It's never a good thing to be asleep at the wheel.
But that's not what this decision is about. Allowing a court to decide that Microsoft should include as part of its product, the product of a company Microsoft regards as its chief competitor, is tantamount to ordering Coca Cola to include a can of Pepsi in every 24 pack. The Court here correctly saw that. If we assume that there is a public good in supporting the proliferation of Java, then we must first ignore that Sun Microsystems is a business seeking to make profits and dominate the market. Remember, Sun wants us to abandon our flat desktop computing models and embrace a networking computing model that has Sun Microsoftsystems at the center. I can recall early Sun speeches about Java's purpose as a long term strategy.
The original decision was additionally irrational. The court didn't spend time considering why Java should be given protected status over any other technology that must also rival de facto standard Microsoft technologies (PHP vs ASP, MP3 vs WMA, DIVX vs WMV). The original decision further set a precedent that would encourage companies to sue more successful competitors into giving up access. This actually goes against the spirit of the AntiTrust Act, which sought only to create a level playing field and not guarantee the success of any one company. Granted, this is a floodgate argument, and would be considered inherently weak, but it's a worthy one.
After many years, I've gotten pretty good at identifying spam by scanning Sender and Subject headers, so I don't really see the benefit in using a Bayesian (or any other filter). I'd rather just have a POP email client (in Windows) that will let me scan headers and remove unwanted emails on the POP server before downloading anything at all, and then only display those emails I download when I take an affirmative action to view a message body. In other words. Clicking on the header should not launch a preview pane that loads the email body.
For me the answer is a well-thought out email client that assumes all email to be hostile - unlike Outlook, which assumes all email to be friendly. I've got an idea about chaining several apps together (fetchmail, Hotpop, etc.) to accomplish a lot of the functionality I want; but there's still no turnkey solution in Windows that I know of.:(
Maybe I'll be accused of trolling (again), but I have to ask, what's wrong with just basing evaluations like this on unoptimized vanilla out-of-the-box systems using only software available to all systems?
I do understand though that when it comes to GCC, the PPC support is less mature than x86 support, resulting in a possible disadvantage.
That's why there's significantly less economic incentive for conventional software businesses to create GPL'd products or use GPL'd technologies in derivative works. Businessmen have an emotional need to control their product.
Profiting on GPL'd software is pretty difficult. You can be a software maker, and just earn profits pedddling your wares, but you risk someone altering your product then profitting off of a new version.
Or you could be a service company and earn profits from supporting GPL'd products, but that is expensive. There are so many fixed and variable costs to deal with. And some companies just want to be the software maker.
You could also be a mixture of the two. I think Slackware and RedHat are great respective examples of these models. You slashdotters out there will know more than I; are there any other solid business models out there for GPL'd software?
I already enjoying the PocketPC version. I'd like something like Chessmaster in terms of visual presentation and features. Speaking of, when did Chessmaster's interface get soo ugly and resource consuming??
I can't stand him myself. I read his usability book, and I've heard his lectures. The guy basically doesn't care much for websites. He thinks everyone on the Internet has an attention span as short as his, and cannot be bothered to read more than three lines of text on any subject. He likes bullet points - bullet points and bold face fonts. He wants the web to be one giant archive of PowerPoint presentations.
His usability guidelines are either unoriginal rants uttered by countless designers before him, or nit-picky details that are often irrelavent to the site's purpose. Hmm, was that caustic enough?
It's apparent that big music is starting to see the advantages in steering consumers to online music stores that deal in single song downloads. As a business proposition, it cannot be avoided. The method of delivery is many times cheaper; and thus it reduces some of the financial burden on recording labels, while encouraging consumers to spend their ducats on individual songs - an easier buy than purchasing whole albums from unknown bands.
Big music could use this technology to really screw artists and once again change the way consumers enjoy music. Yeah, I guess I just convinced myself not to join those sites.
I really want a digitized version of Surrealist Max Ernst' Garden Aeroplane Trap, only I don't want the whole series of paintings. I just want the first and the last. I don't care about Ernst' artistic vision.
These musicians have a reasonable concern. It's not about greed - at least not for most artists. Artists must protect their artistic vision and the integrity of their works, which are products of sometimes years of toil. Def Leppard took 4 years to make Hysteria. Pink Floyd took longer than that for Momentary Lapse of Reason. Artists like Britney Spears or Linkin Park are also alone in trying to protect their creativity. The record biz execs aren't interested in things like artistic vision. The execs don't really even care about Britney that much. There's always another *younger* Britney waiting for instant stardom. For Christ sake, there's not a lot of difference between Menudo, New Kids on the Block, NSYNC, or Backstreet Boys.
I think it's about independent music stores and the commoditization of music. Even before music sharing was done online, the record biz and the corporate music stores have been turning artists' music into commodity items that can be bought, sold, and even traded. Corporate music stores tell you what is cool and what you will buy, using inventory and marketing as their weapons.
Single downloads of music can be great for pop stars who release singles that have been carefully engineered to be hits, but what about musicians who create albums as a single cohesive music experience. These albums don't have to be concept albums. I didn't think Radiohead's OK Computer was a concept album in the ilk of Pink Floyd'sThe Wall or Queensryche's Operation: Mindcrime; yet the songs in OK Computer were meant to be enjoyed together.
These fears might amount to nothing though. There's no reason why I might not buy an entire album (however unlikely). If this new crop of online music stores can make independent music as accessible to consumers as is big label music, then great. But this is only possible if I see just as many popups/banners for Clinic as I'd see for Justin Timberlake.
I love wget. I heard about a browser that uses wget as its system for saving files. I wish Internet Explorer could be retro-fitted to use it also. That way, large incomplete downloads wouldn't simply disappear after I cancel or get disconnected.
No, I don't want to use Netscape, so shut up about it already;)
If you're on Linux and someone tells you that, then you should consider yourself lucky. You have decent manuals. On Windows we have that stupid Windows help that responds using the fucking Socratic Method! And all our product documentation are really just post-purchase marketing material.
Besides, it's not just a Linux community thing. Pretty much all techies do that. A lot of you remind me of that Saturday Night Live sketch about the company's computer repair guy.;)
I sleep through chemistry, so this is all new to me. I thought that there were experimental cars running on just water, and that those cars were called hydrogen powered. Is this not the same thing?
Yeah, I can't wait to see how Congress will fsck this one up. They've still made no inroads into stopping all the junk mail I get in my mailbox at home or work, and I can tell you where 90% of all the junk comes from - Clearwater, Flordia!
Congress has no desire to stop spam, though even they realize that it makes up 50% of all mail traffic online. Congress just needs to take an action in order to show that it cares about the issue. A failed measure is better than no measure at all in politics. There's money to be made in letting the market deal with spam.
Last night on Hardball with Chris Mathews (MSNBC), Former Republican Congressman Bob Barr said candidly that individuals have many options available to them to prevent spam without the heavy hand of government getting involved. Barr stated that we can install filters, firewalls, and pay for services that reduce spam. He admitted that he gets less spam because he's taken these actions and has paid a premium to block most spam. He further said that he was rather amused by the telemarketing calls he got.
What politicans like Bob Barr advocate is that we shoulder the burden and buy off spammers or pay protection money.:(
Whenever I think of Big Oil, I always think about some middle-aged fat Texan tycoon complete with the boots, Stetson hat, and belt buckle the size of Rhode Island - not to mention that stupid string tie. So what will the Big Hydrogen tycoon look like?
A person can do that right now. What's your point?
My point is I don't want to be a soldier in the revolution just because I agree with some of the ideas and I don't want my work clouded in ideology.
It's like this. I don't eat meat because I'm a vegetarian. I don't eat meat because I'm somewhat health-conscious. I don't call myself vegetarian because the label implies more than the act of not eating meat does. Similarly, I don't like people who beat up on puppies and rabbits, but I'm not an animal rights activist.
I use GPL'd products because I happen to like some of the products. The fact that they are GPL'd means little to me. I have no philosophical problem buying closed source software - I love using Word;)
I'm not a fan of the rhetoric behind GNU although I love the software. I find some of the ideology a little too unrealstic and fanatic. That I use GNU software and that I will make my source free to anyone who wants it, should not be interpreted as my advocating one set of beliefs over another, and I feel that getting caught up in the GNUish or GPLish nature of a work subtracts from the work itself. I don't love Bash because it's free just like I don't hate the Windows command prompt because I paid for it. one works, the other looks pretty standing still.
Anyway, he's an idiot savant. Most of the time you can't understand what he's saying, and you're left wondering what color the sky is on his planet... but then out comes a little pearl of wisdom that's immediately followed by some comment about what I'm wearing.
I don't think GNU has that much power. RMS makes some great points, but a court could easily dismiss RMS because of his rhetoric. People could reasonably argue that the GNU philosophy is anti-commercialist (but NOT Communist), giving RMS and GNU less credibility is a courtroom - where all issue are economic.
I still wonder about the GPL's effectiveness. We've covered this ground before, so none of this is new. It's an unenforceable license. If one suspects that GPL'd code has been used in a proprietary close-source work, there's really nothing that can be done to prove it. GNU hasn't the authority to demand code reviews, nor can they legally reverse-engineer closed source code in order to "discover" the GPL'd source (thanks to the DMCA).
The GPL seems really only effective within the open-source community, and that's because we respect each other... generally.
Slashdot Mirror
Heh heh heh... Gold Standard. Telecommunications Act of 1996. Republican tort reform.
It's never a good thing to be asleep at the wheel.
But that's not what this decision is about. Allowing a court to decide that Microsoft should include as part of its product, the product of a company Microsoft regards as its chief competitor, is tantamount to ordering Coca Cola to include a can of Pepsi in every 24 pack. The Court here correctly saw that. If we assume that there is a public good in supporting the proliferation of Java, then we must first ignore that Sun Microsystems is a business seeking to make profits and dominate the market. Remember, Sun wants us to abandon our flat desktop computing models and embrace a networking computing model that has Sun Microsoftsystems at the center. I can recall early Sun speeches about Java's purpose as a long term strategy.
The original decision was additionally irrational. The court didn't spend time considering why Java should be given protected status over any other technology that must also rival de facto standard Microsoft technologies (PHP vs ASP, MP3 vs WMA, DIVX vs WMV). The original decision further set a precedent that would encourage companies to sue more successful competitors into giving up access. This actually goes against the spirit of the AntiTrust Act, which sought only to create a level playing field and not guarantee the success of any one company. Granted, this is a floodgate argument, and would be considered inherently weak, but it's a worthy one.
After many years, I've gotten pretty good at identifying spam by scanning Sender and Subject headers, so I don't really see the benefit in using a Bayesian (or any other filter). I'd rather just have a POP email client (in Windows) that will let me scan headers and remove unwanted emails on the POP server before downloading anything at all, and then only display those emails I download when I take an affirmative action to view a message body. In other words. Clicking on the header should not launch a preview pane that loads the email body.
:(
For me the answer is a well-thought out email client that assumes all email to be hostile - unlike Outlook, which assumes all email to be friendly. I've got an idea about chaining several apps together (fetchmail, Hotpop, etc.) to accomplish a lot of the functionality I want; but there's still no turnkey solution in Windows that I know of.
Early Raul Julia flick, Overdrawn at the Memory Bank - best hacking flick ever, and this is coming from a MST3K devotee ;)
You're fooling yourself. PCI and 16 million colors will change everything ;)
Maybe I'll be accused of trolling (again), but I have to ask, what's wrong with just basing evaluations like this on unoptimized vanilla out-of-the-box systems using only software available to all systems?
I do understand though that when it comes to GCC, the PPC support is less mature than x86 support, resulting in a possible disadvantage.
That's why there's significantly less economic incentive for conventional software businesses to create GPL'd products or use GPL'd technologies in derivative works. Businessmen have an emotional need to control their product.
Profiting on GPL'd software is pretty difficult. You can be a software maker, and just earn profits pedddling your wares, but you risk someone altering your product then profitting off of a new version.
Or you could be a service company and earn profits from supporting GPL'd products, but that is expensive. There are so many fixed and variable costs to deal with. And some companies just want to be the software maker.
You could also be a mixture of the two. I think Slackware and RedHat are great respective examples of these models. You slashdotters out there will know more than I; are there any other solid business models out there for GPL'd software?
I already enjoying the PocketPC version. I'd like something like Chessmaster in terms of visual presentation and features. Speaking of, when did Chessmaster's interface get soo ugly and resource consuming??
BattleChess!
Sorry, it just came to mind.
Oh I will be pissed if you're telling me I should have gone with the 1.8GHz AnthlonXP instead of the 2.5GHz P4...
Probably only a Go player could understand the humor there.
;) Is there a good quality Windows version of Go?
Speaking of, I'm playing a port of GNU Go on my PocketPC, alongside a port of Chess.
I can't stand him myself. I read his usability book, and I've heard his lectures. The guy basically doesn't care much for websites. He thinks everyone on the Internet has an attention span as short as his, and cannot be bothered to read more than three lines of text on any subject. He likes bullet points - bullet points and bold face fonts. He wants the web to be one giant archive of PowerPoint presentations.
His usability guidelines are either unoriginal rants uttered by countless designers before him, or nit-picky details that are often irrelavent to the site's purpose. Hmm, was that caustic enough?
Just to follow up,
It's apparent that big music is starting to see the advantages in steering consumers to online music stores that deal in single song downloads. As a business proposition, it cannot be avoided. The method of delivery is many times cheaper; and thus it reduces some of the financial burden on recording labels, while encouraging consumers to spend their ducats on individual songs - an easier buy than purchasing whole albums from unknown bands.
Big music could use this technology to really screw artists and once again change the way consumers enjoy music. Yeah, I guess I just convinced myself not to join those sites.
I really want a digitized version of Surrealist Max Ernst' Garden Aeroplane Trap, only I don't want the whole series of paintings. I just want the first and the last. I don't care about Ernst' artistic vision.
These musicians have a reasonable concern. It's not about greed - at least not for most artists. Artists must protect their artistic vision and the integrity of their works, which are products of sometimes years of toil. Def Leppard took 4 years to make Hysteria. Pink Floyd took longer than that for Momentary Lapse of Reason. Artists like Britney Spears or Linkin Park are also alone in trying to protect their creativity. The record biz execs aren't interested in things like artistic vision. The execs don't really even care about Britney that much. There's always another *younger* Britney waiting for instant stardom. For Christ sake, there's not a lot of difference between Menudo, New Kids on the Block, NSYNC, or Backstreet Boys.
I think it's about independent music stores and the commoditization of music. Even before music sharing was done online, the record biz and the corporate music stores have been turning artists' music into commodity items that can be bought, sold, and even traded. Corporate music stores tell you what is cool and what you will buy, using inventory and marketing as their weapons.
Single downloads of music can be great for pop stars who release singles that have been carefully engineered to be hits, but what about musicians who create albums as a single cohesive music experience. These albums don't have to be concept albums. I didn't think Radiohead's OK Computer was a concept album in the ilk of Pink Floyd'sThe Wall or Queensryche's Operation: Mindcrime; yet the songs in OK Computer were meant to be enjoyed together.
These fears might amount to nothing though. There's no reason why I might not buy an entire album (however unlikely). If this new crop of online music stores can make independent music as accessible to consumers as is big label music, then great. But this is only possible if I see just as many popups/banners for Clinic as I'd see for Justin Timberlake.
I love wget. I heard about a browser that uses wget as its system for saving files. I wish Internet Explorer could be retro-fitted to use it also. That way, large incomplete downloads wouldn't simply disappear after I cancel or get disconnected.
;)
No, I don't want to use Netscape, so shut up about it already
If you're on Linux and someone tells you that, then you should consider yourself lucky. You have decent manuals. On Windows we have that stupid Windows help that responds using the fucking Socratic Method! And all our product documentation are really just post-purchase marketing material.
;)
Besides, it's not just a Linux community thing. Pretty much all techies do that. A lot of you remind me of that Saturday Night Live sketch about the company's computer repair guy.
So am I an evil bitch for using 'wget -c' from my Windows console no less ;) ?
I think the fact that I can't download anything at greater than 5.40K/s in the age of broadband means that I'm being very gentle to the mirrors :)
I sleep through chemistry, so this is all new to me. I thought that there were experimental cars running on just water, and that those cars were called hydrogen powered. Is this not the same thing?
Yeah, I can't wait to see how Congress will fsck this one up. They've still made no inroads into stopping all the junk mail I get in my mailbox at home or work, and I can tell you where 90% of all the junk comes from - Clearwater, Flordia!
:(
Congress has no desire to stop spam, though even they realize that it makes up 50% of all mail traffic online. Congress just needs to take an action in order to show that it cares about the issue. A failed measure is better than no measure at all in politics. There's money to be made in letting the market deal with spam.
Last night on Hardball with Chris Mathews (MSNBC), Former Republican Congressman Bob Barr said candidly that individuals have many options available to them to prevent spam without the heavy hand of government getting involved. Barr stated that we can install filters, firewalls, and pay for services that reduce spam. He admitted that he gets less spam because he's taken these actions and has paid a premium to block most spam. He further said that he was rather amused by the telemarketing calls he got.
What politicans like Bob Barr advocate is that we shoulder the burden and buy off spammers or pay protection money.
I believe the proposed bill actually addresses the subject of spamming from foreign locations. ?Yeah, like that will work.
Somebody has to mod that one up one more!
Whenever I think of Big Oil, I always think about some middle-aged fat Texan tycoon complete with the boots, Stetson hat, and belt buckle the size of Rhode Island - not to mention that stupid string tie. So what will the Big Hydrogen tycoon look like?
A person can do that right now. What's your point?
;)
My point is I don't want to be a soldier in the revolution just because I agree with some of the ideas and I don't want my work clouded in ideology.
It's like this. I don't eat meat because I'm a vegetarian. I don't eat meat because I'm somewhat health-conscious. I don't call myself vegetarian because the label implies more than the act of not eating meat does. Similarly, I don't like people who beat up on puppies and rabbits, but I'm not an animal rights activist. I use GPL'd products because I happen to like some of the products. The fact that they are GPL'd means little to me. I have no philosophical problem buying closed source software - I love using Word
I'm not a fan of the rhetoric behind GNU although I love the software. I find some of the ideology a little too unrealstic and fanatic. That I use GNU software and that I will make my source free to anyone who wants it, should not be interpreted as my advocating one set of beliefs over another, and I feel that getting caught up in the GNUish or GPLish nature of a work subtracts from the work itself. I don't love Bash because it's free just like I don't hate the Windows command prompt because I paid for it. one works, the other looks pretty standing still.
I was being ironic...
Anyway, he's an idiot savant. Most of the time you can't understand what he's saying, and you're left wondering what color the sky is on his planet... but then out comes a little pearl of wisdom that's immediately followed by some comment about what I'm wearing.
I don't think GNU has that much power. RMS makes some great points, but a court could easily dismiss RMS because of his rhetoric. People could reasonably argue that the GNU philosophy is anti-commercialist (but NOT Communist), giving RMS and GNU less credibility is a courtroom - where all issue are economic.
I still wonder about the GPL's effectiveness. We've covered this ground before, so none of this is new. It's an unenforceable license. If one suspects that GPL'd code has been used in a proprietary close-source work, there's really nothing that can be done to prove it. GNU hasn't the authority to demand code reviews, nor can they legally reverse-engineer closed source code in order to "discover" the GPL'd source (thanks to the DMCA).
The GPL seems really only effective within the open-source community, and that's because we respect each other... generally.