If I were Google, I would respond to this by immediately removing access to Google Video and Youtube from all Italian IP addresses, citing the trial. If I were Google and I was vindictive, I would also remove access to Google.com Google Maps (iPhone users are probably influential in Italy) and GMail.
It would be the over-reacting response to this over-reacting lawsuit which would cause a crisis far greater than necessary, but it would show the world how ridiculous the response would need to be to prevent such lawsuits. I mean - GMail - you can insult someone from there, right? Google.com - you can search insults from there, right?
So to be cautious, they'd just have to turn off those services while this lawsuit was pending.
Your examples try to make a point, but miss the mark. The point of the article is not about understanding what the code in question does, it's about maintaining the code - there is a big difference between understanding *what* code does vs. *how* the code does it. A one line comment before a block of unreadable code doesn't help to debug the code. A one line comment in front of a block of semi-readable code at least helps a little.
The real problem is undebuggable and unreviewable code presenting security risk. Did you use your pointers and buffers correctly? Did you check inputs and deal with errors correctly? Does your code follow the contract specified by all the annotations?
If you write a block of code with an annotation which says that you will initialize an output parameter, but on an error fail to initialize that output parameter, and do not throw an exception, then you can cause bugs upstream. Similarly, if you do not understand the contract of a method and do not check it for errors, you also can cause bugs upstream. Documenting these things is a basic requirement that experienced and unexperienced developers make, and code reviewing is an important part of the development process (as is testing).
I just have to say that I've used OOo and Office 2007. I challenge you to make a good looking diagram in OOo. I can make better looking diagrams in Office 95 or even Paint.
I don't get what all the fuss is about. The stated goal of OOXML is to make an XML based file format compatible with all the proprietary binary bits of Office. Why on earth would anyone outside of Microsoft need to implement the whole thing? Microsoft Office is huge and everywhere. So there are some bits in there that aren't fully documented. Well, maybe you'd have to go dumpster diving in millions of lines of Microsoft source code to figure out how those bits actually work. The line spacing like Word 95 example everyone is fond of mentioning is probably quite complex and outdated. Well, I hate to break it to you, but some of my coworkers are working with ODF files, and some are working with OOXML, and OOo doesn't conform to ODF moreso than Office not conforming to OOXML. Both use extensions to convey information. The difference is that OOo uses extensions to convey information that should be specified and OOXML uses extensions to convey information about things that are rarely used (from what my coworkers talk about). Apple and OOo don't seem to have much trouble implementing something with the OOXML standard, and my coworkers don't seem to have much trouble with either standard, even with extensions. They might not be perfect standards, but we're all human. ODF and OOXML are both free to download, and are being maintained by lots of people.
How can this be a bad thing? Just because it's Microsoft doesn't make it a bad thing.
If Amazon buys a book publishing/printing company and starts to refuse authors who publish with other publishers/printers, and it hurts the other publishers/printers, I suggest that they will have an anti-trust lawsuit on their hands.
Just like the Microsoft case - you don't get penalized for *being* a monopoly. You get penalized for *abusing* that monopoly. Once you *are* declared an abusive monopoly by a successful lawsuit when you *do* abuse your monopoly, well, then the floodgates of hell^H^H^H^H lawyers are unleashed upon you from anyone else who can make a claim that they were/are/continue to be hurt by your monopoly.
And *that* is precisely why this is a stupid move.
It's called a Captcha. If you suspect your users are bots, you can just insert human solvable problems every couple of hours into the system. If the user is human, they can easily pass the test. If the user is a bot, then it will most likely fail to pass the test. If you want to keep it fun, make it relevant to a mini game, or something.
I have never played WoW, nor will I ever. Starcraft, however, is one of my favorite games.
1) People on Slashdot claim that Open Source Software is better than Closed Source Software (not everyone makes this claim, and I doubt that people who use them both all the time believe it). 2) Microsoft releases Office 2007 with documentation about the new zipped-XML-based file formats (It's kinda neat to hack around in them for fun and profit). 3) The new XML-based formats are bug-compatible with the old binary formats - they preserve dusty old behaviors from old software that people might still be running (so if your customers still use Office 97 you can still support them). 4) There are many articles/people on Slashdot whining and complaining about OOXML vs ODF (this is Slashdot after all - news for nerds, stuff that nobody else cares about).
Is ODF any better than OOXML or the old Microsoft formats in all ways? If not, then why not? Make it better - don't waste your time on Slashdot whining - your whines do nothing. Is OOo better than Microsoft Office in all ways? If not, then why not? Make it better - don't waste your time on Slashdot whining. Your hate shortens your life and accomplishes nothing.
The truth of the matter is that it is hard to write good software, and it is complicated. There are those who write good software, and those who talk about it. Clearly people who write on Slashdot aren't the former, or we wouldn't be here.
I will point out that Apple already added support for OOXML in their iWork '08 suite, so it really doesn't appear to be terribly difficult to do. Will it matter? How many Million copies of Microsoft Office 2007 are out there in corporations around the world? While we are arguing on Slashdot, Microsoft's army of code monkies and lock-in experts are coming up with the next set of killer features and file format extensions. If you want to compete, you'd better get off Slashdot and start coding. By my recollection, you have about 10 years worth of feature work to catch up on, starting with a UI that doesn't make me want to gouge out my eyeballs with a spoon...
What happens if/when Microsoft absorbs ODF support as a "feature" and bitmap-izes/OOXML-izes the extra functionality? It would satisfy requirements that Microsoft Office be compatible with ODF while at the same time neutering OOo ODF support. Would you rather have a neutered ODF file or something which doesn't pretend to be ODF wrapping OOXML? Really, think about the compatability problems with different document formats. It's just like IE 6's rendering of HTML+W3C standards vs IE 7 vs Opera vs Netscape vs Mozilla vs Safari. Get ready for it. It is coming. The people using ODF with Microsoft products won't suffer - the people using ODF with OOo will cry bloody murder and be forced to use Microsoft Office to get full fidelity from their ODF files.
And Microsoft marketing will call the ODF support a feature. They will laugh all the way to the bank as they sell millions and millions of copies to governments and corporations around the world. If you want to beat Microsoft at this game, you have to play like Microsoft does - make OOo save out OOXML with limitations or extenstions that frustrate Microsoft Office customers - uneditable charts, etc. Embrace and extend works in both ways.
Of course, it's a double edged sword. Microsoft makes these apps, and hundreds of millions of people run them every day. People are paid to write programs around them and their APIs and their file formats. The products that Microsoft spit out are the standard. You can't stop the Microsoft army of coders directed by Gates and co from making their next version and patching the previous one. All you can do is attempt - little by little - to make something that people would want to use more.
Speaking as a father and as someone who spends too much time staring at glowing screens, I can say that this feature is a great idea. Obvioulsy, it doesn't substitute for good parenting and spending time with your child/encouraging them to pursue better activities than video game playing. It is simply a tool.
Some will see this as a way to punish kids (and some will call it ineffective for various reasons - not all parents can operate a game console). Others will see this as a way for lazy parents to avoid parenting (this won't change that). It is partly each of these things. What it is most of all is a tool. It can be used positively, such as like an allowance - it can be increased for good behavior or decreased as a punishment.
Parenting isn't easy, and in the modern world you can't always be with your child 100% of the time. This tool helps set some boundaries. Like every tool, there is abuse potential. Like every piece of software, it will have its fair share of bugs to work out.
Technology is moving very quickly. When I was growing up (I'm nearly 30), computers had Kilobytes of RAM and phones had rotary dials. There were no mobile phones (these too appear to be going away slowly), and no cell phones. My childhood photos are in some shoeboxes on the other side of the country. My son's photos are on our website, from the day he was born. Hundreds of 4MP+ images - several each month as we go to parties or walk in the park, etc. Each picture has embedded date and time and other metadata.
We are more connected than ever before with cellphones/cameras/the net. This month people can spend $400 on 2 laptops - one for a poor child in another country and one for themselves. As time goes on, the OLPC/"$100 Laptop" will go down in price (to some extent) and the technology curve will advance. Eventually, the future generation of people will all have a minimum amount of digital technology. This will enable expression from any point in the globe to every other point regardless of income. It won't happen overnight.
The point is that the technology is coming to the masses. People on/. are generally at the cutting edge and we often worry about the worst possible cases and get stuck in hyperbole. We are the priviledged few. Parental controls on a new game console enable most people in my generation to help balance the amount of time our children are spending on one form of entertainment.
I have spent most of my nearly 30 years of life staring at glowing screens... There's some good, some bad, and some plain old that's just the way it is in that statement.
"even if it were truly open it would be a hindrance because there already is one international standard (ODF). why a second one? microsoft can just implement that one."
First: Microsoft doesn't implement other people's standards for their bread and butter. They have the luxury of controlling the largest hoard of software engineers, product planners, marketers, testers, and customers in the desktop application market. Their motivation is to make money. Using their competition's file format as their primary format is akin to being defeated.
Second: Microsoft's customers demand of Microsoft that it do things certain ways. If Microsoft wants to meet those demands, it has to remain flawlessly compatible with prior versions content, including bugs. ODF just can't match the compatability that well - the internal data structures at Microsoft should be nothing like OOo's unless someone was copying the other. The XML representation of that data sheds a lot of light on it.
Finally: It is a real step for Microsoft to make an XML standard format for Office file formats, take it to a standards body, and go through the procedures and public scrutiny. The ISO is no rubber stamp organization. The fact that Microsoft has done this and made the XML format the default for save in the Office 2007 suite means that Microsoft is committed to more transparency. You might be snarky and claim that the format is too tied to the old.DOC, etc data structures, but I love that my years of old documents are convertable without losing formatting or content. Microsoft is confident enough in its army of coders and entrenched market position to open up to its customers without fear of being cloned out of existence. Word may not be the best editor, but now at least, there are public docs to enable new editors to work on Word, etc files.
There's an obvious explanation for the "corporate trolling" -- my generation which was in college when/. became popular, and we graduated from High School and College. Lots of us got recruited at places like Apple, IBM, MS, etc. It's kinda like, you might be able to tell in general when or how someone got broadband by if they use Friendster vs MSN Spaces vs MySpace vs... Or if they use AOL or Hotmail or GMail or MSN or Yahoo.
Computer nerds grow up to become corporate shills. Would you rather spend years at an unknown startup or game company, slaving away 24-7 on a product which may not succeed, or would you like an 8+ hour flexible time job with a nice $80K paycheck + benefits? If you had the latter, you might take a little pride in the company paying you, and you might know something that is being misconstrued and want to correct the/. public's interpretation of the FUD that others are spreading. Of course, you might just have the stupid my-company-can-do-no-evil blinders on, too.
I have friends at places including Adobe, Apple, Amazon, IBM, Google, Microsoft, etc. They all read/., although many have also moved on. In time, the new popular places for geeks to hang out will be overrun with the next generation of corporate shills and OSS zealots. I've been called both by my friends at different points in time.:)
The interesting market for MCE was the college student in a dorm room who wanted to save space and watch TV on their PC. As a set top box, MCE was interesting only in that it brought media into a "workstation/server" right under the TV.
There have been a few interesting developments in the past few years. 1) Vista Premium and XBox 360 The MCE 2005 has a toy "Media Center Extender" which works with the original XBox to deliver video to the XBox from the XP Media Center. The XBox 360 has native support for extending the Media Center from Windows Vista, and these features work much, much better (MS didn't get it right in V1, but V2 is fine).
2) The new Windows Home Server Home Server is built on Windows Server 2003 (i.e. it's based on XP Server, not Vista Server), and promises to be a friendly solution to the needs of people who want one box to rule all their storage, backup, media, shared folders, and want convenient ways to get remote access to home computers from the web. Obviously, it appeals to the slightly less nerdy computer user as a box to manage their TBs of files and be a central home repository. Windows XP and Vista can be used just as well for this task, but some of the new features are nice.
I personally would like it if they included MCE features so that I could install Home Server over my 400GB MCE 2005 box with dual TV tuners and use spare CPU cycles on my HT 3GHz P4 to be able to downsample and stream video content (while recording) to my laptop over the cable modem. As it is, using a share and WiFi is ok, but I can only watch media from the laptop after it has finished recording on MCE. The interesting thing from my perspective is that I'm not willing to have MCE under the TV, but I'm willing to put an XBox there with an MCE Extender and a 10/100 Ethernet.
Unfortunately for me, when upgrade time hits later this year, I get hit for memory (512MB not enough for Vista), software (Photoshop CS doesn't work on Vista), and compatability (MCE Extender for XBox doesn't work with Vista's MCE). Hopefully one of my friends of friends at Adobe will let me get an employee discount on the PS CS3. I have a friend at MS who gave me Vista Ultimate. Eventually, MS will release Halo 3, and I'll solve the XBox 369 dilemna.
Especially in the day of publishing on the web, where when you decide to stop pulishing, it's gone. If you publish a book and sell it, whoever bought the book can come back to it over and over. If you remove your webpage it's gone -- unless some asshat corporation (non-profit or otherwise) comes along and decides to republish your content without your permission. So if I write something like a web cache such as Coral, I'm violating your copyright if the information on your site dissappears? I have the feeling that you just don't understand the way the internet works. People who "publish" content make it available, and people who "surf" the content pull down copies. Those copies are transmitted through several network systems on the way to their destination, and any network in the middle could copy the data for purposes of caching or otherwise.
It's just the way the internet and web work. Your little opinions don't really matter. If the web didn't work this way, it would not be reliable, and it would not be useful. Search engines and archives and caches are services without which we would get significantly less benefit from the information put out on the web.
If you don't want to make information publicly available, don't put it on the internet, and don't advertise its presence by linking your content. Sue people who violate your copyright if they put it on the internet. If you want to make information publicly available to a private community, then use appropriate technologies like Bulletin Board software with accounts and passwords.
Copyright is not violated by computers. Copyright is violated by people. You can't sue computers. Large organizations with lots of money (big targets for lawsuits) will in general try not to violate copyright, but they aren't in general responsible for the copyright violations that the masses do through their services, just like how the FSF isn't responsible if you use their software to violate copyright or Microsoft isn't responsible if you use their software to violate copyright. Wouldn't it suck if Microsoft Word didn't let you "Copy and Paste", because "God forbid you might be copying/pasting something that was copyrighted by someone else, and Word can't make the distinction".
Being indexed should be opt-in. Just like being spammed. Robots.txt can be used to advertise where a crawler should index as well as where a crawler should not. It is both opt-in and opt-out at the same time. Before you write another uninformed word about it, you should read more about it. You should also read this google blog post, this google blog post, The main robots.txt site, and the RFC.
There are crawlers which "violate robots.txt" (usually those crawlers are just poor implementations by people learning to write a crawler or unfinished programs - people who write real crawlers in general understand that you probably have good reasons for not wanting them crawling those pages of your site, and they don't want to waste their bandwidth on them).
And everything you wrote was off topic, and yet people moderated you to +4 "Insightful".
What Microsoft has done differently this time is that it used its army of lawyers to trademark, patent, copyright, and protect every aspect of the "ribbon". This is a licence to use UI designs, which Microsoft has protected. Knowing infringing patents increases the damages a good deal. So by promoting this licensing agreement, Microsoft is basically ensuring that people know that there are patents. What Slashdot is doing is propagating that knowledge.
Here's what you wrote: Seriously - would you lose any sleep because MS won't give you a new toy? Even if OO.o wanted it, and even if MS gave them it, they probably couldn't use it because it'll probably be Vista- (or at least Windows-)only.
Microsoft isn't giving you a new toy. It's licensing the right to use patents/other IP to people who don't compete with Office.
And seeing as most critics have slammed the new MS Office UI as being generally awful, it's not beyond the realms of possibility that OO.o's similarity to the "old" MS Office UI might pick them up a few users.
I doubt it. You haven't read enough. Obviously, you haven't RTFA so you don't know WTF you are talking about. Let me give you another FA not to read here.
"Software is not interchangable, as the StarOffice marketing team is learning. Even when the price is zero, the cost of switching from Microsoft Office is non-zero. Until the switching cost becomes zero, desktop office software is not truly a commodity. And even the smallest differences can make two software packages a pain to switch between."
And seeing as most critics have slammed the new MS Office UI as being generally awful, it's not beyond the realms of possibility that OO.o's similarity to the "old" MS Office UI might pick them up a few users.
Where do you read that? Microsoft is taking a gamble with the new UI by introducing a lot of change. You apparently don't read the same reviews that I do. Maybe you just don't read reviews. So let me look around for some Office 2007 reviews...
PC Magazine "Pros: New interface give beginners the same power as experts. Dazzling new graphics engine. Massively improved security. Smoother collaboration.
Cons: Not all applications get an interface overhaul. New interface can't be customized--yet. Potential for document-sharing problems with users of versions before Office 2003."
There is a reason why I don't read/. very often, and your +4 insightful reply is neither +4 nor insightful.
By replying to this, I know I'm giving up my moderating/meta-moderating power, so people who do meta moderate... please do your job and remove this gibberish...
Better yet, when was the car in question purchased? If it was purchased before the federal program then it really can't be argued that it was purchased with federal money. Is there a title/deed for the ownership of the car? And if so, to which government is it registered?
My curiosity with this case is a matter of how much can the government go fishing for evidence that they do not have. Someone blogging on the internet does not make them a journalist. Someone filming something and putting up their video does not make them a reporter.
What is the litmus test here for a judge to pronounce that someone produce what they suspect is evidence? If someone witnesses a crime being committed are they required to testify? If you declare publicly that you have information, can you be required to produce the information?
Patent's aren't a bad thing. They allow a *limited* monopoly on an *invention* for a period of about 15 years at *most* (in the USA). Yeah, technology changes... The Lempel Ziv Welch patent which recently expired is an example of a patent of a non obvious method which changed our lives and is now free to implement. There are better algorithms and tons of other patents in the image compression space, but this was a particularly high profile patent.
Any patents on obvious or previously implemented technologies won't stand up in court, but of course, it means paying lawyers to stick up for the little guys who don't have the money.
But just because you don't like the law doesn't mean that you can suddenly chnage the rules, unless you are a congressman, and then you can only make the rules under your jurisdiction.
Microsoft may not be the worlds best team player, but that doesn't mean that MS doesn't deserve to use the inventions its employees legitimately invent. It also doesn't mean that Microsoft can't charge licensing fees for the usage of those patents.
What is scary is the number of companies whose sole existence is to buy up patents with potential litigation and then sue people with products that potentially violate the patents. These companies of lawyers suing companies making real products is a disturbing trend in the industry. Normally, when one large company sues another for violating patents, the other counter sues, and the two companies shake hands and agree to license each other's patents. But when a company that exists solely to sue large and small companies sues, they tie up our court system to take money from people who build the products that make our world run.
That ends up coming from all of our pockets to make a few people who bought a few inventions fabulously wealthy.
The moral of the story is that all the large corporations now seem to be cross-licensing each others patents so that hungry lawyer companies attempting to claim huge amounts of money can be beaten down with a big "I licensed that technology from XYZ corp" stick. And the big corps have also started licensing some of these technologies, Microsoft for example has this website here. Is this progress? Well, OSS needs to develop its own patents if it wants to compete. Is it not unreasonable for individuals in the Open Source movement to compete like this?
MS has Billions of $ in the bank and brings in about 32 Billion more in revenue each year. Subtract out the costs of doing business and you have profit. How many Billion does MS pour into its lawyers/people who sue MS? Not enough to make a dent, that's for sure.
Some lawsuits are definitely legitimate, but just because MS has a lot of power doesn't mean that it's abusive. They got where they are by producing software that was "good enough" and selling it better than the competition.
Now that open source has come along, watch and see Microsoft get better at selling their software and spend more money trying to make it better than the competition to survive.
The Tablet PC is an example of this. Microsoft is actually doing some innovative stuff in their platform, although Longhorn seems destined not to ship.
"There is a limit as to how fast you can safely travel which is mainly governed by how quickly you can stop. Sport Compact Car magazine recently reviewed a race-ready Mitsubishi Evolution 8 with upgraded everything including a beefed up braking system."
But I have to share the road with big trucks, sports cars, SUVs, School Busses, hybrids, etc. The road has a mix of brand new cars to cars that are 30 or 40 years old along with busses and trucks. Drivers vary from people who are about to die of old age who are missing spots in their vision to people who just got their permit, to 25 year old frat party animals to soccer moms, professional drivers (of all types), etc.
How fast I can stop is a factor including my reflexes, vehicle, tires, road conditions, weight in tow, etc. Put 10 cars behind each other, and one or two guys with too much testosterone weaving through, and although it might be safe for the guys with the muscle car, the fast reflexes, and the adrenaline, it's the guy who slams on the brakes and gets hit by the Mac truck behind him that's going to be paralyzed from the waist down.
There are so many factors to take into account, but it's not rocket science. Crashes happen because people make bad choices without understanding or caring about the consequences. They know those choices are wrong. Rarely are the choices that cause crashes and death are the ones made by the road engineers or car engineers. Equipment failure shouldn't always be the cause of death... These things are designed with room to spare on safety, but people gobble up those design constraints through bad choices.
I was told that the concept of the "mecha" came from Japan's cartoons and anime, and the concept has appeared in all kinds of movies, cartoons, video games, etc (for example, The Matrix, Star Wars, Final Fantasy, Metal Gear Solid, Thundercats, Power Rangers, etc).
Japan is ahead of american society by a few years... You know the average/.er would kill to live in a society where you can find a toilet with more functionality than your average desktop computer...
I vote for the Toshiba Portege M200 though. Much higher resolution (12.1" XVGA+ 1400x1050 pixels), faster Centrino (1.5GHz on mine, 1.6GHz on newer versions), SD card reader, PC Card slot, USB 2.0. And a very cool built-in accelerometer that is underused, but there's a demo application available called WinGimcana.
I will second that. I recently purchased a 2GHz M200 with the 512MB RAM and 60GB 7200 RPM drive option and BlueTooth. I got mine through a B2B deal from my company at a %25 discount for about $2000 (would cost about $2600 otherwise). The M200 is the most popular model of laptop in my building at work.
The M200 is a great machine, but it does have its flaws (having one at home and one at work, I can attest to them): 1) The LCD screen suffers outdoors. 2) The track pad is a bit finnicky. 3) No CD/DVD drive built-in. 4) The bottom heats up to an uncomfortable level to place in your lap (doesn't seriously impact carrying the device, but I normally put a pillow between it and my lap when on the couch). 5) The pen isn't always accurate, and needs to be calibrated too often.
The device has a number of good things going for it: 1) 12.1" SXGA (144DPI LCD) is very sharp. Amazing for Photoshop. 2) 4.5lbs is very easy to carry, open or closed. 3) The supplied pen isn't bad (not as good as the Cross Executive Penabled, but certainly better than an average Tablet stylus) 4) Toshiba's excellent battery management software. 5) The full sized QWERTY portion of the keyboard is comfortable. If I want to use an external (bluetooth or USB keyboard+mouse), I can use the tablet's base like a monitor stand.
I really like the Convertible style tablet. The slate factor is nice to carry around, but a keyboard is a necessity and carrying around an external keyboard is a nuisance.
The hybrid style where you have a slate with a specially designed clip-on keyboard that can be carried as a unit is one step above a slate, but the keyboards are one step below the convertible, and the base of the convertible are very solid and balance the device on your lap or desk well regardless of if you are in clamshell or slate mode.
I bought the M200 because 10" is not enough for a full sized keyboard, 14" XGA is not enough resolution for serious photographic editing and is bulky. 12" SXGA+ is big enough for a full-sized keyboard, and is light enough to take around.
Battery life on the M200 is great at about 4 hours for me (depends on many settings including how much you let the CPU throttle itself and how bright the screen is, how much time before you power down the disk drives, and how much you run the fan to cool the CPU).
Web pages can do just about anything. Maybe they can't do SSH by themselves, but if you're given more than just port 80, and even if you're not (so long as your port 80 isn't proxied in a way that destroys your usability), you can still run any kind of TCP/IP tunnel... you just have to do it over HTTP.
Where there's a will, there's a way. For all intents and purposes, HTTP = FTP = SSH = Telnet = SMTP = POP3, etc. All these protocols just specify who wants to upload/download what. They are optimized differently and some aren't encrypted, but as Google proved: Give users an HTTP mail store with unlimited space, and someone will write a filesystem on top of it. When I was in High School and College, I wrote lots of tiny HTTP server/proxies. One connected a customized MUD to HTTP so I could bypass the firewall of the company I was working at to chat with my friends.
Parent wrote:
There is a very simple issue: settle on a set of standards that are open and free and then even if 100 different programs that do the same thing, like calendering, come out they could still all interoperate. The users would win since they could use the program that they liked the most, not the one that is holding their data hostage. Open and free standards leads to more inovation because it encourages developers to try new things and not worry about loosing users because they can't use their old data. This is what scares Bill and MS the most and why they will NEVER use open and free standards in their products. They will "embrace and extend" standards, which means making their own version and then not giving it out and blaming everyone else for "not following the standard".
So I'll bite. Your post doesn't deserve +5 insightful, but rather than use my Mod points, I will let you know why and add some thoughts.
Take a look at this RFC, note that it's how Outlook does their calendaring (and that the RFC's authors work at Lotus (IBM) and MS). What were you saying about Microsoft being afraid to commit to an open standard? How many other internet standards are authored or co-authored by Microsoft employees? How many are accepted as standards by committees with Microsoft employees sitting on them? XML, etc.
There are lots of standards that "Microsoft" not only commits to, but also authors. There are some closed standards organizations (mostly hardware) also. Standards are just as much of a double edged sword (for interoperability sake) as everyone doing their own thing.
On one hand, if everyone works off of a standard, then the minimal subset of implementation of that standard is adopted, and there's a common platform for interoperability. On the other hand, if people implement competing applications without agreeing on a standard, or by extending the standard in new and unapproved ways (think HTML), then the market will determine which application is best fit. If Microsoft was not the best fit software to run on computers (note that this is a broad definition of fitness as determined by the market forces in general), then why would Dell and Gateway install it on just about all their desktop and laptop products? Why would consumers pick Windows over Linspire, or Knoppix?
Regardless of what you think about the stability of Windows, Linux, etc. The truth is that there are many reasons that Windows is on top on the desktop market. But the fundamental most important one is that it runs 99% of the software from all of the Microsoft Windows and DOS operating systems that came before. If you're looking for freeware, shareware, commercial software, or even open source software, chances are, it all runs on Windows. That's what Bill Gates is talking about when he talks about interoperability. It's commitment to running the garbage that's already out there in the market. Someone (who works at MS) once told me that there are something on the order of 500 global variables which tweak the way that IE behaves to account for bugs in other people's software.
This is a major problem for Microsoft in the future: How do they release a new version of Windows without breaking that? How do they release a Windows which doesn't let users log in as administrator or administrators log in like normal users? How do they break the cycle of bad programmers making bad assumptions that the circumstances involving the way the OS used to work were going to be true forever? Commitment to interoperability means being willing to suffer for the mistakes of others.
If this means by comparison that OSS has poor interoperability, then that's what it means. It's not elegant software design to add kludges here and kludges there to special case it so that other people's poorly designed code still works, but commitment to keeping older software working without rewriting it is what keeps Microsoft in business. And commitment to interoperating and extending older software with new software will make-or-break Microsoft's future deals also.
"We can't even prevent war amongst humankind, how do you expect us to prevent it when we have to fight for dominance."
I don't. Our set of affairs is always a winner-take-all situation. Business is just as much about power as war is.
"How much benefit will we get from this type of research? Is it truly worth the negatives of a divided society?"
If our society isn't divided on other issues, why would this be any different? Our society is always divided. It's a blessing to have more than 2 opinions out there.
"The problem is we don't know what situations we will live in. You can't predetermine evolution...that's the point of evolution to adapt to something that changes, be it environment, predators, disease, or whatever."
Sure you can. We pick the largest grain to grow the next crop. We pick the largest crops, and breed "pure-bread" animals by sets of rules that we determine. So why can't/shouldn't we determine what the next advancement of the gene pool we will either selectively breed to get to or simply engineer our way in the lab? We live in several different kinds of environment that aren't technically speaking natural, but we could adapt our genes so that they were. What if we wanted gills to breathe water. Or maybe a recycling system in the body to adapt to being in space, where there is little storage, etc.
"At what point do we say this mouse is no longer a mouse but should be treated with equal rights as a human? How long will it take to get half-human species equal rights?"
Good question. Obviously, we have to get to the half-human stage of evolution first. It's an interesting point to ponder.
Parent poster wrote: Does anyone stop to think that there may be too many flavors of Linux for the average user?...Perhaps the Linux community should get together and make a serious effort at a unified "desktop" launch.
And this would be *yet another* flavor... The truth is that you can't herd cats. Everyone wants to make the wheel in their own image, and there will always be a thousand varieties of anything that isn't controlled by a corporate entity.
The reason that Linux isn't competing on the desktop against Windows is that it isn't something which a user can go out to the store and buy software and hardware with confidence for. If I go to a best buy, there is no Linux certified laptop. There is no Linux certified Tablet. No Linux certified Media Center. I can buy a laptop and put whatever OS and drivers I want on it, but if I want a good laptop, I buy an Intel Centrino with Microsoft Windows. Maybe Joe Sixpack is a little less informed about software, hardware, etc than I am, but I happily pay the Microsoft tax because I get software that my wife can use out of the box, and she can also add software that her schools use (she is a teacher, and her school uses grading software that runs on Windows).
Windows has more software available for it than any other platform, and that includes FOSS. How is Linux special if all the software that runs on it also runs on Windows, but I need to worry about not being able to run the latest game or work with the latest cool devices? When I bought that Taiwanese 20GB portable USB2 storage device 2 years ago, I plugged it into my Windows machine, and I could use it. No kernel futzing, etc. I wanted to show my friend a bunch of photos on a CD (simple CD-R with no folder structure and just a bunch of.JPG files), and he spent 10 minutes putzing around with Linux getting his CD-ROM drive mounted, and attempting to find X-windows software that would load a picture. On Windows, I stick the disk in, and when it asks what I want to do, I click full-screen slide show.
For two years in college, I had a DEC Alpha running Linux and Windows NT. It was a damn fast computer at the time, but the Windows only ran x86 software under emulation, and that meant that I couldn't run all the software I wanted to in my room. So if I wanted to use the school-licensed software apps, I had to go to the public cluster. Eventually, I traded my alpha for a Pentium at a lesser clock rate, and it just clicked in my mind what I had been missing by running a less-used OS (even though it was a version of Windows that could run *some* Intel 32-bit Windows apps). That was the point where I gave up on my Microsoft is the devil category of thinking. I realized that the Intel/Microsoft platform is a constant. It always supports the latest hardware, and the apps from years ago continue to run.
In order for Linux to take over the desktop, it's going to have to be put out as the major option by hardware vendors, and it's going to have to clone all of Windows. Windows adds about $50 to the cost of a PC, but it is the brand name which people know runs their software. Software makers (even FOSS makers) target Windows over Linux simply because their target audience doesn't run Linux.
The barriers to adopt a desktop operating system are huge. Apple is successful because they have a user base and a set of apps. They made a very smart move to bring in Unix into their OS. This article is just a single data point which shows how the Linux market is fragmented. And Linux doesn't natively run Windows software. Windows is evolving, and the only thing which is completely bug-compatible with it is itself.
There are good emulators for Windows, but ask most people if they want to run a good emulator, or the thing being emulated. When I ran OS/2 Warp, I found myself using Windows more than the PM. I definately thought it was cool that the Windows session was embedded in the OS/2 session, and lots of things were really neat about that system, but it reall
Slashdot Mirror
If I were Google, I would respond to this by immediately removing access to Google Video and Youtube from all Italian IP addresses, citing the trial. If I were Google and I was vindictive, I would also remove access to Google.com Google Maps (iPhone users are probably influential in Italy) and GMail.
It would be the over-reacting response to this over-reacting lawsuit which would cause a crisis far greater than necessary, but it would show the world how ridiculous the response would need to be to prevent such lawsuits. I mean - GMail - you can insult someone from there, right? Google.com - you can search insults from there, right?
So to be cautious, they'd just have to turn off those services while this lawsuit was pending.
Your examples try to make a point, but miss the mark. The point of the article is not about understanding what the code in question does, it's about maintaining the code - there is a big difference between understanding *what* code does vs. *how* the code does it. A one line comment before a block of unreadable code doesn't help to debug the code. A one line comment in front of a block of semi-readable code at least helps a little.
The real problem is undebuggable and unreviewable code presenting security risk. Did you use your pointers and buffers correctly? Did you check inputs and deal with errors correctly? Does your code follow the contract specified by all the annotations?
If you write a block of code with an annotation which says that you will initialize an output parameter, but on an error fail to initialize that output parameter, and do not throw an exception, then you can cause bugs upstream. Similarly, if you do not understand the contract of a method and do not check it for errors, you also can cause bugs upstream. Documenting these things is a basic requirement that experienced and unexperienced developers make, and code reviewing is an important part of the development process (as is testing).
I just have to say that I've used OOo and Office 2007. I challenge you to make a good looking diagram in OOo. I can make better looking diagrams in Office 95 or even Paint.
I don't get what all the fuss is about. The stated goal of OOXML is to make an XML based file format compatible with all the proprietary binary bits of Office. Why on earth would anyone outside of Microsoft need to implement the whole thing? Microsoft Office is huge and everywhere. So there are some bits in there that aren't fully documented. Well, maybe you'd have to go dumpster diving in millions of lines of Microsoft source code to figure out how those bits actually work. The line spacing like Word 95 example everyone is fond of mentioning is probably quite complex and outdated. Well, I hate to break it to you, but some of my coworkers are working with ODF files, and some are working with OOXML, and OOo doesn't conform to ODF moreso than Office not conforming to OOXML. Both use extensions to convey information. The difference is that OOo uses extensions to convey information that should be specified and OOXML uses extensions to convey information about things that are rarely used (from what my coworkers talk about). Apple and OOo don't seem to have much trouble implementing something with the OOXML standard, and my coworkers don't seem to have much trouble with either standard, even with extensions. They might not be perfect standards, but we're all human. ODF and OOXML are both free to download, and are being maintained by lots of people.
How can this be a bad thing? Just because it's Microsoft doesn't make it a bad thing.
If Amazon buys a book publishing/printing company and starts to refuse authors who publish with other publishers/printers, and it hurts the other publishers/printers, I suggest that they will have an anti-trust lawsuit on their hands.
Just like the Microsoft case - you don't get penalized for *being* a monopoly. You get penalized for *abusing* that monopoly. Once you *are* declared an abusive monopoly by a successful lawsuit when you *do* abuse your monopoly, well, then the floodgates of hell^H^H^H^H lawyers are unleashed upon you from anyone else who can make a claim that they were/are/continue to be hurt by your monopoly.
And *that* is precisely why this is a stupid move.
It's called a Captcha. If you suspect your users are bots, you can just insert human solvable problems every couple of hours into the system. If the user is human, they can easily pass the test. If the user is a bot, then it will most likely fail to pass the test. If you want to keep it fun, make it relevant to a mini game, or something.
I have never played WoW, nor will I ever. Starcraft, however, is one of my favorite games.
Here's the thing that I don't get.
1) People on Slashdot claim that Open Source Software is better than Closed Source Software (not everyone makes this claim, and I doubt that people who use them both all the time believe it).
2) Microsoft releases Office 2007 with documentation about the new zipped-XML-based file formats (It's kinda neat to hack around in them for fun and profit).
3) The new XML-based formats are bug-compatible with the old binary formats - they preserve dusty old behaviors from old software that people might still be running (so if your customers still use Office 97 you can still support them).
4) There are many articles/people on Slashdot whining and complaining about OOXML vs ODF (this is Slashdot after all - news for nerds, stuff that nobody else cares about).
Is ODF any better than OOXML or the old Microsoft formats in all ways? If not, then why not? Make it better - don't waste your time on Slashdot whining - your whines do nothing. Is OOo better than Microsoft Office in all ways? If not, then why not? Make it better - don't waste your time on Slashdot whining. Your hate shortens your life and accomplishes nothing.
The truth of the matter is that it is hard to write good software, and it is complicated. There are those who write good software, and those who talk about it. Clearly people who write on Slashdot aren't the former, or we wouldn't be here.
I will point out that Apple already added support for OOXML in their iWork '08 suite, so it really doesn't appear to be terribly difficult to do. Will it matter? How many Million copies of Microsoft Office 2007 are out there in corporations around the world? While we are arguing on Slashdot, Microsoft's army of code monkies and lock-in experts are coming up with the next set of killer features and file format extensions. If you want to compete, you'd better get off Slashdot and start coding. By my recollection, you have about 10 years worth of feature work to catch up on, starting with a UI that doesn't make me want to gouge out my eyeballs with a spoon...
What happens if/when Microsoft absorbs ODF support as a "feature" and bitmap-izes/OOXML-izes the extra functionality? It would satisfy requirements that Microsoft Office be compatible with ODF while at the same time neutering OOo ODF support. Would you rather have a neutered ODF file or something which doesn't pretend to be ODF wrapping OOXML? Really, think about the compatability problems with different document formats. It's just like IE 6's rendering of HTML+W3C standards vs IE 7 vs Opera vs Netscape vs Mozilla vs Safari. Get ready for it. It is coming. The people using ODF with Microsoft products won't suffer - the people using ODF with OOo will cry bloody murder and be forced to use Microsoft Office to get full fidelity from their ODF files.
And Microsoft marketing will call the ODF support a feature. They will laugh all the way to the bank as they sell millions and millions of copies to governments and corporations around the world. If you want to beat Microsoft at this game, you have to play like Microsoft does - make OOo save out OOXML with limitations or extenstions that frustrate Microsoft Office customers - uneditable charts, etc. Embrace and extend works in both ways.
Of course, it's a double edged sword. Microsoft makes these apps, and hundreds of millions of people run them every day. People are paid to write programs around them and their APIs and their file formats. The products that Microsoft spit out are the standard. You can't stop the Microsoft army of coders directed by Gates and co from making their next version and patching the previous one. All you can do is attempt - little by little - to make something that people would want to use more.
Speaking as a father and as someone who spends too much time staring at glowing screens, I can say that this feature is a great idea. Obvioulsy, it doesn't substitute for good parenting and spending time with your child/encouraging them to pursue better activities than video game playing. It is simply a tool.
/. are generally at the cutting edge and we often worry about the worst possible cases and get stuck in hyperbole. We are the priviledged few. Parental controls on a new game console enable most people in my generation to help balance the amount of time our children are spending on one form of entertainment.
Some will see this as a way to punish kids (and some will call it ineffective for various reasons - not all parents can operate a game console). Others will see this as a way for lazy parents to avoid parenting (this won't change that). It is partly each of these things. What it is most of all is a tool. It can be used positively, such as like an allowance - it can be increased for good behavior or decreased as a punishment.
Parenting isn't easy, and in the modern world you can't always be with your child 100% of the time. This tool helps set some boundaries. Like every tool, there is abuse potential. Like every piece of software, it will have its fair share of bugs to work out.
Technology is moving very quickly. When I was growing up (I'm nearly 30), computers had Kilobytes of RAM and phones had rotary dials. There were no mobile phones (these too appear to be going away slowly), and no cell phones. My childhood photos are in some shoeboxes on the other side of the country. My son's photos are on our website, from the day he was born. Hundreds of 4MP+ images - several each month as we go to parties or walk in the park, etc. Each picture has embedded date and time and other metadata.
We are more connected than ever before with cellphones/cameras/the net. This month people can spend $400 on 2 laptops - one for a poor child in another country and one for themselves. As time goes on, the OLPC/"$100 Laptop" will go down in price (to some extent) and the technology curve will advance. Eventually, the future generation of people will all have a minimum amount of digital technology. This will enable expression from any point in the globe to every other point regardless of income. It won't happen overnight.
The point is that the technology is coming to the masses. People on
I have spent most of my nearly 30 years of life staring at glowing screens... There's some good, some bad, and some plain old that's just the way it is in that statement.
"even if it were truly open it would be a hindrance because there already is one international standard (ODF). why a second one? microsoft can just implement that one."
.DOC, etc data structures, but I love that my years of old documents are convertable without losing formatting or content. Microsoft is confident enough in its army of coders and entrenched market position to open up to its customers without fear of being cloned out of existence. Word may not be the best editor, but now at least, there are public docs to enable new editors to work on Word, etc files.
First: Microsoft doesn't implement other people's standards for their bread and butter. They have the luxury of controlling the largest hoard of software engineers, product planners, marketers, testers, and customers in the desktop application market. Their motivation is to make money. Using their competition's file format as their primary format is akin to being defeated.
Second: Microsoft's customers demand of Microsoft that it do things certain ways. If Microsoft wants to meet those demands, it has to remain flawlessly compatible with prior versions content, including bugs. ODF just can't match the compatability that well - the internal data structures at Microsoft should be nothing like OOo's unless someone was copying the other. The XML representation of that data sheds a lot of light on it.
Finally: It is a real step for Microsoft to make an XML standard format for Office file formats, take it to a standards body, and go through the procedures and public scrutiny. The ISO is no rubber stamp organization. The fact that Microsoft has done this and made the XML format the default for save in the Office 2007 suite means that Microsoft is committed to more transparency. You might be snarky and claim that the format is too tied to the old
PageHeap is a debugging tool for Windows created by Microsoft. It does what you want.
For more information look here:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/286470
There's an obvious explanation for the "corporate trolling" -- my generation which was in college when /. became popular, and we graduated from High School and College. Lots of us got recruited at places like Apple, IBM, MS, etc. It's kinda like, you might be able to tell in general when or how someone got broadband by if they use Friendster vs MSN Spaces vs MySpace vs... Or if they use AOL or Hotmail or GMail or MSN or Yahoo.
/. public's interpretation of the FUD that others are spreading. Of course, you might just have the stupid my-company-can-do-no-evil blinders on, too.
/., although many have also moved on. In time, the new popular places for geeks to hang out will be overrun with the next generation of corporate shills and OSS zealots. I've been called both by my friends at different points in time. :)
Computer nerds grow up to become corporate shills. Would you rather spend years at an unknown startup or game company, slaving away 24-7 on a product which may not succeed, or would you like an 8+ hour flexible time job with a nice $80K paycheck + benefits? If you had the latter, you might take a little pride in the company paying you, and you might know something that is being misconstrued and want to correct the
I have friends at places including Adobe, Apple, Amazon, IBM, Google, Microsoft, etc. They all read
Just filter out the spam sent from that region of the world... No increase in bandwidth would be necessary...
The interesting market for MCE was the college student in a dorm room who wanted to save space and watch TV on their PC. As a set top box, MCE was interesting only in that it brought media into a "workstation/server" right under the TV.
There have been a few interesting developments in the past few years.
1) Vista Premium and XBox 360
The MCE 2005 has a toy "Media Center Extender" which works with the original XBox to deliver video to the XBox from the XP Media Center. The XBox 360 has native support for extending the Media Center from Windows Vista, and these features work much, much better (MS didn't get it right in V1, but V2 is fine).
2) The new Windows Home Server
Home Server is built on Windows Server 2003 (i.e. it's based on XP Server, not Vista Server), and promises to be a friendly solution to the needs of people who want one box to rule all their storage, backup, media, shared folders, and want convenient ways to get remote access to home computers from the web. Obviously, it appeals to the slightly less nerdy computer user as a box to manage their TBs of files and be a central home repository. Windows XP and Vista can be used just as well for this task, but some of the new features are nice.
I personally would like it if they included MCE features so that I could install Home Server over my 400GB MCE 2005 box with dual TV tuners and use spare CPU cycles on my HT 3GHz P4 to be able to downsample and stream video content (while recording) to my laptop over the cable modem. As it is, using a share and WiFi is ok, but I can only watch media from the laptop after it has finished recording on MCE. The interesting thing from my perspective is that I'm not willing to have MCE under the TV, but I'm willing to put an XBox there with an MCE Extender and a 10/100 Ethernet.
Unfortunately for me, when upgrade time hits later this year, I get hit for memory (512MB not enough for Vista), software (Photoshop CS doesn't work on Vista), and compatability (MCE Extender for XBox doesn't work with Vista's MCE). Hopefully one of my friends of friends at Adobe will let me get an employee discount on the PS CS3. I have a friend at MS who gave me Vista Ultimate. Eventually, MS will release Halo 3, and I'll solve the XBox 369 dilemna.
It's just the way the internet and web work. Your little opinions don't really matter. If the web didn't work this way, it would not be reliable, and it would not be useful. Search engines and archives and caches are services without which we would get significantly less benefit from the information put out on the web.
If you don't want to make information publicly available, don't put it on the internet, and don't advertise its presence by linking your content. Sue people who violate your copyright if they put it on the internet. If you want to make information publicly available to a private community, then use appropriate technologies like Bulletin Board software with accounts and passwords.
Copyright is not violated by computers. Copyright is violated by people. You can't sue computers. Large organizations with lots of money (big targets for lawsuits) will in general try not to violate copyright, but they aren't in general responsible for the copyright violations that the masses do through their services, just like how the FSF isn't responsible if you use their software to violate copyright or Microsoft isn't responsible if you use their software to violate copyright. Wouldn't it suck if Microsoft Word didn't let you "Copy and Paste", because "God forbid you might be copying/pasting something that was copyrighted by someone else, and Word can't make the distinction". Being indexed should be opt-in. Just like being spammed. Robots.txt can be used to advertise where a crawler should index as well as where a crawler should not. It is both opt-in and opt-out at the same time. Before you write another uninformed word about it, you should read more about it. You should also read this google blog post, this google blog post, The main robots.txt site, and the RFC.
There are crawlers which "violate robots.txt" (usually those crawlers are just poor implementations by people learning to write a crawler or unfinished programs - people who write real crawlers in general understand that you probably have good reasons for not wanting them crawling those pages of your site, and they don't want to waste their bandwidth on them).
Of course I didn't RTFA
/. very often, and your +4 insightful reply is neither +4 nor insightful.
And everything you wrote was off topic, and yet people moderated you to +4 "Insightful".
What Microsoft has done differently this time is that it used its army of lawyers to trademark, patent, copyright, and protect every aspect of the "ribbon". This is a licence to use UI designs, which Microsoft has protected. Knowing infringing patents increases the damages a good deal. So by promoting this licensing agreement, Microsoft is basically ensuring that people know that there are patents. What Slashdot is doing is propagating that knowledge.
Here's what you wrote:
Seriously - would you lose any sleep because MS won't give you a new toy? Even if OO.o wanted it, and even if MS gave them it, they probably couldn't use it because it'll probably be Vista- (or at least Windows-)only.
Microsoft isn't giving you a new toy. It's licensing the right to use patents/other IP to people who don't compete with Office.
And seeing as most critics have slammed the new MS Office UI as being generally awful, it's not beyond the realms of possibility that OO.o's similarity to the "old" MS Office UI might pick them up a few users.
I doubt it. You haven't read enough. Obviously, you haven't RTFA so you don't know WTF you are talking about. Let me give you another FA not to read here.
"Software is not interchangable, as the StarOffice marketing team is learning. Even when the price is zero, the cost of switching from Microsoft Office is non-zero. Until the switching cost becomes zero, desktop office software is not truly a commodity. And even the smallest differences can make two software packages a pain to switch between."
And seeing as most critics have slammed the new MS Office UI as being generally awful, it's not beyond the realms of possibility that OO.o's similarity to the "old" MS Office UI might pick them up a few users.
Where do you read that? Microsoft is taking a gamble with the new UI by introducing a lot of change. You apparently don't read the same reviews that I do. Maybe you just don't read reviews. So let me look around for some Office 2007 reviews...
PC Magazine
"Pros: New interface give beginners the same power as experts. Dazzling new graphics engine. Massively improved security. Smoother collaboration.
Cons:
Not all applications get an interface overhaul. New interface can't be customized--yet. Potential for document-sharing problems with users of versions before Office 2003."
Pointer to 22 page review on NeoWin I found the comments following the link to the review interesting.
There is a reason why I don't read
By replying to this, I know I'm giving up my moderating/meta-moderating power, so people who do meta moderate... please do your job and remove this gibberish...
Better yet, when was the car in question purchased? If it was purchased before the federal program then it really can't be argued that it was purchased with federal money. Is there a title/deed for the ownership of the car? And if so, to which government is it registered?
My curiosity with this case is a matter of how much can the government go fishing for evidence that they do not have. Someone blogging on the internet does not make them a journalist. Someone filming something and putting up their video does not make them a reporter.
What is the litmus test here for a judge to pronounce that someone produce what they suspect is evidence? If someone witnesses a crime being committed are they required to testify? If you declare publicly that you have information, can you be required to produce the information?
Patent's aren't a bad thing. They allow a *limited* monopoly on an *invention* for a period of about 15 years at *most* (in the USA). Yeah, technology changes... The Lempel Ziv Welch patent which recently expired is an example of a patent of a non obvious method which changed our lives and is now free to implement. There are better algorithms and tons of other patents in the image compression space, but this was a particularly high profile patent.
Any patents on obvious or previously implemented technologies won't stand up in court, but of course, it means paying lawyers to stick up for the little guys who don't have the money.
But just because you don't like the law doesn't mean that you can suddenly chnage the rules, unless you are a congressman, and then you can only make the rules under your jurisdiction.
Microsoft may not be the worlds best team player, but that doesn't mean that MS doesn't deserve to use the inventions its employees legitimately invent. It also doesn't mean that Microsoft can't charge licensing fees for the usage of those patents.
What is scary is the number of companies whose sole existence is to buy up patents with potential litigation and then sue people with products that potentially violate the patents. These companies of lawyers suing companies making real products is a disturbing trend in the industry. Normally, when one large company sues another for violating patents, the other counter sues, and the two companies shake hands and agree to license each other's patents. But when a company that exists solely to sue large and small companies sues, they tie up our court system to take money from people who build the products that make our world run.
That ends up coming from all of our pockets to make a few people who bought a few inventions fabulously wealthy.
The moral of the story is that all the large corporations now seem to be cross-licensing each others patents so that hungry lawyer companies attempting to claim huge amounts of money can be beaten down with a big "I licensed that technology from XYZ corp" stick. And the big corps have also started licensing some of these technologies, Microsoft for example has this website here. Is this progress? Well, OSS needs to develop its own patents if it wants to compete. Is it not unreasonable for individuals in the Open Source movement to compete like this?
"Hello Pot. This is kettle. You're black."
Flaws found in device drivers shipped with Windows, Microsoft recommends upgrading to Vista!
MS has Billions of $ in the bank and brings in about 32 Billion more in revenue each year. Subtract out the costs of doing business and you have profit. How many Billion does MS pour into its lawyers/people who sue MS? Not enough to make a dent, that's for sure.
Some lawsuits are definitely legitimate, but just because MS has a lot of power doesn't mean that it's abusive. They got where they are by producing software that was "good enough" and selling it better than the competition.
Now that open source has come along, watch and see Microsoft get better at selling their software and spend more money trying to make it better than the competition to survive.
The Tablet PC is an example of this. Microsoft is actually doing some innovative stuff in their platform, although Longhorn seems destined not to ship.
"There is a limit as to how fast you can safely travel which is mainly governed by how quickly you can stop. Sport Compact Car magazine recently reviewed a race-ready Mitsubishi Evolution 8 with upgraded everything including a beefed up braking system."
But I have to share the road with big trucks, sports cars, SUVs, School Busses, hybrids, etc. The road has a mix of brand new cars to cars that are 30 or 40 years old along with busses and trucks. Drivers vary from people who are about to die of old age who are missing spots in their vision to people who just got their permit, to 25 year old frat party animals to soccer moms, professional drivers (of all types), etc.
How fast I can stop is a factor including my reflexes, vehicle, tires, road conditions, weight in tow, etc. Put 10 cars behind each other, and one or two guys with too much testosterone weaving through, and although it might be safe for the guys with the muscle car, the fast reflexes, and the adrenaline, it's the guy who slams on the brakes and gets hit by the Mac truck behind him that's going to be paralyzed from the waist down.
There are so many factors to take into account, but it's not rocket science. Crashes happen because people make bad choices without understanding or caring about the consequences. They know those choices are wrong. Rarely are the choices that cause crashes and death are the ones made by the road engineers or car engineers. Equipment failure shouldn't always be the cause of death... These things are designed with room to spare on safety, but people gobble up those design constraints through bad choices.
I was told that the concept of the "mecha" came from Japan's cartoons and anime, and the concept has appeared in all kinds of movies, cartoons, video games, etc (for example, The Matrix, Star Wars, Final Fantasy, Metal Gear Solid, Thundercats, Power Rangers, etc).
/.er would kill to live in a society where you can find a toilet with more functionality than your average desktop computer...
Japan is ahead of american society by a few years... You know the average
I vote for the Toshiba Portege M200 though. Much higher resolution (12.1" XVGA+ 1400x1050 pixels), faster Centrino (1.5GHz on mine, 1.6GHz on newer versions), SD card reader, PC Card slot, USB 2.0. And a very cool built-in accelerometer that is underused, but there's a demo application available called WinGimcana.
I will second that. I recently purchased a 2GHz M200 with the 512MB RAM and 60GB 7200 RPM drive option and BlueTooth. I got mine through a B2B deal from my company at a %25 discount for about $2000 (would cost about $2600 otherwise). The M200 is the most popular model of laptop in my building at work.
The M200 is a great machine, but it does have its flaws (having one at home and one at work, I can attest to them):
1) The LCD screen suffers outdoors.
2) The track pad is a bit finnicky.
3) No CD/DVD drive built-in.
4) The bottom heats up to an uncomfortable level to place in your lap (doesn't seriously impact carrying the device, but I normally put a pillow between it and my lap when on the couch).
5) The pen isn't always accurate, and needs to be calibrated too often.
The device has a number of good things going for it:
1) 12.1" SXGA (144DPI LCD) is very sharp. Amazing for Photoshop.
2) 4.5lbs is very easy to carry, open or closed.
3) The supplied pen isn't bad (not as good as the Cross Executive Penabled, but certainly better than an average Tablet stylus)
4) Toshiba's excellent battery management software.
5) The full sized QWERTY portion of the keyboard is comfortable. If I want to use an external (bluetooth or USB keyboard+mouse), I can use the tablet's base like a monitor stand.
I really like the Convertible style tablet. The slate factor is nice to carry around, but a keyboard is a necessity and carrying around an external keyboard is a nuisance.
The hybrid style where you have a slate with a specially designed clip-on keyboard that can be carried as a unit is one step above a slate, but the keyboards are one step below the convertible, and the base of the convertible are very solid and balance the device on your lap or desk well regardless of if you are in clamshell or slate mode.
I bought the M200 because 10" is not enough for a full sized keyboard, 14" XGA is not enough resolution for serious photographic editing and is bulky. 12" SXGA+ is big enough for a full-sized keyboard, and is light enough to take around.
Battery life on the M200 is great at about 4 hours for me (depends on many settings including how much you let the CPU throttle itself and how bright the screen is, how much time before you power down the disk drives, and how much you run the fan to cool the CPU).
Web pages can do just about anything. Maybe they can't do SSH by themselves, but if you're given more than just port 80, and even if you're not (so long as your port 80 isn't proxied in a way that destroys your usability), you can still run any kind of TCP/IP tunnel... you just have to do it over HTTP.
Where there's a will, there's a way. For all intents and purposes, HTTP = FTP = SSH = Telnet = SMTP = POP3, etc. All these protocols just specify who wants to upload/download what. They are optimized differently and some aren't encrypted, but as Google proved: Give users an HTTP mail store with unlimited space, and someone will write a filesystem on top of it. When I was in High School and College, I wrote lots of tiny HTTP server/proxies. One connected a customized MUD to HTTP so I could bypass the firewall of the company I was working at to chat with my friends.
So I'll bite. Your post doesn't deserve +5 insightful, but rather than use my Mod points, I will let you know why and add some thoughts.
Take a look at this RFC, note that it's how Outlook does their calendaring (and that the RFC's authors work at Lotus (IBM) and MS). What were you saying about Microsoft being afraid to commit to an open standard? How many other internet standards are authored or co-authored by Microsoft employees? How many are accepted as standards by committees with Microsoft employees sitting on them? XML, etc.
There are lots of standards that "Microsoft" not only commits to, but also authors. There are some closed standards organizations (mostly hardware) also. Standards are just as much of a double edged sword (for interoperability sake) as everyone doing their own thing.
On one hand, if everyone works off of a standard, then the minimal subset of implementation of that standard is adopted, and there's a common platform for interoperability. On the other hand, if people implement competing applications without agreeing on a standard, or by extending the standard in new and unapproved ways (think HTML), then the market will determine which application is best fit. If Microsoft was not the best fit software to run on computers (note that this is a broad definition of fitness as determined by the market forces in general), then why would Dell and Gateway install it on just about all their desktop and laptop products? Why would consumers pick Windows over Linspire, or Knoppix?
Regardless of what you think about the stability of Windows, Linux, etc. The truth is that there are many reasons that Windows is on top on the desktop market. But the fundamental most important one is that it runs 99% of the software from all of the Microsoft Windows and DOS operating systems that came before. If you're looking for freeware, shareware, commercial software, or even open source software, chances are, it all runs on Windows. That's what Bill Gates is talking about when he talks about interoperability. It's commitment to running the garbage that's already out there in the market. Someone (who works at MS) once told me that there are something on the order of 500 global variables which tweak the way that IE behaves to account for bugs in other people's software.
This is a major problem for Microsoft in the future: How do they release a new version of Windows without breaking that? How do they release a Windows which doesn't let users log in as administrator or administrators log in like normal users? How do they break the cycle of bad programmers making bad assumptions that the circumstances involving the way the OS used to work were going to be true forever? Commitment to interoperability means being willing to suffer for the mistakes of others.
If this means by comparison that OSS has poor interoperability, then that's what it means. It's not elegant software design to add kludges here and kludges there to special case it so that other people's poorly designed code still works, but commitment to keeping older software working without rewriting it is what keeps Microsoft in business. And commitment to interoperating and extending older software with new software will make-or-break Microsoft's future deals also.
"We can't even prevent war amongst humankind, how do you expect us to prevent it when we have to fight for dominance."
I don't. Our set of affairs is always a winner-take-all situation. Business is just as much about power as war is.
"How much benefit will we get from this type of research? Is it truly worth the negatives of a divided society?"
If our society isn't divided on other issues, why would this be any different? Our society is always divided. It's a blessing to have more than 2 opinions out there.
"The problem is we don't know what situations we will live in. You can't predetermine evolution...that's the point of evolution to adapt to something that changes, be it environment, predators, disease, or whatever."
Sure you can. We pick the largest grain to grow the next crop. We pick the largest crops, and breed "pure-bread" animals by sets of rules that we determine. So why can't/shouldn't we determine what the next advancement of the gene pool we will either selectively breed to get to or simply engineer our way in the lab? We live in several different kinds of environment that aren't technically speaking natural, but we could adapt our genes so that they were. What if we wanted gills to breathe water. Or maybe a recycling system in the body to adapt to being in space, where there is little storage, etc.
"At what point do we say this mouse is no longer a mouse but should be treated with equal rights as a human? How long will it take to get half-human species equal rights?"
Good question. Obviously, we have to get to the half-human stage of evolution first. It's an interesting point to ponder.
Does anyone stop to think that there may be too many flavors of Linux for the average user?...Perhaps the Linux community should get together and make a serious effort at a unified "desktop" launch.
And this would be *yet another* flavor... The truth is that you can't herd cats. Everyone wants to make the wheel in their own image, and there will always be a thousand varieties of anything that isn't controlled by a corporate entity.
The reason that Linux isn't competing on the desktop against Windows is that it isn't something which a user can go out to the store and buy software and hardware with confidence for. If I go to a best buy, there is no Linux certified laptop. There is no Linux certified Tablet. No Linux certified Media Center. I can buy a laptop and put whatever OS and drivers I want on it, but if I want a good laptop, I buy an Intel Centrino with Microsoft Windows. Maybe Joe Sixpack is a little less informed about software, hardware, etc than I am, but I happily pay the Microsoft tax because I get software that my wife can use out of the box, and she can also add software that her schools use (she is a teacher, and her school uses grading software that runs on Windows).
Windows has more software available for it than any other platform, and that includes FOSS. How is Linux special if all the software that runs on it also runs on Windows, but I need to worry about not being able to run the latest game or work with the latest cool devices? When I bought that Taiwanese 20GB portable USB2 storage device 2 years ago, I plugged it into my Windows machine, and I could use it. No kernel futzing, etc. I wanted to show my friend a bunch of photos on a CD (simple CD-R with no folder structure and just a bunch of .JPG files), and he spent 10 minutes putzing around with Linux getting his CD-ROM drive mounted, and attempting to find X-windows software that would load a picture. On Windows, I stick the disk in, and when it asks what I want to do, I click full-screen slide show.
For two years in college, I had a DEC Alpha running Linux and Windows NT. It was a damn fast computer at the time, but the Windows only ran x86 software under emulation, and that meant that I couldn't run all the software I wanted to in my room. So if I wanted to use the school-licensed software apps, I had to go to the public cluster. Eventually, I traded my alpha for a Pentium at a lesser clock rate, and it just clicked in my mind what I had been missing by running a less-used OS (even though it was a version of Windows that could run *some* Intel 32-bit Windows apps). That was the point where I gave up on my Microsoft is the devil category of thinking. I realized that the Intel/Microsoft platform is a constant. It always supports the latest hardware, and the apps from years ago continue to run.
In order for Linux to take over the desktop, it's going to have to be put out as the major option by hardware vendors, and it's going to have to clone all of Windows. Windows adds about $50 to the cost of a PC, but it is the brand name which people know runs their software. Software makers (even FOSS makers) target Windows over Linux simply because their target audience doesn't run Linux.
The barriers to adopt a desktop operating system are huge. Apple is successful because they have a user base and a set of apps. They made a very smart move to bring in Unix into their OS. This article is just a single data point which shows how the Linux market is fragmented. And Linux doesn't natively run Windows software. Windows is evolving, and the only thing which is completely bug-compatible with it is itself.
There are good emulators for Windows, but ask most people if they want to run a good emulator, or the thing being emulated. When I ran OS/2 Warp, I found myself using Windows more than the PM. I definately thought it was cool that the Windows session was embedded in the OS/2 session, and lots of things were really neat about that system, but it reall