"MS does this because when one business upgrades, it forces the partners to upgrade as well. Why because most people have a hard time understanding what the different formats are."
Actually, MS doesn't do this intentionally, and you are neglecting to mention the free Office converters MS puts out for users of older software, such as Word 97. Your lack of information does not constitute anything informative here.
Microsoft spent money developing these converters. Proof: http://www.microsoft.com/office/ork/2003/tools/Box A07.htm
While private colleges are perfectly capable of not allowing computers to connect to the network, it is impossible to prevent connected computers to share their connection with others. VPN or otherwise.
Laptop users with multiple network cards can be used as a WAP (your average/.er should be able to easily setup Windows XP to bridge these connections), and Linksys boxes make particularly good firewalls for a Dorm-Room LAN party. Second NICs are $20, and if someone can get online with Windows XP, they can share the line with the rest of their local network with their Linksys. This is very much like my home network (except that I connect the linksys to the cable and not through a Windows box).
If I wanted to get a shaky-hand-held-recording, I could just take a nice clear rip downloaded from the local pirate server, and record it with a camcorder.
Osmosis_Garett wrote:
Not only will this make CAM recordings more rare It will make them more elite and thus more sought after by release groups.
Piracy groups always go for quality first. Besides, once someone cracks the DVD the copying game is over.
I don't suppose anyone is going to come up with an argument saying that they are in the theaters with their camcorders excersizing their right to time shift...:)
It is not a right to get high speed internet access through your university. If you have a problem with the connectivity offering, you shouldn't connect.
Another thing to realize is that the IT departments at Colleges and Universities (especiall liberal arts colleges) are dealing with a population of students, professors, and staff that are generally computer illiterate. I can say this because I was in the help desk at my college, and people needed help with the most basic functionality of their computer. I would often think to myself: These are some of the brightest people in the world (nobel laureates would come in with basic computer problems) and they don't know the difference between a disk drive and a CD. Eventually, it dawned on me that I shouldn't take even the most basic computer knowledge for granted.
It makes complete sense for a college IT department to require this amount of control over their computers that connect to their network. Remember, using the network is a priviledge not a right. This level of control is done for a very good reason. It makes it better for everyone to raise the bar. I'd rather my tuition go to the education departments than to waste on removing every new worm and trojan that comes in... Especially because as a help desk worker, I was being paid $10 per hour (best student job on campus) to disinfect peoples computers.
'API's are a black box: you pass them values, they return some. All you need to know is what to feed them and what to expect in return.'
"OK, no offence but it's pretty clear that you've not done a huge amount of programming, at least, not with APIs of any size.
No API of any complexity at all is a "black box" - they are often backed by millions of lines of code, and that code, just like application code, will contain bugs and odd behaviours. The documentation will be incomplete - very few people can spec out a complex API to the degree needed to truly understand it, even when you have documentation coming out of your ears like with MSDN.
Even assuming the API is perfection itself, it'll always be lacking SOME feature you want. Openness of an API is a very important thing indeed."
Openness of an API isn't as important as documentation of how to use it. Being able to look into the details of how an API is implemented breaks the contract, and enables you to depend on the specific implementation details to not change instead of being responsible and coding to the contract. That's the reason that you have a separation of implementation from interface. Often times, having the implementation details of some API makes it worse. How many times has Microsoft itself been burned by employees between Office and Windows collaborating too deeply, and as a result having to support some undocumented feature that should never have been there in the first place, or Office shipping Windows updates and Windows shipping Office updates. You don't want to make that same mistake.
Microsoft gives out the Windows headers and documentation. Those form a contract that enables an application developer to write to the APIs, and then test with (in some cases several different) implementations of those APIs. If your application isn't tested, say on Windows XP and Windows 95, then there are a few million people who might not be able to use it.
However, if your application depends on some line of code in Linux's APIs, and there is a change to that code, you won't discover it until your application breaks.
Microsoft Windows has a market where people develop commercial applications. If you want to make Linux be a mainstream desktop OS, one of the barriers you have to overcome is mainstream application developers (of ALL types). If all the great games run on Windows XP and Longhorn with Microsoft XNA (DirectX 10 and Media Player 10), then how many Linux geeks will still have a PC running Windows for their games (even pirated). If you're a teenager with a PC, do you want to run the NERD OS, or would you rather play Halo at a LAN Party?
If you want the lion's share of the software market available on Linux, you're going to have to convince games houses, application writers, system integrators, and other developers that there's a paycheck coming to them for producing content on Linux. Until at least 25% of the PC games at my local EB Games store say Linux on them, Linux won't have the desktop.
In simpler words: people who expect to not pay for their OS expect not to pay for their software. You can't sell me Linux if my games don't run on it. You can't sell my mom Linux if she can't buy a printer that works with it. You can't sell my dad Linux if his Digital Camera's software says Mac or Windows. You can't even give it away to this kind of person. They don't want it.
My parents started a small company that now (primarily) sells large clusters of Linux based servers (they've been selling hardware and software for my entire life -- and I'm 25). They run Windows on their desktops. The engineering tools they use (hardware engineering) run on Windows. The software engineers at the company run Linux.
You can't sell me Linux when it is being given away on the streets, but you can give it away with your hardware. You can sell me Linux as an embedded OS inside my LinkSys box (as long as there's a nice Windows XP logo certification on the side...), or ma
"Now, granted, you shouldn't use an O(n) algorithm when an O(lg n) one exists to solve the same problem. However, knowing the difference between O(n) and O(lg n) has nothing to do with knowing assembly. The only benefits you can get out of knowing assembly are constant-multiplier speed increases. And, frankly, shaving off 50% of 0.1% CPU time used is not going to help much."
While I agree with much of what you are saying, you're 100% wrong here. Try as much as you want to, the engineers who wrote the optimizer for the compiler know far more about how to make its output efficient than you do. Most attempts to "hand-optimize" code actually make it worse. The only place you need to use assembly is when writing certain low-level parts of an Operating System or a Device Driver. Do you know which of the 15 different ways to zero a register executes the fastest on your CPU version? How about which one is the smallest instruction? Your compiler does. Also, it knows how to schedule the operation so that on the latest 5 CPUs, the execution happens in parallel with the previous set of instruction. Which variables should be in registers, and which should be left on the stack? Heap? Did you play the red-pebble, blue-pebble game? How does the scheduling improve if we unroll that loop? Can we improve the branch-prediction here? These questions are answered by the compiler to degrees you don't need to or want to know about. Are you optimizing for space or time? Do you understand why optimizing for space may improve the execution of your code more than optimizing for time?
Your algorithm assertion about an O(n) vs O(lg n) only holds as n becomes very large, and is only relevant if the situation warrants it. It isn't bad design to choose an inferior algorithm which makes the code more maintainable. Your O(n) time algorithm may run within O(n) space that has been allocated locally and happens to be within the cache, whereas your O(lg n) time algorithm may run within O(x(n)) space already allocated, but outside the cached memory. Now your O(lg n) includes O(x) page switches at a painful C.
The point is that knowledge of algorithms doesn't make you a good engineer. Engineering is about designing something, building it, and testing it.
Assembly language is terribly important to understand when writing C and C++, because you learn the constraints of the system. You cannot dereference a NULL pointer and expect your program to behave correctly. If you don't allocate enough memory for your input, and you don't document it, and you don't check your assumptions then you deserve what happens to you when a customer exploits you by asking for x bytes and delivering x + exploit bytes.
Granted, you do not need to completely understand all assembly language to get these concepts, but I wouldn't hire you as a developer on my team if you couldn't tell me what an Access Violation is, or why it happens when you dereference 0, I also think it's important that you understand interrupts and exceptions, and how to write code so that if an exception is thrown, you handle it correctly. Being sloppy because you are lazy or uninformed isn't acceptable when millions of people run your code. Just because your specific computer runs at 3GHz with the ability to retire instructions from separate threads simultaneously doesn't mean that your customer's battery-saving laptop running between 300 and 900MHz makes short work of it while they're running their MP3s and typing out their homework. If you need to spin up their HD to hit virtual memory because you're being lazy, you may have just cost them 10 minutes of battery life. Spinning up and spinning down a HD is expensive.
"Really, the speed of modern CPU's is sickening. I can't count the number of times I've written a piece of code, thought "This is going to be so slow...", then watched it execute near instantaneously. Even when running programs in a prototype programming language I'm working on -- which currently runs about 40x slower than C, because it's a c
13Echo Wrote: "They can pretend that they hate piracy of their products, but they hate OSS/Free software even more. Locking out non-payers would probably just hurt them more than help them, causing a lot of people to defect to Linux and Macs."
[sarcasm] Uhm. Right. Sure. Whatever. [/sarcasm] Let me make an analogy: You're a baker. You bake cookies, and sell them at your bakery. Another baker down the street bakes cakes, and he gives away cookies to sell the cakes. Another guy sneaks in when you aren't looking, and steals some of your cookies.
Do you "hate" the other baker more than you hate the guy who steals your cookies?
Do you even hate the other baker? Maybe you don't get to own the entire market (or even half of it), but competition is a good thing when it comes to a market. Theft is theft.
The companies that "make" Linux are getting paid to do something, otherwise they would be bankrupt.
Microsoft is a smart company full of 50,000 smart people. Many are running Windows XP with stolen activation codes. Just because they can get away with it without paying doesn't mean that they should get the benefit of the updates that Microsoft makes for the paying customers. Maybe it's more work for those people who pirate, but there's an old expression: time is money.
You don't get ahead in business by giving out free beer to your worst customers. I was all for this open source software is good software line before I had to support myself and my wife by writing software.
>> They have every right to adjust their prices >> to reflect these additional costs.
> Actually, no, they do not. This is yet another > example of them abusing their monopoly > position within the marketplace. That's what > all of the legal action has been about.
Ok, I'm confused. Is being a monopoly all about the amount of money you can charge for a product in theory or in practice? Or is it about competition?
I have seen so many arguments in this thread that claim that Microsoft does X, Y, and Z because it is a Monopoly, and that Microsoft does A, B, C to out-compete others. It seems to me, that people are over-analyzing what Microsoft does.
Microsoft is a giant intellectual factory. They pay people top-dollar to sit in a slightly-larger-than-cubicle-office and dump their creative energies into the computer all day long (40+, 50+, and 60+ hour weeks are not uncommon). Then, they turn around and pay people to market/sell the products of that factory to be bundled with everything that they can possibly bundle it with, at whatever costs the market will bear. It seems like this lawyer's argument that the other lawyers eating $300M of MS's money hurts consumers isn't quite reality -- consumers won't actually pay any more than they did before. The money will just be deducted from Microsoft's costs of doing business.
The question I really have to wonder is, do the lawyers who won this case against Microsoft really deserve $3000 per hour?
When you do the math and divide the gross yearly revenue by the number of employees, you get something like $750,000 per employee, per year. And yet, the average salary is $600 PC. I don't think that the big OEMs like Dell pay more than $50 for Windows, but that doesn't come with support. You're not supposed to call MS when your Dell PC crashes... you're supposed to call Dell.
The interesting thing about the price hike, is that it probably will be transparent to end users. It will simply come attached to the next version of Windows. The reason the next version of Windows isn't out yet, is that the last one -- XP has met the market demands quite successfully. Unfortunately for Microsoft, they need to figure out how to sweeten the pot to take advantage of new directions and new trends in computing to make a compelling release post XP.
I don't think we'll actually see another compelling Windows OS until Longhorn/2008, and who knows if OSS will catch up/advance the state of the art during that time. MS will probably release another Windows in 2005 for the SA customers that are paying to upgrade every few years.
It is quite amusing to take a step back and read our dialogue. All of this armchair-business and armchair-propaganda. Slashdot is usually good for a laugh, and not much more. The world is much more complicated than the views expressed here.
"Maybe thats what Microsoft is most afraid of, to loose control over the heading of the software industry. Open source have control over web servers and can take control over the protocols on the web if we just do our own thing. If we only follow what Microsoft do we will always be number two and thats no where to be."
If they (Microsoft's management/people who make the big decisions) are really afraid of losing control of the heading of the software industry, they certainly don't show it. The software industry is ultra-competitive. Microsoft is an ultra-competitive player in that market. They always have been. Bill Gates started by being a key player in the way people developed software for what we think of today as toy or hobby computers. He made the compiler of an easy-to-use language. BASIC became the first programming language that millions of people ever used. And they used Bill's BASIC.
Bill didn't invent BASIC. He just implemented it, marketed it, and was the first to sell rights to use an implementation of it. That concept of licensing a piece of software was what *made* Microsoft what it is today.
Bill didn't invent the Operating System, or the Word Processor, or a Web Browser. What Bill did was to enter each of those spaces and offer what people were looking for at the cheapest price with some innovative features. Linux/OSS may be offering an interesting proposition, but the products speak for themselves. Linux/OSS is like the imitation product made by people who are smart enough to figure out how to make a clone and tweak a few things. Now, imagine you are at a counter of a camera store. The salesperson behind the counter shows you a $300 Canon camera, and a $50 Kanan. Do you buy the Kanan, made by people smart enough to roughly clone the original and maybe add a few differences?
Are Microsoft managers worried about how to keep up earnings and revenue. Sure. Every successful company has leaders who worry about that. But you will note that Microsoft hasn't been firing off its employees like Sun, IBM, et all. Basically, the strategy at Microsoft is to have a deep development pipe. Build it, and sell it, and build it, and sell it. That's what Microsoft is. It's a highly organic code factory. Microsoft has 2 strategies. 1) Make it work. 2) Make it depend only on Microsoft technologies.
Microsoft will never lose control over the heading of its own industry (no, I'm not saying that Microsoft is the whole software industry, just a large industry within it).
Let me make an analogy. Say I buy a Canon Digital camera. It comes with Canon software. The store that sells me the camera may or may not sell me Canon lenses for the camera, but most people will buy Canon accessories for their Canon camera. In the case of the Digital SLR, Canon Lenses, Canon Flashes, and Canon accessories out-sell the 3rd parties in the Canon market. Now you can say that maybe that is because Canon is better than its 3rd party vendors, or maybe it is because people are afraid of breaking the device with third party stuff, but most people buy 1st part accessories. And if Canon is (as www.dpreview.com's statistics seem to indicate to me) the leader in the market (I own 3 Canon cameras, so I'm quite biased in this regard, but please ignore my bias for argument's sake), then you can imagine that being the leader, the market will follow you. Of course, the only way to stay a leader is to produce more of what people want to buy. Canon's offerings in the digital camera space match Nikon, Kodak, Olympus, Sony, Fuji, Sigma, etc.
Similarly, Microsoft's offerings match IBM, Novell, Oracle, Sun, etc. Granted, each of these companies competes in different segments of the markets, Microsoft is vertically integrated (depends on products produced by itself) and horizontally integrated (offers products in most/all categories in the industry in which it competes) specifically with regard to software.
Sony is an example of a company which is similarly vertically and horizontally integrated in th
How can you show someone a "Word Processor" without them learning "That Specific Word Processor". Back in the day of WordStar, Microsoft had this funny cursor. See, the Microsoft cursor could change size and shape... we call this a selection today, but at the time it came out, it was a big deal. Some people loved it, others hated it. Of course, the mouse really masked this. Today, both mechanisms of applying formatting (selecting a region and applying formatting as well as changing the current format and typing and finally turning off the format) are in widespread use in any decent word processor.
Your point about different tools is useful. There are different tools. Most people Google for whatever they need, and play with a bunch of tools until the right one does what they need. Then they just use that.
Open Source Software may be a good thing. It will put constant pressure on for-profit software to compete, but don't expect it to create a standard that closed source software will adhere to. Expect exactly the opposite. It will become a form of standard that non-OSS will avoid using simply because there is no profit in it. OSS will drive the push from big businesses on for-profit standards bodies and patents.
Microsoft's recent deal with Sun is an example. You might see Microsoft do this deal with IBM and other big businesses. As they say, "Business is business." I expect that Sun will soon stop throwing their money away into OSS because it gives them no returns.
Wouldn't it make more sense to introduce a date format where there was a separator between the fields? Then the length of the fields can grow as needed.
Yes, I do understand that this RFC was an April 1st joke, but still...
I can dump out all the methods in any Windows.dll and call them if I so choose. I can write my own Spy utility and watch how messages are passed between components, and create an emulator of any app on the market if I choose. Maybe this is because I am a competant developer with some reverse engineering skills and enough free time to play with and/or write engineering utilities.
If I am a non-MS (third party) developer and I want access to some part of the OS that I don't have access to, I can write the appropriate hooks at the appropriate level just using the documentation provided free of charge on http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/ (although their search is horrible unless you have the Google toolbar). If I were writing some Linux app, and waded through the source, I could do the very same. Big deal.
Sure, MS has people inside that talk to other insiders, but that's hardly "unfair". Microsoft is a large company and is vertically and horizontally integrated in several ways. Those integrations give it the ability to create product dependencies that tie solutions to the Microsoft platform.
Microsoft's platform is the most popular not because of its features, but because of the uniformity across the system. What does that mean? It means that Windows has one and only one Window manager. One and only one web browser. Applications depend on that browser and that window manager. Linux might have some cool new better web browser and some cool new funky window manager, but Linux is too late. Microsoft has 99% of the applications market, and a patent portfolio, and a network of hotmail and MSN users, etc, etc.
Regardless of if the Microsoft OS became the domimant OS through all the business tactics of licensing at different prices to people who only sold MS software vs people who sold competing software, it is now the dominant OS. If you want to "unseat" it, you have to keep up with the platform which is growing at a rate that 10,000 well paid engineers will make it grow at.
All of this recent malware recently put out has really caused Microsoft to adapt. Microsoft is like the Borg collective. It can lose a LOT. It will adapt, though. Those 5,000+ developers in the Windows org and 5,000+ developers in the Office org don't make over $100,000 per year to sit around and not produce code. They are well-paid developers who earn their living by working hard (many 50/60+ hour weeks according to my friends there), not by posting to slashdot. It would be nice if MS spent a few Billion on the customer running Windows 95 and Office 6.0, but realistically, it's not going to happen.
If Europe wants a crippled Windows, MS will make theie crippled Windows come with a big disclaimer: This version of Windows isn't as good as the one which includes the software you need to be competitive in this world. If MS really wanted to slap the EU, it would take the WMP and MCI out of the Windows so that all Music and Sound applications would fail on it, including all of MS's competitors like Apple and Real that use MCI (the Windows Media Control Interface) to play media. Then you wouldn't even be able to download/install WMP from the internet.
Given the choice between a Windows OS that was crippled and a Windows OS that did what the people want, I'd have to say that you'd need to pay me to run the crippled OS.
If you want to make a viable competitor to Windows, you need 1 thing: Software that runs on it that Joe 6 pack can buy in the local software store. Until you have just as many "titles" you aren't even in 2nd place. Just like in Japan, the XBox is a clear loser in 3rd place.
Under the section, "The Functional Limitations of Linux Before IBM's Involvement" (emphasis added):
80. The first versions of Linux evolved through bits and pieces of various contributions by numerous software developers using single or dual processor computers.
Unlike IBM, virtually none of these software developers and hobbyists had access to enterprise-scale equipment and testing facilities for Linux development. Without access to such equipment, facilities and knowledge of sophisticated development methods learned in many years of UNIX development it would be difficult, if not impossible, for the Linux development community to create a grade of Linux adequate for enterprise use.
Hmm... Well, let's see for a moment. None of these hobbyists had access to enterprise-scale equipment. I don't know about you, but I don't consider Linus Torvalds a "hobbyist". I consider him and all the people who wrote Linux with him to be developers.
Regardless of wether or not they develop for fun or profit (or both), it doesn't mean that they don't have access to enterprise-scale equipment and testing facilities. Moreover, the millions of people who use Linux daily make for far better Quality Assurance teams than most commercial QA houses. And IBM didn't need to bring their people into the mix to jumpstart the industry. RedHat (a company with no exposure to proprietary SYS V UNIX code) had already started doing that.
If you consider how many people worked on Linux as a software development team, you have the worlds largest development team. If SCO is trying to make the claim that the world's largest development team can't produce enterprise quality code, then why was SCO selling it as enterprise quality code before they discovered that IBM had added features that IBM had given to AIX?
Some vendors seem to think the purpose of a web interface is so you don't have to install new software on your Windows PC (giving them the benefit of the doubt vs just plain laziness/poor qa), whereas it _should_ mean it's platform and browser independent.
So where do you get off saying what the purposes of web interfaces are? I'm not saying don't test your web pages with Mozilla, but this is not plain laziness/poor QA. Test your web interfaces with what your clients use. Mozilla is doing itself a disservice by claiming it's MSIE...
The web runs on servers which gather statistics from HTTP headers. HTTP headers show what % of people use what browser... If "99.5%" of your customers use IE (or software which makes such a claim), you test it on IE and say that you support IE. If the software (Mozilla) is not fully compatible with IE, then it's Mozilla's fault for advertising to the web server that it is IE.
If a company goes to the trouble of making a web interface, it ought to be done "right", so any web browser that follows http/html standards can run it. It's not _that_ hard to do.
Which HTML standard (HTTP is the transfer protocol, and that is the responsibility of the server)? 3? 4? XHTML? CSS? JavaScript? etc.
Which web browser? Not everyone uses IE or Mozilla. And people use IE who can't see or hear. How do you make your web pages accessible to your disabled customers? Does Mozilla support text-to-speech or graile readers? Some governments require these things.
Compatability is a double edged sword. In order to be 100% compatible with a thing, you must be a thing. Dogs and Cats are not 100% compatible.
Personally, if it will only run on I.E. in Windows (wine/xover office notwithstanding), what's the point - may as well run a Windows app.
To you, HTML is something special. To Microsoft, HTML is just another way to write a Windows app. Want proof? Have you ever seen the IE error messages inside of the Windows Explorer? Last time I checked, people write apps for Windows a whole lot more often than they write apps for Linux. There's nothing wrong with that. People generally follow the path of least resistance. Microsoft knows and understands this, so you need to find a way to make your competing software offer something other than following the standard... In other words, you have to lead. Not on a moral ground, but on a functional one.
"When the people lead, the leaders they will have to follow."
-Ben Harper
Did you explain to them why it didn't work? Non-techie's need to be educated in terms that they can relate to, and I find the association of computers to cars to be a very simple way of making that comparison. So when you tell that that the reason Firebird didn't work isn't because the car is broken, but instead it's because the road was intentionally made for specific cars to use and will cause non-equipped cars to crash, they may begin to understand.
If enough people start making layperson comparisons like this and can complain loudly enough, we might get somewhere. But if the average computer user simply caves into whatever works, it doesn't matter whether it is a piece of crap or if the competing product is the greatest thing since sliced bread -- people will instinctively use the easiest tool to accomplish something as possible, and IE fits that bill. If the converse were true, we'd have turbine engines in cars and Betamax would never have lost to VHS.
Thank you for making my point. If Firebird is a car, and it doesn't drive on the highway, then it isn't useful. Unfortunately for Firebird, IE defined the highway. This reminds me of the reason that the space shuttle's rockets are the width of the behinds of two horses...
Everyone has read this before, but just in case you haven't here's a
link.
There is a difference between a standard and software. Even if you write the standard down, the most often used application which does things slightly differently creates the real standard. If you mimick the IE web browser's call sign, and don't mimick the way it renders, then the fault is your own when people claim it's not as good as IE. Being compliant to a standard is different than being useful. If you want it to be better, you need to extend Firebird to do everything the same way AND THEN do more. Until it is on par with the basic rendering, and that means bug-for-bug, you won't get my download.
In a relatively static corporate network, you're going to keep renewing the same IP address over and over and over. That's how DHCP works. (After your lease is 50% up, your 'puter asks the DHCP server if it can renew the lease on that IP addy again.) There are people on the LAN at work whose IP hasn't changed in years, despite being DHCP clients.
I don't know why ISPs mix up the pool of IP addresses, but sure enough I have a new one (though my subnet hasn't chagned) every week or so.
First off, Microsoft is an ISP (ever heard of MSN?). Second, all corporate networks that I have used have this nifty device called a firewall. One of the properties of a firewall is that the corporation can decide what traffic goes in, and what traffic goes out. Most corporations also have a device called a proxy server.
If any of these IP addresses come from a corporate environment then they are most-likely the IP addresses of one of the proxy servers. Since the proxy server is constantly providing sanitized network access for several thousand users, one might imagine that it doesn't log much about the gigabits and gigabits used per minute...
This brings me to an anecdote. I once received an automated email from the network ops people where I work. It noticed that something like 20MB of data was sent to port 22 of a specific off-network machine from my computer by a Windows program called "pscp.exe".
The report had all the details, including that I was the user running the program. I am sure that this message came to me to make sure that someone hadn't hacked my computer (I was logged in from home), but it did make me feel for a moment like big-brother was watching.
For anyone who doesn't know, pscp was PuTTY Secure Copy, which uses port 22 (the Secure Shell port) and the entire connection is quite encrypted.
IP addresses are really only a way of labelling the closest NAT/Router to the network. Once you get off the network with wireless, or go behind a network address translator that doesn't have the storage capacity to remember who owned what when, the game of finding the person who used the IP is over.
I have a linksys router. It doesn't have a hard drive. It does have a wireless port open (although I do use WEP). If my current IP address was in their list (this is hypothetical), then I would take my legal insurance and counter-sue them for harassment and wasting my time.
They got that Microsoft shipped a Rights Management package for Windows, but they completely missed that Microsoft Office uses it to provide DRM for documents. I would expect this to make more waves since the Office apps were released in 2003.
Millions of desktop computers around the world can now restrict your rights. The "Do Not Forward" email is just the beginning. Note however, that in order to use Windows Rights Management, you need a Windows server which hosts the document and authenticates you to receive an encrypted copy of it. The system is not flawless, but I don't see any competition for this "Rights Management" feature from Open Source.
The funny thing is that is not the only MS software that forces IE on you. There are others (especially in VS.NET).
And while I'm on the topic of IE being foisted upon me...
The only Web site that I have problems browsing is microsoft.com. Well, that and MSNBC.com. So much relies on IE. Why are MS coders in such a manic rush to make themselves look so stupid? "Uh, we only know how to write code for IE." I can view multimedia content at every news site except MSNBC, which requires IE and related crap.
OK. Yes. I know why they do it. But, my god. Pick some other way to annoy people in to using your products. That, or actually release a browser that is as good as Firebird. Firebird is in freaking Alpha and it's better than a 10 year old IE. Innovation my ass.
So you're tying your panties in a knot because firebird won't render a site the same way that IE renders a site which was only tested in IE? Well, then I'd expect that Firebird would try and make a "IE compatible" mode.
See, regardless of what the written standard is, it takes far more energy to conform to it than it does to keep the legacy going. Case in point, Windows and IE. Microsoft was trying recently to drop support for Windows 98! You'd think that a product developed about 10 years ago and shipped 6 years ago would be ancient history, but people hold onto it log past its prime.
The majority of PCs are running Windows 95, 98, ME, and XP. Some people run Windows NT, 2000, and even Windows Server 2003. The point is that Firebird might be standards compliant to the letter of what's written, but IE has the legacy. Sure, it'll render to the standard, but it has its fair share of legacy bugs and will also render a whole lot of stuff just because to change a line of code could break people's sites all over again.
The team of people who wrote IE have all taken their big bonuses and moved on to more interesting work a long time ago. What you see now is what you get.
So all that Tufte really says in his pamphlet is that most people really can't put together a presentation if their life depended on it, but then their boss gives them PowerPoint, and suddenly they think they have a holy grail.
Regardless of how much information you construct in your charts, displaying it on a XGA (1024x768) projector will ruin it. Don't blame the medium for the faults that really should be blamed on the information gatherer / analyzer / organizer.
If you print out those presentations at 300DPI, then you can fit a lot of information on them. Somehow, people always forget that bulleted slides used to come with handouts chock full of the data the slides referred to.
As for the Columbia tradgedy, blaming the death of our nation's explorers on software to produces presentations instead of the incompetance of the people using it to perform their job is irresponsible. If those engineers couldn't communicate, NASA should have spent the money required to train them better.
Tufte has his own reasons for publishing his material. He believes that there is an optimal way to organize data. You can follow his methods without burning PowerPoint... You just have to organize what you are presenting, and determine how to best present it before you even launch PowerPoint.
It never ceases to amaze me how much time it saves to take a few sheets of paper and a pencil and work out what the important message you are trying to deliver is before you write your presentation to deliver it. Just like with writing software, planning is the most time-saving step.
It helps to know where you are going before you get on the highway.
Digital SLR may be the future, but the value of today's DSLRs is a function of their retail price and the amont of time they've been on the market, with some cameras 3 years old dropping in value by a factor of 1/10th. Spend $2000 this year or $200 in 3-4 years on a body.
My first camera was a 3MP Digital P&S (it was the first 3MP P&S from Canon). I then went on to an Elan 7 film body and now I have an EOS 10D (6MP Digital SLR equivalent of the Elan 7). For $200 you will get a cheap lens (or a decent Manual Focus lens). If you buy a body for $200, then you will get a manual focus body (or a cheaper amateur body with Autofocus). The new retail price for a decent film body is around $300-$400.
Reduced feature Digital SLRs start at $900, and the digital factor means that they don't hold their resale value. Small P&S digitals can be had for around $200, but they aren't worth it.
My recommendation is to spend 80% of your money on a lens. $200 will buy you a nice piece of glass like a 50mm f/1.4. Then you will need a body to go with it. Go with the cheapest body that will work with your lens (shop at the used department of camera stores or online at ebay -- you might get a lens with your body by shopping in this way). Remember that in 3 years, my Elan 7 and 10D (I paid a total of $2000 for these cameras) will probably be worth less than half what I paid for them. The 4 lenses that I have will probably hold their value. I have shot over 6,000 photos this past year, so that's where all the money that went into these cameras went. If I can manage to go a year without buying a camera part, then perhaps I'll manage to get my price/exposure ratio down to $.10/frame. Printing costs about $.20 per 6x4. My first camera lasted me over 6,000 frames over 3 years of pretty active use.
Whatever you decide to purchase, the only way you can get value out of it is to load it up with media (film/memory cards) and shoot. With film you have to do more diligence to learn from your settings. With digital, the medata is in the image file. Regardless, it is your challenge to make the most of it.
Don't worry too much about the equipment... A great photographer can take an awe-inspiring photograph with any decent camera. A lousy photographer can't make an inspired photograph with the world's best camera. Photography is an art to some and a science to others. To some it is a profession or a trade/craft. To me, it's a hobby. What you need to do is to take more pictures. $200 should be enough to get you a camera. SLR or not, you can still develop your own film.
(1) You say: Open Source != GNU Public License.. There's no such thing as the "GNU Public License"; you probably mean the GNU General Public License.
(2) Microsoft's license says: "You are not licensed to sublicense or transfer your rights". This means if you write a program using Microsoft's license, and license your preogram under the BSDL, then someone using your program isn't licensed to modify it. I would imagine MS have done this deliberately to sabotage open source / free software implementations of their XML schemas.
So write your code as a module/library, and you have nothing to worry about.
Remember that in Japan, public awareness of technology far exceeds the US. Everyone in Japan has a cell, a digital camera, etc, etc. Even their toilets are high tech.
So it wouldn't surprise me if because of Nokia's N-Guage, that Nintento got into the cell phone market with the Gameboy Advanced.
I have 3 cameras (35mm SLR, 6MP Digital SLR, 3.3MP Digital P&S). This 1.3MP digital P&S camera with a fixed focal lengh/fixed focus lens competes with none of mine for image quality.
My friend (also a photo enthusiast and major geek) and I went to Ritz and bought one of these Dakota digitals (I had to drop off a roll of film). About an hour later, he had the software and made a connector out of a ruler, some tape, and a spare USB cable. He was pleasantly surprised with the quality of the images after downloading them into his computer. 1280x960 JPEGs aren't bad, and you can get 25 of them on the built-in 16MB flash memory.
When we went back to Ritz later (among other reasons, to pick up the prints), my friend wanted to buy a good 10 or 20 of these cameras. The guy behind the counter didn't flinch. He was very helpful. "There's more of them over in that corner." He also told us that they have a new model coming in a month with an LCD screen to preview the image for $18. My friend decided to wait for the ones with the LCD screen.
I like the Ritz camera store. They do a good job with prints, and some of the sales staff are very helpful and knowledgeable. Mind you, this was one of their bigger stores (a Cameras West) in the area. Some of the smaller stores have complete airheads behind the counters.
Anyway, just like the XBox hacking, the cheap DC hacking is not likely to hurt the revenue for these devices. My friend hacked his XBox, too... It has all of the NES games and Quake on the HD.
One interesting tidbit: Ritz charges about $11 for the developing and printing of a roll of 35mm film with 24/25 exposures. If you consider that by not returning the camera, they don't have to process your photos, it seems like a winning proposition. The camera certainly felt like its COGS (cost of goods sold) was $2-$5, so they should still be able to make money on it.
Great pictures are made by the vision of the photographer, and the processing skills of the developer, not the camera.
Slashdot Mirror
"MS does this because when one business upgrades, it forces the partners to upgrade as well. Why because most people have a hard time understanding what the different formats are."
x A07.htm
Actually, MS doesn't do this intentionally, and you are neglecting to mention the free Office converters MS puts out for users of older software, such as Word 97. Your lack of information does not constitute anything informative here.
Microsoft spent money developing these converters. Proof: http://www.microsoft.com/office/ork/2003/tools/Bo
While private colleges are perfectly capable of not allowing computers to connect to the network, it is impossible to prevent connected computers to share their connection with others. VPN or otherwise.
/.er should be able to easily setup Windows XP to bridge these connections), and Linksys boxes make particularly good firewalls for a Dorm-Room LAN party. Second NICs are $20, and if someone can get online with Windows XP, they can share the line with the rest of their local network with their Linksys. This is very much like my home network (except that I connect the linksys to the cable and not through a Windows box).
Laptop users with multiple network cards can be used as a WAP (your average
Ok, so I'm replying to myself.
If I wanted to get a shaky-hand-held-recording, I could just take a nice clear rip downloaded from the local pirate server, and record it with a camcorder.
But what's the point. I know... you were joking.
Osmosis_Garett wrote: Not only will this make CAM recordings more rare It will make them more elite and thus more sought after by release groups.
Piracy groups always go for quality first. Besides, once someone cracks the DVD the copying game is over.
I don't suppose anyone is going to come up with an argument saying that they are in the theaters with their camcorders excersizing their right to time shift... :)
It is not a right to get high speed internet access through your university. If you have a problem with the connectivity offering, you shouldn't connect.
Another thing to realize is that the IT departments at Colleges and Universities (especiall liberal arts colleges) are dealing with a population of students, professors, and staff that are generally computer illiterate. I can say this because I was in the help desk at my college, and people needed help with the most basic functionality of their computer. I would often think to myself: These are some of the brightest people in the world (nobel laureates would come in with basic computer problems) and they don't know the difference between a disk drive and a CD. Eventually, it dawned on me that I shouldn't take even the most basic computer knowledge for granted.
It makes complete sense for a college IT department to require this amount of control over their computers that connect to their network. Remember, using the network is a priviledge not a right. This level of control is done for a very good reason. It makes it better for everyone to raise the bar. I'd rather my tuition go to the education departments than to waste on removing every new worm and trojan that comes in... Especially because as a help desk worker, I was being paid $10 per hour (best student job on campus) to disinfect peoples computers.
'API's are a black box: you pass them values, they return some. All you need to know is what to feed them and what to expect in return.'
"OK, no offence but it's pretty clear that you've not done a huge amount of programming, at least, not with APIs of any size.
No API of any complexity at all is a "black box" - they are often backed by millions of lines of code, and that code, just like application code, will contain bugs and odd behaviours. The documentation will be incomplete - very few people can spec out a complex API to the degree needed to truly understand it, even when you have documentation coming out of your ears like with MSDN.
Even assuming the API is perfection itself, it'll always be lacking SOME feature you want. Openness of an API is a very important thing indeed."
Openness of an API isn't as important as documentation of how to use it. Being able to look into the details of how an API is implemented breaks the contract, and enables you to depend on the specific implementation details to not change instead of being responsible and coding to the contract. That's the reason that you have a separation of implementation from interface. Often times, having the implementation details of some API makes it worse. How many times has Microsoft itself been burned by employees between Office and Windows collaborating too deeply, and as a result having to support some undocumented feature that should never have been there in the first place, or Office shipping Windows updates and Windows shipping Office updates. You don't want to make that same mistake.
Microsoft gives out the Windows headers and documentation. Those form a contract that enables an application developer to write to the APIs, and then test with (in some cases several different) implementations of those APIs. If your application isn't tested, say on Windows XP and Windows 95, then there are a few million people who might not be able to use it.
However, if your application depends on some line of code in Linux's APIs, and there is a change to that code, you won't discover it until your application breaks.
Microsoft Windows has a market where people develop commercial applications. If you want to make Linux be a mainstream desktop OS, one of the barriers you have to overcome is mainstream application developers (of ALL types). If all the great games run on Windows XP and Longhorn with Microsoft XNA (DirectX 10 and Media Player 10), then how many Linux geeks will still have a PC running Windows for their games (even pirated). If you're a teenager with a PC, do you want to run the NERD OS, or would you rather play Halo at a LAN Party?
If you want the lion's share of the software market available on Linux, you're going to have to convince games houses, application writers, system integrators, and other developers that there's a paycheck coming to them for producing content on Linux. Until at least 25% of the PC games at my local EB Games store say Linux on them, Linux won't have the desktop.
In simpler words: people who expect to not pay for their OS expect not to pay for their software. You can't sell me Linux if my games don't run on it. You can't sell my mom Linux if she can't buy a printer that works with it. You can't sell my dad Linux if his Digital Camera's software says Mac or Windows. You can't even give it away to this kind of person. They don't want it.
My parents started a small company that now (primarily) sells large clusters of Linux based servers (they've been selling hardware and software for my entire life -- and I'm 25). They run Windows on their desktops. The engineering tools they use (hardware engineering) run on Windows. The software engineers at the company run Linux.
You can't sell me Linux when it is being given away on the streets, but you can give it away with your hardware. You can sell me Linux as an embedded OS inside my LinkSys box (as long as there's a nice Windows XP logo certification on the side...), or ma
"Now, granted, you shouldn't use an O(n) algorithm when an O(lg n) one exists to solve the same problem. However, knowing the difference between O(n) and O(lg n) has nothing to do with knowing assembly. The only benefits you can get out of knowing assembly are constant-multiplier speed increases. And, frankly, shaving off 50% of 0.1% CPU time used is not going to help much."
While I agree with much of what you are saying, you're 100% wrong here. Try as much as you want to, the engineers who wrote the optimizer for the compiler know far more about how to make its output efficient than you do. Most attempts to "hand-optimize" code actually make it worse. The only place you need to use assembly is when writing certain low-level parts of an Operating System or a Device Driver. Do you know which of the 15 different ways to zero a register executes the fastest on your CPU version? How about which one is the smallest instruction? Your compiler does. Also, it knows how to schedule the operation so that on the latest 5 CPUs, the execution happens in parallel with the previous set of instruction. Which variables should be in registers, and which should be left on the stack? Heap? Did you play the red-pebble, blue-pebble game? How does the scheduling improve if we unroll that loop? Can we improve the branch-prediction here? These questions are answered by the compiler to degrees you don't need to or want to know about. Are you optimizing for space or time? Do you understand why optimizing for space may improve the execution of your code more than optimizing for time?
Your algorithm assertion about an O(n) vs O(lg n) only holds as n becomes very large, and is only relevant if the situation warrants it. It isn't bad design to choose an inferior algorithm which makes the code more maintainable. Your O(n) time algorithm may run within O(n) space that has been allocated locally and happens to be within the cache, whereas your O(lg n) time algorithm may run within O(x(n)) space already allocated, but outside the cached memory. Now your O(lg n) includes O(x) page switches at a painful C.
The point is that knowledge of algorithms doesn't make you a good engineer. Engineering is about designing something, building it, and testing it.
Assembly language is terribly important to understand when writing C and C++, because you learn the constraints of the system. You cannot dereference a NULL pointer and expect your program to behave correctly. If you don't allocate enough memory for your input, and you don't document it, and you don't check your assumptions then you deserve what happens to you when a customer exploits you by asking for x bytes and delivering x + exploit bytes.
Granted, you do not need to completely understand all assembly language to get these concepts, but I wouldn't hire you as a developer on my team if you couldn't tell me what an Access Violation is, or why it happens when you dereference 0, I also think it's important that you understand interrupts and exceptions, and how to write code so that if an exception is thrown, you handle it correctly. Being sloppy because you are lazy or uninformed isn't acceptable when millions of people run your code. Just because your specific computer runs at 3GHz with the ability to retire instructions from separate threads simultaneously doesn't mean that your customer's battery-saving laptop running between 300 and 900MHz makes short work of it while they're running their MP3s and typing out their homework. If you need to spin up their HD to hit virtual memory because you're being lazy, you may have just cost them 10 minutes of battery life. Spinning up and spinning down a HD is expensive.
"Really, the speed of modern CPU's is sickening. I can't count the number of times I've written a piece of code, thought "This is going to be so slow...", then watched it execute near instantaneously. Even when running programs in a prototype programming language I'm working on -- which currently runs about 40x slower than C, because it's a c
13Echo Wrote:
"They can pretend that they hate piracy of their products, but they hate OSS/Free software even more. Locking out non-payers would probably just hurt them more than help them, causing a lot of people to defect to Linux and Macs."
[sarcasm] Uhm. Right. Sure. Whatever. [/sarcasm]
Let me make an analogy:
You're a baker. You bake cookies, and sell them at your bakery. Another baker down the street bakes cakes, and he gives away cookies to sell the cakes. Another guy sneaks in when you aren't looking, and steals some of your cookies.
Do you "hate" the other baker more than you hate the guy who steals your cookies?
Do you even hate the other baker? Maybe you don't get to own the entire market (or even half of it), but competition is a good thing when it comes to a market. Theft is theft.
The companies that "make" Linux are getting paid to do something, otherwise they would be bankrupt.
Microsoft is a smart company full of 50,000 smart people. Many are running Windows XP with stolen activation codes. Just because they can get away with it without paying doesn't mean that they should get the benefit of the updates that Microsoft makes for the paying customers. Maybe it's more work for those people who pirate, but there's an old expression: time is money.
You don't get ahead in business by giving out free beer to your worst customers. I was all for this open source software is good software line before I had to support myself and my wife by writing software.
>> They have every right to adjust their prices
>> to reflect these additional costs.
> Actually, no, they do not. This is yet another
> example of them abusing their monopoly
> position within the marketplace. That's what
> all of the legal action has been about.
Ok, I'm confused. Is being a monopoly all about the amount of money you can charge for a product in theory or in practice? Or is it about competition?
I have seen so many arguments in this thread that claim that Microsoft does X, Y, and Z because it is a Monopoly, and that Microsoft does A, B, C to out-compete others. It seems to me, that people are over-analyzing what Microsoft does.
Microsoft is a giant intellectual factory. They pay people top-dollar to sit in a slightly-larger-than-cubicle-office and dump their creative energies into the computer all day long (40+, 50+, and 60+ hour weeks are not uncommon). Then, they turn around and pay people to market/sell the products of that factory to be bundled with everything that they can possibly bundle it with, at whatever costs the market will bear. It seems like this lawyer's argument that the other lawyers eating $300M of MS's money hurts consumers isn't quite reality -- consumers won't actually pay any more than they did before. The money will just be deducted from Microsoft's costs of doing business.
The question I really have to wonder is, do the lawyers who won this case against Microsoft really deserve $3000 per hour?
When you do the math and divide the gross yearly revenue by the number of employees, you get something like $750,000 per employee, per year. And yet, the average salary is $600 PC. I don't think that the big OEMs like Dell pay more than $50 for Windows, but that doesn't come with support. You're not supposed to call MS when your Dell PC crashes... you're supposed to call Dell.
The interesting thing about the price hike, is that it probably will be transparent to end users. It will simply come attached to the next version of Windows. The reason the next version of Windows isn't out yet, is that the last one -- XP has met the market demands quite successfully. Unfortunately for Microsoft, they need to figure out how to sweeten the pot to take advantage of new directions and new trends in computing to make a compelling release post XP.
I don't think we'll actually see another compelling Windows OS until Longhorn/2008, and who knows if OSS will catch up/advance the state of the art during that time. MS will probably release another Windows in 2005 for the SA customers that are paying to upgrade every few years.
It is quite amusing to take a step back and read our dialogue. All of this armchair-business and armchair-propaganda. Slashdot is usually good for a laugh, and not much more. The world is much more complicated than the views expressed here.
"Maybe thats what Microsoft is most afraid of, to loose control over the heading of the software industry. Open source have control over web servers and can take control over the protocols on the web if we just do our own thing. If we only follow what Microsoft do we will always be number two and thats no where to be."
If they (Microsoft's management/people who make the big decisions) are really afraid of losing control of the heading of the software industry, they certainly don't show it. The software industry is ultra-competitive. Microsoft is an ultra-competitive player in that market. They always have been. Bill Gates started by being a key player in the way people developed software for what we think of today as toy or hobby computers. He made the compiler of an easy-to-use language. BASIC became the first programming language that millions of people ever used. And they used Bill's BASIC.
Bill didn't invent BASIC. He just implemented it, marketed it, and was the first to sell rights to use an implementation of it. That concept of licensing a piece of software was what *made* Microsoft what it is today.
Bill didn't invent the Operating System, or the Word Processor, or a Web Browser. What Bill did was to enter each of those spaces and offer what people were looking for at the cheapest price with some innovative features. Linux/OSS may be offering an interesting proposition, but the products speak for themselves. Linux/OSS is like the imitation product made by people who are smart enough to figure out how to make a clone and tweak a few things. Now, imagine you are at a counter of a camera store. The salesperson behind the counter shows you a $300 Canon camera, and a $50 Kanan. Do you buy the Kanan, made by people smart enough to roughly clone the original and maybe add a few differences?
Are Microsoft managers worried about how to keep up earnings and revenue. Sure. Every successful company has leaders who worry about that. But you will note that Microsoft hasn't been firing off its employees like Sun, IBM, et all. Basically, the strategy at Microsoft is to have a deep development pipe. Build it, and sell it, and build it, and sell it. That's what Microsoft is. It's a highly organic code factory. Microsoft has 2 strategies.
1) Make it work.
2) Make it depend only on Microsoft technologies.
Microsoft will never lose control over the heading of its own industry (no, I'm not saying that Microsoft is the whole software industry, just a large industry within it).
Let me make an analogy. Say I buy a Canon Digital camera. It comes with Canon software. The store that sells me the camera may or may not sell me Canon lenses for the camera, but most people will buy Canon accessories for their Canon camera. In the case of the Digital SLR, Canon Lenses, Canon Flashes, and Canon accessories out-sell the 3rd parties in the Canon market. Now you can say that maybe that is because Canon is better than its 3rd party vendors, or maybe it is because people are afraid of breaking the device with third party stuff, but most people buy 1st part accessories. And if Canon is (as www.dpreview.com's statistics seem to indicate to me) the leader in the market (I own 3 Canon cameras, so I'm quite biased in this regard, but please ignore my bias for argument's sake), then you can imagine that being the leader, the market will follow you. Of course, the only way to stay a leader is to produce more of what people want to buy. Canon's offerings in the digital camera space match Nikon, Kodak, Olympus, Sony, Fuji, Sigma, etc.
Similarly, Microsoft's offerings match IBM, Novell, Oracle, Sun, etc. Granted, each of these companies competes in different segments of the markets, Microsoft is vertically integrated (depends on products produced by itself) and horizontally integrated (offers products in most/all categories in the industry in which it competes) specifically with regard to software.
Sony is an example of a company which is similarly vertically and horizontally integrated in th
How can you show someone a "Word Processor" without them learning "That Specific Word Processor". Back in the day of WordStar, Microsoft had this funny cursor. See, the Microsoft cursor could change size and shape... we call this a selection today, but at the time it came out, it was a big deal. Some people loved it, others hated it. Of course, the mouse really masked this. Today, both mechanisms of applying formatting (selecting a region and applying formatting as well as changing the current format and typing and finally turning off the format) are in widespread use in any decent word processor.
Your point about different tools is useful. There are different tools. Most people Google for whatever they need, and play with a bunch of tools until the right one does what they need. Then they just use that.
Open Source Software may be a good thing. It will put constant pressure on for-profit software to compete, but don't expect it to create a standard that closed source software will adhere to. Expect exactly the opposite. It will become a form of standard that non-OSS will avoid using simply because there is no profit in it. OSS will drive the push from big businesses on for-profit standards bodies and patents.
Microsoft's recent deal with Sun is an example. You might see Microsoft do this deal with IBM and other big businesses. As they say, "Business is business." I expect that Sun will soon stop throwing their money away into OSS because it gives them no returns.
RFC 2550
Wouldn't it make more sense to introduce a date format where there was a separator between the fields? Then the length of the fields can grow as needed.
Yes, I do understand that this RFC was an April 1st joke, but still...
Who cares about MS using internal APIs or not?
.dll and call them if I so choose. I can write my own Spy utility and watch how messages are passed between components, and create an emulator of any app on the market if I choose. Maybe this is because I am a competant developer with some reverse engineering skills and enough free time to play with and/or write engineering utilities.
I can dump out all the methods in any Windows
If I am a non-MS (third party) developer and I want access to some part of the OS that I don't have access to, I can write the appropriate hooks at the appropriate level just using the documentation provided free of charge on http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/ (although their search is horrible unless you have the Google toolbar). If I were writing some Linux app, and waded through the source, I could do the very same. Big deal.
Sure, MS has people inside that talk to other insiders, but that's hardly "unfair". Microsoft is a large company and is vertically and horizontally integrated in several ways. Those integrations give it the ability to create product dependencies that tie solutions to the Microsoft platform.
Microsoft's platform is the most popular not because of its features, but because of the uniformity across the system. What does that mean? It means that Windows has one and only one Window manager. One and only one web browser. Applications depend on that browser and that window manager. Linux might have some cool new better web browser and some cool new funky window manager, but Linux is too late. Microsoft has 99% of the applications market, and a patent portfolio, and a network of hotmail and MSN users, etc, etc.
Regardless of if the Microsoft OS became the domimant OS through all the business tactics of licensing at different prices to people who only sold MS software vs people who sold competing software, it is now the dominant OS. If you want to "unseat" it, you have to keep up with the platform which is growing at a rate that 10,000 well paid engineers will make it grow at.
All of this recent malware recently put out has really caused Microsoft to adapt. Microsoft is like the Borg collective. It can lose a LOT. It will adapt, though. Those 5,000+ developers in the Windows org and 5,000+ developers in the Office org don't make over $100,000 per year to sit around and not produce code. They are well-paid developers who earn their living by working hard (many 50/60+ hour weeks according to my friends there), not by posting to slashdot. It would be nice if MS spent a few Billion on the customer running Windows 95 and Office 6.0, but realistically, it's not going to happen.
If Europe wants a crippled Windows, MS will make theie crippled Windows come with a big disclaimer: This version of Windows isn't as good as the one which includes the software you need to be competitive in this world. If MS really wanted to slap the EU, it would take the WMP and MCI out of the Windows so that all Music and Sound applications would fail on it, including all of MS's competitors like Apple and Real that use MCI (the Windows Media Control Interface) to play media. Then you wouldn't even be able to download/install WMP from the internet.
Given the choice between a Windows OS that was crippled and a Windows OS that did what the people want, I'd have to say that you'd need to pay me to run the crippled OS.
If you want to make a viable competitor to Windows, you need 1 thing: Software that runs on it that Joe 6 pack can buy in the local software store. Until you have just as many "titles" you aren't even in 2nd place. Just like in Japan, the XBox is a clear loser in 3rd place.
Regardless of wether or not they develop for fun or profit (or both), it doesn't mean that they don't have access to enterprise-scale equipment and testing facilities. Moreover, the millions of people who use Linux daily make for far better Quality Assurance teams than most commercial QA houses. And IBM didn't need to bring their people into the mix to jumpstart the industry. RedHat (a company with no exposure to proprietary SYS V UNIX code) had already started doing that.
If you consider how many people worked on Linux as a software development team, you have the worlds largest development team. If SCO is trying to make the claim that the world's largest development team can't produce enterprise quality code, then why was SCO selling it as enterprise quality code before they discovered that IBM had added features that IBM had given to AIX?
The web runs on servers which gather statistics from HTTP headers. HTTP headers show what % of people use what browser... If "99.5%" of your customers use IE (or software which makes such a claim), you test it on IE and say that you support IE. If the software (Mozilla) is not fully compatible with IE, then it's Mozilla's fault for advertising to the web server that it is IE.
Which HTML standard (HTTP is the transfer protocol, and that is the responsibility of the server)? 3? 4? XHTML? CSS? JavaScript? etc.Which web browser? Not everyone uses IE or Mozilla. And people use IE who can't see or hear. How do you make your web pages accessible to your disabled customers? Does Mozilla support text-to-speech or graile readers? Some governments require these things.
Compatability is a double edged sword. In order to be 100% compatible with a thing, you must be a thing. Dogs and Cats are not 100% compatible.
To you, HTML is something special. To Microsoft, HTML is just another way to write a Windows app. Want proof? Have you ever seen the IE error messages inside of the Windows Explorer? Last time I checked, people write apps for Windows a whole lot more often than they write apps for Linux. There's nothing wrong with that. People generally follow the path of least resistance. Microsoft knows and understands this, so you need to find a way to make your competing software offer something other than following the standard... In other words, you have to lead. Not on a moral ground, but on a functional one."When the people lead, the leaders they will have to follow."
-Ben Harper
Everyone has read this before, but just in case you haven't here's a link.
There is a difference between a standard and software. Even if you write the standard down, the most often used application which does things slightly differently creates the real standard. If you mimick the IE web browser's call sign, and don't mimick the way it renders, then the fault is your own when people claim it's not as good as IE. Being compliant to a standard is different than being useful. If you want it to be better, you need to extend Firebird to do everything the same way AND THEN do more. Until it is on par with the basic rendering, and that means bug-for-bug, you won't get my download.
First off, Microsoft is an ISP (ever heard of MSN?). Second, all corporate networks that I have used have this nifty device called a firewall. One of the properties of a firewall is that the corporation can decide what traffic goes in, and what traffic goes out. Most corporations also have a device called a proxy server.
If any of these IP addresses come from a corporate environment then they are most-likely the IP addresses of one of the proxy servers. Since the proxy server is constantly providing sanitized network access for several thousand users, one might imagine that it doesn't log much about the gigabits and gigabits used per minute...
This brings me to an anecdote. I once received an automated email from the network ops people where I work. It noticed that something like 20MB of data was sent to port 22 of a specific off-network machine from my computer by a Windows program called "pscp.exe".
The report had all the details, including that I was the user running the program. I am sure that this message came to me to make sure that someone hadn't hacked my computer (I was logged in from home), but it did make me feel for a moment like big-brother was watching.
For anyone who doesn't know, pscp was PuTTY Secure Copy, which uses port 22 (the Secure Shell port) and the entire connection is quite encrypted.
IP addresses are really only a way of labelling the closest NAT/Router to the network. Once you get off the network with wireless, or go behind a network address translator that doesn't have the storage capacity to remember who owned what when, the game of finding the person who used the IP is over.
I have a linksys router. It doesn't have a hard drive. It does have a wireless port open (although I do use WEP). If my current IP address was in their list (this is hypothetical), then I would take my legal insurance and counter-sue them for harassment and wasting my time.
Millions of desktop computers around the world can now restrict your rights. The "Do Not Forward" email is just the beginning. Note however, that in order to use Windows Rights Management, you need a Windows server which hosts the document and authenticates you to receive an encrypted copy of it. The system is not flawless, but I don't see any competition for this "Rights Management" feature from Open Source.
So you're tying your panties in a knot because firebird won't render a site the same way that IE renders a site which was only tested in IE? Well, then I'd expect that Firebird would try and make a "IE compatible" mode.
See, regardless of what the written standard is, it takes far more energy to conform to it than it does to keep the legacy going. Case in point, Windows and IE. Microsoft was trying recently to drop support for Windows 98! You'd think that a product developed about 10 years ago and shipped 6 years ago would be ancient history, but people hold onto it log past its prime. The majority of PCs are running Windows 95, 98, ME, and XP. Some people run Windows NT, 2000, and even Windows Server 2003. The point is that Firebird might be standards compliant to the letter of what's written, but IE has the legacy. Sure, it'll render to the standard, but it has its fair share of legacy bugs and will also render a whole lot of stuff just because to change a line of code could break people's sites all over again.
The team of people who wrote IE have all taken their big bonuses and moved on to more interesting work a long time ago. What you see now is what you get.
So all that Tufte really says in his pamphlet is that most people really can't put together a presentation if their life depended on it, but then their boss gives them PowerPoint, and suddenly they think they have a holy grail.
Regardless of how much information you construct in your charts, displaying it on a XGA (1024x768) projector will ruin it. Don't blame the medium for the faults that really should be blamed on the information gatherer / analyzer / organizer.
If you print out those presentations at 300DPI, then you can fit a lot of information on them. Somehow, people always forget that bulleted slides used to come with handouts chock full of the data the slides referred to.
As for the Columbia tradgedy, blaming the death of our nation's explorers on software to produces presentations instead of the incompetance of the people using it to perform their job is irresponsible. If those engineers couldn't communicate, NASA should have spent the money required to train them better.
Tufte has his own reasons for publishing his material. He believes that there is an optimal way to organize data. You can follow his methods without burning PowerPoint... You just have to organize what you are presenting, and determine how to best present it before you even launch PowerPoint.
It never ceases to amaze me how much time it saves to take a few sheets of paper and a pencil and work out what the important message you are trying to deliver is before you write your presentation to deliver it. Just like with writing software, planning is the most time-saving step.
It helps to know where you are going before you get on the highway.
Digital SLR may be the future, but the value of today's DSLRs is a function of their retail price and the amont of time they've been on the market, with some cameras 3 years old dropping in value by a factor of 1/10th. Spend $2000 this year or $200 in 3-4 years on a body.
My first camera was a 3MP Digital P&S (it was the first 3MP P&S from Canon). I then went on to an Elan 7 film body and now I have an EOS 10D (6MP Digital SLR equivalent of the Elan 7). For $200 you will get a cheap lens (or a decent Manual Focus lens). If you buy a body for $200, then you will get a manual focus body (or a cheaper amateur body with Autofocus). The new retail price for a decent film body is around $300-$400.
Reduced feature Digital SLRs start at $900, and the digital factor means that they don't hold their resale value. Small P&S digitals can be had for around $200, but they aren't worth it.
My recommendation is to spend 80% of your money on a lens. $200 will buy you a nice piece of glass like a 50mm f/1.4. Then you will need a body to go with it. Go with the cheapest body that will work with your lens (shop at the used department of camera stores or online at ebay -- you might get a lens with your body by shopping in this way). Remember that in 3 years, my Elan 7 and 10D (I paid a total of $2000 for these cameras) will probably be worth less than half what I paid for them. The 4 lenses that I have will probably hold their value. I have shot over 6,000 photos this past year, so that's where all the money that went into these cameras went. If I can manage to go a year without buying a camera part, then perhaps I'll manage to get my price/exposure ratio down to $.10/frame. Printing costs about $.20 per 6x4. My first camera lasted me over 6,000 frames over 3 years of pretty active use.
Whatever you decide to purchase, the only way you can get value out of it is to load it up with media (film/memory cards) and shoot. With film you have to do more diligence to learn from your settings. With digital, the medata is in the image file. Regardless, it is your challenge to make the most of it.
Don't worry too much about the equipment... A great photographer can take an awe-inspiring photograph with any decent camera. A lousy photographer can't make an inspired photograph with the world's best camera. Photography is an art to some and a science to others. To some it is a profession or a trade/craft. To me, it's a hobby. What you need to do is to take more pictures. $200 should be enough to get you a camera. SLR or not, you can still develop your own film.
So write your code as a module/library, and you have nothing to worry about.
Remember that in Japan, public awareness of technology far exceeds the US. Everyone in Japan has a cell, a digital camera, etc, etc. Even their toilets are high tech.
So it wouldn't surprise me if because of Nokia's N-Guage, that Nintento got into the cell phone market with the Gameboy Advanced.
I have 3 cameras (35mm SLR, 6MP Digital SLR, 3.3MP Digital P&S). This 1.3MP digital P&S camera with a fixed focal lengh/fixed focus lens competes with none of mine for image quality.
My friend (also a photo enthusiast and major geek) and I went to Ritz and bought one of these Dakota digitals (I had to drop off a roll of film). About an hour later, he had the software and made a connector out of a ruler, some tape, and a spare USB cable. He was pleasantly surprised with the quality of the images after downloading them into his computer. 1280x960 JPEGs aren't bad, and you can get 25 of them on the built-in 16MB flash memory.
When we went back to Ritz later (among other reasons, to pick up the prints), my friend wanted to buy a good 10 or 20 of these cameras. The guy behind the counter didn't flinch. He was very helpful. "There's more of them over in that corner." He also told us that they have a new model coming in a month with an LCD screen to preview the image for $18. My friend decided to wait for the ones with the LCD screen.
I like the Ritz camera store. They do a good job with prints, and some of the sales staff are very helpful and knowledgeable. Mind you, this was one of their bigger stores (a Cameras West) in the area. Some of the smaller stores have complete airheads behind the counters.
Anyway, just like the XBox hacking, the cheap DC hacking is not likely to hurt the revenue for these devices. My friend hacked his XBox, too... It has all of the NES games and Quake on the HD.
One interesting tidbit: Ritz charges about $11 for the developing and printing of a roll of 35mm film with 24/25 exposures. If you consider that by not returning the camera, they don't have to process your photos, it seems like a winning proposition. The camera certainly felt like its COGS (cost of goods sold) was $2-$5, so they should still be able to make money on it.
Great pictures are made by the vision of the photographer, and the processing skills of the developer, not the camera.