I did understand. I just simply disagree. Is there a central defining entity for web browsers? Sure you could bug W3C or even IETF but would that change anything? Dragging MS (IE) to court or the folks at Mozilla.org or even Opera.com might change something though...
I agree wholeheartedly with you on the "The only hope that someone like MS has is to make it illegal to run it. " so perhaps we argue the same point from a different perspective, I argue from a product liability perspective and not so much from a property perspective, again, you can claim me if I sell you encumbered products, hence I become your "central entity" for that particular matter.
"The usual defense against patents is to obtain patents of your own"
Actually this MAD (Mutual Assured Destruction)approach will not work. What does work is jurisprudence. Lets see some action in front of judges. That is the proof of the pudding (and grease for the Groklaw fires...;) )
The question you gotta ask yourself (and the MS gorillas when they come a pounding threatening lawsuits) is why doesn't MS throw it's weight into the courtroom for all of their so-called infringed patents? Simply because they know it would be a bluf call and that the vast majority of US patents wouldn't hold up in front of any semi-literate judge.
Patents and intellectual property are important. It is a pity that they are so abused, in the long run it will cause more harm than good.
"Linux's primary defense to date has been the lack of a defining central entity to sue."
I disagree, all the coders (kernel) are known. All the commercially available products are with registered companies. If I sell you a linux system, you can sue me. Go ahead, make my day punk (and our lawyers... they will love it!).
So in the final analysis I think it fair to say that MS is simply stalling the impending demise of the OS business untill they can come up with another money maker scheme to fill the billion $ + gap they see coming. I think it is a tough call for them and I suspect their moves to dominate mail, messenging and entertainement markets are the direct consequence of this insight.
You are correct, except if you read it again you may notice that I included one of the reasons of our dotnet infrastructure. That is amongst others, ingrained in our intranet, of course they only know what it does with IE and they aren't interested in what it does with other browsers. That is why they are 800-pound-microsoft-certified-gorillas and yes, a robotic allegiance, in the organisation where I am employed. No harm intended, simply the world from my perspective.
And yes, the idea of using open source software scares the IT folks here. Really it does, I saw one of them turn slightly green the other day and it had nothing to do with his fallafel lunch..
I am happy to see in this thread that there are Microsoft Professionals who do endorse the use of Open Source alternatives.
You should carefully weigh what you feel. Do you have a natural drive or are you more interested in things outside your sphere of work? If you have the need to charge forward and can self-motivate then, assuming you have decent social skills, you could probably make yourself a better living as a contractor. As for your questions about health and retirement I would suggest you check with a local expert. Perhaps your bank or your lawyer could point you in the right direction. That direction, of course, is a decent accountant (similar to a geek but it doesn't count in binary, it counts in $).
What is important to remember is that you really will need to have good social skills, I have seen so many "coders" try to go independant and fail because they think that they can just "geek" their way through.. uh uh uh... nope, wear that suit and articulate properly, yes, go for aftershave! As an independant, YOU are the executive and you must look the part. I cannot stress this enough!!
Well actually I think that since a large portion of PC's are in Offices, you will see a change when employers start getting rid of their 800-pund-microsoft-certified-gorilla IT services... in my experience they don't want to hear of anything but IE because "our dotnet infrastructure requires it" or "our vendor contract doesn't allow it" or "quit wasting my time you drone".....
Otherwise this would be one more statistic right ehre and now...
My point is that no-one HAS to.. that is why I give my loved one's a nifty rom full of Knoppix...oh. and the fact that it will mount my private repository with the latest antivirus/spam software and clean up the loved one's windows mess in the background is of course a little compromise.. I call it "condom", sort of like, if they must, let's try and keep it safe...
LOL! Maybe Jon will finally get a haircut? And Scot will learn not to rant and rave? Nah... you can't teach an old dog new tricks and that is exactly the problem here. Just watch as the company slowly bleeds to nothingness.. All their smart guys are leaving and joining the Open Source world in some way or other and that is the trend. Sun used to be great, fast OS, spunky hardware but nowadays computing is tending towards commodity and hence there is no room for a machine like a sun anymore. You just simply don't earn it back fast enough. And if you are in an industry where you could then you probably be using a mac by now.
Sorry to say but Sun is going the way of the dodo and I fear they may end up SCO'ing their way to the grave...
I wonder if it is that simple.. I hope it is then we can expect it to appear soon in KDE or Gnome... Perhaps a/.'er here knows of an OSS project to bring this kind of functionality to everyone?
From my perspective Spotlight is the best excuse yet to get a mac.. now they just need to ship it and prefferably on a g-5 ibook... grrrr....
Being relitvely novice at network security I only have an extremely humble opinion but at the same time I must say that Mr. Chavaukin strikes me to be an extremeley adept man on this subject. Having just finished the Security Warrior I have learned a lot and I find his (and his co-author Mr. Pekari) insights and information to be extremely astute. No, I will take no grain of salt regarding his comments about the book in question, untill I have achieved a decent status in the matter I will refer to Mr. Chavaukin's comments eagerly!
It is within te domain of responsabilities of the PRC Government to deal with the matter. Whether or not the accusations on their part are salient is not really *our* issue. The PRC is an independant en sovereign state. Sure it isn't a democracy and there are many human rights issues but really, cyber-porno bars being shut down is an item for/. ?
for crying out loud..
I mean really, Ivar Jacobsen (granddaddy of object oriented software engineering) once lamented about what the world would look like if engineers worked with the same level of professionalism as the computer programmer..
unified software development process, ISBN 0-521-78774-2 p27
well I guess it depends on which side of the fence you sit.
*Imagine* that you are a member of political-industrial family and you have acquired power. Now you see the opportunity to bring e-voting in to the mainstream. One of daddy's buddies makes machines to do this and well.. yeah he could bugger the tally a bit in a software glitch, if given the exclusive contract to make the machines and is awarded a patent or two... nothing dear old dad can't arrange... so how a bout it eh? no more bugsome voters and you can smile and make jokes throughout the campaign! You'll look better than ever!
Really, any voting machines should be public property and the software either open source or at least public domain. Checksums and double entry score keeping should be mandatory.
The law for hand counting states three people need to tally a vote so should a computer keep multiple registers and have a failover....
well then maybe I will jsut buy one of these and run SuSE PPC or Yellow Dog..
I was sorta half waiting for a g-5 but then I guess for a 12 incher it doesn't make that big a difference. Probably better off with a G4 and more ram, 256 is a little on the anemic side..
You may be right. However, just imagine for one second that a serious competitor succeeds in taking over 50% of the desktop market. How much in terms of annual revenue will Microsoft have to "make-up" with alternative business in order to uphold it's credit rating and cashflow? Billions, you are correct in assuming. How easy is it to come up with a business plan that can generate billions within the short to medium run? Not!
Unless you play dirty, and by dirty I mean attempt to gain control of consumer behaviour in a proprietary sense, that is. to proprietarize behaviour that is currently non-propriety.
You have guessed it: entertainement. Microsoft is aware of the potential revenue loss due to encraoching platforms and wishes to maintain revenue by getting control over music and movies and forcing it's proprietary format to maintain billions in revenue..
Failing that I would offer that even if someone acquired a BSD licensed kernel, what good would it do him as a product since he is a stand alone develloper who competes against the rest of Linux devellopment... it's not just about the market, it's also about the production model, the Open Source model as opposed to closing the dev'ing to a limited group.
Considering the amount of time and effort involved in both projects it is clear that OO.org cannot rival a multi-billion dollar operation to it's fullest extent after 4 years. The point being that you should be fair about a comparison. Compare it to suites other than MS Office Pro. Compare it to Works or compare it to Abiword (for writer then) and so forth and so on.
I guess the question society must answer is "what price freedom?"
At the end of the day what do you think is more important? I personally think that freedom of speech is a cornerstone of society. This doesn't mean that anything should just be legal. The fact is that as long as you are free to act, you are also free to be responsible. That is the key to an open and democratic culture. Let's all be free AND responsible in what we say and to who we say it. That way nobody needs to hire lawyers or get legislation to ban bla di blah etc....
right, the final analysis?
education is key to a culture which breeds responsible open communication. Gee that wasn't so tough was it?
A sad thing but the reality is that there is nothing they could do to stop spam. In fact the only thing anyone can do to stop spam is to stop using email. Yep, the spammer wins.. I abandoned my email account. So in effect he loses because my address is now worthless..
I don't think that you should underestimate the problem, granted most of don't run a major risk but they do try, and as you will acknowledge, trying leads to learning...
Actually the amount of entries in my LogWatch with failed attempts coming from korea (south) and China (commie) is sort of up and down but there are more and more of them that try.. It seems that they like to attack the mailservers.. luckily they ain't too bright, yet....
Just TCPwrap their netblocks away.. I don't know anyone out there anyway that would be interesting or interested with regards to my online activities.
I am not a lawyer but I believe Mr. Ballmer just wrongfully accused me and slandered the vendor of my device. Perhaps a lawyer here sees a possibility for class action? I am sick of these Microsnuffers accusing me of all sorts of shit they know nothing about. Who the heck are they to judge me and what I do? I am sorry Mr. Ballmer but You have no affiliation with the copyright holders of the music I listen to and as such I don't see why you meddle in my business relationship with Apple Computer Corp. and my Music Vendor. I think Microsoft is in breach of many laws and regulations yet I don't particularly feel a requirement in my inner monkey to spout this at my upcoming public speaking arrangements.
Maybe I should but I bet you that If I do I will be presented with a lawsuit...
Slashdot Mirror
I did understand. I just simply disagree. Is there a central defining entity for web browsers? Sure you could bug W3C or even IETF but would that change anything? Dragging MS (IE) to court or the folks at Mozilla.org or even Opera.com might change something though... I agree wholeheartedly with you on the "The only hope that someone like MS has is to make it illegal to run it. " so perhaps we argue the same point from a different perspective, I argue from a product liability perspective and not so much from a property perspective, again, you can claim me if I sell you encumbered products, hence I become your "central entity" for that particular matter.
"The usual defense against patents is to obtain patents of your own"
;) )
...
Actually this MAD (Mutual Assured Destruction)approach will not work. What does work is jurisprudence. Lets see some action in front of judges. That is the proof of the pudding (and grease for the Groklaw fires...
The question you gotta ask yourself (and the MS gorillas when they come a pounding threatening lawsuits) is why doesn't MS throw it's weight into the courtroom for all of their so-called infringed patents? Simply because they know it would be a bluf call and that the vast majority of US patents wouldn't hold up in front of any semi-literate judge.
Patents and intellectual property are important. It is a pity that they are so abused, in the long run it will cause more harm than good.
"Linux's primary defense to date has been the lack of a defining central entity to sue."
I disagree, all the coders (kernel) are known. All the commercially available products are with registered companies. If I sell you a linux system, you can sue me. Go ahead, make my day punk (and our lawyers... they will love it!).
So in the final analysis I think it fair to say that MS is simply stalling the impending demise of the OS business untill they can come up with another money maker scheme to fill the billion $ + gap they see coming. I think it is a tough call for them and I suspect their moves to dominate mail, messenging and entertainement markets are the direct consequence of this insight.
Run billy, run
You are correct, except if you read it again you may notice that I included one of the reasons of our dotnet infrastructure. That is amongst others, ingrained in our intranet, of course they only know what it does with IE and they aren't interested in what it does with other browsers. That is why they are 800-pound-microsoft-certified-gorillas and yes, a robotic allegiance, in the organisation where I am employed. No harm intended, simply the world from my perspective. And yes, the idea of using open source software scares the IT folks here. Really it does, I saw one of them turn slightly green the other day and it had nothing to do with his fallafel lunch.. I am happy to see in this thread that there are Microsoft Professionals who do endorse the use of Open Source alternatives.
You should carefully weigh what you feel. Do you have a natural drive or are you more interested in things outside your sphere of work? If you have the need to charge forward and can self-motivate then, assuming you have decent social skills, you could probably make yourself a better living as a contractor. As for your questions about health and retirement I would suggest you check with a local expert. Perhaps your bank or your lawyer could point you in the right direction. That direction, of course, is a decent accountant (similar to a geek but it doesn't count in binary, it counts in $).
What is important to remember is that you really will need to have good social skills, I have seen so many "coders" try to go independant and fail because they think that they can just "geek" their way through.. uh uh uh... nope, wear that suit and articulate properly, yes, go for aftershave! As an independant, YOU are the executive and you must look the part. I cannot stress this enough!!
Good luck and Go get 'em tiger!
Well actually I think that since a large portion of PC's are in Offices, you will see a change when employers start getting rid of their 800-pund-microsoft-certified-gorilla IT services... in my experience they don't want to hear of anything but IE because "our dotnet infrastructure requires it" or "our vendor contract doesn't allow it" or "quit wasting my time you drone".....
Otherwise this would be one more statistic right ehre and now...
My point is that no-one HAS to.. that is why I give my loved one's a nifty rom full of Knoppix...oh. and the fact that it will mount my private repository with the latest antivirus/spam software and clean up the loved one's windows mess in the background is of course a little compromise.. I call it "condom", sort of like, if they must, let's try and keep it safe...
Yep, and I love to help my loved ones really I do.. just I don't do windows...
LOL! Maybe Jon will finally get a haircut? And Scot will learn not to rant and rave? Nah... you can't teach an old dog new tricks and that is exactly the problem here. Just watch as the company slowly bleeds to nothingness.. All their smart guys are leaving and joining the Open Source world in some way or other and that is the trend. Sun used to be great, fast OS, spunky hardware but nowadays computing is tending towards commodity and hence there is no room for a machine like a sun anymore. You just simply don't earn it back fast enough. And if you are in an industry where you could then you probably be using a mac by now.
Sorry to say but Sun is going the way of the dodo and I fear they may end up SCO'ing their way to the grave...
yeah beats having to say: Sorry teacher but the dog ate my RFID tag...
..an 800 pound microsoft certified gorilla?
I wonder if it is that simple.. I hope it is then we can expect it to appear soon in KDE or Gnome... Perhaps a /.'er here knows of an OSS project to bring this kind of functionality to everyone?
From my perspective Spotlight is the best excuse yet to get a mac.. now they just need to ship it and prefferably on a g-5 ibook... grrrr....
Being relitvely novice at network security I only have an extremely humble opinion but at the same time I must say that Mr. Chavaukin strikes me to be an extremeley adept man on this subject. Having just finished the Security Warrior I have learned a lot and I find his (and his co-author Mr. Pekari) insights and information to be extremely astute.
No, I will take no grain of salt regarding his comments about the book in question, untill I have achieved a decent status in the matter I will refer to Mr. Chavaukin's comments eagerly!
It is within te domain of responsabilities of the PRC Government to deal with the matter. Whether or not the accusations on their part are salient is not really *our* issue. The PRC is an independant en sovereign state. Sure it isn't a democracy and there are many human rights issues but really, cyber-porno bars being shut down is an item for /. ?
for crying out loud.. I mean really, Ivar Jacobsen (granddaddy of object oriented software engineering) once lamented about what the world would look like if engineers worked with the same level of professionalism as the computer programmer.. unified software development process, ISBN 0-521-78774-2 p27
well I guess it depends on which side of the fence you sit. *Imagine* that you are a member of political-industrial family and you have acquired power. Now you see the opportunity to bring e-voting in to the mainstream. One of daddy's buddies makes machines to do this and well.. yeah he could bugger the tally a bit in a software glitch, if given the exclusive contract to make the machines and is awarded a patent or two... nothing dear old dad can't arrange... so how a bout it eh? no more bugsome voters and you can smile and make jokes throughout the campaign! You'll look better than ever! Really, any voting machines should be public property and the software either open source or at least public domain. Checksums and double entry score keeping should be mandatory. The law for hand counting states three people need to tally a vote so should a computer keep multiple registers and have a failover....
well then maybe I will jsut buy one of these and run SuSE PPC or Yellow Dog ..
I was sorta half waiting for a g-5 but then I guess for a 12 incher it doesn't make that big a difference. Probably better off with a G4 and more ram, 256 is a little on the anemic side..
You may be right. However, just imagine for one second that a serious competitor succeeds in taking over 50% of the desktop market. How much in terms of annual revenue will Microsoft have to "make-up" with alternative business in order to uphold it's credit rating and cashflow? Billions, you are correct in assuming. How easy is it to come up with a business plan that can generate billions within the short to medium run? Not!
Unless you play dirty, and by dirty I mean attempt to gain control of consumer behaviour in a proprietary sense, that is. to proprietarize behaviour that is currently non-propriety.
You have guessed it: entertainement. Microsoft is aware of the potential revenue loss due to encraoching platforms and wishes to maintain revenue by getting control over music and movies and forcing it's proprietary format to maintain billions in revenue..
Failing that I would offer that even if someone acquired a BSD licensed kernel, what good would it do him as a product since he is a stand alone develloper who competes against the rest of Linux devellopment ... it's not just about the market, it's also about the production model, the Open Source model as opposed to closing the dev'ing to a limited group.
Considering the amount of time and effort involved in both projects it is clear that OO.org cannot rival a multi-billion dollar operation to it's fullest extent after 4 years. The point being that you should be fair about a comparison. Compare it to suites other than MS Office Pro. Compare it to Works or compare it to Abiword (for writer then) and so forth and so on.
I guess the question society must answer is "what price freedom?" At the end of the day what do you think is more important? I personally think that freedom of speech is a cornerstone of society. This doesn't mean that anything should just be legal. The fact is that as long as you are free to act, you are also free to be responsible. That is the key to an open and democratic culture. Let's all be free AND responsible in what we say and to who we say it. That way nobody needs to hire lawyers or get legislation to ban bla di blah etc.... right, the final analysis? education is key to a culture which breeds responsible open communication. Gee that wasn't so tough was it?
and hence another argument to disable anonymous posting...
A sad thing but the reality is that there is nothing they could do to stop spam. In fact the only thing anyone can do to stop spam is to stop using email. Yep, the spammer wins.. I abandoned my email account. So in effect he loses because my address is now worthless..
I disagree entirely. There are too many things in fundamental research which are known exclusivly through the names of their makers.
t m
http://web.mit.edu/8.712/www/lecture3/tsld008.h
above is but one of many
I don't think that you should underestimate the problem, granted most of don't run a major risk but they do try, and as you will acknowledge, trying leads to learning...
Actually the amount of entries in my LogWatch with failed attempts coming from korea (south) and China (commie) is sort of up and down but there are more and more of them that try.. It seems that they like to attack the mailservers.. luckily they ain't too bright, yet....
Just TCPwrap their netblocks away.. I don't know anyone out there anyway that would be interesting or interested with regards to my online activities.
I am not a lawyer but I believe Mr. Ballmer just wrongfully accused me and slandered the vendor of my device. Perhaps a lawyer here sees a possibility for class action? I am sick of these Microsnuffers accusing me of all sorts of shit they know nothing about. Who the heck are they to judge me and what I do? I am sorry Mr. Ballmer but You have no affiliation with the copyright holders of the music I listen to and as such I don't see why you meddle in my business relationship with Apple Computer Corp. and my Music Vendor. I think Microsoft is in breach of many laws and regulations yet I don't particularly feel a requirement in my inner monkey to spout this at my upcoming public speaking arrangements. Maybe I should but I bet you that If I do I will be presented with a lawsuit...