Make sure you include a bunch of "customers", the people for whom the project is being developed, who really have no clue of what it is that they really want. Point is to develop the students' skills at mental telepathy and crystal ball gazing.
(Oh, and make sure none of them are included in the group which ultimately has to evaluate the success of the project.)
OK, then go read what Balmer is saying himself.
The fact that he has one Linux vendor essentially "admitting" that they know of parts of Linux that infringe on Microsoft patents implies that he has some proof. It doesn't matter if he has any REAL evidence, any more than it mattered three years ago when SCO started spewing bile about copyright infringement and copied SYSV code in Linux. As it turns out, their SCO strategy has failed miserably, so now MS has to try a different tack.
> There's absolutely no way MS can stop companies from using open source software.
Actually, yes they can, or perhaps more to the point, they can stop organizations (for-profit or not) from distributing that software you are using by bringing "patent infringement" suits against them. They may even be able to sue companies that are just using the software, even though they aren't actively distributing it. (That's the way patents work.) They may not be able to stop your particular application (if it's clearly not covered by any of their patents), but applications rarely stand completely on their own. If they take down, or even cast enough of a shadow on some key parts of the overall system, they can effectively shut you out. True, YOU as an individual developer, can still develop software, but I doubt you're doing all that development on your own, and you can probably be hindered from distributing it.
> That's the most insane thing I've ever heard.
Uh.... Welcome to the world of Software Patents.:-(
Build your own system? HA!!! I can do it in about 10 minutes. (Takes me longer to install the OS than it does to put the hardware together.)
However, expecting the average user to know how to do that is like expecting the average person to perform brain surgery. Most people I know have a hard time telling the difference between RAM memory and Disk memory. They think the tower is the "CPU", and that SCSI is what you call gum stuck to the bottom of your chair. It's not that the people aren't smart. It's just that they have no context to work from, and for that matter, no motivation to learn. You could probably learn how to bake bread from scratch, but why bother if you can just go to the store and buy it ready made? Sure, bread made from scratch is better tasting, and probably a LOT better for you, but you don't have time to fiddle around with it. So, you let other people do the baking for you, and you just keep buying scuzzy store-bought bread.
Remember, Google means search. The reason why Google mail is "quirky" is that it is a completely different approach to organizing your saved mail. That means learning a whole different way to deal with looking back through old messages to find things.
Frankly, I haven't used gmail enough to really get comfortable with it, but I can see how some people wouldn't like it. However, comparing it with Outlook is counterproductive. Gmail doesn't even try to look like Outlook, because it has whole different vision of the world.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but the First Ever Computer Game, one which I think should be somewhere in the top 12, is "Adventure!" I think it was one of the games K&R first wrote on their UNIX system. (I definitely remember it from the book, "The Soul of a New Machine". "You are in a maze of twisty passages that all look the same.") I know it kept me busy for many hours on my original CP/M computer.
> Politics, although nasty at times, is very important and is definately worthy of discussion since it affects us all in one way or another.
Very true, just as religion is also important (especially if you take "religion" in the broader sense of "World Views" and how our perception of reality affects everything we do). Unfortunately, there is rarely any real "discussion" around either of these topics. Mostly, it's just flame fests, name calling and, "How could any intelligent person possibly believe what you are saying???"
In most any "online" forum, most people are so close-minded and set in their ways of looking at the world (regardless of whether they call themselves Conservative, Liberal, or worse yet, Moderate) that meaningful dialogue is an impossibility. Face to face, there is a slightly greater chance that people can really TALK to each other, but even that is rare.
One of the interesting things about this pattern is that it only really works on conservatives. A good definition of Conservative/Liberal would be that Conservatives tend to cling to what they "Know" is right, Liberals however tend to be more ready to challenge their preconceived ideals, so aren't as open to fluff pieces aimed at allowing someone to retain a "Faith" in the face of significant evidence against it.
Spoken like a True Liberal! Actually, Conservatives are people who believe in what has been shown to work in the past. Liberals are people who want to say, "Everything YOU think is true is actually wrong -- MY ideas are better."
Suffice it to say that using labels like "Conservative" and "Liberal" to equate to "Stoooopid" and "Smart" is just silly and counterproductive. Both camps are full of "fluff pieces" and people only willing to look at the world through their own particular filters. You just happen to like your filters better than those of the Conservatives.
Well, "PR stunt" or just more of the same "GPL Prevents IP" FUD. The article, what I actually bothered to read of it, was filled with the same old Party Line of, "We TRIED to cooperate with the GPL, but it just prevents us from creating any of our own Intellectual Property." It's the same old story saying that you can't "mix" proprietary and GPL software. Well, actually you can write LOTS of proprietary software to work on a system using GPL software. You can even link with LGPL'ed libraries. You just can't rip off other people's work and use it as your own. Somehow that never seems to get through to the media pundits. I think Microsoft understands it just fine, but it makes better PR if they whine incessantly about it.
> You lost me when you compared use of a phone to using a credit card
They are both "services" that someone else is paying for (or has paid for). A credit card is basically a "service" allowing you quick access to "borrowing" money against a credit account in order to buy goods. Federal law has very explicit regulations about using a "device" (cell phone or other) to access services that someone else has paid for, without their permission.
Movies based on Video games can't be any worse than the couple of movies I've seen based on the AD&D universe. Gawd they were bad! Stick figure characters straight out of the Cleric/Rogue/Paladin/Mage manuals. I could almost hear the D20's rolling as the fights progressed. Pull up a dragon or two and hope you can make a movie out of it. Even the magic items were straight out of the manuals.
Only good part was seeing the thief pick locks and trigger traps around the hidden treasure.
Most AD&D games I've played had pretty poor "plots", if that's all you are looking at, but that's now why I play. It's the thrill of figuring out a puzzle, or getting through a maze, or developing a character. Personally, I like sitting around in a room with a hex grid and a couple of miniatures because it makes me use my imagination, unlike certain on-line "games", which are nothing more than ways to squander huge amounts of time in what amounts to a glorified FPS.
How long before we start seeing JBoss packages in Fedora Core installs, like we are seeing Eclipse and Xen being rolled out? Seems like they run everything through Fedora first, just to shake out the integration glitches and get as many people jumping on it as possible. (Open Source Beta Testers!)
I wonder if they will build it on the SUN JVM, or on the GNU JVM that currently ships with Fedora.
We had a fax machine at our church, and were constantly getting junk faxes. We can't afford to keep the old machine up, not to mention that the thing was so old we didn't know how much longer we could get supplies for it. So, we just pulled the plug on the machine and cancelled the extra phone line. It's getting to the point where, if someone wants to send us something, they do it by email. The new copier we just got on lease is a multi-function, and doubles as a network printer, so we can send and receive scans. At this point, there isn't any reason to keep the fax going any longer.
My first real computer was a Motorola 6800 (8-bit) evaluation kit. Basically, a single board kit with CPU, 128 bytes of RAM (Yes, that's BYTES), a hex keypad, and a simple monitor program driving four memory mapped 7-segment LED's for a display. You had to program in assembler, hand compile to machine code, and key in the instructions in HEX. You could save programs to a tape recorder. I can't say I did a lot of programming on it (there's not much you can do in 128 bytes), but I did write some loops to make the LED's blink...
Don't remember the date, but must have been some time around 1978, after High School, but before I graduated from college. This was a couple of years after the 6800 was introduced (1975), so it was probably an older eval board that my father picked up and brought home for me to play around with. I had actually done some programming a couple of years earlier in High School (1973) on a HP system (unknown model) with a card reader and TTY terminal, running BASIC. This was the only High School that I knew of in the area where students could actually physically get their hands on the computer (as opposed to simple batch terminals linked to a larger system off site somewhere).
Sounds like someone trying to give credence to the, "If you talk on cell phones a lot, you'll get brain tumors" myth. Obviously, if you can cook an egg in two minutes, they you MUST be cooking your brain cells!!!!
There may still be some evidence for long term damage to the brain if you talk on the cell phone all day long for a hundred years or so, but I really doubt this egg myth is anything more than a bad yoke...
First, as a gazilion of other people have already said, if you stop to get out of the car and try to remove/disable the device, you've probably already been caught.
Second, recall that this thing is designed to be shout of a high powered air-gun, slam into the back/side of a speeding car, and stick there. I kinda sorta expect that it's not what we would describe as "delicate" electronics. More likely, at least three quarters of the mass of that golf-ball sized package is impact absorbing material and reinforcing. Stick that up against a rather flimsy backing of sheet metal (as opposed to a concrete floor), and hitting it with a hammer (assuming you even have one handy) will only dent the body panel it's stuck to.
True, there is "nudity" that is clearly not "porn", but unfortunately, there are still plenty of people riding a fine line between "art" nudes of children (or "pre-teen model" sites), which are clearly intended as porn. There are some rules, but I don't know if the impact on the young children themselves (or the adults who eat this sort of stuff up) is any different.
I'm not at all certain that the search engines are sucking value OUT of the rest of the "content" sites on the Internet so much as they are adding value TO them. Think: Network Effect. I put up a site, and no one knows about it. I can spam all my friends with links, or put them in my signature block on other popular Blog sites, but that's limited to how many people and places I can personally hit.
On the other hand, include a couple of keywords or search terms that people are interested in, and I start getting search engine hits. People start finding my site. If I have a commercial site, or one with HOWTO docs on Linux, or interesting political commentary, then the search engines are the ONLY way people are going to find my site. People might even add links to my content on their pages, if they find it interesting enough, but the only way to break in is through the search engines.
(Now, there are all the techniques that some sites use to artificially boost their ranking on search sites and abuse the system, but that's a different issue.)
The author specifically mentions this. The problem is certainly compounded because Windows is more popular, but the fundamentally, it goes back to shoddy programming practices, an emphasis on getting releases out before they are tested, and most important, the tight integration of the ENTIRE suite, such that, "If you compromise one program, you've compromised them all."
I'm wondering, how much work is required to hack into the box, not necessarily to run illegally copied games, but to run Linux or something else? I know there was a lot of talk about hacking into the original Xbox, mostly because the internal guts were primarily OTS PC components. The 360 sounds like a lot more custom work. However, being able to run a triple-core Power box would be pretty interesting, even if it was tweaked out for gaming rather than general purpose programming.
Did you read the article? The point the ARTIST was making is that DRM, no matter how "well" it is implemented, prevents people from sharing the music with other people, which in turn limits the wide distribution of the music, especially to people who haven't heard your work before. OK, so if you're Madonna or KISS or some other huge name, then pretty much everyone had heard of you, but for every big name band that could really use DRM to protect them from massive piracy, how many thousands of other small time bands are there struggling to get their songs out? I don't even mean "garage bands". There are plenty of established bands who just aren't in the top 0.1% that get a lot of air time on the big corporate owned radio stations. They would love to have 10,000 more people downloading their music and actually listening to them. Downloads still drive real sales, both of CD's and concert tickets. You may only see receipts on 1 out of 10 copies of your songs out of there, but that's still better than ZERO sales.
... The point I intended to make, in response to the parent article, is that what we have lost is the freedom of access to radio as a broadcast medium. Currently, access to the Internet is open to anyone with a few bucks a month to pay for an ISP connection. Once on-line, we can publish pretty much anything we want. That ability no longer exists, as the "ownership" of the air-waves has been divided up between the big CONTENT providers. I have a feeling that this is the scenario that the original article is concerned with -- an "Internet" owned by the content and "pipe" providers, where only approved content is served, and the rest of us (unless we have Big $$$ to pay for access) are simply "consumers" of that content.
Slashdot Mirror
(Oh, and make sure none of them are included in the group which ultimately has to evaluate the success of the project.)
OK, then go read what Balmer is saying himself. The fact that he has one Linux vendor essentially "admitting" that they know of parts of Linux that infringe on Microsoft patents implies that he has some proof. It doesn't matter if he has any REAL evidence, any more than it mattered three years ago when SCO started spewing bile about copyright infringement and copied SYSV code in Linux. As it turns out, their SCO strategy has failed miserably, so now MS has to try a different tack.
Actually, yes they can, or perhaps more to the point, they can stop organizations (for-profit or not) from distributing that software you are using by bringing "patent infringement" suits against them. They may even be able to sue companies that are just using the software, even though they aren't actively distributing it. (That's the way patents work.) They may not be able to stop your particular application (if it's clearly not covered by any of their patents), but applications rarely stand completely on their own. If they take down, or even cast enough of a shadow on some key parts of the overall system, they can effectively shut you out. True, YOU as an individual developer, can still develop software, but I doubt you're doing all that development on your own, and you can probably be hindered from distributing it.
> That's the most insane thing I've ever heard.
Uh.... Welcome to the world of Software Patents. :-(
Well, it's about time we finally had some good news on the SPAM front... :-P
Hummm.... Yea, except Dell already did it. Only, they use a Web site rather than a nice little box you can plug into the wall.
However, expecting the average user to know how to do that is like expecting the average person to perform brain surgery. Most people I know have a hard time telling the difference between RAM memory and Disk memory. They think the tower is the "CPU", and that SCSI is what you call gum stuck to the bottom of your chair. It's not that the people aren't smart. It's just that they have no context to work from, and for that matter, no motivation to learn. You could probably learn how to bake bread from scratch, but why bother if you can just go to the store and buy it ready made? Sure, bread made from scratch is better tasting, and probably a LOT better for you, but you don't have time to fiddle around with it. So, you let other people do the baking for you, and you just keep buying scuzzy store-bought bread.
Remember, Google means search. The reason why Google mail is "quirky" is that it is a completely different approach to organizing your saved mail. That means learning a whole different way to deal with looking back through old messages to find things.
Frankly, I haven't used gmail enough to really get comfortable with it, but I can see how some people wouldn't like it. However, comparing it with Outlook is counterproductive. Gmail doesn't even try to look like Outlook, because it has whole different vision of the world.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but the First Ever Computer Game, one which I think should be somewhere in the top 12, is "Adventure!" I think it was one of the games K&R first wrote on their UNIX system. (I definitely remember it from the book, "The Soul of a New Machine". "You are in a maze of twisty passages that all look the same.") I know it kept me busy for many hours on my original CP/M computer.
Very true, just as religion is also important (especially if you take "religion" in the broader sense of "World Views" and how our perception of reality affects everything we do). Unfortunately, there is rarely any real "discussion" around either of these topics. Mostly, it's just flame fests, name calling and, "How could any intelligent person possibly believe what you are saying???"
In most any "online" forum, most people are so close-minded and set in their ways of looking at the world (regardless of whether they call themselves Conservative, Liberal, or worse yet, Moderate) that meaningful dialogue is an impossibility. Face to face, there is a slightly greater chance that people can really TALK to each other, but even that is rare.
Spoken like a True Liberal! Actually, Conservatives are people who believe in what has been shown to work in the past. Liberals are people who want to say, "Everything YOU think is true is actually wrong -- MY ideas are better."
Suffice it to say that using labels like "Conservative" and "Liberal" to equate to "Stoooopid" and "Smart" is just silly and counterproductive. Both camps are full of "fluff pieces" and people only willing to look at the world through their own particular filters. You just happen to like your filters better than those of the Conservatives.
Well, "PR stunt" or just more of the same "GPL Prevents IP" FUD. The article, what I actually bothered to read of it, was filled with the same old Party Line of, "We TRIED to cooperate with the GPL, but it just prevents us from creating any of our own Intellectual Property." It's the same old story saying that you can't "mix" proprietary and GPL software. Well, actually you can write LOTS of proprietary software to work on a system using GPL software. You can even link with LGPL'ed libraries. You just can't rip off other people's work and use it as your own. Somehow that never seems to get through to the media pundits. I think Microsoft understands it just fine, but it makes better PR if they whine incessantly about it.
They are both "services" that someone else is paying for (or has paid for). A credit card is basically a "service" allowing you quick access to "borrowing" money against a credit account in order to buy goods. Federal law has very explicit regulations about using a "device" (cell phone or other) to access services that someone else has paid for, without their permission.
Only good part was seeing the thief pick locks and trigger traps around the hidden treasure.
Most AD&D games I've played had pretty poor "plots", if that's all you are looking at, but that's now why I play. It's the thrill of figuring out a puzzle, or getting through a maze, or developing a character. Personally, I like sitting around in a room with a hex grid and a couple of miniatures because it makes me use my imagination, unlike certain on-line "games", which are nothing more than ways to squander huge amounts of time in what amounts to a glorified FPS.
I wonder if they will build it on the SUN JVM, or on the GNU JVM that currently ships with Fedora.
We had a fax machine at our church, and were constantly getting junk faxes. We can't afford to keep the old machine up, not to mention that the thing was so old we didn't know how much longer we could get supplies for it. So, we just pulled the plug on the machine and cancelled the extra phone line. It's getting to the point where, if someone wants to send us something, they do it by email. The new copier we just got on lease is a multi-function, and doubles as a network printer, so we can send and receive scans. At this point, there isn't any reason to keep the fax going any longer.
Don't remember the date, but must have been some time around 1978, after High School, but before I graduated from college. This was a couple of years after the 6800 was introduced (1975), so it was probably an older eval board that my father picked up and brought home for me to play around with. I had actually done some programming a couple of years earlier in High School (1973) on a HP system (unknown model) with a card reader and TTY terminal, running BASIC. This was the only High School that I knew of in the area where students could actually physically get their hands on the computer (as opposed to simple batch terminals linked to a larger system off site somewhere).
There may still be some evidence for long term damage to the brain if you talk on the cell phone all day long for a hundred years or so, but I really doubt this egg myth is anything more than a bad yoke...
Second, recall that this thing is designed to be shout of a high powered air-gun, slam into the back/side of a speeding car, and stick there. I kinda sorta expect that it's not what we would describe as "delicate" electronics. More likely, at least three quarters of the mass of that golf-ball sized package is impact absorbing material and reinforcing. Stick that up against a rather flimsy backing of sheet metal (as opposed to a concrete floor), and hitting it with a hammer (assuming you even have one handy) will only dent the body panel it's stuck to.
True, there is "nudity" that is clearly not "porn", but unfortunately, there are still plenty of people riding a fine line between "art" nudes of children (or "pre-teen model" sites), which are clearly intended as porn. There are some rules, but I don't know if the impact on the young children themselves (or the adults who eat this sort of stuff up) is any different.
(*sigh*) Well, that was quick. They're already down. :(
On the other hand, include a couple of keywords or search terms that people are interested in, and I start getting search engine hits. People start finding my site. If I have a commercial site, or one with HOWTO docs on Linux, or interesting political commentary, then the search engines are the ONLY way people are going to find my site. People might even add links to my content on their pages, if they find it interesting enough, but the only way to break in is through the search engines.
(Now, there are all the techniques that some sites use to artificially boost their ranking on search sites and abuse the system, but that's a different issue.)
The author specifically mentions this. The problem is certainly compounded because Windows is more popular, but the fundamentally, it goes back to shoddy programming practices, an emphasis on getting releases out before they are tested, and most important, the tight integration of the ENTIRE suite, such that, "If you compromise one program, you've compromised them all."
I'm wondering, how much work is required to hack into the box, not necessarily to run illegally copied games, but to run Linux or something else? I know there was a lot of talk about hacking into the original Xbox, mostly because the internal guts were primarily OTS PC components. The 360 sounds like a lot more custom work. However, being able to run a triple-core Power box would be pretty interesting, even if it was tweaked out for gaming rather than general purpose programming.
Did you read the article? The point the ARTIST was making is that DRM, no matter how "well" it is implemented, prevents people from sharing the music with other people, which in turn limits the wide distribution of the music, especially to people who haven't heard your work before. OK, so if you're Madonna or KISS or some other huge name, then pretty much everyone had heard of you, but for every big name band that could really use DRM to protect them from massive piracy, how many thousands of other small time bands are there struggling to get their songs out? I don't even mean "garage bands". There are plenty of established bands who just aren't in the top 0.1% that get a lot of air time on the big corporate owned radio stations. They would love to have 10,000 more people downloading their music and actually listening to them. Downloads still drive real sales, both of CD's and concert tickets. You may only see receipts on 1 out of 10 copies of your songs out of there, but that's still better than ZERO sales.