Gates' deposition also was the subject of a federal appeals court hearing yesterday. Microsoft is trying to block public access to videotapes of the government's questioning.
An obscure 1913 law requires that depositions in federal antitrust cases be open to the public "as freely as are trials in open court."
But a Microsoft lawyer called the 1913 law outdated.
One thing that Microsoft has always done is keep their people feeling that Microsoft is the underdog and needs to keep fighting. They believe that all the money belongs to them by right and they are incredibly bugged by ANYONE else who makes money in their business area. They also feel that the next innovation could obsolete them and while this does not drive them to innovate, it does drive them to co-opt others' innovations quickly.
But everybody knows that Abstraction Is Good. That's why Wittgenstein and Kirkegaard are so much easier to understand than Zane Gray and Mickey Spillane.
Exactly, it's not a question of ratios of dollars but of utility, and the 2nd billion has a lot less utility than the 1st. Eventually the use with the most utility to Bill is to give it away for good publicity and warm fuzzies.
Actually MS seems to make pissing off judges part of their strategy. If they can get the judge to do something foolish, they get an appealable issue. This has worked in the past for them. I'm not really sure how well it works in Europe, probably U.S. is not too popular and MS even less so.
In fact it seems to me that monolithic proprietary COTS solutions might well be riskier than home-grown solutions, at least in terms of being too grandiose, alienating users, etc. A small in-house staff is much more likely to be able to make incremental, customer-drive, "organic" progress.
He seems to be taking the argument somewhere that it doesn't go. I don't see how you get from his good case for incremental improvements to making a case for buying COTS rather than developing stuff in-house. So sure, don't try to jump the whole stream at once -- your testing will be hard, you'll alienate your users, you'll spend a lot of money with no progress metrics, your risk is much higher. Look for stepping stones. But where is the FBI supposed to buy COTS to automate their workload? Spooks-R-US?
Ahem, these are lawyers. One does not get arbitrary amounts of effort out of an attorney in exchange for fixed amounts of money, no matter what their agreement says.
Is it "the skies are (not cloudy) all day" or "the skies are not (cloudy all day)"?
The mother of all languages to embrace syntax extensibility was Algol 68, which was available around, uh, 1968 or so. I think you could define new operators, change precedences, etc. It was a great way to turn reasonable programs into syntactic minefields.
People understand things by a chunking process. A program written in C is not understood by a programmer at the character level. Changing the basic syntax of the language is fine if you are writing the program because you can mentally re-chunk it into terms that you understand. But the reader is in a different boat, especially if he or she wants to read a random section out of the middle.
And it doesn't even matter whether Cisco is a US company or not. US invaded Panama, a sovereign country, and arrested Manuel Noriega for violations of US law, so logically they could invade Great Britain and arrest all those scofflaws who are driving on the wrong side of the road!
They don't have restrictive "agreements" with their vendors to the effect that a hard drive shipped with Windoze cannot be shipped with anything else? They haven't stolen operating systems code, pen technology, disk compression technology, audio transmission technology, driven the people they stole it from out of business, and settled the resultant lawsuits out of court so they could seal the terms of the settlements?
They don't say things like "when you're trying to kill someone, just smile and pull the trigger"?
They don't subsidize the competitors of their competitors, like Microsoft did with SCO?
Masters is definitely worth it; PhD only if you are really really smart and enjoy teaching & doing research & writing papers & applying for grants & advising & serving on committees. Being a university prof is a hard job.
At the master's stage you are more interested in the department's rep than in the university's. Figure out who is doing research you are interested in and apply to their departments.
Actually Freeman Dyson wrote a very interesting little book called "Origin of Life" which makes the case that the chicken came first -- ie the first cells consisted of bags of amino acid chains that catalyzed their own reproduction in an approximate manner. Cell reproduction happened when a cell split up physically into two cells that both happened to contain all the necessary chains of amino acids. Exact reproduction (via DNA/RNA) is supposed to have happened after this stage.
Normally I worry a lot more about how efficient government is at spending money. They could be a lot less efficient at taking it as far as I'm concerned.
Apparently if you steal someone's software and use it yourself, you're a commie. If you steal it, sell millions of copies, drive the people you stole it from out of business, and settle the resulting lawsuit out of court so you can keep the terms of the settlement secret, you're Capitalists like Bill and Steve.
That's right, didn't your mother ever tell you "If you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all"? You have hurt Java's feelings, now apologize!
Apparently Communists steal software and music for their own use, while Capitalists like Bill steal technology, incorporate it into their own product, sell it, and settle the resulting lawsuit out of court.
I had a wonderful time in school and got to work with absolutely brilliant professors. Most of what I learned didn't come out of books, it came from working with great profs, doing homework that I would never have done otherwise, talking to fellow students, coding projects. I learned mostly by solving problems and coding projects, and I would never have invested the necessary energy in them if I didn't have someone guiding me and telling me that it was a worthwhile investment.
I just don't get why the only ethical way for me to sell or buy software is to accompany it with an unrestricted source code license. It's like saying that the only ethical way to sell milk is in 8-ounce glasses. Surely the details of the transaction should be left to the transacting parties.
Of course I'd RATHER have the source code, just like I'd RATHER have unlimited ocean cruises and Swedish masseuses.
Slashdot Mirror
See for example the childish headline
8 /n ews/news12.html
Microsoft Claims It's An Underdog
http://www.pub.umich.edu/daily/1998/oct/10-21-9
A brief excerpt:
Gates' deposition also was the subject of a federal appeals court hearing yesterday. Microsoft is trying to block public access to videotapes of the government's questioning.
An obscure 1913 law requires that depositions in federal antitrust cases be open to the public "as freely as are trials in open court."
But a Microsoft lawyer called the 1913 law outdated.
One thing that Microsoft has always done is keep their people feeling that Microsoft is the underdog and needs to keep fighting. They believe that all the money belongs to them by right and they are incredibly bugged by ANYONE else who makes money in their business area. They also feel that the next innovation could obsolete them and while this does not drive them to innovate, it does drive them to co-opt others' innovations quickly.
But everybody knows that Abstraction Is Good. That's why Wittgenstein and Kirkegaard are so much easier to understand than Zane Gray and Mickey Spillane.
Exactly, it's not a question of ratios of dollars but of utility, and the 2nd billion has a lot less utility than the 1st. Eventually the use with the most utility to Bill is to give it away for good publicity and warm fuzzies.
And he gave it to them because he had a hard time spending it on himself. God knows he tried.
Actually MS seems to make pissing off judges part of their strategy. If they can get the judge to do something foolish, they get an appealable issue. This has worked in the past for them. I'm not really sure how well it works in Europe, probably U.S. is not too popular and MS even less so.
In fact it seems to me that monolithic proprietary COTS solutions might well be riskier than home-grown solutions, at least in terms of being too grandiose, alienating users, etc. A small in-house staff is much more likely to be able to make incremental, customer-drive, "organic" progress.
He seems to be taking the argument somewhere that it doesn't go. I don't see how you get from his good case for incremental improvements to making a case for buying COTS rather than developing stuff in-house.
So sure, don't try to jump the whole stream at once -- your testing will be hard, you'll alienate your users, you'll spend a lot of money with no progress metrics, your risk is much higher. Look for stepping stones. But where is the FBI supposed to buy COTS to automate their workload? Spooks-R-US?
Ahem, these are lawyers. One does not get arbitrary amounts of effort out of an attorney in exchange for fixed amounts of money, no matter what their agreement says.
Is it "the skies are (not cloudy) all day" or "the skies are not (cloudy all day)"?
The mother of all languages to embrace syntax extensibility was Algol 68, which was available around, uh, 1968 or so. I think you could define new operators, change precedences, etc. It was a great way to turn reasonable programs into syntactic minefields.
People understand things by a chunking process. A program written in C is not understood by a programmer at the character level. Changing the basic syntax of the language is fine if you are writing the program because you can mentally re-chunk it into terms that you understand. But the reader is in a different boat, especially if he or she wants to read a random section out of the middle.
Code generators will make most expensive programmers obsolete...
Funny, they said that about Fortran too!
This is just the sort of thing I would want job applicants to do, if anyone were foolish enough to trust me to hire people.
http://www.itasoftware.com/careers/eng/job1.php
So are there any studies backing any of this up or is it all just personal opinions?
And it doesn't even matter whether Cisco is a US company or not. US invaded Panama, a sovereign country, and arrested Manuel Noriega for violations of US law, so logically they could invade Great Britain and arrest all those scofflaws who are driving on the wrong side of the road!
They don't have restrictive "agreements" with their vendors to the effect that a hard drive shipped with Windoze cannot be shipped with anything else? They haven't stolen operating systems code, pen technology, disk compression technology, audio transmission technology, driven the people they stole it from out of business, and settled the resultant lawsuits out of court so they could seal the terms of the settlements?
They don't say things like "when you're trying to kill someone, just smile and pull the trigger"?
They don't subsidize the competitors of their competitors, like Microsoft did with SCO?
They don't bug their competition's hotel rooms?
I'm just guessing here...
Maybe you could paint the roadbed.
Masters is definitely worth it; PhD only if you are really really smart and enjoy teaching & doing research & writing papers & applying for grants & advising & serving on committees. Being a university prof is a hard job.
At the master's stage you are more interested in the department's rep than in the university's. Figure out who is doing research you are interested in and apply to their departments.
Actually Freeman Dyson wrote a very interesting little book called "Origin of Life" which makes the case that the chicken came first -- ie the first cells consisted of bags of amino acid chains that catalyzed their own reproduction in an approximate manner. Cell reproduction happened when a cell split up physically into two cells that both happened to contain all the necessary chains of amino acids. Exact reproduction (via DNA/RNA) is supposed to have happened after this stage.
Normally I worry a lot more about how efficient government is at spending money. They could be a lot less efficient at taking it as far as I'm concerned.
Apparently if you steal someone's software and use it yourself, you're a commie. If you steal it, sell millions of copies, drive the people you stole it from out of business, and settle the resulting lawsuit out of court so you can keep the terms of the settlement secret, you're Capitalists like Bill and Steve.
That's right, didn't your mother ever tell you "If you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all"? You have hurt Java's feelings, now apologize!
Apparently Communists steal software and music for their own use, while Capitalists like Bill steal technology, incorporate it into their own product, sell it, and settle the resulting lawsuit out of court.
I had a wonderful time in school and got to work with absolutely brilliant professors. Most of what I learned didn't come out of books, it came from working with great profs, doing homework that I would never have done otherwise, talking to fellow students, coding projects. I learned mostly by solving problems and coding projects, and I would never have invested the necessary energy in them if I didn't have someone guiding me and telling me that it was a worthwhile investment.
I just don't get why the only ethical way for me to sell or buy software is to accompany it with an unrestricted source code license. It's like saying that the only ethical way to sell milk is in 8-ounce glasses. Surely the details of the transaction should be left to the transacting parties.
Of course I'd RATHER have the source code, just like I'd RATHER have unlimited ocean cruises and Swedish masseuses.
Melting points.
Aluminum - 660 C
Titanium - 1660 C