".....With an increasing number of people disenchanted with the flaws, bugs and security holes in the world's most popular web browser (still) switching to the current open source champion......"
I looked at the browser statistics at W3 Schools the other day and noticed that the most recent month both IE5 and 6 usage increased and that Firefox decreased by over a percent (19.6% to 20.7% the preceeding month). Maybe an anomaly, but notable because it is the first reverse of the Firefox trend on that web site since it was released. It makes me wonder about the statement above, and whether a flattening has started or arrived.
"The Scream" was painted by "Edvard Munch" (pr. "Munk" not "Munch"), a Norwegian painter. So *THERE*!
Yeah - and if you locked the museum door maybe you would still have it.
Re:Social Networks = Criminal Networks?
on
The Evil in E-Mail
·
· Score: 1
Yeah - and every tech support person on the planet will be sharing a cell in some far away place. Although for these people the "criminal network" is actually apt in some instances - or is should be (criminal that is).
The implication that this is a lot of money is just way off base.
A brief Google search suggests that the US spends on the order of 500 billion dollars per year on education (http://www.oclc.org/membership/escan/economic/edu cationlibraryspending.htm). It would not be unreasonable to spend a percent or two of that amount on research directed at understanding and improving the process - which would mean five to ten thousand projects of this magnitude (the annual cost for this project being about 1 million). The idea being that a one percent investment in research will typically yield more than a 1 percent improvment in the process.
A 3.3 million dollar project would pay for itself in one year if it improved teaching efficiency by 0.001%.
Taking that money and using it to support schools directly - say for more teachers - is like saying that we should not do any more biomedical research, but instead use that money to pay for more doctors to deliver health care. You might get an overall improvement in the first year, but in the long run you pay a huge price. There needs to be a balance between short term and long term expenses - giving up the long term view because you have short term problems is - well - a short term view.
You might argue with the details of the research - and whether the money is well spent in this particular case. But as a general matter it is if anything a modest amount of money.
Average user: Storage time desired (in years) = 74 - your current age (slightly longer for women, and varies depending on country, how much you smoke, and several other parameters).
Optimistic user: Storage time desired (in years) = 90 - your current age
Extreme user: Storage time desired (in years) = 122 - your current age (standard set by Jeanne-Louise Calment, 1875-1997)
It strikes me that if there are enough mistakes like this, then they will not be able to convict anyone. The question will be asked - are you sure (beyond reasonable doubt) that you have the right person - the person who was actually committing the "crime". And the mistakes will be held up as evidence that they can't be sure. So how many mistakes will be enough to make reasonable doubt for everyone?
As of 2.30 pm the stock was at about $4.20 - up from $3.53 the previous day. That is an 11 million dollar increase in market cap - which effectively means the market thinks the ruling is worth 11 million to SCO. I can't say that I see what about the ruling is worth quite that much. Maybe the way to think about it is that this is a 3 billion dollar lottery - and the price of the ticket just went from 62 million to 73 million.
That looks like a misleading article title to me. What happened is that DHS inherited Customs because Customs is responsible for controlling things that cross US - which is not unreasonable. But customs also apparently has some trademark enforcement duties - probably on things that are imported. Also not unreasonable - although it leads to trademark enforcement sitting under DHS which is a little weird. But the article should more rightfully have been about a shop owner who was visited by Customs agents.
Whether or not trademarks were actually being violated is a another matter.
The push to open access is probably only the beginning of an overdue restructuring of the whole enterprise of scientific publication,
The current structure of scientific journals is an arcane system that derives its organization from a time when you actually had to go to the library and read the journals. Because a person could only read a dozen or two journals per week, a few journals became more important than others - the ones that were well positioned at the time or had some other competitive advantage. Their standing depended on the fact that people read them, which then drew better papers and better reviewers - which caused more people to read them. But the underlying driving force that generated this hierarchy of journals is now gone - because you scan all of them in (0.25 seconds). There are probably two things that tend to keep the hierarchy in place. The most important is academic promotion and grants - review panels look at the journal names, and use them to judge the success of junior faculty or grant applicants. The "good" journals also tend to have better reviewers, which improves the quality of the journal. But in the absence of fundamental driving force - I believe these two advantages will wane. One reason they will wane is that the big journals have a significant old boy component to them; members of their editorial boards and their friends publish stuff in the journals that others could never get accepted. That means that poor science gets in and good science goes elsewhere. This will tend to erode other metrics of journal quality, such as impact factor (essentially how many times others cite papers in that journal). Review panels will begin to notice, the good reviewers will have less incentive to review mostly for the big journals, and the playing field will become increasingly level.
When one thinks about the issues above and why we have the journal selection we do - I don't think that it is unreasonable to consider the possibility (in my view likelihood) that scientific journals as we know them will go away entirely. What they will be replaced is an interesting question for which I am sure the Slashdot crowd is not lacking suggestions.
This whole thing makes me wonder about how dumping - the practice of selling goods abroad at a price below the manufacturing cost or the price you charge in your home market. When foreign manufacturers sell steel or RAM or some other commodity in the US at prices lower than their home markets then the US calls that dumping and slaps a tariff on the goods. I believe that these tariffs are in principle legal under the WTO, so it seems that the WTO must have some antidumping provisions in it.
In this specific case it seems one could argue that MS is dumping Windows in these third world countries. There must be some small software companies - such as Linux shops - in these countries that are getting hurt? Yeah it is a stripped down version, but they only do that to protect their pricing elsewhere - and it is not clear to me how slightly different products are dealt with in a dumping context. You change the amount of carbon in your steel by 0.01% outside some specification, call it " Really Special Steel", and avoid US dumping tariffs? I don't think so. Might there be a basis for these countries to bring action against MS - and would then even want to? Who else might have legal standing to bring such an action - other OS vendors? Of course, IANL.
In the more general case the notion of dumping as applied to software or other information products (databases, movies, music) seems to raise some interesting questions - and I wonder if there has ever been a dumping case based on such products. With a commodity your production price is often a substantial fraction of your sales price, and you can't go very low before you start loosing money. But a $1,000 piece of software could be sold elsewhere for $5 without a direct loss on unit sold. There are also the endless different versions one can make - where the above steel example does not hold. As you change a product you do eventually reach a point where it is truly different, and it seems like information products are particularly suited to that.
I agree that it is a waste from the stand point of prediction - trying to figure out where the market is going. It won't be useful for making money, regulating the market or any other forward looking activity. But it might give some interesting posthoc insight into the behavior of the market and the people and computers in it.
Describing it in public before the patent application date is not prior art per se. IANL, but for it to be public I am pretty sure one has to show that it was public before the date of invention - which can preceed the date of filing by many years.
I get the impression that most Senators and people at that level have other people read their email, and that they don't always feel the impact of spam the way the rest of us do.
But their messing with their cell phones has got to be a completely different matter. So the upside might be that this actually gets their attention. The downside - I am not sure if I trust the government to develop legislation that does not throw the baby out with the bath water.
This reminds me of an experience I had a few years ago. There used to be a company called 555-NEED that provided free business directory information. I think the way they made money was that they charged businesses to be the first recommended - so if you called and asked for a dry cleaner they would first give you the number of one of their clients. But if they did not have client in that category they just looked something up in the regular phone book. Since my cell phone company - Sprint I think - charged a buck per telephone number, I tried 555-NEED from my cell phone. That was essentially a free call as long as I stayed under my minutes, and even if I was over it was less than what Sprint would charge for the airtime. But when I dialed the 555-NEED number I got Sprint information; I tried again and the same thing happened. And when my bill arrived they charged me for those information calls. I don't remember what their support people said, but I did file a complaint with the FCC. It seemed to me that it should be illegal for a phone company to redirect your call from the number you dialed to some number that they make money off of. I never heard from the FCC - but I did get a call from some suit at Sprint. I guess the FCC forwarded my complaint to them, and gave them my phone number (which is inappropriate in itself). This person said something to the effect that they were not in the business of making money for the other company and that they were within their rights to do this. I don't know if this still goes on, but I remember thinking that it would not be long before I dialed my dentist and got a sprint prefered dentist.
This article made me wonder what might happen IF an outcome of the SCO action is that the GPL invalidated or crippled in some fashion.
Could some or most of the rest of the world continue to honor the GPL, while the US does not - that would lead to some real weirdness.
Maybe a lawyer can comment.
This is great. You can claim some piece of rock somewhere in space just because you know it is there (ie you can see it), and charge a fee for landing on it.
Space and time being one, I am claiming the three seconds between January 1, 2004, 00:00:00 and 00:00:03. My little rock in time. Hey, I know it is (or will be) there.
Anyone wanting to see the new year is going to have to pay me - hmmm... 6 billion times... - lets make it 10 cents - in parking and storage fees.
Slashdot Mirror
I know that even the bleeping bookstore has decals and T-shirts with Cal Tech, but everyone knows that it should be Caltech.
".....With an increasing number of people disenchanted with the flaws, bugs and security holes in the world's most popular web browser (still) switching to the current open source champion......"
I looked at the browser statistics at W3 Schools the other day and noticed that the most recent month both IE5 and 6 usage increased and that Firefox decreased by over a percent (19.6% to 20.7% the preceeding month). Maybe an anomaly, but notable because it is the first reverse of the Firefox trend on that web site since it was released. It makes me wonder about the statement above, and whether a flattening has started or arrived.
"The Scream" was painted by "Edvard Munch" (pr. "Munk" not "Munch"), a Norwegian painter. So *THERE*!
Yeah - and if you locked the museum door maybe you would still have it.
Yeah - and every tech support person on the planet will be sharing a cell in some far away place. Although for these people the "criminal network" is actually apt in some instances - or is should be (criminal that is).
The two word response to this nonsense is - "the wheel". There is even a one word response - "fire".
Even the frigging cave men could innovate.
The implication that this is a lot of money is just way off base.
u cationlibraryspending.htm). It would not be unreasonable to spend a percent or two of that amount on research directed at understanding and improving the process - which would mean five to ten thousand projects of this magnitude (the annual cost for this project being about 1 million). The idea being that a one percent investment in research will typically yield more than a 1 percent improvment in the process.
A brief Google search suggests that the US spends on the order of 500 billion dollars per year on education (http://www.oclc.org/membership/escan/economic/ed
A 3.3 million dollar project would pay for itself in one year if it improved teaching efficiency by 0.001%.
Taking that money and using it to support schools directly - say for more teachers - is like saying that we should not do any more biomedical research, but instead use that money to pay for more doctors to deliver health care. You might get an overall improvement in the first year, but in the long run you pay a huge price. There needs to be a balance between short term and long term expenses - giving up the long term view because you have short term problems is - well - a short term view.
You might argue with the details of the research - and whether the money is well spent in this particular case. But as a general matter it is if anything a modest amount of money.
Average user:
Storage time desired (in years) = 74 - your current age
(slightly longer for women, and varies depending on country, how much you smoke, and several other parameters).
Optimistic user:
Storage time desired (in years) = 90 - your current age
Extreme user:
Storage time desired (in years) = 122 - your current age
(standard set by Jeanne-Louise Calment, 1875-1997)
It strikes me that if there are enough mistakes like this, then they will not be able to convict anyone. The question will be asked - are you sure (beyond reasonable doubt) that you have the right person - the person who was actually committing the "crime". And the mistakes will be held up as evidence that they can't be sure. So how many mistakes will be enough to make reasonable doubt for everyone?
As of 2.30 pm the stock was at about $4.20 - up from $3.53 the previous day. That is an 11 million dollar increase in market cap - which effectively means the market thinks the ruling is worth 11 million to SCO. I can't say that I see what about the ruling is worth quite that much. Maybe the way to think about it is that this is a 3 billion dollar lottery - and the price of the ticket just went from 62 million to 73 million.
That looks like a misleading article title to me. What happened is that DHS inherited Customs because Customs is responsible for controlling things that cross US - which is not unreasonable. But customs also apparently has some trademark enforcement duties - probably on things that are imported. Also not unreasonable - although it leads to trademark enforcement sitting under DHS which is a little weird. But the article should more rightfully have been about a shop owner who was visited by Customs agents.
Whether or not trademarks were actually being violated is a another matter.
Looks like almost all the combinations of Browser and Google have been proposed, though I haven't seen "Broowser" yet...
The push to open access is probably only the beginning of an overdue restructuring of the whole enterprise of scientific publication,
The current structure of scientific journals is an arcane system that derives its organization from a time when you actually had to go to the library and read the journals. Because a person could only read a dozen or two journals per week, a few journals became more important than others - the ones that were well positioned at the time or had some other competitive advantage. Their standing depended on the fact that people read them, which then drew better papers and better reviewers - which caused more people to read them. But the underlying driving force that generated this hierarchy of journals is now gone - because you scan all of them in (0.25 seconds). There are probably two things that tend to keep the hierarchy in place. The most important is academic promotion and grants - review panels look at the journal names, and use them to judge the success of junior faculty or grant applicants. The "good" journals also tend to have better reviewers, which improves the quality of the journal. But in the absence of fundamental driving force - I believe these two advantages will wane. One reason they will wane is that the big journals have a significant old boy component to them; members of their editorial boards and their friends publish stuff in the journals that others could never get accepted. That means that poor science gets in and good science goes elsewhere. This will tend to erode other metrics of journal quality, such as impact factor (essentially how many times others cite papers in that journal). Review panels will begin to notice, the good reviewers will have less incentive to review mostly for the big journals, and the playing field will become increasingly level.
When one thinks about the issues above and why we have the journal selection we do - I don't think that it is unreasonable to consider the possibility (in my view likelihood) that scientific journals as we know them will go away entirely. What they will be replaced is an interesting question for which I am sure the Slashdot crowd is not lacking suggestions.
This whole thing makes me wonder about how dumping - the practice of selling goods abroad at a price below the manufacturing cost or the price you charge in your home market. When foreign manufacturers sell steel or RAM or some other commodity in the US at prices lower than their home markets then the US calls that dumping and slaps a tariff on the goods. I believe that these tariffs are in principle legal under the WTO, so it seems that the WTO must have some antidumping provisions in it.
In this specific case it seems one could argue that MS is dumping Windows in these third world countries. There must be some small software companies - such as Linux shops - in these countries that are getting hurt? Yeah it is a stripped down version, but they only do that to protect their pricing elsewhere - and it is not clear to me how slightly different products are dealt with in a dumping context. You change the amount of carbon in your steel by 0.01% outside some specification, call it " Really Special Steel", and avoid US dumping tariffs? I don't think so. Might there be a basis for these countries to bring action against MS - and would then even want to? Who else might have legal standing to bring such an action - other OS vendors? Of course, IANL.
In the more general case the notion of dumping as applied to software or other information products (databases, movies, music) seems to raise some interesting questions - and I wonder if there has ever been a dumping case based on such products. With a commodity your production price is often a substantial fraction of your sales price, and you can't go very low before you start loosing money. But a $1,000 piece of software could be sold elsewhere for $5 without a direct loss on unit sold. There are also the endless different versions one can make - where the above steel example does not hold. As you change a product you do eventually reach a point where it is truly different, and it seems like information products are particularly suited to that.
I am sure Microsoft is relieved that they are all paid up.
I agree that it is a waste from the stand point of prediction - trying to figure out where the market is going. It won't be useful for making money, regulating the market or any other forward looking activity. But it might give some interesting posthoc insight into the behavior of the market and the people and computers in it.
Describing it in public before the patent application date is not prior art per se. IANL, but for it to be public I am pretty sure one has to show that it was public before the date of invention - which can preceed the date of filing by many years.
I get the impression that most Senators and people at that level have other people read their email, and that they don't always feel the impact of spam the way the rest of us do. But their messing with their cell phones has got to be a completely different matter. So the upside might be that this actually gets their attention. The downside - I am not sure if I trust the government to develop legislation that does not throw the baby out with the bath water.
This reminds me of an experience I had a few years ago. There used to be a company called 555-NEED that provided free business directory information. I think the way they made money was that they charged businesses to be the first recommended - so if you called and asked for a dry cleaner they would first give you the number of one of their clients. But if they did not have client in that category they just looked something up in the regular phone book. Since my cell phone company - Sprint I think - charged a buck per telephone number, I tried 555-NEED from my cell phone. That was essentially a free call as long as I stayed under my minutes, and even if I was over it was less than what Sprint would charge for the airtime. But when I dialed the 555-NEED number I got Sprint information; I tried again and the same thing happened. And when my bill arrived they charged me for those information calls. I don't remember what their support people said, but I did file a complaint with the FCC. It seemed to me that it should be illegal for a phone company to redirect your call from the number you dialed to some number that they make money off of. I never heard from the FCC - but I did get a call from some suit at Sprint. I guess the FCC forwarded my complaint to them, and gave them my phone number (which is inappropriate in itself). This person said something to the effect that they were not in the business of making money for the other company and that they were within their rights to do this. I don't know if this still goes on, but I remember thinking that it would not be long before I dialed my dentist and got a sprint prefered dentist.
What else to do you need? Things...
This article made me wonder what might happen IF an outcome of the SCO action is that the GPL invalidated or crippled in some fashion. Could some or most of the rest of the world continue to honor the GPL, while the US does not - that would lead to some real weirdness. Maybe a lawyer can comment.
This is great. You can claim some piece of rock somewhere in space just because you know it is there (ie you can see it), and charge a fee for landing on it. Space and time being one, I am claiming the three seconds between January 1, 2004, 00:00:00 and 00:00:03. My little rock in time. Hey, I know it is (or will be) there. Anyone wanting to see the new year is going to have to pay me - hmmm... 6 billion times... - lets make it 10 cents - in parking and storage fees.