Microsoft's first priority should be to close the holes in its products that let viruses, spyware, spambots, mushrooms, toadstools, or whatever grow in their customers' computers.
This desktop search tool will just be one more thing to have to shut off.
If left on, it will
slow down the system
form another avenue to attack the OS
expose private data
facilitate user lock-in, since the user is trained to use the Microsoft interface and not the universal file/folder metaphor
further separate the user from how things work
That last point is arguably Not Completely Bad, since the machines are supposed to work for us, and not the other way around. The trouble is that it encourages the user to be lazy, putting all of their files into one big bucket. Then, when it comes time to upgrade or migrate to another machine, you've got to move all of that stuff, whether it's needed or not.
Microsoft as a company can't stand it if someone else has a feature they don't have. Couple that with the mindset that adding a security applet or layer on top of what's there already is the way to go, and you get insecure bloatware.
How long before Windows collapses under its own weight?
Actually, a biosphere seems like the next logical step for the space station.
Make the greenhouse a disk:
Spin it and make centifugal "gravity"
Keep it to the moon's 1/6 G
Put a convex mirror at the hub, reflecting some filtered sunlight to augment the artificial light.
Play some Yanni. Plants love Yanni:^}
You'd have to be careful about mixing in animals, though. It'd be tragic if the animal population got out of hand.
A greenhouse would serve to keep the astronauts from getting too loopy, too. "Gardening", even hydroponically, would probably be a welcome change from the other crap they have to do all day.
Speaking of crap, a garden might be a good way to recycle other human byproducts.
Maybe the irony of Microsoft selling AV software will push some people to look at Linux.
But probably this will just put more pressure on some smaller AV companies that are just squeaking by, forcing them out of business.
If Microsoft follows their usual pattern, the AV group will have access to the Windows source code. They will also have access to the Microsoft marketing team, which means that A) they will sell a lot of AV software and B) they will tend to coordinate bug fixes with the marketing department.
So rather than fixing holes in the OS as they're uncovered by malware (which the AV group can see from the Windows source code), Microsoft will tell users to buy the AV software.
It will provide them a way to shed criticism over vulnerabilities while actually profiting by them. Maybe they'll fix bugs uncovered by the AV group, but probably they'll delay a little bit to generate sales of AV software.
This is the same as saying they should fix the OS rather than sell AV software, but it will give them an out when future problems are discovered. They can dissemble for a while, calling an OS hole a simple virus matter.
Never mind that viruses should not exist. No OS is totally impenetrable, but to have an entire industry devoted to removing automated attack software is ridiculous.
Terrorism happened mere months after Clinton was elected. In the same place!
And we ignored it and went on with our happy little lives.
It has been shown that the Patriot Act was a wish list from Ashcrofts Justice Department, that was pushed shortly after 9/11 when the nation was still fearfull.
Yes, the nation was fearful. You're beginning to catch on. We're not fearful now, and we can scale the Patriot Hacked back a bit.
Some Congressmen logged complaints about having to vote on a bill that was printed the same morning as the vote. http://groups-beta.google.com/group/gov.us.fed.con gress.record.extensions/browse_thread/thread/b3f12 7369d4139e7/45b17e93fcb2648b?
As a point of fact the bill presented to the House that morning was not even the same bill that was discussed and passed earlier by the Judicary committee. Instead of mounting criticism on the House leadership, Republicans spun rhetoric and fear.http://www.wired.com/news/conflict/0,2100,475 49,00.html
Whoop-tee-do. The Patriot Hacked was rushed through, so what? We know that.
There will always be partisan nay-sayers, people who will argue that black is white and apples are really seven. There was a minority view at the time that said we deserved the 9/11 attacks, because America is just bad.
In 2004 when other parts of the bill were set to expire, the Republicans saw that they may not get the votes that they wanted in time. What did our leaders do? They extended the vote by 23 minutes to give the Republican leadership enough time to strongarm other Republicans who had all ready voted against the renewal to change the vote that was all ready cast. http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/ a/2004/07/09/MNGQC7IV231.DTL
Now you're telling me that the mechanism of Congress is messy? Heavens to Betsy! That's not a convincing argument of anything in particular.
Republicans openly manipulate the system, bending and breaking the rules as they see fit. You may call it politics, I call it criminal.
"Criminal"? How naive can you be? It's the way things happen in Washington, or in business, or in baseball, or in soup kitchens. The rules are bent everywhere, because the rules can't possibly fit every situation.
Besides that, you're making a mountain out of a molehill. You've decided you don't like the Republicans, or at least the current crop, and so you find the slightest irregularity and call it "criminal". That's the kind of thing that makes the Democrats sound like a bunch of Chicken Littles, crying about the sky falling.
Stop giving them the benefit of the doubt. There are no excuses for their actions. All of them were placed into office with the expectation that they would not put their heads up their collective butts in case of a national emergency.
I don't know of a single case of craniorectal inversion (CRI, TM) in governement after 9/11.
I could compare it to the rise of the Nazi party in the 30's by playing on the fear of the citizens, instead I will leave that exercise up to you.
>But terrorism has happened in the US.. many times before..
Sure. And we discounted it.
There was the Patti Hearst in the '70s, but we chalked that up to the '60s.
The WTC in 1993 was news for a week, then it was just a traffic problem in NYC.
Oklahoma City we attributed to right-wing anger over Waco.
9/11 was different. It was a concerted series of attacks, and that, along with the order of magnitude greater damage it caused, was why it was significant.
I guess Republicans must be looking beyond Bush now, and thinking about how they're going to justify the post-911 decisions they made.
It's not clear from your post whether you mean that the upcoming review of the Patriot Act signals a change or whether something else leads you to think that. In any case, you're 180 degrees off target.
The Republicans are hoping to find someone who will continue after President Bush because he's coming to the end of his final term. Grass root Republican still like him. By and large the leadership is not ashamed of their post-9/11 decisions, despite all the revisionist finger pointing going on in Washington.
If anything, the leadership is looking for someone who is more dynamic and smooth, and able to carry off centrism - sort of a right-wing Bill Clinton. I don't think that kind of person would be a successful candidate for them, but that's what they want.
To your other point: before 9/11/2001, none of us thought for a minute that something like that could happen here. Terroism happened in Europe and the Middle East, not here. We were trained by a century of domestic peace and foreign wars to believe that our oceans and good character would protect us.
We were all in shock, and that includes those in government. Can you imagine feeling responsible for 9/11? You could tell yourself everything I just said above, but still there would be the self-doubt asking whether you should have planned better.
The Patriot Act needs tweaking, obviously, where it violates the Fourth Amendment. But a lot of what's in it - such as allowing domestic and overseas law enforcement to share notes - can help defend our liberty without infringing it.
...can Wine be sued for reverse engineering... Windows APIs/functionality under the DMCA?
No.
The nasty provisions of the DMCA are there to prevent people from disabling copy protection and from falsely creating or removing "copyright management information", which means things like holograms on the outside of packages as well as simple copyright notices in code.
Copyright only covers the particular expression of a concept. APIs have been held to be concepts, and you can't copyright them. You can copyright
The source code for your version of the API
A binary library implementing the API
A book about an API
A book comparing two versions of an API
Etc.
To protect an idea or concept, you have to use a patent. You can't patent an API, and even if you could it's not protected by the nasty provisions of the DMCA. I'm pretty sure any patents on document formats will be thrown out, too.
Regarding reverse engineering: don't sweat it. As long as you are only looking at what a program does, it makes no legal difference whether you are looking at what bits it sends on a wire or what output it makes on a screen. It's only if you disassemble the program and use the disassembled instructions as your own that you are guilty of copyright infringement.
No, I'm not a lawyer, but I do play one on the net.
Programming is not an end in itself, but it does appeal to our fascination with winding things up and watching them go. To attract young people to programming, you have to find the right hook, whether it's a game, a robot, or a cool applet on a web page.
Did you ever sit down to write a program without considering what problem you were trying to solve? For that matter, we don't say, "I'm going to write a letter" without having an addressee and probably a topic in mind.
I first got interested in programming because my TRS-80 Model I (the 16K expanded version!) had a BASIC interpreter. I was 14. After "Hello, world", I think my very first program was a game, and so was my second.
It was a first person 3D maze game. I'd played them on PLATO at the University of Illinois, and the subject matter captured my attention. The programming was a means to an end. Then I got hooked on creating.
After that, I wanted to apply my new programming tool to every problem, whether it was schoolwork or figuring out which girl to ask to prom. Yeah, really. No, I didn't go.
There are many people who go to school to stucy engineering, philosophy, or graphic design and realize that what they really enjoy is creating, too. They like winding things up and watching them go. That's where you want to get people. Whether you use a game or a robot it really doesn't matter, but you can't just use programming in and of itself.
It's not a question of if she'll show up again, but when. There's too much at stake for the other side to allow such a willing tool to go unused.
My bet that she starts her own blog. That way she can have a platform to expound on her quirky worldview, without these pesky editor types watching over her shoulder.
Or she may choose a new pseudo'nym and start writing about life in White Plains, Westchester, and anyplace north of the East River and east of Long Island Sound. She seems really fascinated by that area. O'bsessed, you might say.
I think this is the same article: google:www.coder.com
Google United - Google Patent Examined
Google's newest patent application is lengthy. It is interesting in some places and enigmatic in others. Less colourful than most end user license agreements, the patent covers an enormous range of ranking analysis techniques Google wants to ensure are kept under their control.
Publication Date: 4/7/2005 7:41:24 AM
By Jim Hedger, StepForth News Editor, StepForth Placement Inc.
Thoughts on Google's patent... "Information retrieval based on historical data."
Google's newest patent application is lengthy. It is interesting in some places and enigmatic in others. Less colourful than most end user license agreements, the patent covers an enormous range of ranking analysis techniques Google wants to ensure are kept under their control. Some of the ideas and concepts covered in the document are almost certainly worked into the current algorithm running Google. Some are being worked in as this article is being written. Some may never see the blue-light of electrons but are pretty good ideas so it might have been considered wise to patent them. Google's not saying which is which. While not exactly War and Peace, it's a pretty complex document that gives readers a glimpse inside the minds of Google engineers. What it doesn't give is a 100% clear overview of how Google operates now and how the various ideas covered in the patent application will be integrated into Google's algorithms. One interesting section seems to confirm what SEOs have been saying for almost a year, Google does have a "sandbox" where it stores new links or sites for about a month before evaluation.
Google is in the midst of sweeping changes to the way it operates as a search engine. As a matter of fact, it isn't really a search engine in the fine sense of the word anymore. It isn't really a portal either. It is more of an institution, the ultimate private-public partnership. Calling itself a media-company, Google is now a multi-faceted information and multi-media delivery system that is accessed primarily through its well-known interface found at www.google.com.
Google is known for its from-the-hip style of innovation. While the face is familiar, the brains behind it are growing and changing rapidly. Four major factors (technology, revenue, user demand and competition) influence and drive these changes. Where Microsoft dithers and.dll's over its software for years before introduction, Google encourages its staff to spend up to 20% of their time tripping their way up the stairs of invention. Sometimes they produce ideas that didn't work out as they expected, as was the case with Orkut, and sometimes they produce spectacular results as with Google News. The sum total of what works and what doesn't work has served to inform Google what its users want in a search engine. After all, where the users go, the advertising dollars must follow. Such is the way of the Internet.
In its recent SEC filing, the first it has produced since going public in August 2004, Google said it was going to spend a lot of money to continue outpacing its rivals. This year they figure they will spend about $500 million to develop or enhance newer technologies. In 2004 and 2003, Google spent $319 million and $177 million respectively. The increase in innovation-spending corresponds with a doubling of Google's staff headcount which has jumped from 1628 employees in 2003 to 3021 by the end of 2004.
Over the past five years Google has produced a number of features that have proven popular enough to be included among its public-search offerings. On their front page, these features include Image Search, Google Groups, Google News, Froogle, Google Local, and Google Desktop. There are dozens of other features which can be accessed by cli
Wife: Have you got anything without spam? Waitress: Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it. Wife: I don't want ANY spam! Man: Why can't she have egg bacon spam and sausage? Wife: THAT'S got spam in it! Man: Hasn't got as much spam in it as spam egg sausage and spam, has it? it.
As odd as it sounds, both are correct. A sophisticated intruder could compromise security with the stolen code. Or not.
But for the sake of argument, suppose they do find flaws in Cisco's code. An exploit shows up on rootkit.org or someplace. It should be apparent from the exploit which flaws they're using, and so Cisco cleans up the flaw. In the long run, customers are actually safer.
It's sort of a backasswards way to open source your code.
Some genius haxx0r is toying around in the lab, writing a simulated virus. There's no way it can get out to the wild, of course. The thing's just for study.
Then he spills his coffee and within a few hours everyone gets to study it.
This one just spreads through blogs. Want to see a neat virus demo? Click here!
When you've got multiple billions of dollars in liquid assets, investing one tenth of one of those billions in a company that you like is a no-brainer. Risk, shmisk.
Michael Dell has been a capitalist his whole life, from selling newspaper subscriptions to selling PCs out of his dorm room. He's always been a risk-taker and an achiever. I'm not really impressed with him as a deep thinker, from the few interviews and articles I've seen him do, but that's not his area.
His goal was becoming the top PC maker, even bigger than IBM. His victory in that arena is complete, having driven IBM out of the PC market. Those of us who have watching the computer scene since the '70s should think back to what IBM was then.
Suppose a new kind of car were invented that a guy in his garage could make, and one of those garage hackers figured out how to mass-market his vehicle. If he did it so well that GM decided to get out of the consumer market altogether, that would rival what Dell did.
So what do he do when at 40 having accomplished what seemed like an impossible goal? I'd want my life to mean something besides business, but I'm not him.
I suspect you'll see Dell try to accomplish some new "impossible" goal, whether it's space exploration, a cancer cure, seawater desalination, selling electric cars, or whatever.
Also, after you've had it a while one of the pair refuses to go into "69" mode, even though it's still fine in standard mode. Something about being incompatible with a daughtercard.
What was wrong with the first two prequels? People complain about Star Wars episodes not being highbrow enough, or adult enough, or complex enough, etc. Star Wars is supposed to be popcorn, not trout almondine. If you can follow the symbolism to see the film at another level, so much the better, but it's a mistake to look so hard for the deep meaning that you miss the fun at the surface.
I have seen all of the Star Wars episodes as they have been released, and each time I make it a point not to expect anything. I watch and enjoy. The cliche "it is what it is" fits here.
These movies are aimed at multiple audiences: pre-teens, teenagers, adult sci-fi nerds, moms, dads, etc. That's why there's always a Jar-Jar, a tragic love affair, a love triangle, a classic struggle between good and evil affecting the future of a civilization, or whatever.
If you go in thinking you want the plot to go a certain way or for there to be a final explanation of any particular story line, you'll usually be disappointed.
Just keep your eyes open, sit back, and enjoy the popcorn.
Sighing was Cheryl Shepherd-Adams, a physics teacher who took an unpaid day off from Hays High School to attend the hearings. "Kansas has been through this before," she said. "I'm really tired of going to conferences and being laughed at because I'm from Kansas."
First, teachers seldom get a paid day off during the school year. They get "all summer" off (glossing, but that's the rationale). They are even less likely to get a paid day off to attend a political event, whether it affects their curriculum or not.
Secondly, her concern over being laughed at reveals a lot:
On the conference circuit, it's Correct to poke fun at Kansas because of the political climate.
Her motivation is at least partly from peer pressure
Her reaction to the peer pressure is to exert political pressure in Kansas, and apparently not to seize the moment to refute those making fun of her state. If she had been able to defend the position and honor of physical science educators in Kansas, she probably would not have been motivated to take a day off work to do so.
I'm not sure about the last point, of course, but it's also not important. What is important is that the argument is not just between people who disagree about the definition of science, but that the shape of the debate leads to closed minds on both sides. Both sides are also convinced that their minds are open and the other side's minds are not.
Few things are harder to fight than a closed mind. One of those things may be a mind that thinks it's open.
Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft's first priority should be to close the holes in its products that let viruses, spyware, spambots, mushrooms, toadstools, or whatever grow in their customers' computers.
This desktop search tool will just be one more thing to have to shut off.
If left on, it will
That last point is arguably Not Completely Bad, since the machines are supposed to work for us, and not the other way around. The trouble is that it encourages the user to be lazy, putting all of their files into one big bucket. Then, when it comes time to upgrade or migrate to another machine, you've got to move all of that stuff, whether it's needed or not.
Microsoft as a company can't stand it if someone else has a feature they don't have. Couple that with the mindset that adding a security applet or layer on top of what's there already is the way to go, and you get insecure bloatware.
How long before Windows collapses under its own weight?
Why don't they build a greenhouse up there?
Actually, a biosphere seems like the next logical step for the space station.
Make the greenhouse a disk:
You'd have to be careful about mixing in animals, though. It'd be tragic if the animal population got out of hand.
A greenhouse would serve to keep the astronauts from getting too loopy, too. "Gardening", even hydroponically, would probably be a welcome change from the other crap they have to do all day.
Speaking of crap, a garden might be a good way to recycle other human byproducts.
Dr. Who fans will note that their house now looks a lot smaller on the outside than it really is on the inside.
Maybe the irony of Microsoft selling AV software will push some people to look at Linux.
But probably this will just put more pressure on some smaller AV companies that are just squeaking by, forcing them out of business.
If Microsoft follows their usual pattern, the AV group will have access to the Windows source code. They will also have access to the Microsoft marketing team, which means that A) they will sell a lot of AV software and B) they will tend to coordinate bug fixes with the marketing department.
So rather than fixing holes in the OS as they're uncovered by malware (which the AV group can see from the Windows source code), Microsoft will tell users to buy the AV software.
It will provide them a way to shed criticism over vulnerabilities while actually profiting by them. Maybe they'll fix bugs uncovered by the AV group, but probably they'll delay a little bit to generate sales of AV software.
This is the same as saying they should fix the OS rather than sell AV software, but it will give them an out when future problems are discovered. They can dissemble for a while, calling an OS hole a simple virus matter.
Never mind that viruses should not exist. No OS is totally impenetrable, but to have an entire industry devoted to removing automated attack software is ridiculous.
Dude, you married your mother? That's sick...
Mom's dead, you insensitive clod!
That's why I need the pills to do the job.
Nah, but when you're as limp and lifeless down there as me, you need a truckload just to raise up a little.
... till after Mother's Day. My wife would have been pissed if I had pay full price for her Rolex.
And I'm glad I stocked up on Cialis and Viagra for our anniversary.
Our real thanks should go to OJ Simpson. Without his efforts to find his wife's real killer, more Hollywood wives would keep getting hacked.
And we ignored it and went on with our happy little lives.
Yes, the nation was fearful. You're beginning to catch on. We're not fearful now, and we can scale the Patriot Hacked back a bit.
Whoop-tee-do. The Patriot Hacked was rushed through, so what? We know that.
There will always be partisan nay-sayers, people who will argue that black is white and apples are really seven. There was a minority view at the time that said we deserved the 9/11 attacks, because America is just bad.
Now you're telling me that the mechanism of Congress is messy? Heavens to Betsy! That's not a convincing argument of anything in particular.
"Criminal"? How naive can you be? It's the way things happen in Washington, or in business, or in baseball, or in soup kitchens. The rules are bent everywhere, because the rules can't possibly fit every situation.
Besides that, you're making a mountain out of a molehill. You've decided you don't like the Republicans, or at least the current crop, and so you find the slightest irregularity and call it "criminal". That's the kind of thing that makes the Democrats sound like a bunch of Chicken Littles, crying about the sky falling.
I don't know of a single case of craniorectal inversion (CRI, TM) in governement after 9/11.
Oh, now you've played the Nazi card. Get real.
... the luggable is back.
Sure. And we discounted it.
9/11 was different. It was a concerted series of attacks, and that, along with the order of magnitude greater damage it caused, was why it was significant.
It's not clear from your post whether you mean that the upcoming review of the Patriot Act signals a change or whether something else leads you to think that. In any case, you're 180 degrees off target.
The Republicans are hoping to find someone who will continue after President Bush because he's coming to the end of his final term. Grass root Republican still like him. By and large the leadership is not ashamed of their post-9/11 decisions, despite all the revisionist finger pointing going on in Washington.
If anything, the leadership is looking for someone who is more dynamic and smooth, and able to carry off centrism - sort of a right-wing Bill Clinton. I don't think that kind of person would be a successful candidate for them, but that's what they want.
To your other point: before 9/11/2001, none of us thought for a minute that something like that could happen here. Terroism happened in Europe and the Middle East, not here. We were trained by a century of domestic peace and foreign wars to believe that our oceans and good character would protect us.
We were all in shock, and that includes those in government. Can you imagine feeling responsible for 9/11? You could tell yourself everything I just said above, but still there would be the self-doubt asking whether you should have planned better.
The Patriot Act needs tweaking, obviously, where it violates the Fourth Amendment. But a lot of what's in it - such as allowing domestic and overseas law enforcement to share notes - can help defend our liberty without infringing it.
No.
The nasty provisions of the DMCA are there to prevent people from disabling copy protection and from falsely creating or removing "copyright management information", which means things like holograms on the outside of packages as well as simple copyright notices in code.
Copyright only covers the particular expression of a concept. APIs have been held to be concepts, and you can't copyright them. You can copyright
To protect an idea or concept, you have to use a patent. You can't patent an API, and even if you could it's not protected by the nasty provisions of the DMCA. I'm pretty sure any patents on document formats will be thrown out, too.
Regarding reverse engineering: don't sweat it. As long as you are only looking at what a program does, it makes no legal difference whether you are looking at what bits it sends on a wire or what output it makes on a screen. It's only if you disassemble the program and use the disassembled instructions as your own that you are guilty of copyright infringement.
No, I'm not a lawyer, but I do play one on the net.
Programming is not an end in itself, but it does appeal to our fascination with winding things up and watching them go. To attract young people to programming, you have to find the right hook, whether it's a game, a robot, or a cool applet on a web page.
Did you ever sit down to write a program without considering what problem you were trying to solve? For that matter, we don't say, "I'm going to write a letter" without having an addressee and probably a topic in mind.
I first got interested in programming because my TRS-80 Model I (the 16K expanded version!) had a BASIC interpreter. I was 14. After "Hello, world", I think my very first program was a game, and so was my second.
It was a first person 3D maze game. I'd played them on PLATO at the University of Illinois, and the subject matter captured my attention. The programming was a means to an end. Then I got hooked on creating.
After that, I wanted to apply my new programming tool to every problem, whether it was schoolwork or figuring out which girl to ask to prom. Yeah, really. No, I didn't go.
There are many people who go to school to stucy engineering, philosophy, or graphic design and realize that what they really enjoy is creating, too. They like winding things up and watching them go. That's where you want to get people. Whether you use a game or a robot it really doesn't matter, but you can't just use programming in and of itself.
It's not a question of if she'll show up again, but when. There's too much at stake for the other side to allow such a willing tool to go unused.
My bet that she starts her own blog. That way she can have a platform to expound on her quirky worldview, without these pesky editor types watching over her shoulder.
Or she may choose a new pseudo'nym and start writing about life in White Plains, Westchester, and anyplace north of the East River and east of Long Island Sound. She seems really fascinated by that area. O'bsessed, you might say.
Google United - Google Patent Examined
Google's newest patent application is lengthy. It is interesting in some places and enigmatic in others. Less colourful than most end user license agreements, the patent covers an enormous range of ranking analysis techniques Google wants to ensure are kept under their control.
Publication Date: 4/7/2005 7:41:24 AM
By Jim Hedger, StepForth News Editor, StepForth Placement Inc.
Thoughts on Google's patent... "Information retrieval based on historical data."
Google's newest patent application is lengthy. It is interesting in some places and enigmatic in others. Less colourful than most end user license agreements, the patent covers an enormous range of ranking analysis techniques Google wants to ensure are kept under their control. Some of the ideas and concepts covered in the document are almost certainly worked into the current algorithm running Google. Some are being worked in as this article is being written. Some may never see the blue-light of electrons but are pretty good ideas so it might have been considered wise to patent them. Google's not saying which is which. While not exactly War and Peace, it's a pretty complex document that gives readers a glimpse inside the minds of Google engineers. What it doesn't give is a 100% clear overview of how Google operates now and how the various ideas covered in the patent application will be integrated into Google's algorithms. One interesting section seems to confirm what SEOs have been saying for almost a year, Google does have a "sandbox" where it stores new links or sites for about a month before evaluation.
Google is in the midst of sweeping changes to the way it operates as a search engine. As a matter of fact, it isn't really a search engine in the fine sense of the word anymore. It isn't really a portal either. It is more of an institution, the ultimate private-public partnership. Calling itself a media-company, Google is now a multi-faceted information and multi-media delivery system that is accessed primarily through its well-known interface found at www.google.com.
Google is known for its from-the-hip style of innovation. While the face is familiar, the brains behind it are growing and changing rapidly. Four major factors (technology, revenue, user demand and competition) influence and drive these changes. Where Microsoft dithers and .dll's over its software for years before introduction, Google encourages its staff to spend up to 20% of their time tripping their way up the stairs of invention. Sometimes they produce ideas that didn't work out as they expected, as was the case with Orkut, and sometimes they produce spectacular results as with Google News. The sum total of what works and what doesn't work has served to inform Google what its users want in a search engine. After all, where the users go, the advertising dollars must follow. Such is the way of the Internet.
In its recent SEC filing, the first it has produced since going public in August 2004, Google said it was going to spend a lot of money to continue outpacing its rivals. This year they figure they will spend about $500 million to develop or enhance newer technologies. In 2004 and 2003, Google spent $319 million and $177 million respectively. The increase in innovation-spending corresponds with a doubling of Google's staff headcount which has jumped from 1628 employees in 2003 to 3021 by the end of 2004.
Over the past five years Google has produced a number of features that have proven popular enough to be included among its public-search offerings. On their front page, these features include Image Search, Google Groups, Google News, Froogle, Google Local, and Google Desktop. There are dozens of other features which can be accessed by cli
As odd as it sounds, both are correct. A sophisticated intruder could compromise security with the stolen code. Or not.
But for the sake of argument, suppose they do find flaws in Cisco's code. An exploit shows up on rootkit.org or someplace. It should be apparent from the exploit which flaws they're using, and so Cisco cleans up the flaw. In the long run, customers are actually safer.
It's sort of a backasswards way to open source your code.
Some genius haxx0r is toying around in the lab, writing a simulated virus. There's no way it can get out to the wild, of course. The thing's just for study.
Then he spills his coffee and within a few hours everyone gets to study it.
This one just spreads through blogs. Want to see a neat virus demo? Click here!
Putting "Boom" in a story about spacecraft always gets my attention.
Then I read the story. Oh, that kind of boom.
Had me going for a minute, though.
Didn't that come with NeXTStep? I think the top machines were 50Mhz 486's at the time, but maybe I'm confused.
That would have been around 1990.
When you've got multiple billions of dollars in liquid assets, investing one tenth of one of those billions in a company that you like is a no-brainer. Risk, shmisk.
Michael Dell has been a capitalist his whole life, from selling newspaper subscriptions to selling PCs out of his dorm room. He's always been a risk-taker and an achiever. I'm not really impressed with him as a deep thinker, from the few interviews and articles I've seen him do, but that's not his area.
His goal was becoming the top PC maker, even bigger than IBM. His victory in that arena is complete, having driven IBM out of the PC market. Those of us who have watching the computer scene since the '70s should think back to what IBM was then.
Suppose a new kind of car were invented that a guy in his garage could make, and one of those garage hackers figured out how to mass-market his vehicle. If he did it so well that GM decided to get out of the consumer market altogether, that would rival what Dell did.
So what do he do when at 40 having accomplished what seemed like an impossible goal? I'd want my life to mean something besides business, but I'm not him.
I suspect you'll see Dell try to accomplish some new "impossible" goal, whether it's space exploration, a cancer cure, seawater desalination, selling electric cars, or whatever.
I don't know, because I don't dream big enough.
>AMD 69 XXX Hardcore
They only come in pairs.
Also, after you've had it a while one of the pair refuses to go into "69" mode, even though it's still fine in standard mode. Something about being incompatible with a daughtercard.
What was wrong with the first two prequels? People complain about Star Wars episodes not being highbrow enough, or adult enough, or complex enough, etc. Star Wars is supposed to be popcorn, not trout almondine. If you can follow the symbolism to see the film at another level, so much the better, but it's a mistake to look so hard for the deep meaning that you miss the fun at the surface.
I have seen all of the Star Wars episodes as they have been released, and each time I make it a point not to expect anything. I watch and enjoy. The cliche "it is what it is" fits here.
These movies are aimed at multiple audiences: pre-teens, teenagers, adult sci-fi nerds, moms, dads, etc. That's why there's always a Jar-Jar, a tragic love affair, a love triangle, a classic struggle between good and evil affecting the future of a civilization, or whatever.
If you go in thinking you want the plot to go a certain way or for there to be a final explanation of any particular story line, you'll usually be disappointed.
Just keep your eyes open, sit back, and enjoy the popcorn.
First, teachers seldom get a paid day off during the school year. They get "all summer" off (glossing, but that's the rationale). They are even less likely to get a paid day off to attend a political event, whether it affects their curriculum or not.
Secondly, her concern over being laughed at reveals a lot:
I'm not sure about the last point, of course, but it's also not important. What is important is that the argument is not just between people who disagree about the definition of science, but that the shape of the debate leads to closed minds on both sides. Both sides are also convinced that their minds are open and the other side's minds are not.
Few things are harder to fight than a closed mind. One of those things may be a mind that thinks it's open.