Really? What do we need Microsoft for? Why not replace both with the next generation Internet and OS company? Miccrosoft are a classic example of "what happens when a company has a monopoly". I strongly doubt Google getting a monopoly on Internet search and advertising would be a good thing. Whether the competition happens to be Ballmer's Flying Chairs, Inc. or some other company I really don't care - but there has to be real competition.
I've signed a load of contracts in the US by having my publisher send me a PDF, which I've returned (by email) having copied and pasted a scanned copy of my signature over it. Interestingly, they would accept this but not a hash of the original PDF signed with a certificate signed by CACert, which had two people verify two pieces of government-issued ID to confirm that I am me. Perhaps because (outside of computing circles), the idea of electronic signatures isn't very well known?
Fruit is really not so healthy as people have been lead to believe. It is mostly water, sugar, vit C and (some) antioxidants. If you believe every piece of healthy eating hype that's ever published, I reckon you'd starve to death in under 6 months.
We've had red meat and butter (saturated fat), poultry (salmonella), eggs (again, salmonella), oily fish (mercury), non-oily fish (overfished to the point of extinction in some areas), margarine (hydrogenated fat), non-organic food (toxic pesticides), water (female sex hormones reducing sperm count), genetically modified food (we don't actually know what the problem is yet, but we are afraid it may be worse than anything seen before). And that's just off the top of my head.
I'm sorry what? When has the **AA ever violated human rights? Sure they're scumbags, but try to keep a little perspective. They're not exactly selling people into slavery. They're not doing it the old-fashioned way - by invading a country, capturing as many people as they can find and putting them on the next ship going home - but there are plenty of experienced artists would disagree with you over the "not exactly selling people into slavery" comment:
"Our servers did it" definitely induced a head-scratch from me. Why on earth would they have their servers set up to automatically commit serious crimes just because a server was public and then restricted access? That doesn't make sense, even from their twisted viewpoint.. You're not thinking like a crazed RIAA vigilante, that's why it doesn't make sense.
If you abandon all attempts at logic and what we the/. using public know about products like BitTorrent, it makes perfect sense. Viz:
1. Bittorrent is only used for distributing illegal content. (Whoopsie, that's not always true) 2. Anyone who's running a bittorrent tracker is therefore distributing illegal content. (Only true if 1. above is. And if the entire world has identical copyright laws.) 3. We can determine who's using this tracker by persuading it to track the details of specific files and then subpoena the IP address of anyone who connects to us to download them. (Whoopsie! We can identify an IP address but it turns out that turning that into a guaranteed-correct person's name is actually quite difficult) 4. If they attempt to defend themselves (eg. by blocking the fake files injected in step 3 above), then they're as good as admitting guilt and also they're making it impossible for us to subpoena anything. Therefore, the correct course of action is to take their system off the Internet. (Whoopsie! Except that almost any country with even vaguely up to date laws would consider this highly illegal - and if our target is a legitimate tracker, it may get investigated).
Makes some sense if you're selling a service which claims to stop p2p.
Because Firefox deviates badly from the W3C specification? Not quite what I meant.
Despite the original point of HTML being "content is important, layout is decided by the user (or, more accurately, their software)", it's not really worked out that way - hence why CSS came to be.
7 years ago, IE was the reference implementation not because it was any good but because it was what most people were likely to be using. So web designers could very well find themselves designing for IE (because that's what most of the customers would be using) then tweaking to make it look much the same in Netscape (because no matter how much we say "Layout is not the business of the web designer", that never really cut much ice with the designer or their boss)
Why is Firefox assumed to be the reference implementation which must be matched? Same reason as IE was considered the reference implementation that must be matched 7 years ago.
I have never seen a switch fail what are you doing to them? mine are just consumer 5-16port devices but they are in constant use quite often at maximum capacity for several hours at a time while large files are transfered over the network. I think I have had one crash needing a reeboot once and had to reset another after a momentry power loss another time. Then at least one of the following is true:
1. You've been fantastically lucky. 2. You've not been in IT terribly long. 3. Your job doesn't involve network management and so your experience of what switches can do when they have a mind to is limited.
Solid-state simple dumb switches can and do fail, as can managed ones. If you're lucky, they fail in a fairly obvious fashion (eg. they just stop pushing packets on some or all ports).
If you're unlucky, they start spewing corrupt frames everywhere confusing the hell out of everything else on the network and you have to figure out exactly which switch is doing this and get rid of it.
Indeed and if you have 200 thousand servers running, they must be employing at least a couple of dozen people to run around hot datacenters all day and replace hard drives. Neither the hard drives nor the people will be cheap. By all accounts, they don't bother with individual machine repairs. A dead rack might get repaired or replaced, but an individual node will simply be marked as dead and left there. The rack itself will get maintenance as and when it no longer has enough functioning servers to merit keeping it going.
Events like this seem to have become a near-monthly event. I would've thought banks and credit card companies and thier ilk would have learned thier lesson the first time something like this made news and started at least encrypting this stuff. Or at least the second time it happened. Or the third, maybe if we're cutting them a lot of slack. Yes, it's expensive and yes it's hard work, but it'd be less expensive than a potential 4.5 millian lawsuits and less work than the PR mess that they now have to clean up. Maybe they haven't learned because none of these incidents have yet resulted in the "4.5 million lawsuits" you're talking about.
It's important to remember things such as this when the usual brainwashed-by-Fox conservatives say stuff like: "if you've nothing to hide, they why are you worried about privacy". Things such as this are always a lousy counter-argument to that.
I can thing of plenty of other things to say. Like "What are your bank details?"
"How do you feel about your mother in law?" (ask when their spouse is within earshot)
"How much do you spend on golf clubs?" (again, ask when their spouse is within earshot)
Though to be fair, IME most people of the "nothing to hide" mentality are already so far down that road that they're way beyond reason.
I'm actually currently dealing with my company's legal department in regards to shipping data tapes from the EU to the US. Turns out, the EU considers the laws in the US as insufficient when it comes to guarding and protecting individual privacy (apparently, we're on a list of untrusted foreign entities when it comes to privacy protection). I believe there actually are laws in the US that requires encryption of this kind of data; but by no means are the requirements from the EU the same as anywhere else. Encryption isn't the point.
The EU laws are more concerned with how you use the data than how you encrypt it. I can't speak for the rest of the EU, but the UK has the Data Protection Act which briefly states:
1. Data may only be used for the purposes for which it was collected. You can't ask me to fill in a questionnaire for market research purposes and then use my answers to crank up my life insurance premiums. 2. Data must not be disclosed to others without the subject's consent unless there is a legal obligation to do so. You can't sell my details to someone for marketing purposes unless I've said you can - but if the police come knocking demanding my data, that's OK. 3. Individuals have a right to access personal data, and may not be charged more than a nominal fee for this, subject to some exceptions. So I can write to you and ask what personal data regarding me that you store, but I can't write to the police and ask if they're carrying out an undercover investigation of me. (Well, I can, but they're not obliged to confirm or deny it). 4. Personal information may not be kept for longer than necessary. 5. Personal information may not be transmitted outside the EEA unless the individual has consented or "adequate" protection is in place. (Your company would probably be fine if they signed a contract saying "Regarding all data you send us, we shall store and process it within the law laid down by the EU", but IANAL).
The data protection act is one of the most misunderstood laws in the UK - it's been used as an excuse to avoid doing anything by all sorts of entities in cases where it's plainly irrelevant. Which is odd because it's one of the few laws which come packaged with a set of plain-English guidelines explaining what it's trying to achieve.
A minor nitpick. MS have stated their intention to support ODF. Until they deliver it's dangerous to assume or to state as fact, that support. Alex. More to the point, Microsoft are famously good at corrupting standards. I wouldn't be too surprised to see ODF "support" that amounts to "will happily read and render sensibly anything produced by OO.o, will go out of its way to write ODF files that for whatever reason OO.o doesn't like".
OpenOffice may be OSS, but it is also backed by Sun. Thus, it seems to me that OpenOffice is already backed by a big name and your executives should be happy with OpenOffice. Sun is a big name that's well known in technology circles. Unlike IBM or Microsoft, however, they're nowhere near as well known by people outside technology circles.
Bosses and other persons who makes the decisions, dont need to know those, because they are so afraid that "Open Source" force them to publish their treasure. They are like pirates, you need to trick them. They are greedy, you need to give them to think they have control for everything. They will then instead adopt the age-old idea that you don't get something for nothing.
Fact is that it would be a bad development for RIM. And I'm glad they are fighting it. Most communications mechanisms are open to government snooping in some fashion - be it post, telephone, email or whatever.
If your average business were to conduct every little thing they did displaying the kind of paranoia displayed on/., nothing would ever get done. It's infinitely more likely you'll get screwed over by the person you're dealing with directly than some unknown eavesdropper anyway.
True story: I received a phone call a few weeks ago from a company trying to sell me a PC imaging product akin to Acronis TrueImage or Symantec Ghost. They openly admitted having bought my details and deduced that I might be interested in such a product because those details that they'd bought came from... er... a company which produced imaging software. You don't need to eavesdrop when you can simply ask a company to sell you details of all their sales leads then point them at a competitor's products.
I don't see how contact and talks could be bad. Show them the "wonders of the world", grant them the rights to the land they live on, and then give them the choice. Erm... hate to break it to you but if they're so uncontacted, there's a very good chance that the very concept of even needing "rights to the land that they live on" is completely alien to them.
So, what happens when trade secrets leak because some gov employee got bribed to access them and pass them to a competitor?... I would assume RIM could also be held liable for loss. And its harder to sue (and win) against a government, esp. somewhere like India. A lot easier to drag RIM in front of a jury in the US.
How's this any different to a US government employee being bribed to arrange a tap on a business phoneline and passing details of any conversation to an outside party?
Not that damn expensive - about £5 a bulb. Cheap enough that my house is entirely fitted with daylight-spectrum bulbs, just because they're so much nicer. (We have a few of the crappy-spectrum CFLs around, for the toilet and laundry and stuff where it matters less, just because they give them away now.) You don't consider £5 for a bulb expensive when a typical incandescent costs 30-60p and a cheap CFL costs £1-2? It really adds up, particularly if you have a number of fittings which require multiple bulbs or bulbs of a particular shape.
OS developers are not idiots - they KNOW that they are working for free (simplification, I know, there are exceptions, but it's not important now) and they wouldn't be if they didn't want to. If they do - that means they're just fine with that. I think your simplification is both excessive and very important.
The most successful, biggest open source projects (by a LONG way) are those with some sort of commercial/foundation backing them. Even if all that amounts to is "one organisation pays a handful of developers fulltime, everything else is volunteer driven" (cf. Mozilla).
This isn't drastically different from how any commercial software has been developed in the past. What's different is the GPL and related licenses make it much easier for organisations to collaborate on development (say, one organisation pays someone who handles the backend logic, the other pays someone who writes the pretty GUI) because it puts a pre-cooked legal framework around the work to ensure that the organisation that wrote the GUI can't take their metaphorical ball and go home.
It's no different to two organisations developing a physical product for both their benefits (eg. Sony Ericsson mobile phones or Braun Oral-B toothbrushes) but it's applied to software rather than hardware.
I don't understand this - fluorescents easily beat all *mass produced* white LEDs with good colour rendering in efficiency, and as long as you don't believe the manufacturers' 'incandescent equivant ratings', are a perfect replacement for incandescents. Compact flourescents tend to produce light that's a sickly greenish-yellow in colour and spread over a relatively small part of the visible spectrum. Much better CFLs are available (google for full spectrum CFL), but they're damn expensive and tend to be mail-order only.
You might find something you like in your local supermarket or B&Q, but realistically you'd have to buy one of each manufacturer's and try them all. The bulbs you see in the supermarket don't even acknowledge that a spectrum of light exists, much less how much the bulb covers or what colour temperature light it throws out.
Clearly the idea was "abolish computing jargon, replace with more friendly terms". Which is fine unless the person using the system is familiar with computing jargon, in which case they now have to re-learn everything.
"It was easier for Apple to make Linux user friendly than it was for them to fix Windows"
Actually, I believe the quote would have been it was easier for Apple to make UNIX user friendly [...] OS X doesn't run Linux it runs BSD. And of course, Apple computers didn't run Windows anyway. The quote should be: "It was easier for Apple to make UNIX user friendly than it was for them to fix Mac OS 9." No, but Apple did seriously consider licensing the NT kernel and building their own user interface on top of it. NT 4 ran on MIPS and PowerPC chips so it would have been quite possible.
I suspect the main reason for not licensing the NT kernel had more to do with not wanting to be beholden to Microsoft than any technical concerns with the kernel.
Sort out graphics drivers (NT4 moved graphics drivers to ring 0, meaning that buggy graphics drivers could bluescreen the OS) and you've got a reasonably stable base to work from - and with a stranglehold on the hardware, Apple didn't really need to worry too much about a graphics card with a lousy driver.
Come on! When Win95 came out, with preemptive multitasking, Macs were still using "cooperative" multi-tasking, which is really just a toy by comparison. In many ways Win95 was quite an advance as a true preemptive multi-tasking OS Except pre-emptive multi tasking only worked with Win32 programs - anything which was originally written for DOS or earlier versions of Windows had to be co-operatively multitasked. And there were lots of programs like that around at the time.
It finally implemented a TCP/IP stack, Explorer (for better or worse), 32-bit filesystem, and a workable interface. Not until '95 OSR2 did FAT32 come along.
Regarding the interface, I felt distinctly ambivalent at the time. For instance, the word "directory" was fairly well entrenched in computing at the time, and trying to find out how to create one was a dog because there were no references to "directory" anywhere in the menu structure or the help file. "Folder? What the hell's a folder?".
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We've had red meat and butter (saturated fat), poultry (salmonella), eggs (again, salmonella), oily fish (mercury), non-oily fish (overfished to the point of extinction in some areas), margarine (hydrogenated fat), non-organic food (toxic pesticides), water (female sex hormones reducing sperm count), genetically modified food (we don't actually know what the problem is yet, but we are afraid it may be worse than anything seen before). And that's just off the top of my head.
Courtney Love:
http://dir.salon.com/story/tech/feature/2000/06/14/love/
David Bowie even set up his own record label:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/music/1714545.stm
If you abandon all attempts at logic and what we the
1. Bittorrent is only used for distributing illegal content. (Whoopsie, that's not always true)
2. Anyone who's running a bittorrent tracker is therefore distributing illegal content. (Only true if 1. above is. And if the entire world has identical copyright laws.)
3. We can determine who's using this tracker by persuading it to track the details of specific files and then subpoena the IP address of anyone who connects to us to download them. (Whoopsie! We can identify an IP address but it turns out that turning that into a guaranteed-correct person's name is actually quite difficult)
4. If they attempt to defend themselves (eg. by blocking the fake files injected in step 3 above), then they're as good as admitting guilt and also they're making it impossible for us to subpoena anything. Therefore, the correct course of action is to take their system off the Internet. (Whoopsie! Except that almost any country with even vaguely up to date laws would consider this highly illegal - and if our target is a legitimate tracker, it may get investigated).
Makes some sense if you're selling a service which claims to stop p2p.
Despite the original point of HTML being "content is important, layout is decided by the user (or, more accurately, their software)", it's not really worked out that way - hence why CSS came to be.
7 years ago, IE was the reference implementation not because it was any good but because it was what most people were likely to be using. So web designers could very well find themselves designing for IE (because that's what most of the customers would be using) then tweaking to make it look much the same in Netscape (because no matter how much we say "Layout is not the business of the web designer", that never really cut much ice with the designer or their boss)
1. You've been fantastically lucky.
2. You've not been in IT terribly long.
3. Your job doesn't involve network management and so your experience of what switches can do when they have a mind to is limited.
Solid-state simple dumb switches can and do fail, as can managed ones. If you're lucky, they fail in a fairly obvious fashion (eg. they just stop pushing packets on some or all ports).
If you're unlucky, they start spewing corrupt frames everywhere confusing the hell out of everything else on the network and you have to figure out exactly which switch is doing this and get rid of it.
I can thing of plenty of other things to say. Like "What are your bank details?"
"How do you feel about your mother in law?" (ask when their spouse is within earshot)
"How much do you spend on golf clubs?" (again, ask when their spouse is within earshot)
Though to be fair, IME most people of the "nothing to hide" mentality are already so far down that road that they're way beyond reason.
The EU laws are more concerned with how you use the data than how you encrypt it. I can't speak for the rest of the EU, but the UK has the Data Protection Act which briefly states:
1. Data may only be used for the purposes for which it was collected. You can't ask me to fill in a questionnaire for market research purposes and then use my answers to crank up my life insurance premiums.
2. Data must not be disclosed to others without the subject's consent unless there is a legal obligation to do so. You can't sell my details to someone for marketing purposes unless I've said you can - but if the police come knocking demanding my data, that's OK.
3. Individuals have a right to access personal data, and may not be charged more than a nominal fee for this, subject to some exceptions. So I can write to you and ask what personal data regarding me that you store, but I can't write to the police and ask if they're carrying out an undercover investigation of me. (Well, I can, but they're not obliged to confirm or deny it).
4. Personal information may not be kept for longer than necessary.
5. Personal information may not be transmitted outside the EEA unless the individual has consented or "adequate" protection is in place. (Your company would probably be fine if they signed a contract saying "Regarding all data you send us, we shall store and process it within the law laid down by the EU", but IANAL).
The data protection act is one of the most misunderstood laws in the UK - it's been used as an excuse to avoid doing anything by all sorts of entities in cases where it's plainly irrelevant. Which is odd because it's one of the few laws which come packaged with a set of plain-English guidelines explaining what it's trying to achieve.
If your average business were to conduct every little thing they did displaying the kind of paranoia displayed on
True story: I received a phone call a few weeks ago from a company trying to sell me a PC imaging product akin to Acronis TrueImage or Symantec Ghost. They openly admitted having bought my details and deduced that I might be interested in such a product because those details that they'd bought came from... er... a company which produced imaging software. You don't need to eavesdrop when you can simply ask a company to sell you details of all their sales leads then point them at a competitor's products.
... and is protected from disclosure.
So, what happens when trade secrets leak because some gov employee got bribed to access them and pass them to a competitor?... I would assume RIM could also be held liable for loss. And its harder to sue (and win) against a government, esp. somewhere like India. A lot easier to drag RIM in front of a jury in the US.
How's this any different to a US government employee being bribed to arrange a tap on a business phoneline and passing details of any conversation to an outside party?The most successful, biggest open source projects (by a LONG way) are those with some sort of commercial/foundation backing them. Even if all that amounts to is "one organisation pays a handful of developers fulltime, everything else is volunteer driven" (cf. Mozilla).
This isn't drastically different from how any commercial software has been developed in the past. What's different is the GPL and related licenses make it much easier for organisations to collaborate on development (say, one organisation pays someone who handles the backend logic, the other pays someone who writes the pretty GUI) because it puts a pre-cooked legal framework around the work to ensure that the organisation that wrote the GUI can't take their metaphorical ball and go home.
It's no different to two organisations developing a physical product for both their benefits (eg. Sony Ericsson mobile phones or Braun Oral-B toothbrushes) but it's applied to software rather than hardware.
You might find something you like in your local supermarket or B&Q, but realistically you'd have to buy one of each manufacturer's and try them all. The bulbs you see in the supermarket don't even acknowledge that a spectrum of light exists, much less how much the bulb covers or what colour temperature light it throws out.
It was something similar in the UK version.
Clearly the idea was "abolish computing jargon, replace with more friendly terms". Which is fine unless the person using the system is familiar with computing jargon, in which case they now have to re-learn everything.
Actually, I believe the quote would have been it was easier for Apple to make UNIX user friendly [...] OS X doesn't run Linux it runs BSD. And of course, Apple computers didn't run Windows anyway. The quote should be: "It was easier for Apple to make UNIX user friendly than it was for them to fix Mac OS 9." No, but Apple did seriously consider licensing the NT kernel and building their own user interface on top of it. NT 4 ran on MIPS and PowerPC chips so it would have been quite possible.
I suspect the main reason for not licensing the NT kernel had more to do with not wanting to be beholden to Microsoft than any technical concerns with the kernel.
Sort out graphics drivers (NT4 moved graphics drivers to ring 0, meaning that buggy graphics drivers could bluescreen the OS) and you've got a reasonably stable base to work from - and with a stranglehold on the hardware, Apple didn't really need to worry too much about a graphics card with a lousy driver.
Regarding the interface, I felt distinctly ambivalent at the time. For instance, the word "directory" was fairly well entrenched in computing at the time, and trying to find out how to create one was a dog because there were no references to "directory" anywhere in the menu structure or the help file. "Folder? What the hell's a folder?".