Of course they will. And as soon as any technical journalist asks them about it, the response will be some boilerplate about how they've "done the best they could within the limitations of the format - we did say that OOXML would be richer..."
So in essence, you can have varying levels of compliance and only Microsoft will ever be able to produce a piece of software which is 100%, no questions asked compliant with every last nuance of the specification, even the optional parts.
That's not a standard. That's an obvious attempt to maintain dominance in a market by making sure the standard suits your business and not anybody else's.
Smaller government means less work for the people in government. Less money for departments within government. And less opportunities for empire building.
IOW, more or less the exact opposite of what most politicians really want, regardless of what they claim.
So he made a few mistakes which you consider stupid. TBH, as soon as anyone says "NAS" without considering RAID and backups, I think they're on a path to pain.
But at the end of the day, no matter how many things you think about, no matter how much effort you go to, there is always something that gets missed. AFAICT, he's only got one power supply and no UPS on there, and on any large filesystem I'd consider journalling (or Soft Updates on OpenBSD) a must these days.
You can build a system in which nothing is missed, and it always works no matter what happens. But then you're talking realtime mirroring across at least two sites, gigabit links between the sites and regular DR tests to make sure everything works as intended. A little more sophisticated than your average/. article.
There's nothing particularly magic about "user decides they like the music so goes out and buys a legal copy". What's different is "the device forces the user to do this automatically", which arguably is a technological innovation.
Interesting idea. The GPL does offer a get out clause: "if you don't like the license, don't distribute the product" - perhaps they could add a "license" tag to MP3s?
All of your points are technically correct, but you missed out one major one:
Microsoft, Sony BMG, Warner Music, EMI et al have enough lawyers that they can keep you as an artist tied up in court from now until several years after you're dead. Now go away and record that third album you're contracted to produce, puny mortal.
They're not even subtle about this anymore. They're openly shaking down their own artists.
Didn't do them any good in this case. I've got a copy of the promotional CD downstairs which, as announced, came free with the Mail on Sunday.
But Prince is an established artist who's already been screwed over by a record company, has learnt from his experiences and gone on to produce more music. He's in a strong enough position that he can afford to do this kind of thing. Perhaps the record industry is trying to send a message to the younger acts who are still a bit wet behind the ears: "you need us, don't piss us off".
I'm going to assume that you're still fairly young - in your late teens.
Computing in general is a fairly broad field. Off the top of my head, I can think of:
Embedded software development (things like set top boxes, routers).
Business application development (you probably won't write the next Word for Windows, but you may very well be involved in writing a piece of software to solve the kind of boring business need which never gets much attention from the open source crowd)
Mission/life critical application development (generally a subset of embedded or business applications - basically, if there's something wrong, someone could very realistically die)
Middleware applications (the kind of glue which holds other things together - becoming popular in telecoms as it's a lot cheaper than the highly specialised embedded systems which has previously dominated the field)
Operating System development. Not many companies working hard on this, but it may be something which interests you.
Systems Administration - which could be Windows, could be Linux/Unix or you might even find yourself working in one of the remaining VMS sites.
If you know what interests you, go for a university which has a good course which is relevant to that interest. But seeing as you asked/., I'm going to assume that you aren't sure what interests you.
In which case, probably the best thing you can do is go somewhere which has a reasonably strong computer science department and a wide range of courses/modules. That way, you'll get a good grounding in the basics and once you've got a better idea of what you want to do, you can tailor the course to better suit your tastes. Also, if you're in the UK, think seriously about doing a sandwich course. The year in industry is generally paid, so it shouldn't substantially increase your overdraft and you'll get some very useful real world experience and skills which will help you stand out from all the other graduates who will be competing with you for work when you get out of uni. Students who do well in their sandwich year are sometimes invited to return to a permanent job after they graduate - which saves a lot of job-hunting hassle.
I've thought about that myself. The UK has very clear consumer protection laws: for one thing, "goods must be fit for the purpose for which they are supplied". And no consumer can sign those rights away, no retailer can even ask them to. (This is why most companies which state terms of sale include a sentence to the effect of "your statutory rights are not affected").
However, I don't think consequential losses are necessarily covered. So you could perhaps demand your money back, but that's as far as you could go. Not terribly helpful with your average Linux distribution.
OTOH, I've noticed a pattern recently (particularly in large chains) where the staff are instructed in the company policy but not in law - and the company policy is often in complete contradiction to the law. So you wind up spending ages trying to explain that you aren't returning it under the company policy, you're returning it under the legal right to return faulty goods. It's very frustrating when the store manager is some young chap who has had zero customer service training, and the extent of the management training they received was "This is Company Policy. Thou shalt not deviate from it under any circumstances, lest Great Demons of Fire descend upon Thee and take Thee kicking and screaming Into the Fire And Brimstone of the Deepest Pits of Hell".
I've looked into software to do software auditing before - most of it fell into one of two camps:
1. Free AND lousy - many only checked the "Add/remove programs" list in Control Panel, which is practically useless if a package was installed just by copying to c:\program files. 2. Expensive AND horrific license - most of the commercial software auditing tools which claim to do everything but make the tea seem to be licensed with rather nastier licenses than the software they're meant to be auditing.
Is there anything out there which is Free or Very Cheap, without absurdly onerous licensing and doesn't suck?
A few days ago, I said that the only way to successfully fork a large, complex project (which you may well wish to do if you don't like a license change) is to hire a developer who's important to it.
Sounds like this is exactly what Apple's done. GPLv3 has a few clauses in there that Apple probably don't much like (eg. the patents bit) and they probably don't much fancy reinventing the printing wheel - the risk of CUPS going GPLv3 versus the cost of just buying ESP outright is probably well worth it.
A citizen's militia doesn't need the support of the military. What it needs is a free press and a government which can't easily stop being democratic overnight.
Think what wonderful headlines a military standoff between a citizen's militia and the country's army would make. Exactly the kind of headlines politicians don't want.
My only concern is that these days, many governments have become very effective at manipulating a supposedly "free" press. Had you asked me prior to September 11 (in the US) or July 7 (in the UK), I'd have said there is no way you can spin "citizens mown down by the Army" into something which makes the government look good. Today, I'm not so sure.
A fork wouldn't necessarily do much good anyway. IME, it's unusual for both forks to receive substantial development - generally anyone who forks a project finds that both users and developers stick with the original unless the people leading the project start doing very odd things (cf. X.org/XF86).
Novell lost much of their relevance in the IT world before I graduated. Though I've heard great things about ZenWorks - but AFAICT it's rather more expensive than a Windows Server AD infrastructure and doesn't do quite as much.
There's three problems with opensourcing something like that:
1. Any company that is dying probably has higher priorities than open sourcing their products. 2. They may not own enough rights on all the code to opensource it. 3. If they're dying, they could well get bought out by someone like Microsoft with a view to either selling off assets or simply closing down competition. Even if Microsoft didn't do it directly, I wouldn't put it past them to finance someone else to do their dirty work like they did with SCO.
I disagree. Novell does have some pretty neat products, and it would be a shame to see them die. You can be pretty damn certain that if Microsoft does drag Novell down with this, their products will disappear into a digital black hole rather than being open sourced.
I'm a not an expert on GPLv2, buy can't someone simply juust take the existing Samba CVS code and create a "new" Samba and stay with the GPLv2?
Yes. And Samba has forked in the past.
But it's a big, complex project with a few people behind it and they're pretty good at what they do. Unless you can poach one of them to work on your fork, it'll probably be a good 6 months before anyone on your fork even understands what's going on under the hood, let alone is able to substantially improve on it. Once Samba 4 is declared stable, version 3 will suddenly appear very dated because 4 adds all sorts of goodies - AIUI the plan is to basically bring Samba up to the level of "able to act natively as a DC in an ADS domain" - and a fork will likely die on the vine or exist purely in commercial projects.
It's not that I have a problem with the speed limit being enforced. But speeding isn't the only thing which is dangerous.
Speed cameras don't do anything about the Corsa which cut me up at 70mph on the motorway yesterday. Speed cameras don't stop the motorist who was all over the lane while yakking on his mobile phone. They don't stop the tailgating motorist who caused an accident which (thankfully) didn't look too serious but could have been far worse.
Slashdot Mirror
Of course they will. And as soon as any technical journalist asks them about it, the response will be some boilerplate about how they've "done the best they could within the limitations of the format - we did say that OOXML would be richer..."
Standards organisations aren't afraid of a standard which appears otherwise silly.
I suggest you look up ISO 3103:1980 (also known as BS 6008:1980).
Wonderful.
So in essence, you can have varying levels of compliance and only Microsoft will ever be able to produce a piece of software which is 100%, no questions asked compliant with every last nuance of the specification, even the optional parts.
That's not a standard. That's an obvious attempt to maintain dominance in a market by making sure the standard suits your business and not anybody else's.
Smaller government means less work for the people in government. Less money for departments within government. And less opportunities for empire building.
IOW, more or less the exact opposite of what most politicians really want, regardless of what they claim.
So he made a few mistakes which you consider stupid. TBH, as soon as anyone says "NAS" without considering RAID and backups, I think they're on a path to pain.
/. article.
But at the end of the day, no matter how many things you think about, no matter how much effort you go to, there is always something that gets missed. AFAICT, he's only got one power supply and no UPS on there, and on any large filesystem I'd consider journalling (or Soft Updates on OpenBSD) a must these days.
You can build a system in which nothing is missed, and it always works no matter what happens. But then you're talking realtime mirroring across at least two sites, gigabit links between the sites and regular DR tests to make sure everything works as intended. A little more sophisticated than your average
There's nothing particularly magic about "user decides they like the music so goes out and buys a legal copy". What's different is "the device forces the user to do this automatically", which arguably is a technological innovation.
Interesting idea. The GPL does offer a get out clause: "if you don't like the license, don't distribute the product" - perhaps they could add a "license" tag to MP3s?
They're not even subtle about this anymore. They're openly shaking down their own artists.
Didn't do them any good in this case. I've got a copy of the promotional CD downstairs which, as announced, came free with the Mail on Sunday.
But Prince is an established artist who's already been screwed over by a record company, has learnt from his experiences and gone on to produce more music. He's in a strong enough position that he can afford to do this kind of thing. Perhaps the record industry is trying to send a message to the younger acts who are still a bit wet behind the ears: "you need us, don't piss us off".
Computing in general is a fairly broad field. Off the top of my head, I can think of:
If you know what interests you, go for a university which has a good course which is relevant to that interest. But seeing as you asked
In which case, probably the best thing you can do is go somewhere which has a reasonably strong computer science department and a wide range of courses/modules. That way, you'll get a good grounding in the basics and once you've got a better idea of what you want to do, you can tailor the course to better suit your tastes. Also, if you're in the UK, think seriously about doing a sandwich course. The year in industry is generally paid, so it shouldn't substantially increase your overdraft and you'll get some very useful real world experience and skills which will help you stand out from all the other graduates who will be competing with you for work when you get out of uni. Students who do well in their sandwich year are sometimes invited to return to a permanent job after they graduate - which saves a lot of job-hunting hassle.
Why bother? Many countries have laws to sidestep the need to even bother collecting evidence - particularly since 9/11.
From what you say, I assume you've had the opportunity to review BitLocker and confirm that there are no backdoors then.
Why should I believe you?
Even if I do believe you, what happens when the first patch comes out? How do I know that no backdoor will be added at a later date?
I've thought about that myself. The UK has very clear consumer protection laws: for one thing, "goods must be fit for the purpose for which they are supplied". And no consumer can sign those rights away, no retailer can even ask them to. (This is why most companies which state terms of sale include a sentence to the effect of "your statutory rights are not affected").
However, I don't think consequential losses are necessarily covered. So you could perhaps demand your money back, but that's as far as you could go. Not terribly helpful with your average Linux distribution.
OTOH, I've noticed a pattern recently (particularly in large chains) where the staff are instructed in the company policy but not in law - and the company policy is often in complete contradiction to the law. So you wind up spending ages trying to explain that you aren't returning it under the company policy, you're returning it under the legal right to return faulty goods. It's very frustrating when the store manager is some young chap who has had zero customer service training, and the extent of the management training they received was "This is Company Policy. Thou shalt not deviate from it under any circumstances, lest Great Demons of Fire descend upon Thee and take Thee kicking and screaming Into the Fire And Brimstone of the Deepest Pits of Hell".
No kidding. Google are a freaking company, every request they make will be self serving in some way, even if it's not immediately apparent why.
Or perhaps AT&T would like to suggest that they provide telephone services out of the goodness of their black little hearts?
I've looked into software to do software auditing before - most of it fell into one of two camps:
1. Free AND lousy - many only checked the "Add/remove programs" list in Control Panel, which is practically useless if a package was installed just by copying to c:\program files.
2. Expensive AND horrific license - most of the commercial software auditing tools which claim to do everything but make the tea seem to be licensed with rather nastier licenses than the software they're meant to be auditing.
Is there anything out there which is Free or Very Cheap, without absurdly onerous licensing and doesn't suck?
A few days ago, I said that the only way to successfully fork a large, complex project (which you may well wish to do if you don't like a license change) is to hire a developer who's important to it.
Sounds like this is exactly what Apple's done. GPLv3 has a few clauses in there that Apple probably don't much like (eg. the patents bit) and they probably don't much fancy reinventing the printing wheel - the risk of CUPS going GPLv3 versus the cost of just buying ESP outright is probably well worth it.
A citizen's militia doesn't need the support of the military. What it needs is a free press and a government which can't easily stop being democratic overnight.
Think what wonderful headlines a military standoff between a citizen's militia and the country's army would make. Exactly the kind of headlines politicians don't want.
My only concern is that these days, many governments have become very effective at manipulating a supposedly "free" press. Had you asked me prior to September 11 (in the US) or July 7 (in the UK), I'd have said there is no way you can spin "citizens mown down by the Army" into something which makes the government look good. Today, I'm not so sure.
True, but I wouldn't imagine the phone is worth very much now.
Perhaps they could try returning it under the warranty?
A fork wouldn't necessarily do much good anyway. IME, it's unusual for both forks to receive substantial development - generally anyone who forks a project finds that both users and developers stick with the original unless the people leading the project start doing very odd things (cf. X.org/XF86).
Novell lost much of their relevance in the IT world before I graduated. Though I've heard great things about ZenWorks - but AFAICT it's rather more expensive than a Windows Server AD infrastructure and doesn't do quite as much.
There's three problems with opensourcing something like that:
1. Any company that is dying probably has higher priorities than open sourcing their products.
2. They may not own enough rights on all the code to opensource it.
3. If they're dying, they could well get bought out by someone like Microsoft with a view to either selling off assets or simply closing down competition. Even if Microsoft didn't do it directly, I wouldn't put it past them to finance someone else to do their dirty work like they did with SCO.
I disagree. Novell does have some pretty neat products, and it would be a shame to see them die. You can be pretty damn certain that if Microsoft does drag Novell down with this, their products will disappear into a digital black hole rather than being open sourced.
I'm a not an expert on GPLv2, buy can't someone simply juust take the existing Samba CVS code and create a "new" Samba and stay with the GPLv2?
Yes. And Samba has forked in the past.
But it's a big, complex project with a few people behind it and they're pretty good at what they do. Unless you can poach one of them to work on your fork, it'll probably be a good 6 months before anyone on your fork even understands what's going on under the hood, let alone is able to substantially improve on it. Once Samba 4 is declared stable, version 3 will suddenly appear very dated because 4 adds all sorts of goodies - AIUI the plan is to basically bring Samba up to the level of "able to act natively as a DC in an ADS domain" - and a fork will likely die on the vine or exist purely in commercial projects.
That economy of scale only works if people actually want to buy the product.
It's not that I have a problem with the speed limit being enforced. But speeding isn't the only thing which is dangerous.
Speed cameras don't do anything about the Corsa which cut me up at 70mph on the motorway yesterday. Speed cameras don't stop the motorist who was all over the lane while yakking on his mobile phone. They don't stop the tailgating motorist who caused an accident which (thankfully) didn't look too serious but could have been far worse.