And, finally, I have to say that I am utterly fucking disgusted with the./ people who are whining about Political Correctness. We're not talking about some pointless argument over semantics. We're talking about locking out a portion of our community, a portion of the community that is already excluded from so much in our society, from the explosive growth in our economy and society taking place on the Internet. For a group of people who whine so much about being excluded, about being ostracized because they are different, this attitude is utter hypocrisy!
I couldn't agree more.
I'm generally pretty conservative, but I just don't see the ADA as being a burden on society. The intent is that society will benefit by allowing handicapped people to function as productive members of society. Anybody have a problem with this?
Now, there are people who try to abuse it. Like the policeman who was fired because he couldn't make a comprehensible report and claimed to have "Disability of Written Expression" or the people who tried to claim that they were discriminated against because they couldn't perform certain jobs, like being a pilot, that required a certain standard of uncorrected vision.
The geeks whining about special accomodations or comparing this to something we might see in a "Harrison Bergeron" world are pretty clueless. I've known productive blind computer programmers. As others have mentioned, there are OCR devices that will read a computer screen.
I, for one, am disappointed that the Web is as much a visual medium as it's become. I like to think that the Web is best when it's a information, primarily written language, medium. I'm not looking forward to the day when high speed access turns it the Web into just Interactive TV.
In so far as the Web is written language based, simple accomodations, like ALT tags, and command-based systems so that people can navigate without the need for visual cues, are all that's needed. It wouldn't be hard to do and everyone could benefit. If more sites were Lynx accessible, we'd have a Web that was more useful to people with slow connections and simple character based systems, too.
There's a lot of hyperbole about all of this. From the link in this story about the guidelines the Federal Government is adopting, you can find this document that really explains what the Fed is doing. A particularly interesting extract is:
9) Are there any exemptions to the technology accessibility standards?
A Federal agency does not have to comply with the accessibility standards if it would impose an undue burden to do so. This is consistent with language used in the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) and other civil rights legislation, where the term 'undue burden' has been defined as "significant difficulty or expense." However, the agency must explain why meeting the standards would pose an undue burden for a given procurement action, and must still provide people with disabilities access to the information or data that is affected.
Is this too much to ask? That we make some effort to give people with disabilities access to information?
Someday, someday soon perhaps, the Internet will be a necessity. You may need it to apply for Government services or licenses. You might need it to access the future version of Libraries. Do we really want to make decisions now that closes the Internet off to people with disabilities?
Packard Bell has been losing money ever since NEC bought them, years ago. They've never been a profitable division of NEC.
You make it sound like NEC ran Packard Bell into the ground.
I seem to remember at the time of the NEC buy-in to Packard Bell that Packard Bell was going through some very bad times already.
I don't have any inside information, but I always thought the NEC-America/PB merger was a marriage made by Intel, who had huge cash (multi-Billion dollar) loans out to Packard Bell. Packard Bell had gotten stuck with an unbelievable number of Pentium 90s and 100s when the market had already turned to buying faster models. Intel turned Packard Bell's debt into a loan, which probably upset a lot of other computer manufacturers. From what I read at the time, Packard Bell would have gone under had it not been for that loan.
I think NEC paid off a lot on that loan and otherwise got their interest in Packard Bell for next to nothing, while at the same time boosting NEC's relationship with Intel considerably, which had been strained for a long time over the V series chips.
2 years? No. It *is* about a year late, by MS's own estimate. They're just trying to get it right the first time, and go on a "One service pack a year" schedule. Getting it right is what it's all about. Most folks were HAPPY when Motorola chose to delay shipping a falty chip for this reason.
Again, a personal jibe when you know nothing about me. You're just being rude.
I only know you from the things you say. I know you read too much MS bull, in this case about release dates, and believe it.
Check out this article from June of 1998. It contains this paragraph:
To combat the perception that another delay has befallen its NT upgrade, Microsoft posted a document on its Web site to explain its position. In the posting, the company stressed that final delivery of NT 5.0 is not necessarily behind its latest schedule, even though original estimates for delivery of the massive upgrade date back to late last year--a time-table used at a 1996 Professional Developer's Conference in Long Beach, California.
Let's see, a timetable used in 1996 showed NT5 being out in late 1997. You're right, it's not 2 years late, it's more than 2 years late.
You try to tell that to a guy in the marketing department who consideres Linux/Unix "That hacker OS".:-(
That's OK. The marketing guy who doesn't understand the value proposition with Linux/Unix won't be around much longer. Or, you can set a reliable Apache server up for the marketing guy at the next company when this one goes under because they have marketing guys with their heads in the sand.
It's actually half the price to upgrade from older Novell (say, 3.12) to W2K than to Novell 5!
Talk about someone who doesn't 'get it'. HELLO!?! Novell is not the competitor here. Novell is not growing exponentially. Linux IS.
W2K will be as revolutionary to NT4/95 what NT4/95 was to Windows for Workgroups.
Well, that's the Microsoft line. But really, what, exactly, is it that we'll get from W2K that NT4 doesn't already have? Oh yeah, one operating system for the home user and business user! Nope, that fell out months ago. Clustering support? Nope, they dropped that out. Oh, I know, more stability! That's not what the beta testers are saying (when they can slip some news around the NDA they've signed).
The change from WfW - good comparison point there, a product so unsuccessful that Microsoft people internally were calling it Windows for Warehouses - to NT4/95 was a complete new user interface. Sure, THAT was a big change. I see nothing in W2K that's as dramatic as that.
You'll probably reply with a dizzying array of Microsoft specific acronyms that really don't mean anything in the real world.
I've heard that W2K has better management tools. It's about time. MS has been promising for years to have good remote administration, something that every version of UNIX had with X forever. X is also the 15 year old solution that Microsoft reinvented with their Windows Terminal Server stuff too. Not that MS wanted to do Terminal Server, the success of Citrix forced them to do it...
Other than this, what's the big deal with W2K? Directory Services? LDAP and NDS are there already.
W2K will SOMEDAY have 64-bit and scaleability, and SOMEDAY will have better multi-media support.
All in all, the W2K release is a big yawn. They failed to consolidate their OS offerings between home and business, the whole raison d'etret of NT 5 (remember when it was called that?). With the exception of better remote administration, a problem that everybody else solved years ago, there's nothing in W2K that couldn't be covered as an add-on to 95/NT4.
And, it's, what, 2 years late? What a laugh that MS is saying "On time and in stores Feb. 17".
To say it's armageddon for web-life as we know it is just silly.
Who's saying that? What I'm seeing people say is that it's armageddon for MS.
Oh, I get it, people like you actually believe that MS and "web-life" are one and the same. The mantra is "There would be no Web without Bill. Everything that's good about the Web is due to MicroSoft. Microsoft has legitimized The Web, Perl, HTML, XML, SQL and made them available to the masses. All praise to the innovators in Redmond."
Redhat is a publically traded corporation. Everything they do is mandated by an obligation to increase thier stock price (via the omnipresesnt threat of shareholder lawsuits, which is very real).
First, let me say that IANAL. However, I don't believe you are correct that a publically traded corporation is mandated, in everything they do, to increase their stock price.
Officers of a corporation are only under an obligation to not make misrepresentations or mislead shareholders and to not work against the interest of the shareholders. It's particularly egregious for the officers to work against the interest of the shareholders and in their own interests instead.
There are some other obligations of an officer, like to hold regular meetings, produce regular reports and hold elections of board members by shareholders.
If a company has as it's stated mission to perform many community services and the shareholders can reasonably be expected to know this then I don't think there would be basis for a shareholder suit based on the fact that they are performing community services at the expense of increasing share price.
In addition, there are companies that specialize in producing dividends for the shareholders. An investor might have the basis for a successful shareholder suit should a company that promises steady dividends chose instead to invest the profits back into the company in an effort to increase share price.
We could form a corporation who's stated mission is to employ technology workers and offer shares for sale. I don't believe that shareholders would have the basis of a winning case if they were try to sue based on the fact that the corporation was employing people to the detriment of the share value. However, if these disgruntled shareholders became the majority stock holders, they could change the company mission.
I think that the primary difference between a non-profit corporation and a for-profit corporation is the tax status of the investments made.
It makes you wonder about MS's inclusion in the DJIA.
I've been wondering about that too.
Everyone, including recent comments from none other than Ballmer himself, seem to believe that Tech stocks (including Microsoft) are overvalued.
Greenspan said something awhile back abound overexhuberance in Tech stocks, too. Both Ballmer's and Greenspan's comments caused a momentary dip in Tech stocks, but they picked right back up in a week or so.
The market Analysts seem to be in la-la land. I can't find the reference now, but I saw a bizaare Analyst Opinion rating MS a 'strong Buy' because Windows 2000 finally had a ship date of Feb, 2000 and traditionally MS has done well in the months leading up to a ship date. Sheesh... Whatever happened to The Random Walk? Whatever happened to analysis?
Almost everybody in the Technology Press and Industry seem to believe that MS faces tough new competition in the form of (no particular order): Linux, Sun/StarOffice, Java apps, and Apple. Also, almost everyone seems to believe that the anti-trust finding of fact will go against MS, but the stock just keeps climbing and climbing.
Any sensible person would expect SOME kind of correction in MSFT soon. Even Ballmer warns that it's overvalued, along eith the other tech stocks.
I have heard the opinion that the broad market has not been doing so well as the Blue Chips. And that this has led to a false sense of security. When people see the DJIA climbing beyond all sense, they think the economy is doing better than it actually is.
It's almost like some Wall Street cabal feels there's no way to restore sanity to this market except to put MSFT on the DJIA before MSFT takes a big fall.
Intel was also added to the DJIA at the same time MSFT was. A lot of people seem to believe there's soft demand for processors coming up and it appears that Intel has stronger-than-expected competition from AMD. This would seem to be another choice to weigh down the DJIA.
Maybe I'm paranoid.
The above is pure opinion based on analysis. I have no inside information from Intel or MSFT.
If I ever have 1% of the money Bill Gates has, I'm going to fund a manned mission to Mars, including a colony.
If you ever got any real money, I would suggest that the first thing that you buy is a clue.
I believe you'll find that the Apollo missions to the Moon cost quite a bit more than Bill Gates' fortune (that's 100% of the money Bill Gates has), if you convert 1960-1970 dollars to today's dollars. Although, I couldn't find hard figures to support this speculation, I did find where the NASA budget was around $30 Billion between 1964 and 1969 alone. But, it's difficult to tell if this was mostly Apollo spending. I also can't tell for sure if this has been adjusted for inflation. If it wasn't adjusted for inflation, then it would be over $100 Billion, which is what Bill Gates' fortune is often reported to be, in today's dollars.
In any case, I imagine that a colony on Mars would cost quite a bit more than the $1 Billion that you seem to think it would require.
You could make a case for the cards used to "program" Jaquard looms being a form of software...
Yes, and it would make my point yet again. These would be of no value to anyone, except perhaps for historical interest, but they are in the public domain.
Woohoo! Those Jaquard loom programs are quite a windfall to us Open Source types!
I know the trust-funders don't like to see talk of money on Slashdot (or anywhere else) but it's a fact of life that most of us have to pay the bills somehow.
Wow, now there's something that hasn't really occurred to me. Are there a lot of trust-funders among Slashdot readers?
Are there people who support their geek lifestyles completely on inherited money?
Since the "code" for ENAIC was plugboards used to re-wire it...
Kind of makes my point. There is no software older than 50 years old. It's all still eligible for copyright protection, even IBM 701 code that nobody, except possibly a museum, could have any use for.
So, a judge realizes that in the Internet age, lengthy non-competes don't make any sense.
When will we see Congress wake up and realize that 50 year copyrights on software don't make any sense whatsoever?
Hmmm... IBM, Microsoft, CA, and the rest of the big software vendors would throw all their lobbying efforts against any change in the absurd copyright duration on software. I wonder when I can count on this changing?
I'm looking forward to the day when the first software copyright expires. I, for one, am anxious to get my hands on all that great ENIAC code!
The classical argument for such agreeements is that the employee consented to the clause and therefore knew what he was doing when he signed away his freedom to work at a competitor.
There are some rights that law does not allow us to consent to give away. For example, you are not allowed to sign your freedom away to become an indentured servant, at any price.
This seems like a very similar situation.
It is for this reason that employment agreements are typically held to be at the pleasure of both parties. Anyone can quit at any time, anyone can be fired at any time. Extending your rights over someone's services with these non-competes seems to be trying to get around this.
I appreciate where trade secrets or privileged information is at stake, but normally such a claim, under law, would normally be up to a plaintiff to prove in court.
Hello moderators. I think it would be good to honor the fine work of Michael in the Comment that I'm responding to here by moderating it WAY UP as INFORMATIVE.
After this is accomplished, feel free to moderate THIS Comment down as off-topic. Heh.
Perhaps some French speaking geeks could get the text of the proposed law and translate that for us.
From the translated message from the Senator, it's not at all clear as to what the Articles actually state.
I'd be very much in favor of a law that required all software used by the Government to be provided as Open Source, wherever possible (whatever that means).
This is not really that different from the current law in the US, if I understand it correctly, that any software written for the US Government (as a deliverable) has no copyright and is thus in the public domain. It would simply be moving from public domain to an Open Source license requirement. The two are very close, but an Open Source requirement would imply that the original source code must be supplied. A deliverable to the US Government could be executables that are in the public domain (could legally be reverse engineered).
There was a discussion of these issues over on Technocrat awhile back, with Bruce Perens making the interesting suggestion that someone should look into getting software created by/for the US Government released with Freedom Of Information Act (FOIA) requests. While it appears the software created by/for the US Government has no copyright (Public Domain), the US Government is not under any obligation to make releases, except possibly under FOIA requests, which is what Bruce suggested someone should look into.
It appears that some people here seem to think that the French law will require that all Software be Open Source. I'd probably be opposed to such a mandate. This would unnecessarily displace workers suddenly who develop and release non-Open Source software. If Open Source is to succeed, I feel that it's better that it wins in the marketplace, not by mandate.
The Government is a customer in the marketplace, and if it's determined that the Government (and thus the people) benefit from the advantages of Open Source, well, that's just a customer making a minimum requirement for purchased goods. Nothing wrong with that.
I have to agree that these are good reasons for rejecting NNTP. I did want to put it out there though. I have seen web-based discussion forums that could be done just as well with NNTP.
Someone should come up with a really good, drop-in, NNTP server with web based administration. Maybe there is one... I dunno.
The performance of NNTP is quite good and the clients that are included with IE and Netscape are not bad. Having it integrated with mailers is kind of a natural. It's easy for users to manage folders of threads that they want to keep, along with email thread discussions.
Unfortunately, NNTP is harder to administer than it should be and it's not at all flexible.
We in the community have nothing to fear but fragmentation itself. The 10,000 faces of UNIX is what originally killed it as a server operating system...
Excuse me? UNIX dead as a server operating system? I wonder what it is that Sun is making so much money from?
This is unnecessarily alarmist. The problem with the 10,000 faces of UNIX was that these versions were all in competition and could not be merged. The good thing with differing versions of Linux out there could be that someone will take the best of all of them and put them together into the best system.
Remember too that various directions may not be entirely compatible with each other. The best server system may be fundamentally different from the best desktop system, and may actually require different teams of people working on each to produce the best result.
There's also the danger that the Linux kernel will grow unboundedly trying to support every possible environment. I doubt one Linux kernel can serve both the super Enterprise Server environment and the palmtop environment, yet people are going in both directions with Linux right now.
The plethora of mutually-incompatible patches to GCC that resulted from people supporting forks for:
Pentium optimization
Trying to support C++
FORTRAN
Pascal
Ada
Special forms of optimizations (IBM Haifa stuff, for instance)
The net result of the forks were that you could have a compiler that covers one purpose, but not necessarily more than one.
All of the things you mention above are good things to support. They all have their market and perhaps none of them would have been available had we waited for complete consensus among all GCC developers to bless every change.
Code forks are just healthy competition. Remember that? Competition?
You fail to mention that a lot of these things were eventually folded back into the latest GCC versions.
The EGCS split was eventually folded back into the mainline, and the result is a better GCC, I think. People were allowed to go their own way, proving their approach good and when the fork was unforked, it benefitted everyone.
I do support of some R/3 code where our local group has "forked" from the standard stuff SAP AG provides; it is a bear of a job to just handle the parallel changes when we do minor "Legal Change Patch" upgrades. We've got a sizable project team in support of a major version number upgrade; the stuff that we have forked will represent a big chunk of the grief that results in that year long project.
Oh, so you're having problems with parallel changes. Hmm... This is bad. I know. Don't make any local changes! Use the SAP out-of-the-box. Whew! That was easy, problem resolved, the badness of a code fork vanquished once and for all.
What's this I hear? You need those changes? Those changes are there for a good reason? Oh, well, I guess nothing worthwhile doesn't have a price, eh?
Sure, it's a bear to syncronize parallel updates, but that's no justification to never fork.
The ability to fork is an important aspect of the software's essential freedom. If we never fork, we're possibly missing out on important development direction that would be missed.
Besides, there already are a number of Linux code forks out there. People are still developing in 2.0, 2.1, 2.2 and now 2.3 and 2.4 kernels. Each of these represent a fork. When someone improves a 2.2 kernel in some significant way, someone will probably try and integrate those changes into 2.3 and 2.4 kernels.
What people are really concerned about here is that Linus will no longer be have control over the forks.
My guess is that Linus would welcome the contributions. Remember that anything these TurboLinux people might do would be available to be merged into a Linus blessed kernel in the future.
Hey, if these are real improvements, I'm just glad they're putting them into a GPL OS rather than doing them (again and again) to some proprietary commercial OS.
The forks that have occurred in the *BSD world haven't seemed to hurt them. *BSD is gaining support all the time, we read. The various *BSD projects have learned a lot from one another. The only forks in *BSD that one might argue don't contribute to the Open Source world are the ones by BSDI and other commercial interests. Even these have probably helped popularized *BSD operating systems.
HTML is not designed for building traditional data-entry applications, requires all kinds of nastiness to maintain application context, and is inefficient in terms of bandwidth.
Really, Forms aren't so bad. The issues of maintaining application context were solved years ago.
They are well understood, there's an unbelievable number of tools and examples. Bandwidth use, while not entirely minimal, is not that bad, either.
If your concern is presentation, just a little Javascript goes a long way here.
If you are not concerned with presentation, you can actually do a lot with character-cell based forms over a telnet connection. It's a tough sell, but once your users are trained, they typically love the responsiveness and efficiency that can be had with a simple solution like this. Of course, these days, to run a character-cell based form typically means a PC, which is too thick for some.
As others have said, maybe there is a market for a new dumb terminal standard. You might want to try and work out exactly what your ideal dumb terminal would have, but unless you can build commodity hardware, it would probably have to be implemented with HTML, XML, Java or some other plug-in.
Research? I don't see any research there. Just a lot of speculations and anecdotes. I can understand why this "is not garlanded with references". Great works of the past often came about because the authors stood on the shoulders of giants. This "academic" work asks us to "Try to get under it".
It's difficult to fathom that we have this great communications medium that allows us to publish our ideas in written language and distribute them instantly to a world-wide audience, yet people seem to have forgotten what the word research means. Here's a clue, it's not just sitting around, thinking up "a radically altered view of the nature of time, space, consciousness, causality, life, the universe and everything", at least, not without a lot of supporting material to back up this "radically altered view".
Every advance that improves communication seems to lead to a decrease in the average content of our messages.
Someday soon, I expect we'll all have our minds linked in one great matrix and we'll be sending out grunts and squawks.
Ouch! Sorry about that. I meant to hit preview, I really did. Here's that Comment again in a more pleasant (I hope) form:
Hmmm... wouldn't surprise me if they were the ones that came up with the brilliant innovation that is the Annoying Talking Paperclip (TM).
In fact, they do claim to have invented that! From their home page:
Applications of our research are found in numerous products, such as Office Assistant...
They are so proud of that talking paperclip that they put it at the top of their list of "accomplishments".
I had heard that the Office Assistant was based on "technology" that they developed along with Microsoft Bob and we all know what a dog that was. Heh, heh...
I wonder why they don't list Microsoft Bob as one of their accomplishments...
Slashdot Mirror
I couldn't agree more.
I'm generally pretty conservative, but I just don't see the ADA as being a burden on society. The intent is that society will benefit by allowing handicapped people to function as productive members of society. Anybody have a problem with this?
Now, there are people who try to abuse it. Like the policeman who was fired because he couldn't make a comprehensible report and claimed to have "Disability of Written Expression" or the people who tried to claim that they were discriminated against because they couldn't perform certain jobs, like being a pilot, that required a certain standard of uncorrected vision.
The geeks whining about special accomodations or comparing this to something we might see in a "Harrison Bergeron" world are pretty clueless. I've known productive blind computer programmers. As others have mentioned, there are OCR devices that will read a computer screen.
I, for one, am disappointed that the Web is as much a visual medium as it's become. I like to think that the Web is best when it's a information, primarily written language, medium. I'm not looking forward to the day when high speed access turns it the Web into just Interactive TV.
In so far as the Web is written language based, simple accomodations, like ALT tags, and command-based systems so that people can navigate without the need for visual cues, are all that's needed. It wouldn't be hard to do and everyone could benefit. If more sites were Lynx accessible, we'd have a Web that was more useful to people with slow connections and simple character based systems, too.
There's a lot of hyperbole about all of this. From the link in this story about the guidelines the Federal Government is adopting, you can find this document that really explains what the Fed is doing. A particularly interesting extract is:
A Federal agency does not have to comply with the accessibility standards if it would impose an undue burden to do so. This is consistent with language used in the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) and other civil rights legislation, where the term 'undue burden' has been defined as "significant difficulty or expense." However, the agency must explain why meeting the standards would pose an undue burden for a given procurement action, and must still provide people with disabilities access to the information or data that is affected.
Is this too much to ask? That we make some effort to give people with disabilities access to information?
Someday, someday soon perhaps, the Internet will be a necessity. You may need it to apply for Government services or licenses. You might need it to access the future version of Libraries. Do we really want to make decisions now that closes the Internet off to people with disabilities?
You make it sound like NEC ran Packard Bell into the ground.
I seem to remember at the time of the NEC buy-in to Packard Bell that Packard Bell was going through some very bad times already.
I don't have any inside information, but I always thought the NEC-America/PB merger was a marriage made by Intel, who had huge cash (multi-Billion dollar) loans out to Packard Bell. Packard Bell had gotten stuck with an unbelievable number of Pentium 90s and 100s when the market had already turned to buying faster models. Intel turned Packard Bell's debt into a loan, which probably upset a lot of other computer manufacturers. From what I read at the time, Packard Bell would have gone under had it not been for that loan.
I think NEC paid off a lot on that loan and otherwise got their interest in Packard Bell for next to nothing, while at the same time boosting NEC's relationship with Intel considerably, which had been strained for a long time over the V series chips.
I'm not in the habit of paying so that I can help debug a product.
R&D, hmmmm... Is that Renaming & Debugging?
Again, a personal jibe when you know nothing about me. You're just being rude.
I only know you from the things you say. I know you read too much MS bull, in this case about release dates, and believe it.
Check out this article from June of 1998. It contains this paragraph:
Let's see, a timetable used in 1996 showed NT5 being out in late 1997. You're right, it's not 2 years late, it's more than 2 years late.
That's OK. The marketing guy who doesn't understand the value proposition with Linux/Unix won't be around much longer. Or, you can set a reliable Apache server up for the marketing guy at the next company when this one goes under because they have marketing guys with their heads in the sand.
Talk about someone who doesn't 'get it'. HELLO!?! Novell is not the competitor here. Novell is not growing exponentially. Linux IS.
Well, that's the Microsoft line. But really, what, exactly, is it that we'll get from W2K that NT4 doesn't already have? Oh yeah, one operating system for the home user and business user! Nope, that fell out months ago. Clustering support? Nope, they dropped that out. Oh, I know, more stability! That's not what the beta testers are saying (when they can slip some news around the NDA they've signed).
The change from WfW - good comparison point there, a product so unsuccessful that Microsoft people internally were calling it Windows for Warehouses - to NT4/95 was a complete new user interface. Sure, THAT was a big change. I see nothing in W2K that's as dramatic as that.
You'll probably reply with a dizzying array of Microsoft specific acronyms that really don't mean anything in the real world.
I've heard that W2K has better management tools. It's about time. MS has been promising for years to have good remote administration, something that every version of UNIX had with X forever. X is also the 15 year old solution that Microsoft reinvented with their Windows Terminal Server stuff too. Not that MS wanted to do Terminal Server, the success of Citrix forced them to do it...
Other than this, what's the big deal with W2K? Directory Services? LDAP and NDS are there already.
W2K will SOMEDAY have 64-bit and scaleability, and SOMEDAY will have better multi-media support.
All in all, the W2K release is a big yawn. They failed to consolidate their OS offerings between home and business, the whole raison d'etret of NT 5 (remember when it was called that?). With the exception of better remote administration, a problem that everybody else solved years ago, there's nothing in W2K that couldn't be covered as an add-on to 95/NT4.
And, it's, what, 2 years late? What a laugh that MS is saying "On time and in stores Feb. 17".
Who's saying that? What I'm seeing people say is that it's armageddon for MS.
Oh, I get it, people like you actually believe that MS and "web-life" are one and the same. The mantra is "There would be no Web without Bill. Everything that's good about the Web is due to MicroSoft. Microsoft has legitimized The Web, Perl, HTML, XML, SQL and made them available to the masses. All praise to the innovators in Redmond."
First, let me say that IANAL. However, I don't believe you are correct that a publically traded corporation is mandated, in everything they do, to increase their stock price.
Officers of a corporation are only under an obligation to not make misrepresentations or mislead shareholders and to not work against the interest of the shareholders. It's particularly egregious for the officers to work against the interest of the shareholders and in their own interests instead.
There are some other obligations of an officer, like to hold regular meetings, produce regular reports and hold elections of board members by shareholders.
If a company has as it's stated mission to perform many community services and the shareholders can reasonably be expected to know this then I don't think there would be basis for a shareholder suit based on the fact that they are performing community services at the expense of increasing share price.
In addition, there are companies that specialize in producing dividends for the shareholders. An investor might have the basis for a successful shareholder suit should a company that promises steady dividends chose instead to invest the profits back into the company in an effort to increase share price.
We could form a corporation who's stated mission is to employ technology workers and offer shares for sale. I don't believe that shareholders would have the basis of a winning case if they were try to sue based on the fact that the corporation was employing people to the detriment of the share value. However, if these disgruntled shareholders became the majority stock holders, they could change the company mission.
I think that the primary difference between a non-profit corporation and a for-profit corporation is the tax status of the investments made.
gcc is provided for "ease of use"?
I suppose it does make it easier to do kernel development.
I've been wondering about that too.
Everyone, including recent comments from none other than Ballmer himself, seem to believe that Tech stocks (including Microsoft) are overvalued.
Greenspan said something awhile back abound overexhuberance in Tech stocks, too. Both Ballmer's and Greenspan's comments caused a momentary dip in Tech stocks, but they picked right back up in a week or so.
The market Analysts seem to be in la-la land. I can't find the reference now, but I saw a bizaare Analyst Opinion rating MS a 'strong Buy' because Windows 2000 finally had a ship date of Feb, 2000 and traditionally MS has done well in the months leading up to a ship date. Sheesh... Whatever happened to The Random Walk? Whatever happened to analysis?
Almost everybody in the Technology Press and Industry seem to believe that MS faces tough new competition in the form of (no particular order): Linux, Sun/StarOffice, Java apps, and Apple. Also, almost everyone seems to believe that the anti-trust finding of fact will go against MS, but the stock just keeps climbing and climbing.
Any sensible person would expect SOME kind of correction in MSFT soon. Even Ballmer warns that it's overvalued, along eith the other tech stocks.
I have heard the opinion that the broad market has not been doing so well as the Blue Chips. And that this has led to a false sense of security. When people see the DJIA climbing beyond all sense, they think the economy is doing better than it actually is.
It's almost like some Wall Street cabal feels there's no way to restore sanity to this market except to put MSFT on the DJIA before MSFT takes a big fall.
Intel was also added to the DJIA at the same time MSFT was. A lot of people seem to believe there's soft demand for processors coming up and it appears that Intel has stronger-than-expected competition from AMD. This would seem to be another choice to weigh down the DJIA.
Maybe I'm paranoid.
The above is pure opinion based on analysis. I have no inside information from Intel or MSFT.
If you ever got any real money, I would suggest that the first thing that you buy is a clue.
I believe you'll find that the Apollo missions to the Moon cost quite a bit more than Bill Gates' fortune (that's 100% of the money Bill Gates has), if you convert 1960-1970 dollars to today's dollars. Although, I couldn't find hard figures to support this speculation, I did find where the NASA budget was around $30 Billion between 1964 and 1969 alone. But, it's difficult to tell if this was mostly Apollo spending. I also can't tell for sure if this has been adjusted for inflation. If it wasn't adjusted for inflation, then it would be over $100 Billion, which is what Bill Gates' fortune is often reported to be, in today's dollars.
In any case, I imagine that a colony on Mars would cost quite a bit more than the $1 Billion that you seem to think it would require.
Yes, and it would make my point yet again. These would be of no value to anyone, except perhaps for historical interest, but they are in the public domain.
Woohoo! Those Jaquard loom programs are quite a windfall to us Open Source types!
Wow, now there's something that hasn't really occurred to me. Are there a lot of trust-funders among Slashdot readers?
Are there people who support their geek lifestyles completely on inherited money?
Kind of makes my point. There is no software older than 50 years old. It's all still eligible for copyright protection, even IBM 701 code that nobody, except possibly a museum, could have any use for.
Fifty year copyrights on software is absurd.
So, a judge realizes that in the Internet age, lengthy non-competes don't make any sense.
When will we see Congress wake up and realize that 50 year copyrights on software don't make any sense whatsoever?
Hmmm... IBM, Microsoft, CA, and the rest of the big software vendors would throw all their lobbying efforts against any change in the absurd copyright duration on software. I wonder when I can count on this changing?
I'm looking forward to the day when the first software copyright expires. I, for one, am anxious to get my hands on all that great ENIAC code!
There are some rights that law does not allow us to consent to give away. For example, you are not allowed to sign your freedom away to become an indentured servant, at any price.
This seems like a very similar situation.
It is for this reason that employment agreements are typically held to be at the pleasure of both parties. Anyone can quit at any time, anyone can be fired at any time. Extending your rights over someone's services with these non-competes seems to be trying to get around this.
I appreciate where trade secrets or privileged information is at stake, but normally such a claim, under law, would normally be up to a plaintiff to prove in court.
After this is accomplished, feel free to moderate THIS Comment down as off-topic. Heh.
Thank you for your time, moderators.
There's some interesting discussion over on Technocrat on this story.
From the translated message from the Senator, it's not at all clear as to what the Articles actually state.
I'd be very much in favor of a law that required all software used by the Government to be provided as Open Source, wherever possible (whatever that means).
This is not really that different from the current law in the US, if I understand it correctly, that any software written for the US Government (as a deliverable) has no copyright and is thus in the public domain. It would simply be moving from public domain to an Open Source license requirement. The two are very close, but an Open Source requirement would imply that the original source code must be supplied. A deliverable to the US Government could be executables that are in the public domain (could legally be reverse engineered).
There was a discussion of these issues over on Technocrat awhile back, with Bruce Perens making the interesting suggestion that someone should look into getting software created by/for the US Government released with Freedom Of Information Act (FOIA) requests. While it appears the software created by/for the US Government has no copyright (Public Domain), the US Government is not under any obligation to make releases, except possibly under FOIA requests, which is what Bruce suggested someone should look into.
It appears that some people here seem to think that the French law will require that all Software be Open Source. I'd probably be opposed to such a mandate. This would unnecessarily displace workers suddenly who develop and release non-Open Source software. If Open Source is to succeed, I feel that it's better that it wins in the marketplace, not by mandate.
The Government is a customer in the marketplace, and if it's determined that the Government (and thus the people) benefit from the advantages of Open Source, well, that's just a customer making a minimum requirement for purchased goods. Nothing wrong with that.
Someone should come up with a really good, drop-in, NNTP server with web based administration. Maybe there is one... I dunno.
The performance of NNTP is quite good and the clients that are included with IE and Netscape are not bad. Having it integrated with mailers is kind of a natural. It's easy for users to manage folders of threads that they want to keep, along with email thread discussions.
Unfortunately, NNTP is harder to administer than it should be and it's not at all flexible.
Excuse me? UNIX dead as a server operating system? I wonder what it is that Sun is making so much money from?
This is unnecessarily alarmist. The problem with the 10,000 faces of UNIX was that these versions were all in competition and could not be merged. The good thing with differing versions of Linux out there could be that someone will take the best of all of them and put them together into the best system.
Remember too that various directions may not be entirely compatible with each other. The best server system may be fundamentally different from the best desktop system, and may actually require different teams of people working on each to produce the best result.
There's also the danger that the Linux kernel will grow unboundedly trying to support every possible environment. I doubt one Linux kernel can serve both the super Enterprise Server environment and the palmtop environment, yet people are going in both directions with Linux right now.
The net result of the forks were that you could have a compiler that covers one purpose, but not necessarily more than one.
All of the things you mention above are good things to support. They all have their market and perhaps none of them would have been available had we waited for complete consensus among all GCC developers to bless every change.
Code forks are just healthy competition. Remember that? Competition?
You fail to mention that a lot of these things were eventually folded back into the latest GCC versions.
The EGCS split was eventually folded back into the mainline, and the result is a better GCC, I think. People were allowed to go their own way, proving their approach good and when the fork was unforked, it benefitted everyone.
I do support of some R/3 code where our local group has "forked" from the standard stuff SAP AG provides; it is a bear of a job to just handle the parallel changes when we do minor "Legal Change Patch" upgrades. We've got a sizable project team in support of a major version number upgrade; the stuff that we have forked will represent a big chunk of the grief that results in that year long project.
Oh, so you're having problems with parallel changes. Hmm... This is bad. I know. Don't make any local changes! Use the SAP out-of-the-box. Whew! That was easy, problem resolved, the badness of a code fork vanquished once and for all.
What's this I hear? You need those changes? Those changes are there for a good reason? Oh, well, I guess nothing worthwhile doesn't have a price, eh?
Sure, it's a bear to syncronize parallel updates, but that's no justification to never fork.
The ability to fork is an important aspect of the software's essential freedom. If we never fork, we're possibly missing out on important development direction that would be missed.
Besides, there already are a number of Linux code forks out there. People are still developing in 2.0, 2.1, 2.2 and now 2.3 and 2.4 kernels. Each of these represent a fork. When someone improves a 2.2 kernel in some significant way, someone will probably try and integrate those changes into 2.3 and 2.4 kernels.
What people are really concerned about here is that Linus will no longer be have control over the forks.
My guess is that Linus would welcome the contributions. Remember that anything these TurboLinux people might do would be available to be merged into a Linus blessed kernel in the future.
Hey, if these are real improvements, I'm just glad they're putting them into a GPL OS rather than doing them (again and again) to some proprietary commercial OS.
The forks that have occurred in the *BSD world haven't seemed to hurt them. *BSD is gaining support all the time, we read. The various *BSD projects have learned a lot from one another. The only forks in *BSD that one might argue don't contribute to the Open Source world are the ones by BSDI and other commercial interests. Even these have probably helped popularized *BSD operating systems.
Really, Forms aren't so bad. The issues of maintaining application context were solved years ago.
They are well understood, there's an unbelievable number of tools and examples. Bandwidth use, while not entirely minimal, is not that bad, either.
If your concern is presentation, just a little Javascript goes a long way here.
If you are not concerned with presentation, you can actually do a lot with character-cell based forms over a telnet connection. It's a tough sell, but once your users are trained, they typically love the responsiveness and efficiency that can be had with a simple solution like this. Of course, these days, to run a character-cell based form typically means a PC, which is too thick for some.
As others have said, maybe there is a market for a new dumb terminal standard. You might want to try and work out exactly what your ideal dumb terminal would have, but unless you can build commodity hardware, it would probably have to be implemented with HTML, XML, Java or some other plug-in.
It's difficult to fathom that we have this great communications medium that allows us to publish our ideas in written language and distribute them instantly to a world-wide audience, yet people seem to have forgotten what the word research means. Here's a clue, it's not just sitting around, thinking up "a radically altered view of the nature of time, space, consciousness, causality, life, the universe and everything", at least, not without a lot of supporting material to back up this "radically altered view".
Every advance that improves communication seems to lead to a decrease in the average content of our messages.
Someday soon, I expect we'll all have our minds linked in one great matrix and we'll be sending out grunts and squawks.
Ouch! Sorry about that. I meant to hit preview, I really did. Here's that Comment again in a more pleasant (I hope) form:
Hmmm... wouldn't surprise me if they were the ones that came up with the brilliant innovation that is the Annoying Talking Paperclip (TM).
In fact, they do claim to have invented that! From their home page:
They are so proud of that talking paperclip that they put it at the top of their list of "accomplishments".
I had heard that the Office Assistant was based on "technology" that they developed along with Microsoft Bob and we all know what a dog that was. Heh, heh...
I wonder why they don't list Microsoft Bob as one of their accomplishments...