What would happen if TimeWarnerAOLMegaCorp were to buy out the Internet Explorer company?
They'd have to get approval from the government for a merger like that since it would give them a monopoly on the browser market. And they wouldn't get it. As it is, the government still hasn't OK'd the merger with Time Warner because they are worried about letting one company have that kind of power.
Microsoft continues to develop Windows in it's Windows company, but still blends Internet Explorer in. After all, they will be (most likely) all working in the same building, and have access to everybody's source code.
No they won't. That's the whole point of breaking up a company -- breaking up assets and code and giving them to one of the new companies. The Baby Bills will be fighting over which company gets to keep what.
Microsoft buys up Netscape from AOL, thus eliminating the whole anti-trust crap in the first place.
The government would never allow that to happen. They'd get dragged back into court the second the even thought about it.
Seriously though, what exactly will it do? Microsoft's employees, from what I understand of it, talk to each other -- the OS team, the IE team, and the Office team -- so that they can interweave their applications together. What's going to stop them from doing it after the breakup?
They would not be allowed to do so by the government.
Since they are separate companies with separate, records, networks, code, and a separate set of books, it would be easier to prove it if they were violating any consent decrees and the penalties for doing so would be more severe.
Even if they were not making the same products they would now be in competition with each other.
Money!
If Linux gets more popular, nothing can stop the Office company from making Office for Linux.
The IE company would be more vulnerable to pressure to conform to W3C standards.
The OS company wouldn't have any incentive to screw over the Office company's competitors. "Why should we keep trying to break Lotus for you guys? We don't get money from you any more."
Though, here is an interesting thought: Why not replace the high school kids with robots? Not just in the job market, but everywhere. Schools, homes, parties and the whole nine yards. Parents and teachers would be happier, the crime rate would go down and no need for the police to enforce a cerfew. When mom asks her son to take out the trash a perfectly pleseant vox voiced child would happily and obediently fullfil it's task.
That sounds like a great idea! Let's start implanting chips into our kids at birth, neural interfaces, enhanced memory and all that. Screw evolution! Let's take the whole species up a notch!
Universal access to computers and the Internet is not a right anymore than owning a phone or a television are rights. They are, however, considered "necessary" conveniences of modern life. Computers and the Internet are also becoming necessary conveniences as well. Soon, everybody will have a computer, not because everybody has a right to own a computer but because everybody wants and can afford a computer.
When Intel or Ford provides its employees with free computers and Internet access, it is evidence that they "get it" but not in the way that Jon writes. These companies see such things as perks that they can use to attract and keep workers. The idea is to make the employee think that this is a good company to work for so that they'll think twice before jumping to higher paying job in our strong.
They also see them as tools to make their existing workforce more productive. Just as a company might pay for an employee's cell phone, not out of altruism but because they feel that this employee needs one to his or her job efficiently, so they might also provide their employees with a free computer at home so they can learn to take better care of their computers at work.
They could do worse. "The Unnatural" was a wonderful show and "Hollywood A.D." while sloppy, had a lot of energy and turned out to be better than it had a right to be.
This is garbage. Your first point is correct -- that most users don't know what a macro is. However, to say that the mere existence of a macro implies that it is malicious is bullshit. Macros have tons of uses and I know people that use them all the time.
This is true but macro viruses are so common that checking them out first is just good-thinking. I don't know anyone who uses macros, so from my perspective, my comments make more sense.
And your proposed solutions are just more roadblocks, more dialogs for people to click blindly on, more hoops to jump through.
This is also true but I've found that after a few bad experiences, users will tend to get paranoid and ask an IT or systems guy when they see a warning dialog. Sometimes they even get a little too paranoid and start asking questions when they see one of those banner ad that look like an error message.:-)
The solution is to simply not allow any file of any type to do something malicious or questionable to the system. This includes accessing/modifying the registry period, sending mail to people in the address book, etc.
Yes and if only Microsoft would do this we wouldn't need to come up with half-assed work arounds in the first place.
Great, I'm sick and tired of downloading all those anothersillything.mpg attachments. Attachments are evil, we need a standard way of ftp-ing the attachments to a server and then just posting the url!
That's a good point. One way would be by allowing the user to specify a personal ftp site in their e-mail preferences. Whenever a user sends an attachment greater than a certain size, the e-mail program automatically uploads the "attachment" to the user's personal ftp site and inserts a URL for it in the e-mail. When the user downloads the file, the e-mail program deletes the file from the user's personal ftp site. This method also has the advantage that the user would know if the recipient never looked at the file he or she sent if it stays on their ftp site for a long time.
Theoretically, Word is supposed to be able to warn users if it opens a.doc file with embedded code. And stupid users still manage to infect themselves.
I usually refuse to let Word or Excel execute any embedded macros they find in a document until I've had a chance to check out the in Office's VBA editor. I've stopped several virii dead in their tracks this way. Every intelligent Windows user -- and god knows they are rare thanks to Microsoft's ease of use over usability mentality -- should know of and use this trick.
Word and Excel can be set to warn you if you are opening a document that has macros. Since most Windows users don't even know what a macro is, it's a pretty good bet that if a document has macros, they are of the viral persuasion. Unfortunately, since most Windows users don't even know what a macro is, they will often click on the OK button in the warning dialog and infect themselves anyway. This has happened several times in this office.
Having said that, it would probably be better if Outlook were set up this way to merely warn a user that they could potentially be opening a virus infected file. Ideally, when a user double-clicks on an attachment in Outlook that can carry a virus like an exe, doc, vbs, etc. file, it should:
Warn the user that this type of file can carry virus.
Offer to run that file through the user's virus scanning software.
If the user has no virus scanning software on his or her system, offer to merely save the attachment to a file on the user's hard drive.
Encourage the user to pick up the damn phone and call whomever sent them this file to ask:
Did you really mean to send this file to tell me you love me?
Or are you just another schmuck who got caught up by the latest virus?
If Outlook did this, the last two big virus outbreaks (Melissa and ILOVEYOU) would never have happened.
I had the same experience in reverse. I came in, check my e-mail, discovered the virus, saved it for my collection, reported it, and checked Slashdot. And lo, and behold. . . .
Mail.com is a free e-mail service. It's probably a free account started up using falsified information to through people off the author's scent. Or maybe he really is that stupid.
I haven't received a copy and I didn't receive a copy of Melissia et al either. Does that mean that nobody has me in their address book?
I didn't get a copy of Melissa either but I did get a copy of this one. Does that mean I'm becoming more popular? Or am I just hanging out with a less clueful class of people?
It will be a great day when Psion finally figures out how to let the world know about its palmtop.
Why does this great tool go unnoticed?
For the same reason that the clamshell WinCE devices with tiny keyboards were even bigger duds than WinCE handhelds. Users see them as tiny laptops. Notebook computers are getting smaller and smaller to the point where you're not really giving up much in the way of weight to a palmtop device.
As a result, the palmtop market got killed, or at the very least smothered, by Win9x mini-notebooks. WinCE handhelds also ate into the palmtop market from below. Now that Microsoft has begun to get its act together with PocketPC, what's left of the palmtop market will be further eroded as users of clamshell WinCE devices decide that they are willing to give up their devices' tiny keyboards.
IMHO, as PalmOS and PocketPC devices get more sophisticated and mini-notebooks' battery lives improve, the market for clamshell palmtops like the Psion can only get smaller.
Does anyone want to attempt to lisence the PalmOS and port it over to a wince machine? That'd be uber-cool.
Well, people are trying to port Linux to WinCE. You could probably create a PalmOS like GUI to run on top of the kernel and have yourself a pretty nifty little device.
2000 A.D. Library of Congress Will Not Digitize Books "There is a difference between turning pages and scrolling down," he said. "There is something about a book that should inspire a certain presumption of reverence." -- James Billington, Library of Congress
1000 B.C. Library of Egypt Will Not Bind Scrolls "There is a difference unrolling papyrus and turning pages," he said. "There is something about a scroll that should inspire a certain presumption of reverence." -- Ramenhotep of Alexandria
3000 B.C. Library of Sumeria Will Not Write From Clay Tablets "There is a difference lifting a tablet and unrolling papyrus," he said. "There is something about a clay tablet that should inspire a certain presumption of reverence." -- Asurbanipal of Nineveh
Clifford Stoll has a very interesting book on the subject: "High Tech Heretic - Why Computers *Don't* Belong in the Classroom and Other Reflections by a COmputer Contrarian".
Excepts from the back of his book:
On Computer Literacy: I don't think our suffers from a fear of technology. If anything, our problems are rooted in a love affair with gizmos.
I think that the two go hand in hand. We love our gizmos but (and I'm generalizing here) deep, down inside we are afraid that either we're not smart enough to use them or that they are really useless toys. This leads to a lot of time being wasted because "we don't have time to do things that way."
I frequently see people retype entire documents after asking me to scan them because even though the text (which, after all is the important part) is recognized properly because they don't want to waste time trying to recreate the formatting. So instead, they retype *and* format their old documents instead of reformatting perfectly good text.
Sure, kids love computers. I met an eigth grader who told me he'd spent his summer vacations logged onto the Internet for seven hours a day. Every day of the summer.
Maybe he lived in a rough neighborhood and his parents sacrificed to get him a computer so he wouldn't be on the streets. I know that if I had a kid, I wouldn't mind if he "wasted" his time reading Slashdot instead of hanging out on the playground if usually got beaten up a lot when he went there.
I also remember that some people complained that I spent too much time reading, when I could be out on the playground when I was a kid.
On Computers in the Classroom Whenever I point out the dubious value of computers in the schools. I hear, 'Look, computers are everywhere, so we have to bring them into the classroom.' Well, automobiles are everywhere, too. They play a damned important part in our society, and it's hard to get a job if you can't drive. In fact, cars count for more of our economy than do computers. But we don't teach automotive literacy.
Yes we do. Only we call it "Driver's Ed."
I didn't have computers in grammar school. It was more important to learn to read, write, do math, and learn to interact, to communicate with other people. Why learn to read, when you can have the computer read back the book for you? Why learn to write, when the computer can correct your spelling, and your grammar? Why learn to think when you can just have the computer spit back the homework answers for you?
It's a matter of balance. Computers are just one more tool for learning, just like books and lab equipment. A good teacher should be smart enough to integrate computers into the curriculum. Most research papers have be typed anyway, so why not take full advantage of a wordprocessing application's editing features? A computer can analyze and compute complex data, freeing the student to concentrate on learning theory and technique.
Wouldn't the money spent on computers be better off hiring more teachers, increasing the salary so that more quality people will be interested in becoming teachers?
I think you'd be surprised at the number of quality people who would be willing to give up their higher salaries to become teachers (whose salaries, by the war, have been rising in recent years) if only state regulations made it easier for them to do just that. The way things are now, an experienced engineer who wanted to teach math or science instead of retiring would have to go back to school to study education, even when it would be perfectly obvious that he or she is qualified to teach that subject. If states had some sort of streamlined program to certify experienced professionals who want to get into teaching more quickly, they'd attract more "quality" people who are interested in teaching.
I agree. If code is treated as speech, it would still fall under the First Amendment which might make regulation a little more sensible IMHO. Just as you can't yell "fire" in a crowded theater, you wouldn't be able to create a virus and unleash it on hapless AOLers. Something like DeCSS could be protected as a form of peaceful protest while using Trin00 to launch a Denial of Service attack would clearly be form of illegal protest.
A few years ago when the one of the first browser bugs became widely publicized, there was a message propagating through Usenet calling this bug a "deadly" security breach. One day, I got tired of this and started flaming anybody who posted this message saying that I had a cousin who was killed by this virus/security flaw/hack attack. A couple of months ago during the Melissa scare I started telling the same story to anyone at work who forwarded such a virus warning to more than a dozen people. Obviously, my story has propagated all over the Internet, mutated, and has been picked up by this tabloid.
If I had known that it would lead to this, I would have started a story about a hacker initiation ritual that involved spamming users with virus warnings and blowing up the computer of anyone stupid enough to forward them....
That makes no sense. If they knew the lander was fatally flawed, why wouldn't they change its mission to salvage some research dollars? Maybe adjust its course so it goes into orbit, instead of crashing? Or adjusting its course so it crashes in full view of the Hubble Telescope's cameras?
Imagine if NASA were to call a press conference to announce that the Lander can't land and will be allowed to go into orbit in hopes that they can use it for some other purpose. Or that they'll deliberately crash it to study atmospheric effects. This would have been a much better form of CYA then just going, "Whoops! We lost the Lander, we'll waste a crapload of resources just to make sure we're not wrong, but basically, we're screwed."
Slashdot Mirror
What would happen if TimeWarnerAOLMegaCorp were to buy out the Internet Explorer company?
They'd have to get approval from the government for a merger like that since it would give them a monopoly on the browser market. And they wouldn't get it. As it is, the government still hasn't OK'd the merger with Time Warner because they are worried about letting one company have that kind of power.
No they won't. That's the whole point of breaking up a company -- breaking up assets and code and giving them to one of the new companies. The Baby Bills will be fighting over which company gets to keep what.
The government would never allow that to happen. They'd get dragged back into court the second the even thought about it.
Seriously though, what exactly will it do? Microsoft's employees, from what I understand of it, talk to each other -- the OS team, the IE team, and the Office team -- so that they can interweave their applications together. What's going to stop them from doing it after the breakup?
Though, here is an interesting thought: Why not replace the high school kids with robots? Not just in the job market, but everywhere. Schools, homes, parties and the whole nine yards. Parents and teachers would be happier, the crime rate would go down and no need for the police to enforce a cerfew. When mom asks her son to take out the trash a perfectly pleseant vox voiced child would happily and obediently fullfil it's task.
That sounds like a great idea! Let's start implanting chips into our kids at birth, neural interfaces, enhanced memory and all that. Screw evolution! Let's take the whole species up a notch!
Universal access to computers and the Internet is not a right anymore than owning a phone or a television are rights. They are, however, considered "necessary" conveniences of modern life. Computers and the Internet are also becoming necessary conveniences as well. Soon, everybody will have a computer, not because everybody has a right to own a computer but because everybody wants and can afford a computer.
When Intel or Ford provides its employees with free computers and Internet access, it is evidence that they "get it" but not in the way that Jon writes. These companies see such things as perks that they can use to attract and keep workers. The idea is to make the employee think that this is a good company to work for so that they'll think twice before jumping to higher paying job in our strong.
They also see them as tools to make their existing workforce more productive. Just as a company might pay for an employee's cell phone, not out of altruism but because they feel that this employee needs one to his or her job efficiently, so they might also provide their employees with a free computer at home so they can learn to take better care of their computers at work.
They could do worse. "The Unnatural" was a wonderful show and "Hollywood A.D." while sloppy, had a lot of energy and turned out to be better than it had a right to be.
If you flesh Scully out any further you're going to burst her bra.
And is this is supposed to be a bad thing?
This is garbage. Your first point is correct -- that most users don't know what a macro is. However, to say that the mere existence of a macro implies that it is malicious is bullshit. Macros have tons of uses and I know people that use them all the time.
:-)
This is true but macro viruses are so common that checking them out first is just good-thinking. I don't know anyone who uses macros, so from my perspective, my comments make more sense.
And your proposed solutions are just more roadblocks, more dialogs for people to click blindly on, more hoops to jump through.
This is also true but I've found that after a few bad experiences, users will tend to get paranoid and ask an IT or systems guy when they see a warning dialog. Sometimes they even get a little too paranoid and start asking questions when they see one of those banner ad that look like an error message.
The solution is to simply not allow any file of any type to do something malicious or questionable to the system. This includes accessing/modifying the registry period, sending mail to people in the address book, etc.
Yes and if only Microsoft would do this we wouldn't need to come up with half-assed work arounds in the first place.
Great, I'm sick and tired of downloading all those anothersillything.mpg attachments. Attachments are evil, we need a standard way of ftp-ing the attachments to a server and then just posting the url!
That's a good point. One way would be by allowing the user to specify a personal ftp site in their e-mail preferences. Whenever a user sends an attachment greater than a certain size, the e-mail program automatically uploads the "attachment" to the user's personal ftp site and inserts a URL for it in the e-mail. When the user downloads the file, the e-mail program deletes the file from the user's personal ftp site. This method also has the advantage that the user would know if the recipient never looked at the file he or she sent if it stays on their ftp site for a long time.
Theoretically, Word is supposed to be able to warn users if it opens a
I usually refuse to let Word or Excel execute any embedded macros they find in a document until I've had a chance to check out the in Office's VBA editor. I've stopped several virii dead in their tracks this way. Every intelligent Windows user -- and god knows they are rare thanks to Microsoft's ease of use over usability mentality -- should know of and use this trick.
Word and Excel can be set to warn you if you are opening a document that has macros. Since most Windows users don't even know what a macro is, it's a pretty good bet that if a document has macros, they are of the viral persuasion. Unfortunately, since most Windows users don't even know what a macro is, they will often click on the OK button in the warning dialog and infect themselves anyway. This has happened several times in this office.
Having said that, it would probably be better if Outlook were set up this way to merely warn a user that they could potentially be opening a virus infected file. Ideally, when a user double-clicks on an attachment in Outlook that can carry a virus like an exe, doc, vbs, etc. file, it should:
If Outlook did this, the last two big virus outbreaks (Melissa and ILOVEYOU) would never have happened.
. . . But a part of me thinks that this would have been really, really cool.
I had the same experience in reverse. I came in, check my e-mail, discovered the virus, saved it for my collection, reported it, and checked Slashdot. And lo, and behold. . . .
Mail.com is a free e-mail service. It's probably a free account started up using falsified information to through people off the author's scent. Or maybe he really is that stupid.
I haven't received a copy and I didn't receive a copy of Melissia et al either. Does that mean that nobody has me in their address book?
I didn't get a copy of Melissa either but I did get a copy of this one. Does that mean I'm becoming more popular? Or am I just hanging out with a less clueful class of people?
I wonder how much it cost to "create" or buy those names?
Salon had a very good article on that very same subject. I was both amused and appalled by it.
Well.. the side of the Borg cube did have "Intel Inside" on it....
Then Intel's days are numbered.
It will be a great day when Psion finally figures out how to let the world know about its palmtop.
Why does this great tool go unnoticed?
For the same reason that the clamshell WinCE devices with tiny keyboards were even bigger duds than WinCE handhelds. Users see them as tiny laptops. Notebook computers are getting smaller and smaller to the point where you're not really giving up much in the way of weight to a palmtop device.
As a result, the palmtop market got killed, or at the very least smothered, by Win9x mini-notebooks. WinCE handhelds also ate into the palmtop market from below. Now that Microsoft has begun to get its act together with PocketPC, what's left of the palmtop market will be further eroded as users of clamshell WinCE devices decide that they are willing to give up their devices' tiny keyboards.
IMHO, as PalmOS and PocketPC devices get more sophisticated and mini-notebooks' battery lives improve, the market for clamshell palmtops like the Psion can only get smaller.
Does anyone want to attempt to lisence the PalmOS and port it over to a wince machine? That'd be uber-cool.
Well, people are trying to port Linux to WinCE. You could probably create a PalmOS like GUI to run on top of the kernel and have yourself a pretty nifty little device.
The ironic part is that that despite this opening line, the reporter spent half the article explaining how the version of WinCE is not like Windows.
Oh please. The Internet is a fad, just like talkies.
He he, I agree. I also heard on the radio today that the TV fad'll run its course and be gone in two years.
2000 A.D.
Library of Congress Will Not Digitize Books
"There is a difference between turning pages and scrolling down," he said. "There is something about a book that should inspire a certain presumption of reverence."
-- James Billington, Library of Congress
1000 B.C.
Library of Egypt Will Not Bind Scrolls
"There is a difference unrolling papyrus and turning pages," he said. "There is something about a scroll that should inspire a certain presumption of reverence."
-- Ramenhotep of Alexandria
3000 B.C.
Library of Sumeria Will Not Write From Clay Tablets
"There is a difference lifting a tablet and unrolling papyrus," he said. "There is something about a clay tablet that should inspire a certain presumption of reverence."
-- Asurbanipal of Nineveh
Excepts from the back of his book:
I don't think our suffers from a fear of technology. If anything, our problems are rooted in a love affair with gizmos.
I think that the two go hand in hand. We love our gizmos but (and I'm generalizing here) deep, down inside we are afraid that either we're not smart enough to use them or that they are really useless toys. This leads to a lot of time being wasted because "we don't have time to do things that way."
I frequently see people retype entire documents after asking me to scan them because even though the text (which, after all is the important part) is recognized properly because they don't want to waste time trying to recreate the formatting. So instead, they retype *and* format their old documents instead of reformatting perfectly good text.
Maybe he lived in a rough neighborhood and his parents sacrificed to get him a computer so he wouldn't be on the streets. I know that if I had a kid, I wouldn't mind if he "wasted" his time reading Slashdot instead of hanging out on the playground if usually got beaten up a lot when he went there.
I also remember that some people complained that I spent too much time reading, when I could be out on the playground when I was a kid.
Yes we do. Only we call it "Driver's Ed."
I didn't have computers in grammar school. It was more important to learn to read, write, do math, and learn to interact, to communicate with other people. Why learn to read, when you can have the computer read back the book for you? Why learn to write, when the computer can correct your spelling, and your grammar? Why learn to think when you can just have the computer spit back the homework answers for you?
It's a matter of balance. Computers are just one more tool for learning, just like books and lab equipment. A good teacher should be smart enough to integrate computers into the curriculum. Most research papers have be typed anyway, so why not take full advantage of a wordprocessing application's editing features? A computer can analyze and compute complex data, freeing the student to concentrate on learning theory and technique.
Wouldn't the money spent on computers be better off hiring more teachers, increasing the salary so that more quality people will be interested in becoming teachers?
I think you'd be surprised at the number of quality people who would be willing to give up their higher salaries to become teachers (whose salaries, by the war, have been rising in recent years) if only state regulations made it easier for them to do just that. The way things are now, an experienced engineer who wanted to teach math or science instead of retiring would have to go back to school to study education, even when it would be perfectly obvious that he or she is qualified to teach that subject. If states had some sort of streamlined program to certify experienced professionals who want to get into teaching more quickly, they'd attract more "quality" people who are interested in teaching.
I agree. If code is treated as speech, it would still fall under the First Amendment which might make regulation a little more sensible IMHO. Just as you can't yell "fire" in a crowded theater, you wouldn't be able to create a virus and unleash it on hapless AOLers. Something like DeCSS could be protected as a form of peaceful protest while using Trin00 to launch a Denial of Service attack would clearly be form of illegal protest.
A few years ago when the one of the first browser bugs became widely publicized, there was a message propagating through Usenet calling this bug a "deadly" security breach. One day, I got tired of this and started flaming anybody who posted this message saying that I had a cousin who was killed by this virus/security flaw/hack attack. A couple of months ago during the Melissa scare I started telling the same story to anyone at work who forwarded such a virus warning to more than a dozen people. Obviously, my story has propagated all over the Internet, mutated, and has been picked up by this tabloid.
If I had known that it would lead to this, I would have started a story about a hacker initiation ritual that involved spamming users with virus warnings and blowing up the computer of anyone stupid enough to forward them....
That makes no sense. If they knew the lander was fatally flawed, why wouldn't they change its mission to salvage some research dollars? Maybe adjust its course so it goes into orbit, instead of crashing? Or adjusting its course so it crashes in full view of the Hubble Telescope's cameras?
Imagine if NASA were to call a press conference to announce that the Lander can't land and will be allowed to go into orbit in hopes that they can use it for some other purpose. Or that they'll deliberately crash it to study atmospheric effects. This would have been a much better form of CYA then just going, "Whoops! We lost the Lander, we'll waste a crapload of resources just to make sure we're not wrong, but basically, we're screwed."