It is also true that Microsoft has paid to have "research" done which is more favorable to Microsoft products. Moreover, the "money trail" has often been brought to light AFTER the favorable research has had its first viewing by the public.
Microsoft has some of the best researchers money can buy. I wonder, sometimes, if this is more to keep them "off the market" than it is to use their knowledge. You know, buy your competition and muzzle them.
Doesn't this mean that the system was just over engineered? And that paying the $$$ to buy one is silly, 'cuz you're paying for something you just can't use?
Of course the people don't want war. Why would some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best that he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece?... But after all, it's the leaders of the country who determine the policy, and it's always a simple matter to drag the people along whether it's a democracy, a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism, and exposing the country to greater danger."
If a company's PHB outsources development (and fires employees) to save money, why should it be a surprise when employees leave a company for higher wages?
I guess we gotta beat this one to death... Let me quote from an earlier posting which quotes from IEEE Spectrum magazine (Nov 2004) which we know to be a firey political bunch
The record shows that Mr. Gore did a lot more for your internet connection than you're giving him credit for. Mr. Gore didn't invent networks or protocols or browsers. He gave you commercial-free bandwidth.
The most recent IEEE Spectrum (Nov. 2004) has an article about their success in predicting technology over the past 40 years (it's their 40th anniversary issue). The 1989 entry (pg. 79) is The Internet. The text:
Sometimes all you have to do is unlock the barn door--the hourse will amble out, and the cart will follow. When it came to the horse that would turn into the Internet, Bob Lucky wasn't worried about where it would go--he just wanted to be sure he was along for the ride.
In September 1989, two years before any commercial activity on the Internet and four years before the graphical Web, the plucky Lucky, then a Bell Labs research director and still Spectrum's in-house sage, wrote: "A bill pending before the United States Congress, sponsored by Senator Albert Gore Jr. (D-Tenn), would authorize the construction of a nationwide gigabit network to connect educational and research institutes. The issue that keeps being raised is: what would a user do with a gigabit data link?"
Lucky's answer was simple. "We are not very good at prediciting uses until the actual service becomes available. I am not worried; we will think of something when it happens."
At that time, 56K was sufficient for research; those home users who existed were getting by with 300 to 1440 Baud. (Even today, many users still survive on dial-up.) Of course, someone would have gotten the idea to fund a high speed network for commercial use. However, it almost certainly wouldn't look like the one that got funded for educational and research use, though. Necessarily so, it would have been immediately organized to generate an ROI for the investors who paid for it. Who knows? Maybe SPAM would have been called: COMMERCIAL CONTENT?
Gore's contribution wasn't technical, but if you've been paying attention you'll know that the technical problems are almost always the easiest to solve. The Internet as we know it today wouldn't exist without high bandwidth, inexpensive data pipes, and Mr. Gore generated the cash to have those built. I think he deserves a little credit for the significance of the contribution he made.
I think that '91 comes after '89, even in base 16. So that "internet" you were using and researching while in college stills owes credit to Senator Gore (or so says the IEEE). So come on, give thanks to those damn liberal tree huggers. Come on, you can do it.
And, they'll be technical jobs. Unfortuntely, they'll be jobs trying to help the non-technical decypher and use a bloated, overly constraining system that crashes regularly, but, hey, at least they'll be jobs. And it'll be tough to off-shore 'em because there won't be a network connection (the machine'll be down).
Of course, Microsoft neeeds the money to buy more chairs for Steve to throw.
Let me count the ways... Several have brought up its use as a weapon in a divorce. It would be stupid NOT to do so. Of course, men are far more likely to be screwed by this than women. Of coruse, "liberal" (non god-fearing) men are probably the best targets. Want to destroy the relationships of fathers and their children? I can just hear it.. "That'll teach that prick." or "Won't have to worry about arguments with him anymore." Won't revenge be sweet in Ohio?
Want to screw your potential opponents (in politics, busyness, etc.)? "Hey, i think they're a sex offender." This'll be particularly effective when co-joined with a sexual harassment lawsuit against the company. The best part about this is that the guy'll be terrified of fighting the harassment lawsuit if he's threatened with this branding.
I think there will be really creative uses of this law (and its underlying attitude) that will evolve. The really exciting advances will be to find other offenses they'll be able to label.
"I think he's a terrorist because..." he bought alot of cell phones. Thought the war in Iraq was a mistake. Thinks we should find alternative energy sources to get away from transfering obscene amounts of money into politically unstable regions of the world.
"I think he's a drug addict because... " he had bloodshot eyes that last couple of times i saw him (i think). Said that he thought the "war" on drugs was a method of profits for the industries of law enforcement and incarceration. Thought there were alternative strategies for dealing with use and addictions.
"I think he's a communist becauase..." oh, wait, we already did that one.
"I think he's an online music and movie pirate because... " he runs linux. He has security procedures on his machine to avoid identity theft (and other illegal stuff).
"I think he's bad because... " he's not like me.
"I think he's not a 'murican because..." you get the idea.
In short, anything the intolerant religious majority (of the legislative bodies) want to deem a "detestable but not provably illegal" offense can be fit into this template. I don't know whether i should laugh at their stupidity or cry at the destruction of the civil liberties in this country.
This'll get fixed (but not corrected) when some powerful "christian" representative gets entered onto the list by his wife when she finds out he's been having sex with one of his interns. Unfortunately, it won't be in time to help out the thousands of poor schmoes who have had their life destroyed by such a stupid, stupid law. Or, maybe it'll be busynesses in Ohio who'll object when they start taking significant hits from sexual harassment cases. Serves them right.
There should be some kind of qualifying exam that people have to take before they're able to run for political office. Whoever introduced and voted on this thing clearly have no understanding of the US Constitution and are obviously legislating their favorite religious tome.
Hey, maybe we should bring back stoning to deal with "offenders" like these.
Companies throw out Windows (tm) computers rather than try to remove existing spy-crap on them (NY Times article of April 2006, i believe).
Microsoft itself found 60% of the machines it scanned to be infected with malware.
Non-technical people are almost completely unable to use the damn things because so many software components can break and the OS provides virtually no assistance in correcting errors.
In an interview, Bill himself said that there was no point in fixing program bugs: there's no profit in it. Just generate another crappy version of the code and release it.
As one of the above comments said, the UI for Windows hasn't advanced the art of 26 years ago, and doesn't improve upon UIs from the early days of Xerox Parc.
Bill has made a ridiculous amount of money due to a huge amount of dumb luck (think of the book: "Fooled by Randomness") and by applying dirty corporate techniques to competitors and partners. He gives capitalists a bad name. God help the world if he uses his Microsoft skill set to the management and direction of his charitable foundation.
I forsee the "designated cell phone carrier" who carries a pack of phones so parents are happy. With call forwarding, most parents will be none-the-wiser where their kids are.
This won't work until the phone gets embedded into their kids' skull. Or, perhaps an RFID chip in their arm and a proximity sensor in the phone; yeah, there's the ticket!
Companies (regulated or not) can't care about altruistic value of their work. They only care about the money it saves them.
So, the question is: How can you show that it will save them money to give back to OSS?
If they give back to OSS, it means that they won't have to continually re-integrate their changes into the core. In addition to saving them the obvious expense of the insertion, it also saves them the expense if the core has changed in some way that makes their "enhancement" incompatible. In this later case, they could be looking at a rather large expense in upgrading their systems.
If you don't pay, how are they going afford watching TV?
What are you, some sort of communist?
Ah, kind sir, it is you who displays socialist aires. For i am merely trying to hoard my ill-gotten gains, whereas you are subscribing to a scheme for a re-distribution of (my) wealth based not upon merit, but merely upon whichever corporate nation to which a peasant is indentured.
With social skills like these, is there any wonder why we geeks have problems attracting girl friends?
This makes me think about celebate catholic priests. They're the only intermediaries to the deity (Linux, in our case), but... they're evolutionarily sterile so the meme is less likely to propogate without a mutation in the general population.
The primary Implementation for this will be the ads on DVD's
and the DVD's for TV shows will start including the ads that ran durring the network run.
Perhaps my sarcasm flag had the wrong color and was undetectable. If i've paid to buy both the DVD and the content, why do i need to paid yet a third time to avoid watching the f*cking advertisements? As another poster showed, much of the "anti-piracy" effort by the moguls is driven simply to prevent us from using technology to avoid their advertisements. Imagine.. a felony conviction from attempting to avoid having to watch another ad for Disney's newest release of a 50 year old cartoon.
If M$ is doing this, although the report talks about how it detects "gaming" of pay-per-click behavior, is this a way to determine how to corrupt the monitoring that Google is doing and thus cast doubt upon their revenue model?
The real reason that early Crays were powerful was because they were very fast (high speed devices), and their main memory was SRAMs (very low latency, but smaller in size) instead of DRAMs (high latency, large size), so memory requests were serviced quickly. A friend once said that a Cray was a great lisp machine because it had a low latency memory.
The vector registers were interesting, but only of utility for linear algebra problems (Matrix operations), and then only when the vector sizes were fairly large. Their architectural contribution is overrated.
The parallelism you describe is a result of the attack of the killer micros. There was no way that an innovative architecture could compete against the relentless advances in device technology pursued by Intel and others. Most of the modern tera-flop systems use oodles and oodles of "stock" micros and a high performance interconnect network.
Today, the era of the killer micros is about over. Micro manufacturers can't just speed up their devices because they are already operating close to a limit of device technology. "Multi-core" processors are being built primarily because the manufacturers don't know what else to do. We're also about to start seeing the return of "architecture" to the realm of computing.
I give the keys of a car to a kid. He (er, she) gets a ticket for speeding. Or driving under the influence. Or some other offense. They get a ticket. They do it again. They get another ticket. Fairly quickly they will lose their license. Because, driving is a priviledge.
These kids repeatedly violated the rules of use of the machines. So take the machines away from them! The only unbreakable security strategy is to prevent access to the system.
Each time the machines were returned to these kids constituted a challenge to them to crack the new level of "security". From what is written, it seems obvious that they demonstrated that they know more about computers than the admin at the school district. If the IT admin staff were only part-time (because they have more relevant obligations, like teaching), why shouldn't we expect that they are less informed than a collection of people who can provide "full-time" energy to the activity? Their mistake and criticizable failure was in not taking the student's machines away from them.
Moreover, if i give the keys of a car to a drunk, i suspect (warning: IANAL) then i have liability if that person commits a crime (kills someone with the car, etc.). I believe this falls under aiding and abetting a crime. If the school's admins knew that these people were continually hacking the systems yet continued to provide them with the tools to do so, aren't they also liable?
You're logging onto slashdot 10 times a day? Whew! If i figure you're reading 5 minutes per time, that's about an hour a day. Good thing it's work related.
To me what was much more important than key positions (i.e. QWERTY) or key pressure was the orientation of the hands with respect to the wrists. On a non-split keyboard, the hands are "unnaturally" angled when the hands are in position on the keyboard. The split keyboard aligns the hands with the wrists. For me, that was the significant problem with typing.
I have little doubt that the Dvorak keyboard would enable me to type faster. However, i don't think i actually need more speed. I can't think that fast:-)
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, i guess you're right. Diebold is actually following the time honored tradition of RIAA of suing non-customers.
to sue your customers. Just ask the RIAA.
It is also true that Microsoft has paid to have "research" done which is more favorable to Microsoft products. Moreover, the "money trail" has often been brought to light AFTER the favorable research has had its first viewing by the public.
Microsoft has some of the best researchers money can buy. I wonder, sometimes, if this is more to keep them "off the market" than it is to use their knowledge. You know, buy your competition and muzzle them.
Doesn't this mean that the system was just over engineered? And that paying the $$$ to buy one is silly, 'cuz you're paying for something you just can't use?
http://www.snopes.com/quotes/goering.htm
If a company's PHB outsources development (and fires employees) to save money, why should it be a surprise when employees leave a company for higher wages?
It's all about "the benjamins". Too bad.
Define it away.
I think that '91 comes after '89, even in base 16. So that "internet" you were using and researching while in college stills owes credit to Senator Gore (or so says the IEEE). So come on, give thanks to those damn liberal tree huggers. Come on, you can do it.
Of course, Microsoft neeeds the money to buy more chairs for Steve to throw.
Want to screw your potential opponents (in politics, busyness, etc.)? "Hey, i think they're a sex offender." This'll be particularly effective when co-joined with a sexual harassment lawsuit against the company. The best part about this is that the guy'll be terrified of fighting the harassment lawsuit if he's threatened with this branding.
I think there will be really creative uses of this law (and its underlying attitude) that will evolve. The really exciting advances will be to find other offenses they'll be able to label.
In short, anything the intolerant religious majority (of the legislative bodies) want to deem a "detestable but not provably illegal" offense can be fit into this template. I don't know whether i should laugh at their stupidity or cry at the destruction of the civil liberties in this country.
This'll get fixed (but not corrected) when some powerful "christian" representative gets entered onto the list by his wife when she finds out he's been having sex with one of his interns. Unfortunately, it won't be in time to help out the thousands of poor schmoes who have had their life destroyed by such a stupid, stupid law. Or, maybe it'll be busynesses in Ohio who'll object when they start taking significant hits from sexual harassment cases. Serves them right.
There should be some kind of qualifying exam that people have to take before they're able to run for political office. Whoever introduced and voted on this thing clearly have no understanding of the US Constitution and are obviously legislating their favorite religious tome.
Hey, maybe we should bring back stoning to deal with "offenders" like these.
Who moderated this guy?
Companies throw out Windows (tm) computers rather than try to remove existing spy-crap on them (NY Times article of April 2006, i believe).
Microsoft itself found 60% of the machines it scanned to be infected with malware.
Non-technical people are almost completely unable to use the damn things because so many software components can break and the OS provides virtually no assistance in correcting errors.
In an interview, Bill himself said that there was no point in fixing program bugs: there's no profit in it. Just generate another crappy version of the code and release it.
As one of the above comments said, the UI for Windows hasn't advanced the art of 26 years ago, and doesn't improve upon UIs from the early days of Xerox Parc.
Bill has made a ridiculous amount of money due to a huge amount of dumb luck (think of the book: "Fooled by Randomness") and by applying dirty corporate techniques to competitors and partners. He gives capitalists a bad name. God help the world if he uses his Microsoft skill set to the management and direction of his charitable foundation.
This won't work until the phone gets embedded into their kids' skull. Or, perhaps an RFID chip in their arm and a proximity sensor in the phone; yeah, there's the ticket!
So, the question is: How can you show that it will save them money to give back to OSS?
If they give back to OSS, it means that they won't have to continually re-integrate their changes into the core. In addition to saving them the obvious expense of the insertion, it also saves them the expense if the core has changed in some way that makes their "enhancement" incompatible. In this later case, they could be looking at a rather large expense in upgrading their systems.
Ah, kind sir, it is you who displays socialist aires. For i am merely trying to hoard my ill-gotten gains, whereas you are subscribing to a scheme for a re-distribution of (my) wealth based not upon merit, but merely upon whichever corporate nation to which a peasant is indentured.
This makes me think about celebate catholic priests. They're the only intermediaries to the deity (Linux, in our case), but ... they're evolutionarily sterile so the meme is less likely to propogate without a mutation in the general population.
Makes me consider priests in a whole new light.
working.
Perhaps my sarcasm flag had the wrong color and was undetectable. If i've paid to buy both the DVD and the content, why do i need to paid yet a third time to avoid watching the f*cking advertisements? As another poster showed, much of the "anti-piracy" effort by the moguls is driven simply to prevent us from using technology to avoid their advertisements. Imagine .. a felony conviction from attempting to avoid having to watch another ad for Disney's newest release of a 50 year old cartoon.
I thought the small fee was to buy the DVD player and the movie.
Tesla was just another guy ... who got screwed by Edison.
Nahhhh. What was i thinking?
I'll vote for that.
The vector registers were interesting, but only of utility for linear algebra problems (Matrix operations), and then only when the vector sizes were fairly large. Their architectural contribution is overrated.
The parallelism you describe is a result of the attack of the killer micros . There was no way that an innovative architecture could compete against the relentless advances in device technology pursued by Intel and others. Most of the modern tera-flop systems use oodles and oodles of "stock" micros and a high performance interconnect network.
Today, the era of the killer micros is about over. Micro manufacturers can't just speed up their devices because they are already operating close to a limit of device technology. "Multi-core" processors are being built primarily because the manufacturers don't know what else to do. We're also about to start seeing the return of "architecture" to the realm of computing.
These kids repeatedly violated the rules of use of the machines. So take the machines away from them! The only unbreakable security strategy is to prevent access to the system.
Each time the machines were returned to these kids constituted a challenge to them to crack the new level of "security". From what is written, it seems obvious that they demonstrated that they know more about computers than the admin at the school district. If the IT admin staff were only part-time (because they have more relevant obligations, like teaching), why shouldn't we expect that they are less informed than a collection of people who can provide "full-time" energy to the activity? Their mistake and criticizable failure was in not taking the student's machines away from them.
Moreover, if i give the keys of a car to a drunk, i suspect (warning: IANAL) then i have liability if that person commits a crime (kills someone with the car, etc.). I believe this falls under aiding and abetting a crime. If the school's admins knew that these people were continually hacking the systems yet continued to provide them with the tools to do so, aren't they also liable?
You're logging onto slashdot 10 times a day? Whew! If i figure you're reading 5 minutes per time, that's about an hour a day. Good thing it's work related.
I have little doubt that the Dvorak keyboard would enable me to type faster. However, i don't think i actually need more speed. I can't think that fast :-)