There are inherent dangers of this level of linkage. One week,
person clicks link X: "We are at war with eurasia",
next week, clicks the same link "We were never at war with eurasia".
No one else see this?
Uh... yeah, but that's not inherent to data linking, that's inherent to digital information. Electronic data is mutable and therefore evanescent in nature. Period.
The entire history of digital information storage is a dialectic between data's innate mutability and the need for enduring records. Data linking is a (single) step toward the latter end of the continuum.
One problem -- from a business perspective -- of linking data in a machine-understandable way is that it makes it much easier for third parties to use that data. At first that may seem like a good thing, but for many companies the data are the entire business.
It's true that data linking is detrimental to some business models. That is a weakness in the business models, not in data linking. They're victim to the classic fallacy that data is worth more as a secret than when it's shared.
The simple fact is that if they don't link such data usefully the next person will, or a more amenable source will be found. The only thing that can slow this process is:
a) Not to share the data with anyone, or to do so with such restrictions as to lessen its value in the first place; or
b) To convince every single party that uses this data that it should never be linked, either individually (possible, but not likely to endure) or in aggregate with other data (highly unlikely).
Conversely, processing the data such that it can be finely sliced and diced and freely shared is extremely valuable to the system overall. Unfortunately, Mr. Smith in all his wisdom didn't consider gift economies and economies of wealth when he wrote the Wealth of Nations.
Graham Cluley...declined to identify the site, saying only that it was dedicated to open source software.
Begging the question
Raising the question
No, I think 'begging' was appropriate, because Microsoft, by being just glib enough to mention that it was a FOSS site, but too coy to name it, manages to create the suspicion that any FOSS site might be spreading malware to their poor defenceless XP clients.
Very lawyerly, indeed. And a fine example of Begging the Question -albeit without actually asking a question. 8^)
The vast majority of movies either lose money or break even, so the big studios subsidize them with the profits made by the big hits. Picking a single very successful movie and trying to make an argument about the entire industry then isn't going to work.
Okay, let's take another metric that does (or should) reflect the state of the movie industry: Barry Diller.
I first paid attention to him when his 3 masted yacht - one of the largest private yachts in the world - arrived in our harbour a couple of months ago. He was chairman and CEO of Paramount, and later head of Fox Broadcasting (including 20th Century Fox). When he left, he received (IIRC) a US $400+ million payout.
Perhaps you could reconcile the supposed impoverishment of the movie studios to the benefits reaped by their illustrious leaders?
I'm actually not trying to be a smart-ass here (not entirely, anyway). If there really is a way to explain how an executive could legitimately receive such an immense payout in reward for his service to an industry that scratches by from blockbuster to blockbuster, how an apparently moribund industry could even manage to have that kind of equity... well, I'm entirely open to persuasion.
... says the guy that can't get his PHP page to function without error.
... And can't see the problem with a first page that has two graphics of questionable value and only 5 paragraphs, in which only one single (unsupported) assertion is made.
I'm surprised he didn't include a Flash game and maybe a poll or two.
Feh, I'll come back as soon as the author graduates from 1rst grade. In the mean time, somebody get the kid some candy to shut him up.
C'mon, it is exactly in a "developing" country where you will find real freedom.
If by freedom, you mean freedom from government services, including police, education and health services, then yes, you'd be right.
I live in a country with a lot of freedom as defined above. Trust me, the malaria, dengue, lack of dentists and occasional outbreaks of mob violence make it a taste that few would willingly acquire, given the choice....
You can get the 48 light deal and setup a grid of lights to provide night time lighting for six hours and you won't have to pay the electricity bill.
But will anyone in the developing countries know or care about this?
Er, yes and yes.
I live in the developing world and a family to whom I'm quite close have two solar-powered lanterns already. They use them for illumination as well as to light their roadside shop in the evenings. The lamp also has a plug for mobile phones and a mini-USB connector. Its solar panels are significantly larger than this light bulb's and they're all on one side, so you can use them all at once.
The lanterns are pretty expensive by local standards - almost a week's pay. But they're much cheaper to own and way more effective at lighting than kerosene (which is the 'other' means of illumination around here) that everyone wants one. Demand is high enough that a local micro-finance agency just bought a container-load of them to sell.
These lightbulbs, frankly, are kind of old news. Neat, but only riffing on stuff we've been doing for a couple/three years now....
We've still got people like Horacio Gutierrez (Corporate Vice President and Deputy General Counsel) making statements like this:
...Open innovation is only possible through the licensing of third party IP rights, which ensures that those who develop the building blocks that make a new technology possible are properly compensated for their investments in research and development. After all, technology just doesn’t appear, fully-developed, from Zeus’s head. It requires lots of hard work and resources to create....
Mr. Gutierrez would do well to choose better classical allusions. He refers to the birth myth of Athena, who sprung fully formed from Zeus' head, and uses it to explain how such a process could never happen with so-called Intellectual Property.
Athena was the goddess of knowledge and learning, and her appearance, fully formed, from the mind of Zeus was a deliberate reference to the nature of wisdom. So, in effect, Gutierrez has said, "Great ideas don't just spring fully formed from the collective mind, as described in this story about ideas springing fully formed from the collective mind."
Hate to tell you, Mr. Gutierrez, but apparently they do. And have done throughout recorded human history.
(Yes, I know: his real point was that technology costs money. But that's what hardware sales and services are for.)
Someone mod this man up! I totally agree that blaming the OS is a bit passe, but Autorun is also the worst "feature" I've ever encountered - "Oh, you plugged something in that has a filesystem I understand? And an executable it wants me to run? Ok."
Who's blaming the OS? We're blaming the company that made the OS. The same company, by the way, that brought us ActiveX in Internet Explorer, executable attachments in Outlook, Word Document viruses, IIS prior to 7, and 'run as Administrator by default'.
Dumb.
Dumb, indeed.
(I'm not even going to get into the myriad other objectionable actions and statements that they've indulged in since the beginning of the '90s. They're not germane to this discussion.)
I'm 35 years old, I've been fed up with Microsoft since about Windows XP SP2 although previously not much of a fan before that.
But at this point it's just like you guys are picking on the autistic kid.
We get it. Microsoft sucks. Give it back it's helmet.
I don't know about the rest of the world, but I'll leave Microsoft alone when it starts leaving me alone.
Microsoft may be autistic, but that's not why we pick on it. We pick on it because it's also crazy and occasionally a little scary. But mostly we pick on it because we all know it's the crazy, scary autistic kid, but nobody else seems to see the problem in that.
For every "unlocked" phone that allows you to install unsigned software, yes. That's the price you pay for unlocked hardware.
Can you explain precisely what you mean when you use the term 'unlocked'? You're almost certainly wrong no matter which sense you use it in, but I want to make sure I refute the proper argument. 8^)
Okay, seriously: The valid part of your statement is your mention of 'unsigned software', which I take to mean the Microsoft approach of allowing all comers with little more than a 'caveat emptor' to protect the person who installs it. If that's the case, then yes, it is a design liability.
But even then, it's not inconceivable that a phone maker could sandbox all applications and police the hardware itself, showing the user explicitly what each app is doing, or autonomously applying certain sane rules.
There's no doubt, however, that having central repositories is a useful element in overall system security. Linux and Apple have demonstrated that fairly well.
But none of that has to have anything whatsoever to do with whether the phone is 'locked' or not. In fact, I can't really see how tying the phone to a particular vendor (that is what you mean, right?) has anything whatsoever to do with security. If experience is any guide, this would be counter-productive, because it would encourage vendors not only to go their own way, but to build walls between their respective implementations. Apple notwithstanding, historically these companies handle security very poorly because they see it as a cost centre rather than a baseline requirement.
"...third-party influentials and industry leaders like Cisco tell us regularly that our focus and investment continues to surpass others."
Focus and investment. Notice "results" aren't on that list.
SECURITY ANALYST: WTF? You invest billions and billions of dollars trying to fix your software, and this is the best you can do? Christ on a kebab, man! Do your developers even know how to tie their own shoelaces? What do they do, sit their slack-jawed at their desks all day, watching the grass die on their Farmville plots and pissing their pants because they can't even remember where the toilet is?
MS MARKETING PERSON:sotto voce Hmmm, billions spent... developers unable to leave desks... Ah! [WRITING] "industry leaders tell us regularly that our focus and investment continues to surpass others."
Tens of millions of Farmville players would like to disagree.
Okay, seriously: As near as anyone can tell, organised human society became possible with the rise of agrarian societies, so stewardship and resource management are rather central to the human condition.
You need to read your own link! What the GP is talking about is not indentured servitude. There is no forced period of employment.
He's saying that people should have to work for their welfare checks. Is that really so onerous? I don't think so. I don't even think it is that new a concept...
Most of us call it a job.
No, it's called forced labour and it always ends in abuse. Read your history before recreating its worst excesses, please.
Let's empty our prison cells, our ghetto projects, and everyplace else we are warehousing deadbeat do-nothing bums, and put them to work.
Either this modest little proposal of yours is a case of an epically poor sense of the mechanics of satire, or you're actually serious about this. Forgive me if I assume that it's the latter.
Before you embark on the journey towards that lofty goal, you might want to do a bit of research into this historical social phenomenon called Indentured Servitude and workhouses. They were, after all, some of the means by which the US economy operated in its early days. (The other was slavery, but that meddler Lincoln made sure we'd never get that back.)
You know, Charles Dickens, the Methodist movement and entire generations of the best and brightest in England, Europe and North America devoted their lives to ending this practice. If they knew you were proposing it again, they'd no doubt be rolling in their graves.
Shame on you for even considering this. Shame too on the moderator(s) who thought this was in any way insightful.
Yes, I am surprised. In one really important regard:
That NYT piece is an excellent piece of reporting. It gets to the facts - some of which are decidedly uncomfortable for both the government & BP and many of which required considerable research and effort - it ties everything nicely together and, without commentary, innuendo or logical fallacy, manages to paint a compelling picture of corporate and bureaucratic laxity.
Congratulations to Brown and Lehren for an excellent and important piece of work. This kind of journalism is exactly what we need.
Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, and Mark Zuckerberg did not complete their University degrees. They are all smarter and more worldly from than you and many of the rest of us who spent four years in the ivory tower.
Wow, it's interesting that you use three really unsavoury examples of pathological behaviour whose only uniting characteristic is that they achieved wealth via technology. They are none of them near the pinnacle of brilliance, insight, ethics or morality or even the advancement of knowledge.
Honestly, is this were the only alternative, I'd choose the Ivory Tower. It might reduce my impact on humanity but, given these shining examples of leadership, I'd consider that a good thing. What genuinely thoughtful and perceptive person would want that kind of legacy on their head?
I doubt Allied cares who leases the bandwidth. And I would be surprised if they managed to build more than the combined purchasing power of the incumbents can afford to lease.
All true, of course, but here's the cool part:
If the incumbents were to buy out Allied's entire capacity, they'd effectively be funding it to build more.
Given that capitalisation is the hardest part of the roll-out process, having your competitors effectively subsidising the growth of your network as part of a plan to make you fail... surely, that would provide at least a few moments of delightful schadenfreude.
The education minister wasn't buying into any of this.
The push for Windows and Office came from him.
Bullshit. The push for Windows and Office may have been channeled through the Minister, that's true. But it came from the vested interests in the Education establishment, for a number of reasons. Some of those reasons were valid; most of them were just good, old-fashioned vested-interest conservatism in the face of change.
XP is still a solid operating system and currently has the highest market share.
One of those statements is true. One is false. Will our hero find the truth before time runs out and the Internet drowns him in a torrent of malicious bytes?
Tune in next week for the gripping season finale of... IE6: How the Might Have Fallen.
I think more accurately, if we were prepared for it, it wouldn't be a disaster.
Not entirely true. Cyclones are largely predictable and (in my part of the world, at least) we do take steps to prepare for them. They are, nonetheless, disastrous when they strike.
But what I'd like to know -and what McAllister conveniently forgets to mention- is: "What, exactly, constitutes a 'True Data Disaster?"
Are we talking about a data leak that effectively kills a company's credibility dead? I don't think so, because if incompetence or data mismanagement had any kind of real-world relationship with a company's success, Microsoft, Amazon, Heartland Payment Systems and dozens of others would at very least have suffered losses in stock value following their colossally poor management practices.
Are we talking criminal abuse of private information? If that were the case, then Microsoft, Yahoo! and all the nation's telcos (save Qwest) should be facing an imminent demise because of their complicity in the unconstitutional breach of their customers' privacy in the US Government's domestic spying programme.
Are we talking straight-up data loss? If so, then Microsoft (hmm, that name keeps coming up) should have taken a dive when they managed quite literally to lose all of Danger Networks' data.
Or are we talking non-performance and generalised uselessness on a scale that beggars comprehension? If that were the case, then why do large consultancies still manage to win multi-million dollar contracts that suck up centuries of developer time and never actually deliver a thing? Think of the FBI's famous foray into modernisation, the now-legendary death of the UK's online medical database and any of a dozen other projects that ended up entirely written off (to the tune of 100s of millions each) without so much as a downward tick in the value of the contracting companies involved.
No, I'm afraid that Data Disasters don't exist, because we don't want to believe they exist. It seems that in the esoteric world of noughts and ones, belief matters far more than empirical truth, making a true Data Disaster literally inconceivable.
There can't be a Data Disaster today, because we can't imagine what one would look like. Likewise, there won't be a Data Disaster until we become capable of realising that they're all around us, happening every day.
(perhaps they just don't think they'll ever profit from malaria drugs, etc)
And there you have it. Most of the countries where Malaria is prevalent are not rich countries. However, most people have heard the word Malaria and, even if they don't know what it is or how you get it, this announcement sounds impressive to them. Dengue Fever is also common in many of the areas of the world where Malaria is but they aren't releasing that research. Why? Because no one has heard of it so it's not an effective PR stunt.
The other reason for not releasing research on Dengue is that there is currently no treatment available whatsoever (unless you count liquids and Panadol to reduce the fever).
Being the first company to provide a viable treatment is a very attractive prospect. I know this because I just got over a bout of Dengue a couple of months ago, and I would have paid really good money for a treatment. In fact, when I was waiting for my blood test results, I quietly prayed that I had malaria, because although it's a bitch, with treatment it's over quickly. Dengue just has to run its course.
So yes: No profit from malaria? Open source it. Big profit from Dengue? Keep your cards to your chest.
Slashdot Mirror
There are inherent dangers of this level of linkage. One week,
person clicks link X: "We are at war with eurasia",
next week, clicks the same link "We were never at war with eurasia".
No one else see this?
Uh... yeah, but that's not inherent to data linking, that's inherent to digital information. Electronic data is mutable and therefore evanescent in nature. Period.
The entire history of digital information storage is a dialectic between data's innate mutability and the need for enduring records. Data linking is a (single) step toward the latter end of the continuum.
It's true that data linking is detrimental to some business models. That is a weakness in the business models, not in data linking. They're victim to the classic fallacy that data is worth more as a secret than when it's shared.
The simple fact is that if they don't link such data usefully the next person will, or a more amenable source will be found. The only thing that can slow this process is:
a) Not to share the data with anyone, or to do so with such restrictions as to lessen its value in the first place; or
b) To convince every single party that uses this data that it should never be linked, either individually (possible, but not likely to endure) or in aggregate with other data (highly unlikely).
Conversely, processing the data such that it can be finely sliced and diced and freely shared is extremely valuable to the system overall. Unfortunately, Mr. Smith in all his wisdom didn't consider gift economies and economies of wealth when he wrote the Wealth of Nations.
Graham Cluley...declined to identify the site, saying only that it was dedicated to open source software.
Begging the question
Raising the question
No, I think 'begging' was appropriate, because Microsoft, by being just glib enough to mention that it was a FOSS site, but too coy to name it, manages to create the suspicion that any FOSS site might be spreading malware to their poor defenceless XP clients.
Very lawyerly, indeed. And a fine example of Begging the Question -albeit without actually asking a question. 8^)
A day that will live in Ormandy.
Too soon
Too soon
The 15th of June...
(Apologies to Guy Fawkes.)
Okay, let's take another metric that does (or should) reflect the state of the movie industry: Barry Diller.
I first paid attention to him when his 3 masted yacht - one of the largest private yachts in the world - arrived in our harbour a couple of months ago. He was chairman and CEO of Paramount, and later head of Fox Broadcasting (including 20th Century Fox). When he left, he received (IIRC) a US $400+ million payout.
Perhaps you could reconcile the supposed impoverishment of the movie studios to the benefits reaped by their illustrious leaders?
I'm actually not trying to be a smart-ass here (not entirely, anyway). If there really is a way to explain how an executive could legitimately receive such an immense payout in reward for his service to an industry that scratches by from blockbuster to blockbuster, how an apparently moribund industry could even manage to have that kind of equity... well, I'm entirely open to persuasion.
... says the guy that can't get his PHP page to function without error.
... And can't see the problem with a first page that has two graphics of questionable value and only 5 paragraphs, in which only one single (unsupported) assertion is made.
I'm surprised he didn't include a Flash game and maybe a poll or two.
Feh, I'll come back as soon as the author graduates from 1rst grade. In the mean time, somebody get the kid some candy to shut him up.
If by freedom, you mean freedom from government services, including police, education and health services, then yes, you'd be right.
I live in a country with a lot of freedom as defined above. Trust me, the malaria, dengue, lack of dentists and occasional outbreaks of mob violence make it a taste that few would willingly acquire, given the choice....
You can get the 48 light deal and setup a grid of lights to provide night time lighting for six hours and you won't have to pay the electricity bill.
But will anyone in the developing countries know or care about this?
Er, yes and yes.
I live in the developing world and a family to whom I'm quite close have two solar-powered lanterns already. They use them for illumination as well as to light their roadside shop in the evenings. The lamp also has a plug for mobile phones and a mini-USB connector. Its solar panels are significantly larger than this light bulb's and they're all on one side, so you can use them all at once.
The lanterns are pretty expensive by local standards - almost a week's pay. But they're much cheaper to own and way more effective at lighting than kerosene (which is the 'other' means of illumination around here) that everyone wants one. Demand is high enough that a local micro-finance agency just bought a container-load of them to sell.
These lightbulbs, frankly, are kind of old news. Neat, but only riffing on stuff we've been doing for a couple/three years now....
We've still got people like Horacio Gutierrez (Corporate Vice President and Deputy General Counsel) making statements like this:
...Open innovation is only possible through the licensing of third party IP rights, which ensures that those who develop the building blocks that make a new technology possible are properly compensated for their investments in research and development. After all, technology just doesn’t appear, fully-developed, from Zeus’s head. It requires lots of hard work and resources to create....
Mr. Gutierrez would do well to choose better classical allusions. He refers to the birth myth of Athena, who sprung fully formed from Zeus' head, and uses it to explain how such a process could never happen with so-called Intellectual Property.
Athena was the goddess of knowledge and learning, and her appearance, fully formed, from the mind of Zeus was a deliberate reference to the nature of wisdom. So, in effect, Gutierrez has said, "Great ideas don't just spring fully formed from the collective mind, as described in this story about ideas springing fully formed from the collective mind."
Hate to tell you, Mr. Gutierrez, but apparently they do. And have done throughout recorded human history.
(Yes, I know: his real point was that technology costs money. But that's what hardware sales and services are for.)
Someone mod this man up! I totally agree that blaming the OS is a bit passe, but Autorun is also the worst "feature" I've ever encountered - "Oh, you plugged something in that has a filesystem I understand? And an executable it wants me to run? Ok."
Who's blaming the OS? We're blaming the company that made the OS. The same company, by the way, that brought us ActiveX in Internet Explorer, executable attachments in Outlook, Word Document viruses, IIS prior to 7, and 'run as Administrator by default'.
Dumb, indeed.
(I'm not even going to get into the myriad other objectionable actions and statements that they've indulged in since the beginning of the '90s. They're not germane to this discussion.)
I'm 35 years old, I've been fed up with Microsoft since about Windows XP SP2 although previously not much of a fan before that.
But at this point it's just like you guys are picking on the autistic kid.
We get it. Microsoft sucks. Give it back it's helmet.
I don't know about the rest of the world, but I'll leave Microsoft alone when it starts leaving me alone.
Microsoft may be autistic, but that's not why we pick on it. We pick on it because it's also crazy and occasionally a little scary. But mostly we pick on it because we all know it's the crazy, scary autistic kid, but nobody else seems to see the problem in that.
Can you explain precisely what you mean when you use the term 'unlocked'? You're almost certainly wrong no matter which sense you use it in, but I want to make sure I refute the proper argument. 8^)
Okay, seriously: The valid part of your statement is your mention of 'unsigned software', which I take to mean the Microsoft approach of allowing all comers with little more than a 'caveat emptor' to protect the person who installs it. If that's the case, then yes, it is a design liability.
But even then, it's not inconceivable that a phone maker could sandbox all applications and police the hardware itself, showing the user explicitly what each app is doing, or autonomously applying certain sane rules.
There's no doubt, however, that having central repositories is a useful element in overall system security. Linux and Apple have demonstrated that fairly well.
But none of that has to have anything whatsoever to do with whether the phone is 'locked' or not. In fact, I can't really see how tying the phone to a particular vendor (that is what you mean, right?) has anything whatsoever to do with security. If experience is any guide, this would be counter-productive, because it would encourage vendors not only to go their own way, but to build walls between their respective implementations. Apple notwithstanding, historically these companies handle security very poorly because they see it as a cost centre rather than a baseline requirement.
... Or did you mean 'jail broken'?
Nice zero content marketingspeak there:
"...third-party influentials and industry leaders like Cisco tell us regularly that our focus and investment continues to surpass others."
Focus and investment. Notice "results" aren't on that list.
SECURITY ANALYST: WTF? You invest billions and billions of dollars trying to fix your software, and this is the best you can do? Christ on a kebab, man! Do your developers even know how to tie their own shoelaces? What do they do, sit their slack-jawed at their desks all day, watching the grass die on their Farmville plots and pissing their pants because they can't even remember where the toilet is?
MS MARKETING PERSON: sotto voce Hmmm, billions spent... developers unable to leave desks... Ah!
[WRITING] "industry leaders tell us regularly that our focus and investment continues to surpass others."
by design; we do not conserve, we consume.
Tens of millions of Farmville players would like to disagree.
Okay, seriously: As near as anyone can tell, organised human society became possible with the rise of agrarian societies, so stewardship and resource management are rather central to the human condition.
Sounds like an excellent way to spread disinformation.....even better than say.....the New York Times.
You know, even as recently as the salad days of my youth, I could have labeled you a troll for writing that about the NYT.
Now, alas, all I can do is nod my head sadly in agreement.
That book -even the review of it- was way too verbose.
Here is everything any beginner will ever to know about using Joomla:
DON'T
You need to read your own link! What the GP is talking about is not indentured servitude. There is no forced period of employment.
He's saying that people should have to work for their welfare checks. Is that really so onerous? I don't think so. I don't even think it is that new a concept...
Most of us call it a job.
No, it's called forced labour and it always ends in abuse. Read your history before recreating its worst excesses, please.
Either this modest little proposal of yours is a case of an epically poor sense of the mechanics of satire, or you're actually serious about this. Forgive me if I assume that it's the latter.
Before you embark on the journey towards that lofty goal, you might want to do a bit of research into this historical social phenomenon called Indentured Servitude and workhouses. They were, after all, some of the means by which the US economy operated in its early days. (The other was slavery, but that meddler Lincoln made sure we'd never get that back.)
You know, Charles Dickens, the Methodist movement and entire generations of the best and brightest in England, Europe and North America devoted their lives to ending this practice. If they knew you were proposing it again, they'd no doubt be rolling in their graves.
Shame on you for even considering this. Shame too on the moderator(s) who thought this was in any way insightful.
Does this really surprise anyone?
Yes, I am surprised. In one really important regard:
That NYT piece is an excellent piece of reporting. It gets to the facts - some of which are decidedly uncomfortable for both the government & BP and many of which required considerable research and effort - it ties everything nicely together and, without commentary, innuendo or logical fallacy, manages to paint a compelling picture of corporate and bureaucratic laxity.
Congratulations to Brown and Lehren for an excellent and important piece of work. This kind of journalism is exactly what we need.
Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, and Mark Zuckerberg did not complete their University degrees. They are all smarter and more worldly from than you and many of the rest of us who spent four years in the ivory tower.
Wow, it's interesting that you use three really unsavoury examples of pathological behaviour whose only uniting characteristic is that they achieved wealth via technology. They are none of them near the pinnacle of brilliance, insight, ethics or morality or even the advancement of knowledge.
Honestly, is this were the only alternative, I'd choose the Ivory Tower. It might reduce my impact on humanity but, given these shining examples of leadership, I'd consider that a good thing. What genuinely thoughtful and perceptive person would want that kind of legacy on their head?
I doubt Allied cares who leases the bandwidth. And I would be surprised if they managed to build more than the combined purchasing power of the incumbents can afford to lease.
All true, of course, but here's the cool part:
If the incumbents were to buy out Allied's entire capacity, they'd effectively be funding it to build more.
Given that capitalisation is the hardest part of the roll-out process, having your competitors effectively subsidising the growth of your network as part of a plan to make you fail... surely, that would provide at least a few moments of delightful schadenfreude.
Bullshit. The push for Windows and Office may have been channeled through the Minister, that's true. But it came from the vested interests in the Education establishment, for a number of reasons. Some of those reasons were valid; most of them were just good, old-fashioned vested-interest conservatism in the face of change.
One of those statements is true. One is false. Will our hero find the truth before time runs out and the Internet drowns him in a torrent of malicious bytes?
Tune in next week for the gripping season finale of... IE6: How the Might Have Fallen.
I think more accurately, if we were prepared for it, it wouldn't be a disaster.
Not entirely true. Cyclones are largely predictable and (in my part of the world, at least) we do take steps to prepare for them. They are, nonetheless, disastrous when they strike.
But what I'd like to know -and what McAllister conveniently forgets to mention- is: "What, exactly, constitutes a 'True Data Disaster?"
Are we talking about a data leak that effectively kills a company's credibility dead? I don't think so, because if incompetence or data mismanagement had any kind of real-world relationship with a company's success, Microsoft, Amazon, Heartland Payment Systems and dozens of others would at very least have suffered losses in stock value following their colossally poor management practices.
Are we talking criminal abuse of private information? If that were the case, then Microsoft, Yahoo! and all the nation's telcos (save Qwest) should be facing an imminent demise because of their complicity in the unconstitutional breach of their customers' privacy in the US Government's domestic spying programme.
Are we talking straight-up data loss? If so, then Microsoft (hmm, that name keeps coming up) should have taken a dive when they managed quite literally to lose all of Danger Networks' data.
Or are we talking non-performance and generalised uselessness on a scale that beggars comprehension? If that were the case, then why do large consultancies still manage to win multi-million dollar contracts that suck up centuries of developer time and never actually deliver a thing? Think of the FBI's famous foray into modernisation, the now-legendary death of the UK's online medical database and any of a dozen other projects that ended up entirely written off (to the tune of 100s of millions each) without so much as a downward tick in the value of the contracting companies involved.
No, I'm afraid that Data Disasters don't exist, because we don't want to believe they exist. It seems that in the esoteric world of noughts and ones, belief matters far more than empirical truth, making a true Data Disaster literally inconceivable.
There can't be a Data Disaster today, because we can't imagine what one would look like. Likewise, there won't be a Data Disaster until we become capable of realising that they're all around us, happening every day.
(perhaps they just don't think they'll ever profit from malaria drugs, etc)
And there you have it. Most of the countries where Malaria is prevalent are not rich countries. However, most people have heard the word Malaria and, even if they don't know what it is or how you get it, this announcement sounds impressive to them. Dengue Fever is also common in many of the areas of the world where Malaria is but they aren't releasing that research. Why? Because no one has heard of it so it's not an effective PR stunt.
The other reason for not releasing research on Dengue is that there is currently no treatment available whatsoever (unless you count liquids and Panadol to reduce the fever).
Being the first company to provide a viable treatment is a very attractive prospect. I know this because I just got over a bout of Dengue a couple of months ago, and I would have paid really good money for a treatment. In fact, when I was waiting for my blood test results, I quietly prayed that I had malaria, because although it's a bitch, with treatment it's over quickly. Dengue just has to run its course.
So yes: No profit from malaria? Open source it. Big profit from Dengue? Keep your cards to your chest.