"Has it ever occured to you or anyone else that these people you are going to try to sell $100 laptops to have no use for a laptop, for MS Windows, or for open sourced?"
Yes, it has occurred to me. So I went and checked. I didn't just ask people 'Do you want a cheap computer?', I spent a year travelling through a developing country assessing their priority needs. I spent another year setting up community-owned computer centres where people can use computers for about a dollar an hour. There are full every minute of the day. One computer centre has 4 computers and over 250 students signed up for this term alone. The service is expensive for them, but they love it. I'm currently working on another project to replicate this effort throughout the South Pacific.
Unfortunately, a lot of people fall victim to the same kind of binary logic that you use above. Since when does buying farm implements or providing food aid preclude spending a few dollars on education and employment opportunities? Is it absolutely unimaginable that we could do both?
"If you GAVE it to them, they would sell it for $60 to buy some better farming equipment or some shoes for their kids."
Bull. Selling a computer is like selling the milk cow. You're sacrificing your (and your children's) future for quick profit today. Although every society the world over has its own quota of short-sighted people, I can tell you from personal experience that inexpensive computers have value, and they improve living conditions where they are available. I can also tell you from direct experience that most people recognise this and are committed to their children's future.
Do you know what the number one spending priority is in the developing country where I live? It's school fees. Every single parent I've spoken with cares about nothing more than ensuring a better future for their children. Many parents hold public fund-raisers on behalf of their children in order to keep them in school. Living a life of abject poverty does not mean that people aren't capable of forgoing immediate gratification in favour of a better long-term solution.
I won't deny for a second that every society has its share of short-sighted people who want flashy new toys without really considering their worth or the cost of owning and using something as sophisticated as a computer. But that's where volunteers like me and the dozens of other working here come in. I've been training unemployed youth in computer repair, maintenance and configuration. They're now earning a modest but viable living providing support services to others. One of them is training the next group of apprentices, too.
There is nothing more important to learning than access to information and the time to study it. Having a computer in the home makes both of those available. I can say from experience that this laptop initiative is enlightened and will almost certainly have a direct and positive effect on the lives of the recipients.
GP: "Once the Chinese market has matured, investors will think of American and the EU as they today think of Luxembourg and Jamaica."
Parent: "Extremely unlikely."
Agreed, but not for the same reasons you offer. Every time I see people writing about the 'China Market', I want to repeat the words a friend of mine (and professional China expert) said to me:
There Is No China Market
The China Market is a fiction. It is a fanciful conception of how market forces can be imposed on China, promoted by wild-eyed capitalists trying to find the next Gold Rush. The government of China does nothing to dissuade them, because it has the salutary effect of causing major corporate leaders to fawn over them, bestowing loss leader after loss leader in vain pursuit of the billion-plus imaginary 'consumers' that await them if they can only get into the proper, er, position.
Before anyone attempts to slap me with their Invisible Hand, I'd recommend the position of power from which the Chinese government - and in particular the People's Liberation Army, which is the largest property owner in China - negotiates:
Microsoft has willingly exposed its crown jewel - the Windows XP code base - to the government in order to allay their fears about security. To my knowledge, this privilege has never been extended to any other party, ever.
Microsoft, Yahoo! and even Google have been willing to breach basic human rights in order to be allowed to do business there. The choices that the government is offering consist, in effect, of 'my way or the highway'. There are few other countries who succeed with this kind of gambit, usually because there's always someone more brib^H^H^H^Hbiddable a few doors down. This is emphatically not the case in China. You bribe who they tell you to bribe and no one else, if you know what's good for you.
In almost every commercial agreement that China negotiates, there are conditions that require the emplyment and training of local staff to deliver and maintain the product. This is common in many countries, but never so well enforced as in China. One large telecom that I worked for was not allowed to touch their switches once they'd been installed.
The thing that people forget about China is that this is not an emerging nation. It has a very long history, and has dealt with the issues of governing a huge populace for longer than just about any other nation. The Chinese take a long view of things and they are just as ruthless in business as they are in government.
There is a reason that China has always been known to the Chinese as the Middle Kingdom. If they decide to trade with barbarians now and then, that's all well and good. But don't for a moment think they can't stop whenever they like.
"The system we've currently established is that drug manufacturers outlay a truly phenomenal amount of money to develop and test any particular drug. They do this on the assumption that they will, in the future, be able to charge good money for the results of their research. If they can't charge for it in the future, there's no incentive for them to develop new drugs today."
You're right that that's the rationale used to justify the state of things today. And if it had any relation to current practice I'd be prone to agree with you. Unfortunately, there are a few minor data points that tend to indicate the reasoning you outline above consists mostly of horse waste:
Drug companies spend roughly twice as much on promotion and marketing as they do on research and development. The trend recently has been a reduction in R&D relative to spending on marketing and, interestingly, executive remuneration.
Drug companies are notorious for milking the patent system for every dime it can be made to produce. One of the most notorious (ab)uses of the US patent system is the ability to win new patents on existing drugs by demonstrating another use for the drug. Unfortunately, a patent is a patent is a patent, so the drug remains inaccessible to generic drug makers for the original use as well for another X years.
The current scandal in the FDA is demonstrating to us that drug companies will go to extreme lengths, including endangering the lives of their customers, in order to sell medications. The FDA has effectively been gutted by 'business-friendly' processes that, among other things. stop FDA scientists from even commenting on the effectiveness of any drug they review.
Drug research is expensive - nobody argues that. What is arguable, however, is how ethically pharmaceutical companies have acquitted their important social role. On that count, it seems that they've failed miserably, and, just as a criminal deserves to have his legal rights restricted, they deserve to have their patent rights restricted unless they demonstrate that they will not abuse this trust.
I'll be recording the proceedings of a week-long conference on the tiny island of Maevo in Vanuatu at the start of next month. The place is largely undeveloped and power is a major concern of mine.
A friend of mine and I have hacked together a little power kit that can be charged with a solar panel or a generator, and provide enough energy for at least a laptop and a few small peripherals, but I can't tell you how cool it would be to be able to power the entire conference with one of these things - especially the laser-guided parachute drop part. The chicks would love that. 8^)
I was going to moderate this thread, but there's no 'factually incorrect' rating available, let alone 're-writing history', so I'll have to reply instead....
"For one example of pitfalls and perks, consider stylesheets. Netscape threw their weight behind JSSS, Internet Explorer threw their weight behind CSS. CSS got taken up by the W3C, JSSS got chucked."
Several corrections:
Microsoft did *not* throw its weight behind CSS as a standard - they openly espoused 'extending' it with proprietary attributes and behaviours. HTML 4 and CSS 1 are the first examples of MS' 'embrace and extend' lock-in tactic. To characterise this as anything other than subversion of the standardisation process is disingenuous at best.
IE 3's CSS implementation was so broken that people resorted to relying on its broken Cascade model (the C in CSS) in order to avoid sending any directives to it at all. Google 'dummy-rules.css' for details on this.
CSS did not get 'taken up' by the W3C; it was designed by the W3C. And this was not, as you imply, a result of MS' support. Believe me, CSS did not succeed because of IE, but in spite of it.
MSIE 3 was, IIRC, not the first popular browser to support CSS. I believe that honour goes to Opera.
JSSS did not get chucked so much as it got dropped. It was a pretty transparent ploy on Netscape's part to control the future of the web, and given their experience with Netscape's impositions in the past (including the <blink> abomination) nobody was willing to buy into it. While Netscape may have submitted the JSSS spec as a draft standard to the W3C, it was never officially supported. The W3C has to consider submissions from all of its members - it's a consortium, after all - but a submission should never be construed as support.
"Another example is XSLT; Microsoft implemented a draft version, and ended up with support that was incompatible with the final specification and later versions of their own browser."
To my knowledge, MS has *never* done a clean implementation of any Internet standard where they didn't absolutely have to. While their TCP/IP stack (which was based on the Berkeley implementation) may more or less work as advertised, their web browsers, email software and Internet-related developer tools have always been skewed from the relevant standards.
Micosoft does provide some object lessons in the difference between de facto standards and true standards, but I would hesitate to claim that it ever made any effort to support or adhere to any open standard.
"Is it perhaps because the most likely answer, that retail stores would lose money selling Linux systems due to higher difficulty of making the sale, higher support costs, higher return rates, and lower volume?"
Not to get all empirical on you or anything, but if history is any guide, it's likely because their OEM sales and partnership agreements require that they push MS into a place of such prominence that all other alternatives remain hopelessly unattractive.
Don't feel compelled to pay any attention to this hugely speculative hypothesis; it's only backed by legal investigators from the DoJ and signficant anecdotal evidence from commentary all over the media. Feel free to hold tight to your faith in the invisible hand as it works its wonders on the flock, sparing us from excellence at every turn.
HTH, HAND
Re:Yes, but is it better than emacs??
on
Vim 6.4 Released
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· Score: 1
"I have hacked Emacs with vim."
Heh, I had a giggle this morning when I checked my history file and found:
"200,000 Allied soldiers died during the battle of normandy."
Hmmm... Wikipedia doesn't seem to agree. From their Battle of Normandy entry:
37,000 dead, 18,000 missing, 154,000 wounded
"Americans don't even remember what real devastation is, and some have never ever experienced it."
We can both agree on this, at least. Though I suspect the same tendency that led you to ascribe casualty figures that were actually closer to those of the losers in that engagement might be at play here: 'Objects in mirror appear closer than they are', to coin a phrase.
There's only one problem with any society's narcissism: It usually requires a catastrophic event to change the perspective. And that's something I wouldn't wish on even the most unabashedly self-absorbed.
Interesting note: Wikipedia states that both narcissism and narcotic stem from the same Greek root, meaning numbness. I'd be hard-pressed to imagine a society that is more numb than ours. I'll be genuinely sorry when we are forced to wake up.
I haven't seen anyone comment on this yet, so here goes....
The summary states that MS hopes to partner with developing nations like China and India to use IPTV as an educational tool. As someone who works full-time on IT in development, I'd like to offer my considered opinion that this is one of the worst possible suggestions one could possibly make.
The resource requirements for a service such as this would be incredibly expensive, especially relative to the amount of money available. Most importantly, it would require a massively centralised infrastructure that is almost the exact opposite of the kind of setup that would actually benefit rural communities. Production studios, distribution facilities, high bandwidth network infrastructure in places that barely even have a power grid - how could this possible look like a good idea?
I'll tell you how: MS is doing the same thing that the IMF and others have done for decades. They're trying to sucker these countries into building a system that will keep them chained to MS for an entire generation, simply by tying a ribbon around it and saying, 'Think of the children!'
It is, in my opinion, a cynical and calculated move to take money from the hands of those who could make a real difference and put it into the hands of the rich.
It sickens me to see people taking advantage of others who are poor and ignorant. Unfortunately, this kind of thing happens all the time in developing nations. It looks like MS is growing up as a corporation, and learning to follow in the footsteps of those who have gone before.
"Even when you get to a desktop OS back in the '90s, quality just wasn't that important. Would you rather pay $10,000 for an OS, or $90 and loose work once in a while."
I'm surprised that this contention doesn't get challenged more. The implication in that statement seems to be that truly robust software would be prohibitively expensive. But consider the income of the top-selling OS maker in the world today. What cost per unit would be reasonable for it to incur in order to write good software?
I'm really not a mathematician, but I am quite certain that there is enough money in the market to justify the creation of a truly decent QA process. Let's take software-related profits of somewhere near a billion dollars a month, subtract the proportion that is eaten by the production and distribution of physical media, take away the dollars that go to other business units, and see what we have left. I won't speculate on the dollar amount, but I will suggest that it's big - in excess of, say, 1 billion per annum.
Economists and business analysts would no doubt observe that there are a great many hidden costs - management and administrative overhead, pension plans, etc. Others will remind us that there exists a duty to generate profit for the shareholders. The list goes on, and the number gets whittled down to, say a mere... what? Let's assume that only 25% of revenues are even theoretically usable for software development. That would make the imaginary number somewhere in the ballpark of 250 million dollars per year.
Yet the suggestion is that a budget on this scale is not enough to pay for a warrantable, largely bug-free OS.
I find this line of reason highly suspect, personally.
There are any number of things that agitate against warrantable software, but I have the feeling that cost is not nearly the factor that some present it to be.
"Don't you all feel bright now for bashing Microsoft?"
Actually, I was most amused by the report that even Microsoft got fooled. Instead of thinking 'That's bullsh*t - we would never do that!' they ran around trying to find out whose business group was responsible for it. Only when they couldn't get anyone to corroborate did they decide that it was untrue.
Apparently even Microsoft thinks this is the kind of thing Microsoft would do. 8^)
Touché. On re-reading, I find that the small text at the top of the page does state that. I started reading - logically, I think - at the part marked Introduction, thinking that that was where the actual article started. My bad, though I do think a full definition, or at least a link to one, would not be out of place.
Thanks for the LART, though. Serves me right for skimming.
"To get an actual working version of this thing, you have to go to the beta news site and then click on any of the story headlines."
To get an actual working version of the thing, I prefer to download the source. This is cute, but it's not really interesting to me unless it has some value to the community.
I'm not simply standing on principle here, either. In order to be a widely useful tool, the Semantic Web has to expose data formats that are open and useful. In other words, it's not what you do with the data; it's what everyone else can do with the data that makes the Semantic Web interesting. In this particular application it's nothing more than a pretty pony that we can ride once around the ring.
Neither the synopsis nor the article bothered to enlighten us plebes as to what exactly SOA stands for, so I googled it for the benefit of others:
A Service-Oriented Architecture is a collection of services that communicate with each other. The services are self-contained and do not depend on the context or state of the other service.
At least, I think it's that one. Then again, maybe it's this one"
Baldurs Gate II: Shadows of Amn.
Maybe they use multi-player mode to define the problem: "Okay, so the database is the castle, right? And the balrog is a stored procedure that we all need to be able to kill - uh, run, but we only have one magic sword, uh interface to do it with...."
"Are you implying there are better cars made by small companies that we have all overlooked because of the car-industrial complex has manipulated the media into not telling us about it?"
Yes. Does that surprise you?
"Which cars in your opinion should we all be taking another look at?"
Well, how about the Bricklin, for one? I mean, sheesh, that little beauty could travel in time!
Re:There is NOTHING the RIAA or the USA can do
on
WinMX Suspends Operations
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· Score: 4, Informative
"If the cables just happened to "break" somewhere, would Vanuatu even have the resources to fix them?"
No, but it's okay. Vanuatu doesn't have undersea cables. Nor does it have the USD 20 million to have one laid. As I mentioned in a previous post, total national bandwidth - for both voice and data - is somewhere around 4Mbps, all through satellite.
Businesses who want to work online typically install their own satellite equipment. Typically, only the cash transactions occur in Vanuatu itself. That means that if you make a bet online, for example, you've placed your bet on a server somewhere in the US (or wherever), but your card actually gets debited through a transaction queued through a server sitting in a air-conditioned room in Vanuatu.
...Perhaps I can offer a little bit of background.
I've been living and working in Vanuatu for the last two years, and have some experience in the IT sector here. So let me try and provide a little perspective.
First, the vanuatugovernment.vu website is NOT the official government website. It was put together by some less-than-reputable individuals who took advantage of their connections with certain politicians to try to sell 'honorary consulships' to 'independant businessmen'. Basically, this is a way of making money from the sale of diplomatic passports. Among the people found to be using Vanuatu diplomatic passports are a Northern Irish 'contractor' working in Sierra Leone and a convicted member of a Chinese triad.
Second, the information on wikipedia.org is far from complete - and in some cases, inaccurate. And yes, as another poster has mentioned, The capital is Port Vila (one 'l'), so the summary is mis-spelled.
Third, Vanuatu has for quite a long time been associated with businesses who need a more flexible set of business rules than they might find in the US. Kazaa, for example, is incorporated in Vanuatu. As a gesture of appreciation, we now have the Kazaa Cricket field, which will be hosting international competition in the next couple of weeks.
There are some seriously large online betting operations interested in setting up shop in Vanuatu. Without telling tales out of school, I can confirm that one operation recently received approval to install one 7m and one 4m satellite dish, giving it total bandwidth capacity of about 40 Mbps. This in a country that currently has a national total about about 4 Mbps for voice and data combined!
Shades of Cryptonomicon, there actually is a 'bunker' here - a hardened server room with independant everything that is being used to manage data more or less along the same lines that Neal Stephenson suggested in his book.
Vanuatu has some of the most expensive Internet services in the world. I'm composing this message on a 56k dial-up line shared with 6 others computers. Unlimited dial-up costs a paltry USD 200/month, and dedicated access typically runs about USD 1000/month when bandwidth is factored in.
Vanuatu was once a site of significant money-laundering activity. Since 2001, the regulatory regime has been strengthened significantly. And yes, it was because the US 'pressurized' the government to act. They simply informed Vanuatu that if they didn't conform to certain minimum standards, they wouldn't be able to buy US dollars. Very persuasive.
Vanuatu is still a major tax haven, and is increasingly of interest to Australian investors. As I write, the private yacht of the richest man in Australia (Kerry Packer) is anchored in Port Vila Bay.
There are over 100 native languages in Vanuatu, but the language of commerce here is Bislama, a pidgin English that is really interesting to learn. Here is a quick and amusing sampler.
As far as WinMX is concerned, I've heard nothing about their arrival in Vanuatu, but some people are fairly secretive about the business they do here, so maybe I shouldn't be skeptical....
FTA: "[Cerf] also will continue as a visiting scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, where he has been focusing on a very Google-like project _ trying to figure out a way to connect the Internet to outer space."
"How is this project Google-like, other than seeming to be pretty cool?"
Actually, they're just trying to head off Amazon's One-Click-Planetary-Domination patent.
"Ice is less dense than water, so we might even see sea levels *decline*"
Un-fucking believable. An entire thread of people who can hold forth about global climate change, when they can't even read a map!
For the geography-impaired in the audience: Greenland, Baffin and Ellesmere islands are really fucking big. And guess what? They're mostly covered with ice. Which might just melt, too.
"I wonder how good the accuracy is. If a "bad" guy and a "good" guy are in close combat how do they make sure that the bolt strikes the "bad" guy and is not instead attracted to the metal gun being held by the "good" guy?"
Oh come on, it's simple. Everybody you hit is a bad guy:
If he's wearing a uniform, he's an enemy soldier and had it coming.
If he's not wearing a uniform, he's an illegal combatant, and had it coming.
If the 'illegal combatant' is an elderly woman or a child, then they were giving aid and comfort to the enemy, and had it coming. In extreme cases, they were in the wrong place at the wrong time, and ignored our best efforts to warn them away.
If it's one of our allies, then they were shot by enemy forces, in spite of our best efforts to assist them.
If it's one of our own, then they were killed by insurgents, darn them to heck and pass the ammunition.
I know that sounds terribly cynical. I only wish it weren't the case. The terrible truth is that the armed forces feel that they simply can't tell the full truth because the American people would never accept it.
The military does occasionally see beyond the need to feed the military-industrial complex and there are a great many who care about the accuracy and usefulness of the weapons systems they make available, but they're hindered by the fact that they cannot admit to mistakes on the front.
Whether that's a good thing, a necessary thing, or an evil thing is left as an exercise for the reader. I have my own opinion about this, but I'm not going to foist it on others.
"When taking into consideration TCO for the company just big enough to want to do their server stuffs in-house, but not big enough to hire a full fledged IT department... Microsoft wins. Hands down it wins."
Just because you only know one way of integrating IT into small and medium sized businesses doesn't mean that's the only way to do it.
I worked for three years with Mitel, and have about 7 and a half years' experience with Windows systems small, medium and large business. The server software Mitel sells can be safely administered remotely for everything except hardware failure. And when I say everything, I mean everything.
We worked with one company that had sold its services into automotive dealerships nationwide. They administered hundreds of these servers with full-time staff of three, and about a dozen hardware monkeys to swap drives etc.
And yes, there's a Free version, too. I'm currently using it to support servers on islands stretched across a thousand miles of ocean. 8^)
Slashdot Mirror
"Has it ever occured to you or anyone else that these people you are going to try to sell $100 laptops to have no use for a laptop, for MS Windows, or for open sourced?"
Yes, it has occurred to me. So I went and checked. I didn't just ask people 'Do you want a cheap computer?', I spent a year travelling through a developing country assessing their priority needs. I spent another year setting up community-owned computer centres where people can use computers for about a dollar an hour. There are full every minute of the day. One computer centre has 4 computers and over 250 students signed up for this term alone. The service is expensive for them, but they love it. I'm currently working on another project to replicate this effort throughout the South Pacific.
Unfortunately, a lot of people fall victim to the same kind of binary logic that you use above. Since when does buying farm implements or providing food aid preclude spending a few dollars on education and employment opportunities? Is it absolutely unimaginable that we could do both?
"If you GAVE it to them, they would sell it for $60 to buy some better farming equipment or some shoes for their kids."
Bull. Selling a computer is like selling the milk cow. You're sacrificing your (and your children's) future for quick profit today. Although every society the world over has its own quota of short-sighted people, I can tell you from personal experience that inexpensive computers have value, and they improve living conditions where they are available. I can also tell you from direct experience that most people recognise this and are committed to their children's future.
Do you know what the number one spending priority is in the developing country where I live? It's school fees. Every single parent I've spoken with cares about nothing more than ensuring a better future for their children. Many parents hold public fund-raisers on behalf of their children in order to keep them in school. Living a life of abject poverty does not mean that people aren't capable of forgoing immediate gratification in favour of a better long-term solution.
I won't deny for a second that every society has its share of short-sighted people who want flashy new toys without really considering their worth or the cost of owning and using something as sophisticated as a computer. But that's where volunteers like me and the dozens of other working here come in. I've been training unemployed youth in computer repair, maintenance and configuration. They're now earning a modest but viable living providing support services to others. One of them is training the next group of apprentices, too.
There is nothing more important to learning than access to information and the time to study it. Having a computer in the home makes both of those available. I can say from experience that this laptop initiative is enlightened and will almost certainly have a direct and positive effect on the lives of the recipients.
"China is a HUGE market, and yahoo and msn have a strong start."
I've posted about this before, but for some reason nobody seems to get it. So, once again:
There is no China Market - not in the sense that the MBAs think, anyway.
GP: "Once the Chinese market has matured, investors will think of American and the EU as they today think of Luxembourg and Jamaica."
Parent: "Extremely unlikely."
Agreed, but not for the same reasons you offer. Every time I see people writing about the 'China Market', I want to repeat the words a friend of mine (and professional China expert) said to me:
There Is No China Market
The China Market is a fiction. It is a fanciful conception of how market forces can be imposed on China, promoted by wild-eyed capitalists trying to find the next Gold Rush. The government of China does nothing to dissuade them, because it has the salutary effect of causing major corporate leaders to fawn over them, bestowing loss leader after loss leader in vain pursuit of the billion-plus imaginary 'consumers' that await them if they can only get into the proper, er, position.
Before anyone attempts to slap me with their Invisible Hand, I'd recommend the position of power from which the Chinese government - and in particular the People's Liberation Army, which is the largest property owner in China - negotiates:
The thing that people forget about China is that this is not an emerging nation. It has a very long history, and has dealt with the issues of governing a huge populace for longer than just about any other nation. The Chinese take a long view of things and they are just as ruthless in business as they are in government.
There is a reason that China has always been known to the Chinese as the Middle Kingdom. If they decide to trade with barbarians now and then, that's all well and good. But don't for a moment think they can't stop whenever they like.
"The system we've currently established is that drug manufacturers outlay a truly phenomenal amount of money to develop and test any particular drug. They do this on the assumption that they will, in the future, be able to charge good money for the results of their research. If they can't charge for it in the future, there's no incentive for them to develop new drugs today."
You're right that that's the rationale used to justify the state of things today. And if it had any relation to current practice I'd be prone to agree with you. Unfortunately, there are a few minor data points that tend to indicate the reasoning you outline above consists mostly of horse waste:
Drug research is expensive - nobody argues that. What is arguable, however, is how ethically pharmaceutical companies have acquitted their important social role. On that count, it seems that they've failed miserably, and, just as a criminal deserves to have his legal rights restricted, they deserve to have their patent rights restricted unless they demonstrate that they will not abuse this trust.
I'll be recording the proceedings of a week-long conference on the tiny island of Maevo in Vanuatu at the start of next month. The place is largely undeveloped and power is a major concern of mine.
A friend of mine and I have hacked together a little power kit that can be charged with a solar panel or a generator, and provide enough energy for at least a laptop and a few small peripherals, but I can't tell you how cool it would be to be able to power the entire conference with one of these things - especially the laser-guided parachute drop part. The chicks would love that. 8^)
I was going to moderate this thread, but there's no 'factually incorrect' rating available, let alone 're-writing history', so I'll have to reply instead....
"For one example of pitfalls and perks, consider stylesheets. Netscape threw their weight behind JSSS, Internet Explorer threw their weight behind CSS. CSS got taken up by the W3C, JSSS got chucked."
Several corrections:
"Another example is XSLT; Microsoft implemented a draft version, and ended up with support that was incompatible with the final specification and later versions of their own browser."
To my knowledge, MS has *never* done a clean implementation of any Internet standard where they didn't absolutely have to. While their TCP/IP stack (which was based on the Berkeley implementation) may more or less work as advertised, their web browsers, email software and Internet-related developer tools have always been skewed from the relevant standards.
Micosoft does provide some object lessons in the difference between de facto standards and true standards, but I would hesitate to claim that it ever made any effort to support or adhere to any open standard.
"Never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by stupidity."
Yeah, 'cos malice is more stupid than stupidity itself....
No wait, I meant that stupidity is more malicious than malice, which is stupid, uh...
Oh no... Must. Not. Recurse...
*head asplodes*
"Is it perhaps because the most likely answer, that retail stores would lose money selling Linux systems due to higher difficulty of making the sale, higher support costs, higher return rates, and lower volume?"
Not to get all empirical on you or anything, but if history is any guide, it's likely because their OEM sales and partnership agreements require that they push MS into a place of such prominence that all other alternatives remain hopelessly unattractive.
Don't feel compelled to pay any attention to this hugely speculative hypothesis; it's only backed by legal investigators from the DoJ and signficant anecdotal evidence from commentary all over the media. Feel free to hold tight to your faith in the invisible hand as it works its wonders on the flock, sparing us from excellence at every turn.
HTH, HAND
"I have hacked Emacs with vim."
Heh, I had a giggle this morning when I checked my history file and found:
8^)
"200,000 Allied soldiers died during the battle of normandy."
Hmmm... Wikipedia doesn't seem to agree. From their Battle of Normandy entry:
"Americans don't even remember what real devastation is, and some have never ever experienced it."
We can both agree on this, at least. Though I suspect the same tendency that led you to ascribe casualty figures that were actually closer to those of the losers in that engagement might be at play here: 'Objects in mirror appear closer than they are', to coin a phrase.
There's only one problem with any society's narcissism: It usually requires a catastrophic event to change the perspective. And that's something I wouldn't wish on even the most unabashedly self-absorbed.
Interesting note: Wikipedia states that both narcissism and narcotic stem from the same Greek root, meaning numbness. I'd be hard-pressed to imagine a society that is more numb than ours. I'll be genuinely sorry when we are forced to wake up.
GP: "LAMP (Apache+Mysql+PHP)"
Parent: "LAMP == (Linux+Apache+Mysql+PHP)"
LAMP == (Linux+Apache+Mysql+{PHP|Perl|Python})
Next in this thread: Acronym changed to include Ruby: LAMeR
8^)
I haven't seen anyone comment on this yet, so here goes....
The summary states that MS hopes to partner with developing nations like China and India to use IPTV as an educational tool. As someone who works full-time on IT in development, I'd like to offer my considered opinion that this is one of the worst possible suggestions one could possibly make.
The resource requirements for a service such as this would be incredibly expensive, especially relative to the amount of money available. Most importantly, it would require a massively centralised infrastructure that is almost the exact opposite of the kind of setup that would actually benefit rural communities. Production studios, distribution facilities, high bandwidth network infrastructure in places that barely even have a power grid - how could this possible look like a good idea?
I'll tell you how: MS is doing the same thing that the IMF and others have done for decades. They're trying to sucker these countries into building a system that will keep them chained to MS for an entire generation, simply by tying a ribbon around it and saying, 'Think of the children!'
It is, in my opinion, a cynical and calculated move to take money from the hands of those who could make a real difference and put it into the hands of the rich.
It sickens me to see people taking advantage of others who are poor and ignorant. Unfortunately, this kind of thing happens all the time in developing nations. It looks like MS is growing up as a corporation, and learning to follow in the footsteps of those who have gone before.
"Even when you get to a desktop OS back in the '90s, quality just wasn't that important. Would you rather pay $10,000 for an OS, or $90 and loose work once in a while."
I'm surprised that this contention doesn't get challenged more. The implication in that statement seems to be that truly robust software would be prohibitively expensive. But consider the income of the top-selling OS maker in the world today. What cost per unit would be reasonable for it to incur in order to write good software?
I'm really not a mathematician, but I am quite certain that there is enough money in the market to justify the creation of a truly decent QA process. Let's take software-related profits of somewhere near a billion dollars a month, subtract the proportion that is eaten by the production and distribution of physical media, take away the dollars that go to other business units, and see what we have left. I won't speculate on the dollar amount, but I will suggest that it's big - in excess of, say, 1 billion per annum.
Economists and business analysts would no doubt observe that there are a great many hidden costs - management and administrative overhead, pension plans, etc. Others will remind us that there exists a duty to generate profit for the shareholders. The list goes on, and the number gets whittled down to, say a mere... what? Let's assume that only 25% of revenues are even theoretically usable for software development. That would make the imaginary number somewhere in the ballpark of 250 million dollars per year.
Yet the suggestion is that a budget on this scale is not enough to pay for a warrantable, largely bug-free OS.
I find this line of reason highly suspect, personally.
There are any number of things that agitate against warrantable software, but I have the feeling that cost is not nearly the factor that some present it to be.
"Do you honestly think that Microsoft cares what Slashdot says?"
Given the depth of the astroturf and the number of banner ads they place here, I'd have to answer yes. 8^)
"Don't you all feel bright now for bashing Microsoft?"
Actually, I was most amused by the report that even Microsoft got fooled. Instead of thinking 'That's bullsh*t - we would never do that!' they ran around trying to find out whose business group was responsible for it. Only when they couldn't get anyone to corroborate did they decide that it was untrue.
Apparently even Microsoft thinks this is the kind of thing Microsoft would do. 8^)
Touché. On re-reading, I find that the small text at the top of the page does state that. I started reading - logically, I think - at the part marked Introduction, thinking that that was where the actual article started. My bad, though I do think a full definition, or at least a link to one, would not be out of place.
Thanks for the LART, though. Serves me right for skimming.
"To get an actual working version of this thing, you have to go to the beta news site and then click on any of the story headlines."
To get an actual working version of the thing, I prefer to download the source. This is cute, but it's not really interesting to me unless it has some value to the community.
I'm not simply standing on principle here, either. In order to be a widely useful tool, the Semantic Web has to expose data formats that are open and useful. In other words, it's not what you do with the data; it's what everyone else can do with the data that makes the Semantic Web interesting. In this particular application it's nothing more than a pretty pony that we can ride once around the ring.
Neither the synopsis nor the article bothered to enlighten us plebes as to what exactly SOA stands for, so I googled it for the benefit of others:
A Service-Oriented Architecture is a collection of services that communicate with each other. The services are self-contained and do not depend on the context or state of the other service.
At least, I think it's that one. Then again, maybe it's this one"
Baldurs Gate II: Shadows of Amn.
Maybe they use multi-player mode to define the problem: "Okay, so the database is the castle, right? And the balrog is a stored procedure that we all need to be able to kill - uh, run, but we only have one magic sword, uh interface to do it with...."
Okay, maybe not.
"Are you implying there are better cars made by small companies that we have all overlooked because of the car-industrial complex has manipulated the media into not telling us about it?"
Yes. Does that surprise you?
"Which cars in your opinion should we all be taking another look at?"
Well, how about the Bricklin, for one? I mean, sheesh, that little beauty could travel in time!
"If the cables just happened to "break" somewhere, would Vanuatu even have the resources to fix them?"
No, but it's okay. Vanuatu doesn't have undersea cables. Nor does it have the USD 20 million to have one laid. As I mentioned in a previous post, total national bandwidth - for both voice and data - is somewhere around 4Mbps, all through satellite.
Businesses who want to work online typically install their own satellite equipment. Typically, only the cash transactions occur in Vanuatu itself. That means that if you make a bet online, for example, you've placed your bet on a server somewhere in the US (or wherever), but your card actually gets debited through a transaction queued through a server sitting in a air-conditioned room in Vanuatu.
...Perhaps I can offer a little bit of background.
I've been living and working in Vanuatu for the last two years, and have some experience in the IT sector here. So let me try and provide a little perspective.
First, the vanuatugovernment.vu website is NOT the official government website. It was put together by some less-than-reputable individuals who took advantage of their connections with certain politicians to try to sell 'honorary consulships' to 'independant businessmen'. Basically, this is a way of making money from the sale of diplomatic passports. Among the people found to be using Vanuatu diplomatic passports are a Northern Irish 'contractor' working in Sierra Leone and a convicted member of a Chinese triad.
Second, the information on wikipedia.org is far from complete - and in some cases, inaccurate. And yes, as another poster has mentioned, The capital is Port Vila (one 'l'), so the summary is mis-spelled.
Third, Vanuatu has for quite a long time been associated with businesses who need a more flexible set of business rules than they might find in the US. Kazaa, for example, is incorporated in Vanuatu. As a gesture of appreciation, we now have the Kazaa Cricket field, which will be hosting international competition in the next couple of weeks.
There are some seriously large online betting operations interested in setting up shop in Vanuatu. Without telling tales out of school, I can confirm that one operation recently received approval to install one 7m and one 4m satellite dish, giving it total bandwidth capacity of about 40 Mbps. This in a country that currently has a national total about about 4 Mbps for voice and data combined!
Shades of Cryptonomicon, there actually is a 'bunker' here - a hardened server room with independant everything that is being used to manage data more or less along the same lines that Neal Stephenson suggested in his book.
Vanuatu has some of the most expensive Internet services in the world. I'm composing this message on a 56k dial-up line shared with 6 others computers. Unlimited dial-up costs a paltry USD 200/month, and dedicated access typically runs about USD 1000/month when bandwidth is factored in.
Vanuatu was once a site of significant money-laundering activity. Since 2001, the regulatory regime has been strengthened significantly. And yes, it was because the US 'pressurized' the government to act. They simply informed Vanuatu that if they didn't conform to certain minimum standards, they wouldn't be able to buy US dollars. Very persuasive.
Vanuatu is still a major tax haven, and is increasingly of interest to Australian investors. As I write, the private yacht of the richest man in Australia (Kerry Packer) is anchored in Port Vila Bay.
There are over 100 native languages in Vanuatu, but the language of commerce here is Bislama, a pidgin English that is really interesting to learn. Here is a quick and amusing sampler.
As far as WinMX is concerned, I've heard nothing about their arrival in Vanuatu, but some people are fairly secretive about the business they do here, so maybe I shouldn't be skeptical....
FTA: "[Cerf] also will continue as a visiting scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, where he has been focusing on a very Google-like project _ trying to figure out a way to connect the Internet to outer space."
"How is this project Google-like, other than seeming to be pretty cool?"
Actually, they're just trying to head off Amazon's One-Click-Planetary-Domination patent.
"Ice is less dense than water, so we might even see sea levels *decline*"
Un-fucking believable. An entire thread of people who can hold forth about global climate change, when they can't even read a map!
For the geography-impaired in the audience: Greenland, Baffin and Ellesmere islands are really fucking big. And guess what? They're mostly covered with ice. Which might just melt, too.
"I wonder how good the accuracy is. If a "bad" guy and a "good" guy are in close combat how do they make sure that the bolt strikes the "bad" guy and is not instead attracted to the metal gun being held by the "good" guy?"
Oh come on, it's simple. Everybody you hit is a bad guy:
I know that sounds terribly cynical. I only wish it weren't the case. The terrible truth is that the armed forces feel that they simply can't tell the full truth because the American people would never accept it.
The military does occasionally see beyond the need to feed the military-industrial complex and there are a great many who care about the accuracy and usefulness of the weapons systems they make available, but they're hindered by the fact that they cannot admit to mistakes on the front.
Whether that's a good thing, a necessary thing, or an evil thing is left as an exercise for the reader. I have my own opinion about this, but I'm not going to foist it on others.
"When taking into consideration TCO for the company just big enough to want to do their server stuffs in-house, but not big enough to hire a full fledged IT department ... Microsoft wins. Hands down it wins."
Bullshit.
Just because you only know one way of integrating IT into small and medium sized businesses doesn't mean that's the only way to do it.
I worked for three years with Mitel, and have about 7 and a half years' experience with Windows systems small, medium and large business. The server software Mitel sells can be safely administered remotely for everything except hardware failure. And when I say everything, I mean everything.
We worked with one company that had sold its services into automotive dealerships nationwide. They administered hundreds of these servers with full-time staff of three, and about a dozen hardware monkeys to swap drives etc.
And yes, there's a Free version, too. I'm currently using it to support servers on islands stretched across a thousand miles of ocean. 8^)