But why should we trust the predictions from a guy, with more money than god, who can't even get his own company to produce product on schedule?
Yep, slamming Bill is often a passtime, but I have to admit, he's making this one easy... so easy, its not even fun really. If Bill or MS tells me that the sky is falling, I logically realize that we have 2-3 more years before it begins to fall, and there will be several false alerts before it actually does fall.
Adblock is very cool. I had to disable it to even see ads on/. I didn't know there were ads till people were talking about them in their posts, so I had to look.
the carpet, that will be exactly when the citizens of the US will know that big brother is watching, and Mr. Orwell was right. Its time for all US citizens (and now EU citizens) to make such matters of privacy a voter issue. Ask your current representatives how they stand on such issues, ask all prospective candidates, and then vote with your privacy in mind on the upcoming, and every subsequent election.
If you are not sure how to find out some of that information, go to eff.org
Once again, the politicians are showing their ignorance of technology, innovation, and change... The mantra of hammering new things into the ground with censorship and 'not in my back yard' tyranny is getting way to old, way too fast.
Restricting access to such sites from public places won't stop kids from using them anyway. Yes, as long as we have nothing to do with it, it doesn't happen... BS As mentioned, there are plenty of sites that are similar to MySpace and are valuable resources to Internet users. Who is going to say which should be blocked? The Republicans? The moral majority? Librarians? who?
This absolutely shows ignorance.... I wish it hurt them to be that stupid.
As stated, it is a foothold for censorship... of the worst kind, and that is because it will be totally ineffectual, cannot be enforced any better than any other pornography law. Worse, it would make some groups feel they are getting something done, and soon there would be other domains where this or that is supposed to be neatly filed away.
The ONLY real answer is sensible sex industry cooperation and self censorship. I don't mean they should take their websites down, but they should open their site with a uniform warning page allowing the site to be filtered thereafter, or other such methods. By following rules that make them nice netizens, they will effectively allow the law enforcement agencies to track those that are not playing nice... and it IS the ones that don't play nice that we all want hammered into dust. Pop-ups, spam, pop-unders, hijacking... all these things need to go away, and if legitimate porn sites played nice, it would soon become apparent how to attack the problem from a legal standpoint.
Not having the.xxx domain is the right thing to do as it would only allow the same result as above, and not achieve anything but allow ICAAN or others to make more money off of the porn industry... sigh
"Researchers [CC] at U Name It have found that women have a remarkable ability to assess a man's finance levels and his interest in making women feel good by looking at how much money he spends. Sixty-nine percent of the women were able to correctly judge a man's ability to buy them diamonds merely by looking at cues in his wallet. Spending samples were also taken from each man in the study and tested for wanton spending on women with a $2,000-a-pop test. The women in the study were able to correctly identify the men with the highest spending levels just by looking at their wallets. Of course, the study did not look at what men were able to tell about women by looking at photographs of their female body parts, though further study is being considered at several men's clubs around the country."
but the inventors are not thinking this through... Have you seen what some people wear with 'regular' materials? Anyone ever want to kill the person that thought "hmmm, spandex will look good in XXXXlarge canary yellow" ???
Have any of you seen what gets worn at high schools? (no, I'm not a pervert) but there are groups of people that would take self expression to an entirely unexpected new level if they could change it before getting caught...
Have you ever seen the gay pride parades? Mardi Gras? Imagine that in the mall or your local TGIF's on occassion. If clothes could make it look like the wearer was naked, but not be, more people than you think, and certainly people you wouldn't want to, will think its fun to do so.
Not that I think such innovations should be held back, but there are some serious consequences to our laws and society with the introduction of such things... and trust me, the judiciary is NOT ready to deal with it, whether it is innovation or change, they are not prepared to deal equitably with either.
Just what do law makers do with someone that creates a virus that makes little girls clothes go transparent? There are some serious things to think about with technology, and UNFORTUNATELY, our law makers have NO CLUE what to do with it other than react like they were born with the patriot act in their mouths (or pick your preferred orrifice).
Yes, I'm paranoid... at least when it comes to anything that requires law makers and politicians to have common sense and good humor.
I think that the worst part of this problem is that if net neutrality ends, those that have access to Google at good speed will stop using other services, likewise, those with only good access to MSN will use only MSN. That puts us right back in the cable-company game where there is only one provider available, for all intents and purposes, and the only person who gets screwed is the consumer. Right now, I have one choice for cable network connection, no DSL, and no fiber(yet)... and I'm at the mercy of whatever that cable company wants to do (say make it very difficult to use a home router with my VoIP provider) or anything else.
That is not a neutrality issue, that ends up being the same mob-like business practices that cable companies have always had, but now the telcos are getting involved too.... all in the name of bending over the consumers.
I'd truly like to see metropolitan networks (wired and wireless) be managed by an independent company where any citizen user can choose where their traffic hits the network outside the MAN. That would allow Earthlink, Google, Yahoo, SBC, Comcast, Verizon... all of them would have access to provide me service, and anytime any of them screws around with my packets, I'll just switch providers, but it is the MAN that makes all those providers equal in relation to my packets and the services that they can provide. The independently managed MAN ensures that they cannot use mobster like practices with my packets... or at least comes closer to packet nirvana than anything else I can think of.
This would certainly go to show two things: how fucked up copyright law is, and how fucked up walmart is. This is close enough to stealing candy from a baby as to make walmart look like the idiots I think they are. Go ahead, mod me down, but the point is that this is stupid, and I hope they win so that walmart and their management look as stupid as this situation is... but to all the world, not just/.
When you have to pay as much as you need to to run oracle, patches released in a timely manner that actually fix things is part of customer service. If there is no customer service, there is soon no customers. The OSS database engines are gaining ground, and personally, I like the way patches and fixes are released thus far for F/OSS.... I'm seeing fewer and fewer reasons to pay for big software packages like Oracle, MS, etc.
ROI is important, and bad patch schedules and releases is not good ROI...
I hope that this doesn't turn out to be linked to some religion or other. All we need is another whacko group claiming to have the only true religion, and proof of its veracity in this pyramid. I truly do hope that this is built by, or inspired by alien visitors, perhaps stranded travellers or something. As long as its anything but more religious hype/tripe/your-fav-bad-thing-here.
For a while in the 90's... everything, and I mean *EVERYTHING* out of hollywood had one of those green shaded desk lamps in it. (just for fun, when you are watching anything from the 90s, count how many there are... tv, movies, anything) and that is not because the lamp manufacturer paid for product placement... it is most likely because the prop departments got a good deal on them!
As for Apple, have you seen the programs that they actually show running on television and movies? It is ALL artwork... there is no programming in it. The reason the Mac is shown is probably because that is the only computer the 'program' would run on... Not to mention that when real wintel computing power came along, the Macs were probably sitting around with nothing to do, so made their way to the prop departments... Thats not meant as a crack on Macs, but face it, its probably true. Any wintel machine that gets old, goes on the scrap heap... Mac users keep theirs around for years after they should upgrade.
So, all in all, the probability that there is something to this is less than that of the cubs winning any year soon.
While there are critics, 'wiki style' collaboration is a good thing. It often takes seeing a problem from different perspectives to understand the real nature of the problem. Sure, there will be idiots trying to help out or make their mark on the wiki, but the concept of shared thinking is more powerful than anyone knows. The promise that was HTML added to many people thinking of how to understand something is incredibly faster than the process that eventually created the atomic bomb.
So, jokes and criticism aside, the OST (open source thinking) is a good plan. Execution may have some drawbacks, but it has goodness in it.
This is funny because all these large corporate entities are proving (by shooting their own feet) that the Google 'do no evil' mantra is worth more than any advertising campaign....
I can see the future where such 'news articles' cause havoc at the next shareholder's meetings... sadly, that day has not yet arrived, but as the world of commerce gets flatter, it will...
This is expected, along with other twisted plot points in the struggle for the world to become completely flat with regard to regulation, business, and other things of huge impact to joe public.
Some of the processes to watch are: Immigration, offshoring, outsourcing, foodstuffs regulation, computer and internet regulation and taxation.
The world is very busy at becoming flat in many regards. Something tells me the French will always be a sore thumb, but everyone else is interested in commerce and becoming either wealthy consumers or those that supply them. Once the regulatory grip slips loose a bit, watch how farmers start selling their products both without the protection of the government, and without the stranglehold on how they can sell their products. Food has been used as a political tool for too long, as technology has been. The old guard are losing control of all the things that kept them in power for... well, up till now. As they lose power and control, they will do many twisted things to try to retain it.
As for taxation, without funds from taxation, governments become rather helpless groups of mislead individuals. This is just one *SMALL* sign that its time to revamp the tax schemes here in the US. The old ways are falling behind so quickly that it will be difficult to keep up... we need someone to start a wiki or something... A place where government types can go to learn about the brave new world they are facing and how they can effect a stable government within it.
Its not really a threat, well unless you consider watching the profits go from big name studios to triple and quadruple play carriers a threat.
Did we forget that tiered internet thingy? Yep. as soon as media shifts to all digital, we have a new set of pipers to pay. Instead of the old cable companies and commercials, it will be digital network providers and commercials PLUS the overhead of tiered network costs if you want to watch that with fewer commercials and in real time streaming.
All of this posturing and lobbying is about capturing market, ensuring that investors will be happy in the future.
Digital content is simply a different medium, and the big players, even the new ones, are not going to let it go for free. If they can't get advertising dollars for it, they will try to charge premium costs for access to it.
One thing is for certain, you can bet that Hollywood, television networks, and other media content providers will be vying to pick consumer's pockets for a very long time indeed.
Will governments decide that all cars must be sold with properly licensed tires on them? Maybe DVD players should be sold with properly licensed DVDs to play in them.
Yeah, I get the point, and I can see how this 'should' help MS and others fight piracy... one day, these people will wake up and see that pirates simply don't care and are going to use illegal copies of things anyway. This is why F/OSS has a strong advantage over MS.... no lobby money needed per se, no court costs needed for fighting pirates, no money needed to influence governments... wow, when you think about it, I wish F/OSS groups were given the equivelent of what MS has spent lobbying courts, governments, and other groups and entities. That should give us all a very nice OS.
Well, you can't say you've been around the proverbial block with computers if you don't know how to use edlin and vi... that's just the facts... sort of like the sun rises and sets...
Did I miss something? Why is a company, who stands to make a lot of money by putting anti-'bad'ware companies out of business, writing the law for this type of thing? There seem to be a lot of loop holes in this law and what it allows. How are businesses to be compensated when this upgradable software deletes some of their code base on a laptop that is plugged in at home, or some other plausible situation. The assignment of rights via a single click during installation is shaky at best, and underhanded on normal days.
If it walks like a duck, smells like a duck, quacks like a duck... its a duck, likewise for monopolies.... This is frightening. MS didn't even have to spend lobby money and bribes...
The problem is both easier and more difficult than it first appears, or even second and third times:
Data, whether held in databases (usually nice and tidy) or in flatfiles, or random text files spread all over hell's half acre, is simply data, not the information required to link it to other data. Even meta data about the data held in any data store is not the information required to link it to other data.
One of the things I believe will help (possibly) is ODF (buzzword warning sounds) because it begins to help format data in a universally accepted manner. Though it is not the only way, universal access methods are required for accessible data. Second, the structure of the data must be presented in a universal manner. This second part allows query languages to support cognitive understanding of the structure, and thus (with some work) the value of data held in a storage location, where ever and whatever that location is, be it RDBMS, text files, or phone bills.
Indexing is simply not enough. The ability to retrieve and utilize the index with the most probability of having relevent data is what is needed. We all know that any search engine can get you too many 'hits' that contain useless data. Google or anyone else is helpless until there are accepted methods for applying metadata and data structure descriptions on all data.
When there is far more organization to data storage, there will be a great sucking sound of people actually using data from the internet in brand new ways.... until then, its all hit and miss.
I think its about time that, even though this piece was slightly biased, mainstream media began looking seriously at the behemouth that *nix has become. Its always been in data centers, and Linux is fitting in well there. The only reason that mainstream view of desktop software is so biased is simply because these people grew up knowing only Windows or Mac, and so that is, to them, how computers are supposed to be, and perform. When someone else comes along with something new, it is always compared to the existing system to see if it measures up.
Now, I'm not saying that Linux is a perfect replacement for XP or OS X, but I remember the arguments about using F3 vs. F1 for the help key, and if you have ever seen Windows 3.0 or earlier, you'd know that there were plenty of people, myself included, that said meh, I'll keep using DR DOS thank you very much. The fact that Linux is the new kid on the block is all the more reason for MS and others to fear it. It *IS* changing everything.
It is about to the point that if a card or MB won't be supported by Linux, I can leave it setting on the shelf, and so can a lot of other people. The fact that there are examples of this, and WHOLE countries (apparently) leaving Windows for Linux means that the revolution is happening, slowly, but it is happening.
This story is not so exciting for those of us who have been waiting for it, expecting it, and are now ready to hear the daily updates in application development that surpases MS's capability to keep up. F/OSS is a better way to do thing, and I think (hope) that CLAMAV and others will show the Bill schills and others exactly what can be done to stop spam, virii, and malware. You know, something along the lines of "here, download the software.. its free.. and only 14.99/year for updates. Then someone fix the F/OSS mail clients to utilize global white and black lists etc. and some of the other ideas for stopping spam for only moderate yearly costs... say... hmmm 14.99/year maybe?
Look at what Vonage and Skype are doing to the telecomms business arena. That is pretty much the same sort of apple cart upsetting that's happening with *nix right now. I'd love to see a *nix distro that is first to be ready (out of the box) to be used to download television, movies, etc.... you know, like a "Ubuntu media edition for Dell computers"... or something like that.
I'd just really like to see totally heated up competition in all media markets. iPod! your days are numbered. CD player? your days are numbered. Solid state memory is able to hold as much, in smaller spaces, and is more flexible. I'm just waiting for someone to create the hardware that will supercede CD's and DVD's altogether... leapfrog this whole BR-HD-DVD argument.
Anyway, the point is that this news, isn't really news to some of us, and it should not be shocking to anyone. Bring on more news like this is what I say... we can all use good news anyday.
While things like this might erode such skills, I'm pretty certain that there isn't much call for the lost art of wagon wheel making thanks to Mr Ford, or lye soap making etc... its the natural way of things. Film developing has kind of gone out of style these days too... uhhh so what?
Drawing skills are seldom needed these days, and for where they are, that just makes artistic folk more appreciated...
Its not software that erodes or diminishes drawing skills, it happens when people have no incentive or reason to use said skills. No news here...
Slashdot Mirror
But why should we trust the predictions from a guy, with more money than god, who can't even get his own company to produce product on schedule?
Yep, slamming Bill is often a passtime, but I have to admit, he's making this one easy... so easy, its not even fun really. If Bill or MS tells me that the sky is falling, I logically realize that we have 2-3 more years before it begins to fall, and there will be several false alerts before it actually does fall.
Wow, just wow
Adblock is very cool. I had to disable it to even see ads on /. I didn't know there were ads till people were talking about them in their posts, so I had to look.
As Mr White says: You can't fix stupid!
the carpet, that will be exactly when the citizens of the US will know that big brother is watching, and Mr. Orwell was right. Its time for all US citizens (and now EU citizens) to make such matters of privacy a voter issue. Ask your current representatives how they stand on such issues, ask all prospective candidates, and then vote with your privacy in mind on the upcoming, and every subsequent election.
If you are not sure how to find out some of that information, go to eff.org
Once again, the politicians are showing their ignorance of technology, innovation, and change... The mantra of hammering new things into the ground with censorship and 'not in my back yard' tyranny is getting way to old, way too fast.
Restricting access to such sites from public places won't stop kids from using them anyway. Yes, as long as we have nothing to do with it, it doesn't happen... BS As mentioned, there are plenty of sites that are similar to MySpace and are valuable resources to Internet users. Who is going to say which should be blocked? The Republicans? The moral majority? Librarians? who?
This absolutely shows ignorance.... I wish it hurt them to be that stupid.
As stated, it is a foothold for censorship... of the worst kind, and that is because it will be totally ineffectual, cannot be enforced any better than any other pornography law. Worse, it would make some groups feel they are getting something done, and soon there would be other domains where this or that is supposed to be neatly filed away.
.xxx domain is the right thing to do as it would only allow the same result as above, and not achieve anything but allow ICAAN or others to make more money off of the porn industry... sigh
The ONLY real answer is sensible sex industry cooperation and self censorship. I don't mean they should take their websites down, but they should open their site with a uniform warning page allowing the site to be filtered thereafter, or other such methods. By following rules that make them nice netizens, they will effectively allow the law enforcement agencies to track those that are not playing nice... and it IS the ones that don't play nice that we all want hammered into dust. Pop-ups, spam, pop-unders, hijacking... all these things need to go away, and if legitimate porn sites played nice, it would soon become apparent how to attack the problem from a legal standpoint.
Not having the
"Researchers [CC] at U Name It have found that women have a remarkable ability to assess a man's finance levels and his interest in making women feel good by looking at how much money he spends. Sixty-nine percent of the women were able to correctly judge a man's ability to buy them diamonds merely by looking at cues in his wallet. Spending samples were also taken from each man in the study and tested for wanton spending on women with a $2,000-a-pop test. The women in the study were able to correctly identify the men with the highest spending levels just by looking at their wallets. Of course, the study did not look at what men were able to tell about women by looking at photographs of their female body parts, though further study is being considered at several men's clubs around the country."
but the inventors are not thinking this through... Have you seen what some people wear with 'regular' materials? Anyone ever want to kill the person that thought "hmmm, spandex will look good in XXXXlarge canary yellow" ???
Have any of you seen what gets worn at high schools? (no, I'm not a pervert) but there are groups of people that would take self expression to an entirely unexpected new level if they could change it before getting caught...
Have you ever seen the gay pride parades? Mardi Gras? Imagine that in the mall or your local TGIF's on occassion. If clothes could make it look like the wearer was naked, but not be, more people than you think, and certainly people you wouldn't want to, will think its fun to do so.
Not that I think such innovations should be held back, but there are some serious consequences to our laws and society with the introduction of such things... and trust me, the judiciary is NOT ready to deal with it, whether it is innovation or change, they are not prepared to deal equitably with either.
Just what do law makers do with someone that creates a virus that makes little girls clothes go transparent? There are some serious things to think about with technology, and UNFORTUNATELY, our law makers have NO CLUE what to do with it other than react like they were born with the patriot act in their mouths (or pick your preferred orrifice).
Yes, I'm paranoid... at least when it comes to anything that requires law makers and politicians to have common sense and good humor.
sigh...
I think that the worst part of this problem is that if net neutrality ends, those that have access to Google at good speed will stop using other services, likewise, those with only good access to MSN will use only MSN. That puts us right back in the cable-company game where there is only one provider available, for all intents and purposes, and the only person who gets screwed is the consumer. Right now, I have one choice for cable network connection, no DSL, and no fiber(yet)... and I'm at the mercy of whatever that cable company wants to do (say make it very difficult to use a home router with my VoIP provider) or anything else.
That is not a neutrality issue, that ends up being the same mob-like business practices that cable companies have always had, but now the telcos are getting involved too.... all in the name of bending over the consumers.
I'd truly like to see metropolitan networks (wired and wireless) be managed by an independent company where any citizen user can choose where their traffic hits the network outside the MAN. That would allow Earthlink, Google, Yahoo, SBC, Comcast, Verizon... all of them would have access to provide me service, and anytime any of them screws around with my packets, I'll just switch providers, but it is the MAN that makes all those providers equal in relation to my packets and the services that they can provide. The independently managed MAN ensures that they cannot use mobster like practices with my packets... or at least comes closer to packet nirvana than anything else I can think of.
Anyone with other ideas?
This would certainly go to show two things: how fucked up copyright law is, and how fucked up walmart is. This is close enough to stealing candy from a baby as to make walmart look like the idiots I think they are. Go ahead, mod me down, but the point is that this is stupid, and I hope they win so that walmart and their management look as stupid as this situation is... but to all the world, not just /.
When you have to pay as much as you need to to run oracle, patches released in a timely manner that actually fix things is part of customer service. If there is no customer service, there is soon no customers. The OSS database engines are gaining ground, and personally, I like the way patches and fixes are released thus far for F/OSS .... I'm seeing fewer and fewer reasons to pay for big software packages like Oracle, MS, etc.
ROI is important, and bad patch schedules and releases is not good ROI...
I hope that this doesn't turn out to be linked to some religion or other. All we need is another whacko group claiming to have the only true religion, and proof of its veracity in this pyramid. I truly do hope that this is built by, or inspired by alien visitors, perhaps stranded travellers or something. As long as its anything but more religious hype/tripe/your-fav-bad-thing-here.
will it run linux?
Seriously, will Vista support a RAID-5 with drives of this size?
For that matter, will Linux?
For a while in the 90's ... everything, and I mean *EVERYTHING* out of hollywood had one of those green shaded desk lamps in it. (just for fun, when you are watching anything from the 90s, count how many there are ... tv, movies, anything) and that is not because the lamp manufacturer paid for product placement... it is most likely because the prop departments got a good deal on them!
As for Apple, have you seen the programs that they actually show running on television and movies? It is ALL artwork... there is no programming in it. The reason the Mac is shown is probably because that is the only computer the 'program' would run on... Not to mention that when real wintel computing power came along, the Macs were probably sitting around with nothing to do, so made their way to the prop departments... Thats not meant as a crack on Macs, but face it, its probably true. Any wintel machine that gets old, goes on the scrap heap... Mac users keep theirs around for years after they should upgrade.
So, all in all, the probability that there is something to this is less than that of the cubs winning any year soon.
While there are critics, 'wiki style' collaboration is a good thing. It often takes seeing a problem from different perspectives to understand the real nature of the problem. Sure, there will be idiots trying to help out or make their mark on the wiki, but the concept of shared thinking is more powerful than anyone knows. The promise that was HTML added to many people thinking of how to understand something is incredibly faster than the process that eventually created the atomic bomb.
So, jokes and criticism aside, the OST (open source thinking) is a good plan. Execution may have some drawbacks, but it has goodness in it.
This is funny because all these large corporate entities are proving (by shooting their own feet) that the Google 'do no evil' mantra is worth more than any advertising campaign....
I can see the future where such 'news articles' cause havoc at the next shareholder's meetings... sadly, that day has not yet arrived, but as the world of commerce gets flatter, it will...
This is expected, along with other twisted plot points in the struggle for the world to become completely flat with regard to regulation, business, and other things of huge impact to joe public.
... well, up till now. As they lose power and control, they will do many twisted things to try to retain it.
Some of the processes to watch are: Immigration, offshoring, outsourcing, foodstuffs regulation, computer and internet regulation and taxation.
The world is very busy at becoming flat in many regards. Something tells me the French will always be a sore thumb, but everyone else is interested in commerce and becoming either wealthy consumers or those that supply them. Once the regulatory grip slips loose a bit, watch how farmers start selling their products both without the protection of the government, and without the stranglehold on how they can sell their products. Food has been used as a political tool for too long, as technology has been. The old guard are losing control of all the things that kept them in power for
As for taxation, without funds from taxation, governments become rather helpless groups of mislead individuals. This is just one *SMALL* sign that its time to revamp the tax schemes here in the US. The old ways are falling behind so quickly that it will be difficult to keep up... we need someone to start a wiki or something... A place where government types can go to learn about the brave new world they are facing and how they can effect a stable government within it.
Its not really a threat, well unless you consider watching the profits go from big name studios to triple and quadruple play carriers a threat.
Did we forget that tiered internet thingy? Yep. as soon as media shifts to all digital, we have a new set of pipers to pay. Instead of the old cable companies and commercials, it will be digital network providers and commercials PLUS the overhead of tiered network costs if you want to watch that with fewer commercials and in real time streaming.
All of this posturing and lobbying is about capturing market, ensuring that investors will be happy in the future.
Digital content is simply a different medium, and the big players, even the new ones, are not going to let it go for free. If they can't get advertising dollars for it, they will try to charge premium costs for access to it.
One thing is for certain, you can bet that Hollywood, television networks, and other media content providers will be vying to pick consumer's pockets for a very long time indeed.
Will governments decide that all cars must be sold with properly licensed tires on them? Maybe DVD players should be sold with properly licensed DVDs to play in them.
.... no lobby money needed per se, no court costs needed for fighting pirates, no money needed to influence governments... wow, when you think about it, I wish F/OSS groups were given the equivelent of what MS has spent lobbying courts, governments, and other groups and entities. That should give us all a very nice OS.
Yeah, I get the point, and I can see how this 'should' help MS and others fight piracy... one day, these people will wake up and see that pirates simply don't care and are going to use illegal copies of things anyway. This is why F/OSS has a strong advantage over MS
Well, you can't say you've been around the proverbial block with computers if you don't know how to use edlin and vi... that's just the facts... sort of like the sun rises and sets...
that you try this new application that is out... Linux :-)
Yeah, maybe not that funny, but its required here
Did I miss something? Why is a company, who stands to make a lot of money by putting anti-'bad'ware companies out of business, writing the law for this type of thing? There seem to be a lot of loop holes in this law and what it allows. How are businesses to be compensated when this upgradable software deletes some of their code base on a laptop that is plugged in at home, or some other plausible situation. The assignment of rights via a single click during installation is shaky at best, and underhanded on normal days.
If it walks like a duck, smells like a duck, quacks like a duck... its a duck, likewise for monopolies....
This is frightening. MS didn't even have to spend lobby money and bribes...
Is it too late to just give the Inerweb back?
The problem is both easier and more difficult than it first appears, or even second and third times:
Data, whether held in databases (usually nice and tidy) or in flatfiles, or random text files spread all over hell's half acre, is simply data, not the information required to link it to other data. Even meta data about the data held in any data store is not the information required to link it to other data.
One of the things I believe will help (possibly) is ODF (buzzword warning sounds) because it begins to help format data in a universally accepted manner. Though it is not the only way, universal access methods are required for accessible data. Second, the structure of the data must be presented in a universal manner. This second part allows query languages to support cognitive understanding of the structure, and thus (with some work) the value of data held in a storage location, where ever and whatever that location is, be it RDBMS, text files, or phone bills.
Indexing is simply not enough. The ability to retrieve and utilize the index with the most probability of having relevent data is what is needed. We all know that any search engine can get you too many 'hits' that contain useless data. Google or anyone else is helpless until there are accepted methods for applying metadata and data structure descriptions on all data.
When there is far more organization to data storage, there will be a great sucking sound of people actually using data from the internet in brand new ways.... until then, its all hit and miss.
I think its about time that, even though this piece was slightly biased, mainstream media began looking seriously at the behemouth that *nix has become. Its always been in data centers, and Linux is fitting in well there. The only reason that mainstream view of desktop software is so biased is simply because these people grew up knowing only Windows or Mac, and so that is, to them, how computers are supposed to be, and perform. When someone else comes along with something new, it is always compared to the existing system to see if it measures up.
... you know, like a "Ubuntu media edition for Dell computers" ... or something like that.
Now, I'm not saying that Linux is a perfect replacement for XP or OS X, but I remember the arguments about using F3 vs. F1 for the help key, and if you have ever seen Windows 3.0 or earlier, you'd know that there were plenty of people, myself included, that said meh, I'll keep using DR DOS thank you very much. The fact that Linux is the new kid on the block is all the more reason for MS and others to fear it. It *IS* changing everything.
It is about to the point that if a card or MB won't be supported by Linux, I can leave it setting on the shelf, and so can a lot of other people. The fact that there are examples of this, and WHOLE countries (apparently) leaving Windows for Linux means that the revolution is happening, slowly, but it is happening.
This story is not so exciting for those of us who have been waiting for it, expecting it, and are now ready to hear the daily updates in application development that surpases MS's capability to keep up. F/OSS is a better way to do thing, and I think (hope) that CLAMAV and others will show the Bill schills and others exactly what can be done to stop spam, virii, and malware. You know, something along the lines of "here, download the software.. its free.. and only 14.99/year for updates. Then someone fix the F/OSS mail clients to utilize global white and black lists etc. and some of the other ideas for stopping spam for only moderate yearly costs... say... hmmm 14.99/year maybe?
Look at what Vonage and Skype are doing to the telecomms business arena. That is pretty much the same sort of apple cart upsetting that's happening with *nix right now. I'd love to see a *nix distro that is first to be ready (out of the box) to be used to download television, movies, etc.
I'd just really like to see totally heated up competition in all media markets. iPod! your days are numbered. CD player? your days are numbered. Solid state memory is able to hold as much, in smaller spaces, and is more flexible. I'm just waiting for someone to create the hardware that will supercede CD's and DVD's altogether... leapfrog this whole BR-HD-DVD argument.
Anyway, the point is that this news, isn't really news to some of us, and it should not be shocking to anyone. Bring on more news like this is what I say... we can all use good news anyday.
While things like this might erode such skills, I'm pretty certain that there isn't much call for the lost art of wagon wheel making thanks to Mr Ford, or lye soap making etc... its the natural way of things. Film developing has kind of gone out of style these days too... uhhh so what?
Drawing skills are seldom needed these days, and for where they are, that just makes artistic folk more appreciated...
Its not software that erodes or diminishes drawing skills, it happens when people have no incentive or reason to use said skills. No news here...