The fact that Microsoft ostensibly priced Internet Explorer at zero does not detract from the conclusion that consumers were forced to pay, one way or another, for the browser along with Windows.
And boy did they! Here's another:
No other distribution channels for browsing software approach the efficiency of OEM pre-installation and IAP bundling. Findings 144-47. Nevertheless, protecting the applications barrier to entry was so critical to Microsoft that the firm was willing to invest substantial resources to enlist ICPs, ISVs, and Apple in its campaign against the browser threat. By extracting from Apple terms that significantly diminished the usage of Navigator on the Mac OS, Microsoft helped to ensure that developers would not view Navigator as truly cross-platform middleware. Id. 356.
Here's a case where the alarmists were right. M$ was buying Apple's cooperation. Not that I ever doubted it myself, but now it's been proven in court.
Furthermore, neither Microsoft's efforts at technical innovation nor its pricing behavior is inconsistent with the possession of monopoly power. Id. 61-66.
But... but... isn't this the most innovative company in the world??!?!??
In fact, Microsoft has expended wealth and foresworn opportunities to realize more in a manner and to an extent that can only represent a rational investment if its purpose was to perpetuate the applications barrier to entry. Id. 136, 139-42. Because Microsoft's business practices "would not be considered profit maximizing except for the expectation that . . . the entry of potential rivals" into the market for Intel-compatible PC operating systems will be "blocked or delayed," Neumann v. Reinforced Earth Co., 786 F.2d 424, 427 (D.C. Cir. 1986), Microsoft's campaign must be termed predatory.
Hmm... I suppose all their rational people are in the accounting department.
If this is going to be a properly maintained Open Source joke, we need to do things right. This joke patch should have been sent as an email to the joke's maintainer, who is then the one responsible for including it in the next point release of the joke. This kind of activity could easily lead to joke forking. Before you know it, there would be two completely incompatable versions of the joke floating around -- look at what happened with the "forward this email to all your friends and Bill Gates will send you $10,000" joke. There are so many versions of it that none of them are funny anymore. This is the sort of thing that gives Open Source a bad name in the stand-up comic community.
Now withdraw this patch from circulation before we send ESR after you with a posse.
Initial development and maintenance are two very different phases of a software project. Many programmers temprementally suited for one are not at all happy doing the other. Perhaps this will end up as a clearinghouse where projects are routinely handed off from developers to maintainers.
For useable voice, you *must* have low altidude satellites.
That depends on what you consider "usable". Even with regular phone lines you get considerable latency on overseas calls, but that doesn't make international long distance unusable. The latency imposed by Iridium certainly would not have been any worse. The low orbits had as much to do with the fact that the satellites needed to be reachable from a handheld unit - low power and no dish - as latency concerns.
...they won't last long....
There are plenty of long-lived low orbit satellites up there. (You've heard of the Hubble Telescope?) The short life of an Iridium bird was a design decision intended, in part, to minimize startup costs. The idea was to spend a relatively small amount on cheap, disposable satellites which could then be continually replaced using funds from operating revenues. Rather than a capital outlay even more enromous than it was, you get a regular expense that you can budget for. Of course, revenues were never as high as Motorola had hoped.
Your basic point remains though. Iridium was always doomed.
There is no way to implement "better, faster, cheaper" properly. Not anymore. It's too late.
I work in the defense industry, on a satellite project that had a serious launch failure last year. The reason we have been having so many problems in the space program is because of a complete breakdown in the transmission of the expertise necessary for success. This expertise was originally gained in the early days of the space race, and would be impossible to recall without cash outlays comparable to what was spent in those days. Adjusted for inflation, of course.
The engineers who did the basic research in those days are long retired, but in past decades they had a long time to transmit what they knew to the younger generation of engineers. Sorry if this offends any of the younger crowd, but freshly minted college graduates are not really fully trained. They have all the basics, but real-world experience is absolutely essential. When there were a large number of experienced older engineers in the workforce there was a kind of informal apprenticeship system in place whereby the new generation received this training. But because this was never codified or formalized, the pointy-haired bosses of the industry never took serious note of it. Under the pressures of "better, faster, cheaper" the began to look for any way they could to cut costs - their own salaries and perks being sacrosanct, of course. Their jaundiced eyes soon lit on the senior engineering staff. They were all older, and with accumulated seniority much more expensive. Why, a PHB could hire three new grads for the cost of just one of these old guys! So out the door they went, either laid off or forced into early retirement, and they took their knowledge with them.
In most cases the knowledge lost wasn't the kind of information that any PHB could apply simple-minded metrics to and put down on a balance sheet. They were all the little things - habits, ways of working, all the reflexive sanity checks that ensured that the numbers that came out at the end of their procedures conveyed the information they were intended to convey. They would check and doublecheck things like unit conversions and software loads just because that's how they worked. And by and large NASA projects worked too.
But now they're gone. Boosters are inserting payloads into useless orbits. Probes are crashing into the planets they were supposed to land softly on. Satellites are failing before their designed lifespans are elapsed. And there just may not be a single thing that can be done about it. Not without an effort that this country no longer has the will to support.
Sometimes I am truly astounded that we got to the moon and back. Not because we couldn't build the rockets, but because the guidance and control is so complex.
You've got that right. I work in a military communications satellite program, and as far as I'm concerned our OA guys have the hardest job in the house. Not only do they hvae to take all ther factors you mention into consideration, but during launch ops they have to do it in close to realtime - not that there's always somehting to be done about it if things go wrong, but it's certainly important to know that things are going right.
...and from the look of the stills, it will be orders of magnitude better than that horrendous movie.
Still, I could wish that the Fremen looked more like the Arabs they were supposed to resemble, except for their blue eyes. But you can't have everything, and it seems to me that this miniseries will give quite a lot. I can actually identify which scene in the book the stills came from. Try doing that with the movie!
Re:Call me extra ignorant...
on
R.I.P. Iridium
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· Score: 2
They're a network of communications satellites in very low orbits. Users have handsets that contact the satellites directly. You can travel anywhere in the world with an Iridium telephone and are able to call anywhere else in the world, on or off the Iridium net, without depending on the local infrastructure. Theoretically a good idea, but it was badly executed.
It's like slashdotting a telescope. Iridium satellites are so reflective that they cause numerous false hits, flooding a telescope with light and making genuine observation impossible.
If you've ever found yourself wanting a third hand while soldering then you're probably not a hacker.
Oh, nonsense. Everybody was a beginner once.
Maybe I should tell about the time when I was twelve and dropped a soldering iron while working on my HO setup. I tried to catch it before it hit the floor. The floor was concrete, and was considerably less affected by the iron than I was.
It seems to me that implementing RPM (or a similar format, perhaps with extensions to handle dependencies like DEB does) is the logical way to go here.
I've never used Red Hat, just Debian. Can someone please tell me why anyone should bother with a package manager that doesn't handle dependencies? ISTM without that feature we might as well stick with the good ol'.tgz.
If you define space as "the limited volume that contains all the 'stuff,'" then yes, I agree that space would be limited.
That's not what space means. It actually has a fairly complex definition, and which one you pick depends on which cosmological theory you hew to. But if you imagine that there is an infinite amount of 3-D space essentially similar to our own, and that the "expanding universe" is simply the expanision of matter into this pre-existing space, then you have a definition accepted by no modern cosmological theory. For more information, I suggest you go to Ask Jeeves and give it the question, "What happened at the Big Bang?" You will get a slew of links that give a broad overview of this most interesting subject.
In one sense this is very disturbing, but... If these employees had been accused of organizing a sickout by, say, a mass mailing of postcards, could the court have authorized a search of their homes for paper evidence? If the answer is "yes," then this is not a new kind of situation and sets no precedent whatsoever. The data on a PC is no more personal than most people maintain among their papers, and really ought be subject to no more (and no less) protection.
This question cannot be answered from the article because they chose to focus on the computer angle, as if it added anything new to the story. Had they done so, and if it's indeed true that a company could have obtained federal court authorization to go through employees' personal papers just as readily as their computers' hard drives, then this story could have been a great springboard to a serious discussion of privacy rights in general, and possibly a spur to political action. But they didn't.
And if it's not true, and the court considered data stored on a computer less worthy of protection than someone's personal papers, it would have been interesting - and possibly a cause of outrage - to know why. That question wasn't answered either. I don't think that reporter understood the issues well enough to report on them effectively.
Correction correction: Matter, space and time are all interdependent and cannot exist without each other. Space has been expanding ever since the Big Bang, along with the matter it contains. You would be more correct to say that it's unbounded, as it indeed is in three dimensions. But it's quite finite.
However the rallying cry to the troops wasn't "We Need More Land!"
Actually, in the example I gave it was. That and spoil from battle. Forget Shakespeare's version in Henry V; the Hundred Years' War was incredibly popular in England because in it a peasant soldier could come home a wealthy landowner. It started because the Plantagenet kings thought they had a better claim on the French throne than the Valois. (Which they did, but after a few decades it was almost besides the point. Henry V, who occupied Paris and had his son crowned Henri II of France, was a Lancaster.)
If, however, you say "if you fail in your quest you'll go to hell" then it's another matter entirely.
I can't think of any examples of this, from European history anyway. The Crusaders for example got an E for Effort, even if they failed. Which they generally did.
One point I failed to make clear is that I want to distinguish rationalization, or how you justify doing what you want to do anyway, from reason which is really why you want to do it. Religion has relatively rarely been the reason for brutality, but has often been used as a rationalization for it. If that's what you meant then I can't disagree.
Dude, you need to pick up a copy of A Brief History of Time by a certain Prof. S. Hawking[1]. You'll discover that the current theory that best describes the data at hand as to the origin of the universe does indeed state that time and space had a beginning - simultaneously (so to speak) because they are interdependent and cannot exist without each other. As to your idea of multiple successive universes, that is certainly within the bounds of possibility, but since any given universe would not be observable from within another one and they are divided by discontinuities (singularities), one cannot possibly have an effect on another.
So following the original question (in which someone professed their faith in God on the assumption that *someone* had to create us since random actions couldn't account for life) it would appear that given random occurence mixed with infinite time and space (or an infinite number of finite universes) the possibility of sentient life developing is at least 1.
So what you're saying is that a disc-shaped world supported on the backs of four elephants standing on a gargantuan turtle swimming through the cosmic void is at least as probable as the existence of life? OK, I'll buy that.
[1] A little dated to be sure, but there have been no really earth-shattering discoveries since it was written.
Probably nobody's going to see this, but... No. You've missed the point. "Real world frame of reference" means a real observer within the real universe. Both space and time had a beginning, therefore to any actual observer both are finite because the ending time and the size of the universe are definite. If time is in fact open-ended, only someone outside both time and space would be able to observe that fact directly. Within time and space, it requires a theoretical observer at infinity. Such an observer must be only theoretical because infinity can never be reached, only approached. But anything short of it is still finite.
If the universe turns out to be flat, then time will indeed be infinite, but not to any real-world frame of reference. That's because time had a beginning. To any real observer, a finite amount of time will have elapsed since it began. Space will always be finite (although arbitrarily large) for any real-world observer as well, for the same reason.
Show me something repeatable that can't be explained without the god hypothesis.
You didn't say repeatable. You said observable.
Nevertheless there are regularly occurring miracles, such as the annual miracle of the Holy Fire in Jerusalem or the myrrh-streaming icon of the Mother of God Iveronskaya in Montreal. Both of these have been shown not to be fraudulent. I suppose that a creative mind could come up with some explanation other than God, but would it be a simpler one? I doubt it.
"Jon" can be someone's name stand-alone, but it's usually short for "Jonathan", which is a name distinct from "John." Neither name is uncommon, although one encounters "John" more often.
But many - I would say most - atheists speak as if science did indeed deny the existence of God. The science/religion dichotomy is a false one, but not to hear some atheists speak.
This just usually can't be made into a concept as small as the Christian God, though.
You must be relying on televangelists for information on the Christian God if you thing He's a small concept. Or you're reading the wrong books. Try some of the Eastern fathers.
Science becomes a faith when claims are made with insufficient data which are yet held to be true - or at least, more probable - simply because they seem more "scientific" than the alternatives. It becomes a faith when it is used to justify an unreasoned confidence in Science to answer all questions, even though it has been proven that no formal system can prove all true propositions.
And frankly, Webster's has the definition of faith wrong. Faith is a method by which answers are sought that steps outside the bounds of formal systems to arrive at otherwise unreachable truths.
Not only this, but the God hypothesis doesn't explain any observables that aren't explained in a more simple manner by other hypotheses.
There are numerous counterexamples from history (in accounts that are usually rejected as historical simply because they contain such counterexamples) and several in my personal experience. Rejecting data just because it doesn't fit the model is hardly scientific, but it happens all the time. This is another way in which science is treated as a religion.
Organized religion, and religious doctrine in particular has been given as a reason for a lot of brutality in history. It has also been the way monarchs maintained power, and that a class system was maintained.
This chestnut is repeated so often that most people believe it unquestioningly. "A lot of brutality" can be the tortured death of one person, especially if that person is yourself. But in the vast sea of "man's inhumanity to man," religion as the reason for it has been a small pond. The overwhelming majority of human brutality has been the simple territorial imperative (i.e. England in the 100 Years' War), ethnic hatred (i.e. the Turkish slaughter of Greeks and Armenians over the past century) or personal megalomania (i.e. Hitler, although there's a good measure of ethnic hatred there too. Before you go off thinking that that was religious hatred, consider that Hitler worshipped himself more than anything else.)
The athiest takes the world as what it appears to be. A sum of what our senses and sensors tell us is there. A person who believes in gods adds to that world view yet another "item", a god.
So if you were to see a miracle - defined, say, as an insufficiently caused effect - would that change your mind? And if the answer is no, how can you possibly stand by the above statement?
This last difference is the reason you see Christians, Muslims and Jews involved in religious wars but you rarely see an army of athiests trying to kill all the people who believe in gods.
Now that was the Big Lie. More Christian martyrs have been made this past century than in the entire previous history of the Church, and the majority of them were made, by the tens of millions, by a militantly athiest regime trying to stamp out all religion within its reach. The attmept failed, but caused untold suffering in the meantime. Read a history of the Soviet Union sometime, if you don't believe me.
Slashdot Mirror
If this is going to be a properly maintained Open Source joke, we need to do things right. This joke patch should have been sent as an email to the joke's maintainer, who is then the one responsible for including it in the next point release of the joke. This kind of activity could easily lead to joke forking. Before you know it, there would be two completely incompatable versions of the joke floating around -- look at what happened with the "forward this email to all your friends and Bill Gates will send you $10,000" joke. There are so many versions of it that none of them are funny anymore. This is the sort of thing that gives Open Source a bad name in the stand-up comic community.
Now withdraw this patch from circulation before we send ESR after you with a posse.
Initial development and maintenance are two very different phases of a software project. Many programmers temprementally suited for one are not at all happy doing the other. Perhaps this will end up as a clearinghouse where projects are routinely handed off from developers to maintainers.
Your basic point remains though. Iridium was always doomed.
I work in the defense industry, on a satellite project that had a serious launch failure last year. The reason we have been having so many problems in the space program is because of a complete breakdown in the transmission of the expertise necessary for success. This expertise was originally gained in the early days of the space race, and would be impossible to recall without cash outlays comparable to what was spent in those days. Adjusted for inflation, of course.
The engineers who did the basic research in those days are long retired, but in past decades they had a long time to transmit what they knew to the younger generation of engineers. Sorry if this offends any of the younger crowd, but freshly minted college graduates are not really fully trained. They have all the basics, but real-world experience is absolutely essential. When there were a large number of experienced older engineers in the workforce there was a kind of informal apprenticeship system in place whereby the new generation received this training. But because this was never codified or formalized, the pointy-haired bosses of the industry never took serious note of it. Under the pressures of "better, faster, cheaper" the began to look for any way they could to cut costs - their own salaries and perks being sacrosanct, of course. Their jaundiced eyes soon lit on the senior engineering staff. They were all older, and with accumulated seniority much more expensive. Why, a PHB could hire three new grads for the cost of just one of these old guys! So out the door they went, either laid off or forced into early retirement, and they took their knowledge with them.
In most cases the knowledge lost wasn't the kind of information that any PHB could apply simple-minded metrics to and put down on a balance sheet. They were all the little things - habits, ways of working, all the reflexive sanity checks that ensured that the numbers that came out at the end of their procedures conveyed the information they were intended to convey. They would check and doublecheck things like unit conversions and software loads just because that's how they worked. And by and large NASA projects worked too.
But now they're gone. Boosters are inserting payloads into useless orbits. Probes are crashing into the planets they were supposed to land softly on. Satellites are failing before their designed lifespans are elapsed. And there just may not be a single thing that can be done about it. Not without an effort that this country no longer has the will to support.
It's less than that, even. The designed lifespan is 5-8 years. Read about it here at the Iridium corporate website.
Still, I could wish that the Fremen looked more like the Arabs they were supposed to resemble, except for their blue eyes. But you can't have everything, and it seems to me that this miniseries will give quite a lot. I can actually identify which scene in the book the stills came from. Try doing that with the movie!
They're a network of communications satellites in very low orbits. Users have handsets that contact the satellites directly. You can travel anywhere in the world with an Iridium telephone and are able to call anywhere else in the world, on or off the Iridium net, without depending on the local infrastructure. Theoretically a good idea, but it was badly executed.
It's like slashdotting a telescope. Iridium satellites are so reflective that they cause numerous false hits, flooding a telescope with light and making genuine observation impossible.
Maybe I should tell about the time when I was twelve and dropped a soldering iron while working on my HO setup. I tried to catch it before it hit the floor. The floor was concrete, and was considerably less affected by the iron than I was.
Ouchie.
This question cannot be answered from the article because they chose to focus on the computer angle, as if it added anything new to the story. Had they done so, and if it's indeed true that a company could have obtained federal court authorization to go through employees' personal papers just as readily as their computers' hard drives, then this story could have been a great springboard to a serious discussion of privacy rights in general, and possibly a spur to political action. But they didn't.
And if it's not true, and the court considered data stored on a computer less worthy of protection than someone's personal papers, it would have been interesting - and possibly a cause of outrage - to know why. That question wasn't answered either. I don't think that reporter understood the issues well enough to report on them effectively.
Correction correction: Matter, space and time are all interdependent and cannot exist without each other. Space has been expanding ever since the Big Bang, along with the matter it contains. You would be more correct to say that it's unbounded, as it indeed is in three dimensions. But it's quite finite.
One point I failed to make clear is that I want to distinguish rationalization, or how you justify doing what you want to do anyway, from reason which is really why you want to do it. Religion has relatively rarely been the reason for brutality, but has often been used as a rationalization for it. If that's what you meant then I can't disagree.
[1] A little dated to be sure, but there have been no really earth-shattering discoveries since it was written.
Probably nobody's going to see this, but... No. You've missed the point. "Real world frame of reference" means a real observer within the real universe. Both space and time had a beginning, therefore to any actual observer both are finite because the ending time and the size of the universe are definite. If time is in fact open-ended, only someone outside both time and space would be able to observe that fact directly. Within time and space, it requires a theoretical observer at infinity. Such an observer must be only theoretical because infinity can never be reached, only approached. But anything short of it is still finite.
If the universe turns out to be flat, then time will indeed be infinite, but not to any real-world frame of reference. That's because time had a beginning. To any real observer, a finite amount of time will have elapsed since it began. Space will always be finite (although arbitrarily large) for any real-world observer as well, for the same reason.
Nevertheless there are regularly occurring miracles, such as the annual miracle of the Holy Fire in Jerusalem or the myrrh-streaming icon of the Mother of God Iveronskaya in Montreal. Both of these have been shown not to be fraudulent. I suppose that a creative mind could come up with some explanation other than God, but would it be a simpler one? I doubt it.
I've been unable to reach The Hunger Site today until just a few minutes ago. Were they among the victims?
You really need to get out more.
And frankly, Webster's has the definition of faith wrong. Faith is a method by which answers are sought that steps outside the bounds of formal systems to arrive at otherwise unreachable truths.
There are numerous counterexamples from history (in accounts that are usually rejected as historical simply because they contain such counterexamples) and several in my personal experience. Rejecting data just because it doesn't fit the model is hardly scientific, but it happens all the time. This is another way in which science is treated as a religion.