Tumor growth rates are a hotly debated topic. This paper contains some interesting ideas. But the headline incorrectly suggests that "fighting cancer with math" is something new. Biologists have been using mathematics, including differential equations and fractals for as long as they have been around (in fact, a lot of math comes from biological problems).
On quick reading, this paper seems to argue primarily that it is not nutrients, but cell diffusion, that limits cancer growth rates. That hypothesis is supported by observing similarities between the growth behavior and shapes created by processes in that class and real tumors. Interesting, but only weak evidence. They'll need to refine their hypothesis and test it more directly experimentally.
Actually, it lets you drive the vacuum cleaner around your home and control it from a web page anywhere in the world; it's weird, but together with the built-in camera, it lets you check in on your home pretty nicely.
If your vacuum cleaner finds your wife having sex in the bedroom with the UPS man, I suppose that may qualify as porn.
It often is, but Microsoft is different. When a company has upwards of 50% market share in some kind of infrastructure, the rules change. For example, Microsoft could (and did) wipe out entire companies simply by making a deliberately fabricated announcement at a show that they were "working on something similar and it would be announced soon". That's not business or competition anymore, and it certainly isn't competition on technical merit.
If Burger King were wiped off the map by McDonald's, would you be worried about it?
No, because their products are largely interchangeable. But I am concerned about Burger King wiping independent, higher quality restaurants off the map, which they do. However, that problem hasn't become anywhere nearly as bad as in the computer industry.
Innovation and choice in operating systems are high on the agenda for geeks like us, but my mom has a hard enough time learning one OS - even if there were another she liked better, I doubt she'd take the time to learn it
But that's part of the problem: lack of standardization. There were actually user interface standards being developed, but they became irrelevant once Microsoft had enough market share and decided to go it alone.
Having said that, my mother (an artsy person) doesn't have any problems moving between Windows, Macintosh, and KDE--the three systems have become so similar to each other that she basically doesn't even care much (Macintosh is actually the worst of the bunch). Unfortunately, they have become similar on Microsoft's terms, rather than through innovation by lots of different companies and open standardization of the best ideas. That's why all their interfaces are far from as easy to use as they could be.
Imagine going to the dealership where "innovative" cars are sold. Someone's decided that it would be a great idea to stick the steering wheel in the back seat. Is that something you want to deal with? Probably not. In this case, of course, choice can be good, but imagine as well that it's hot and humid outside, and that this was only the first dealership of ten that you're planning on visiting before you even begin to decide on which car to buy.
But that example undermines your argument that it is important to have a single company designing the user interfaces. There are still dozens of car companies, yet they all manage to produce products with reasonably interchangeable user interfaces. So, instead of standardization because of a near Microsoft monopoly, we could have standardization through de-factor or explicit standards.
But, to continue your example, imagine now that one of the car companies started buying up all the gas stations and only let its own cars fill up at those gas stations. Sure, you can still buy the other cars, but they'll be less and less practical. That's roughly the situation we have with Microsoft. In fact, something fairly analogous happend in the last century, and the government eventually intervened and broke it all up.
Just curious. I've learned tonight that being human isn't like a bank account where, if you just do enough good things, it balances the bad things.
Well, to be more precise, the problem is that you can't make up for a bad deed by doing something completely unrelated that's good. If you cheat somebody, no amount of donations to the World Wildlife Fund will make up for it--you have to apologize, repair the damage you caused, and give indications that you recognize your behavior was wrong.
Gates doesn't admit that he was wrong; he probably still doesn't believe he was doing something wrong. Therefore, I don't have any reason to trust his business ethics any more now than before his $25b donation. His $25b donation illuminates a completely different aspect of his character, but that aspect was never my concern--I never assumed that Gates was any worse in that particular regard than other wealthy people.
Roomba is a nice little vacuum cleaner, and not too expensive. But it is not the technically most advanced household robot. Roomba operates roughly like a pool cleaner, moving around in some (probably carefully tuned) random patterns.
You can actually get vacuum cleaner robots with a lot more, and more advanced, technology: sensors, cameras, indoor room mapping, WiFi, etc.
It was practically a business model in the late 90's to set your company up for purchase by Microsoft. That's hardly "killing".
Sure, buying a company is not killing it. But there are lots of other companies Microsoft has driven out of business, or nearly so, that Microsoft didn't buy. Furthermore, even though the purchase of various companies by Microsoft may have been good for the few investors in those companies, it was usually bad for everybody else.
People bring up this monopoly thing all the time, but I can't think of a single product we produce for which there isn't competition.
Microsoft hasn't been convicted of being a monopoly, it has been convicted of monopolistic business practices. Being a monopoly is not illegal (but may lead to regulation). Monopolistic business practices, on the other hand, are illegal even if the company isn't a monopoly yet (but not usually worth prosecuting until a company gets as large as Microsoft).
Also, the "competition" you list is illusory. The only two competitors with much public visibility in that list, Apple and Sun, are being propped up by Microsoft, probably to make just the argument you are making; commercially and technologically, they are becoming less and less important.
Almost all the other software you list (Linux, OpenOffice, Mozilla, etc.) are the open source leftovers of once proud commercial competitors to Microsoft (you can figure out why Linux is in that list). Making them open source has been a desparate, last-ditch attempt by the rest of the industry to fight Microsoft, since competing on price, quality, and innovation hasn't not been sufficient.
Oh, OK. Well, somebody should tell Bill that there's enough, then.
The issue isn't whether there is "enough", the issue is what the donation says about the man, his character, and his company.
What exactly *is* it "doing" right now?
Filing bogus patents, refusing to comply with court orders, fialing to comply with standards, bundling more functionality into the OS, and apparently still engaging in bundling arrangements with major hardware vendors.
I can see why you might think that out here, but if we met in "real life", I have little doubt that we'd get along and not find each other to be quite so odd after all.
People and companies aren't all good or all bad. Microsoft does some good things as a company and many Microsoft employees are generally nice people. But ethics isn't like a bank account where, if you just do enough good things, it balances the bad things.
Also, people in real life are generally polite, and that means that they have the good sense to avoid controversial discussions at social events. They are also generally pragmatists, which is why they don't cut off people just because they disagree with them on ethics--the world wouldn't work otherwise. That does not mean they approve. And if people can't avoid the topic, they avoid the person in order to avoid controversy, which is probably why you mostly meet people who agree with you. The advantage of a forum like this is that one can actually discuss things frankly.
I do think 25 billion dollars going to health care in the third world is generally a good thing, but doing a good thing doesn't mean that the person doing it is a good person. What Gates is doing follows a long history of controversial figures and persons with ethical or legal problems trying to improve their image through large, publicly visible donations to popular causes. If this was about the act rather than the person, the name of the man wouldn't figure so prominently in everything. Religions and ethicists actually often hold that true charity requires anonymity.
Anyway, thanks for taking the time to respond and have a discussion
The reason for the patent announcement is simple. Nokia has announced that they'll be shipping a Linux-based device. Once they do, they cannot assert their patents against the Linux kernel they have been shipping, otherwise they'd be violating the GPL. In fact, the same applies to any vendor that ships Linux, including Cisco, IBM, and Sun, all of which probably have more significant patent portfolios in this space than Nokia.
Nevertheless, Nokia didn't have to choose Linux. They could have shipped BSD or QNX, for example. Someone did a cost/benefit analysis inside Nokia and found that Linux was worth it. That's a good thing. In fact, I think it's a better thing than if they had done this for publicity or other intangible reasons.
It's true Nokia is also lobbying for software patents. I'm not convinced, however, that the two actions are necessarily related, however. Companies aren't all that organized or coordinated internally, and there are far easier arguments for them to make.
Open source isn't the same as "anyone". If Microsoft wants to use patents freely licensed for open source use in the NT kernel they have to distribute NT under an open source license. That's actually a good deal. If all software patent holders did that, it would be a real boost for open source.
Furthermore, one can well make the argument that encouraging open source development is good for innovation, since a lot of (arguably most) innovation in the industry has first appeared in open source form.
I'm not sure yet how legally solid Nokia's commitment is, but if it is solid, it's a good thing for open source, regardless of what Nokia's stance on software patents is otherwise.
A whole lot of experts looked at the question of whether Microsoft restricted consumer choice and determined that Microsoft did so. That determination happened to be as part of court proceedings, and it happened to find Microsoft legally guilty, but the behavior occurred even if it had not risen to the level of illegal monopolistic practices.
Maybe you wish to argue that restricting consumer choice through secret agreements should be legal; that's your good right. But legal or not doesn't change what the behavior does.
So, the implication that Microsoft succeeded because consumers could made a free choice is wrong according to experts. Microsoft might perhaps have succeeded in a free and fair competition in the market, but they did not engage in one.
[Microsoft did not create new technology, they simply took over markets and technologies of other companies] Ah, I see, so millions of folks just forked over money to MSFT, from day one, for no reason whatsoever. By that logic they did nothing more than create a "pet rock" and collect money from people with no value returned.
Microsoft is not at all unusual in this regard: most successful businesses do not create new technology at all, they succeed through better marketing, better support, or better business deals, or, in some cases, monopolistic practices.
(Over the last few years, Microsoft research actually has done a lot of interesting things, but that isn't what made the company successful.)
If you paid thousands of dollars for Windows licenses you didn't need, you (or your purchasing dept) are not doing their job. Why would you buy something you didn't need?
This question has been settled in court, where Microsoft has been convicted of illegal bundling and tying arrangements and been ordered to pay restitution to people like me.
Fortunately, over the last few years, we have experienced more choice so that one can now buy desktops and even some laptops without Windows.
What is the point of that statement, mr. obvious?
The point is simple: success anywhere in the world is not correlated with how hard you work (almost everybody works hard). If it is correlated with anything at all other than dumb luck, it is correlated with personality traits like ruthlessness.
Unfortunately, it seems that most of us have somehow gotten so wrapped up in our silly little arguments about which browser is better to be able to care.
I care a lot, as do lots of other people. That is why I object to Gates-style philanthropy in principle. Monopolizing a market, siphoning hundreds of billions out of the economy, and then aggrandizing oneself by giving back a small fraction of that is not an efficient way so help third world nations.
If Microsoft had not killed dozens of innovative companies and imposed enormous unnecessary costs on businesses, Zimbabwe might well be getting a lot more money than it is now, both from private donations as well as from tax revenues.
Of course, given that Microsoft is a convicted monopolist and doing what it is doing, I prefer them to donate money to worthy causes. But that doesn't excuse or justify Microsoft's past or current behavior. Gates is behaving just like the so-called "robber barons" a century earlier.
you're just glad that somebody's doing something.
There are thousands of dedicated volunteers, and billions of dollars of donations and government funds flowing into HIV prevention and care. But the only thing that you recognize is when Gates writes a big check in his comfy mansion. Your arrogance and thoughtlessness is disgusting.
Remember kids, economics is not a zero-sum game. This is how wealth is created.
Wealth is created when new technology creates new value. Microsoft did not create new technology, they simply took over markets and technologies of other companies.
My first computer cost $2500 - if I had bought MSFT at that time, and sold it at the peak, I'd be a MSFT millionaire too (just not as an employee).
And if you had bought a winning lottery ticket, you'd be a millionaire, too.
Yup, hard work, good luck, and the lack of brutal warlords means anyone in the US can make millions
Of course, hard work and good luck allow anyone in Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, and Russia can make millions, too--like the brutal warlords themselves.
As far as the US is concerned, the key point in your statement is "good luck". The vast majority of people who work hard (often double jobs) will remain poor.
If you made money in the US economy (I did) consider yourself lucky; don't ever make the mistake of believing that you did it through hard work. At best, it is a huge reward for a special skill you have.
(And, yes, in the case of Microsoft, it is our money, like the thousands of dollars of unwanted Windows licenses I have ended up paying for for machines that don't even run Windows.)
Forget about the students. The problem is that the university put highly personal information on a public site without protection and that they aren't even admitting wrongdoing--they are trying to cover it up by pretending this was a group of "hackers". That is by far the greater problem here; that kind of ignorance and negligence is at the heart of the rampant security and identity theft problems we are having.
The applicants were evidently viewing publicly accessible pages, protected only because the applicants didn't actually have a link to them yet. Furthermore, the URL wasn't something obscure, it was a plain-text reference using the same applicant ID as all the other pages, just a different page.
If viewing those kinds of pages violates anybody's rules, then that's a bad precedent. The intent of the applicants may have been bad, but punishing them for this sort of innocuous URL manipulation sets a bad precedent for the entire WWW.
The people who should get "rejected" are the people who created the web site: obviously, ApplyYourself.com is incapable of creating a minimally secure web site. Is a site with such poor security acceptable to Stanford, Harvard, and other universities to handle sensitive personal data? What does that say about the integrity and ethics of those universities?
(We are actually looking for an outsourced service like ApplyYourself--does anybody know of more reputable alternatives?)
What it is lacking in however, is utility. Other than noticing that denial of service attacks use thousands of zombies all over the world, this doesn't really help you.
Just because Linux is buggy does not mean C isn't up to the task. The BSDs seem to be doing a much better job
I have been hacking on BSD systems since the early 1980's. BSD systems used to be rife with preventable C-related bugs: pointer errors, buffer overflows, and memory leaks. After 20 years of hacking, yes, one should hope that most of those have been fixed. That's not a testament to the skill of BSD programmers, only to their persistence and the aenormous ge of the system.
and when they have trouble it's usually with drivers that a higher level language wouldn't help.
There is this bizarre myth that C allows you to do things that other languages don't. That's just not true. The features that make C dangerous and unsafe don't give you any more power than other languages. You can cast pointers and manipulate bits in other languages just like you can in C. The difference is that other languages prevent you from doing so accidentally.
You seem to have trouble distinguishing between 'stops accepting data' and irreprable damage, let me guess, your cup explodes as well if you fill it to the brim with coffee, and I just dont want to be anywhere near you when you fill your car with gas.
Well, you posed the challenge whether Evolution or Kontact could handle your 2G mail, and the answer is "yes", while Outlook actually reaches a limit around that size.
Now, you get all worked up about "irreparable damage". The fact is that Outlook has had such a bug for so long that several companies sell heuristic programs that attempt to recover mail messages. The fact that Microsoft shipped and kept such a version of Outlook in circulation for so long shows you what disregard they have for data integrity and safety.
Outlook is simply not a reliable or heavy-duty mail client. Even if Microsoft eventually gets around to fixing individual bugs, they have not demonstrated that they are putting any more effort into reliability or scalability now than they ever did.
My issue is really with the irreparable part or the original troll though.
The troll here is you: you posted challenges that you full well knew were not satisfiable because Microsoft keeps their protocols proprietary.
The 2 GB wrap around was a long identified issue, was preventable (does no one use the archiving and compression tools or monitor the size of their pst file?)
If we needed any clearer demonstration of why Outlook cannot be trusted, you just gave it: it's this kind of mindset. And whether the PST bug has been fixed or not (it recently killed the mailbox of a user here), the mindset that allowed Microsoft to ship this sort of crap is still alive an well.
God forbid anyone thing that Open Source authors learn something about design instead of functionality. That's the difference between Software Engineers and Code Monkeys.
You're confused about the role of a software engineers; they don't know anything about (user interface) design.
But these carbon clones of Outlook aren't helping me as a software consumer, which means there is virtually no incentive for me to switch to Open Source.
What makes you think that anybody cares whether you use open source software?
The problem is that there are two groups arguing here
There are plenty of innovative user interfaces in open source in general, and open source mail readers in particular.
This particular article happens to focus on two open source systems that have a goal of being intuitive to Outlook users, but there are plenty of other systems.
Group A can get it's way when
Group A and Group B aren't in conflict. They both get their way whenever they want. Each group develops what they think is important and users choose.
Simple: it's the law. The specific appearance of the iPod can be protected by design patents and its wheel thingy has a device patent on it. In contrast, the general arrangement of buttons and menus in an application cannot be protected.
Having said that, it doesn't bother me in the least if other companies clone iPod in any way they like.
This sort of eyecandy is very nice to look at, but utterly useless.
Actually, the only thing that's useless is your comment. You know full well that third party software cannot reliably connect with Exchange servers, and you also know full well that the reason is that Microsoft keeps them proprietary and non-interoperable.
Fortunately, increasingly, that doesn't matter because Microsoft's outdated, insecure, and proprietary protocols are being replaced by open standards.
So, why don't you crawl back into the intellectual hole you came from and commune with your Exchange servers and buggy Microsoft Email clients, while the rest of us enjoy our choice in high-quality free software.
Can I handle my 2 Gb of PST files with Evolution and Kontact? If not,
2G is about where Outlook irreparably damages your mailbox, so I would say that you are probably approaching the point where Outlook can't handle your PST files anymore either. Oh, and don't forget that PST is proprietary, too, so you will not be able to migrate your mail easily to anything else.
They cannot match OSes like Solaris, Linux, and FreeBSD in terms of performance any more than microkernels can.
How do you know? Have you ever run any of them?
In any case, I would gladly use a kernel that ran with more overhead than, say, Linux and in return wasn't as buggy, had more functionality (what about a working and secure network file system, for example?), and was easier to hack.
[C memory management is] just a library.
And you can do the same in other HLLs.
Kernel memory management routines meet the needs of the kernel.
Thy only "meet the needs of the kernel" because people are satisfied with a kernel that works like shit. Kernels benefit greatly from a good garbage collector, in their ability to respond in real time, in the amount of memory used, in correctness, and in ease of development.
Conversely, good programming practices can keep security problems in the kernel to a minimum (eg OpenBSD), while some problems are universal to both. A dedication to security will meet with success with any language.
It evidently does not. The huge number of problems that keep cropping up in all C-based software systems that would have been avoided automatically by most other languages is evidence for that.
And even if C programmers did actually produce bug-free software, still wouldn't mean everything is OK. Even the sad state of C-based kernels and system software as is is only achieved through wasting enormous amounts of memory and CPU, wasting enormous amounts of time on testing that could be avoided in other languages, and a paranoid phobia of adding any kind of new functionality. C programmers try to put a positive spin on these behaviors by using phrases like "expert C programmers" and "against bloat", but it's really pathetic.
C programmers have proven over the last three decades that they are incapable of producing reasonably dependable, functional, and safe software. The experiment has failed--we should move on.
Slashdot Mirror
Tumor growth rates are a hotly debated topic. This paper contains some interesting ideas. But the headline incorrectly suggests that "fighting cancer with math" is something new. Biologists have been using mathematics, including differential equations and fractals for as long as they have been around (in fact, a lot of math comes from biological problems).
On quick reading, this paper seems to argue primarily that it is not nutrients, but cell diffusion, that limits cancer growth rates. That hypothesis is supported by observing similarities between the growth behavior and shapes created by processes in that class and real tumors. Interesting, but only weak evidence. They'll need to refine their hypothesis and test it more directly experimentally.
Actually, it lets you drive the vacuum cleaner around your home and control it from a web page anywhere in the world; it's weird, but together with the built-in camera, it lets you check in on your home pretty nicely.
If your vacuum cleaner finds your wife having sex in the bedroom with the UPS man, I suppose that may qualify as porn.
OK, but isn't that business?
It often is, but Microsoft is different. When a company has upwards of 50% market share in some kind of infrastructure, the rules change. For example, Microsoft could (and did) wipe out entire companies simply by making a deliberately fabricated announcement at a show that they were "working on something similar and it would be announced soon". That's not business or competition anymore, and it certainly isn't competition on technical merit.
If Burger King were wiped off the map by McDonald's, would you be worried about it?
No, because their products are largely interchangeable. But I am concerned about Burger King wiping independent, higher quality restaurants off the map, which they do. However, that problem hasn't become anywhere nearly as bad as in the computer industry.
Innovation and choice in operating systems are high on the agenda for geeks like us, but my mom has a hard enough time learning one OS - even if there were another she liked better, I doubt she'd take the time to learn it
But that's part of the problem: lack of standardization. There were actually user interface standards being developed, but they became irrelevant once Microsoft had enough market share and decided to go it alone.
Having said that, my mother (an artsy person) doesn't have any problems moving between Windows, Macintosh, and KDE--the three systems have become so similar to each other that she basically doesn't even care much (Macintosh is actually the worst of the bunch). Unfortunately, they have become similar on Microsoft's terms, rather than through innovation by lots of different companies and open standardization of the best ideas. That's why all their interfaces are far from as easy to use as they could be.
Imagine going to the dealership where "innovative" cars are sold. Someone's decided that it would be a great idea to stick the steering wheel in the back seat. Is that something you want to deal with? Probably not. In this case, of course, choice can be good, but imagine as well that it's hot and humid outside, and that this was only the first dealership of ten that you're planning on visiting before you even begin to decide on which car to buy.
But that example undermines your argument that it is important to have a single company designing the user interfaces. There are still dozens of car companies, yet they all manage to produce products with reasonably interchangeable user interfaces. So, instead of standardization because of a near Microsoft monopoly, we could have standardization through de-factor or explicit standards.
But, to continue your example, imagine now that one of the car companies started buying up all the gas stations and only let its own cars fill up at those gas stations. Sure, you can still buy the other cars, but they'll be less and less practical. That's roughly the situation we have with Microsoft. In fact, something fairly analogous happend in the last century, and the government eventually intervened and broke it all up.
Just curious. I've learned tonight that being human isn't like a bank account where, if you just do enough good things, it balances the bad things.
Well, to be more precise, the problem is that you can't make up for a bad deed by doing something completely unrelated that's good. If you cheat somebody, no amount of donations to the World Wildlife Fund will make up for it--you have to apologize, repair the damage you caused, and give indications that you recognize your behavior was wrong.
Gates doesn't admit that he was wrong; he probably still doesn't believe he was doing something wrong. Therefore, I don't have any reason to trust his business ethics any more now than before his $25b donation. His $25b donation illuminates a completely different aspect of his character, but that aspect was never my concern--I never assumed that Gates was any worse in that particular regard than other wealthy people.
Roomba is a nice little vacuum cleaner, and not too expensive. But it is not the technically most advanced household robot. Roomba operates roughly like a pool cleaner, moving around in some (probably carefully tuned) random patterns.
You can actually get vacuum cleaner robots with a lot more, and more advanced, technology: sensors, cameras, indoor room mapping, WiFi, etc.
It was practically a business model in the late 90's to set your company up for purchase by Microsoft. That's hardly "killing".
Sure, buying a company is not killing it. But there are lots of other companies Microsoft has driven out of business, or nearly so, that Microsoft didn't buy. Furthermore, even though the purchase of various companies by Microsoft may have been good for the few investors in those companies, it was usually bad for everybody else.
People bring up this monopoly thing all the time, but I can't think of a single product we produce for which there isn't competition.
Microsoft hasn't been convicted of being a monopoly, it has been convicted of monopolistic business practices. Being a monopoly is not illegal (but may lead to regulation). Monopolistic business practices, on the other hand, are illegal even if the company isn't a monopoly yet (but not usually worth prosecuting until a company gets as large as Microsoft).
Also, the "competition" you list is illusory. The only two competitors with much public visibility in that list, Apple and Sun, are being propped up by Microsoft, probably to make just the argument you are making; commercially and technologically, they are becoming less and less important.
Almost all the other software you list (Linux, OpenOffice, Mozilla, etc.) are the open source leftovers of once proud commercial competitors to Microsoft (you can figure out why Linux is in that list). Making them open source has been a desparate, last-ditch attempt by the rest of the industry to fight Microsoft, since competing on price, quality, and innovation hasn't not been sufficient.
Oh, OK. Well, somebody should tell Bill that there's enough, then.
The issue isn't whether there is "enough", the issue is what the donation says about the man, his character, and his company.
What exactly *is* it "doing" right now?
Filing bogus patents, refusing to comply with court orders, fialing to comply with standards, bundling more functionality into the OS, and apparently still engaging in bundling arrangements with major hardware vendors.
I can see why you might think that out here, but if we met in "real life", I have little doubt that we'd get along and not find each other to be quite so odd after all.
People and companies aren't all good or all bad. Microsoft does some good things as a company and many Microsoft employees are generally nice people. But ethics isn't like a bank account where, if you just do enough good things, it balances the bad things.
Also, people in real life are generally polite, and that means that they have the good sense to avoid controversial discussions at social events. They are also generally pragmatists, which is why they don't cut off people just because they disagree with them on ethics--the world wouldn't work otherwise. That does not mean they approve. And if people can't avoid the topic, they avoid the person in order to avoid controversy, which is probably why you mostly meet people who agree with you. The advantage of a forum like this is that one can actually discuss things frankly.
I do think 25 billion dollars going to health care in the third world is generally a good thing, but doing a good thing doesn't mean that the person doing it is a good person. What Gates is doing follows a long history of controversial figures and persons with ethical or legal problems trying to improve their image through large, publicly visible donations to popular causes. If this was about the act rather than the person, the name of the man wouldn't figure so prominently in everything. Religions and ethicists actually often hold that true charity requires anonymity.
Anyway, thanks for taking the time to respond and have a discussion
The reason for the patent announcement is simple. Nokia has announced that they'll be shipping a Linux-based device. Once they do, they cannot assert their patents against the Linux kernel they have been shipping, otherwise they'd be violating the GPL. In fact, the same applies to any vendor that ships Linux, including Cisco, IBM, and Sun, all of which probably have more significant patent portfolios in this space than Nokia.
Nevertheless, Nokia didn't have to choose Linux. They could have shipped BSD or QNX, for example. Someone did a cost/benefit analysis inside Nokia and found that Linux was worth it. That's a good thing. In fact, I think it's a better thing than if they had done this for publicity or other intangible reasons.
It's true Nokia is also lobbying for software patents. I'm not convinced, however, that the two actions are necessarily related, however. Companies aren't all that organized or coordinated internally, and there are far easier arguments for them to make.
Open source isn't the same as "anyone". If Microsoft wants to use patents freely licensed for open source use in the NT kernel they have to distribute NT under an open source license. That's actually a good deal. If all software patent holders did that, it would be a real boost for open source.
Furthermore, one can well make the argument that encouraging open source development is good for innovation, since a lot of (arguably most) innovation in the industry has first appeared in open source form.
I'm not sure yet how legally solid Nokia's commitment is, but if it is solid, it's a good thing for open source, regardless of what Nokia's stance on software patents is otherwise.
A whole lot of experts looked at the question of whether Microsoft restricted consumer choice and determined that Microsoft did so. That determination happened to be as part of court proceedings, and it happened to find Microsoft legally guilty, but the behavior occurred even if it had not risen to the level of illegal monopolistic practices.
Maybe you wish to argue that restricting consumer choice through secret agreements should be legal; that's your good right. But legal or not doesn't change what the behavior does.
So, the implication that Microsoft succeeded because consumers could made a free choice is wrong according to experts. Microsoft might perhaps have succeeded in a free and fair competition in the market, but they did not engage in one.
[Microsoft did not create new technology, they simply took over markets and technologies of other companies] Ah, I see, so millions of folks just forked over money to MSFT, from day one, for no reason whatsoever. By that logic they did nothing more than create a "pet rock" and collect money from people with no value returned.
Microsoft is not at all unusual in this regard: most successful businesses do not create new technology at all, they succeed through better marketing, better support, or better business deals, or, in some cases, monopolistic practices.
(Over the last few years, Microsoft research actually has done a lot of interesting things, but that isn't what made the company successful.)
If you paid thousands of dollars for Windows licenses you didn't need, you (or your purchasing dept) are not doing their job. Why would you buy something you didn't need?
This question has been settled in court, where Microsoft has been convicted of illegal bundling and tying arrangements and been ordered to pay restitution to people like me.
Fortunately, over the last few years, we have experienced more choice so that one can now buy desktops and even some laptops without Windows.
What is the point of that statement, mr. obvious?
The point is simple: success anywhere in the world is not correlated with how hard you work (almost everybody works hard). If it is correlated with anything at all other than dumb luck, it is correlated with personality traits like ruthlessness.
Unfortunately, it seems that most of us have somehow gotten so wrapped up in our silly little arguments about which browser is better to be able to care.
I care a lot, as do lots of other people. That is why I object to Gates-style philanthropy in principle. Monopolizing a market, siphoning hundreds of billions out of the economy, and then aggrandizing oneself by giving back a small fraction of that is not an efficient way so help third world nations.
If Microsoft had not killed dozens of innovative companies and imposed enormous unnecessary costs on businesses, Zimbabwe might well be getting a lot more money than it is now, both from private donations as well as from tax revenues.
Of course, given that Microsoft is a convicted monopolist and doing what it is doing, I prefer them to donate money to worthy causes. But that doesn't excuse or justify Microsoft's past or current behavior. Gates is behaving just like the so-called "robber barons" a century earlier.
you're just glad that somebody's doing something.
There are thousands of dedicated volunteers, and billions of dollars of donations and government funds flowing into HIV prevention and care. But the only thing that you recognize is when Gates writes a big check in his comfy mansion. Your arrogance and thoughtlessness is disgusting.
Remember kids, economics is not a zero-sum game. This is how wealth is created.
Wealth is created when new technology creates new value. Microsoft did not create new technology, they simply took over markets and technologies of other companies.
My first computer cost $2500 - if I had bought MSFT at that time, and sold it at the peak, I'd be a MSFT millionaire too (just not as an employee).
And if you had bought a winning lottery ticket, you'd be a millionaire, too.
Yup, hard work, good luck, and the lack of brutal warlords means anyone in the US can make millions
Of course, hard work and good luck allow anyone in Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, and Russia can make millions, too--like the brutal warlords themselves.
As far as the US is concerned, the key point in your statement is "good luck". The vast majority of people who work hard (often double jobs) will remain poor.
If you made money in the US economy (I did) consider yourself lucky; don't ever make the mistake of believing that you did it through hard work. At best, it is a huge reward for a special skill you have.
(And, yes, in the case of Microsoft, it is our money, like the thousands of dollars of unwanted Windows licenses I have ended up paying for for machines that don't even run Windows.)
Along with over $25 billion to charitable causes. [...] He deserves the house, I say.
Giving to charity in order to make up for bad business conduct, a bad reputation, and/or illegal conduct has a long, long history.
Forget about the students. The problem is that the university put highly personal information on a public site without protection and that they aren't even admitting wrongdoing--they are trying to cover it up by pretending this was a group of "hackers". That is by far the greater problem here; that kind of ignorance and negligence is at the heart of the rampant security and identity theft problems we are having.
The applicants were evidently viewing publicly accessible pages, protected only because the applicants didn't actually have a link to them yet. Furthermore, the URL wasn't something obscure, it was a plain-text reference using the same applicant ID as all the other pages, just a different page.
If viewing those kinds of pages violates anybody's rules, then that's a bad precedent. The intent of the applicants may have been bad, but punishing them for this sort of innocuous URL manipulation sets a bad precedent for the entire WWW.
The people who should get "rejected" are the people who created the web site: obviously, ApplyYourself.com is incapable of creating a minimally secure web site. Is a site with such poor security acceptable to Stanford, Harvard, and other universities to handle sensitive personal data? What does that say about the integrity and ethics of those universities?
(We are actually looking for an outsourced service like ApplyYourself--does anybody know of more reputable alternatives?)
Thousands of ramifications. (quite literally).
What it is lacking in however, is utility. Other than noticing that denial of service attacks use thousands of zombies all over the world, this doesn't really help you.
Just because Linux is buggy does not mean C isn't up to the task. The BSDs seem to be doing a much better job
I have been hacking on BSD systems since the early 1980's. BSD systems used to be rife with preventable C-related bugs: pointer errors, buffer overflows, and memory leaks. After 20 years of hacking, yes, one should hope that most of those have been fixed. That's not a testament to the skill of BSD programmers, only to their persistence and the aenormous ge of the system.
and when they have trouble it's usually with drivers that a higher level language wouldn't help.
There is this bizarre myth that C allows you to do things that other languages don't. That's just not true. The features that make C dangerous and unsafe don't give you any more power than other languages. You can cast pointers and manipulate bits in other languages just like you can in C. The difference is that other languages prevent you from doing so accidentally.
I have yet to see anything come even close to the elegance or flexibility that outlook gives me when handling mail.
Well, it's not surprising that you haven't seen anything come close--you already told us that you aren't interested in anything non-Microsoft.
I handle a staggering amount of mail. Outlook is certainly up to the task.
Maybe you are staggered by the amounts of mail you deal with, but it's still less than 2G, in your own words.
Besides the size limits and bugs, other problems with Outlook/Exchange are performance problems with large mailboxes and slow search.
EOM
You seem to have trouble distinguishing between 'stops accepting data' and irreprable damage, let me guess, your cup explodes as well if you fill it to the brim with coffee, and I just dont want to be anywhere near you when you fill your car with gas.
Well, you posed the challenge whether Evolution or Kontact could handle your 2G mail, and the answer is "yes", while Outlook actually reaches a limit around that size.
Now, you get all worked up about "irreparable damage". The fact is that Outlook has had such a bug for so long that several companies sell heuristic programs that attempt to recover mail messages. The fact that Microsoft shipped and kept such a version of Outlook in circulation for so long shows you what disregard they have for data integrity and safety.
Outlook is simply not a reliable or heavy-duty mail client. Even if Microsoft eventually gets around to fixing individual bugs, they have not demonstrated that they are putting any more effort into reliability or scalability now than they ever did.
My issue is really with the irreparable part or the original troll though.
The troll here is you: you posted challenges that you full well knew were not satisfiable because Microsoft keeps their protocols proprietary.
The 2 GB wrap around was a long identified issue, was preventable (does no one use the archiving and compression tools or monitor the size of their pst file?)
If we needed any clearer demonstration of why Outlook cannot be trusted, you just gave it: it's this kind of mindset. And whether the PST bug has been fixed or not (it recently killed the mailbox of a user here), the mindset that allowed Microsoft to ship this sort of crap is still alive an well.
God forbid anyone thing that Open Source authors learn something about design instead of functionality. That's the difference between Software Engineers and Code Monkeys.
You're confused about the role of a software engineers; they don't know anything about (user interface) design.
But these carbon clones of Outlook aren't helping me as a software consumer, which means there is virtually no incentive for me to switch to Open Source.
What makes you think that anybody cares whether you use open source software?
The problem is that there are two groups arguing here
There are plenty of innovative user interfaces in open source in general, and open source mail readers in particular.
This particular article happens to focus on two open source systems that have a goal of being intuitive to Outlook users, but there are plenty of other systems.
Group A can get it's way when
Group A and Group B aren't in conflict. They both get their way whenever they want. Each group develops what they think is important and users choose.
Simple: it's the law. The specific appearance of the iPod can be protected by design patents and its wheel thingy has a device patent on it. In contrast, the general arrangement of buttons and menus in an application cannot be protected.
Having said that, it doesn't bother me in the least if other companies clone iPod in any way they like.
This sort of eyecandy is very nice to look at, but utterly useless.
Actually, the only thing that's useless is your comment. You know full well that third party software cannot reliably connect with Exchange servers, and you also know full well that the reason is that Microsoft keeps them proprietary and non-interoperable.
Fortunately, increasingly, that doesn't matter because Microsoft's outdated, insecure, and proprietary protocols are being replaced by open standards.
So, why don't you crawl back into the intellectual hole you came from and commune with your Exchange servers and buggy Microsoft Email clients, while the rest of us enjoy our choice in high-quality free software.
Can I handle my 2 Gb of PST files with Evolution and Kontact? If not,
2G is about where Outlook irreparably damages your mailbox, so I would say that you are probably approaching the point where Outlook can't handle your PST files anymore either. Oh, and don't forget that PST is proprietary, too, so you will not be able to migrate your mail easily to anything else.
They cannot match OSes like Solaris, Linux, and FreeBSD in terms of performance any more than microkernels can.
How do you know? Have you ever run any of them?
In any case, I would gladly use a kernel that ran with more overhead than, say, Linux and in return wasn't as buggy, had more functionality (what about a working and secure network file system, for example?), and was easier to hack.
[C memory management is] just a library.
And you can do the same in other HLLs.
Kernel memory management routines meet the needs of the kernel.
Thy only "meet the needs of the kernel" because people are satisfied with a kernel that works like shit. Kernels benefit greatly from a good garbage collector, in their ability to respond in real time, in the amount of memory used, in correctness, and in ease of development.
Conversely, good programming practices can keep security problems in the kernel to a minimum (eg OpenBSD), while some problems are universal to both. A dedication to security will meet with success with any language.
It evidently does not. The huge number of problems that keep cropping up in all C-based software systems that would have been avoided automatically by most other languages is evidence for that.
And even if C programmers did actually produce bug-free software, still wouldn't mean everything is OK. Even the sad state of C-based kernels and system software as is is only achieved through wasting enormous amounts of memory and CPU, wasting enormous amounts of time on testing that could be avoided in other languages, and a paranoid phobia of adding any kind of new functionality. C programmers try to put a positive spin on these behaviors by using phrases like "expert C programmers" and "against bloat", but it's really pathetic.
C programmers have proven over the last three decades that they are incapable of producing reasonably dependable, functional, and safe software. The experiment has failed--we should move on.