Unfortunately, this is a bad analogy. With different technology comes different answers. Yes, in a newspaper, it would be difficult if not impossible to remove an article after printing and distribution. However, remember the case of the Tomb Raider model who posed for Playboy last year? Eidos didn't like Playboy using the Tomb Raider and Lara Croft names, and forced Playboy to place stickers over already-printed magazines. Although this is a trademark rather than copyright example, I think it better illustrates what can be expected. Because it would be a massive amount of work to change every newspaper, a judge probably wouldn't force a paper company to change a particular issue. With an electronic site like/., which can permanently purge itself of things with a few keystrokes, removal becomes a more realistic option.
Please take another look at the letter MS sent to/. Their lawyer isn't insisting that discussion of MS's implementation of Kerberos be taken down, as that would violate free speech. What MS's lawyers are insisting is that MS's copyrighted document explaining what MS did in Kerberos be removed. This has to do with a document, not a technical specification.
I would think that if MS decides to press this,/. and Andover will be handing some money over to MS just due to copyright violations. Even if MS decides to back off the "trade secret" front,/. had clearly allowed a copyright violation to take place and this could cost Andover some money.
Yes, MS would have a weak legal case if they were suing/. for implementing MS's "trade secret" extention of Kerberos. However, the letter MS sent to/. was about the article they posted on their website. If MS decides to sue, it would be for violating copyright and/or trade secret. And unless they got a judge who was totally off his rocker,/. and Andover would quickly lose this case.
For those of you not in the know, "fair use" does not give the user the right to republish a whole document. Had a/.er taken a sentence or a paragraph and given proper credits (footnote/paranthetical reference), MS would have no legal footing. However, this was no different from someone publishing an AP article or a NYT article or some other publication without getting permission from the author/publisher.
Please reread what you have posted. Needing a cheat sheet is the _definition_ of a bad UI. If the user does not have direction from the on-screen cues, then the program's interface is not user-friendly. Powerful does not equal easy; knowing 20 - 40 commands for VI makes it _powerful_, but the _need_ to memorize commands belies a bad interface.
Seeing as Win2k has only been out for a few months, is it really fair to say that NT hasn't made any dent in the enterprise? If history is to be a guide, NT4 didn't move copies until SP2-3, so I imagine that Win2k will probably have the same amount of success once some of the initial bugs are found and corrected. (and before you yell about Service Packs, how many revisions of the Linux kernel have been published since the original 2.0 kernel?).
Choose an OS [ ] Windows Me [ ] Windows 2000 Pro [ ] Windows 2000 Server [ ] Windows 2000 Enterprise [ ] Windows 2000 Data Warehousing (?) [ ] BeOS (maybe)
Linux is unlikely to find itself on this list, mostly because IT IS NOT A DESKTOP OS! I hate to burst the bubble, but examples of a Desktop OS (for the masses) - Windows, MacOS, Be - have been designed from the ground up as a desktop experience. For all the complaints that Win95 was an overlay over DOS, Gnome and KDE are overlays on X which sits on top of Linux. How is that less complicated?
What would be nice is to see a micropayment model similar to New York State's EZ-Pass system. The EZPass people charge something like $20 on your credit card, and you have a running tab for thruway tolls. When you use up the $20, another $20 is charged to your card. You get the benefits of micropayments without the hassle of setting up a descrete micropayment system. This would work especially well for groups of artists in the same genre or for artists with a large back catalog. Throw up those live performances and those unreleased tracks and most decent artists could have a pretty substantial library to offer.
I agree with you - I think Speilberg is very good at what he does. Though he has gotten better, Speilberg really hasn't showcased his ability to handle moral ambiguity. Schindler's List does tackle this somewhat, but there's still that clear coating of "good versus evil". I would argue that Speilberg came close in Saving Private Ryan, in the scenes immediately after the storming of the beach. Showing the American soldiers executing their German counterparts who had just surrendered while still maintaining their moral superiority was somewhat effective, even if the rest of this epic was a little lackluster. However, most of the Speilberg library is filled with clear "right and wrong" with very few shades of grey.
I'm not confident that Speilberg could direct a movie like Clockwork Orange, Full Metal Jacket, or Dr Strangelove. I feel that he spends too much time moralizing in places where he could easily let the audience draw their own conclusions (a la Jurassic Park re. science). Where Kubrick forced the audience to interact with the movie (2001 had all of 27 minutes of dialogue! what else could you do?), Speilberg presents everything to the viewer in a nicely packaged whole.
Do you remember "Raiders of the Lost Ark?" Not bland. Not generic. Not badly acted. That was and still is a great movie. It is a classic "larger than life" hero in classic "good vs. evil" story. Harrison Ford a bad actor? Come on.
I think that's exactly the point - Speilberg deals with schmaltzy, feel-good movies where there's a clear "good" guy and a clear "bad" guy. Kubrick isn't so blunt. In all the movies I've seen of his (everything except Eyes Wide Shut) there's a moral ambiguity to the heroes/villains of the story. Speilberg, either through his direction or through the scripts he chooses to direct, seem unable to create some sort of moral complexity. Alex from CW was the protagonist of the movie; you felt for the character, sometimes even rooted for him, even though by all accounts he was an evil person. Contrast this character ot Indiana Jones or any other Speilberg protagonist.
I think you missed the point. Us on the outside see Microsoft as a corporate piranah bent od dominating its waters. But you have to realize that we're used to seeing corporate types do this stuff. It sounds like the heads of microsoft and the programmers have different motivations. While corporate is focused on parleying their product onto as many computers as possible, the worker bees are (trying to) program good product.
The whole competition thing sounds much healthier there than at most companies I've seen. If Mr Fallow's observations are right, working in an office where people work with, rather than against, one another actually sounds pretty nice. You can still have competition, just not the kind that Steve Jobs fostered between the Mac and Apple II people back in the early eighties. That is to say, healthy competition.
Early versions of OS/2 were developed jointly by IBM and MS as a successor to DOS, not to Win3.1 (which was released in 1991). OS/2 was supposed to be the joing MS/IBM product in response to the MacOS.
If The Who is superior (which it may or may not be, I don't want to get into that discussion), why is Brittney Spears so popular? Could it be because Brittney is Open Source? (if you know what I mean...)
Why not post it, even with all of the hard-coded stuff left in. At least it would give people a chance to play with some puzzles and possibly give you extra eyes to spot problems.
Lets get some things straight first. Communism is an economic system, not a political system. It deals with the production and distribution of goods and the allocation of profit (not necessarily money) in a society. Moreover, Communism's application (accd. to Marx) works best in an industrialized economy; his economic philosophy is really a system of urban manufacturing, not rural farming, resource allocation
If you're talking Marxian Communism (which is what most people talk about when they're talking about ideological, rather than applied, communism) then religious orders definitely don't qualify.
There are two reasons why. First, the intent of communism is for purely material benefit, whereas religious institutions (monestaries, etc) are not intended for efficient production and consumption. Second, Marx was very anti-Religious - "Religion is the opiate of the masses." But this wasn't just a personal beef with religion. Marx thought that religion would ruin the pure efficiency of the economy by interrupting the "natural" flow of goods to the people.
That's a little simplistic; a true believer in the scientific method is not faithless. Rather, that person's faith is based in the constructs of rationalism, skepticism, measurability of observations. If any of those things are proven to be untrue under any circumstances, then the scientific method and the whole tradition of Western thinking collapses upon itself.
Unfortunately, it is exceedingly difficult to find any unbiased voices at/. anymore. With the whole WinNT vs Linux thing, all the posters here have presented anecdotal evidence as to why NT is so much worse than Linux. Very few people come to NT's defense, not because no one suports NT (they sell enough licenses) but because any NT users who might have been here have left.
You see, filled only with pro-Linux zealots,/. becomes little more than a group of the same people patting each other on the back. Very little is accomplished in saying "NT sucks, here's why" without having anyone here to defend it. Yet time after time, when someone jumps to NT - or any non-open source competing product for that matter - invariably they are pounced upon by fellow/.'ers.
It feels like its not really worth airing opposing opinions on this forum anymore. In this mob rule, one's dissenting voice gets lost in the incessant bickering that accomplishes very little. For those of you who have said that NT or whatever is difficult to use, ask yourself... no, really ask yourself... where the computer industry is heading and why.
I work for a small state agency where we have three people working in IT. Two people handle the network, servers, and workstations, and I handle the web servers. I manage content, program, handle security, and do a myriad of other tasks to keep my four servers up and running. Two of the web servers run WinNT, the third runs Luinx, as does the Database server. "But why would you run NT, when Linux is clearly superior?" I'll tell you. The linux box has been in this agency since about 95 or so. Its running whatever version of Slackware was out at that time. Its been patched along the way (I hope...), but was the baby of an employee who no longer works here. He didn't leave documentation. One of the two NT servers was also here when I got here and was also the toy of another employee. Which one was easier to take over? I hate to say it, but the NT server was, because it was easier to assess what was installed and what needed to be done with it. The Linux box is sitting there, waiting until I have a solid week or so to go through and see what needs to be done.
NT addrssses a very important issue with the people at my job. Because the IT staff is very small, and the network admin is a NetWare freak while the desktop person knows hardware much better than software, the systems have to easily transfer from one person to the next. I'd be doing a disservice in moving from an NT webserver because the next person they hire will need to quickly assess what they have/what they have to do. Or, because of budget cuts, they don't hire someone, they're going to have to train someone on the basics of how to handle a web server. I can't do that with a Linux box as well as with an NT solution.
Then why a Linux DB? First, it was cheap. Second, the interface for the DB resides on the Linux box. Third, I reason that if the person might as well learn simple linux stuff if they're going to administer a database.
And yet, this integrated functionality is EXACTLY what MS did with IE4 and 5. Yet all the Linux zealots cried foul because this gave an unfair advantage to the IE browser. But I guess as long as it is done in the holy name of Open Source its alright.
Just a couple of things. Firstly, the "reparative" example you posed is actually a fine in disguise. Because the Justice Dept has announced that there will be no fines, no 200 billion will be collected by the US government or consumers. The damage that has already been done can not be repaired, and the high tech industry moves too fast for any attempt to fix things from even a few years ago to really be worthwile. Instead, the repairs have to made for the future; we need to make preventative remedies, so MS doesn't do things like this later.
The open source (beer and speech) solution is not viable and is not fair for MS. As the OS is the core of the company's livelihood, thet would essentially destroy the company. Although a lot of/. readers would love that, that's not something the US govt wants, as MS is a very big piece of the American economy and represents a valuable export. Regulation really is the only way to go.
Breaking up the company and forcing them to be totally separate entities might very well be the best solution for what the government wants. Remember, they are insisting that MS stifled innovation. By breaking up the companies and insuring thet they do not work together like the components of the MS corporation do now, each part has to innovate to make a better product to keep their market. No longer can products rely on bundling with or secret information about the underlying OS.
MS's vertical and horizontal monopoly being broken up alows the government to do a lot less work than if they set up complex regulations, which would require a whole sub-set of the Justice Dept to keep track of their doings. Additionally, regulations would unfairly tie MS's hands in this, the most competitive of industries. While some may argue that MS would deserve that, we must remember that US corporate law does not believe in the adage "an eye for an eye".
I hate to say it, but your entire statement here is little more than anecdotal FUD about MS. The Exchange sysadmins you work with clearly don't know what they're doing if they don;t understand simple things like Exchange filters, etc. And as for needing to reboot the server farm every week, I'm going to guess (having not seen the servers, I can't say for sure) that the problem was with the setup, not the NT system itself. Look at Congress - they run a huge host of Exchange servers to handle their e-mail, and I've never heard any of their sysadmins complain about frequent reboots (a friend works there, so I have an actual connection). The biggest complaint is that people send too many spam messages. So when complaining about MS products, make sure that the system, not the boneheaded admins, are the problem.
Hey, John, before you review a game, or even use it as an example of your anti-Christian moral tirade, don't you think you should have tried it out first? As a supposed journalist, you hacen't given the program any objective crisitism, other than "That wacky Christian Collective are a bunch of hypocrites for releasing a violent game that lets you do the work of God". What authority/credibility/knowledge do you have to justify writing this excrement and posting it on/.?
Although Katz's criticism of the publishing world being somewhat closed-doored and unreceptive to outside opinions when it comes to publishing stories is correct, the Jane's Intelligence Review example is not a viable model for most journalistic reporting. Katz quickly states (somewhere in the last third of his article) that some stories - fast-breaking or announcement - would have difficulty integrating this type of approach into its methods of writing articles, without acknowledging that most journalistic writing out there fits these two descriptions.
Very few articles (notably review pieces occasionally seen buried in the back of trade publications or newspapers) have both the time and a forum of knowledgable people who can propose critical, unbiased statements about what the author is addressing. In this case - a review of potential 21st Century Information Models - the Internet is a natural place to ask for information. The article is timely (being almost the 21st century) but can lag by a few days, weeks, months as the subject matter is siphoned and fashioned into a good article.
How can a journalist use this for broader topics? How about the progression of an occupied Kosovo, US Foreign Policy, or the ramifications of reaching 6 billion people in 1999? How objective can the average internet user (or even the savvy ones who are on/.) profess to understand the convoluted nature of gene splicing or cloning? The internet and a general chat community can not provide the critical information such an article would need.
I also have to take issue with one of Katz's premises in saying this type of journalism is indeed generally viable. "The Web is a godsend for reporters and publications that value truth and reason over dogma and control," doesn't take into account that the journalistic community at least usually understands the difference between fact and opinion (though they don't always acknowledge it). It also doesn't take into accound biases of online communities. Taking/. for this example, asking users here to help outline the merits of deploying a Microsoft solution in an enterprize or, more realistically, to help assess the critical weaknesses of the Linux platform would provide a reporter with the very difficult task of separating wheat from chaff. While every hundreth comment might not be "Linux is invulnerable" or "The anti-MS revolution keeps gaining steam", a reporter saves time and headaches asking knowledgable, reliable resources for their assessments.
In the case of the Jane article, it sounded like this is exactly what they did. Consult some experts and create an on-line edition and request reviews before putting it to ink. In this case, the editor felt that the reality of the subject was so far removed from the text of the article that it called for a rewrite. Well, guess what? This is called a peer review and is done by most academic publications. Source checking is an important part of journalism, and all but the worst rag publications check most sources and facts before they put it to print or make it clear that the posted/printed article is an opinion. Now, because this usually doesn't mean writing "OPINION" as a nice watermark behind the text, it means that the reader must be critical about what they write. In a peer review for information technology, the internet and/. are appropriate peers. For hardcore science, humanities, political or social events this (meaning both/. and as of yet the internet in general) is not the appropriate venue for soliciting informed opinions.
Actually, the Civil War was really the last classical war, albeit with modern weapons. If you look at tactics and troop usage, its little different from how the French or the English fought their wars in the 18th century. When you're using musket technology, you have to line up your troops in tight lines, because the guns weren't all that accurate. With the Civil War, you had the same lineups, but REALLY accurate weapons to fight one another with. American warfare changed a lot after the war, because we actually learned how to use our weapons correctly.
I just took a look at eBay's site and I can't seem to find any ads there. Maybe I'm not looking at the right posts, but the seven items I looked at looked clean.
Slashdot Mirror
Unfortunately, this is a bad analogy. With different technology comes different answers. Yes, in a newspaper, it would be difficult if not impossible to remove an article after printing and distribution. However, remember the case of the Tomb Raider model who posed for Playboy last year? Eidos didn't like Playboy using the Tomb Raider and Lara Croft names, and forced Playboy to place stickers over already-printed magazines. Although this is a trademark rather than copyright example, I think it better illustrates what can be expected. Because it would be a massive amount of work to change every newspaper, a judge probably wouldn't force a paper company to change a particular issue. With an electronic site like /., which can permanently purge itself of things with a few keystrokes, removal becomes a more realistic option.
Please take another look at the letter MS sent to /. Their lawyer isn't insisting that discussion of MS's implementation of Kerberos be taken down, as that would violate free speech. What MS's lawyers are insisting is that MS's copyrighted document explaining what MS did in Kerberos be removed. This has to do with a document, not a technical specification.
I would think that if MS decides to press this, /. and Andover will be handing some money over to MS just due to copyright violations. Even if MS decides to back off the "trade secret" front, /. had clearly allowed a copyright violation to take place and this could cost Andover some money.
Yes, MS would have a weak legal case if they were suing /. for implementing MS's "trade secret" extention of Kerberos. However, the letter MS sent to /. was about the article they posted on their website. If MS decides to sue, it would be for violating copyright and/or trade secret. And unless they got a judge who was totally off his rocker, /. and Andover would quickly lose this case.
For those of you not in the know, "fair use" does not give the user the right to republish a whole document. Had a /.er taken a sentence or a paragraph and given proper credits (footnote/paranthetical reference), MS would have no legal footing. However, this was no different from someone publishing an AP article or a NYT article or some other publication without getting permission from the author/publisher.
Please reread what you have posted. Needing a cheat sheet is the _definition_ of a bad UI. If the user does not have direction from the on-screen cues, then the program's interface is not user-friendly. Powerful does not equal easy; knowing 20 - 40 commands for VI makes it _powerful_, but the _need_ to memorize commands belies a bad interface.
Seeing as Win2k has only been out for a few months, is it really fair to say that NT hasn't made any dent in the enterprise? If history is to be a guide, NT4 didn't move copies until SP2-3, so I imagine that Win2k will probably have the same amount of success once some of the initial bugs are found and corrected. (and before you yell about Service Packs, how many revisions of the Linux kernel have been published since the original 2.0 kernel?).
However, its more likely that the choice will be:
Choose an OS
[ ] Windows Me
[ ] Windows 2000 Pro
[ ] Windows 2000 Server
[ ] Windows 2000 Enterprise
[ ] Windows 2000 Data Warehousing (?)
[ ] BeOS (maybe)
Linux is unlikely to find itself on this list, mostly because IT IS NOT A DESKTOP OS! I hate to burst the bubble, but examples of a Desktop OS (for the masses) - Windows, MacOS, Be - have been designed from the ground up as a desktop experience. For all the complaints that Win95 was an overlay over DOS, Gnome and KDE are overlays on X which sits on top of Linux. How is that less complicated?
What would be nice is to see a micropayment model similar to New York State's EZ-Pass system. The EZPass people charge something like $20 on your credit card, and you have a running tab for thruway tolls. When you use up the $20, another $20 is charged to your card. You get the benefits of micropayments without the hassle of setting up a descrete micropayment system. This would work especially well for groups of artists in the same genre or for artists with a large back catalog. Throw up those live performances and those unreleased tracks and most decent artists could have a pretty substantial library to offer.
I agree with you - I think Speilberg is very good at what he does. Though he has gotten better, Speilberg really hasn't showcased his ability to handle moral ambiguity. Schindler's List does tackle this somewhat, but there's still that clear coating of "good versus evil". I would argue that Speilberg came close in Saving Private Ryan, in the scenes immediately after the storming of the beach. Showing the American soldiers executing their German counterparts who had just surrendered while still maintaining their moral superiority was somewhat effective, even if the rest of this epic was a little lackluster. However, most of the Speilberg library is filled with clear "right and wrong" with very few shades of grey.
I'm not confident that Speilberg could direct a movie like Clockwork Orange, Full Metal Jacket, or Dr Strangelove. I feel that he spends too much time moralizing in places where he could easily let the audience draw their own conclusions (a la Jurassic Park re. science). Where Kubrick forced the audience to interact with the movie (2001 had all of 27 minutes of dialogue! what else could you do?), Speilberg presents everything to the viewer in a nicely packaged whole.
I think that's exactly the point - Speilberg deals with schmaltzy, feel-good movies where there's a clear "good" guy and a clear "bad" guy. Kubrick isn't so blunt. In all the movies I've seen of his (everything except Eyes Wide Shut) there's a moral ambiguity to the heroes/villains of the story. Speilberg, either through his direction or through the scripts he chooses to direct, seem unable to create some sort of moral complexity. Alex from CW was the protagonist of the movie; you felt for the character, sometimes even rooted for him, even though by all accounts he was an evil person. Contrast this character ot Indiana Jones or any other Speilberg protagonist.
Wasn't there a story on /. a few months ago about MS looking to hire Linux programmers? I wonder what they've been working on...
I think you missed the point. Us on the outside see Microsoft as a corporate piranah bent od dominating its waters. But you have to realize that we're used to seeing corporate types do this stuff. It sounds like the heads of microsoft and the programmers have different motivations. While corporate is focused on parleying their product onto as many computers as possible, the worker bees are (trying to) program good product.
The whole competition thing sounds much healthier there than at most companies I've seen. If Mr Fallow's observations are right, working in an office where people work with, rather than against, one another actually sounds pretty nice. You can still have competition, just not the kind that Steve Jobs fostered between the Mac and Apple II people back in the early eighties. That is to say, healthy competition.
Early versions of OS/2 were developed jointly by IBM and MS as a successor to DOS, not to Win3.1 (which was released in 1991). OS/2 was supposed to be the joing MS/IBM product in response to the MacOS.
If The Who is superior (which it may or may not be, I don't want to get into that discussion), why is Brittney Spears so popular? Could it be because Brittney is Open Source? (if you know what I mean ...)
Why not post it, even with all of the hard-coded stuff left in. At least it would give people a chance to play with some puzzles and possibly give you extra eyes to spot problems.
Lets get some things straight first. Communism is an economic system, not a political system. It deals with the production and distribution of goods and the allocation of profit (not necessarily money) in a society. Moreover, Communism's application (accd. to Marx) works best in an industrialized economy; his economic philosophy is really a system of urban manufacturing, not rural farming, resource allocation
If you're talking Marxian Communism (which is what most people talk about when they're talking about ideological, rather than applied, communism) then religious orders definitely don't qualify.
There are two reasons why. First, the intent of communism is for purely material benefit, whereas religious institutions (monestaries, etc) are not intended for efficient production and consumption. Second, Marx was very anti-Religious - "Religion is the opiate of the masses." But this wasn't just a personal beef with religion. Marx thought that religion would ruin the pure efficiency of the economy by interrupting the "natural" flow of goods to the people.
That's a little simplistic; a true believer in the scientific method is not faithless. Rather, that person's faith is based in the constructs of rationalism, skepticism, measurability of observations. If any of those things are proven to be untrue under any circumstances, then the scientific method and the whole tradition of Western thinking collapses upon itself.
Unfortunately, it is exceedingly difficult to find any unbiased voices at /. anymore. With the whole WinNT vs Linux thing, all the posters here have presented anecdotal evidence as to why NT is so much worse than Linux. Very few people come to NT's defense, not because no one suports NT (they sell enough licenses) but because any NT users who might have been here have left.
You see, filled only with pro-Linux zealots, /. becomes little more than a group of the same people patting each other on the back. Very little is accomplished in saying "NT sucks, here's why" without having anyone here to defend it. Yet time after time, when someone jumps to NT - or any non-open source competing product for that matter - invariably they are pounced upon by fellow /.'ers.
It feels like its not really worth airing opposing opinions on this forum anymore. In this mob rule, one's dissenting voice gets lost in the incessant bickering that accomplishes very little. For those of you who have said that NT or whatever is difficult to use, ask yourself ... no, really ask yourself ... where the computer industry is heading and why.
I work for a small state agency where we have three people working in IT. Two people handle the network, servers, and workstations, and I handle the web servers. I manage content, program, handle security, and do a myriad of other tasks to keep my four servers up and running. Two of the web servers run WinNT, the third runs Luinx, as does the Database server. "But why would you run NT, when Linux is clearly superior?" I'll tell you. The linux box has been in this agency since about 95 or so. Its running whatever version of Slackware was out at that time. Its been patched along the way (I hope...), but was the baby of an employee who no longer works here. He didn't leave documentation. One of the two NT servers was also here when I got here and was also the toy of another employee. Which one was easier to take over? I hate to say it, but the NT server was, because it was easier to assess what was installed and what needed to be done with it. The Linux box is sitting there, waiting until I have a solid week or so to go through and see what needs to be done.
NT addrssses a very important issue with the people at my job. Because the IT staff is very small, and the network admin is a NetWare freak while the desktop person knows hardware much better than software, the systems have to easily transfer from one person to the next. I'd be doing a disservice in moving from an NT webserver because the next person they hire will need to quickly assess what they have/what they have to do. Or, because of budget cuts, they don't hire someone, they're going to have to train someone on the basics of how to handle a web server. I can't do that with a Linux box as well as with an NT solution.
Then why a Linux DB? First, it was cheap. Second, the interface for the DB resides on the Linux box. Third, I reason that if the person might as well learn simple linux stuff if they're going to administer a database.
And yet, this integrated functionality is EXACTLY what MS did with IE4 and 5. Yet all the Linux zealots cried foul because this gave an unfair advantage to the IE browser. But I guess as long as it is done in the holy name of Open Source its alright.
Just a couple of things. Firstly, the "reparative" example you posed is actually a fine in disguise. Because the Justice Dept has announced that there will be no fines, no 200 billion will be collected by the US government or consumers. The damage that has already been done can not be repaired, and the high tech industry moves too fast for any attempt to fix things from even a few years ago to really be worthwile. Instead, the repairs have to made for the future; we need to make preventative remedies, so MS doesn't do things like this later.
The open source (beer and speech) solution is not viable and is not fair for MS. As the OS is the core of the company's livelihood, thet would essentially destroy the company. Although a lot of /. readers would love that, that's not something the US govt wants, as MS is a very big piece of the American economy and represents a valuable export. Regulation really is the only way to go.
Breaking up the company and forcing them to be totally separate entities might very well be the best solution for what the government wants. Remember, they are insisting that MS stifled innovation. By breaking up the companies and insuring thet they do not work together like the components of the MS corporation do now, each part has to innovate to make a better product to keep their market. No longer can products rely on bundling with or secret information about the underlying OS.
MS's vertical and horizontal monopoly being broken up alows the government to do a lot less work than if they set up complex regulations, which would require a whole sub-set of the Justice Dept to keep track of their doings. Additionally, regulations would unfairly tie MS's hands in this, the most competitive of industries. While some may argue that MS would deserve that, we must remember that US corporate law does not believe in the adage "an eye for an eye".
I hate to say it, but your entire statement here is little more than anecdotal FUD about MS. The Exchange sysadmins you work with clearly don't know what they're doing if they don;t understand simple things like Exchange filters, etc. And as for needing to reboot the server farm every week, I'm going to guess (having not seen the servers, I can't say for sure) that the problem was with the setup, not the NT system itself. Look at Congress - they run a huge host of Exchange servers to handle their e-mail, and I've never heard any of their sysadmins complain about frequent reboots (a friend works there, so I have an actual connection). The biggest complaint is that people send too many spam messages. So when complaining about MS products, make sure that the system, not the boneheaded admins, are the problem.
Hey, John, before you review a game, or even use it as an example of your anti-Christian moral tirade, don't you think you should have tried it out first? As a supposed journalist, you hacen't given the program any objective crisitism, other than "That wacky Christian Collective are a bunch of hypocrites for releasing a violent game that lets you do the work of God". What authority/credibility/knowledge do you have to justify writing this excrement and posting it on /.?
Although Katz's criticism of the publishing world being somewhat closed-doored and unreceptive to outside opinions when it comes to publishing stories is correct, the Jane's Intelligence Review example is not a viable model for most journalistic reporting. Katz quickly states (somewhere in the last third of his article) that some stories - fast-breaking or announcement - would have difficulty integrating this type of approach into its methods of writing articles, without acknowledging that most journalistic writing out there fits these two descriptions.
Very few articles (notably review pieces occasionally seen buried in the back of trade publications or newspapers) have both the time and a forum of knowledgable people who can propose critical, unbiased statements about what the author is addressing. In this case - a review of potential 21st Century Information Models - the Internet is a natural place to ask for information. The article is timely (being almost the 21st century) but can lag by a few days, weeks, months as the subject matter is siphoned and fashioned into a good article.
How can a journalist use this for broader topics? How about the progression of an occupied Kosovo, US Foreign Policy, or the ramifications of reaching 6 billion people in 1999? How objective can the average internet user (or even the savvy ones who are on /.) profess to understand the convoluted nature of gene splicing or cloning? The internet and a general chat community can not provide the critical information such an article would need.
I also have to take issue with one of Katz's premises in saying this type of journalism is indeed generally viable. "The Web is a godsend for reporters and publications that value truth and reason over dogma and control," doesn't take into account that the journalistic community at least usually understands the difference between fact and opinion (though they don't always acknowledge it). It also doesn't take into accound biases of online communities. Taking /. for this example, asking users here to help outline the merits of deploying a Microsoft solution in an enterprize or, more realistically, to help assess the critical weaknesses of the Linux platform would provide a reporter with the very difficult task of separating wheat from chaff. While every hundreth comment might not be "Linux is invulnerable" or "The anti-MS revolution keeps gaining steam", a reporter saves time and headaches asking knowledgable, reliable resources for their assessments.
In the case of the Jane article, it sounded like this is exactly what they did. Consult some experts and create an on-line edition and request reviews before putting it to ink. In this case, the editor felt that the reality of the subject was so far removed from the text of the article that it called for a rewrite. Well, guess what? This is called a peer review and is done by most academic publications. Source checking is an important part of journalism, and all but the worst rag publications check most sources and facts before they put it to print or make it clear that the posted/printed article is an opinion. Now, because this usually doesn't mean writing "OPINION" as a nice watermark behind the text, it means that the reader must be critical about what they write. In a peer review for information technology, the internet and /. are appropriate peers. For hardcore science, humanities, political or social events this (meaning both /. and as of yet the internet in general) is not the appropriate venue for soliciting informed opinions.
Watermarked "OPINION" for your protection
Actually, the Civil War was really the last classical war, albeit with modern weapons. If you look at tactics and troop usage, its little different from how the French or the English fought their wars in the 18th century. When you're using musket technology, you have to line up your troops in tight lines, because the guns weren't all that accurate. With the Civil War, you had the same lineups, but REALLY accurate weapons to fight one another with. American warfare changed a lot after the war, because we actually learned how to use our weapons correctly.
I just took a look at eBay's site and I can't seem to find any ads there. Maybe I'm not looking at the right posts, but the seven items I looked at looked clean.