The "effectiveness" of an ad is generally measured in number of units sold to the target demographic, not the ratio of sales to people viewing the ad. The ads don't become more effective if you can hit the target demographic specifically rather than target demographic + everyone else.
The hope is that targetted advertising can increase the ratio between sales versus advertising costs. There's also an unfounded notion that it will also increase overall sales (putting an ad at on a bus stop will induce more commuters to buy than if the same people saw the same ad on TV or in a magazine).
Really what they are getting trying to do is to lower the signal-to-noise ratio of advertisement with the hope that you will get out of the habit of tuning out advertising. That's not likely to work unless the total amount of advertising decreases substantially -- fat chance of that.
Let's assume that Web2.0 had something to do with social networking for the sake of discussin the article...
The thesis that advertising becomes "more effective" is without evidence. Advertisers might hope it is more effective, but historically, it's only proven to be more annoying (both by being more plentiful, and by making hopelessly silly demographic conclusions). I'm guessing that this sort of targeted advertising will go over like Jalapeno-flavored toilet paper.
The term "semantic web" generally refers to Tim Berners-Lee's notion of "semantic web" -- he coined the term. TBL's vision is simply a model of describing information. One expression of it is RDF-XML, another is data in N3 notation, but the core of it is the idea that you can express most information as a simple triplet of data: subject-predicate-value (e.g.: the sky - is - blue). That's basically it. It doesn't even have to have anything to do with "the Web" in the sense of the Internet.
The idea, however, is that you can represent information, and even information about that information, as a graph (where the object is itself the subject of another triple). If everything is uniformly presented, there's a slew of common operations you can perform on it, and merging data, making inferences from it, and such becomes easier.
The "semantic web" could be used to represent social networks (the apparent use case that is cause for hysteria), but it is not necessary and might not even be the best approach. Certainly, "semantic web" doesn't equate to social networks. For me, the greatest value is a method to store information about biological systems -- but then that's the field I work in. It could be used to add useful metadata to the web, it could be useful for making taxonomies and ontologies, all sorts of things.
However, the "semantic web" is itself about as sinister in nature as plain text.
This is also easy to implement for Java. I had written a toolchain while working for my first post-graduate employer that would write JNI binding code that would allow you to freely mix C++ and Java code by writing bindings based on the C++ headers or Java class files.
At the time, it was used to blend together some fairly complex C++ algorithms with some Java code that provided a uniform UI (at the time, AWT-based).
It worked great. I seem to remember that it took less than a week to slap together. So, coming up with a Java-SWIG is eminently doable by someone with a passable knowledge of both languages.
In the early-to-mid 90's I attended an "Institute of Technology" where, among other things, I took the level 1 databases course. In that course we had various projects to do, one of which was to implement an "online shopping site".
At that time, our design presumed that you'd set up your account with the retailer over the phone (mostly because we didn't want to get bogged down with the form handling, but also because the UI design was a minor part of this one assignment).
So, we did what was obvious (and what several other people came up with) -- have someone login (no cookies back then) and use the HTTP basic authentication link the session to the customer record in the database. Next to each item, there was a button that said "put it on my tab" and did just that, stuck an entry in the database saying you wanted it. There was a script that could run on a periodic basis and rolled up a list of what was on who's tab and built an order from it.
It seems to me that if a biology student taking a database class thought it was obvious then (to be fair, I had a partner who was an engineer), then it was obvious to anyone that did that sort of thing for a living. Do I have a record of the assignment? No. It never occurred to me to hold onto my old homework for more than a decade.
There's an ever increasing number of people that won't purchase or use Microsoft products of their own volition. If the average consumer won't buy your product, market it to an industry infatuated with itself (the recording and movie industries) who is already making money despite their contempt for their clientele.
Personally, I think it's a brilliant strategy on the part of Microsoft. They've spent billions on developing an underwhelming polished turd of an OS (VISTA) that they may never see a profit on, but they spend pennies on a DRM scheme and sell it at a zillion-fold mark-up to an industry richer than Croesus that couldn't tell DRM from a hole in the ground (much less deduce that it's a waste of time and money that cuts into their net profit).
Check the company's privacy policy. If they don't don't tell you that they'll give your records away without a court order, then they are in violation. So long as they breached the contract, you can terminate service without any termination fees and/or sue for damages based on the breach of contract (say, your phone bills 2002-present). In my case, that's about $1300, not $1000.
I live in MA, so you can write the company with a complaint, state that the complaint is a MGL 93A demand letter. If they fail to give you what you want, you can sue and they are liable for triple damages plus court costs. For $1300, you can go to small claims court for $50 and have a chance at a $3900 return. Not a bad bet.
They can claim that the information is confidential, but that's not likely to wash in small-claims.
"Actions" in Nautilus with that extension is equivalent to KDE's "Actions" -- something that I use a lot and think is sorely under-used (in both KDE and GNOME).
For example, adding a context-menu option to rotate images involves nothing more than writing a.desktop entry that identifies the file-types it applies to and doing 'mogrify -rotate 90 %f' to them. That's a simple case, but I use this sort of thing all the time (for example, to publish RPMs to a local repository, to add/remove items from a mirror list, convert data formats, etc.).
A flood of neutrons into a fissile isotope... That ought to speed things up quite a bit.
"Um, Al, you know that U 235 over there. You know, over there in the core."
"Yep. What about it Mo?"
"Well, I'm not sure about it yet, but I think that the big red glowing mass that just melted through the containment vessel floor like a giant glowing gopher making a burrow was our U-235."
It seems as though proposed legislation would mandate some pretty nasty DRM be incorporated into broadcast streams. If that be the case, I suppose Democracy and the very idea of Participatory Culture will be finished in the USA.
I was wondering how long it would be before our representatives finally outlawed Democracy. Apparently, the day is at hand.
The biggest victory for "content cartels" is not the bill itself, it's the title. It would mark the first time that the phrase "intellectual property" appears in a US law. It's a very important first step in realizing the transformation of copyirghts, patents, and trademarks into real property. Eventually, photocopying pages from a book really will be theft.
I kind of understand the comment about sites being misleading by including the words "Teletubbies" and "Barbie" in a site that is actually full of sexually explicit photographs...
But what of sites that feature sexually explicit photographs of Teletubbies and Barbie? It is deceptive in that case?
And why only commercial sites? What about Ken and Tinky-winky's all amateur web-cam -- totally free, totally K`inky?
In response, I'd probably tell the IRS the truth: "Intellectual Property" is a marketing term not a tangible asset. US law does not recognize the concept (yet). In so far as "Intellectual Property" is a convenient fiction, the IRS has no authority to levy taxes on fictional assets.
The "value" of information ("intellectual property") depends on the the buyer. In fact, the value of the information that they are being assessed $900 million in taxes for is $0 to me. In fact, on average, it's likely to be $0 for most people (outside of the possibility that you're bound to find some idiot that will pay gobs of money for it).
What point is there to repurchasing the drives? Once the information is out, it's out. Anyone that would be interested isn't interested in the drives, they are interested in the data -- data that's easily copied and transmitted in a couple of minutes. All you are doing is paying people to get back a USB key, the data on which they've already sold someone else.
Heck, let them keep the drive as a keepsake. If the information is misinformation, maybe it will propagate farther. If it's real information, the damage is already done, there's really no point in rewarding for it.
To be fair, a copy of "The Davinci Code" from Amazon is $8. I would bet, however, if it was available for free as an PDF or included in toto in the Sunday paper, I'm sure that DoubleDay would be upset and claim it was worth a lot more than $80,000.
Not that I don't agree that the E911 document ought to be public and freely available -- any standards that are the basis of or result from legislation or regulation ought to be.
In fact, it's quite simple... Reduce the two code bases to a lexical parse of the actual code. Compare the structure rather than the arbitrary names of the symbols that compose it. It's quite simple to do.
Simple as it is (IBM even writes several tools to do such a thing and markets them to various niche markets), it wouldn't be helpful in this case. SCO no longer maintains that there is any "SCO" code in Linux. They now claim that certain "technological concepts" related to UNIX were improperly used, but they make the assertion without clear explanation of what they mean by that.
Searching for plagiarism would be cake... some ambiguous intellectual abstraction? Now that's hard!
If you look at the claims SCO started with, and what they are now attempting to argue in court, there's no relation. How the case has played out so long without being thrown out is anyone's guess.
That depends, are you running Windows in a VMWare VM? If so, simply restart from the initial image (you can configure it to maintain all changes to the disk in a separate file so that you can return to the initial state with a couple of mouse clicks) -- much faster than Ghost.
With regard to scientific equipment: my experience (in a biotech firm) has been quite similar. Vendors did not want you to patch the OS, install ANY software (AV or otherwise), and advised against placing the devices on a network. However, biotech generally have a protocol that requires the backing up all the data that comes off the machine.
However, lately, we see more and more vendors moving to Linux for instrumentation control. As a company, we now request non-Windows based control and data acquisition systems (most are Linux, but we've got Mac, Solaris, and IRIX). In general, we've found these to be more robust with fewer software and data-acquisition glitches. All of our newer mass-specs have Linux-based instrumentation systems, as do our gel-imagers and such.
You are right, though, in that reimaging Windows systems is SOP most places. The company I work for now does a "refresh" on a biannual schedule whether you need it or not, and just about any time anything strange happens on your machine. Company policy dictates that useful information be stored on a shared drive and not locally -- that way, reimaging is a minor inconvenience.
Funny, we don't have a similar policy for non-Windows systems. Of course, about 45% of our desktops run Windows and 100% of our desktop support guys are MSCEs.
Basically, Venter -- whose a shameless self-promoter, but nonetheless well accomplished because he's well funded and hires good people -- had an idea that he'd travel the world taking DNA samples from everything in sight to capture a broad view of biodiversity at the genetic level. The idea is that by doing so that we'd better be able to categorize genes, describe their function and evolution, etc. There's more than a few problems with that, but in true Venter style, he'd cross that bridge when he came to it.
While he travelled, he found out that not everyone thought this was a keen idea. It turns out that many people perceived (one could argue correctly) that a US company was out to make a buck by exploiting things specific to their community -- and if this was the case, they wanted a cut -- which he wasn't going to give, this is for the world scientific community! As a result, Venter was frequently required to throw away samples, forced out of certain areas, made to wipe the dirt off his shoes, etc.
If there's gold to be found in them there genetic hills, by God the locals ought to have dibs -- so the thinking goes. Now Google plans to make a giant database of it (well, truth be told, much of it already is public, they are simply going to add the magic Google touch, build services, and cull annotation around it). In theory, doing so would dilute the value of the information and prevent the locals from capitalizing on the information.
In a sense, it's a silly situation. The information in isolation has little probability of being useful. Even if it were, it's not likely anyone would ever be able to capitalize on it and turn a profit from it -- that's hard enough with genes that are well researched and have obvious commercial implications. And all that is predicated on the assumption that people own and have IP rights on all living matter in their own sphere of geopolitical influence. Further, we're talking about water samples, pollen, dirt -- stuff likely to be stuck to your clothes if you walk by.
Even if you are the Pope of the church of "intellectual property" and think every quark in a lizard's nut is patentable, I would think its a real stretch to call this "piracy".
How's he ever going to learn if we just make fun of him? I, for one, sent him a CentOS DVD and a kind note supporting him in his time of public embarrassment.
Come to think of it, why doesn't every one do that?
It's simply ludicrous to make the assertion that they are going to rewrite 60% of the code. If they want to make their new 1Q2007 target, they don't even have time to review that much code.
That said, there is, of course, something serious going on... Shortly after another Windows delay announcement last year, Allchin announces he's going to retire, but stay long enough to get Vista out the door. Pretty innocuous... Then there's a period of everything appears hunky-dory, then Microsoft holds an internal "Blue-hat" conference for internal folks to demo issues and exploits to MS products -- and by several accounts there were not only some doozies, but all sorts of hissy fits were thrown by management. There's a flurry of meetings, another announcement about Windows being delayed concurrent with some pretty drastic restructuring in the Windows division, and a new division head that will take over for Allchin a little sooner than expected.
Now you're seeing articles about last-minute rewrites and fixes (not just the one cited), some very lack-luster press-coverage (buzz-kill for MS' planned media blitz), and reported hundreds of millions of dollars in cost overruns, etc. Add to that Microsoft's target of converting 50% of Windows users to Vista in 24 months (ostensibly so that the OS division can remain profitable).
It paints a pretty bleak picture of the state of Microsoft and its management. Vista, when it does eventually come out, may well be the best OS MS has ever released. The real question is, will that be good enough?
I don't know, but I'm willing to bet MS doesn't have an idea either.
I work for a large biotech company. Upper management uses Windows-based systems, as does manufacturing.
However, I work in research. Until recently the systems were about 50-50 Windows / Mac with the exceptions of bioinformatics (mostly Linux), and cheminformatics (mostly Irix). However, more recently, vendors have been phasing out the use of Windows for instrumentation control in favor of Linux. Nearly all the structural chemistry applications have moved to Linux, and most genomics, proteomics, and metabolomics software is now Linux-based (and, frequently, runs just fine on Macs too). Macs are still pretty popular, but the use of Windows in research is pretty much considered "legacy" at this point.
If you come from an academic environment in contemporary biology, you were probably weened on Mac OS, or Solaris (when I was in grad school). If it's more recent, it's most definitely OS/X or Linux. It's also clear that Linux is rapidly becoming the platform-of-choice for apps in biotech and pharamceutical research, but with a heavy emphasis on WEB-based technologies.
That's not to say that there aren't users that use nothing but Excel and Word, but that's not so common anymore in research (at least were I work and in my previous job). This poses a big problem for our IT department -- they aren't prepared to support Linux desktops and Mac OS/X, yet those are the platforms where most of our applications run.
Biolgists either don't do computers at all (particularly "old school" biologists), or, if they do, Windows is not what they have the most experience with...
Just daisy-chain some external drives off the back. I do this for video editting (under Linux, but same applies elsewhere) and it's really the way to go. When not editing, they are off, and when I need them, I fire them up. Lacie makes a nice 500G unit in an aluminum case that matches the Mac mini (fits underneath like a matching coaster), and they also have very nice external drives ranging from 250GB to 2TB (a bargain at $1900 MSRP).
Slashdot Mirror
The "effectiveness" of an ad is generally measured in number of units sold to the target demographic, not the ratio of sales to people viewing the ad. The ads don't become more effective if you can hit the target demographic specifically rather than target demographic + everyone else.
The hope is that targetted advertising can increase the ratio between sales versus advertising costs. There's also an unfounded notion that it will also increase overall sales (putting an ad at on a bus stop will induce more commuters to buy than if the same people saw the same ad on TV or in a magazine).
Really what they are getting trying to do is to lower the signal-to-noise ratio of advertisement with the hope that you will get out of the habit of tuning out advertising. That's not likely to work unless the total amount of advertising decreases substantially -- fat chance of that.
Let's assume that Web2.0 had something to do with social networking for the sake of discussin the article...
The thesis that advertising becomes "more effective" is without evidence. Advertisers might hope it is more effective, but historically, it's only proven to be more annoying (both by being more plentiful, and by making hopelessly silly demographic conclusions). I'm guessing that this sort of targeted advertising will go over like Jalapeno-flavored toilet paper.
The term "semantic web" generally refers to Tim Berners-Lee's notion of "semantic web" -- he coined the term. TBL's vision is simply a model of describing information. One expression of it is RDF-XML, another is data in N3 notation, but the core of it is the idea that you can express most information as a simple triplet of data: subject-predicate-value (e.g.: the sky - is - blue). That's basically it. It doesn't even have to have anything to do with "the Web" in the sense of the Internet.
The idea, however, is that you can represent information, and even information about that information, as a graph (where the object is itself the subject of another triple). If everything is uniformly presented, there's a slew of common operations you can perform on it, and merging data, making inferences from it, and such becomes easier.
The "semantic web" could be used to represent social networks (the apparent use case that is cause for hysteria), but it is not necessary and might not even be the best approach. Certainly, "semantic web" doesn't equate to social networks. For me, the greatest value is a method to store information about biological systems -- but then that's the field I work in. It could be used to add useful metadata to the web, it could be useful for making taxonomies and ontologies, all sorts of things.
However, the "semantic web" is itself about as sinister in nature as plain text.
This is also easy to implement for Java. I had written a toolchain while working for my first post-graduate employer that would write JNI binding code that would allow you to freely mix C++ and Java code by writing bindings based on the C++ headers or Java class files.
At the time, it was used to blend together some fairly complex C++ algorithms with some Java code that provided a uniform UI (at the time, AWT-based).
It worked great. I seem to remember that it took less than a week to slap together. So, coming up with a Java-SWIG is eminently doable by someone with a passable knowledge of both languages.
In the early-to-mid 90's I attended an "Institute of Technology" where, among other things, I took the level 1 databases course. In that course we had various projects to do, one of which was to implement an "online shopping site".
At that time, our design presumed that you'd set up your account with the retailer over the phone (mostly because we didn't want to get bogged down with the form handling, but also because the UI design was a minor part of this one assignment).
So, we did what was obvious (and what several other people came up with) -- have someone login (no cookies back then) and use the HTTP basic authentication link the session to the customer record in the database. Next to each item, there was a button that said "put it on my tab" and did just that, stuck an entry in the database saying you wanted it. There was a script that could run on a periodic basis and rolled up a list of what was on who's tab and built an order from it.
It seems to me that if a biology student taking a database class thought it was obvious then (to be fair, I had a partner who was an engineer), then it was obvious to anyone that did that sort of thing for a living. Do I have a record of the assignment? No. It never occurred to me to hold onto my old homework for more than a decade.
There's an ever increasing number of people that won't purchase or use Microsoft products of their own volition. If the average consumer won't buy your product, market it to an industry infatuated with itself (the recording and movie industries) who is already making money despite their contempt for their clientele.
Personally, I think it's a brilliant strategy on the part of Microsoft. They've spent billions on developing an underwhelming polished turd of an OS (VISTA) that they may never see a profit on, but they spend pennies on a DRM scheme and sell it at a zillion-fold mark-up to an industry richer than Croesus that couldn't tell DRM from a hole in the ground (much less deduce that it's a waste of time and money that cuts into their net profit).
Go-go gadget marketing!
Check the company's privacy policy. If they don't don't tell you that they'll give your records away without a court order, then they are in violation. So long as they breached the contract, you can terminate service without any termination fees and/or sue for damages based on the breach of contract (say, your phone bills 2002-present). In my case, that's about $1300, not $1000.
I live in MA, so you can write the company with a complaint, state that the complaint is a MGL 93A demand letter. If they fail to give you what you want, you can sue and they are liable for triple damages plus court costs. For $1300, you can go to small claims court for $50 and have a chance at a $3900 return. Not a bad bet.
They can claim that the information is confidential, but that's not likely to wash in small-claims.
Nice idea, but most people don't have a choice of carriers.
"Actions" in Nautilus with that extension is equivalent to KDE's "Actions" -- something that I use a lot and think is sorely under-used (in both KDE and GNOME).
.desktop entry that identifies the file-types it applies to and doing 'mogrify -rotate 90 %f' to them. That's a simple case, but I use this sort of thing all the time (for example, to publish RPMs to a local repository, to add/remove items from a mirror list, convert data formats, etc.).
For example, adding a context-menu option to rotate images involves nothing more than writing a
A flood of neutrons into a fissile isotope... That ought to speed things up quite a bit.
"Um, Al, you know that U 235 over there. You know, over there in the core."
"Yep. What about it Mo?"
"Well, I'm not sure about it yet, but I think that the big red glowing mass that just melted through the containment vessel floor like a giant glowing gopher making a burrow was our U-235."
"Damn zioinst neutrons!"
It seems as though proposed legislation would mandate some pretty nasty DRM be incorporated into broadcast streams. If that be the case, I suppose Democracy and the very idea of Participatory Culture will be finished in the USA.
I was wondering how long it would be before our representatives finally outlawed Democracy. Apparently, the day is at hand.
The biggest victory for "content cartels" is not the bill itself, it's the title. It would mark the first time that the phrase "intellectual property" appears in a US law. It's a very important first step in realizing the transformation of copyirghts, patents, and trademarks into real property. Eventually, photocopying pages from a book really will be theft.
I kind of understand the comment about sites being misleading by including the words "Teletubbies" and "Barbie" in a site that is actually full of sexually explicit photographs...
But what of sites that feature sexually explicit photographs of Teletubbies and Barbie? It is deceptive in that case?
And why only commercial sites? What about Ken and Tinky-winky's all amateur web-cam -- totally free, totally K`inky?
In response, I'd probably tell the IRS the truth: "Intellectual Property" is a marketing term not a tangible asset. US law does not recognize the concept (yet). In so far as "Intellectual Property" is a convenient fiction, the IRS has no authority to levy taxes on fictional assets.
The "value" of information ("intellectual property") depends on the the buyer. In fact, the value of the information that they are being assessed $900 million in taxes for is $0 to me. In fact, on average, it's likely to be $0 for most people (outside of the possibility that you're bound to find some idiot that will pay gobs of money for it).
What point is there to repurchasing the drives? Once the information is out, it's out. Anyone that would be interested isn't interested in the drives, they are interested in the data -- data that's easily copied and transmitted in a couple of minutes. All you are doing is paying people to get back a USB key, the data on which they've already sold someone else.
Heck, let them keep the drive as a keepsake. If the information is misinformation, maybe it will propagate farther. If it's real information, the damage is already done, there's really no point in rewarding for it.
To be fair, a copy of "The Davinci Code" from Amazon is $8. I would bet, however, if it was available for free as an PDF or included in toto in the Sunday paper, I'm sure that DoubleDay would be upset and claim it was worth a lot more than $80,000.
Not that I don't agree that the E911 document ought to be public and freely available -- any standards that are the basis of or result from legislation or regulation ought to be.
In fact, it's quite simple... Reduce the two code bases to a lexical parse of the actual code. Compare the structure rather than the arbitrary names of the symbols that compose it. It's quite simple to do.
Simple as it is (IBM even writes several tools to do such a thing and markets them to various niche markets), it wouldn't be helpful in this case. SCO no longer maintains that there is any "SCO" code in Linux. They now claim that certain "technological concepts" related to UNIX were improperly used, but they make the assertion without clear explanation of what they mean by that.
Searching for plagiarism would be cake... some ambiguous intellectual abstraction? Now that's hard!
If you look at the claims SCO started with, and what they are now attempting to argue in court, there's no relation. How the case has played out so long without being thrown out is anyone's guess.
That depends, are you running Windows in a VMWare VM? If so, simply restart from the initial image (you can configure it to maintain all changes to the disk in a separate file so that you can return to the initial state with a couple of mouse clicks) -- much faster than Ghost.
With regard to scientific equipment: my experience (in a biotech firm) has been quite similar. Vendors did not want you to patch the OS, install ANY software (AV or otherwise), and advised against placing the devices on a network. However, biotech generally have a protocol that requires the backing up all the data that comes off the machine.
However, lately, we see more and more vendors moving to Linux for instrumentation control. As a company, we now request non-Windows based control and data acquisition systems (most are Linux, but we've got Mac, Solaris, and IRIX). In general, we've found these to be more robust with fewer software and data-acquisition glitches. All of our newer mass-specs have Linux-based instrumentation systems, as do our gel-imagers and such.
You are right, though, in that reimaging Windows systems is SOP most places. The company I work for now does a "refresh" on a biannual schedule whether you need it or not, and just about any time anything strange happens on your machine. Company policy dictates that useful information be stored on a shared drive and not locally -- that way, reimaging is a minor inconvenience.
Funny, we don't have a similar policy for non-Windows systems. Of course, about 45% of our desktops run Windows and 100% of our desktop support guys are MSCEs.
I believe a thermal lance burns up to 2500C.
Basically, Venter -- whose a shameless self-promoter, but nonetheless well accomplished because he's well funded and hires good people -- had an idea that he'd travel the world taking DNA samples from everything in sight to capture a broad view of biodiversity at the genetic level. The idea is that by doing so that we'd better be able to categorize genes, describe their function and evolution, etc. There's more than a few problems with that, but in true Venter style, he'd cross that bridge when he came to it.
While he travelled, he found out that not everyone thought this was a keen idea. It turns out that many people perceived (one could argue correctly) that a US company was out to make a buck by exploiting things specific to their community -- and if this was the case, they wanted a cut -- which he wasn't going to give, this is for the world scientific community! As a result, Venter was frequently required to throw away samples, forced out of certain areas, made to wipe the dirt off his shoes, etc.
If there's gold to be found in them there genetic hills, by God the locals ought to have dibs -- so the thinking goes. Now Google plans to make a giant database of it (well, truth be told, much of it already is public, they are simply going to add the magic Google touch, build services, and cull annotation around it). In theory, doing so would dilute the value of the information and prevent the locals from capitalizing on the information.
In a sense, it's a silly situation. The information in isolation has little probability of being useful. Even if it were, it's not likely anyone would ever be able to capitalize on it and turn a profit from it -- that's hard enough with genes that are well researched and have obvious commercial implications. And all that is predicated on the assumption that people own and have IP rights on all living matter in their own sphere of geopolitical influence. Further, we're talking about water samples, pollen, dirt -- stuff likely to be stuck to your clothes if you walk by.
Even if you are the Pope of the church of "intellectual property" and think every quark in a lizard's nut is patentable, I would think its a real stretch to call this "piracy".
How's he ever going to learn if we just make fun of him? I, for one, sent him a CentOS DVD and a kind note supporting him in his time of public embarrassment.
Come to think of it, why doesn't every one do that?
It's simply ludicrous to make the assertion that they are going to rewrite 60% of the code. If they want to make their new 1Q2007 target, they don't even have time to review that much code.
That said, there is, of course, something serious going on...
Shortly after another Windows delay announcement last year, Allchin announces he's going to retire, but stay long enough to get Vista out the door. Pretty innocuous... Then there's a period of everything appears hunky-dory, then Microsoft holds an internal "Blue-hat" conference for internal folks to demo issues and exploits to MS products -- and by several accounts there were not only some doozies, but all sorts of hissy fits were thrown by management. There's a flurry of meetings, another announcement about Windows being delayed concurrent with some pretty drastic restructuring in the Windows division, and a new division head that will take over for Allchin a little sooner than expected.
Now you're seeing articles about last-minute rewrites and fixes (not just the one cited), some very lack-luster press-coverage (buzz-kill for MS' planned media blitz), and reported hundreds of millions of dollars in cost overruns, etc. Add to that Microsoft's target of converting 50% of Windows users to Vista in 24 months (ostensibly so that the OS division can remain profitable).
It paints a pretty bleak picture of the state of Microsoft and its management. Vista, when it does eventually come out, may well be the best OS MS has ever released. The real question is, will that be good enough?
I don't know, but I'm willing to bet MS doesn't have an idea either.
I work for a large biotech company. Upper management uses Windows-based systems, as does manufacturing.
However, I work in research. Until recently the systems were about 50-50 Windows / Mac with the exceptions of bioinformatics (mostly Linux), and cheminformatics (mostly Irix). However, more recently, vendors have been phasing out the use of Windows for instrumentation control in favor of Linux. Nearly all the structural chemistry applications have moved to Linux, and most genomics, proteomics, and metabolomics software is now Linux-based (and, frequently, runs just fine on Macs too). Macs are still pretty popular, but the use of Windows in research is pretty much considered "legacy" at this point.
If you come from an academic environment in contemporary biology, you were probably weened on Mac OS, or Solaris (when I was in grad school). If it's more recent, it's most definitely OS/X or Linux. It's also clear that Linux is rapidly becoming the platform-of-choice for apps in biotech and pharamceutical research, but with a heavy emphasis on WEB-based technologies.
That's not to say that there aren't users that use nothing but Excel and Word, but that's not so common anymore in research (at least were I work and in my previous job). This poses a big problem for our IT department -- they aren't prepared to support Linux desktops and Mac OS/X, yet those are the platforms where most of our applications run.
Biolgists either don't do computers at all (particularly "old school" biologists), or, if they do, Windows is not what they have the most experience with...
Just daisy-chain some external drives off the back. I do this for video editting (under Linux, but same applies elsewhere) and it's really the way to go. When not editing, they are off, and when I need them, I fire them up. Lacie makes a nice 500G unit in an aluminum case that matches the Mac mini (fits underneath like a matching coaster), and they also have very nice external drives ranging from 250GB to 2TB (a bargain at $1900 MSRP).