The US has precisely zero legal standing in the dispute, so "sending diplomats" would be an empty guesture.
Besides, I haven't seen any signs recently that the EU is at all impressed by the US opinion in this matter since it demonstrably operates well within the WTO framework.
Last but not least... the US has enough troubles of its own to head for a trade war with its largest trade partner in the world. And just about the only major one with which, by the way, doesn't have a massive deficit.
So no. The EU might see some grumblings from the US, but it need't worry about any follow-up action. The EU is free to apply its fair-competition laws to Microsoft and there will be no-one in Washington willing to risk even a luncheon voucher to help Microsoft out.
So Microsoft just might just find that it's cheapest for them to play fair for a change.
Missile guidance systems may work fine without GPS, but as I understand, the military also makes heavy use of other types of satellites in Low Earth Orbit:
- communication satellites (all Command and Control over distances longer than say 20-80 Km; both voice and data).
As far as I am aware, most of the emerging "networked" aspects of the military depend on satellite communications. The control of and imagery from Unmanned Aerial Vehicles, and all those automated little messages that collect information from many sensors to where it's combined, analysed, interpreted, and redistributed as terms of a coherent picture of what's where, down to the target coordinates. I believe that we saw both in Kosovo and in the Iraq war how extremely powerful those systems are.
In other words: if someone can destroy those satellites, the US military will -at a stroke- loose its single largest unmatched advantage. So one might imagine that there is some reason for concern.
First of all, realise that the critique in the article you refer to focused on CS students who don't really _know_ their chosen subject. Specifically:
- being restricted to being able to connect Java components together like a plumber *without* understanding what makes those components tick in the first place, and what their strong and weak points are
- not having a feel for what certain high-level instructions mean when projected onto hardware
- being unable to understand, plan, and implement simple memory allocation constructs using pointers
As a CS major, Computer _Science_ is your subject. Not specifically "coding". Apart from being competent at entry-level jobs, you should have sufficient background information to recognise, place, and absorb new developments quicker and more accurately than someone without your background. That's where the "science" part comes in. It really helps if you have a firm grasp of system architecture and understand how computers and even whole information systems consist of layers and components. Nine times out of ten a "revolutionary" change only changes one layer or component, and with it the appearance but not the structure of a system. Focus on structure, not details. You can always bone up on details, but if you don't understand the structure, you don't understand the essence.
Being able to remain current (without being deluged by all the implementation details) ensures that
(a) you will be able to spot where interesting developments are taking place and
(b) your skills and knowledge won't quickly become obsolescent. Coding skills, especially those tied to a specific language, will become obsolescent with that language if they're tied to it.
For example, dedicated C coders may have a blind spot when it comes to properly using (or even designing) object hierarchies or interacting objects. Dedicated Java coders may loose sight of memory management issues and may become fixated on "glueing components together" and "graphical interfaces". Dedicated Assembler coders may be so focused on low-level detail that they both fail to see the high-level logic of the software they're dealing with, miss out on object-oriented programming and understand nothing of e.g. correctness proofs.
As a CS graduate you should have an overview in addition to specific skills because those skills will usually pale next to the specific skills of seasoned coders.
Being able to recognise the underlying algorithms, datastructures, trade-offs, and fundamental limitations of new programming languages will aid you immensely in learning new tricks (languages, packages, concepts, systems), for very few so-called "new" concepts really are anything but old concepts improved or adapted to take advantage of new technologies.
So, here are my suggestions:
- look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_science#Fields_of_computer_science
and make sure you know what all of the terms referred to under "Fields of computer science" mean. Refer you your course material if needed. Ask your professors for reading material if needed. You _don't_ need to be proficient in all of them (so don't try), but you do need to know: what problems they address, what the approximate state of the art is, how quickly the field evolves, and what it's likely to throw up within the next 5-10 year. You should at least be able to explain the highlights of all those fields to an intelligent layman off the top of your head, even if you're prodded awake at 2 am in the morning.
- some fields are more important than others. Since your major says CS *and* business, you will probably be required to talk to both "hard" IT people and business people. So: make sure to train yourself to see the core of problems from both points of view, and then present what you found. Both orally and in writing. Make sure you have a look at case studies of implement
Let no-one be mistaken: this is Microsoft making a 1.2 billion $ investment in Innovation the way we are used to see from it. And in a sharp divergence from its usual practice, this Innovation results in a high-quality ready-to-run product.
Previous posters (and the article itself) have pretty much exposed the pitfalls if having Java as a first (and sometimes only) language.
Anyone who needs to understand programming close to the hardware or memory management must learn C. Agreed. One might then differ about the merits of C++, ADA, and the need for learning LISP.
However that's not what struck me most about the discussion.
First of all I remember that JAVA was seen as something that "Industry wants" when it was introduced at Universities. It was seen as being "in touch with the needs of Industry" to advocate it. Funnily enough Industry now discovers that there are skills that aren't conveyed when you teach the fad of the week. Could it be that "Industry" really is not competent to determine what should be taught? Sure... they can usually be relied to know what skills they need "right now". But what else? Industry typically isn't able to forecast its demand for skilled workers more than say 2 years ahead, let alone determine what skill-set they need unless there is an acute shortage of it.
Secondly, I find the following criticism levelled by the authors of the original article amusing: "Java, instead of exposing this beauty, encourages the programmer to approach problem-solving like a plumber in a hardware store: by rummaging through a multitude of drawers (i.e. packages) we will end up finding some gadget (i.e. class) that does roughly what we want."
Well... isn't that what Engineering is about? What Engineer building a bridge starts out by redesigning I-beams and/or reformulating the concrete mix? We'd consider that idiotic... even dangerous. But software engineers should be doing that? Sure... sure... any Engineer (unlike a plumber) should understand the properties of the components used, and be able to spot less suitable components. But that understanding doesn't mean he's got to redo the components every time he builds a bridge.
In third place... the criticism formulated as: "Students found it hard to write programs that did not have a graphic interface [...]". Well... I know that all Java IDEs tend to push you towards writing graphical interfaces, but as a teacher you can set assignments that *require* command-line activated programs, just by specifying that such programs must be callable from a command prompt. Might it be that said professors haven't sufficiently thought of teaching command-line programming?
I agree with the discussion so far, but since Microsoft is the only one in charge of MS Office code, it's no use getting upset. Microsoft will simply manage their formats as suits them best.
This is why we simply need to move all our documents from MS proprietary formats into some kind of Open format. Then, with the right plug-ins, we'll no longer be affected when MS decides to drop support for something. Or at the very least we'll have a good and convenient workaround.
What's happening with Open Source is that software development takes on more aspects of engineering, and sheds some of the aspects of radicalism and creativiy.
Engineering is like that: in tackling a problem, any problem, you first look at what worked before in a similar situation and then you try to stay as close as possible to it. Just ask people who do structural design for bridges for commercial construction companies. They have some piece of software (that no-one understands and no-one is allowed to change) that they enter a few parameters into (span, load etc.), and it generates the complete design for them, right down to the component lists. They typically aren't allowed to change even the tiniest screws or nuts for fear that their adaptations would result in a design that isn't certified anymore. If it's clear that the conventional design doesn't scale, then it's called a specialist job and it will be outsourced to a specialist firm which employs a lot of MIT graduates. This approach doesn't exactly promote a rapid evolution of bridge design, but what it does do is to spit out lots and lots of bridge designs that are unexciting, safe, proven, easy to build, and which can be budgeted to a nicety.
The same thing is starting to happen in software engineering. You generally don't start building something in C anymore, all the while rolling you our GUIs, coding your own mathematical subroutine libraries, your own sort routines, your own database engine and your own network drivers. Even today's software engineers understand that, and that's why you see people using things like widget and component libraries, high-level languages, and third-party applications. As soon as that happens, your design and your system architecture will be impacted by the capabilities and design of your components.
When using closed source using ready-made components is always a bit of a risk, especially if you don't completely understand the design logic of whover built the library/widget set/class hierarchy/whatever in the first place. Why?
(1) Because it's very likely that your project will somehow run into trouble when you try to use the tools you have as *you* understand then, rather than as whoever built them would have used them had they been in your place.
(2) You are likely to have to spend a lot of time trying to understand the logic of your tools and components compared to actually using them
(3) High quality components don't usually come cheap and sometimes come with nasty royalty clauses.
Therefore people tend to look more favourably on software engineers who come back from their feasibility study and say something like: "We can meet 80% of the specifications just by sticking together off-the-shelf components, but if you want 100% we will have to custom-code X,Y, and Z." If that is acceptable, it usually turns out they will have to custom code U,V,W as well to meet performance benchmarks and R,S,T if they are to accommodate that senior VP's last-minute "really essential" add-ons *plus* a lot of glue code to make everything work together. If the "does 80% of what we want" solution isn't acceptable, then custom-made coding orgies are guaranteed.
With Open Source software, the situation is subtly different. You can often find actual code that does parts of what you need done. Code that demonstrably works, can be modified if needed, and which can be used for free. You'll often find yourself trying to hunt down components that do as much as possible of what you need. And even if such components don't exist, you'll generally stick to platforms and environments that you can test before you commit yourself.
In doing that I'll admit that people who develop strictly using Open Source software will tend to use tools that are unexciting but tried and trusted, will use libraries that have been around for some time, and will constrain themselves to use GUI's that are supported by the (somewhat unexciting and mainstream) widget
The PC mentioned is touted as something aimed at computer illiterates who don't want to go to the hassle of installing Linux and don't want the expense of buying Windows pre-installed. Fair enough, there should be a sizeable market for such products.
Something like that isn't so much a PC as a piece of consumer electronics. Meaning that it should work flawlessly right out of the box, and should have no need for supplemental installs. Unfortuntely it didn't and it had.
The issues mentioned in the review (screen resolution not set properly and reverts to improper default after changing, flash not installed so no Youtube, firefox not default although it said on the box that its browser is firefox, firefox launches so slow (and without feedback that it has been launched at all, so you find yourself launching it two or three times)) seriously detract from a "consumer electronics" user experience. So yes, from that point of view the offering falls short, and PC-Mag is right to be critical.
What I can't understand is: why can't they simply make it work perfectly straight out of the box? Without *any* need to tweak or adjust or install anything whatsoever. Well... the Flash player might be impossible to include (because of its license conditions), but a simple and fool-proof install prompt when you first switch the thing on and connect it to the Internet could take care of that without the need for user intervention beyond choosing between: "Yes download and install Flash player now" and "No, don't install" and pressing return.
The flaws mentioned are fairly minor, but totally avoidable. That they were there at all is just a measure of sloppiness that's OK for IT gear, but not for consumer electronics (which is what this PC is being pitched as). Besides, an option of having 500 Mb of extra memory for say $20 more to make the whole thing run fluidly wouldn't have been amiss either.
This article really was a pleasure to read (although it took me most of a day).
Not just because of the conclusions ("Part III
examines potential market-based rationales that influenced Sony BMG's deployment of these DRM systems and reveals that even the most charitable interpretation of Sony BMG's internal strategizing demonstrates a failure to adequately value security and privacy.") but also because of the rant-free and very lucid and illuminating analysis of the factors involved.
To me, the best part was: "After taking stock of the
then-existing technological environment that both encouraged and enabled the distribution of these protection measures in Part IV, we examine law, the third vector of influence on Sony BMG's decision to release flawed protection measures into the wild, in Part V. We argue that existing doctrine in the fields of contract, intellectual property, and consumer protection
law fails to adequately counter the technological and market forces that allowed a self-interested actor to inflict such harms on the public.".
Those who have hopes for political action to amend the current crop of laws may be interested to read: "Finally in Part VI, we present two recommendations aimed at reducing the likelihood of companies deploying protection measures with known security vulnerabilities in the consumer marketplace. First, we suggest that Congress should alter the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) by creating permanent exemptions from its anti-circumvention and anti trafficking provisions in order to enable security research and the dissemination of tools to remove harmful protection measures. Second, we offer promising ways to leverage insights from the field of human computer interaction security (HCI-Sec) to develop a stronger framework for user control over the security and privacy aspects of computers."
Well... I have no idea whether the shortcomings (no auxiliary power supply for the backup pumps) are sufficiently serious to prevent taking the reactor into production again. It might sound more scary than it is.
However I have found that there is at least one other reactor in the world that produces the at least one of the isotopes (molybdenum-99) as the Chalk River reactor, and it's in The Netherlands (Europe) (see http://www.nrg-nl.com/public/medical/valley/node6.html). I gather that some of the other isotopes needed (technetium-99) are decays products of mo-99. I really wonder if all possibilities have been exhausted. After all... Europe produces that particular isotope as well, and Russia and China must be doing the same; if not Japan as well.
"Annular Core
Research Reactor and associated hot cell facility at Sandia National
Laboratories/New Mexico and the Chemistry and Metallurgy Research
facility at Los Alamos National Laboratory to produce Mo-99 and related
medical isotopes. The Draft EIS also analyzes the environmental impacts
of producing Mo-99 using the Omega West reactor at Los Alamos National
Laboratory, the Power Burst Facility at Idaho National Engineering
Laboratory, and the Oak Ridge Research Reactor at Oak Ridge National
Laboratory, as well as the impacts of not establishing a Mo-99
production source (the No Action alternative)".
Apparently the DOE noticed the problem in time (1995), but it appears that a solution wasn't implemented quick enough.
However, I disagree with the idea that amateurs be limited to reporting raw observations without being able to comment on theories that might explain the observation. Such a limitation implies that people are unable to learn from experience.
I am forced to admit that it's not impossible for amateurs to contribute. However I maintain however that it's (very) unlikely for people who lack knowledge of the underlying theory.
As an illustration I would like to point to a steady flow of letters to the Mathematics Department from people who send examples of trisecting angles, squaring circles, and doubling cubes. Nevermind that you can prove, using Galois field theory, that such constructions are outside the set of what can be generated with straightedge and compass. Taking a clean sheet of paper and starting to draw is *much* more satisfying than spending six months getting to grips with basic modern Algebra. And about half of them forget that they're supposed to only use straight edge and compass, and I am told that for the other half there are forms stating something like "Dear sir/madam, the first mistake we discovered in your work was on page... line...".
Then you have a trickle of letters to the physics department (often from people who insist on the deepest secrecy in order not to compromise their patent application) for a Perpetuum Mobile. Usually accompanied with non-standard terms to describe the effects of electromagnetism and involving smudged diagrams with lots of coils and one or more black boxes. What such letters tend to lack however is a grasp of elementary thermodynamics.
Closely followed by (usually very long) letters from people who wish to explain that Einstein was a Fool, and that Quantum Mechanics is Wrong, followed by an unintelligible essay using a wholly new and unique symbolism, a series of thought experiments to "prove" their point, topped off by a closing section claiming that their ideas have been unfairly sat upon by the "Scientific Establishment".
It excludes them from that opportunity. As well, discovery often depends on looking beyond established technique.
Well, yes. I agree with you're on that point. In Science, experiment is the final arbiter. However... I still maintain that it's very helpful to actually understand established technique in the first place. Not so much because it will tell you where your chances of investigative success are rather slim, but because it will (a) help you to spot and avoid outright mistakes and (b) it will help you to write up what you did so that the rest of us can understand it. My point is that where scientific discovery is hard enough for honest, smart, and well-educated practitioners who talk to their peers, it's much harder for people who lack the education (or even the ability to write clearly).
Having said this I agree that of course being an amateur certainly doesn't mean you're a dolt. Far from it. It's an understanding of the basic theory plus a systematic exposure to what has been discovered already plus a healthy dose of self-criticism and a general ability to accept criticism that seem to be the prerequisites for ability to contribute. And yes, sometimes established scientists too suffer from collective blindness and group-think. But in my experience they are usually willing to listen to anyone they feel isn't about to waste their time.
Science was founded on the work of amateurs. Automatically discounting, or ignoring, comments from amateurs only hurts science.
As I proposed in my previous post, if there is a lot of (well-founded) existing theory in a field then it's important that would-be contributors know about that. Where such theory is absent (or not well-founded) keen-eyed amateurs really can contribute. No doubt about it.
But as I see it, automatically treating comments from amateurs with mu
What the parent post fails to appreciate is that each field of human endeavor has some previously established knowledge. Both theoretical and as regards the facts of the subject area.
Qualification in a field generally means no more than that the person being "qualified" (e.g. through a degree from an educational institute) in a certain field has shown to have undergone a systematic exposure to and a basic grounding in that previous knowledge. In addition a certain basic competence in the (established through consensus) techniques in that field has to be demonstrated.
By being aware of previously established techniques people can avoid treading in the same pitfalls as those before them (in the case of Mathematics, the Sciences and Engineering often centuries before them). In areas where previous knowledge is plentiful, well-established, and being proven on an hour-by-hour basis, a lack of that knowledge is usually enough to ensure that the odds of that someone saying of thinking anything worthwhile or even coherent about the theoretical size of that common background knowledge (the theory of that area) is really rather slim. There *are* exceptions, but they are mighty rare (the mathematician Ramanuyan was one).
That is as far as thoughts on theory go. However, there is something that generally trumps theory, and that is (valid and careful) observation. Raw data if you like. Precisely how valid an observation is is something an amateur unfortunately often cannot tell because he doesn't know enough of the pitfalls that have been taught to qualified people. However, if he uses an established observational methodology (e.g. pointing a camera at the sky and carefully noting down when and where they did that) there isn't all that much they can do wrong.
If the camera subsequently shows flying saucers, then this bit of "evidence" has to be weighed against all the other bits of evidence that qualified practitioners know about, and may be discounted on that basis alone (it wouldn't be the first hoax). But this is hardly something that a serious amateur astronomer would do... or even want to do. Amateurs can be as dedicated to the pursuit of truth and knowledge as any qualified practitioner.
For this reason alone, amateur astronomers can contribute without academic qualifications. Simply because they can contribute instrumental observations. Such observations as a rule are highly reproducible (and may be objective, valid and valuable even if they are not reproducible because they record one-of-a-kind phenomena), and their value is one of *discovery*.
This however does *not* contradict the idea that an "amateur" in a certain field is unlikely to be able to fruitfully contribute to thoughts about the theory of that field. As such "amateur astronomers" are a very poor example.
The same holds for Chemistry, Physics, Biology and any kind of engineering. As long as someone can come up with an interesting (and reproducible) observation, they can make a contribution to the total stock of knowledge. When it comes to interpreting that observation, and/or fitting that observation into a theoretical framework one simply needs to know the theory, which is quite unlikely without qualification.
The reasons I cannot imagine any lawyer reading Slashdot are:
- Slashdot if far too diffuse: it doesn't focus on any single topic and covers that really well. In the words of Cmdr Taco it tries to present an appealing mix of stories. There you go... you cannot ever *count* on Slashdot covering anything well. It does however focus on IT-oriented stories.
- Slashdot itself possesses zero editorial expertise. The expertise (if any) is all with the people who post here. Posts vary from garbage to insightful and you can't tell which is which without actually reading them all (despite the moderation system).
- Slashdot posts usually carry a substantial bias and are almost always strongly opinionated. No lawyer can afford getting caught up in that for any professional research. He might use it to get a quick sample of opinions though.
- Because Slashdot's valuable insights are so diffuse, trying to get at them is like mining gold from seawater. There's an awful lot of gold in the oceans but it really isn't worth your time to try and extract that. The gold content in IT-related topics might just be high enough to take a look at, as opposed to any business related or legal topics.
- A lawyer might just let a paralegal sift out the more obvious rubbish before taking a look at it, but then only when he already knows that Slashdot actually has something on the subject he wants to know about. And he generally wouldn't know that from visiting Slashdot, but from a search engine like Google.
I couldn't agree more. Pamela Jones contributes things that seem to be increasingly scarce and out of fashion in the US of A:
- actual knowledge of what she is writing about (legal proceedings) and the self-restraint to stay inside her area of expertise (Groklaw is something that professional lawyers read to obtain information. Can you imagine *any* lawyer reading Slashdot for information? I cannot.)
- a willingness to actually do research, read source material instead of press releases, and to piece various tidbits of information together in an open and documented way (compare that to the mainstream press who can't seem to do anything but print press-releases)
- a deep commitment to and interest in discovering the truth
- a refusal to be intimidated by legal bluster
- old-fashioned correctness in speech and demeanor
For displaying these qualities in public, over a period of years, I feel she deserves a medal.
Let's face it, why-ever would China sit on its hands and watch a US company like Google develop into the biggest search engine for their slice of the Internet?
Think about what it would mean if they let Google expand as it wants. All those advertising revenues... gone. Control over which websites appear in searches (and at what level) and which don't... gone. A great way for their security forces to keep tabs on what searches are made... gone. A natural niche for their home-grown search engine company... gone.
If the same thing were happening to the US, we would be seeing plenty of legislative initiatives that would somewhere feature the magic words "national security".
China has a more practical approach to addressing the issue that doesn't involve legislative initiatives, but the ethics and the net effect seem to be quite comparable.
Having scanned the document and read its table of content, I can't see much danger or even inconvenience arising from its publication. Of course, the level of detail of the description of the operating procedures and the base diagrams could conceivably be of help to anyone planning an assault on the GTMO. But then the area security arrangements are another matter altogether and are not even in the document. Besides it's unlikely that security of the GTMO hinges on it's layout or operating routines not being known: if anyone who doesn't belong there even gets close to it then security has been compromised already.
As to the angle of "national embarrassment", I don't see the problem. Considering the document, the level of procedural detail, the emphasis on not using gratuitous or non-functional force, and the stress placed on respectful treatment of a detainee's religious beliefs and taboos made a positive impression on me. All in all I'd say that this manual is something the US can be seen with in public. To me it conveys a sense of "Ok, you haven't done anything of this sort before so how you might not know how to behave. However we need to do this right, so we'll spell it out to you.". It's certainly much better than some of the stories that have been floating around, and it could even help to defuse such stories.
Whilst I continue to object to the somewhat gratuitous suspension of the "habeas corpus" rule, and the especially the (in my view) illegal denial of detainee's access to a fair trial, these detainee's aren't detained for smelly feet. They are detained because there seems to be reason to believe that they have been, are, or will be involved in acts of terrorism. In this view it seems reasonable to treat them with every caution while they are detained.
Whether the detainees should be in the GTMO at all is quite another matter which I feel can and should be discussed separately. But given that they are in the GTMO, I feel that the leaked operating procedures don't seem unreasonable at all.
Why would it be unfair to have equal no-appeal no-notice rights to stop employment on both sides? It would be fair if both sides were equal, right?
However, both sides aren't equal. Now is that the case, and why would that be so?
(1) It is reflected in the asymmetric conditions on e.g. the ownership of anything that an employer creates during the period (not the hours, the period) that the employment lasts, plus the fact that an employer is in a position of authority with respect to his employee. As noted before it really isn't as if there were two businesses dealing "as equals". If parties were "equal", contract terms would be symmetric. They aren't. Far from it.
(2) An employer is (barring exceptional conditions) in a much stronger negotiation position than any employee because
(2.a) an employer can replace an employee much easier than an employee can replace an employer (The whole organisation of work is set up so that employees are interchangable.)
(2.b) an employee is dependent on his employment for his livelihood and that of his family, and an employer is not (unless he's running a really small business). This makes it much more onerous and dangerous for an employee to change employer than the other way round.
(2.c) it's part of an employer's normal business to think of employees as replaceable resources, to continuously monitor their productiveness, to replace them whenever this is profitable, to continuously gather information on the employees market, and to have contingency plans for when that resource becomes unavailable. Employers expressly budget time and money for such tasks. It's called "Human Resource Management". The other way round is hardly normal.
Not to argue that there is something intrinsically wrong with the inequality, but the inequality is a fact. For exactly this reason I think that the equal "no-notice termination" conditions are unfair on employees. Employees need time to suddenly shift their activity from fulfilling the terms of their employment to replacing their employer.
No, I didn't realise that, although I *did* try KOffice a long time ago, when KDE was the new thing. I put it aside very quickly and went back to MS Word and Latex.
But Ok, I take your point. KOffice started as Open Source text processor before StarOffice did. So KOffice isn't a me-too response to Open Office. I'll take that back.
However... I still think that as in terms of adoptation Open Office is so far ahead because (a) in terms of features (features that I've come to expect) Open Office offers a lot more than KOffice and (b) as a "drop-in" replacement for MS Office, Open Office is viable right now, that it makes it at least unclear why we need a ground-up-different product like KOffice.
I think you are doing this the right way: start with the task you need done, see how existing software measures up, note where it falls short.
I'm sorry to hear that current Office software fails you. Now if you could only describe how and why the software you use doesn't measure up to your expectations that might be valuable input for developers.
But it's a totally different approach from the gushing: "Gee lets redo the whole darn thing, lets code the interface in Qt4 and gosh lets rejoice over what a nice quick application we have" approach we see with KOffice. Sure, Open Office is slow. But as long as the it processes my keystrokes faster than I can type them what's the rush?
I still feel that KOffice is a "me-too" thing that starts at the wrong end of the problem... and hence is a largely unproductive use of time and effort.
This mantra about "competition is good" misses the point that (a) you need lots of (working) features before you get a decent Office software package and (b) the task to be done is well-known and hasn't changed for years.
And if the task to be done, spreadsheeting and writing documents, letters, and reports is known, then where is the percentage of redoing the whole thing from scratch?
There is a very good reason why MS Office has such a high marketshare: it does the job, without too much fuss, and people are comfortable with it. What job? Well... day-to-day office jobs. In about 20 year nobody has really identified any additional core functionality they needed over spreadsheet, text-processor, presentation maker, personal database, simple drawing package. Open Office is competitive, KOffice (in my opinion) is (in my view at least) redundant.
Err and when you say you "run your company" on the KOffice spreadsheet, how big an application are you talking about? Anything beyond a straightforward 1-page spreadsheet? Any scripting? Any pulling in of external datafiles? Any graphing? Any database access?
... but I'm not in the least interested in KOffice.
I got used to Microsoft Office, have switched (with some gripes) to Open Office, and am getting up to speed with it. Works OK under Linux *and* under Windows. The very last thing I need is yet another (half-baked) piece of software reinventing the wheel.
Oh well... if they really want to, they can develop their KOffice of course. Just don't expect me (or others who just want their office software to "just work" and look the way they are used to) to pay any attention or to respond with anything but mild irritation (can't they think of anything more productive to do?). I'm not even installing it. Not until and unless I see mainstream-press reviews (and no, really no Linux enthousiast reviews: I have seen reviews touting Emacs as a text processor instead of MS Office or Open Office. *sigh*)
Why not focus on really perfecting Open Office? And who knows... perhaps even adding new worthwhile features to it (the "extensions" come to mind).
This isn't the first time that Mr. Ballmer makes unsubstantiated allegations on the subject of supposedly infringed Microsoft patents. The last time he shut up after awhile.
Interestingly, and following SCO's proven tactics in the matter, he stubbornly refuses to say *what* patents are allegedly violated.
Of course Mr. Ballmer admits that he doesn't expect to see a huge revenue stream from licensing agreements (he named the Novell agreement), but that isn't the point you see.
The point is that "free as in speech" and "free as in beer" are threatening Microsoft's business model. If only he could somehow get rid of the "free as in beer", and with it the "free as in speech", he would turn Linux into just another commercial offering. And that's something he knows how to compete with. By fair means or foul (just see the recent EU verdict against Microsoft and judge Jackson's findings of fact in the DOJ-Microsoft case a few years ago for what those "foul means" amount to).
It's also important to realise that no solution that consists of Linux simply dropping any code (assuming any Linux code were to be found to infringe on Microsoft's patents) can be acceptable to Mr. Ballmer.
With that in mind it's easy to understand why Mr. Ballmer really *cannot* list the patents he wishes to receive "just compensation" for. It's because he does not want to give Linux any opportunity to remove any offending code (assuming there is any). He does not want any compensation either.
He just wants to make Linux non-free because that's how he can get rid of it.
Perhaps if people read all of Linux's email they would be more understanding and less quick to condemn him.
His complete email reads:
Schedulers can be objectively tested. There's this thing called
"performance", that can generally be quantified on a load basis.
Yes, you can have crazy ideas in both schedulers and security. Yes, you
can simplify both for a particular load. Yes, you can make mistakes in
both. But the *discussion* on security seems to never get down to real
numbers.
So the difference between them is simple: one is "hard science". The other
one is "people wanking around with their opinions".
If you guys had been able to argue on hard data and be in agreement, LSM
wouldn't have been needed in the first place.
BUT THAT WAS NOT THE CASE.
And perhaps more importantly:
BUT THAT IS *STILL* NOT THE CASE!
Sorry for the shouting, but I'm serious about this.
Al I alone in thinking that Linux basically says:
"Look I'm no security expert, and I'd be happy to follow your collective expert guidance if only:
(a) you could quantify what you're saying and turn it into engineering instead of a religious argument
(b) the lot of you could agree on *one* set of guidelines/features as being best all-around
Unfortunately it appears you can't do either. That being so, I'm not going to burn my fingers and blindly choose one security boondoggle over all the others. I'll just make them pluggable so that every one of you can have his own personal security system. End of discussion. Now go away and be happy."
Slashdot Mirror
Besides, I haven't seen any signs recently that the EU is at all impressed by the US opinion in this matter since it demonstrably operates well within the WTO framework.
Last but not least ... the US has enough troubles of its own to head for a trade war with its largest trade partner in the world. And just about the only major one with which, by the way, doesn't have a massive deficit.
So no. The EU might see some grumblings from the US, but it need't worry about any follow-up action. The EU is free to apply its fair-competition laws to Microsoft and there will be no-one in Washington willing to risk even a luncheon voucher to help Microsoft out.
So Microsoft just might just find that it's cheapest for them to play fair for a change.
- communication satellites (all Command and Control over distances longer than say 20-80 Km; both voice and data).
- reconnaissance satellites (radar reconnaissance satellites, photo reconnaissance satellites, infra-red imaging satellites)
As far as I am aware, most of the emerging "networked" aspects of the military depend on satellite communications. The control of and imagery from Unmanned Aerial Vehicles, and all those automated little messages that collect information from many sensors to where it's combined, analysed, interpreted, and redistributed as terms of a coherent picture of what's where, down to the target coordinates. I believe that we saw both in Kosovo and in the Iraq war how extremely powerful those systems are.
In other words: if someone can destroy those satellites, the US military will -at a stroke- loose its single largest unmatched advantage. So one might imagine that there is some reason for concern.
First of all, realise that the critique in the article you refer to focused on CS students who don't really _know_ their chosen subject. Specifically:
- being restricted to being able to connect Java components together like a plumber *without* understanding what makes those components tick in the first place, and what their strong and weak points are
- not having a feel for what certain high-level instructions mean when projected onto hardware
- being unable to understand, plan, and implement simple memory allocation constructs using pointers
As a CS major, Computer _Science_ is your subject. Not specifically "coding". Apart from being competent at entry-level jobs, you should have sufficient background information to recognise, place, and absorb new developments quicker and more accurately than someone without your background. That's where the "science" part comes in. It really helps if you have a firm grasp of system architecture and understand how computers and even whole information systems consist of layers and components. Nine times out of ten a "revolutionary" change only changes one layer or component, and with it the appearance but not the structure of a system. Focus on structure, not details. You can always bone up on details, but if you don't understand the structure, you don't understand the essence.
Being able to remain current (without being deluged by all the implementation details) ensures that
(a) you will be able to spot where interesting developments are taking place and
(b) your skills and knowledge won't quickly become obsolescent. Coding skills, especially those tied to a specific language, will become obsolescent with that language if they're tied to it.
For example, dedicated C coders may have a blind spot when it comes to properly using (or even designing) object hierarchies or interacting objects. Dedicated Java coders may loose sight of memory management issues and may become fixated on "glueing components together" and "graphical interfaces". Dedicated Assembler coders may be so focused on low-level detail that they both fail to see the high-level logic of the software they're dealing with, miss out on object-oriented programming and understand nothing of e.g. correctness proofs.
As a CS graduate you should have an overview in addition to specific skills because those skills will usually pale next to the specific skills of seasoned coders.
Being able to recognise the underlying algorithms, datastructures, trade-offs, and fundamental limitations of new programming languages will aid you immensely in learning new tricks (languages, packages, concepts, systems), for very few so-called "new" concepts really are anything but old concepts improved or adapted to take advantage of new technologies.
So, here are my suggestions:
- look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_science#Fields_of_computer_science and make sure you know what all of the terms referred to under "Fields of computer science" mean. Refer you your course material if needed. Ask your professors for reading material if needed. You _don't_ need to be proficient in all of them (so don't try), but you do need to know: what problems they address, what the approximate state of the art is, how quickly the field evolves, and what it's likely to throw up within the next 5-10 year. You should at least be able to explain the highlights of all those fields to an intelligent layman off the top of your head, even if you're prodded awake at 2 am in the morning.
- some fields are more important than others. Since your major says CS *and* business, you will probably be required to talk to both "hard" IT people and business people. So: make sure to train yourself to see the core of problems from both points of view, and then present what you found. Both orally and in writing. Make sure you have a look at case studies of implement
Jay! Keep innovating Microsoft!
Anyone who needs to understand programming close to the hardware or memory management must learn C. Agreed. One might then differ about the merits of C++, ADA, and the need for learning LISP.
However that's not what struck me most about the discussion.
First of all I remember that JAVA was seen as something that "Industry wants" when it was introduced at Universities. It was seen as being "in touch with the needs of Industry" to advocate it. Funnily enough Industry now discovers that there are skills that aren't conveyed when you teach the fad of the week. Could it be that "Industry" really is not competent to determine what should be taught? Sure ... they can usually be relied to know what skills they need "right now". But what else? Industry typically isn't able to forecast its demand for skilled workers more than say 2 years ahead, let alone determine what skill-set they need unless there is an acute shortage of it.
Secondly, I find the following criticism levelled by the authors of the original article amusing: "Java, instead of exposing this beauty, encourages the programmer to approach problem-solving like a plumber in a hardware store: by rummaging through a multitude of drawers (i.e. packages) we will end up finding some gadget (i.e. class) that does roughly what we want."
Well ... isn't that what Engineering is about? What Engineer building a bridge starts out by redesigning I-beams and/or reformulating the concrete mix? We'd consider that idiotic ... even dangerous. But software engineers should be doing that? Sure ... sure ... any Engineer (unlike a plumber) should understand the properties of the components used, and be able to spot less suitable components. But that understanding doesn't mean he's got to redo the components every time he builds a bridge.
In third place ... the criticism formulated as: "Students found it hard to write programs that did not have a graphic interface [...]". Well ... I know that all Java IDEs tend to push you towards writing graphical interfaces, but as a teacher you can set assignments that *require* command-line activated programs, just by specifying that such programs must be callable from a command prompt. Might it be that said professors haven't sufficiently thought of teaching command-line programming?
This is why we simply need to move all our documents from MS proprietary formats into some kind of Open format. Then, with the right plug-ins, we'll no longer be affected when MS decides to drop support for something. Or at the very least we'll have a good and convenient workaround.
What's happening with Open Source is that software development takes on more aspects of engineering, and sheds some of the aspects of radicalism and creativiy.
Engineering is like that: in tackling a problem, any problem, you first look at what worked before in a similar situation and then you try to stay as close as possible to it. Just ask people who do structural design for bridges for commercial construction companies. They have some piece of software (that no-one understands and no-one is allowed to change) that they enter a few parameters into (span, load etc.), and it generates the complete design for them, right down to the component lists. They typically aren't allowed to change even the tiniest screws or nuts for fear that their adaptations would result in a design that isn't certified anymore. If it's clear that the conventional design doesn't scale, then it's called a specialist job and it will be outsourced to a specialist firm which employs a lot of MIT graduates. This approach doesn't exactly promote a rapid evolution of bridge design, but what it does do is to spit out lots and lots of bridge designs that are unexciting, safe, proven, easy to build, and which can be budgeted to a nicety.
The same thing is starting to happen in software engineering. You generally don't start building something in C anymore, all the while rolling you our GUIs, coding your own mathematical subroutine libraries, your own sort routines, your own database engine and your own network drivers. Even today's software engineers understand that, and that's why you see people using things like widget and component libraries, high-level languages, and third-party applications. As soon as that happens, your design and your system architecture will be impacted by the capabilities and design of your components.
When using closed source using ready-made components is always a bit of a risk, especially if you don't completely understand the design logic of whover built the library/widget set/class hierarchy/whatever in the first place. Why?
(1) Because it's very likely that your project will somehow run into trouble when you try to use the tools you have as *you* understand then, rather than as whoever built them would have used them had they been in your place.
(2) You are likely to have to spend a lot of time trying to understand the logic of your tools and components compared to actually using them
(3) High quality components don't usually come cheap and sometimes come with nasty royalty clauses. Therefore people tend to look more favourably on software engineers who come back from their feasibility study and say something like: "We can meet 80% of the specifications just by sticking together off-the-shelf components, but if you want 100% we will have to custom-code X,Y, and Z." If that is acceptable, it usually turns out they will have to custom code U,V,W as well to meet performance benchmarks and R,S,T if they are to accommodate that senior VP's last-minute "really essential" add-ons *plus* a lot of glue code to make everything work together. If the "does 80% of what we want" solution isn't acceptable, then custom-made coding orgies are guaranteed.
With Open Source software, the situation is subtly different. You can often find actual code that does parts of what you need done. Code that demonstrably works, can be modified if needed, and which can be used for free. You'll often find yourself trying to hunt down components that do as much as possible of what you need. And even if such components don't exist, you'll generally stick to platforms and environments that you can test before you commit yourself.
In doing that I'll admit that people who develop strictly using Open Source software will tend to use tools that are unexciting but tried and trusted, will use libraries that have been around for some time, and will constrain themselves to use GUI's that are supported by the (somewhat unexciting and mainstream) widget
Something like that isn't so much a PC as a piece of consumer electronics. Meaning that it should work flawlessly right out of the box, and should have no need for supplemental installs. Unfortuntely it didn't and it had.
The issues mentioned in the review (screen resolution not set properly and reverts to improper default after changing, flash not installed so no Youtube, firefox not default although it said on the box that its browser is firefox, firefox launches so slow (and without feedback that it has been launched at all, so you find yourself launching it two or three times)) seriously detract from a "consumer electronics" user experience. So yes, from that point of view the offering falls short, and PC-Mag is right to be critical.
What I can't understand is: why can't they simply make it work perfectly straight out of the box? Without *any* need to tweak or adjust or install anything whatsoever. Well ... the Flash player might be impossible to include (because of its license conditions), but a simple and fool-proof install prompt when you first switch the thing on and connect it to the Internet could take care of that without the need for user intervention beyond choosing between: "Yes download and install Flash player now" and "No, don't install" and pressing return.
The flaws mentioned are fairly minor, but totally avoidable. That they were there at all is just a measure of sloppiness that's OK for IT gear, but not for consumer electronics (which is what this PC is being pitched as). Besides, an option of having 500 Mb of extra memory for say $20 more to make the whole thing run fluidly wouldn't have been amiss either.
Not just because of the conclusions ("Part III examines potential market-based rationales that influenced Sony BMG's deployment of these DRM systems and reveals that even the most charitable interpretation of Sony BMG's internal strategizing demonstrates a failure to adequately value security and privacy.") but also because of the rant-free and very lucid and illuminating analysis of the factors involved.
To me, the best part was: "After taking stock of the then-existing technological environment that both encouraged and enabled the distribution of these protection measures in Part IV, we examine law, the third vector of influence on Sony BMG's decision to release flawed protection measures into the wild, in Part V. We argue that existing doctrine in the fields of contract, intellectual property, and consumer protection law fails to adequately counter the technological and market forces that allowed a self-interested actor to inflict such harms on the public.".
Those who have hopes for political action to amend the current crop of laws may be interested to read: "Finally in Part VI, we present two recommendations aimed at reducing the likelihood of companies deploying protection measures with known security vulnerabilities in the consumer marketplace. First, we suggest that Congress should alter the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) by creating permanent exemptions from its anti-circumvention and anti trafficking provisions in order to enable security research and the dissemination of tools to remove harmful protection measures. Second, we offer promising ways to leverage insights from the field of human computer interaction security (HCI-Sec) to develop a stronger framework for user control over the security and privacy aspects of computers."
However I have found that there is at least one other reactor in the world that produces the at least one of the isotopes (molybdenum-99) as the Chalk River reactor, and it's in The Netherlands (Europe) (see http://www.nrg-nl.com/public/medical/valley/node6.html). I gather that some of the other isotopes needed (technetium-99) are decays products of mo-99. I really wonder if all possibilities have been exhausted. After all ... Europe produces that particular isotope as well, and Russia and China must be doing the same; if not Japan as well.
Apparently the DOE proposed to build a domestic source for mo-99 in 1995 (see http://www.epa.gov/fedrgstr/EPA-IMPACT/1995/December/Day-22/pr-377.html) but apparently this hasn't been implemented yet. The note identifies a number of existing reactors which could be modified:
"Annular Core Research Reactor and associated hot cell facility at Sandia National Laboratories/New Mexico and the Chemistry and Metallurgy Research facility at Los Alamos National Laboratory to produce Mo-99 and related medical isotopes. The Draft EIS also analyzes the environmental impacts of producing Mo-99 using the Omega West reactor at Los Alamos National Laboratory, the Power Burst Facility at Idaho National Engineering Laboratory, and the Oak Ridge Research Reactor at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, as well as the impacts of not establishing a Mo-99 production source (the No Action alternative)".
Apparently the DOE noticed the problem in time (1995), but it appears that a solution wasn't implemented quick enough.
Whem you say:
I am forced to admit that it's not impossible for amateurs to contribute. However I maintain however that it's (very) unlikely for people who lack knowledge of the underlying theory.
As an illustration I would like to point to a steady flow of letters to the Mathematics Department from people who send examples of trisecting angles, squaring circles, and doubling cubes. Nevermind that you can prove, using Galois field theory, that such constructions are outside the set of what can be generated with straightedge and compass. Taking a clean sheet of paper and starting to draw is *much* more satisfying than spending six months getting to grips with basic modern Algebra. And about half of them forget that they're supposed to only use straight edge and compass, and I am told that for the other half there are forms stating something like "Dear sir/madam, the first mistake we discovered in your work was on page ... line ...".
Then you have a trickle of letters to the physics department (often from people who insist on the deepest secrecy in order not to compromise their patent application) for a Perpetuum Mobile. Usually accompanied with non-standard terms to describe the effects of electromagnetism and involving smudged diagrams with lots of coils and one or more black boxes. What such letters tend to lack however is a grasp of elementary thermodynamics.
Closely followed by (usually very long) letters from people who wish to explain that Einstein was a Fool, and that Quantum Mechanics is Wrong, followed by an unintelligible essay using a wholly new and unique symbolism, a series of thought experiments to "prove" their point, topped off by a closing section claiming that their ideas have been unfairly sat upon by the "Scientific Establishment".
It excludes them from that opportunity. As well, discovery often depends on looking beyond established technique.
Well, yes. I agree with you're on that point. In Science, experiment is the final arbiter. However ... I still maintain that it's very helpful to actually understand established technique in the first place. Not so much because it will tell you where your chances of investigative success are rather slim, but because it will (a) help you to spot and avoid outright mistakes and (b) it will help you to write up what you did so that the rest of us can understand it. My point is that where scientific discovery is hard enough for honest, smart, and well-educated practitioners who talk to their peers, it's much harder for people who lack the education (or even the ability to write clearly).
Having said this I agree that of course being an amateur certainly doesn't mean you're a dolt. Far from it. It's an understanding of the basic theory plus a systematic exposure to what has been discovered already plus a healthy dose of self-criticism and a general ability to accept criticism that seem to be the prerequisites for ability to contribute. And yes, sometimes established scientists too suffer from collective blindness and group-think. But in my experience they are usually willing to listen to anyone they feel isn't about to waste their time.
Science was founded on the work of amateurs. Automatically discounting, or ignoring, comments from amateurs only hurts science.
As I proposed in my previous post, if there is a lot of (well-founded) existing theory in a field then it's important that would-be contributors know about that. Where such theory is absent (or not well-founded) keen-eyed amateurs really can contribute. No doubt about it.
But as I see it, automatically treating comments from amateurs with mu
Qualification in a field generally means no more than that the person being "qualified" (e.g. through a degree from an educational institute) in a certain field has shown to have undergone a systematic exposure to and a basic grounding in that previous knowledge. In addition a certain basic competence in the (established through consensus) techniques in that field has to be demonstrated.
By being aware of previously established techniques people can avoid treading in the same pitfalls as those before them (in the case of Mathematics, the Sciences and Engineering often centuries before them). In areas where previous knowledge is plentiful, well-established, and being proven on an hour-by-hour basis, a lack of that knowledge is usually enough to ensure that the odds of that someone saying of thinking anything worthwhile or even coherent about the theoretical size of that common background knowledge (the theory of that area) is really rather slim. There *are* exceptions, but they are mighty rare (the mathematician Ramanuyan was one).
That is as far as thoughts on theory go. However, there is something that generally trumps theory, and that is (valid and careful) observation. Raw data if you like. Precisely how valid an observation is is something an amateur unfortunately often cannot tell because he doesn't know enough of the pitfalls that have been taught to qualified people. However, if he uses an established observational methodology (e.g. pointing a camera at the sky and carefully noting down when and where they did that) there isn't all that much they can do wrong.
If the camera subsequently shows flying saucers, then this bit of "evidence" has to be weighed against all the other bits of evidence that qualified practitioners know about, and may be discounted on that basis alone (it wouldn't be the first hoax). But this is hardly something that a serious amateur astronomer would do ... or even want to do. Amateurs can be as dedicated to the pursuit of truth and knowledge as any qualified practitioner.
For this reason alone, amateur astronomers can contribute without academic qualifications. Simply because they can contribute instrumental observations. Such observations as a rule are highly reproducible (and may be objective, valid and valuable even if they are not reproducible because they record one-of-a-kind phenomena), and their value is one of *discovery*.
This however does *not* contradict the idea that an "amateur" in a certain field is unlikely to be able to fruitfully contribute to thoughts about the theory of that field. As such "amateur astronomers" are a very poor example.
The same holds for Chemistry, Physics, Biology and any kind of engineering. As long as someone can come up with an interesting (and reproducible) observation, they can make a contribution to the total stock of knowledge. When it comes to interpreting that observation, and/or fitting that observation into a theoretical framework one simply needs to know the theory, which is quite unlikely without qualification.
- Slashdot if far too diffuse: it doesn't focus on any single topic and covers that really well. In the words of Cmdr Taco it tries to present an appealing mix of stories. There you go ... you cannot ever *count* on Slashdot covering anything well. It does however focus on IT-oriented stories.
- Slashdot itself possesses zero editorial expertise. The expertise (if any) is all with the people who post here. Posts vary from garbage to insightful and you can't tell which is which without actually reading them all (despite the moderation system).
- Slashdot posts usually carry a substantial bias and are almost always strongly opinionated. No lawyer can afford getting caught up in that for any professional research. He might use it to get a quick sample of opinions though.
- Because Slashdot's valuable insights are so diffuse, trying to get at them is like mining gold from seawater. There's an awful lot of gold in the oceans but it really isn't worth your time to try and extract that. The gold content in IT-related topics might just be high enough to take a look at, as opposed to any business related or legal topics.
- A lawyer might just let a paralegal sift out the more obvious rubbish before taking a look at it, but then only when he already knows that Slashdot actually has something on the subject he wants to know about. And he generally wouldn't know that from visiting Slashdot, but from a search engine like Google.
- actual knowledge of what she is writing about (legal proceedings) and the self-restraint to stay inside her area of expertise (Groklaw is something that professional lawyers read to obtain information. Can you imagine *any* lawyer reading Slashdot for information? I cannot.)
- a willingness to actually do research, read source material instead of press releases, and to piece various tidbits of information together in an open and documented way (compare that to the mainstream press who can't seem to do anything but print press-releases)
- a deep commitment to and interest in discovering the truth
- a refusal to be intimidated by legal bluster
- old-fashioned correctness in speech and demeanor
For displaying these qualities in public, over a period of years, I feel she deserves a medal.
Think about what it would mean if they let Google expand as it wants. All those advertising revenues ... gone. Control over which websites appear in searches (and at what level) and which don't ... gone. A great way for their security forces to keep tabs on what searches are made ... gone. A natural niche for their home-grown search engine company ... gone.
If the same thing were happening to the US, we would be seeing plenty of legislative initiatives that would somewhere feature the magic words "national security".
China has a more practical approach to addressing the issue that doesn't involve legislative initiatives, but the ethics and the net effect seem to be quite comparable.
What was that complaint again?
I enjoyed reading your clear post and I agree.
Having scanned the document and read its table of content, I can't see much danger or even inconvenience arising from its publication. Of course, the level of detail of the description of the operating procedures and the base diagrams could conceivably be of help to anyone planning an assault on the GTMO. But then the area security arrangements are another matter altogether and are not even in the document. Besides it's unlikely that security of the GTMO hinges on it's layout or operating routines not being known: if anyone who doesn't belong there even gets close to it then security has been compromised already.
As to the angle of "national embarrassment", I don't see the problem. Considering the document, the level of procedural detail, the emphasis on not using gratuitous or non-functional force, and the stress placed on respectful treatment of a detainee's religious beliefs and taboos made a positive impression on me. All in all I'd say that this manual is something the US can be seen with in public. To me it conveys a sense of "Ok, you haven't done anything of this sort before so how you might not know how to behave. However we need to do this right, so we'll spell it out to you.". It's certainly much better than some of the stories that have been floating around, and it could even help to defuse such stories.
Whilst I continue to object to the somewhat gratuitous suspension of the "habeas corpus" rule, and the especially the (in my view) illegal denial of detainee's access to a fair trial, these detainee's aren't detained for smelly feet. They are detained because there seems to be reason to believe that they have been, are, or will be involved in acts of terrorism. In this view it seems reasonable to treat them with every caution while they are detained.
Whether the detainees should be in the GTMO at all is quite another matter which I feel can and should be discussed separately. But given that they are in the GTMO, I feel that the leaked operating procedures don't seem unreasonable at all.
However, both sides aren't equal. Now is that the case, and why would that be so?
(1) It is reflected in the asymmetric conditions on e.g. the ownership of anything that an employer creates during the period (not the hours, the period) that the employment lasts, plus the fact that an employer is in a position of authority with respect to his employee. As noted before it really isn't as if there were two businesses dealing "as equals". If parties were "equal", contract terms would be symmetric. They aren't. Far from it.
(2) An employer is (barring exceptional conditions) in a much stronger negotiation position than any employee because
(2.a) an employer can replace an employee much easier than an employee can replace an employer (The whole organisation of work is set up so that employees are interchangable.)
(2.b) an employee is dependent on his employment for his livelihood and that of his family, and an employer is not (unless he's running a really small business). This makes it much more onerous and dangerous for an employee to change employer than the other way round.
(2.c) it's part of an employer's normal business to think of employees as replaceable resources, to continuously monitor their productiveness, to replace them whenever this is profitable, to continuously gather information on the employees market, and to have contingency plans for when that resource becomes unavailable. Employers expressly budget time and money for such tasks. It's called "Human Resource Management". The other way round is hardly normal.
Not to argue that there is something intrinsically wrong with the inequality, but the inequality is a fact. For exactly this reason I think that the equal "no-notice termination" conditions are unfair on employees. Employees need time to suddenly shift their activity from fulfilling the terms of their employment to replacing their employer.
But Ok, I take your point. KOffice started as Open Source text processor before StarOffice did. So KOffice isn't a me-too response to Open Office. I'll take that back.
However ... I still think that as in terms of adoptation Open Office is so far ahead because (a) in terms of features (features that I've come to expect) Open Office offers a lot more than KOffice and (b) as a "drop-in" replacement for MS Office, Open Office is viable right now, that it makes it at least unclear why we need a ground-up-different product like KOffice.
However, it still doesn't explain to me why a ground-up rewrite is needed instead of, say, a highly customisable interface plus bug-fixing.
I'm sorry to hear that current Office software fails you. Now if you could only describe how and why the software you use doesn't measure up to your expectations that might be valuable input for developers.
But it's a totally different approach from the gushing: "Gee lets redo the whole darn thing, lets code the interface in Qt4 and gosh lets rejoice over what a nice quick application we have" approach we see with KOffice. Sure, Open Office is slow. But as long as the it processes my keystrokes faster than I can type them what's the rush?
I still feel that KOffice is a "me-too" thing that starts at the wrong end of the problem ... and hence is a largely unproductive use of time and effort.
And if the task to be done, spreadsheeting and writing documents, letters, and reports is known, then where is the percentage of redoing the whole thing from scratch?
There is a very good reason why MS Office has such a high marketshare: it does the job, without too much fuss, and people are comfortable with it. What job? Well ... day-to-day office jobs. In about 20 year nobody has really identified any additional core functionality they needed over spreadsheet, text-processor, presentation maker, personal database, simple drawing package. Open Office is competitive, KOffice (in my opinion) is (in my view at least) redundant.
Err and when you say you "run your company" on the KOffice spreadsheet, how big an application are you talking about? Anything beyond a straightforward 1-page spreadsheet? Any scripting? Any pulling in of external datafiles? Any graphing? Any database access?
I got used to Microsoft Office, have switched (with some gripes) to Open Office, and am getting up to speed with it. Works OK under Linux *and* under Windows. The very last thing I need is yet another (half-baked) piece of software reinventing the wheel.
Oh well ... if they really want to, they can develop their KOffice of course. Just don't expect me (or others who just want their office software to "just work" and look the way they are used to) to pay any attention or to respond with anything but mild irritation (can't they think of anything more productive to do?). I'm not even installing it. Not until and unless I see mainstream-press reviews (and no, really no Linux enthousiast reviews: I have seen reviews touting Emacs as a text processor instead of MS Office or Open Office. *sigh*)
Why not focus on really perfecting Open Office? And who knows ... perhaps even adding new worthwhile features to it (the "extensions" come to mind).
Interestingly, and following SCO's proven tactics in the matter, he stubbornly refuses to say *what* patents are allegedly violated.
Of course Mr. Ballmer admits that he doesn't expect to see a huge revenue stream from licensing agreements (he named the Novell agreement), but that isn't the point you see.
The point is that "free as in speech" and "free as in beer" are threatening Microsoft's business model. If only he could somehow get rid of the "free as in beer", and with it the "free as in speech", he would turn Linux into just another commercial offering. And that's something he knows how to compete with. By fair means or foul (just see the recent EU verdict against Microsoft and judge Jackson's findings of fact in the DOJ-Microsoft case a few years ago for what those "foul means" amount to).
It's also important to realise that no solution that consists of Linux simply dropping any code (assuming any Linux code were to be found to infringe on Microsoft's patents) can be acceptable to Mr. Ballmer.
With that in mind it's easy to understand why Mr. Ballmer really *cannot* list the patents he wishes to receive "just compensation" for. It's because he does not want to give Linux any opportunity to remove any offending code (assuming there is any). He does not want any compensation either.
He just wants to make Linux non-free because that's how he can get rid of it.
His complete email reads:
Schedulers can be objectively tested. There's this thing called "performance", that can generally be quantified on a load basis.
Yes, you can have crazy ideas in both schedulers and security. Yes, you can simplify both for a particular load. Yes, you can make mistakes in both. But the *discussion* on security seems to never get down to real numbers.
So the difference between them is simple: one is "hard science". The other one is "people wanking around with their opinions".
If you guys had been able to argue on hard data and be in agreement, LSM wouldn't have been needed in the first place.
BUT THAT WAS NOT THE CASE.
And perhaps more importantly:
BUT THAT IS *STILL* NOT THE CASE!
Sorry for the shouting, but I'm serious about this.
Al I alone in thinking that Linux basically says:
"Look I'm no security expert, and I'd be happy to follow your collective expert guidance if only:
(a) you could quantify what you're saying and turn it into engineering instead of a religious argument
(b) the lot of you could agree on *one* set of guidelines/features as being best all-around
Unfortunately it appears you can't do either. That being so, I'm not going to burn my fingers and blindly choose one security boondoggle over all the others. I'll just make them pluggable so that every one of you can have his own personal security system. End of discussion. Now go away and be happy."
You just didn't think it through then. See my previous post ;-P