No. See my post above. It is an attack on public knowledge. IBM will help but we need not to let a private entity fight this alone. Let's have our (we the people) institutions have a say in what they think of these robber barons. Public knowledge and innovation is the key to the progress of a free society. To let a private entity fight it alone would be like Churchill and the US staying at home while the USSR fights Nazi Germany, then showing up at Yalta and asking their share of the pie.
You are right on the crucial strategic point. Nothing will ever be disclosed, just like in the SCO case. He may actually count on the outrage that will follow to help him make the point (to business customers) that MS is the strong one here. That Ballmer and MS take this gamble, and it is a huge gamble to frontally attack public knowledge and innovation in a free society (just in the middle of the European Commission thing), may actually be a diversion attempt to hide their current weaknesses and the beginning of their decline. Apple is on the rise, Vista is not going to do so well, Linux is doing brilliantly. Let's not play David against Goliath, let's play public knowledge and innovation in a free society against a last century style robber baron. Ballmer fits the part wonderfully.
The post summary seems to suggest that Ars Technica is defending the telcos as innovators against the BusinessWeek attack of them as dinosaurs. This is a misleading interpretation of the tone of the article. Ars Technica merely qualifies and nuances the BusinessWeek stance with a deeper analysis of the past and present state of "blue sky" research versus commercially driven research. But the charge against the telcos as non-innovators and even as suppressors of innovation still stands:
In today's more agile economy, where workers hop from job to job and businesses spring up from nowhere to dominate an industry in the span of half a decade, there's no longer anything in the private sector like the enduring safety of the Ma Bell monopoly to lavishly support a blue sky research lab. The closest we have today is Google's "20 percent time," where engineers are encouraged to spend 20 percent of their time working on whatever research project strikes their fancy. But 20 percent isn't 100 percent.
A bank was robbed in London. Police told the press that the probable cause of the crime was that money was kept there... A woman was raped in Central Park, New York. A representative of the police force told the press...
Keep parent modded up informative despite previous comment. It was definitely informative to me as a scientist to know that UCS was a "fellow traveller". Yes, it is entirely possible that this organisation has learned something and reinvented itself (which I now want to verify), and I am open to a positive initiative, but I do like to know where one comes from, just in case. Anyone who take on such a task as stating publicly to speak in the name of scientists deserves, and will actually appreciate, a little scrutiny and our informed approbation.
Sources indicate that the talks, while still active, have cooled somewhat in the last two weeks as executives considered antitrust issues.
At the face of it, shouldn't it have come to mind BEFORE even beginning any talk? Is this a kind of trial baloon to test how compliant the authorities might be? Are they trying to prepare the minds for a different buyout that will appear more "reasonable" in comparison? MS should already have been split in different operations by now, OS and software, not that this is an absolute remedy, considering what happened with the Bells...
In recent months, Microsoft has attempted to use its popular desktop applications like Internet Explorer to drive traffic to its Web sites and search engines. That drew the ire of Google, which in April complained to the Justice Dept. about unfair competitive practices. Google didn't get much satisfaction. Less than a month later, on May 12, the Justice Dept. dismissed the complaint.
I was just wondering what was happening on that front. At some point, it will have to stop. This nonsense of MS using its OS dominance to crush any living thing on the Internet is just too destructive, innovation wise, economy wise, science wise, democracy wise and, I am even tempted to say, civilisation wise.
It seems like there are suddenly a lot of lawyers writing about the future of the Internet. So we've gone from ambulance chasing to Internet chasing?
Not only is this comment trolling for the ATT and cable companies, taking us for idiots, but I am highly suspicious of anyone having modded this insightful. When something threatening the future of the Internet as we know it is before the Congress, we need all the lawyers we can gather, especially when they are professors at Columbia.
To state my case a little more precisely, the single legitimation for their acting like thugs is for the RIAA to claim that they are doing what they do for the benefit of the artists, and this is the line that lawmakers take for themselves: "I love country music" said a prominent one of them (forget my memory)recently.
THIS has the power to take that carpet under their feet. It is no longer only the greedy consumers, now. It is the producers themselves. This is big.
If there is one way to convince a larger segment of the population of what is going on, and consequently convince lawmakers that they are going in the wrong direction, this is it. Spread this movement, in Canada, in US and in Europe, and we have a chance against the labels and their legislation-buying money.
Your comment strikes me as quite bizarre: distance metaphors are used all the time in a context of, actually, "distancing" a solution from another one. In this context, "a light-year ahead" makes perfect sense. I could also have used the plural, by the way. I note that in order to try to make my remark sound strange, you used the term "kilometre" instead of "mile", the later would have made the pointlessness of your remark particularly evident: we say "miles ahead" and it is common usage. And also: no, I was not trying to be funny.I am dead serious: I AM suggesting putting this on a full page in the New York Time. And I think that you are a Troll.
From the article: Black holes alter spacetime. Therein lies the difficulty in creating black hole models: Space and time shift; density becomes infinite and time can come to a standstill. Such variables cause computer simulations to crash.
But they succeeded with Linux. There you have it, your collision between Microsoft and Linux. Let's buy a full page in the New York Times and title it with something like: Light year ahead of Windows; don't try this at home.
If you de-ice the wings of an aircraft flying at, say, 900 km/h, you are sending said ice toward the tail of the plane at same speed, repeating a recipe that caused, err, a major malfunction not so long ago at the occasion of a shuttle launch, aren't you? And that was not even ice, but just foam. Granted, the place will not have to suffer the penalty of a reintry into the atmosphere, but it is now understood that light debris flying fast can cause serious damage.
Good news but not well interpreted
on
Linux Helping Oracle
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
It is welcomed news that Linux and open source foster a productive cooperation in the high-end database market. The interpretation given in this article gets it just backward, wrongly positioning Linux and IBM in opposite camps (facts given in the article don't support the interpretation offered). Who the # wrote this article?
I say its technology, and any selfrighteous sermonizing jackass that wants to make religious wars based on it can go and do it with himself, for all I care.
Dear Anonymous Coward,
This line of arguments "this is just technology, for god's sake" does not impress me one minute. The guys building defensive forts/castles on waterways and extorting levies could have said the same thing, this is just technology. It is when technology is used as a mean of control on how people live that it begins to require serious attention and yes, there will be differing views on how to respond, so debates like this one or actually in this case, slander from astroturfers throwing one for their sponsors.
If it is easier for a hacker to analyse the code for security holes in OSS, it is equally easier for everyone else, which results in safer code than simple obfuscation, which can - and often is - breached. In the latter case, it takes time to know that a security hole is being exploited and it takes much more time still to fix it, since it is left to the proprietor/obfuscator to do.
Culture is a huge issue as well. Microsoft is a company that is very focused on technology, very focused on business, and very focused on the competition. Getting groups to put security high in their list of priorities was a super hard thing to change at Microsoft.
Unwashed it is, though. This sentence would never have gotten past the security clearance of a PR review. Basically, he is saying that the core elements of the culture of Microsoft is what is preventing it from developing products that serve their customers' interests. It's all about dominating the market. They have it backward and this is why their competitors who have it the right way are doing so well. And IMHO, it is unremediable at this point.
That's a very good point to bring in. Perhaps if Disney produces new material, quality material, they will not depend so much on the old, and that would be one thing out of the way for a push for a public domain oriented reform of copyright law.
Content companies are beginning to understand what having a good reputation as corporates citizen means. That is certainly one thing Steve Jobs knows, and the board who decided to buy Pixar have taken decided so in full knowledge on what effect this style of management had on the fortune of Apple.
Re:Too much focus on Jobs
on
Disney Buys Pixar
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Jobs is just this one guy who sees ahead better than most and invest in people who can make it happen
The author creates a strawman as easy to shoot as the proverbial elephant. It is a pamphlet, not a well constructed argument. As much as I had found O'Reilly intelligent in his careful and well informed elaboration of his ideas on Web 2.0, obviously a concept, like all others, subject to abuse, as much I am sick of nobodies trying hard to position themselves in the counter position.
Please do explain why DRM and security are mutually exclusive?
Breaches of security happen when someone else take control or attempt to take control of your machine. DRM implies someone else, supposedly a trustful party, taking control of your machine, which creates vulnerabilities or eventually (inevitably?) potential abuse from the very people operating the DRM. I use computers for managing critical information in the health sector and I don't want to end up being forced to use machines that are only secondarily useful for my purpose and designed primarily as entertainment machines whose normal functionning is dependent on some entertainment industry or industry watchdog. Wasn't Sony's experience eye-opening enough in that respect?
Of course a jury from that industry/discipline dealing with industrial design has an interest in preserving intellectual property rights.
What I wrote don't imply denying intellectual property rights per se, and the Apple example you suggest is as good as any. What is at stake is industrial designers treating the computer as an entertainment machine, which is a convenient restriction to some industry, but has very serious implications for all other users of computers, who are many. This is an intrinsic design issue. As far as design is concerned, their design has what is a quality for some commercial interests and what is a fatal flaw for many (most?) computer users.
What is the greatest issue facing computing today? For the users, it is security, for some vendors, it is the security of their hold on some part of some market. DRM answers the second interest to the detriment of the first. The jury who awarded this prize don't understand this, or they do, and have themselves some interest, therefore are not impartial.
Precisely! If they supply value diminished things instead of value added ones, no one will want them. This is why they are trying to legislate and sue their way to their dreamed toll gates. It will be meaningful to a lot of people to fight this fight in the name of sound economy principles and openness to innovation.
Err, am I welcoming the indecisiveness of our DRM overlords?
Indeed, the commercial mess that DRM schemes are now demonstrably causing around a promising technology should further convince decision makers and investors around the world that the business model of DRM is wrong. Reasonable pricing and value preserved DRM unencumbered media will do it. One new nail in the coffin!
Slashdot Mirror
No. See my post above. It is an attack on public knowledge. IBM will help but we need not to let a private entity fight this alone. Let's have our (we the people) institutions have a say in what they think of these robber barons. Public knowledge and innovation is the key to the progress of a free society. To let a private entity fight it alone would be like Churchill and the US staying at home while the USSR fights Nazi Germany, then showing up at Yalta and asking their share of the pie.
You are right on the crucial strategic point. Nothing will ever be disclosed, just like in the SCO case. He may actually count on the outrage that will follow to help him make the point (to business customers) that MS is the strong one here. That Ballmer and MS take this gamble, and it is a huge gamble to frontally attack public knowledge and innovation in a free society (just in the middle of the European Commission thing), may actually be a diversion attempt to hide their current weaknesses and the beginning of their decline. Apple is on the rise, Vista is not going to do so well, Linux is doing brilliantly. Let's not play David against Goliath, let's play public knowledge and innovation in a free society against a last century style robber baron. Ballmer fits the part wonderfully.
The post summary seems to suggest that Ars Technica is defending the telcos as innovators against the BusinessWeek attack of them as dinosaurs. This is a misleading interpretation of the tone of the article. Ars Technica merely qualifies and nuances the BusinessWeek stance with a deeper analysis of the past and present state of "blue sky" research versus commercially driven research. But the charge against the telcos as non-innovators and even as suppressors of innovation still stands:
In today's more agile economy, where workers hop from job to job and businesses spring up from nowhere to dominate an industry in the span of half a decade, there's no longer anything in the private sector like the enduring safety of the Ma Bell monopoly to lavishly support a blue sky research lab. The closest we have today is Google's "20 percent time," where engineers are encouraged to spend 20 percent of their time working on whatever research project strikes their fancy. But 20 percent isn't 100 percent.
A bank was robbed in London. Police told the press that the probable cause of the crime was that money was kept there... A woman was raped in Central Park, New York. A representative of the police force told the press...
Keep parent modded up informative despite previous comment. It was definitely informative to me as a scientist to know that UCS was a "fellow traveller". Yes, it is entirely possible that this organisation has learned something and reinvented itself (which I now want to verify), and I am open to a positive initiative, but I do like to know where one comes from, just in case. Anyone who take on such a task as stating publicly to speak in the name of scientists deserves, and will actually appreciate, a little scrutiny and our informed approbation.
Sources indicate that the talks, while still active, have cooled somewhat in the last two weeks as executives considered antitrust issues.
At the face of it, shouldn't it have come to mind BEFORE even beginning any talk? Is this a kind of trial baloon to test how compliant the authorities might be? Are they trying to prepare the minds for a different buyout that will appear more "reasonable" in comparison? MS should already have been split in different operations by now, OS and software, not that this is an absolute remedy, considering what happened with the Bells...
In recent months, Microsoft has attempted to use its popular desktop applications like Internet Explorer to drive traffic to its Web sites and search engines. That drew the ire of Google, which in April complained to the Justice Dept. about unfair competitive practices. Google didn't get much satisfaction. Less than a month later, on May 12, the Justice Dept. dismissed the complaint.
I was just wondering what was happening on that front. At some point, it will have to stop. This nonsense of MS using its OS dominance to crush any living thing on the Internet is just too destructive, innovation wise, economy wise, science wise, democracy wise and, I am even tempted to say, civilisation wise.
It seems like there are suddenly a lot of lawyers writing about the future of the Internet. So we've gone from ambulance chasing to Internet chasing?
Not only is this comment trolling for the ATT and cable companies, taking us for idiots, but I am highly suspicious of anyone having modded this insightful. When something threatening the future of the Internet as we know it is before the Congress, we need all the lawyers we can gather, especially when they are professors at Columbia.
To state my case a little more precisely, the single legitimation for their acting like thugs is for the RIAA to claim that they are doing what they do for the benefit of the artists, and this is the line that lawmakers take for themselves: "I love country music" said a prominent one of them (forget my memory)recently.
THIS has the power to take that carpet under their feet. It is no longer only the greedy consumers, now. It is the producers themselves. This is big.
If there is one way to convince a larger segment of the population of what is going on, and consequently convince lawmakers that they are going in the wrong direction, this is it. Spread this movement, in Canada, in US and in Europe, and we have a chance against the labels and their legislation-buying money.
Yes, this is the way to go.
Your comment strikes me as quite bizarre: distance metaphors are used all the time in a context of, actually, "distancing" a solution from another one. In this context, "a light-year ahead" makes perfect sense. I could also have used the plural, by the way. I note that in order to try to make my remark sound strange, you used the term "kilometre" instead of "mile", the later would have made the pointlessness of your remark particularly evident: we say "miles ahead" and it is common usage. And also: no, I was not trying to be funny.I am dead serious: I AM suggesting putting this on a full page in the New York Time. And I think that you are a Troll.
From the article: Black holes alter spacetime. Therein lies the difficulty in creating black hole models: Space and time shift; density becomes infinite and time can come to a standstill. Such variables cause computer simulations to crash.
But they succeeded with Linux. There you have it, your collision between Microsoft and Linux. Let's buy a full page in the New York Times and title it with something like: Light year ahead of Windows; don't try this at home.
If you de-ice the wings of an aircraft flying at, say, 900 km/h, you are sending said ice toward the tail of the plane at same speed, repeating a recipe that caused, err, a major malfunction not so long ago at the occasion of a shuttle launch, aren't you? And that was not even ice, but just foam. Granted, the place will not have to suffer the penalty of a reintry into the atmosphere, but it is now understood that light debris flying fast can cause serious damage.
It is welcomed news that Linux and open source foster a productive cooperation in the high-end database market. The interpretation given in this article gets it just backward, wrongly positioning Linux and IBM in opposite camps (facts given in the article don't support the interpretation offered). Who the # wrote this article?
I say its technology, and any selfrighteous sermonizing jackass that wants to make religious wars based on it can go and do it with himself, for all I care.
Dear Anonymous Coward,
This line of arguments "this is just technology, for god's sake" does not impress me one minute. The guys building defensive forts/castles on waterways and extorting levies could have said the same thing, this is just technology. It is when technology is used as a mean of control on how people live that it begins to require serious attention and yes, there will be differing views on how to respond, so debates like this one or actually in this case, slander from astroturfers throwing one for their sponsors.
If it is easier for a hacker to analyse the code for security holes in OSS, it is equally easier for everyone else, which results in safer code than simple obfuscation, which can - and often is - breached. In the latter case, it takes time to know that a security hole is being exploited and it takes much more time still to fix it, since it is left to the proprietor/obfuscator to do.
Culture is a huge issue as well. Microsoft is a company that is very focused on technology, very focused on business, and very focused on the competition. Getting groups to put security high in their list of priorities was a super hard thing to change at Microsoft.
Unwashed it is, though. This sentence would never have gotten past the security clearance of a PR review. Basically, he is saying that the core elements of the culture of Microsoft is what is preventing it from developing products that serve their customers' interests. It's all about dominating the market. They have it backward and this is why their competitors who have it the right way are doing so well. And IMHO, it is unremediable at this point.
That's a very good point to bring in. Perhaps if Disney produces new material, quality material, they will not depend so much on the old, and that would be one thing out of the way for a push for a public domain oriented reform of copyright law.
Content companies are beginning to understand what having a good reputation as corporates citizen means. That is certainly one thing Steve Jobs knows, and the board who decided to buy Pixar have taken decided so in full knowledge on what effect this style of management had on the fortune of Apple.
Jobs is just this one guy who sees ahead better than most and invest in people who can make it happen
Isn't that precisely what the role of a CEO is?
The author creates a strawman as easy to shoot as the proverbial elephant. It is a pamphlet, not a well constructed argument. As much as I had found O'Reilly intelligent in his careful and well informed elaboration of his ideas on Web 2.0, obviously a concept, like all others, subject to abuse, as much I am sick of nobodies trying hard to position themselves in the counter position.
Please do explain why DRM and security are mutually exclusive?
Breaches of security happen when someone else take control or attempt to take control of your machine. DRM implies someone else, supposedly a trustful party, taking control of your machine, which creates vulnerabilities or eventually (inevitably?) potential abuse from the very people operating the DRM. I use computers for managing critical information in the health sector and I don't want to end up being forced to use machines that are only secondarily useful for my purpose and designed primarily as entertainment machines whose normal functionning is dependent on some entertainment industry or industry watchdog. Wasn't Sony's experience eye-opening enough in that respect?
Of course a jury from that industry/discipline dealing with industrial design has an interest in preserving intellectual property rights.
What I wrote don't imply denying intellectual property rights per se, and the Apple example you suggest is as good as any. What is at stake is industrial designers treating the computer as an entertainment machine, which is a convenient restriction to some industry, but has very serious implications for all other users of computers, who are many. This is an intrinsic design issue. As far as design is concerned, their design has what is a quality for some commercial interests and what is a fatal flaw for many (most?) computer users.
What is the greatest issue facing computing today? For the users, it is security, for some vendors, it is the security of their hold on some part of some market. DRM answers the second interest to the detriment of the first. The jury who awarded this prize don't understand this, or they do, and have themselves some interest, therefore are not impartial.
You can't fight supply and demand
Precisely! If they supply value diminished things instead of value added ones, no one will want them. This is why they are trying to legislate and sue their way to their dreamed toll gates. It will be meaningful to a lot of people to fight this fight in the name of sound economy principles and openness to innovation.
Err, am I welcoming the indecisiveness of our DRM overlords?
Indeed, the commercial mess that DRM schemes are now demonstrably causing around a promising technology should further convince decision makers and investors around the world that the business model of DRM is wrong. Reasonable pricing and value preserved DRM unencumbered media will do it. One new nail in the coffin!