It's worth remembering that the the ID card scheme was one of Mr Blunkett's pet ideas. Every gov't job he gets he seems to feel he has to do something which leads to a Captain Chaos string of pointless projects.
The ID card scheme is the ultimate pointless project. The Home Office keep changing their justifications for it because its only value is to control freaks in the HO who want to know where everyone is every minute of the day. Fortunately the House of Lords may have put the brakes on. They've added an amendment to the bill, not yet agreed by the Commons, that the project cannot proceed until a full account of the costs had been produced. That would be embarassing.
It seems to me that Microsoft did a bad job in defending this case. Microsoft claims (and for the purpose of argument lets assume the claim is true) that they had a working exchange between Excel and Access prior to 1990. Further you clearly saw similar types of echanges with other products (Paradox and QuatroPro, Lotus 1-2-3 and db2, etc...).
Obviously they lost I'm curious as to why though. I think this means that something like:
1) The layoffs have gotten to to the point that Microsoft can no longer prove stuff about its own code base.
2) They had committed a more serious violation (anti trust, copyright...) and so couldn't go into details.
3) They didn't take the case seriously.
Does anyone have any insight as to why they lost?
How about:
4) They lost because they were lying. They declined the opportunity to buy this gentleman's code because they thought it would be cheaper to just steal it.
MS makes no money on it. What is their motivation to put out a new version of IE as opposed to something like say, MS Office, where they make 100-300 bucks a pop on it?
It's easier to develop for browsers that follow the w3c dom/html/css standards. IE6 has a number of weird bugs that make it a pain.
I think MS is more concerned that corporate intranets might start developing for FF rather than IE6, than any perception among the general public that IE6 a poor quality product.
I'm glad to see I'm not the only one who would like a simple customization of the search engine box in Safari (or at least a way to get rid of it entirely if they won't let me use something other than Google).
Funnily enough, getting rid of it entirely is even more annoying.:-)
I deleted the search box in FF and I find it's absense, when I use FF, grates a bit. With Safari I find myself adding "site:.uk" to my searches where necessary. But the IE7 feature looks great, and I hope the Safari team copy it.
Except in China, the United States of America, and other countries which spy on their citizens illegally
Most governments, including China, USA and my country, the UK spy on their citizens. Within the laws of these countries, this is legal.
Your confusion is perhaps with the current USA / NSA story where, while the Bush administration could and can legally spy on USA citizens, they chose to ignore the existing law and act, as I understand it, illegally. But it was their method that was illegal, not the concept on spying on their own citizens.
Just going through the features tour IE7 appears to have a preference pane for the search box, you can easily choose which search engine to use yourself. I think this is a great idea. I requested the same thing of Apple/Safari through their feedback mechanism, but nothing ever came of it - I'm british so I would rather use google.co.uk or uk.yahoo.com than the google.com that Safari defaults to.
I only use IE6 for compatibility testing at the moment (via Virtual PC) it has a really annoying habit of requiring the 'http://' prefix to urls in the address bar, or sending you to search.msn.com, while other browsers will accept 'www.slashdot.org' and add the prefix themselves. I hope this is changed in IE7 as my next machine will almost certainly be one of HP's Ubuntu laptops which will be set to dual boot with XP.
My prediction, this is a Repblican project and will be DOA.
As I understand it the decision has been made by the IT department and doesn't need to be voted on. The governor's statement just clarifies that MS's lobbying effort to change the decision has not borne fruit.
The introduction says that Gutierrez is good for this job because of his past experience, what is his past experience and why does it make him the best candidate for this job?
If you need someone to read the article for you, it's possible you won't be able to understand the explanation:-)
It would seem like a bigger deal if there were a serious problem with document compatibility, but it doesn't feel to me like there is. The main reason given for the ODF switch is to ensure that documents will be readable indefinitely, and this is certainly important. But the major M$ formats have stabilized in the last half-decade or so, and we're not gonna see decoders for them disappearing anytime in the foreseeable future. Everyone who wants to write a good word-processing package is going to be decoding Word 97+ for the next 50 years at least, and most importantly, when they stop including that compatibility, why should we think they'd be including compatibility for a similar standard? And there will always be people implementing decoders on their own, for either standard. It just feels like we have bigger problems; it's good OSS PR, but not a huge deal. Though of course, I could be wrong.
For you and me, you're right, it doesn't make any difference. But for a company, buying a word processor that relies on a hack to read the accepted standard file format is not an attractive proposition, so they buy MS Word / Office which means that MS can raise the price of Word/Office and the competition have to lower the price of their offerings to compensate for the "hack" compatibility.
Sales droids at Sun, IBM et all must be over the moon. The ODF file format just became "the coming thing", "the future", "the smart choice". No longer the "brave choice", "trend setting choice". Nail biting in Redmond.
Massachusetts is a USD297billion economy with a population of 6.3 million people. Big deal.
I think it falls directly in step with IBM's shift in strategy - lower the software cost and generate service based revenues.
I'm sure you're right. All hardware / service companies want to get a bigger share of the available IT budget, money not spent on software is available for the New Toy.
IBM may be too late for the vast majority of developers. The ones that offered their products to develop and learn on are the ones that will find some sort of loyalty.
Of course it's a non-issue in China: in China, you do what the Chinese government tells you to do & live with, or you don't suck air long enough to say it's an issue.
From the interviews:
The problem is not that Google is censoring its search service, it is that China doesn't have free speech. - YAN SHAM-SHACKLETON, GLUTTER, HONG KONG
Most people in China search for local news, MP3s and software downloads. Some people do talk about politics but the general populace is not very interested. - CHINESE LOAFER, BUSTED IN BEIJING, BEIJING
People are missing the point if they set up the debate that Google is evil. In the end it's down to local laws. The real battle is for the Chinese to fight this law. - ROLAND SOONG, EASTSOUTHWESTNORTH, HONG KONG
All Chinese people know that their expression is censored. We don't need people outside continually reminding us of this. We don't really know how it's going to change but we do hope that it will change. - KEVIN WEN, KEVIN WEN'S WEB, BEIJING
The Chinese people are fully capable of ordering their own country. They don't need foreigners to tell them what's good for them, and what's not.
If you want to improve the accountability of government to the people you could concentrate on your own.
The first gen white iBook, had, according to MacIntouch a 73% failure rate.
The original iMac, I agree - I writing this on an iMac 350:-). The revisions - I think the G5 iMac has had failures do to overheating. Especially the smaller one.
No idea about the iPods but they sell like hotcakes so I'm sure they were good from the start (vague memory about battery trubble).
I think the problem is that there have been enough problems with 1st gen stuff that you start to think that all 1st gen stuff sucks,
That is absolutely right:-), but perception is all, after all. And these are expensive things when they go wrong.
Two problems: Apple needs to upgrade its aging portfolio of laptops, but at the same time they can't risk introducing a flawed first Intel model; it's gotta be more or less perfect, and it's gotta be so much better than a G4 in almost every regard.
Then they're out of luck because Apple's first attempt is invariably flawed.
Personally, I don't think it matters. The iBooks have had awful failure rates before, they still look pretty, and they still sell. And-I-want-one!
"Basically, what is important here is not the fact that you are going to learn a certain language, but that you will learn how to write object oriented code."
You may want to consider what books/software are available.
Objects first with Java has uniformly good reviews on Amazon, a supporting website, and of course the designed-for-education BlueJ IDE
"If governments of other nations having flaws really bothers you that much"
Mate, if that's the impression I've given, I apologise. It's your party, you do what you like. I just find the legal gerrymandering really, really weird.
"Eh, it's a side-effect of the corruption inherent in the party system. In some ways our system inhibits the parties from exercising too much control, and in other ways it encourages or rewards it. Yours, frankly, is about the same overall, though the specific wrongs prevented and encouraged are slightly different. As with all government and most politics, it's more about balance than perfection."
The UK's problem isn't corruption, it's concentration of power. Local gov't has been emasculated and the powers of the Head of State (Queen / president) and the upper house (House of Lords / Senate) have seeped to the lower house (House of Commons / Congress).
Slashdot Mirror
The police take a DNA sample from everyone they question. They keep this on record whether or not it leads to a charge. So they already have a very, very big database with DNA and fingerprints of all the usual suspects and then some.
It's worth remembering that the the ID card scheme was one of Mr Blunkett's pet ideas. Every gov't job he gets he seems to feel he has to do something which leads to a Captain Chaos string of pointless projects.
The ID card scheme is the ultimate pointless project. The Home Office keep changing their justifications for it because its only value is to control freaks in the HO who want to know where everyone is every minute of the day. Fortunately the House of Lords may have put the brakes on. They've added an amendment to the bill, not yet agreed by the Commons, that the project cannot proceed until a full account of the costs had been produced. That would be embarassing.
How about:
4) They lost because they were lying. They declined the opportunity to buy this gentleman's code because they thought it would be cheaper to just steal it.
It's easier to develop for browsers that follow the w3c dom/html/css standards. IE6 has a number of weird bugs that make it a pain.
I think MS is more concerned that corporate intranets might start developing for FF rather than IE6, than any perception among the general public that IE6 a poor quality product.
You said
and I inferred you believed gov'ts spying their citizens to be illegal. My mistake. Sorry.
As to the wisdom of it... we are surely obliged to trust to the good intentions of our elected representatives, and to watch the buggers!
Thanks!
Ah, thanks for the info. I followed your link and this seems to be a really clever and useful application of RSS. I hope other browser's consider following IE7's lead here.
Funnily enough, getting rid of it entirely is even more annoying. :-)
I deleted the search box in FF and I find it's absense, when I use FF, grates a bit. With Safari I find myself adding "site:.uk" to my searches where necessary. But the IE7 feature looks great, and I hope the Safari team copy it.Most governments, including China, USA and my country, the UK spy on their citizens. Within the laws of these countries, this is legal.
Your confusion is perhaps with the current USA / NSA story where, while the Bush administration could and can legally spy on USA citizens, they chose to ignore the existing law and act, as I understand it, illegally. But it was their method that was illegal, not the concept on spying on their own citizens.
Just going through the features tour IE7 appears to have a preference pane for the search box, you can easily choose which search engine to use yourself. I think this is a great idea. I requested the same thing of Apple/Safari through their feedback mechanism, but nothing ever came of it - I'm british so I would rather use google.co.uk or uk.yahoo.com than the google.com that Safari defaults to.
I only use IE6 for compatibility testing at the moment (via Virtual PC) it has a really annoying habit of requiring the 'http://' prefix to urls in the address bar, or sending you to search.msn.com, while other browsers will accept 'www.slashdot.org' and add the prefix themselves. I hope this is changed in IE7 as my next machine will almost certainly be one of HP's Ubuntu laptops which will be set to dual boot with XP.
Camino still has the prettiest buttons :-)
As I understand it the decision has been made by the IT department and doesn't need to be voted on. The governor's statement just clarifies that MS's lobbying effort to change the decision has not borne fruit.
If you need someone to read the article for you, it's possible you won't be able to understand the explanation :-)
For you and me, you're right, it doesn't make any difference. But for a company, buying a word processor that relies on a hack to read the accepted standard file format is not an attractive proposition, so they buy MS Word / Office which means that MS can raise the price of Word/Office and the competition have to lower the price of their offerings to compensate for the "hack" compatibility.
Sales droids at Sun, IBM et all must be over the moon. The ODF file format just became "the coming thing", "the future", "the smart choice". No longer the "brave choice", "trend setting choice". Nail biting in Redmond.
Massachusetts is a USD297billion economy with a population of 6.3 million people. Big deal.
I'm sure you're right. All hardware / service companies want to get a bigger share of the available IT budget, money not spent on software is available for the New Toy.
If DB2 is the superior product, I'm sure the vast majority of developers will be happy to consider it.
AMD's Personal Internet Computer had a similar goal of bringing cheap computing to the world. They're sold in the US for USD199.
Is a USD100 laptop do-able?
From the interviews:
The Chinese people are fully capable of ordering their own country. They don't need foreigners to tell them what's good for them, and what's not.
If you want to improve the accountability of government to the people you could concentrate on your own.
The BBC interviewed some Chinese bloggers and they say it's a non-issue in China.
In the UK, the exams may not be getting any easier, but the pass mark is getting lower.
Not if the author wanted them to be difficult to understand.
If you come across forms / agreements that are difficult to understand, consider asking for one in plain english.
People will rationalise it anywhichway. Whatever. I predict a bumper year for Red Flag Linux.
Sun got top marks in The Register's reader survey. Lots of happy customers. :-)
That is absolutely right :-), but perception is all, after all. And these are expensive things when they go wrong.
Then they're out of luck because Apple's first attempt is invariably flawed.
Personally, I don't think it matters. The iBooks have had awful failure rates before, they still look pretty, and they still sell. And-I-want-one!
Third party applications normally find their way onto OEM installations because someone pays the OEM.
Google are currently paying webmasters who refer new users for Firefox (with google toolbar).
Is anyone paying Dell?
You may want to consider what books/software are available.
Objects first with Java has uniformly good reviews on Amazon, a supporting website, and of course the designed-for-education BlueJ IDE
Mate, if that's the impression I've given, I apologise. It's your party, you do what you like. I just find the legal gerrymandering really, really weird.
The UK's problem isn't corruption, it's concentration of power. Local gov't has been emasculated and the powers of the Head of State (Queen / president) and the upper house (House of Lords / Senate) have seeped to the lower house (House of Commons / Congress).