I wonder who are the moderators that could mod you Insightful. I would have moderated you Troll. Do you really know what would happen if Microsoft would be stupid enough to sue Linux for patent infringement? IBM and these guys will immediatly sue them back for every patent they hold and Microsoft is using. How will this be a good thing for Microsoft's shareholders?
Sorry, nice try, but you're the troll. If you took my full quote, "If someone materially infriges on a corpoations patents and there are substantial damages to the corporations ability to make money, the corporation has a duty to it's shareholders to enforce the patents." I clearly state that if there are substantial damages to the ability to make money. So there are various scenarios where they would not sue, but Balmer is really just stating the obvious. If you have trouble because of the name Microsoft being in this, just imagine it's some other company. What if CEO of company A said, "Well, I think there are experts who claim company B violates our intellectual property. I'm not going to comment. But to the degree that that's the case, of course we owe it to our shareholders to have a strategy." Is this something that would be a shocker? No, it's stating the obvious.
Point taken, they are not forced. If they choose to obey the law they will protect the company's intellectual property rights. If the want to break the law, they can ignore their fiduciary duty to the shareholders.
Yeah, it's a pretty fuddy statement, but no big surprise there, that's what CEOs do. I think it's reasonable to say to the Linux community, hey if you infringe our patents, we'll sue you. Just because it's a FOSS community doesn't mean it's above the law.
Ok, maybe I'm a Unix guy, but was this really something that changed the network? I know a lot of people have it installed, and run webservers, etc on it (usually because they are forced to or don't know any better), but if you want to put this on there it just seems like there are others that should be there like Solaris, Red Hat, Suze, FreeBSD just to name a few.
That's what's realøy scary about corporations. They're only accoutable to the shareholders, ie the money.
Well, corporations have many obligations. They are also obligated to the government to follow all laws. They are there to make money. That's their purpose. It's the government's role to make sure that the ways in which they make money are fair. So, not sure why this is so scary to you, but relax it will all work it's way out. I don't think any of us know if Linux is infringing on Microsoft's patents until we hear both sides of the case.
He didn't state that he's sure that Linux has violated Patents, but he's saying that if they did (as some experts say), they would be forced by their shareholders to take action. This is entirely true and will always be true in every situation. If someone materially infriges on a corpoations patents and there are substantial damages to the corporations ability to make money, the corporation has a duty to it's shareholders to enforce the patents. Balmer really doesn't have a say in this matter he has to act.
The professor is a professional teacher paid to teach, and the student is the one receiving his services.
Actually, they are paid to teach, but they also are paid to do research that generates grants from corporations and government. In my experience, this is their focus which is why some of the most famous professors are terrible teachers and some of the best teachers are not famous professors.
If you were using this with the GDrive (Google's online unlimited storage thingy), maybe reliability is not so important because you could have backups made in real time to the GDrive. Also, you could do some sort of caching as well. Imagine a 32 gB local cache and storing the rest of your data on the network so that you can really have super fast unlimited memory capacity.
Since the benefits to the broader software development community and the economy as a whole go well beyond the users of an individual software product, a policy that subsidizes open source development would increase economic efficiency.
Tax Credits essentially means that the goverment pays people to develop Open Source Software. Open source is currently being subsidised by corporations who pay people to continue to develop an open source product. Many major corporations employ people to continue OSS projects that they were already working on (Linus Torvalds is a prime example, he worked for Transmetta for a while and now Open Source Development Labs). The question here comes down to: who is better equiped to make funding decisions about which OSS projects to fund. The current model is a good one in my opinion and there's no need to have the government make these types of decisions. Corporations are better at deciding which projects to throw money at.
What you're gonna do with a laptop computer if you don't even know how to read and got better shit to do than that anyways?
Believe it or not the reaction of some of the parents of African school kids that got the $100 laptops for free was: This thing is great, it gives us light at night. Hey, that's a start. Because it is handcranked, at the minimum it's a night light. However, it's much better than that because the kids are learning in school how to use it, how to read, how to do all kinds of stuff and they WILL explore how it works. The kids will even have an advantage over me because when I grew up, computers were not around. Maybe they will go to slashdot, maybe they will join an opensource project. Maybe they will play Warcraft online and mine gold to make 10 times more money than they currently make. Who knows, the possibilities are endless. 5 years ago, there were about 5 million internet users in Africa, now there's 22 million and it's the fastest growing continent. This trend will continue and it's OBVIOUSLY a positive trend.
The 47-year-old Princeton University grad thinks the Net is largely a waste of time. Assistants print out e-mails for him and researchers give him paper copies of Wall Street analysts reports from the Web.
It's a waste of time for him, but not for his assistants? Ha! It would be much faster for everyone if this guy just spent the ten seconds it takes to learn how to read his email and not make it an affair that involves countless others. This reminds me of the exective that writes his blog on paper and has his assistants post it for him. What a waste of time. I mean, the whole point of the blog is to be able to type in fast right? If you have to hire a staff to do your blog for you, you're missing the point. This attitude actually creates more work for everyone involved.
but realistically, it's not gonna happen, at least not often.
I think a lot of this will happen actually. Just think about your laptop. The battery life is getting longer and longer. Why do you think that trend won't continue? Eventually, we will all be able to connect to centralized servers with low end laptops that use very little power. Maybe the battery will last for a month. The computing will primarily be done on the network. It already is in many cases (e.g. Slashdot). The reason these guys don't have computers is because it's just too expensive for them. If the price went down 100 fold, how many more people could afford it? A LOT MORE. Computer prices have dropped by about 30% per year for many years now, and there's no reason that this trend won't continue. The first computer I had an IBM 286 cost over $3000, my latest computer cost me about $300 to put together. In 10 years, computers will cost $30. Many of these villagers will be able to afford them by then. For those that can't afford a $30 computer, maybe a company like Google will give them away just so that they get clicks on their webpage? It's not out of the realm of possibility. Cell phones are now free. Now is not the time to be pesimistic. We're on the brink of something special.
Believe it or not these laptops have mesh networks, so they connect to one another, so you don't need an ISP or anything if enough people are using them. Basically, a town would just need one internet connection. I think they're working on some kind of satelite uplink that's solar powered for towns.
I think you're misenterpreting what he said. He's not saying don't do any business with anyone online, he's only saying that if you're not dealing with a company you trust, than you should proceed with caution. I definitly agree with you that sometimes you can get a bargain by dealing with some unknowns, but you have to be careful when doing so. You should be prepared to lose your money. Buying real estate site unseen is clearly a risk. I'm not saying to never do it, but only do it if you're prepared to lose your money.
Imagine when we have 6 billion people with electricity. Currently only about 4 billions.
Believe it or not you don't need electricity to connect to the net. See more info on the laptops created by MIT media lab. It has a hand crank. Also, CHEAP solar is coming using nanotech. So, soon everyone will have electricity to go with their internet.
Uhhh, did you mistake my post for another one. I didn't say anything about this being bad. You must of just got this out of thin air. On the contrary, having 6 billion internet users will be a great thing for the world.
Traditional elementry and high school education has suffered in recent years. You're right about this. But, college education has improved greatly. Also, professional certifications have improved. Think about all the people going to Junior colleges now to take classes. Like other areas, education is changing. Also, a lot of learning is done online. For instance, I learned css by searching on Google the other day. I've learned about many many topics by reading Wikipedia.org. Education is changing and traditional schools are not keeping up.
Yes, I believe we're at the early stages of adopting the internet. Kids already know how to use the internet better than their parents. As people grow up using the internet there will be extrodinary breakthroughs of capabilities. Currently, there are only 1 billion (of the total 6 billion people on the planet) that use the internet. Almost all these people have dial up connections and are still relativly inexperienced. The don't read Slashdot or digg.com or go to flickr.com or myspace. They don't have a blog at blogspot. Imagine when we have 6 billion people with high speed connections that do all these things and more. The impacts on society will be incredible and this WILL happen.
What you've described is not unique to Microsoft. This is pretty much how things work. But, if you had great bulleted lists with accomplishments and kept your manager/director informed of what you've accomplished that probably means you really did deserve the good review. I don't believe that someone that had poor performance would be able to do what you've done. If they spent a lot of time on their review, they would have to put meaningless things like, "filled out expense report last month" or something like that because they don't have good performance. I do however believe that people that don't spend sufficient time on their review (this includes keeping in contact with their manager about their accomplishments, etc) could very well get a lower review. Therefore, it's silly to not focus on putting together an excellent review of your accomplishments when asked to do so. I'd go as far as to say, it's worth working out of the office for a day to put it together. Keep in mind that commincating is an important skill in today's work environment, so it's not enough to do a lot, but in order to let the rest of the company use your innovations, you need to be effective at commincating as well. "Playing the review game" is part of commincating. If you created a new widget that will reduce costs for everyone, what good is it if you don't tell your manager about it?
Slashdot Mirror
I wonder who are the moderators that could mod you Insightful. I would have moderated you Troll. Do you really know what would happen if Microsoft would be stupid enough to sue Linux for patent infringement? IBM and these guys will immediatly sue them back for every patent they hold and Microsoft is using. How will this be a good thing for Microsoft's shareholders?
Sorry, nice try, but you're the troll. If you took my full quote, "If someone materially infriges on a corpoations patents and there are substantial damages to the corporations ability to make money, the corporation has a duty to it's shareholders to enforce the patents." I clearly state that if there are substantial damages to the ability to make money. So there are various scenarios where they would not sue, but Balmer is really just stating the obvious. If you have trouble because of the name Microsoft being in this, just imagine it's some other company. What if CEO of company A said, "Well, I think there are experts who claim company B violates our intellectual property. I'm not going to comment. But to the degree that that's the case, of course we owe it to our shareholders to have a strategy." Is this something that would be a shocker? No, it's stating the obvious.
Point taken, they are not forced. If they choose to obey the law they will protect the company's intellectual property rights. If the want to break the law, they can ignore their fiduciary duty to the shareholders.
Yeah, it's a pretty fuddy statement, but no big surprise there, that's what CEOs do. I think it's reasonable to say to the Linux community, hey if you infringe our patents, we'll sue you. Just because it's a FOSS community doesn't mean it's above the law.
Ok, maybe I'm a Unix guy, but was this really something that changed the network? I know a lot of people have it installed, and run webservers, etc on it (usually because they are forced to or don't know any better), but if you want to put this on there it just seems like there are others that should be there like Solaris, Red Hat, Suze, FreeBSD just to name a few.
That's what's realøy scary about corporations. They're only accoutable to the shareholders, ie the money.
Well, corporations have many obligations. They are also obligated to the government to follow all laws. They are there to make money. That's their purpose. It's the government's role to make sure that the ways in which they make money are fair. So, not sure why this is so scary to you, but relax it will all work it's way out. I don't think any of us know if Linux is infringing on Microsoft's patents until we hear both sides of the case.
RTFA, that's what Balmer said, not me.
He didn't state that he's sure that Linux has violated Patents, but he's saying that if they did (as some experts say), they would be forced by their shareholders to take action. This is entirely true and will always be true in every situation. If someone materially infriges on a corpoations patents and there are substantial damages to the corporations ability to make money, the corporation has a duty to it's shareholders to enforce the patents. Balmer really doesn't have a say in this matter he has to act.
The clock on your cpu.
One bug was an infinite loop that resulted in 100 CPUs spinning for a week before I noticed!
Your bill would have been $16,800 for that infinite loop.
The professor is a professional teacher paid to teach, and the student is the one receiving his services.
Actually, they are paid to teach, but they also are paid to do research that generates grants from corporations and government. In my experience, this is their focus which is why some of the most famous professors are terrible teachers and some of the best teachers are not famous professors.
If you could scan all these books and store them in a searchable database?
If you were using this with the GDrive (Google's online unlimited storage thingy), maybe reliability is not so important because you could have backups made in real time to the GDrive. Also, you could do some sort of caching as well. Imagine a 32 gB local cache and storing the rest of your data on the network so that you can really have super fast unlimited memory capacity.
You're right! You can absolutly deduct the value of the free software you've donated! ;)
Yup, it's already fixed: mod redundant.
Since the benefits to the broader software development community and the economy as a whole go well beyond the users of an individual software product, a policy that subsidizes open source development would increase economic efficiency.
Tax Credits essentially means that the goverment pays people to develop Open Source Software. Open source is currently being subsidised by corporations who pay people to continue to develop an open source product. Many major corporations employ people to continue OSS projects that they were already working on (Linus Torvalds is a prime example, he worked for Transmetta for a while and now Open Source Development Labs). The question here comes down to: who is better equiped to make funding decisions about which OSS projects to fund. The current model is a good one in my opinion and there's no need to have the government make these types of decisions. Corporations are better at deciding which projects to throw money at.
What you're gonna do with a laptop computer if you don't even know how to read and got better shit to do than that anyways?
Believe it or not the reaction of some of the parents of African school kids that got the $100 laptops for free was: This thing is great, it gives us light at night. Hey, that's a start. Because it is handcranked, at the minimum it's a night light. However, it's much better than that because the kids are learning in school how to use it, how to read, how to do all kinds of stuff and they WILL explore how it works. The kids will even have an advantage over me because when I grew up, computers were not around. Maybe they will go to slashdot, maybe they will join an opensource project. Maybe they will play Warcraft online and mine gold to make 10 times more money than they currently make. Who knows, the possibilities are endless. 5 years ago, there were about 5 million internet users in Africa, now there's 22 million and it's the fastest growing continent. This trend will continue and it's OBVIOUSLY a positive trend.
The 47-year-old Princeton University grad thinks the Net is largely a waste of time. Assistants print out e-mails for him and researchers give him paper copies of Wall Street analysts reports from the Web.
It's a waste of time for him, but not for his assistants? Ha! It would be much faster for everyone if this guy just spent the ten seconds it takes to learn how to read his email and not make it an affair that involves countless others. This reminds me of the exective that writes his blog on paper and has his assistants post it for him. What a waste of time. I mean, the whole point of the blog is to be able to type in fast right? If you have to hire a staff to do your blog for you, you're missing the point. This attitude actually creates more work for everyone involved.
but realistically, it's not gonna happen, at least not often.
I think a lot of this will happen actually. Just think about your laptop. The battery life is getting longer and longer. Why do you think that trend won't continue? Eventually, we will all be able to connect to centralized servers with low end laptops that use very little power. Maybe the battery will last for a month. The computing will primarily be done on the network. It already is in many cases (e.g. Slashdot). The reason these guys don't have computers is because it's just too expensive for them. If the price went down 100 fold, how many more people could afford it? A LOT MORE. Computer prices have dropped by about 30% per year for many years now, and there's no reason that this trend won't continue. The first computer I had an IBM 286 cost over $3000, my latest computer cost me about $300 to put together. In 10 years, computers will cost $30. Many of these villagers will be able to afford them by then. For those that can't afford a $30 computer, maybe a company like Google will give them away just so that they get clicks on their webpage? It's not out of the realm of possibility. Cell phones are now free. Now is not the time to be pesimistic. We're on the brink of something special.
Believe it or not these laptops have mesh networks, so they connect to one another, so you don't need an ISP or anything if enough people are using them. Basically, a town would just need one internet connection. I think they're working on some kind of satelite uplink that's solar powered for towns.
I think you're misenterpreting what he said. He's not saying don't do any business with anyone online, he's only saying that if you're not dealing with a company you trust, than you should proceed with caution. I definitly agree with you that sometimes you can get a bargain by dealing with some unknowns, but you have to be careful when doing so. You should be prepared to lose your money. Buying real estate site unseen is clearly a risk. I'm not saying to never do it, but only do it if you're prepared to lose your money.
Imagine when we have 6 billion people with electricity. Currently only about 4 billions.
Believe it or not you don't need electricity to connect to the net. See more info on the laptops created by MIT media lab. It has a hand crank. Also, CHEAP solar is coming using nanotech. So, soon everyone will have electricity to go with their internet.
Uhhh, did you mistake my post for another one. I didn't say anything about this being bad. You must of just got this out of thin air. On the contrary, having 6 billion internet users will be a great thing for the world.
Traditional elementry and high school education has suffered in recent years. You're right about this. But, college education has improved greatly. Also, professional certifications have improved. Think about all the people going to Junior colleges now to take classes. Like other areas, education is changing. Also, a lot of learning is done online. For instance, I learned css by searching on Google the other day. I've learned about many many topics by reading Wikipedia.org. Education is changing and traditional schools are not keeping up.
Yes, I believe we're at the early stages of adopting the internet. Kids already know how to use the internet better than their parents. As people grow up using the internet there will be extrodinary breakthroughs of capabilities. Currently, there are only 1 billion (of the total 6 billion people on the planet) that use the internet. Almost all these people have dial up connections and are still relativly inexperienced. The don't read Slashdot or digg.com or go to flickr.com or myspace. They don't have a blog at blogspot. Imagine when we have 6 billion people with high speed connections that do all these things and more. The impacts on society will be incredible and this WILL happen.
What you've described is not unique to Microsoft. This is pretty much how things work. But, if you had great bulleted lists with accomplishments and kept your manager/director informed of what you've accomplished that probably means you really did deserve the good review. I don't believe that someone that had poor performance would be able to do what you've done. If they spent a lot of time on their review, they would have to put meaningless things like, "filled out expense report last month" or something like that because they don't have good performance. I do however believe that people that don't spend sufficient time on their review (this includes keeping in contact with their manager about their accomplishments, etc) could very well get a lower review. Therefore, it's silly to not focus on putting together an excellent review of your accomplishments when asked to do so. I'd go as far as to say, it's worth working out of the office for a day to put it together. Keep in mind that commincating is an important skill in today's work environment, so it's not enough to do a lot, but in order to let the rest of the company use your innovations, you need to be effective at commincating as well. "Playing the review game" is part of commincating. If you created a new widget that will reduce costs for everyone, what good is it if you don't tell your manager about it?