If Microsoft was serious about it, they should give some compensation for the cost of the upgrade. Imagine large corporations, tens of thousands of desktops. Imagine how much does it cost to upgrade everyone because Microsoft messed up with some IP.
I sincerely don't believe in something like assuming half responsibilities. If you're responsible for something, you should be responsible for the whole. Microsoft is currently only "kind of" responsible for IP issues with the software, which may give some customers the (wrong) impression that they are protected, when they aren't *fully* protected.
The open source world is different for several reasons. Open code makes much easier to spot and correct IP violations earlier, which avoids a lot of issues. Being more modular and dinamic, open source applications tend to be much easier to automatically manage in the long run (apt-get comes to mind), which also makes the cost for such kind of migration, if ever needed, smaller than with comparable Microsoft products. As for the legal protection, there's nothing stopping open source vendors (such as RedHat) from providing equivalent legal umbrellas, for a price.
But the funniest thing about the whole argument is that the reverse of Microsoft argument is true: by being solely responsible for the IP protection, companies like Microsoft become an easy target. Starting a legal case is also very expensive, and IP hoarders need someone big, someone who they can point a finger at and have a reasonable expectation of making some money of it in the end. It does not make sense to go user after user, it does not scale well.
We already have an example with the Unisys GIF case. Unisys tried to actively enforce it, going user after user; they ended up scaling things up, and making more noise than damage. The process sparked the community to create PNG, which lessened the importance of Unisys patents. It's clear that the situation, and the risks involved, are not as clear cut as Microsoft would like us to believe.
You forgot relativity. The actual time depends of the reference point. I sincerely don't know how to make such calculation (I left my physics class about 20 years ago), but I'm sure that it would take a much longer time from Earth's perspective, making the mission not very practical. If you manage to accelerate faster (which is possible using a field), the actual difference, in absolute terms from each reference point, will not matter very much. For example, and by no means do not take these numbers as absolute, it's just an example -- it's like comparing 500 days to 500 years, versus 5 days to a 5 years in Earth time.
Actually, I'm much more concerned about our ability to find (or create?) a uniform field than anything else. At such huge scales, any tiny distortion would probably destroy the ship, tearing it apart. That's a really huge engineering challenge.
Very interesting. If I understand it right, one of the big differences between this and most other proposals I've ever heard is that it is based on a gravitational field, not on propulsion methods.
Why is it so important? Because our bodies are too soft to accelerate over a few G's using standard propulsion methods. Bear in mind that some people have survived enourmous acceleration before, but always for a short amount of time; our circulation system can't handle it for a long time. It would take a very large amount of time to accelerate (or brake) up something like 0.8c -- not to mention that it could be very, very painful.
So that's my understanding: if the entire ship is accelerated by a field, and if the acceleration is relatively uniform over the distances involved inside the ship, then I assume that it's not going to be painful or life threatening. That's a really big development.
I don't know in the US, or in other countries, but here in Brazil Borland is still relatively popular. For a long time, Borland had the lead on development tools. But since it started to fall apart, it never recovered, and it's just a shadow of what it once was. Many people blame Philippe Khan, others blame the subsequent CEOs and the whole Inprise imbroglio. But I prefer to look at it from a programmers perspective.
I started Turbo Pascal 2.0, on floppies. I remember seeing the ads on Byte Magazine. For anyone who tried Pascal on CP/M, or in USCD's implementation, it was a dream come true. And it was really fast! Later, I worked with all versions - from 3.0 to 5.5, and then Borland Pascal 6.0, with object orientation and Turbo Vision, a character based event-driven framework. I have the impression that Borland at that time tried too much, too hard; they tried to change paradigms, to change the way we programmed, but it was too big a change at once. But history does not stop here.
Borland managed to get a lot of things wrong in a couple of years. Quattro was ok, but lacked the 'extra something' that made Borland special. Paradox was innovative for its time, but its stability was never something to write home about (IMHO, it managed to be worse in this respect than Access, and I'm giving my personal testimony on this). Borland even tried to run the clock backwards and sell a text processor named Sprint that I'm sure only the true dinossaurs around here will remember hearing about.
However, Borland still had some gas, and a new chance to get things right. A few years later, I got my hands on the Delphi 1 beta - it was a eighteen 1.44 floppy install, in a time when CDs were still far from popular. The quality of Delphi was amazing - they just got it right. But by then, VB had a small edge. For some reason, and for lots of small misteps, Borland gradually started to lose the lead.
I still can't get what happened around the whole Inprise situation. That they opensourced Interbase, just to close the source later, is something that I don't understand. They also got the pricing wrong. Borland always had the lead on low cost tools, but it started to charge one arm and one leg for a usable toolkit. The 'personal' editions were crippled, and missed some features that almost everyone needed (such as compiling ActiveX controls, or using the database controls in the library). It started to lose touch with the developers. The community (a vibrant one) started to look for other tools, just at the time when open source was starting to become mainstream.
By the way, even in the pre-Internet days, the community was amazing. One of the first popular software repositories in the Internet was Professor Timo Salmi's ftp.uwasa.fi. There were huge repositories of Pascal componentes, many of them in eastern Europe - Poland and Russia, for example. Borland could have amassed the power of the community, but for some reason, it largely ignored them. Students, once one of the strongholds of Borland penetration, were also ignored.
It's a shame that a company like Borland had to go this way. I personally would prefer that the ALM division was divested with a new name, so that Borland, the company, could be allowed to die with dignity. Perhaps a new structure - a Borland Foundation perhaps (borland.org anyone) - could pick the bones to start again. But I fear that's too late, even for that.
Disclaimer: I used to work for a telco. A small one but a telco nevertheless.
Working for a telco is a unique experience. I learned a lot, and believe me, most of it was good. I've learned a lot, both technically and from a management POV. I had some opportunities that a small company could not afford. Even with all problems, it was a good time.
The basic problem with telcos is that they still think in terms of their cash cow service, that is voice. They still think in terms of how much the user will pay per transaction, or minute. They have a huge structure, a huge legacy that can't simply be buried or thrown out the window. They have fear of cannibalizing their own products. But worse, they don't get it, and that's not because they're not intelligent, or bad at what they do. They don't get it because most of the time, people are busy running what pays their wages, and that's the legacy services. There's little incentive inside the company to do something else, specially when it means that it could make a lot of people lose their jobs. There's little incentive for people that talks about cannibalizing revenue.
In the end, telcos are like big animals who are threatened by the changing environment. They may have a lot of power, but in the end, guess what? Evolution is inescapable. Verizon (and other big telcos) may even win this battle, and a few other ones. But in the long term, they can't win the war. Bandwidth is doomed to become cheaper and cheaper. People just want to communicate with each other, and Verizon can't control what people do. It's market at work.
I've read other comments, and I still can't figure out what they are thinking.
What they are doing, in fact, is to create a new class of messages. Paid spam. Companies may figure out that it's better for them to pay a handful thousand bucks for the assurance that they message will be delivered. But there are a number of problems with the entire idea, and I don't even know where to start.
Just to start, one problem. Anti spam filtering is not perfect, and false positives are a fact of life, that we accept because we know that filtering spam is hard. But, the very moment I start receiving "authorized" spam -- spam that I myself did not authorize, but that my ISP decided to forward to me because HE was being paid for it -- I'm probably going to ask, do I deserve indemnification for false positives?
But there's worse. Unsolicited messages are unsolicited messages, period. Paying the ISP to deliver such messages does not make them solicited or legitimate. There's also the risk that, by accepting to forward unsolicited messages in exchange for money, the ISPs may become liable under anti-spam laws. They may claim that they are only carriers, but I fear that the borders start to become fuzzy. In general, most people don't mind spam filtering and anti-virus scanning, because that's something done to OUR benefit, as customers. This is not the case with the "paid spam". I sincerely don't know if such ISPs would still be regarded as common carriers if they decide to discriminate messages this way. I may turn out to be a bad idea in the end.
It can be new genre - culture-based MMOG
on
Africa, The MMOG
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· Score: 0
Hey, I don't know if the implementation is feasible or not (90% improvements on development?), but the idea is excellent. It can spawn a entirely new genre - culture based MMOGs. For example:
A Roman Empire game, with barbarians, roman gods, and intricate politics;
Latin America - Aztecs, Mayans, Amazon tribes (they have a rich folklore);
A Mongolian horde game, with tribes roaming central Asia and fighting against each other.
If well done, this kind of game could be a invaluable tool to teach and explore other cultures, their histories and environment. It's a great idea.
Linux (and to be fair, Unix-like systems in general) shine at file & memory management. Many people don't know, but executable files are not 'loaded' in the Windows sense - they're just mapped into memory. This design improves performance and gives the system better performance under swapping (not thrashing, mind you). Things like mem mapped files are integral in the way the system is designed and implemented. That's one of the very reasons why a Linux machine usually runs faster and more reliable than a equivalent Windows machine... even if has less memory. The Apache tuning example is great, and it shows how much performance you can squeeze out of a good design.
There's a huge difference here. What BMW did was to cheat; they served a special purpose page for the Google bot to index, one that was totally different than the one served to the user. So the page was indexed using information that was not the same that a normal user would find. That's totally unacceptable. And that's Google's business, so they had to take action - they were the ones being cheated (and in turn, cheating their end users).
As for the Wikipedia ripoffs, the situation is different. First, because the Wikipedia license explicitly allows for that. Second, because the ripoffs are just serving content that they rightly can serve, Google has no option but to index them. Now, perhaps some of the Wikipedia ripoffs are using questionable SEO techniques to get there in front of the original Wikipedia site. I don't know. If they are, they need to be purged out of Google listings too. But bear in mind that the Internet is an awfully big place to be, and not even some company as big and powerful as Google stands a chance at checking every page that comes to the index for cheating. Even when their systems catch something suspect, they still have to check it manually, and that takes time, and expensive expert human work hours to do.
They may be able to misuse their power, that's for sure. But in this case they were totally on the spot. BWM was cheating. They were serving a different page for the spider to index than they were serving for the regular users.
Google just had to do it. Think about it. Think if you have one version of the Web for Google to index, and other one for people to read. That's cheating and can't be tolerated.
Slashdot Mirror
If Microsoft was serious about it, they should give some compensation for the cost of the upgrade. Imagine large corporations, tens of thousands of desktops. Imagine how much does it cost to upgrade everyone because Microsoft messed up with some IP. I sincerely don't believe in something like assuming half responsibilities. If you're responsible for something, you should be responsible for the whole. Microsoft is currently only "kind of" responsible for IP issues with the software, which may give some customers the (wrong) impression that they are protected, when they aren't *fully* protected. The open source world is different for several reasons. Open code makes much easier to spot and correct IP violations earlier, which avoids a lot of issues. Being more modular and dinamic, open source applications tend to be much easier to automatically manage in the long run (apt-get comes to mind), which also makes the cost for such kind of migration, if ever needed, smaller than with comparable Microsoft products. As for the legal protection, there's nothing stopping open source vendors (such as RedHat) from providing equivalent legal umbrellas, for a price. But the funniest thing about the whole argument is that the reverse of Microsoft argument is true: by being solely responsible for the IP protection, companies like Microsoft become an easy target. Starting a legal case is also very expensive, and IP hoarders need someone big, someone who they can point a finger at and have a reasonable expectation of making some money of it in the end. It does not make sense to go user after user, it does not scale well. We already have an example with the Unisys GIF case. Unisys tried to actively enforce it, going user after user; they ended up scaling things up, and making more noise than damage. The process sparked the community to create PNG, which lessened the importance of Unisys patents. It's clear that the situation, and the risks involved, are not as clear cut as Microsoft would like us to believe.
You forgot relativity. The actual time depends of the reference point. I sincerely don't know how to make such calculation (I left my physics class about 20 years ago), but I'm sure that it would take a much longer time from Earth's perspective, making the mission not very practical. If you manage to accelerate faster (which is possible using a field), the actual difference, in absolute terms from each reference point, will not matter very much. For example, and by no means do not take these numbers as absolute, it's just an example -- it's like comparing 500 days to 500 years, versus 5 days to a 5 years in Earth time.
Actually, I'm much more concerned about our ability to find (or create?) a uniform field than anything else. At such huge scales, any tiny distortion would probably destroy the ship, tearing it apart. That's a really huge engineering challenge.
Very interesting. If I understand it right, one of the big differences between this and most other proposals I've ever heard is that it is based on a gravitational field, not on propulsion methods.
Why is it so important? Because our bodies are too soft to accelerate over a few G's using standard propulsion methods. Bear in mind that some people have survived enourmous acceleration before, but always for a short amount of time; our circulation system can't handle it for a long time. It would take a very large amount of time to accelerate (or brake) up something like 0.8c -- not to mention that it could be very, very painful.
So that's my understanding: if the entire ship is accelerated by a field, and if the acceleration is relatively uniform over the distances involved inside the ship, then I assume that it's not going to be painful or life threatening. That's a really big development.
I don't know in the US, or in other countries, but here in Brazil Borland is still relatively popular. For a long time, Borland had the lead on development tools. But since it started to fall apart, it never recovered, and it's just a shadow of what it once was. Many people blame Philippe Khan, others blame the subsequent CEOs and the whole Inprise imbroglio. But I prefer to look at it from a programmers perspective.
I started Turbo Pascal 2.0, on floppies. I remember seeing the ads on Byte Magazine. For anyone who tried Pascal on CP/M, or in USCD's implementation, it was a dream come true. And it was really fast! Later, I worked with all versions - from 3.0 to 5.5, and then Borland Pascal 6.0, with object orientation and Turbo Vision, a character based event-driven framework. I have the impression that Borland at that time tried too much, too hard; they tried to change paradigms, to change the way we programmed, but it was too big a change at once. But history does not stop here. Borland managed to get a lot of things wrong in a couple of years. Quattro was ok, but lacked the 'extra something' that made Borland special. Paradox was innovative for its time, but its stability was never something to write home about (IMHO, it managed to be worse in this respect than Access, and I'm giving my personal testimony on this). Borland even tried to run the clock backwards and sell a text processor named Sprint that I'm sure only the true dinossaurs around here will remember hearing about.
However, Borland still had some gas, and a new chance to get things right. A few years later, I got my hands on the Delphi 1 beta - it was a eighteen 1.44 floppy install, in a time when CDs were still far from popular. The quality of Delphi was amazing - they just got it right. But by then, VB had a small edge. For some reason, and for lots of small misteps, Borland gradually started to lose the lead.
I still can't get what happened around the whole Inprise situation. That they opensourced Interbase, just to close the source later, is something that I don't understand. They also got the pricing wrong. Borland always had the lead on low cost tools, but it started to charge one arm and one leg for a usable toolkit. The 'personal' editions were crippled, and missed some features that almost everyone needed (such as compiling ActiveX controls, or using the database controls in the library). It started to lose touch with the developers. The community (a vibrant one) started to look for other tools, just at the time when open source was starting to become mainstream.
By the way, even in the pre-Internet days, the community was amazing. One of the first popular software repositories in the Internet was Professor Timo Salmi's ftp.uwasa.fi. There were huge repositories of Pascal componentes, many of them in eastern Europe - Poland and Russia, for example. Borland could have amassed the power of the community, but for some reason, it largely ignored them. Students, once one of the strongholds of Borland penetration, were also ignored.
It's a shame that a company like Borland had to go this way. I personally would prefer that the ALM division was divested with a new name, so that Borland, the company, could be allowed to die with dignity. Perhaps a new structure - a Borland Foundation perhaps (borland.org anyone) - could pick the bones to start again. But I fear that's too late, even for that.
Disclaimer: I used to work for a telco. A small one but a telco nevertheless.
Working for a telco is a unique experience. I learned a lot, and believe me, most of it was good. I've learned a lot, both technically and from a management POV. I had some opportunities that a small company could not afford. Even with all problems, it was a good time.
The basic problem with telcos is that they still think in terms of their cash cow service, that is voice. They still think in terms of how much the user will pay per transaction, or minute. They have a huge structure, a huge legacy that can't simply be buried or thrown out the window. They have fear of cannibalizing their own products. But worse, they don't get it, and that's not because they're not intelligent, or bad at what they do. They don't get it because most of the time, people are busy running what pays their wages, and that's the legacy services. There's little incentive inside the company to do something else, specially when it means that it could make a lot of people lose their jobs. There's little incentive for people that talks about cannibalizing revenue.
In the end, telcos are like big animals who are threatened by the changing environment. They may have a lot of power, but in the end, guess what? Evolution is inescapable. Verizon (and other big telcos) may even win this battle, and a few other ones. But in the long term, they can't win the war. Bandwidth is doomed to become cheaper and cheaper. People just want to communicate with each other, and Verizon can't control what people do. It's market at work.
I've read other comments, and I still can't figure out what they are thinking.
What they are doing, in fact, is to create a new class of messages. Paid spam. Companies may figure out that it's better for them to pay a handful thousand bucks for the assurance that they message will be delivered. But there are a number of problems with the entire idea, and I don't even know where to start.
Just to start, one problem. Anti spam filtering is not perfect, and false positives are a fact of life, that we accept because we know that filtering spam is hard. But, the very moment I start receiving "authorized" spam -- spam that I myself did not authorize, but that my ISP decided to forward to me because HE was being paid for it -- I'm probably going to ask, do I deserve indemnification for false positives?
But there's worse. Unsolicited messages are unsolicited messages, period. Paying the ISP to deliver such messages does not make them solicited or legitimate. There's also the risk that, by accepting to forward unsolicited messages in exchange for money, the ISPs may become liable under anti-spam laws. They may claim that they are only carriers, but I fear that the borders start to become fuzzy. In general, most people don't mind spam filtering and anti-virus scanning, because that's something done to OUR benefit, as customers. This is not the case with the "paid spam". I sincerely don't know if such ISPs would still be regarded as common carriers if they decide to discriminate messages this way. I may turn out to be a bad idea in the end.
- A Roman Empire game, with barbarians, roman gods, and intricate politics;
- Latin America - Aztecs, Mayans, Amazon tribes (they have a rich folklore);
- A Mongolian horde game, with tribes roaming central Asia and fighting against each other.
If well done, this kind of game could be a invaluable tool to teach and explore other cultures, their histories and environment. It's a great idea.Linux (and to be fair, Unix-like systems in general) shine at file & memory management. Many people don't know, but executable files are not 'loaded' in the Windows sense - they're just mapped into memory. This design improves performance and gives the system better performance under swapping (not thrashing, mind you). Things like mem mapped files are integral in the way the system is designed and implemented. That's one of the very reasons why a Linux machine usually runs faster and more reliable than a equivalent Windows machine... even if has less memory. The Apache tuning example is great, and it shows how much performance you can squeeze out of a good design.
There's a huge difference here. What BMW did was to cheat; they served a special purpose page for the Google bot to index, one that was totally different than the one served to the user. So the page was indexed using information that was not the same that a normal user would find. That's totally unacceptable. And that's Google's business, so they had to take action - they were the ones being cheated (and in turn, cheating their end users). As for the Wikipedia ripoffs, the situation is different. First, because the Wikipedia license explicitly allows for that. Second, because the ripoffs are just serving content that they rightly can serve, Google has no option but to index them. Now, perhaps some of the Wikipedia ripoffs are using questionable SEO techniques to get there in front of the original Wikipedia site. I don't know. If they are, they need to be purged out of Google listings too. But bear in mind that the Internet is an awfully big place to be, and not even some company as big and powerful as Google stands a chance at checking every page that comes to the index for cheating. Even when their systems catch something suspect, they still have to check it manually, and that takes time, and expensive expert human work hours to do.
They may be able to misuse their power, that's for sure. But in this case they were totally on the spot. BWM was cheating. They were serving a different page for the spider to index than they were serving for the regular users.
Google just had to do it. Think about it. Think if you have one version of the Web for Google to index, and other one for people to read. That's cheating and can't be tolerated.