For all of its recent political evils, the US has done surprisingly little meddling with the internet. The standards are still based on non-governmental organizations, there is no effective taxation, anonymity is still possible, etc etc. The internet of today doesn't appear to be run significantly differently than the internet of 10 years ago.
What possible motivation could there be for other governments to want to seize "control" away from the current scheme?
Because they're not happy with the above.
So one should surmise that an internet under new management would feature - easier support for taxation - technology "standards" created by government bodies - less baked-in anonymity
As pissed off as I am with the current US political climate, do you know what government I trust even less than my own?
Additionally, men with normally ineligible genetic material can still procreate via IVF and other assisted conception procedures. In unaltered evolution, aggressive potent men would continue to dominate the genepool, but that's not what is happening, and so it is unsurprising that these traits are becoming irrelevant.
Why would anyone willingly pass defective genes to their children? There is always an option of using donor egg or sperm, genetic therapy and of course adoption.
Because while it is not clear that some, all, or any male-factor infertility problems are genetic in nature (apart from Y-chromosome deletion, which represents an edge case in the male factor infertility problem), it is likely that some are. But, even if you knew for _sure_ that any male offspring you had would also have fertility problems, if modern medicine can work around it for you, it can work around it for your offspring, right?
The goal of procreation isn't to create a perfect genetic society, is it? And even if you beleive that there is a moral directive or impetus to not conceive children that are at risk for "birth defects", its a different ball of wax when an individual has to decide - "will i attempt to have offspring or not?", isn't it? Who has the sense of social justice to "bow out" of the procreation game? And on what criteria should they do so?
Regarding adoption and egg/sperm replacement programs, the desire for a biologically related offspring is understandable, if not instinctual. And the donor concept is unsettling to me, even if there is no rational basis for it, the notion of having some other persons sperm in your wife "Feels" somewhere between 50-99% like some other man fornicating with her.
In 200 years unassisted procreation will be rare, which will help people build the kind of society that Aldous Huxley and others wrote about.
Yeah, and we can also start a nuclear war and make living outside a fallout shelter rare. Should we strive towards either outcome?
I wasn't making a pro-position statement, just stating what I suspect the outcome will be. You can safely assume that I beleive a future where the government breeds conditioned babies is undesirable.
Since writing this post originally, i've thought a bit more and i beleive there is a counter-effect in play. Affluent westerners tend to not have children anywhere near as often as they have sex, so the overall impact on the genetic makeup of homo sapiens may not be severe as much as originally thought. (see the earlier article about the homo sapiens species split paper).
Maybe it's time for the society to wake up and move away from extremes.
I think that's exactly what's happening. I think that over the last 1000 years Western Society has moved away from the model of "women as property of the most violent male" and "rape to procreate", and that these extremes are best left behind.
I don't think that's what you meant.
The selection criteria of today are clearly different than they were in the recent past. Women have some basic right-of-refusal and thus the selectivity criteria is no longer "he killed the most bears" or "he fought off the most other cavemen before raping me". It's a bit more like "he has the most money", "he went to the best school", "he got me the most drunk" -- whatever.
Additionally, men with normally ineligible genetic material can still procreate via IVF and other assisted conception procedures. In unaltered evolution, aggressive potent men would continue to dominate the genepool, but that's not what is happening, and so it is unsurprising that these traits are becoming irrelevant.
In 200 years unassisted procreation will be rare, which will help people build the kind of society that Aldous Huxley and others wrote about.
I am a pretty hardcore libertarian, and i am furious with the practical outcome of Kelo, but i actually think that the SCOTUS did the legally correct thing here, even if it meant the wrong outcome for the victim of the case.
IIRC, the law on the books that SCOTUS was looking at was the nature/extent of what types of laws about eminant domain are valid, that, barring a sufficient body of law regarding the "just compensation" clause of the 5th amendment, so long as the presiding court acted legally in this determination, they couldn't rule against New London.
IOW, SCOTUS "said" that the procedure by which New London determined just compensation didn't violate any law on the books, because there was insufficient law.
To circumvent, change, or re-define the letter of law to acheive a particular outcome, even if that outcome is "good" (i.e. correcting the gross injustice of the city/township of New London) is the very definition of Judicial Activisim, isn't it?
The take away from Kelo vs. New London was that municipalities/states/whomever needed more definition around just compensation and other aspects of when eminent domain is acceptalbe. The immediate response to the outcome of Kelo vs New London in my home state (north dakota) was that a new law clarifying various aspects of eminant domain - including a controversial clause that property seized via ED can never be released to private ownership - is up for vote now in the state legistlature.
Your "analysis" is neither enlightening nor correct. More accurate info on the matters you speak of can be gleaned from the SEC documents filed 4 times a year. There has been some restructuring that makes year-over-year by-product comparisons difficult (and some of this is probably on purpose), but it is easy to discredit the claims you are making with a cursory examination of the SEC filings.
Doesn't wine attempt to run arbitrary windows apps without a windows license?
IE is a windows component. I beleive that running the windows version of IE without a valid license for windows is a violation of the IE license.
Besides, running IE7 under wine is not a valid test environment anyway. Suppose that something doesn't render right in IE7 on Wine? Is it a site problem, a Wine problem, an IE7 on wine problem, or what? You're testing that your site looks great to the 5 people out there that run IE7 on Wine.
If you were serious about testing IE7 against your site, and didn't want a bunch of windows machine sitting around just for testing (and didn't want to buy all those licenses), you'd do your testing from a virtual machine running windows + IE7 inside of it, using the MSDN subscription you have that lets you run any MS product for any non-production or testing purpose.
I think it's important to remember who is behind the Zune. Yes, Microsoft. But more specifically, the Home & Entertainment Division (the Xbox people). Who, by the way, posted a 70% revenue increase last quarter.
Keeping this in mind (that this is an MS product, and that it's the H&E people behind it), just because the Zune _software_ doesn't do something today (or at launch) doesn't mean it won't do it for ZuneOS "SP1"
After all, Xbox Live didn't come out for 1 year after Xbox was shipped, and X360 1080P support was issued as a software _patch_ on the 360 after Sony thought they could use it to make noise in the competitive space. Progessive Scan dashboard support was another software patch on the original Xbox. Those products _had_ to get out in the market place at the right time to be viable, the cut list must have been severe. Everyone knew the hardware was capable of more than what it launched with, and as the Xbox team got their feet under them, and heard the real-world feedback, and had a chance to breathe a bit, some of the more interesting features that didn't make the original bar started to show up.
I'm telling myself that the current idiotic 3/3 DRM model and the lack of wifi sync on the Zune are temporary things. They'll be corrected via a software update after the Zune launches (even if it means a Linux-based "software update";) )
This is what I am _telling_ myself (and as an MS employee, I hope it turns out to be accurate) but I don't think i'll actually put my money down until I see it happen.
What line of work are you in, and what was the process for getting employed in japan? Did you go there first and then find a great job, or did you find a great job and then go there? Did you apply for a new position at a new (to you) company in japan, or did you have a pre-existing arrangement with an opportunity to move to the japanese branch/office of your pre-existing employer?
What things do you especially like about living/working in Tokyo? What do you dislike?
The Lambda Driver requires massive electrical power, as well as a human operator . The human operator must be emitting brain waves in the 30 - 40 Hz range, known as Gamma Waves. These waves are emitted under intense concentration, or by the use of certain psychoactive drugs of extremely specialised manufacture. The system also produces a tremendous amount of waste heat as it experiences load. Observed failures of the lambda driver have been heat overloads caused by damage to the cooling system, or overloading the output of the system. Both the massive electrical load and heat output preclude the Lambda Driver's use in conjunction with the ECS.
For reasons unknown, the operator's mental conditions act as a key to initializing the lambda driver. The system is then operated directly by the operator's mental imaging, its powers manifesting directly in accordance with what is envisioned. A very strong mental image is required, and as a result the most commonly observed and basic manifestation of the field is an instinctive defense field. The magnitude of manifestation seems to be directly related to the willpower behind the lambda driver. This has created the illusion of the lambda driver 'converting' the willpower of the operator into a directed force field.
Avenged Sevenfold is pretty good.. at least their City of Evil album. I'm not much of a fan of "NuMetal" or "Emo-teen" music, as compared to older stuff like pre-Black album Metallica or pre-Youthanasia Megadeth. I had been disappointed in the "progress" of the metal scene since that time (i.e. 15+ years) but I heard the City of Evil record playing at a video store (of all places) and asked the kid working there who we were listening to. I went and got the disc the next day and really like it quite a bit. A7S and Killswitch Engage have largely contributed to me listening to music made in this century instead of clutching onto the old stuff from the old standby bands.
Well, them and all the J-pop/j-rock bands that do intro music for Anime:)
Disclosure: I am an SQA employee at Microsoft, albeit not in the Windows org.
One thing that F/OSS advocates (rightly) point out (everytime there is a windows vs linux security bug count study) is that not all bugs are equal. While defects/KLOC is interesting in a variety of ways, it is not nececssarily a good indicator of how well the software meets the needs of the user(s), and ultimately, how well the software meets the needs of the user(s) is what matters (its what matters to users, and its what matters to developers/vendors)
So to be fair, some of the conceptual test problems you mention (like complete-path coverage, or all edge-case coverage, etc) are not necessarily important test scenarios, especially if those values fall outside of the expected use of the product.
For instance, it may very well be that Vista's IP stack will not allow 2^31 in-flight TCP connections simultaneously. A clever tester might write a test that tries to set this up, only to see it fail.
But a more clever tester wouldn't have bothered, mostly because they know that other issues would prevent 2^31 connections from working long before you got there, and that 2^31 connectinos isn't any kind of customer scenario in the lifecycle of Vista.
This kind of sucks at some level - you want the product to be "intellectually" bug free, i.e. if you konw of a defect, it is satisfying to know that it is going to be fixed. But not all bugs are created equal, and some just don't warrant the effort required to fix them.
In some teams at Microsoft, I'd argue that test tools and test automation are used too heavily, to the detriment of the product's quality. I'm a huge fan of test tools and test automation, but it has to free up tester time so they can actually use the product and find the things that computers can't (yet) find. Exploratory or ad-hoc testing still finds a ton of bugs, and if you're familiar with the art, you know that the "goal" of SQA is not to provide a body of tests for posterity, but to act as a feedback mechanism for developers to stop writing the same kinds of defects they did 12 months ago. Thus, many functional tests have a built-in expiration date, and ultimately, a test most effective if it simulates how the customer is expected to use the product.
Naturally, the rules change depending on the nature of the product - the majority of testing going on for security-sensitive applications is much different than the majority of testing for Office UI localization. In many security-sensitive areas, it is often more important that the product doesn't do what it shouldn't than verifying that it does do what it should, and what constitutes "security sensitive" is changing (mostly expanding) on a daily basis.
So back on topic - one thing we do to try and help with the quality of Vista, inspite of not being able to do theoretically complete test coverage, is extensive customer use. I've been running Vista on my main work machine for months. I'm running it at home on my media center machine. Tens of thousands of MS employees are running Vista (and Office 12). The claim goes - if a cross-section of Microsoft employees can survive their work and home computer usage scenarios, on pre-release builds of Vista, then Vista is generally "ok". We'll find a lot of the issues that customers are likely to run into via extensive real-world usage of the product.
Additionally, Vista has been deployed by real customers doing real work at multiple customer sites. And this is how it is with most MS products now. Any version of SQL server, Visual Studio, the.NET Framework - all had real companies "go live" on pre-release versions of those products, with the developers and testers from MS working directly with those companies on issues as they arose. The companies get a head start on using newer stuff (to solve real problems they're having) and we get incredible real-world feedback on the product.
I don't want to shrink the amount of effort we put into forma
Hundreds of pink, purple, green, and blue haired middle school girls have reported to the secret under-mountain bases where their enormous transformable robots (using alien technology, no less) have been meticulously maintained by bespectacled scientists in labcoats.
North Korea doesn't stand a chance.
(As long as the pilots don't get too involved with text-messaging their awkward love interests during battle)
While i have no experience with coverity's tools in general, you seem to hold a very dim view of static analysis tools, which is unfortuneate, since they can and do find real bugs.
When there are no more peices of software that ship with stack overruns, static analysis tools _might_ not be worth using. But we're not there yet.
Static analysis is just one of many tools that can help refine the quality of software. As we learn not to make the mistakes static analyzers can detect, their necessity and usefulness will also change, just like the types of bugs we are writing will also change.
As someone that is in the software QA business, I happen to love that some developers are using static analysis tools. I want my job to be automated just like (most) everyone else does, and every arcane buffer size defect or missing return value check that is detected by automated tools is one I never see when I do a code review. This leaves me free to focus on looking for things I know aren't well detected - like logic errors, infinite loops, etc.
I've been thinking for a while that there is a lot of software engineering methodology that could be applied to great effect in the F/OSS world. The linux kernel code coverage project for instance is somewhat primitive compared to tools we're using internally at my company, but it's "close enough" that it could present tremendous value if some structure/practices were put around it. Combine it with the linux test project (and based on reading about the linux test project, that one has a lot of good content but doesn't seem to have the right focus and presence) and now you've got the beginnings of some real software testing with feedback loops going towards the developers. Throw in some static analysis here and there and it's almost going to feel like software engineering instead of "hacking".
Yeah - hacking got us (part way) here. How far will it take us? How much of what I envision is already being done behind closed doors at IBM, Redhat, or whereever ? I just read a paper abstract today on using an instrumented version of Bochs to test the linux kernel for various run time faults. Fantastic idea. Now, put it into production.. hook that thing up to a profiler.. or lcov.. run the LTP inside of it.. run crashme or whatever todays syscall-fuzzer is..even if you find only one "wow.. thats weird" result, the computer was doing all the work for you, so why not take advantage of it?
the Iraqi surrender story was to point out that not only are some of the current drones visible, but they are visible enough and fly missions low enough that an Iraq tried to surrender to one.. he either thought it was a munitious capable aircraft or knew that somebody was watching video of what it was recorded.. either way he didn't want to get bombed.
Do your kids have admin rights on the computer(s) they use? They may be able to check whats going on, but may be unable to do anything about it.
Ultimately you can install a key logger, even if they get encrypted connections going or install software that makes it harder for you to snoop. I wouldn't be surprised if there was some kind of key logger that logged what keys were sent to which app at what time.. that could give you a 1-sided "replay" of activity even in the face of them putting stealthier software on the machine(or using web based chats via https anonymizers or something)
As someone else pointed out though - i'm not sure you want to be in a technology cold war with your kids. You need to come to an understanding about why they want to disobey you. There is probably a lot of ignorance and arrogance on both sides of the parent/child relationship, and the right meeting is somewhere in the middle.
The internet is a hostile place for adults also. The struggle of parenting would seem to be hw to let your child grow into an adult that makes responsible decisions about their privacy, personal safety, etc, while still giving them boundaries that let you sleep relatively comfortably at nite as they learn how to do this.
I'm not a parent, but it seems to me that the "threats" are the same as they've always been, but the vectors are different this time around (and they'll be different again in 10 years)
Your response is both factually incorrect and unimaginative.
There are a variety of unmanned aerial vehicles in the US armed forces that serve a variety of missions. Surely you've heard of the UAV launched from Iowa class battleships as a targeting / BDA unit, that an Iraqi tried to surrender to ? (IIRC, this one was a "Predator").
In any case, there is probably a role for a unit-deployable, short range, low altatitude, small form factor, long "hang time" (ability to stay airborne in a localized area for extended time) UAV. The scenrio here is that a small company of men and one or two armored vehicles needs to enter a town with an unknown enemy force deployment. On the outskirts of town, they unpack their suit-case sized UAV, start its engines, and hand-launch it into the sky. The trained operator (for now) watches the real time video feed on their laptop. The UAV gives the troops an aerial view of the town - they can map out block or unblocked streets/alleys.. they can spot rooftop snipers.. they can get early warnings of people spilling out of buildings in other parts of the town.
The key here is distributed, localized intelligence gathering that is deployed and consumed by field units.. it is more pertinent and easier (and faster!) to act on then something more full size where intel goes back to an Air conditioned trailer hundreds of miles away from the theater of operation, and intel goes up and down the chain of command.
small-unit sized deployable semi-autonomous robots are a cutting edge application of commodity hardware and software. You need something cheap, field proof, and easy for lower level enlisted men to launch, operate, and recover. The smarter the software, the less of a burden it is on the operator(s), and the more value it provides. Given the changing nature of combat (trained army goes through town hoping to not get ambushed), small-scale UAVs are absolutely worth persuing.
Never mind that they're dirt cheap (as military hardware goes) - some prototypes are little more than the RC model aircraft you see at hobbyist stores with some cameras, radio control equipment, and a small embedded device.
I run Vista on my Dell Latitude D600 w/ 1GB ram and a centrino 1.7M.
Having adequate ram will be a key point - thankfully, that's the easiest part of most laptops to upgrade. I wouldn't try it on less than 1GB. On laptops this is especially important because the disks are slower and Vista's background search indexer wants to use your disk as often as it thinks you aren't using it (although this has been pretty unobtrusive in the latest builds)
My hardware is not Aero capable and i get a solid 1.0 on the performance score index. Even so, this is my main work machine for browsing, email, and office apps.
I built an HTPC at home for about $600 of newegg parts (including a $100 case).. an am2 athlon 3800, the MSI-K9G, 2GB of ram, and an SATA disk. That machine gets a 3.8 i think and the video is the only individual component below 5. I'm using the onboard GF6150 video. This machine also runs Media Center on Vista and that seems to work fine.
Vista runs acceptably on any machine with 1GB of ram, but without a beefy enough system you'll miss features like Aero (vista measures your system performance during the OOBE and turns features on/off as appropriate)
I hope you pasted the wrong link, or that this is a bad account of the event you meant to talk about.
I've read it a few times now, and maybe I'm just a dummy, but nothing in there ever shows Gates being caught in a lie or commiting perjury.
Based on how i read that memo, apparently he was asked "did you ever have a conversation about undermining Sun". No answer is specified, although "No" is implied. If his answer had been anything beside "No", it's hard to suggest he's guilty of anything. The beginning of the article says a lot of "I don't remember" answers were given, which may or may not be truthful.
Then the ask him if he remembers sending an email about undermining Sun. He says no, he doesn't remember. Then they show him one and ask if there is any doubt that it was one he sent. He says "yeah, that looks like mine".
So what's the problem? That he forgot about an email he wrote a year ago?
Having sat on the defense stand in trials before, I'd have to agree that you never volunteer information you're not asked about, and given how nasty the cross examining lawyers are, it's best to be as truthful as possible. "I don't remember" is a perfectly valid answer to a "did you do this" question, and has many legal benefits (like giving you a non-perjury out if it turns out you did do it)
So, I can't prove that lying was going on in this case, and neither, apparently, could anyone else. I'm willing to entertain that he may have been lying, but from reading this article it doesn't appear cut and dry from a legal perspective.
"No" means you are sure that the event did not take place. "Yes" means you are sure that it did. "I do not remember" means that you cannot be sure that the event did or did not occur.
These lawyers were fishing and there was no reason to volunteer information they weren't specifically asking about.
I think your understanding is wrong. The law is the law. Saying "no harm no foul" does not absolve you of your crimes. If you steal something and bring it back you still stole it and you are still a criminal.
Yeah, i am saying that part of the definition of the law that people are talking about is that the consumer was harmed by the practice in question. Merely existing as a monopoly in this country is not illegal. One of the charges in question had consumer harm as a predicate to the definition of the law, as i understand things. If you can point me to information that says differently, please do so.
Since perjury is a criminal offence and since this was a federal case the justice dept would have to bring up charges. If it was a civil case then some lawyer could have tried making a name for himself.
Right - I was referring to a hypothetical justice dept employee. There are plenty of people in the government that are power-hungry and oppose the current administration (for any definitino of "current"). If there was an open and shut case, why didn't they go for it? The entire justice department wasn't disposed of, even if a lot of shuffling happened.
He was caught in at least two lies in depositions (Clinton was impeached for lying in a deposition). Look it up
Why are you sure of something you can neither describe nor cite?
I asked 3 specific questions of the original poster and got 2 very frothy-mouthed rants that do not clearly answer any of the questions i asked. I also got modded "Troll" for simply asking questions. Nice:)
They point is THEY ARE CRIMINALS, they have been proven to have BROKEN THE LAW in multiple countries and the EU is the first to do anything meaningful to them. If we are going to debate this we need to start with the premise that they are guilty, as it is public record they are, and go from there.
Guilty of what though? I seem to recall they were found guilty on some counts and not guilty of others. Being specific about the charges they were found guilty of and the degree of each charge is important in having a meaningful discussion.
I've also broken the law in multiple countries (speeding tickets in the US and Germany) but it is still possible to have a rational discourse about "what should be done" with me based on a reasonable understanding of the nature and severity of my offenses. I am not charged and sentenced based on how much I am or am not "liked" by slashdot (thankfully, although my fans/freaks ratio is still > 1:)) - my punishment has to be based on some legally solid justification.
They promote lock in to their system, use their new lock-in to promote their other business interests etc. They spend lots of money promoting standards and then do not follow them so consumers and left hanging. The very definition of a monopoly no?
Monopoly in and of itself is not illegal in the United States. The crime of "monopoly maintenance", which I beleive is one of the charges Microsoft was found innocent of, I beleive has to do with abusing monopoly powers in a way that is detrimental to consumers or the public. I've asked before and continue to do so now - in what way was Microsoft's behvior detrimental to the public? There is no evidence of price fixing, etc which are the normal hallmarks of monopolistic damage to consumers.
Granted, the EU has different laws about monopolies that also protect competing businesses; in those legal waters it is much more plausible that Microsoft is guilty of "something". However, neither the United States government, nor anyone on slashdot has ever made a convincing case that consumers were harmed by any intentional or side-effect of Microsoft's behavior, in any market or locale.
If you want specific examples how about them buying competing software companies, shutting them down, raping the pension funds to cover the cost of the acquisition leaving the employees with nothing, shutting down the company as "unneeded" and then adding a remarkably similar feature to windows. Shall I go on?
Actually I'd be interested in this, since I work at an office of an MS acquisition and one of my best friends came from an MS acquisition. That is to say, "what you describe has not been our experience". I don't mean to say that it doesn't or hasn't happened, but since I'd not heard of this I'd love a link or two giving me an overview of the basis of this complaint.
Although I don't see that that is a business practice that has anything to do with consumers. It'd be one thing if they bought/killed a competitor, then raised their price on a competing product. I don't know that there's any evidence of that ever happening.
I am not one for political conspiracies, but I do have some questions, since you seem to have firm opinions on this matter
- as i understand it, in the US, anti-trust revolves around demonstrated consumer harm. i beleive that the court failed to demonstrate any harm was done to consumers by Microsoft. All that aside, in your opinion, what harm have they done to consumers?
- what constitutes a "wrist slap" in this case? What would have been an "appropriate" punishment, and on what grounds?
- Can you describe the bit about Gates lying in federal court? What do you know that an entire army of lawyers doesn't? Someone could have made quite a career for themselves if there'd been enough evidence to put Gates behind bars. Don't you think they would have if the opportunity had been there?
I assert that if your employer is doing something that is incompatible with your values, integrity dictates you find another employer. If you do not, that says something about your values.
Thanks for making your argument more succinctly - now I can re-use my two examples above even more succinctly
I assert that if your country is doing something that is incompatible with your values, integrity dictates you find another country. If you do not, that says something about your values.
and
I assert that if your wife is doing something that is incompatible with your values, integrity dictates you find another wife. If you do not, that says something about your values.
In both cases, and in the case of my employment, dissatisfaction, disapproval, and even apparent incompatability does NOT mean "cut and run", because the context is one of a generally good relationship - one with history, struggle, and mutual improvement. One worth preserving, if at all possible.
I cannot think of any action on the part of my wife that demands a guaranteed "we're through" response. I certainly "value" marital faithfulness, and even according to the strictest moral codes, I'd be well within my right to divorce an adulteress, but even so, many couples that experience adultery choose to stay together. Value's dictate your opinion on something, but do not necessarily mandate what your behavior will be in future events.
This response is totally unnecessary since you managed to invoke Godwin's law on the very first line of your post (as an AC, no less), but I'll indulge anyway. Let's look at things point by point.
Lets take Stallman as an example. I don't know his coding skills, I would say they were pretty good in his time and now they'd be a little dated. But morally Stallman is and has been very good.
Really? Aren't issues of morality reasonably subjective? Especially on something as esoteric as intellectual property, the nature of software, and so on? Have you ever tried to explain with a straight face, the GPL, RMS's point of view, and so on to your Grandmother?
The man is an ideological icon, that much is certain. I admire the guy for sticking to his guns. But I don't happen to subscribe to his newsletter -- and neither do lots of F/OSS developers. The suggestion that he is cut and dry a "good" character is faulty because it pre-supposes that the issue of intellectual property and the nature of software ownership has a "good" vs "bad" aspect to it, and furthermore, that he is on the right "side" of that argument.
Now an engineer working at Sony or MS on DRM I would argue is evil. They are selling out their fellow human beings for $$$. I.e. they could make $90,000 not working for MS or Sony on evil things, but they choose to work at MS or Sony for the sixth figure ($100,000). Thus the $10,000 is more important to them than that particular morality. Or someone who works at MS but doesn't work on DRM is taking the fatter paycheck, as opposed to working for one of the zillions of other jobs, because they want the extra cash despite helping an evil monopoly.
At least MS is providing a useful service to somebody. I'd argue that Real Estate Agents are a much bigger "evil" in society - especially buyers agents. If you want to talk about monopoly and exclusionary practices, look at the MLS and the real estate industry sometime!
Now, pretty much the definition of "trade" is that there is a consentual exchange of currency, goods, or services, for other currency, goods, or services. I would argue that paying $299 or wahtever a copy of Windows XP costs is worthwhile to me in the face of spending the amount of time it would take me to write my own marginally acceptable operating system, and i might further argue that the benefits of windows xp over linux for my particular usage scenarios and habits are _still_ worth a $299 premium over the zero-cost-of-acquisition that linux carries. Somewhere between 0 and 1 billion people agree with me (that Microsoft sells products that deliver value commensurate with their price)
MS lobbists pushing things in the EU.
With the recent articles about EU-vs-MS type dealings, I just wanted to talk about this breifly. I've worked at the Microsoft Campus in Copenhagen. I would wager that Microsoft is putting more money into the EU economy than you are. Copenhagen is just one of the cities in Europe where MS has a presence that puts money into the local economy. (I mention this because now that I think about it, I don't recall if Denmark is an EU member state or not..) I would say that Microsoft has a rightful stake in how the EU develops its business climate - just as being a citizen of whatever country you're in gives you some right to vote there (unless you live somewhere odd:)
You are part of that empire. That makes you an enemy solider in my book. I don't think you belong at slashdot dude. Got to Channel 9 or whatever astroturf MS has cooked up.
Erm - check my UID. I think my "street cred" is at least as good as any AC's.
Oh and by the way, like you I love cars to. I love racing games etc. I think cars are awesome. But as I don't have kids or a long commute I have put my purchase on hold till we deal with t
You're doing a little mis-representation:) That was a _$1200_ BMW I had in college... one that was 18 years old and with 220,000 miles. I had one of the oldest, crappiest cars at the midwestern state-school I went to... which was fine since I was more interested in driving it than being "cool" (nobody is cool in a rusty BMW)
And the Audi I have now was $2400, and has 200,000 miles on it... and has had parts fall off of it at track events.
Only my wife has a "new" car - and that one was still ~2 years used when we bought it.
As an aside, I do more OSX support than Windows - my wife has an iBook (one that's had a failed disk and 2 failed screens, mind you, i've written on my MSDN blog in detail about the OS X bootup sequence (which i had to figure out when debugging a botched patch install on my sister-in-laws powerbook). The notion that linux or OSX is a magic bullet for compuers having problems is frankly hillarious. I don't mean to sound like I am pulling rank but I've got plenty of professional and "the guy in the family" experience supporting all three (yes, i made my dad put up with running linux when i was in highschool and all of the support that that entailed).
And one (presumably) difference between you and I is that when I run across something that trips up a family member with an MS product, I track down the appropriate people at work and ask them if that's really the best we can do, if it's the right behavior for customers, and so on. It is at least as effective at getting things fixed as undirected complaining on slashdot:)
Finally, anytime i make a post that plainly states who i work for, i get plenty of AC's responding with negative remarks. The negative remarks are fine - but are people so unsure of themselves or their arguments that they are remaining anonymous? It's not like I can pick up the phone and have your computer explode remotely if you say something nasty to me on slashdot.
(I'd send an email. Phones? Who even uses those anymore:)
Actually, my only 1:1 "interaction" with Ballmer was when he held the door for me at the entrance to the health-club most MSFT guys go to in Redmond. He had forgotten his health-club id card that morning. His money more or less built the whole place so I smirked as he explained who he was to the person working the card scanner. "Ballmer.. B-A-L-L-M-E-R..".
I can attest that when asked who he was, he did not shout "DEVELOPERS, DEVELOPERS, DEVELOPERS!":)
Slashdot Mirror
For all of its recent political evils, the US has done surprisingly little meddling with the internet. The standards are still based on non-governmental organizations, there is no effective taxation, anonymity is still possible, etc etc. The internet of today doesn't appear to be run significantly differently than the internet of 10 years ago.
What possible motivation could there be for other governments to want to seize "control" away from the current scheme?
Because they're not happy with the above.
So one should surmise that an internet under new management would feature
- easier support for taxation
- technology "standards" created by government bodies
- less baked-in anonymity
As pissed off as I am with the current US political climate, do you know what government I trust even less than my own?
All of them
Because while it is not clear that some, all, or any male-factor infertility problems are genetic in nature (apart from Y-chromosome deletion, which represents an edge case in the male factor infertility problem), it is likely that some are. But, even if you knew for _sure_ that any male offspring you had would also have fertility problems, if modern medicine can work around it for you, it can work around it for your offspring, right?
The goal of procreation isn't to create a perfect genetic society, is it? And even if you beleive that there is a moral directive or impetus to not conceive children that are at risk for "birth defects", its a different ball of wax when an individual has to decide - "will i attempt to have offspring or not?", isn't it? Who has the sense of social justice to "bow out" of the procreation game? And on what criteria should they do so?
Regarding adoption and egg/sperm replacement programs, the desire for a biologically related offspring is understandable, if not instinctual. And the donor concept is unsettling to me, even if there is no rational basis for it, the notion of having some other persons sperm in your wife "Feels" somewhere between 50-99% like some other man fornicating with her.
I wasn't making a pro-position statement, just stating what I suspect the outcome will be. You can safely assume that I beleive a future where the government breeds conditioned babies is undesirable.
Since writing this post originally, i've thought a bit more and i beleive there is a counter-effect in play. Affluent westerners tend to not have children anywhere near as often as they have sex, so the overall impact on the genetic makeup of homo sapiens may not be severe as much as originally thought. (see the earlier article about the homo sapiens species split paper).
I think that's exactly what's happening. I think that over the last 1000 years Western Society has moved away from the model of "women as property of the most violent male" and "rape to procreate", and that these extremes are best left behind.
I don't think that's what you meant.
The selection criteria of today are clearly different than they were in the recent past. Women have some basic right-of-refusal and thus the selectivity criteria is no longer "he killed the most bears" or "he fought off the most other cavemen before raping me". It's a bit more like "he has the most money", "he went to the best school", "he got me the most drunk" -- whatever.
Additionally, men with normally ineligible genetic material can still procreate via IVF and other assisted conception procedures. In unaltered evolution, aggressive potent men would continue to dominate the genepool, but that's not what is happening, and so it is unsurprising that these traits are becoming irrelevant.
In 200 years unassisted procreation will be rare, which will help people build the kind of society that Aldous Huxley and others wrote about.
I am a pretty hardcore libertarian, and i am furious with the practical outcome of Kelo, but i actually think that the SCOTUS did the legally correct thing here, even if it meant the wrong outcome for the victim of the case.
IIRC, the law on the books that SCOTUS was looking at was the nature/extent of what types of laws about eminant domain are valid, that, barring a sufficient body of law regarding the "just compensation" clause of the 5th amendment, so long as the presiding court acted legally in this determination, they couldn't rule against New London.
IOW, SCOTUS "said" that the procedure by which New London determined just compensation didn't violate any law on the books, because there was insufficient law.
To circumvent, change, or re-define the letter of law to acheive a particular outcome, even if that outcome is "good" (i.e. correcting the gross injustice of the city/township of New London) is the very definition of Judicial Activisim, isn't it?
The take away from Kelo vs. New London was that municipalities/states/whomever needed more definition around just compensation and other aspects of when eminent domain is acceptalbe. The immediate response to the outcome of Kelo vs New London in my home state (north dakota) was that a new law clarifying various aspects of eminant domain - including a controversial clause that property seized via ED can never be released to private ownership - is up for vote now in the state legistlature.
Last I heard, MSN is finally profitable.
Your "analysis" is neither enlightening nor correct. More accurate info on the matters you speak of can be gleaned from the SEC documents filed 4 times a year. There has been some restructuring that makes year-over-year by-product comparisons difficult (and some of this is probably on purpose), but it is easy to discredit the claims you are making with a cursory examination of the SEC filings.
Doesn't wine attempt to run arbitrary windows apps without a windows license?
IE is a windows component. I beleive that running the windows version of IE without a valid license for windows is a violation of the IE license.
Besides, running IE7 under wine is not a valid test environment anyway. Suppose that something doesn't render right in IE7 on Wine? Is it a site problem, a Wine problem, an IE7 on wine problem, or what? You're testing that your site looks great to the 5 people out there that run IE7 on Wine.
If you were serious about testing IE7 against your site, and didn't want a bunch of windows machine sitting around just for testing (and didn't want to buy all those licenses), you'd do your testing from a virtual machine running windows + IE7 inside of it, using the MSDN subscription you have that lets you run any MS product for any non-production or testing purpose.
I think it's important to remember who is behind the Zune. Yes, Microsoft. But more specifically, the Home & Entertainment Division (the Xbox people). Who, by the way, posted a 70% revenue increase last quarter.
;) )
Keeping this in mind (that this is an MS product, and that it's the H&E people behind it), just because the Zune _software_ doesn't do something today (or at launch) doesn't mean it won't do it for ZuneOS "SP1"
After all, Xbox Live didn't come out for 1 year after Xbox was shipped, and X360 1080P support was issued as a software _patch_ on the 360 after Sony thought they could use it to make noise in the competitive space. Progessive Scan dashboard support was another software patch on the original Xbox. Those products _had_ to get out in the market place at the right time to be viable, the cut list must have been severe. Everyone knew the hardware was capable of more than what it launched with, and as the Xbox team got their feet under them, and heard the real-world feedback, and had a chance to breathe a bit, some of the more interesting features that didn't make the original bar started to show up.
I'm telling myself that the current idiotic 3/3 DRM model and the lack of wifi sync on the Zune are temporary things. They'll be corrected via a software update after the Zune launches (even if it means a Linux-based "software update"
This is what I am _telling_ myself (and as an MS employee, I hope it turns out to be accurate) but I don't think i'll actually put my money down until I see it happen.
What line of work are you in, and what was the process for getting employed in japan? Did you go there first and then find a great job, or did you find a great job and then go there? Did you apply for a new position at a new (to you) company in japan, or did you have a pre-existing arrangement with an opportunity to move to the japanese branch/office of your pre-existing employer?
What things do you especially like about living/working in Tokyo? What do you dislike?
taken from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lambda_Driver
Avenged Sevenfold is pretty good.. at least their City of Evil album. I'm not much of a fan of "NuMetal" or "Emo-teen" music, as compared to older stuff like pre-Black album Metallica or pre-Youthanasia Megadeth. I had been disappointed in the "progress" of the metal scene since that time (i.e. 15+ years) but I heard the City of Evil record playing at a video store (of all places) and asked the kid working there who we were listening to. I went and got the disc the next day and really like it quite a bit. A7S and Killswitch Engage have largely contributed to me listening to music made in this century instead of clutching onto the old stuff from the old standby bands.
:)
Well, them and all the J-pop/j-rock bands that do intro music for Anime
Disclosure: I am an SQA employee at Microsoft, albeit not in the Windows org.
.NET Framework - all had real companies "go live" on pre-release versions of those products, with the developers and testers from MS working directly with those companies on issues as they arose. The companies get a head start on using newer stuff (to solve real problems they're having) and we get incredible real-world feedback on the product.
One thing that F/OSS advocates (rightly) point out (everytime there is a windows vs linux security bug count study) is that not all bugs are equal. While defects/KLOC is interesting in a variety of ways, it is not nececssarily a good indicator of how well the software meets the needs of the user(s), and ultimately, how well the software meets the needs of the user(s) is what matters (its what matters to users, and its what matters to developers/vendors)
So to be fair, some of the conceptual test problems you mention (like complete-path coverage, or all edge-case coverage, etc) are not necessarily important test scenarios, especially if those values fall outside of the expected use of the product.
For instance, it may very well be that Vista's IP stack will not allow 2^31 in-flight TCP connections simultaneously. A clever tester might write a test that tries to set this up, only to see it fail.
But a more clever tester wouldn't have bothered, mostly because they know that other issues would prevent 2^31 connections from working long before you got there, and that 2^31 connectinos isn't any kind of customer scenario in the lifecycle of Vista.
This kind of sucks at some level - you want the product to be "intellectually" bug free, i.e. if you konw of a defect, it is satisfying to know that it is going to be fixed. But not all bugs are created equal, and some just don't warrant the effort required to fix them.
In some teams at Microsoft, I'd argue that test tools and test automation are used too heavily, to the detriment of the product's quality. I'm a huge fan of test tools and test automation, but it has to free up tester time so they can actually use the product and find the things that computers can't (yet) find. Exploratory or ad-hoc testing still finds a ton of bugs, and if you're familiar with the art, you know that the "goal" of SQA is not to provide a body of tests for posterity, but to act as a feedback mechanism for developers to stop writing the same kinds of defects they did 12 months ago. Thus, many functional tests have a built-in expiration date, and ultimately, a test most effective if it simulates how the customer is expected to use the product.
Naturally, the rules change depending on the nature of the product - the majority of testing going on for security-sensitive applications is much different than the majority of testing for Office UI localization. In many security-sensitive areas, it is often more important that the product doesn't do what it shouldn't than verifying that it does do what it should, and what constitutes "security sensitive" is changing (mostly expanding) on a daily basis.
So back on topic - one thing we do to try and help with the quality of Vista, inspite of not being able to do theoretically complete test coverage, is extensive customer use. I've been running Vista on my main work machine for months. I'm running it at home on my media center machine. Tens of thousands of MS employees are running Vista (and Office 12). The claim goes - if a cross-section of Microsoft employees can survive their work and home computer usage scenarios, on pre-release builds of Vista, then Vista is generally "ok". We'll find a lot of the issues that customers are likely to run into via extensive real-world usage of the product.
Additionally, Vista has been deployed by real customers doing real work at multiple customer sites. And this is how it is with most MS products now. Any version of SQL server, Visual Studio, the
I don't want to shrink the amount of effort we put into forma
Hundreds of pink, purple, green, and blue haired middle school girls have reported to the secret under-mountain bases where their enormous transformable robots (using alien technology, no less) have been meticulously maintained by bespectacled scientists in labcoats.
North Korea doesn't stand a chance.
(As long as the pilots don't get too involved with text-messaging their awkward love interests during battle)
While i have no experience with coverity's tools in general, you seem to hold a very dim view of static analysis tools, which is unfortuneate, since they can and do find real bugs.
When there are no more peices of software that ship with stack overruns, static analysis tools _might_ not be worth using. But we're not there yet.
Static analysis is just one of many tools that can help refine the quality of software. As we learn not to make the mistakes static analyzers can detect, their necessity and usefulness will also change, just like the types of bugs we are writing will also change.
As someone that is in the software QA business, I happen to love that some developers are using static analysis tools. I want my job to be automated just like (most) everyone else does, and every arcane buffer size defect or missing return value check that is detected by automated tools is one I never see when I do a code review. This leaves me free to focus on looking for things I know aren't well detected - like logic errors, infinite loops, etc.
I've been thinking for a while that there is a lot of software engineering methodology that could be applied to great effect in the F/OSS world. The linux kernel code coverage project for instance is somewhat primitive compared to tools we're using internally at my company, but it's "close enough" that it could present tremendous value if some structure/practices were put around it. Combine it with the linux test project (and based on reading about the linux test project, that one has a lot of good content but doesn't seem to have the right focus and presence) and now you've got the beginnings of some real software testing with feedback loops going towards the developers. Throw in some static analysis here and there and it's almost going to feel like software engineering instead of "hacking".
Yeah - hacking got us (part way) here. How far will it take us? How much of what I envision is already being done behind closed doors at IBM, Redhat, or whereever ? I just read a paper abstract today on using an instrumented version of Bochs to test the linux kernel for various run time faults. Fantastic idea. Now, put it into production.. hook that thing up to a profiler.. or lcov.. run the LTP inside of it.. run crashme or whatever todays syscall-fuzzer is..even if you find only one "wow.. thats weird" result, the computer was doing all the work for you, so why not take advantage of it?
the Iraqi surrender story was to point out that not only are some of the current drones visible, but they are visible enough and fly missions low enough that an Iraq tried to surrender to one.. he either thought it was a munitious capable aircraft or knew that somebody was watching video of what it was recorded.. either way he didn't want to get bombed.
Do your kids have admin rights on the computer(s) they use? They may be able to check whats going on, but may be unable to do anything about it.
Ultimately you can install a key logger, even if they get encrypted connections going or install software that makes it harder for you to snoop. I wouldn't be surprised if there was some kind of key logger that logged what keys were sent to which app at what time.. that could give you a 1-sided "replay" of activity even in the face of them putting stealthier software on the machine(or using web based chats via https anonymizers or something)
As someone else pointed out though - i'm not sure you want to be in a technology cold war with your kids. You need to come to an understanding about why they want to disobey you. There is probably a lot of ignorance and arrogance on both sides of the parent/child relationship, and the right meeting is somewhere in the middle.
The internet is a hostile place for adults also. The struggle of parenting would seem to be hw to let your child grow into an adult that makes responsible decisions about their privacy, personal safety, etc, while still giving them boundaries that let you sleep relatively comfortably at nite as they learn how to do this.
I'm not a parent, but it seems to me that the "threats" are the same as they've always been, but the vectors are different this time around (and they'll be different again in 10 years)
Your response is both factually incorrect and unimaginative.
There are a variety of unmanned aerial vehicles in the US armed forces that serve a variety of missions. Surely you've heard of the UAV launched from Iowa class battleships as a targeting / BDA unit, that an Iraqi tried to surrender to ? (IIRC, this one was a "Predator").
In any case, there is probably a role for a unit-deployable, short range, low altatitude, small form factor, long "hang time" (ability to stay airborne in a localized area for extended time) UAV. The scenrio here is that a small company of men and one or two armored vehicles needs to enter a town with an unknown enemy force deployment. On the outskirts of town, they unpack their suit-case sized UAV, start its engines, and hand-launch it into the sky. The trained operator (for now) watches the real time video feed on their laptop. The UAV gives the troops an aerial view of the town - they can map out block or unblocked streets/alleys.. they can spot rooftop snipers.. they can get early warnings of people spilling out of buildings in other parts of the town.
The key here is distributed, localized intelligence gathering that is deployed and consumed by field units.. it is more pertinent and easier (and faster!) to act on then something more full size where intel goes back to an Air conditioned trailer hundreds of miles away from the theater of operation, and intel goes up and down the chain of command.
small-unit sized deployable semi-autonomous robots are a cutting edge application of commodity hardware and software. You need something cheap, field proof, and easy for lower level enlisted men to launch, operate, and recover. The smarter the software, the less of a burden it is on the operator(s), and the more value it provides. Given the changing nature of combat (trained army goes through town hoping to not get ambushed), small-scale UAVs are absolutely worth persuing.
Never mind that they're dirt cheap (as military hardware goes) - some prototypes are little more than the RC model aircraft you see at hobbyist stores with some cameras, radio control equipment, and a small embedded device.
I run Vista on my Dell Latitude D600 w/ 1GB ram and a centrino 1.7M.
Having adequate ram will be a key point - thankfully, that's the easiest part of most laptops to upgrade. I wouldn't try it on less than 1GB. On laptops this is especially important because the disks are slower and Vista's background search indexer wants to use your disk as often as it thinks you aren't using it (although this has been pretty unobtrusive in the latest builds)
My hardware is not Aero capable and i get a solid 1.0 on the performance score index. Even so, this is my main work machine for browsing, email, and office apps.
I built an HTPC at home for about $600 of newegg parts (including a $100 case).. an am2 athlon 3800, the MSI-K9G, 2GB of ram, and an SATA disk. That machine gets a 3.8 i think and the video is the only individual component below 5. I'm using the onboard GF6150 video. This machine also runs Media Center on Vista and that seems to work fine.
Vista runs acceptably on any machine with 1GB of ram, but without a beefy enough system you'll miss features like Aero (vista measures your system performance during the OOBE and turns features on/off as appropriate)
I hope you pasted the wrong link, or that this is a bad account of the event you meant to talk about.
I've read it a few times now, and maybe I'm just a dummy, but nothing in there ever shows Gates being caught in a lie or commiting perjury.
Based on how i read that memo, apparently he was asked "did you ever have a conversation about undermining Sun". No answer is specified, although "No" is implied. If his answer had been anything beside "No", it's hard to suggest he's guilty of anything. The beginning of the article says a lot of "I don't remember" answers were given, which may or may not be truthful.
Then the ask him if he remembers sending an email about undermining Sun. He says no, he doesn't remember. Then they show him one and ask if there is any doubt that it was one he sent. He says "yeah, that looks like mine".
So what's the problem? That he forgot about an email he wrote a year ago?
Having sat on the defense stand in trials before, I'd have to agree that you never volunteer information you're not asked about, and given how nasty the cross examining lawyers are, it's best to be as truthful as possible. "I don't remember" is a perfectly valid answer to a "did you do this" question, and has many legal benefits (like giving you a non-perjury out if it turns out you did do it)
So, I can't prove that lying was going on in this case, and neither, apparently, could anyone else. I'm willing to entertain that he may have been lying, but from reading this article it doesn't appear cut and dry from a legal perspective.
"No" means you are sure that the event did not take place. "Yes" means you are sure that it did. "I do not remember" means that you cannot be sure that the event did or did not occur.
These lawyers were fishing and there was no reason to volunteer information they weren't specifically asking about.
Yeah, i am saying that part of the definition of the law that people are talking about is that the consumer was harmed by the practice in question. Merely existing as a monopoly in this country is not illegal. One of the charges in question had consumer harm as a predicate to the definition of the law, as i understand things. If you can point me to information that says differently, please do so.
Right - I was referring to a hypothetical justice dept employee. There are plenty of people in the government that are power-hungry and oppose the current administration (for any definitino of "current"). If there was an open and shut case, why didn't they go for it? The entire justice department wasn't disposed of, even if a lot of shuffling happened.
Why are you sure of something you can neither describe nor cite?
Guilty of what though? I seem to recall they were found guilty on some counts and not guilty of others. Being specific about the charges they were found guilty of and the degree of each charge is important in having a meaningful discussion.
I've also broken the law in multiple countries (speeding tickets in the US and Germany) but it is still possible to have a rational discourse about "what should be done" with me based on a reasonable understanding of the nature and severity of my offenses. I am not charged and sentenced based on how much I am or am not "liked" by slashdot (thankfully, although my fans/freaks ratio is still > 1
Monopoly in and of itself is not illegal in the United States. The crime of "monopoly maintenance", which I beleive is one of the charges Microsoft was found innocent of, I beleive has to do with abusing monopoly powers in a way that is detrimental to consumers or the public. I've asked before and continue to do so now - in what way was Microsoft's behvior detrimental to the public? There is no evidence of price fixing, etc which are the normal hallmarks of monopolistic damage to consumers.
Granted, the EU has different laws about monopolies that also protect competing businesses; in those legal waters it is much more plausible that Microsoft is guilty of "something". However, neither the United States government, nor anyone on slashdot has ever made a convincing case that consumers were harmed by any intentional or side-effect of Microsoft's behavior, in any market or locale.
Actually I'd be interested in this, since I work at an office of an MS acquisition and one of my best friends came from an MS acquisition. That is to say, "what you describe has not been our experience". I don't mean to say that it doesn't or hasn't happened, but since I'd not heard of this I'd love a link or two giving me an overview of the basis of this complaint.
Although I don't see that that is a business practice that has anything to do with consumers. It'd be one thing if they bought/killed a competitor, then raised their price on a competing product. I don't know that there's any evidence of that ever happening.
I am not one for political conspiracies, but I do have some questions, since you seem to have firm opinions on this matter
- as i understand it, in the US, anti-trust revolves around demonstrated consumer harm. i beleive that the court failed to demonstrate any harm was done to consumers by Microsoft. All that aside, in your opinion, what harm have they done to consumers?
- what constitutes a "wrist slap" in this case? What would have been an "appropriate" punishment, and on what grounds?
- Can you describe the bit about Gates lying in federal court? What do you know that an entire army of lawyers doesn't? Someone could have made quite a career for themselves if there'd been enough evidence to put Gates behind bars. Don't you think they would have if the opportunity had been there?
Thanks for making your argument more succinctly - now I can re-use my two examples above even more succinctly
and
In both cases, and in the case of my employment, dissatisfaction, disapproval, and even apparent incompatability does NOT mean "cut and run", because the context is one of a generally good relationship - one with history, struggle, and mutual improvement. One worth preserving, if at all possible.
I cannot think of any action on the part of my wife that demands a guaranteed "we're through" response. I certainly "value" marital faithfulness, and even according to the strictest moral codes, I'd be well within my right to divorce an adulteress, but even so, many couples that experience adultery choose to stay together. Value's dictate your opinion on something, but do not necessarily mandate what your behavior will be in future events.
Really? Aren't issues of morality reasonably subjective? Especially on something as esoteric as intellectual property, the nature of software, and so on? Have you ever tried to explain with a straight face, the GPL, RMS's point of view, and so on to your Grandmother?
The man is an ideological icon, that much is certain. I admire the guy for sticking to his guns. But I don't happen to subscribe to his newsletter -- and neither do lots of F/OSS developers. The suggestion that he is cut and dry a "good" character is faulty because it pre-supposes that the issue of intellectual property and the nature of software ownership has a "good" vs "bad" aspect to it, and furthermore, that he is on the right "side" of that argument.
At least MS is providing a useful service to somebody. I'd argue that Real Estate Agents are a much bigger "evil" in society - especially buyers agents. If you want to talk about monopoly and exclusionary practices, look at the MLS and the real estate industry sometime!
Now, pretty much the definition of "trade" is that there is a consentual exchange of currency, goods, or services, for other currency, goods, or services. I would argue that paying $299 or wahtever a copy of Windows XP costs is worthwhile to me in the face of spending the amount of time it would take me to write my own marginally acceptable operating system, and i might further argue that the benefits of windows xp over linux for my particular usage scenarios and habits are _still_ worth a $299 premium over the zero-cost-of-acquisition that linux carries. Somewhere between 0 and 1 billion people agree with me (that Microsoft sells products that deliver value commensurate with their price)
With the recent articles about EU-vs-MS type dealings, I just wanted to talk about this breifly. I've worked at the Microsoft Campus in Copenhagen. I would wager that Microsoft is putting more money into the EU economy than you are. Copenhagen is just one of the cities in Europe where MS has a presence that puts money into the local economy. (I mention this because now that I think about it, I don't recall if Denmark is an EU member state or not..) I would say that Microsoft has a rightful stake in how the EU develops its business climate - just as being a citizen of whatever country you're in gives you some right to vote there (unless you live somewhere odd :)
Erm - check my UID. I think my "street cred" is at least as good as any AC's.
You're doing a little mis-representation :) That was a _$1200_ BMW I had in college... one that was 18 years old and with 220,000 miles. I had one of the oldest, crappiest cars at the midwestern state-school I went to... which was fine since I was more interested in driving it than being "cool" (nobody is cool in a rusty BMW)
:)
:)
And the Audi I have now was $2400, and has 200,000 miles on it... and has had parts fall off of it at track events.
Only my wife has a "new" car - and that one was still ~2 years used when we bought it.
As an aside, I do more OSX support than Windows - my wife has an iBook (one that's had a failed disk and 2 failed screens, mind you, i've written on my MSDN blog in detail about the OS X bootup sequence (which i had to figure out when debugging a botched patch install on my sister-in-laws powerbook). The notion that linux or OSX is a magic bullet for compuers having problems is frankly hillarious. I don't mean to sound like I am pulling rank but I've got plenty of professional and "the guy in the family" experience supporting all three (yes, i made my dad put up with running linux when i was in highschool and all of the support that that entailed).
And one (presumably) difference between you and I is that when I run across something that trips up a family member with an MS product, I track down the appropriate people at work and ask them if that's really the best we can do, if it's the right behavior for customers, and so on. It is at least as effective at getting things fixed as undirected complaining on slashdot
Finally, anytime i make a post that plainly states who i work for, i get plenty of AC's responding with negative remarks. The negative remarks are fine - but are people so unsure of themselves or their arguments that they are remaining anonymous? It's not like I can pick up the phone and have your computer explode remotely if you say something nasty to me on slashdot.
(I'd send an email. Phones? Who even uses those anymore
hahah :) nicely done.
:)
Actually, my only 1:1 "interaction" with Ballmer was when he held the door for me at the entrance to the health-club most MSFT guys go to in Redmond. He had forgotten his health-club id card that morning. His money more or less built the whole place so I smirked as he explained who he was to the person working the card scanner. "Ballmer.. B-A-L-L-M-E-R..".
I can attest that when asked who he was, he did not shout "DEVELOPERS, DEVELOPERS, DEVELOPERS!"