And what's so much easier about installing a suitable browser on every computer (regardless of OS) anyone employed by the company might ever want to use to edit a document, and on every PC anyone might ever want to share such a document with?
The fact that virtually every such computer will come with such a browser bundled with the operating system, and thus not need to have one installed separately, makes that a lot easier.
Clicking "Next" 5 times and waiting a few minutes - once - is incomparable to the productivity lost by operating an online Office suite for several hours a day.
Maybe, but:
1) Not every employee that might need to use an office suite does so for several hours a day (and, really, office suites are poorly suited to much of what they are used for, so I think this will increase as more and more work is diverted into specialized managed-workflow applications from general purpose office suites.) 2) Installation using all defaults often takes fewer clicks than that, but an installation that requires any non-default setting takes much more careful consideration. 3) Installing once per user isn't the right comparison, its once per machine -- machines often being replaced more often than users. And, really, to compare to an online suite where the upgrades as well as installs are handled for you, a more appropriate comparison might be once per machine per major version release (assuming automatic patches are distributed silently.)
I think you'll find that in Somalia, you're not as free to do as you please as you think. Somalia is ruled by warlords, which is just another form of government.
Yes, when people that aren't constrained by an effective de jure government, those with more personal power set themselves up as a de facto government over whatever domain they can establish.
I think that was rather the point GP was making in response to the argument that the government is the source of everything wrong with the country -- that, in the absence of real government, what you get is much worse, even from a perspective of practical freedom.
Why not spend the time installing Office, rather than a browser, so they can actually get work done? Seriously, a reason to use Google Docs over Office is that it's harder to install Office than a web browser?
Its easier to install a web browser and keep it up-to-date than to install every app that might be needed to for every document type you might want to use.
So, yeah, browser-based, hosted apps do have certain advantages.
Yes, businesses have so much trouble installing Office on every PC.
On every computer (regardless of OS) anyone employed by the company might ever want to use to edit a document, and on every PC anyone might ever want to share such a document with? Yeah, actually, that is a bit of a challenge.
Everyone has the time to install an app. Google want to pretend that no-one does.
Everyone has time to do most any task you can imagine. OTOH, most everyone also has higher-value tasks they could be performing instead if "installing an app" was taken care of.
Sad that people have to be publicly shamed into doing their job - but it does work!
"Shame" or not, I don't think its surprising that people are more likely to do the job that they are being paid to do if their performance (or lack thereof) is more visible to the people that are paying them to do it.
Without a doubt, it would be very difficult to put someone into a position like CIO without the person having had much in the way of experience with large and successful companies.
Its quite easy to have experience with large and successful companies without ever having worked as a lobbyist.
How come when Apple does something people take notice. But when a hundred others go through more traditional channels such as trade shows people who think they are industry insiders don't have a clue?
Because Apple has a better marketing department than its competitors.
Apple revives a ten year old niche that no one really liked for reasons that are still entirely relevant
The reasons no one really liked the form factor before is that you couldn't get enough computing power to do much from a traditional "computer" point of view in the form factor, and that there weren't compelling non-traditional applications specialized for the form factor.
The first has changed -- as netbooks, UMPCs, and smartphones doing things that previously were reserved to traditional computing has shown -- and so has the second -- which the explosion of dedicated eBook reader devices has shown.
So I don't think its really accurate to say that the reasons why tablets haven't been successful in the past are still "entirely relevant".
As an American, no i can't. We the public did not create this, have no say in this and have nothing to do with this. I wouldn't even know where to send a strongly worded letter to.
As an American, the logical place to complain would be to the elected federal officers that represent you, that is, the President, Vice President, the two US Senators from your state, and your Representative in the House of Representatives.
You might also look into participating in groups that are interested in the issue.
Murdoch has got it ass-about. The reason that print media is dying is that the classified advertising model that was so profitable for so long has died.
That's part of the reason print newspapers, especially print dailies, are dying. Though its not the only one -- another thing is that a lot of the cheap, low-hanging fruit of journalism, the stuff that amounts to just relaying press releases with minimal work -- has dropped in value to the consumer as there are more competing outlets for that (including, since the advent of email, getting them straight from the horse's mouth.)
Tabloid rags? WSJ? Geez, I'm as non-Republican as they come but you sound like an idiot saying that.
Long ago, the WSJ had a much-deserved reputation for having very excellent news coverage, even while having one of the most right-wing editorial/opinion sections around. That had slipped considerably even before the News Corp acquisition, and quite a bit further since.
No matter how much you want to argue that this paper or that newpaper isn't doing "real journalism", they are all dying
Print dailies are dying, other outlets, including other forms of newspapers, not so much.
and they are almost the sole original sources for most news we hear, including most news the government or various corporations don't want you to hear.
Newspapers aren't even close to the "sole original source" of news, and haven't been for decades. Both other print media (newsmagazines, for instance) and non-print media (broadcast, cable, and internet-based outlets) do original reporting.
And very little of what is printed in newspapers is original reporting by the newspaper.
Blogs and Google News on their own would be almost completely devoid of news if all the newspapers closed shop today.
Many blogs heavily feature original reporting (often by people who either also work in print, or who moved out of print and onto the web), and while Google News is just an aggregator, it aggregates a lot more than just newspapers.
The websites that you use every day become faster and more responsive, and developers can create new classes of web applications through standards based markup that were previously not possible.
So, is IE9 now going to implement standards correctly, or is it just going to be "wrong, but fast".
Re:Creator of the personal computer?
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The first PC was the Altair 8800 (shipped in 1975 and ran Microsoft Software no less),
The Altair 8800 was not a PC, it was a pre-PC microcomputer programmed with toggle switches using banks of LEDs for output.
the first fully assembled PC you could buy ready to run was the Commodore PET in 1977 (shipped in January - Apple ]['s shipped the same year in June).
Actually, the fully-assembled, ready-to-run, hand-built-by-Steve-Wozniak Apple I in (demoed in April 1976, on sale July of 1976) was the first fully-assembled PC you could buy ready-to-run. Admittedly, since they were hand-built, the production rate wasn't very high.
But neither were made by a couple of hip guys from silicon valley named Steve - so it doesn't count right?
The first wasn't a PC, the second was after the Apple I, which is why neither of them counts as the first PC.
Look, it doesn't matter who or where you are. The government has guns, you do not.
Correction, it doesn't matter who or where you are, some subset of the people have guns, and the government only has guns to the extent that that subset of the people is willing to obey the dictates of the government. (Even if that subset is nominally in the employ of the government -- e.g., if it is exclusively the army and official law enforcement that have guns -- that is by no means guaranteed.)
The government isn't some magical entity that exists separate from individuals.
You're missing the point. When somebody says "I won't sue you for doing this", the law does not allow them to retract that.
Whether or not, and to what extent, the law allows that depends on the laws in the particular jurisdiction in which an action is brought, it certainly is not as black and white as you present it under the doctrine of promissory estoppel, which would be the main basis for something like the bar you suggest in most US jurisdictions.
Further, in any case, the whole issue becomes moot if you aren't doing what the promise said you wouldn't be sued for in the first place; not that IBM included a very specific definition of "open source license" in the pledge, including exactly those published on the opensource.org website as of a specific date. The license actually used by Hercules claims to be the Q Public License v1.0, (even including Trolltech's copyright notice) which is such a license, however, it's text differs from that text of the Q Public License v1.0 on opensource.org (the text of the Choice of Law section is changed from "This license is governed by the Laws of Norway. Disputes shall be settled by Oslo City Court" to "This license is governed by the Laws of England".)
Since IBM didn't pledge not to press patent claims against license merely very similar to those listed on opensource.org as of the date specified, I think it is pretty clear that, whether or not the law of any particular jurisdiction makes the promise not sue binding, TurboHercules hasn't done the thing that IBM promised not sue over.
The point is IBM said they wouldn't use these patents against open source projects, and just did.
Hercules uses an altered version of the QPL (changing the "Choice of Law" section), which therefore is not the version that was posted on the opensource.org website as of the specific date in 2005 mentioned in the pledge, and therefore not an "open source license" covered by the pledge.
It sure seems strange to me that Apple, who sell themselves as the "complete" and "it just works" experience would release the iPad before the next version of iPhoneOS comes out.
Its actually really not that strange that Apple, or any other company, would do something substantive that is at odds with its carefully constructed PR image.
Of course, their PR folks will be working overtime to make sure that this is forgotten as soon as possible, because that's what a carefully constructed PR image is all about -- working hard to make people see the things that are consistent with it, and forget those that aren't.
Yes. Apart from anything else, he's just about entirely missing Facebook's point. Facebook don't give a shit how he accesses their site; this has nothing to do with the fact that he spidered it in a way that their robots.txt file allows, and everything to do with the fact that he was *redistributing their data* without consent.
Robots.txt is a standard manner of providing (or denying) consent to have an automated system crawl and copy the content of the site in order to redistribute data from the site in an alternative form.
If they can filter content, based on whatever they want to do, they lose their common carrier status
ISPs don't have common carrier status or the various obligations that go with that (net neutrality parallels some of those obligations), which is one reason why telcos want to be ISPs more than they want to be telcos.
They do separate from common carrier status have many of the same kinds of protections granted to common carriers, as a result of lots of lobbying, but without the conditions that go with that for common carriers.
Since only two of 171 patents were covered by the covet not to assert. IBM doesnt need those two patents to win its case.
Winning a case isn't a binary thing. The scope and scale of violations is often important.
In any event the two patents are unenforceable under the doctrine of promissory estoppel.
That's less clear than it seems. Promissory estoppel is an equitable doctrine which allows a court to mitigate remedies to which a party might otherwise be entitled to the extent necessary to avoid injustice where there has been reasonable and detrimenetal reliance by the other party on a promise made by the party which has the cause of action. The exact nature of the promise, and the actions undertaken supposedly based on it, are relevant to determining to whether the reliance was reasonable, and the extent to which remedies should be mitigate to avoid injustice.
They will however confuse those who are not BD-related professionals or aficionados.
Lots of things exist for specialized markets that are available to professionals and in consumer versions that are mostly used by hobbyists rather than the masses, and they don't particularly "confuse" the masses -- even when they are variants of popular standard technologies -- because the masses just ignore them because they are irrelevant.
So, any Federal regulations are, by definition, good, since, by definition, they're all relevant to your business?
Uh, no.
Your post is the first in the exchange to refer to "good" or anything like it. Anything that has negative consequences for your bottom line (including, inter alia, any federal, state, local, or other regulation that is enforced against your business) is relevant to your business, and therefore a place where it may make sense to spend money to assure that negative consequences do not occur.
Whether the regulation itself is "good", desirable, etc., is a completely separate and unrelated question to whether or not it is relevant to your business and an appropriate and even necessary place to spend resources given its existence.
For any particular set of Federal regulations, the question should be "does this accomplish the intended purpose?"
There are lots of appropriate questions about federal regulations; which are relevant depend on the context. If the context is a discussion of the appropriateness of the regulations themselves, the set of key questions includes not just "does the regulation accomplish its intended purpose?" but also: 1. "Is the regulation within the authority of the body issuing the regulation?" 2. "Does the regulation minimize the undesirable side effects it creates in the process of acheiving the intended purpose?" 3. "Are the beneficial effects of the regulation -- both including the intended effect and any positive side effects -- sufficient to outweigh the negative side effects?"
OTOH, if the context is "given the existence of the regulation, what resources, if any, is it appropriate for my business to spend on compliance?", then most of those questions (including "does the regulation accomplish its intended purpose?") are not relevant at all.
HIPAA basically says you have to take reasonable measures.
That's less true since the HITECH Act was passed as part of the stimulus law last year, which required HHS to specify much more specific rules as to what consitutes "unsecured" PHI as well as specific rules for breach notification that are tied to breaches of unsecured PHI. The guidance promulgated under HITECH sets out fairly specific guidance as to what must be done for PHI not to be considered "unsecured" (mostly, by referencing existing federal standards and applying them to different scenarios.)
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The fact that virtually every such computer will come with such a browser bundled with the operating system, and thus not need to have one installed separately, makes that a lot easier.
Maybe, but:
1) Not every employee that might need to use an office suite does so for several hours a day (and, really, office suites are poorly suited to much of what they are used for, so I think this will increase as more and more work is diverted into specialized managed-workflow applications from general purpose office suites.)
2) Installation using all defaults often takes fewer clicks than that, but an installation that requires any non-default setting takes much more careful consideration.
3) Installing once per user isn't the right comparison, its once per machine -- machines often being replaced more often than users. And, really, to compare to an online suite where the upgrades as well as installs are handled for you, a more appropriate comparison might be once per machine per major version release (assuming automatic patches are distributed silently.)
Yes, when people that aren't constrained by an effective de jure government, those with more personal power set themselves up as a de facto government over whatever domain they can establish.
I think that was rather the point GP was making in response to the argument that the government is the source of everything wrong with the country -- that, in the absence of real government, what you get is much worse, even from a perspective of practical freedom.
Its easier to install a web browser and keep it up-to-date than to install every app that might be needed to for every document type you might want to use.
So, yeah, browser-based, hosted apps do have certain advantages.
On every computer (regardless of OS) anyone employed by the company might ever want to use to edit a document, and on every PC anyone might ever want to share such a document with? Yeah, actually, that is a bit of a challenge.
Everyone has time to do most any task you can imagine. OTOH, most everyone also has higher-value tasks they could be performing instead if "installing an app" was taken care of.
"Shame" or not, I don't think its surprising that people are more likely to do the job that they are being paid to do if their performance (or lack thereof) is more visible to the people that are paying them to do it.
Its quite easy to have experience with large and successful companies without ever having worked as a lobbyist.
The proposal to turn cell-phones into portable, centrally-monitored chemical sensors comes from the Department of Homeland Security.
The absence of anonymity is, I would think, not merely an oversight, but a central feature of the concept.
Because Apple has a better marketing department than its competitors.
How is that any easier of an answer than slapping iPhone OS on a tablet?
The reasons no one really liked the form factor before is that you couldn't get enough computing power to do much from a traditional "computer" point of view in the form factor, and that there weren't compelling non-traditional applications specialized for the form factor.
The first has changed -- as netbooks, UMPCs, and smartphones doing things that previously were reserved to traditional computing has shown -- and so has the second -- which the explosion of dedicated eBook reader devices has shown.
So I don't think its really accurate to say that the reasons why tablets haven't been successful in the past are still "entirely relevant".
As an American, the logical place to complain would be to the elected federal officers that represent you, that is, the President, Vice President, the two US Senators from your state, and your Representative in the House of Representatives.
You might also look into participating in groups that are interested in the issue.
That's part of the reason print newspapers, especially print dailies, are dying. Though its not the only one -- another thing is that a lot of the cheap, low-hanging fruit of journalism, the stuff that amounts to just relaying press releases with minimal work -- has dropped in value to the consumer as there are more competing outlets for that (including, since the advent of email, getting them straight from the horse's mouth.)
Long ago, the WSJ had a much-deserved reputation for having very excellent news coverage, even while having one of the most right-wing editorial/opinion sections around. That had slipped considerably even before the News Corp acquisition, and quite a bit further since.
Print dailies are dying, other outlets, including other forms of newspapers, not so much.
Newspapers aren't even close to the "sole original source" of news, and haven't been for decades. Both other print media (newsmagazines, for instance) and non-print media (broadcast, cable, and internet-based outlets) do original reporting.
And very little of what is printed in newspapers is original reporting by the newspaper.
Many blogs heavily feature original reporting (often by people who either also work in print, or who moved out of print and onto the web), and while Google News is just an aggregator, it aggregates a lot more than just newspapers.
So, is IE9 now going to implement standards correctly, or is it just going to be "wrong, but fast".
The Altair 8800 was not a PC, it was a pre-PC microcomputer programmed with toggle switches using banks of LEDs for output.
Actually, the fully-assembled, ready-to-run, hand-built-by-Steve-Wozniak Apple I in (demoed in April 1976, on sale July of 1976) was the first fully-assembled PC you could buy ready-to-run. Admittedly, since they were hand-built, the production rate wasn't very high.
The first wasn't a PC, the second was after the Apple I, which is why neither of them counts as the first PC.
Correction, it doesn't matter who or where you are, some subset of the people have guns, and the government only has guns to the extent that that subset of the people is willing to obey the dictates of the government. (Even if that subset is nominally in the employ of the government -- e.g., if it is exclusively the army and official law enforcement that have guns -- that is by no means guaranteed.)
The government isn't some magical entity that exists separate from individuals.
Whether or not, and to what extent, the law allows that depends on the laws in the particular jurisdiction in which an action is brought, it certainly is not as black and white as you present it under the doctrine of promissory estoppel, which would be the main basis for something like the bar you suggest in most US jurisdictions.
Further, in any case, the whole issue becomes moot if you aren't doing what the promise said you wouldn't be sued for in the first place; not that IBM included a very specific definition of "open source license" in the pledge, including exactly those published on the opensource.org website as of a specific date. The license actually used by Hercules claims to be the Q Public License v1.0, (even including Trolltech's copyright notice) which is such a license, however, it's text differs from that text of the Q Public License v1.0 on opensource.org (the text of the Choice of Law section is changed from "This license is governed by the Laws of Norway. Disputes shall be settled by Oslo City Court" to "This license is governed by the Laws of England".)
Since IBM didn't pledge not to press patent claims against license merely very similar to those listed on opensource.org as of the date specified, I think it is pretty clear that, whether or not the law of any particular jurisdiction makes the promise not sue binding, TurboHercules hasn't done the thing that IBM promised not sue over.
Hercules uses an altered version of the QPL (changing the "Choice of Law" section), which therefore is not the version that was posted on the opensource.org website as of the specific date in 2005 mentioned in the pledge, and therefore not an "open source license" covered by the pledge.
Its actually really not that strange that Apple, or any other company, would do something substantive that is at odds with its carefully constructed PR image.
Of course, their PR folks will be working overtime to make sure that this is forgotten as soon as possible, because that's what a carefully constructed PR image is all about -- working hard to make people see the things that are consistent with it, and forget those that aren't.
Robots.txt is a standard manner of providing (or denying) consent to have an automated system crawl and copy the content of the site in order to redistribute data from the site in an alternative form.
ISPs don't have common carrier status or the various obligations that go with that (net neutrality parallels some of those obligations), which is one reason why telcos want to be ISPs more than they want to be telcos.
They do separate from common carrier status have many of the same kinds of protections granted to common carriers, as a result of lots of lobbying, but without the conditions that go with that for common carriers.
Winning a case isn't a binary thing. The scope and scale of violations is often important.
That's less clear than it seems. Promissory estoppel is an equitable doctrine which allows a court to mitigate remedies to which a party might otherwise be entitled to the extent necessary to avoid injustice where there has been reasonable and detrimenetal reliance by the other party on a promise made by the party which has the cause of action. The exact nature of the promise, and the actions undertaken supposedly based on it, are relevant to determining to whether the reliance was reasonable, and the extent to which remedies should be mitigate to avoid injustice.
Lots of things exist for specialized markets that are available to professionals and in consumer versions that are mostly used by hobbyists rather than the masses, and they don't particularly "confuse" the masses -- even when they are variants of popular standard technologies -- because the masses just ignore them because they are irrelevant.
Uh, no.
Your post is the first in the exchange to refer to "good" or anything like it. Anything that has negative consequences for your bottom line (including, inter alia, any federal, state, local, or other regulation that is enforced against your business) is relevant to your business, and therefore a place where it may make sense to spend money to assure that negative consequences do not occur.
Whether the regulation itself is "good", desirable, etc., is a completely separate and unrelated question to whether or not it is relevant to your business and an appropriate and even necessary place to spend resources given its existence.
There are lots of appropriate questions about federal regulations; which are relevant depend on the context. If the context is a discussion of the appropriateness of the regulations themselves, the set of key questions includes not just "does the regulation accomplish its intended purpose?" but also:
1. "Is the regulation within the authority of the body issuing the regulation?"
2. "Does the regulation minimize the undesirable side effects it creates in the process of acheiving the intended purpose?"
3. "Are the beneficial effects of the regulation -- both including the intended effect and any positive side effects -- sufficient to outweigh the negative side effects?"
OTOH, if the context is "given the existence of the regulation, what resources, if any, is it appropriate for my business to spend on compliance?", then most of those questions (including "does the regulation accomplish its intended purpose?") are not relevant at all.
That's less true since the HITECH Act was passed as part of the stimulus law last year, which required HHS to specify much more specific rules as to what consitutes "unsecured" PHI as well as specific rules for breach notification that are tied to breaches of unsecured PHI. The guidance promulgated under HITECH sets out fairly specific guidance as to what must be done for PHI not to be considered "unsecured" (mostly, by referencing existing federal standards and applying them to different scenarios.)