[I hope they take into consideration] That there truly is a certain level of knowledge and expertise that should be a requirement for the "volunteers" to participate. I would hate to think someone like my dad, who is the technological equivalent of a sloth, would have any kind of say over this kind of issue.
You know, you could read the official government announcement of the volunteer opportunity linked in TFA, which specifies the prerequisites for volunteering.
I do understand that just the knowledge of the opportunity to volunteer would gleen out quite a large portion of the people you wouldn't want making these kinds of decisions, but all the same, it would be frightening if there was no over-sight involved with these decisions by civilians.
You could read the announcement linked in TFA (or even the excerpt of it directly quoted in TFA), and realize that (contrary to the scare-mongering by the consulting-firm president also quoted in TFA) the volunteers will not be making decisions about applications, but writing up evaluations which will be referenced by the actual NTIA decisionmakers.
In order to qualify as a "volunteer" for this service you need to be an employed member of the business community relevant to the topic.
Wrong. Per the announcement linked in TFA, current employment in the field is not require, but "[t]o be considered as a reviewer you must have significant expertise and experience in at least one of the following areas: 1) the design, funding, construction, and operation of broadband networks or public computer centers; 2) broadband-related outreach, training, or education; and 3) innovative programs to increase the demand for broadband services." (emphasis added)
Indeed, being currently employed in the field probably makes it more difficult, since you have to abide by the Department of Commerce's conflict of interest rules; I'm not familiar with their particular rules, but certainly you'd be less likely to fall afoul of them if you didn't have any current direct interest in that market despite prior experience.
We're talking about billions of dollars here...surely the government could toss in a couple hundred thousand to pay people to do the job.
A couple hundred thousand wouldn't hire enough people at any meaningful pay for the kind of qualifications you are looking for; at any rate, sure, they could hire either government employees or contracted consultants, and the exact same biases you suggest for volunteers would exist. Either (a) they would be hiring short term government employees for the job, who would either (1) lack any relevant experience, or (2) be coming from and hoping to return to the broadband industry, or (b) they would be hiring private consultants in the broadband field who have existing clients in the industry with direct interests.
Of course, they would seek to mitigate these problems with minimum qualification requirements and conflict of interest rules -- but they are applying the same kind of requirements to the volunteers, so that's no difference.
The only difference between the paid and volunteer cases is how much money you divert from the actual services to the people reviewing the applications.
You really think that educated volunteers are going to outnumber paid plants?
I think that the actual announcement sets out the same kind of rules that would be applied to paid employees or contractors doing this kind of work, both as regards qualifications and conflict rules, so I don't see how having volunteers makes it any worse than any other possible way of doing first line review (note, also, that contrary to the complaints of the broadband consulting-firm president quoted in TFA that seems upset that firm's like his aren't getting business from the government, the reviewers don't have the power to approve or reject applications.)
The Java VM was a good idea, but Sun never bothered to port other languages to it.
Well, except that in reality there are lots of implementations of non-Java languages for the JVM, several of which (Jython and JRuby, among others) have Sun resources behind them, and some of which are even Sun created (Fortress, JavaFX Script.) There were non-Java languages for the JVM before.NET existed.
It's 'a little scary' that volunteers will have the power to accept and reject broadband applications, said Craig Settles, an analyst and president of consulting firm Successful.com.
If Settles had read the NTIA announcement, he would have noted that volunteer reviewers will not have the power to accept and reject applications, but instead that instead their "evaluations will be an important factor considered by NTIA in determining whether to award grant funding". Either Settles didn't read the announcement and should have some idea what he is talking about before he shoots his mouth off, or he did read it and he's being deliberately dishonest. Settles then goes on to complain:
Volunteers may have limited expertise, or they may have biases that aren't evident to the NTIA, he said.
This is no more true of volunteers than paid reviewers; relevant to these issues, on the expertise issue, the announcement states: "To be considered as a reviewer you must have significant expertise and experience in at least one of the following areas: 1) the design, funding, construction, and operation of broadband networks or public computer centers; 2) broadband-related outreach, training, or education; and 3) innovative programs to increase the demand for broadband services. In addition you must agree to comply with Department of Commerce policies on conflict of interest and confidentiality." (emphasis added)
Essentially, this are the same kind of requirements that would be put into place for paid reviewers, but Settles real problem is revealed when he says this:
I think you'd want the best people stimulus money can acquire influencing who the winners are.
The real problem is that he is that Successful.com is a broadband consulting firm, and that the decision to seek volunteers rather than paid consultants for this task means less total business for broadband consulting firms resulting from the stimulus bill, and more for actual broadband services.
Is my POP client going to hand my login credentials to a Comcast server, if my email service's DNS does not resolve for some reason?
In theory, its possible, but it would require more than just the DNS redirection. It would also require the servers to which you are redirected to be running POP servers (or something that acted like them initially) on the usual POP port. Since Comcasts whole plan with this seems to be a sophisticated form of typosquatting to redirect web browsers to add pages, they probably aren't doing that (though they could, then accept any credentials you offered, and just dump spam to you over POP when you tried to collect email. I doubt they would, but it would be pretty much in line with what they are doing to HTTP.)
Because ISPs control every packet going over their networks, and while they enjoy most of the liability protections that go to common carrier is other fields, they experience very little of the kind of behavioral regulations that go with that status.
It might be somewhat more efficient to move the cow directly from farmer to farmer, but this intermediate stop at an auction house can't be that big an inconvenience, can it?
Sure, it can (especially if the place the cattle end up going is closer to where they came from than the auction house is to either). Probably more importantly, so can actually having and supporting an auction house capable of holding cattle auctions (cattle are large, live animals), even before considering transportation. So that adds a substantial transaction cost to auctioning cattle. If you could do it online with equal confidence, that would reduce the transaction costs substantially.
I wouldn't run an OS from a company who's business is knowing your consumer preferences
You might not, but, given that (while less successful than Google) Microsoft also sells ads (including search ads) and collects consumer preference data and uses it, the vast majority of the computing market obviously will. So I don't see that as big barrier to Google succeeding in the OS market.
The Design Patterns book is now over fifteen years old and it predates the Internet, Java, and XML
Not that it really matters, but the Design Patterns book just under 15 years old (published October of 1994), and it certainly doesn't predate the Internet (which is, if one dates from the adoption of the term as a term for the specific network of interlinked TCP/IP based networks that it still refers to, close to 25 years old) or even the World Wide Web(which is either a few months short of 19 years old, having first been implemented in late 1990, or 16 years old, dating either from the CERN announcement that the WWW would be free for everyone with no licensing fees or the introduction of NCSA Mosaic, both in 1993).
Remember, we're talking the slowest possible hardware above cell-phone-grade that we're talking about here. Big screen and keyboard, but essentially a cell-phone/PDA on the backend. I wouldn't be surprised if the browser is required to be full screen like on a cell.
I would be, since Chrome OS, while the initial platforms will be netbooks, appears, from the news coverage, to be intended for markets ranging from netbooks up through traditional laptops and desktops. And I'm not sure I'd characterize, say, an Atom-powered netbook or nettop as "essentially a cell-phone/PDA on the backend".
Further, there is a serious argument to be made about low-performance devices and the lack of desire to store sensitive / loosable information on them. Viruses + hardware failure + hardware upgrade means losing your data. While some people avidly setup backup strategies, it's applied with lesser diligence to lower-end devices.
Well, I think that depends on what you mean "lower end"; I'd expect a greater percentage of smartphone users have the phone's data backed up on a traditional desktop or laptop computer than the percentage of traditional desktop or laptop computer users that have that computer's data backed up elsewhere.
Oh, that's right, the word "nuclear" is too super-scary for the science-based environmentalists. Never mind that they actually are better for the environment than anything else.
They are certainly pretty good from the perspective of carbon emissions, which gets most of the attention right now due to climate change. OTOH, they are pretty much worse than any other form of power generation in terms of radioactive waste. Judging how good they are "for the environment" on an overall basis requires determining exactly how to weigh GHG emissions against radioactive waste against various kinds of accident risks against various other types of emissions, etc., all of which is highly contentious.
Anyhow, the main reason more reactors aren't being built in the US is liability concerns and the difficulty--even with government loan guarantees that are available specifically for nuclear projects--of reactor projects to secure financing, not succesful efforts by environmentalists to block them.
I am aware of Google Gears. But the Chrome OS, which is what this entire discussion is about, does not yet exist.
Google is unlikely to take an OS from "does not exist" to "full public release" in less a year (with "release open source code" even sooner), so given the mid-2010 announced release date and later-this-year plan for letting the code see the outside world, I suspect that Chrome OS exists in a fairly developed form already. But none of us (excluding Slashdotters who happen to work at Google) have yet seen it.
But shareholders may not be so keen on Google giving away something that consumes as much resources as an OS
There is a reason that when Google had its IPO, the shares had much less voting power than the shares held by its pre-IPO shareholders. Google has been designed to avoid the pressure for short-term results that plague public companies. (There still is pressure, because short-term results will affect the ability to secure capital for new ventures, but Google's management probably faces a lot less of this kind of pressure than that of most publicly trade companies.)
The easy way out would be to only distribute it to OEMs who aren't going to balk at paying for it.
Alternatively, they could, once it makes some inroads among users and developers as a free OS, sell commercial support (possibly including commercial versions with additional features, though contracted support itself is probably more important than extra features here) to enterprises, while keeping the main consumer version completely free.
So if the OS is the browser and it strongly guides the users to your applications what's the functional difference?
The legal difference is that whether it is illegal to leverage your position in one market to gain ground in another often depends on, in addition to the method used, whether or not your position in the first market is a monopoly.
Microsoft was not charged with "tying a browser to an OS", they were charged with (and convicted of) illegally leveraging their desktop OS monopoly to push out competition in the browser market by tying a browser to an OS and using various means to prevent other browsers from being distributed by OEMs with the OS.
Without the OS monopoly, there would have been no crime (the reason for this, is that without the monopoly, there would be real competitive alternatives to the OS, so consumers could avoid the lock-in created by Microsoft's tying efforts by going with one of the competing OS's.)
Right, but If we call this new OS, the "Google" OS, then we have to go back and call every other Linux distribution, "GNU" OSs.
Why? I would think that if we call a Linux distribution put together by Google that includes components beside the Linux kernel (whether developed in house by Google or open source components from third parties) selected by Google and marketed by them under the Chrome OS brand as a "Google OS" and as "Chrome OS", then we would call an OS with the Linux kernel and other components selected by, say, Canonical and marketed under the Ubuntu brand as a "Canonical OS" and as "Ubuntu". We wouldn't call it a "GNU OS" or a "Ruby OS" or a "MySQL OS", just because it includes open source components from those sources, just as we aren't calling "Google Chrome OS" names based on where it acquired third-party open-source components.
Sure, if GNU created its own Linux distribution (or, say, released the HURD), calling that a "GNU OS" would be analogous to calling Google Chrome OS a "Google OS", but that's a different story altogether.
To me, it sounds a bit like Chrome OS is an operating system where the browser is the OS. It's not yet clear whether Google expect all applications running on Chrome OS to be web applications. Let's suppose the answer is 'yes'...
In that case, perhaps they don't really need a windowing system at all. What if the graphical interface of Chrome OS is to be a web browser that displays itself as a single window in a simple frame buffer?
While I suspect that the assumption that the application model is going to be dominated by browser-rendered apps, I doubt they'll go "single window". I can very easily see something where Chrome is the only user-facing truly native application, but where, just as with desktop Chrome on conventional OS's, they fully support multiple windows, dragging tabs out to do make new windows (or dragging tabs in to collapse multiple windows into one), etc.
For netbooks, single-window might be sufficient, but it seems from the coverage very clear that Google sees netbooks just as a stepping stone, so I doubt very much that they are aiming this in a way that it will be just barely good enough for netbooks, and not suitable for anything else.
You still can't know that the browser will be able to deal with it. The browser could lie about its capabilities. The user could have disabled video support in the configuration. The user could be surfing through a proxy that renders the video tag inert.
If the browser is lying, it isn't an HTML5-compliant browser; if the user chooses not to allow video (or chooses to access the internet through a pathway that selectively filters video) that's outside of the scope of problem the spec is seeking to deal with. HTML5 exists to make possible portable (cross platform and cross [compliant] browser) web apps, using HTML+CSS+Javascript without plugins, and without different content for different browsers and platforms. Specifying at least one must-support codec supports that objective in a way that failing to do so does not, particularly if the mandatory codecs are free of patent restrictions (as otherwise, they pose a potential cost and licensing barrier to adoption of the standard.)
If a monolithic browser is such a good idea, why not a monolithic operating system?
The functionality that HTML5 provides is not equivalent to a "word processor" or similar apps. Its more analogous to basic networking, windowing, video, and sound capabilities that are, while often outside of the kernel, bundled features on most modern operating systems. The applications are the things on the web you access with the browser.
Now that they have payment model instructed too, why not expand it outside US aswell?
Probably because the scope of the agreement with copyright owners doesn't extend to use beyond the US; my understanding from what I've read about it is that it specifies a licensing fee that includes a portion of US revenues in exchange for allowing internet streaming of the music in the US.
Now Microsoft is estopped from going after people using c# and.net technologies.
Note, however, that promissory estoppel is generally not an absolute bar to asserting the underlying rights, its simply an equitable bar that a court may apply to limit attempts to assert the underlying rights to the extent necessary to prevent injustice, where there is good faith detrimental reliance on the promise.
Particularly, if Microsoft chose to clearly publicly renounce the "Community Promise", in general or with regard to a particular piece of software, any subsequent reliance on it would probably not provide a basis for asserting estoppel unless the relying party could prove that it was unaware of the renunciation.
Slashdot Mirror
You know, you could read the official government announcement of the volunteer opportunity linked in TFA, which specifies the prerequisites for volunteering.
You could read the announcement linked in TFA (or even the excerpt of it directly quoted in TFA), and realize that (contrary to the scare-mongering by the consulting-firm president also quoted in TFA) the volunteers will not be making decisions about applications, but writing up evaluations which will be referenced by the actual NTIA decisionmakers.
Wrong. Per the announcement linked in TFA, current employment in the field is not require, but "[t]o be considered as a reviewer you must have significant expertise and experience in at least one of the following areas: 1) the design, funding, construction, and operation of broadband networks or public computer centers; 2) broadband-related outreach, training, or education; and 3) innovative programs to increase the demand for broadband services." (emphasis added)
Indeed, being currently employed in the field probably makes it more difficult, since you have to abide by the Department of Commerce's conflict of interest rules; I'm not familiar with their particular rules, but certainly you'd be less likely to fall afoul of them if you didn't have any current direct interest in that market despite prior experience.
A couple hundred thousand wouldn't hire enough people at any meaningful pay for the kind of qualifications you are looking for; at any rate, sure, they could hire either government employees or contracted consultants, and the exact same biases you suggest for volunteers would exist. Either (a) they would be hiring short term government employees for the job, who would either (1) lack any relevant experience, or (2) be coming from and hoping to return to the broadband industry, or (b) they would be hiring private consultants in the broadband field who have existing clients in the industry with direct interests.
Of course, they would seek to mitigate these problems with minimum qualification requirements and conflict of interest rules -- but they are applying the same kind of requirements to the volunteers, so that's no difference.
The only difference between the paid and volunteer cases is how much money you divert from the actual services to the people reviewing the applications.
I think that the actual announcement sets out the same kind of rules that would be applied to paid employees or contractors doing this kind of work, both as regards qualifications and conflict rules, so I don't see how having volunteers makes it any worse than any other possible way of doing first line review (note, also, that contrary to the complaints of the broadband consulting-firm president quoted in TFA that seems upset that firm's like his aren't getting business from the government, the reviewers don't have the power to approve or reject applications.)
Well, except that in reality there are lots of implementations of non-Java languages for the JVM, several of which (Jython and JRuby, among others) have Sun resources behind them, and some of which are even Sun created (Fortress, JavaFX Script.) There were non-Java languages for the JVM before .NET existed.
If Settles had read the NTIA announcement, he would have noted that volunteer reviewers will not have the power to accept and reject applications, but instead that instead their "evaluations will be an important factor considered by NTIA in determining whether to award grant funding". Either Settles didn't read the announcement and should have some idea what he is talking about before he shoots his mouth off, or he did read it and he's being deliberately dishonest. Settles then goes on to complain:
This is no more true of volunteers than paid reviewers; relevant to these issues, on the expertise issue, the announcement states: "To be considered as a reviewer you must have significant expertise and experience in at least one of the following areas: 1) the design, funding, construction, and operation of broadband networks or public computer centers; 2) broadband-related outreach, training, or education; and 3) innovative programs to increase the demand for broadband services. In addition you must agree to comply with Department of Commerce policies on conflict of interest and confidentiality." (emphasis added)
Essentially, this are the same kind of requirements that would be put into place for paid reviewers, but Settles real problem is revealed when he says this:
The real problem is that he is that Successful.com is a broadband consulting firm, and that the decision to seek volunteers rather than paid consultants for this task means less total business for broadband consulting firms resulting from the stimulus bill, and more for actual broadband services.
In theory, its possible, but it would require more than just the DNS redirection. It would also require the servers to which you are redirected to be running POP servers (or something that acted like them initially) on the usual POP port. Since Comcasts whole plan with this seems to be a sophisticated form of typosquatting to redirect web browsers to add pages, they probably aren't doing that (though they could, then accept any credentials you offered, and just dump spam to you over POP when you tried to collect email. I doubt they would, but it would be pretty much in line with what they are doing to HTTP.)
Because ISPs control every packet going over their networks, and while they enjoy most of the liability protections that go to common carrier is other fields, they experience very little of the kind of behavioral regulations that go with that status.
Which is a great deal, if you are a major ISP.
Sure, it can (especially if the place the cattle end up going is closer to where they came from than the auction house is to either). Probably more importantly, so can actually having and supporting an auction house capable of holding cattle auctions (cattle are large, live animals), even before considering transportation. So that adds a substantial transaction cost to auctioning cattle. If you could do it online with equal confidence, that would reduce the transaction costs substantially.
You might not, but, given that (while less successful than Google) Microsoft also sells ads (including search ads) and collects consumer preference data and uses it, the vast majority of the computing market obviously will. So I don't see that as big barrier to Google succeeding in the OS market.
Maybe, but browsers that don't comply with the spec aren't within the scope of what the spec is attempting to address.
Wrong. Bill Gates is still with Microsoft in his official capacity as Chairman of the Board of Directors.
Its been more than a year since he stopped working full-time at Microsoft, which isn't the same thing.
Not that it really matters, but the Design Patterns book just under 15 years old (published October of 1994), and it certainly doesn't predate the Internet (which is, if one dates from the adoption of the term as a term for the specific network of interlinked TCP/IP based networks that it still refers to, close to 25 years old) or even the World Wide Web(which is either a few months short of 19 years old, having first been implemented in late 1990, or 16 years old, dating either from the CERN announcement that the WWW would be free for everyone with no licensing fees or the introduction of NCSA Mosaic, both in 1993).
Because the target of Chrome OS is mainly people who aren't in the Linux (or BSD) world.
I would be, since Chrome OS, while the initial platforms will be netbooks, appears, from the news coverage, to be intended for markets ranging from netbooks up through traditional laptops and desktops. And I'm not sure I'd characterize, say, an Atom-powered netbook or nettop as "essentially a cell-phone/PDA on the backend".
Well, I think that depends on what you mean "lower end"; I'd expect a greater percentage of smartphone users have the phone's data backed up on a traditional desktop or laptop computer than the percentage of traditional desktop or laptop computer users that have that computer's data backed up elsewhere.
They are certainly pretty good from the perspective of carbon emissions, which gets most of the attention right now due to climate change. OTOH, they are pretty much worse than any other form of power generation in terms of radioactive waste. Judging how good they are "for the environment" on an overall basis requires determining exactly how to weigh GHG emissions against radioactive waste against various kinds of accident risks against various other types of emissions, etc., all of which is highly contentious.
Anyhow, the main reason more reactors aren't being built in the US is liability concerns and the difficulty--even with government loan guarantees that are available specifically for nuclear projects--of reactor projects to secure financing, not succesful efforts by environmentalists to block them.
Google is unlikely to take an OS from "does not exist" to "full public release" in less a year (with "release open source code" even sooner), so given the mid-2010 announced release date and later-this-year plan for letting the code see the outside world, I suspect that Chrome OS exists in a fairly developed form already. But none of us (excluding Slashdotters who happen to work at Google) have yet seen it.
And the code it uses to do that is, in fact, a windowing system.
There is a reason that when Google had its IPO, the shares had much less voting power than the shares held by its pre-IPO shareholders. Google has been designed to avoid the pressure for short-term results that plague public companies. (There still is pressure, because short-term results will affect the ability to secure capital for new ventures, but Google's management probably faces a lot less of this kind of pressure than that of most publicly trade companies.)
Alternatively, they could, once it makes some inroads among users and developers as a free OS, sell commercial support (possibly including commercial versions with additional features, though contracted support itself is probably more important than extra features here) to enterprises, while keeping the main consumer version completely free.
The legal difference is that whether it is illegal to leverage your position in one market to gain ground in another often depends on, in addition to the method used, whether or not your position in the first market is a monopoly.
Microsoft was not charged with "tying a browser to an OS", they were charged with (and convicted of) illegally leveraging their desktop OS monopoly to push out competition in the browser market by tying a browser to an OS and using various means to prevent other browsers from being distributed by OEMs with the OS.
Without the OS monopoly, there would have been no crime (the reason for this, is that without the monopoly, there would be real competitive alternatives to the OS, so consumers could avoid the lock-in created by Microsoft's tying efforts by going with one of the competing OS's.)
Why? I would think that if we call a Linux distribution put together by Google that includes components beside the Linux kernel (whether developed in house by Google or open source components from third parties) selected by Google and marketed by them under the Chrome OS brand as a "Google OS" and as "Chrome OS", then we would call an OS with the Linux kernel and other components selected by, say, Canonical and marketed under the Ubuntu brand as a "Canonical OS" and as "Ubuntu". We wouldn't call it a "GNU OS" or a "Ruby OS" or a "MySQL OS", just because it includes open source components from those sources, just as we aren't calling "Google Chrome OS" names based on where it acquired third-party open-source components.
Sure, if GNU created its own Linux distribution (or, say, released the HURD), calling that a "GNU OS" would be analogous to calling Google Chrome OS a "Google OS", but that's a different story altogether.
While I suspect that the assumption that the application model is going to be dominated by browser-rendered apps, I doubt they'll go "single window". I can very easily see something where Chrome is the only user-facing truly native application, but where, just as with desktop Chrome on conventional OS's, they fully support multiple windows, dragging tabs out to do make new windows (or dragging tabs in to collapse multiple windows into one), etc.
For netbooks, single-window might be sufficient, but it seems from the coverage very clear that Google sees netbooks just as a stepping stone, so I doubt very much that they are aiming this in a way that it will be just barely good enough for netbooks, and not suitable for anything else.
If the browser is lying, it isn't an HTML5-compliant browser; if the user chooses not to allow video (or chooses to access the internet through a pathway that selectively filters video) that's outside of the scope of problem the spec is seeking to deal with. HTML5 exists to make possible portable (cross platform and cross [compliant] browser) web apps, using HTML+CSS+Javascript without plugins, and without different content for different browsers and platforms. Specifying at least one must-support codec supports that objective in a way that failing to do so does not, particularly if the mandatory codecs are free of patent restrictions (as otherwise, they pose a potential cost and licensing barrier to adoption of the standard.)
The functionality that HTML5 provides is not equivalent to a "word processor" or similar apps. Its more analogous to basic networking, windowing, video, and sound capabilities that are, while often outside of the kernel, bundled features on most modern operating systems. The applications are the things on the web you access with the browser.
Probably because the scope of the agreement with copyright owners doesn't extend to use beyond the US; my understanding from what I've read about it is that it specifies a licensing fee that includes a portion of US revenues in exchange for allowing internet streaming of the music in the US.
Note, however, that promissory estoppel is generally not an absolute bar to asserting the underlying rights, its simply an equitable bar that a court may apply to limit attempts to assert the underlying rights to the extent necessary to prevent injustice, where there is good faith detrimental reliance on the promise.
Particularly, if Microsoft chose to clearly publicly renounce the "Community Promise", in general or with regard to a particular piece of software, any subsequent reliance on it would probably not provide a basis for asserting estoppel unless the relying party could prove that it was unaware of the renunciation.