To be patented, something has to be both novel and inventive. The definition of inventive is that it should not be "obvious to someone skilled in the art". But it seems that the trend in the patent process has been towards granting patents where the inventive step is both small and questionable, with the onus being on the infringer to bring a case as to why the patent should be struck down.
This is where I have a problem. The onus ought to be on the patent examiner who is granting the patent to ensure that the invention is sufficiently inventive, but instead they seem to spend all their time looking for prior art - earlier patents which might predate the one under examination (and the inventor has to argue the case as to why the prior art cited isn't relevant).
The way the system works now, a company with deep pockets can file numerous trivial patents, and anyone who is working in the same area *has* to go to law in order to carry on what they were doing all along. If the patent holder chooses to fight for a long time, then the plaintiff will run out of money. Acquiring patents is cheap relative to the legal costs of taking them out. And you have no option - if you don't successfully take the patent out you either have to stop what you've been doing (perhaps for some time) or face damages which will be ruinous.
The final twist in the tail is proving that you did something before the person who is patenting it - there seem to be only two ways to establish that proof, either you publish a paper about what you did, or you file a patent yourself. It is very hard to prove prior art by any other means. So you can end up with the farcical situation where you get stopped from doing something which you considered too trivial to patent by someone else filing a patent which takes precedence as prior art.
Confused? You will be. Patents have a whole subculture of their own in law and precedent, and they are 99% to do with law and 1% to do with technology.
The main problem I saw with the ".com's" was their business plans. The typical.com would secure its first tranche of venture capital - say $2m - and firstly earmark half of it for marketting. Of what was left, over half of that would be earmarked for content development. As that got overspent, the budget for technology would get eroded and they would end up looking to lease as much of their equipment as possible rather than buy. They would get the next tranche of venture capital as they went live, which would be consumed in further marketing and servicing their leasing costs. They would then find that their income stream didn't even cover leasing costs, let alone repay the capital, and then the money would run out.
It is pure coincidence that the.com frenzy and the GNU/Linux frenzy came at the same time, and went through the discovery-hype-overexpectation-disillusionment-rea lism cycle at the same time, much as the railways did in Victorian Britain. And Internet Business and Free Software have both now arrived at the point where the overexpectation bubble has burst, speculators have lost money, and now lots of realistic people are going to settle down to making decent (but not indecent) livings out of it, as people have been doing for over 100 years with the railways.
Even with a reference application (oracle 8.1.6) on a reference OS (Solaris 8), the patch levels for the 64 -bit version were 3 revs behind those for the 32-bit version when I last looked. What bothered me was that the bug I'd run into was fixed in the 32-bit version but still there in the 64-bit version. Guess which version I ran.
What I found interesting was the advice on finding out what customers are doing. A sales rep who's doing his job properly should have already negotiated walkabouts in machine rooms, and should have a relationship with his customers such that he knows what's there, and doesn't need to go trawling.
But the interest in odd little boxes doing specific jobs is Microsoft seeing their enemy absolutely spot on. Hell, in a previous job I put in an "experimental" DHCP server running RedHat 5.0 on a redundant 486, and two years later there were 1,000 users left dangling one morning because of a power loss - the first time its use impinged on the users. This sort of "cupboardware" frightens Microsoft, because it is cheap, effective and hassle free, and they don't want the guys further up the management tree to get the idea that anything in IT can be cheap, effective and hassle free.
Dunstan
Euro - not such a new currency
on
The Euro
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· Score: 1
While the Euro notes and coins have been issued today, it has been a de-facto currency since Jan 99 when the exchange rates of the participating countries were fixed. At that point the interest rates across the Euro zone was effectively fixed, and the likes of Germany and Greece had their economies tied together. All that has happened today is that the coinage has caught up with the economics.
One of the concerns is the existence of very high denomination notes (up to E500). Some of the Eurozone countries (such as Germany) have a tradition of large purchases being made in cash, and lobbied for high denomination notes. Of course, they will be ideal for drug dealers and other ciminals.
Still, I wish the Eurozone luck, and look forward to seeing which is the first country to either fall off or get chucked out - my money would be on Ireland where booming growth will lead to rampant inflation if they can't change their interest rate to suit.
I find it hard to take an award seriously where it is given for establishing a paradigm. It was Linus' use of the GPL for the Linux kernel which was the major step, and for putting the missing piece into the GNU project.
I think this is the wrong prize to the wrong person for the wrong reason. The course of free software would definitely have been different without Linus, but this smacks of "Linux Torvalds, the inventor of the Linux Operating System". Still, perhaps Linus will be more diplomatic about getting an award for establishing a paradigm than RMS would have been...
Guys, reality check here. This is a consultation document written by a civil servant. At the same time we have Tony Blair schmoozing with Bill Gates in order to look good. Hell, the National Health Service recently announced a huge (hundred of millions IIRC) deal with Microsoft for a "unified buying scheme", and one of the sweeteners was that Gates would come and address a conference on IT in the NHS. You have to remember that the UK government is motivated largely by vanity, and that a lot of excellent civil servants have been sidelined because they upset that vanity.
During the last election campaign Blair paid a visit to Gates, who was in the UK promoting XP. It was very hard to see who was exploiting who for their own purposes.
Although this is a significant bit of consultation from within the government's paid service, there are much weightier reasons why we might end up with a government here which embraces free software - like Gates forgetting Blair's birthday or something. While govenment agencies require submissions to be in "industry standard" formats (i.e. Word or Excel documents) we've got an awfully long way to go.
Obligatory disclaimer - I'm a British Conservative, which influences my view on Blair's Britain a smidge.
No, the internet is totally international, but users, content providers, ISPs are all going to be subject to law somewhere. Sometimes this is fairly sound and sensible (e.g. paedophile rings which have been cracked by analysing their internet traffic patterns, but prosecuted on the basis of information stored on their disc drives). Sometimes it isn't (a UK ISP was fined for failing to cancel a Usenet posting which was deemed libelous - the court took the view that they were publishing Usenet rather than a carrier).
The internet may be international, like the sea, but the actors in the network, be they content providers, ISPs or users, are somewhere, and can be subject to law wherever they are. Your views on the law may influence where you decide to live.
If I spend $1,000 on proprietary software in the US, and import it across the wire, I'm still subject to paying UK import duty/VAT even though it's not coming through a port, and the retailer is still subject to sales tax wherever (s)he sold it. If I then make an illegal copy of that software and pass it to my friend, I'm still subject to action under UK law for breach of copyright.
Similarly, if I decode a DVD and make a copy of the content, then DMCA or no DMCA, it's still a copyright breach the same as if I copy a music CD onto a CD-R.
It seems as if the legal head-up-arse syndrome has come from an inability or unwillingness to tackle the subject of copyright infringement at the point where it happens, and instead to try to use law against the wrong targets. Remember, before CD-R the record companies were trying to get a levy introduced onto blank cassettes on the assumption that blank cassettes were only ever used for illegal copying - i.e. to levy for an unproven offence.
What's new isn't the need for law, or even the applicability of law, it's the newfound increase in difficulty of its enforcement. IMHO, there is a particular onus on lawmakers when they make law which forbids something which I can legitimately do today - I need a higher level of proof that such law is necessary and will be effective. Where such law is being introduced for my security then if the case is properly put I will consent to that loss if liberty (e.g. drink driving laws). Where such law is being introduced for someone's commercial benefit (e.g. the banning of reverse engineering or decoding) I don't find that the burden of proof has been met.
Your position sounds deeply troubling to me. Knowing the intricacies of the network in the office where you work shouldn't be grounds for either security or raises.
If you wanted to demonstrate maturity then you would look at getting yourself *out* of the position where your value to the place you work is based on your knowledge of the intricacies of their networks.
What does this mean? It means writing documents, drawing schematics etc. So that they can hire in an experienced network admin and, using your guides to the peculiarities of their setup, someone else who is skilled in the art can then manage the network as well as you can.
You can then use a suitably redacted version of this documentation as an exhibit to go with your resume - a future potential employer will see this as a much more valuable skill than being a network jockey in a particular environment.
You also need to be careful about using offers from other companies to get leverage on your current employer, because:
a) they won't be happy about it - they are only coughing up because you have ransom value
b) you'll find it harder to get potential employers to take you seriously if you've got a track record of turning offers down. They'll assume you're using them as a bargaining chip again, and won't play.
Not a fast track, but for those who are serious about getting a degree the Open University is geared towards those who need to study at their own pace. Dunno how it works in the US, but in GB the Open University gives opportunity to lots of people who other wise wouldn't have it - by providing them with a sound study framework, but enabling them to work to their own circumstances.
Check out http://www.open.edu or http://www.open.ac.uk
Defections from MS office to OpenOffice (probably badged as StafOffice 6) will be the most significant thing to happen next year in both private business and government (national and local, around the world). Why will this happen?
1) Not running Windows on the desktop seriously limits the vendor software that can be run on a desktop.
2) Office is now as expensive, if not more so, than Windows.
3) StarOffice has a big name (Sun) behind it, so the corporation can feel that "the CEO can call Scott".
4) If a big corporation or government starts exchanging documents in StarOffice/OpenOffice formats, their suppliers can meet this requirement without spending cash. Sun do this now.
Why, when most corporations employ loads of accountants to minimise the tax they pay, don't they put any effort into reducing their Microsoft Tax bills?
If a decent proportion of those of us who use free software were to leave some money to free software organisations in our wills then it would generate a significant income stream. Many charities get most of their funding through legacies from those who've benefited from them (e.g. Macmillan Cancer Nurses), and perhaps we should bequest money to, for example, the Free Software Foundation if we've benefited from free software through our lifetimes.
If you haven't got a will, then your New Year's Resolution should be to make one, and to remember free software in it. Statistically, sadly, a fair number of you who are reading this message will die in 2002, so if a good proportion of us make bequests to free software bodies then they will get quite a bit of income next year.
The programme you mention (Come to your Senses) is a prime example of the BBC creating a middlebrow personality (Adam Hart Davies) and then using them to brand programme series (Starting with Local Heroes - which both I and my children enjoyed, through What the Romans did for us... What the Victorians did...). They then wheel out their "personality" and use them as a spoiler against another programme which is standing on its content.
But then they have a pretty cynical approach to viewers anyway - someone will decide to kill off a popular programme (e.g. Mastermind) and take a familiar pattern. First you move it around the schedule - if it's a programme enjoyed by older viewers then you should shift it to a late evening slot after they've gone to bed. Then you shift it to a different night. Then you miss a couple of weeks for some sporting event, so that people who make a point of watching the programme don't know whether it's on or not. This should lose you enough viewers that you can say "finished due to falling audiences".
I pay for the BBC (which isn't state funded - it's funded by the Television Licence which you have to have at any address where there's a television) and moan constantly about the dumming down that goes on there year after year. But (as they so smugly keep on reminding us) the funding mechanism *does* enable them to be more speculative both with content, where the occasional gem surfaces, and technically.
They were very early with teletext services (and today the close captioning still runs via the teletext service). They were early with broadcasting using Nicam. Hell, they were early with broadcasting television at all. They were later than the US with Colour television which is A Good Thing as we run on PAL rather than Never Twice the Same Colour (NTSC - yuk).
They were also pretty early with providing internet services - and it was copyright rather than technology which stopped them putting teletext onto the web/gopher much earlier. They are proud (and yes, a bit smug too) about the amount of emailed listener feedback they get from around the world.
My big fear is that they spend a fortune on external consultants - not that the money is wasted, but that the MacKinsey style suits of the world will advise the senior management at the BBC to climb into bed with, for example, MicroSoft for content delivery. They have a good track record over the last few years of "outsourcing" some absolute jewels of internal resources (the library services, the music library services, the pronounciation unit), and losing the skill and expertise which has been built over more than fifty years.
The BBC seem to be particularly receptive to opinion from overseas listeners, so if you want to remind them that enabling free (whether beer or speech, but preferably speech) technology will increase their listener base in the developing world, then that is a good point to make.
The big flaw is almost everybody thinks that artificial intelligence ought to be like human intelligence. This isn't about numbers of neurons, or their strange interconnections, or about Turing tests, but about the strange things which go on in our brains which are impossible to model. Yesterday I was writing the name William in the condensation in the bathroom (my son Willam, 7, was in the bath), and having put the "W" with the points of the V's rounded rather than angular William remarked to me "That looks just like a bottom". I can't imagine an artificial version of that sort of intelligence - even matching a seven year old's ability to recognise the visual similarity (of a stylised representation of the real object), recognise that it was funny and recognise that it was an appropriate moment to crack the joke.
Instead we've used the concepts from AI work and applied them elsewhere, as fuzzy logic and neural networks. Some of this statistical logic has been seriously useful to us.
Back to 2001 - the part which would seem unbelieveable both then and in 1972 at the time of the last Apollo moon shot is that thirty years later we wouldn't have sent men back to the moon. Our space exploration is still at the level of "lob some instruments at Mars and hope they land the right way up".
Dunstan
Re:Billion citizens != Billion Internet Users
on
The Internet Shifts East
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Erm, I don't expect the growth in internet usage in China to be based on individuals buying windoze PeeCees and using dial up access. Expect it to be based around some sort of appliances, probably in communal facilities in small towns. Remember the small town US mayor who in the early days of telephony confidently predicted "someday *every* town in America will have a telephone". Remember, too, that a couple of days ago we were discussing how the uptake of software libre in China is significantly higher than in the West.
Outlook doesn't count - they haven't bundled it into the OS yet.
The bugs in IE don't count either as Felten showed Judge Jackson how to remove it from his Windows machine. Even though it's an integral part of the OS. Allegedly. Confused - you will be.
I think we can all start from the premise that these statistics are:
a) flawed
b) backward looking
What would be more interesting is some insight into where browsing is headed. For example, there will be some sites which will attract mobile traffic much more readily than others - traffic updates, or train running info, or today's tube (as in London Underground) breakdown. Then we are going to see amounts of traffic from appliances such as set-top boxes.
But then I suppose "We produce rubbish statistics" won't be as headline grabbing as "You Linux folks are all losers".
I first used KDE in the pre version 1 betas, and the look and feel hasn't changed much since then. This is A Good Thing, because it means they got it right in the first place. When I first tried out KDE the current state of the art in unix desktops was CDE. When I first saw KDE my view (and that of my then colleagues) was "OK, that's the X desktop sorted, now let's move on". Since then most of the change has been under the bonnet (hood), enabling applications running under KDE to play nicely together, together with new applications which use this functionality (Konqueror, Koffice).
It is a true tribute to KDE that a major version change doesn't look or feel much different.
I believe there are some (many even) within Microsoft who want to see improvements, but there is a fundamental conflict between presenting Windows as being a GUI administered simple OS and explaining that a server administrator needs expertise and experience.
Me, my expertise is in Solaris/SunOS, and I've won it over ten or more years. I come across people in this field who have a variety of levels of expertise, but those whose knowledge is superficial can't get away with presenting themselves as experts. I've dealt with a variety of Windows SA's who vary from excellent (often with Unix backgrounds), who know how to manage DLLs and hack config files, through to those who can't understand how to allocate subnetted IP addresses.
It's true that many Windows security problems are related to the poor level of expertise of the SA's, but MS are guilty of throwing mud (and FUD) at other OS's as "difficult to administer" when what they really mean is "poor SA's can't hide as easily".
I have respect for IT professionals who are good at their jobs, be they Unix, storage, networking, security or Windows. I have no respect for charlatans, of whom there are plenty in every field. Through the MCSE programme Microsoft is complicit with these charlatans, most of whom don't even know what they don't know (which is particularly dangerous).
A Solaris machine with an out-of-the box OS installation is totally unsuitable to be put facing the Internet, as is a Windows machine. Both Sun and Microsoft provide good material about running secure installations. The difference is that Microsoft have promoted a culture of flimsy sysadmin.
1) The last time I was on the job market I always submitted my resume in both MSWord *and* plain text - which would allow both the MS free and the PHB to read it in their prefered format. Remember, when you submit your resume you're selling, and the person who you want to have read it is buying.
2) A requirement from any *public* body for items to be submitted in a proprietary format is effectively the state using its coercion to benefit a private company. Rather like the college putting a sign on the entrance saying "only Ford cars may be parked on campus".
3) A semantics peeve - piracy is a bloody and violent crime which is still widespread in some parts of the world, and which often results in the death of its victims. The term "illegal copying" is more accurate
Well, given the discussion about KWord's use of frames, I can't see that it will be that simple to import KWord into a non frame aware package.
Where things should be better is where there's a closer overlap in functionality between different packages. The first step - where we are now - is to have office packages working on *published* file formats. Following on, a degree of component sharing would make sense (as with the Gecko engine).
At this point the benefit of using free software kicks in with a vengeance, as interoperability issues are of interest to *both* parties rather than a cat and mouse game based around reverse engineering. Extending Bob Young's analogy, you would then find Ford helping BMW to transplant in their engine, rather than suing them for cutting through the welds which hold the bonnet (hood) shut.
Right now Microsoft's most valuable asset is probably the huge and growing base of documents in proprietary file formats, a pernicious form of enslavement. Our blow for freedom must be the use of open formats such as plain text and comma separated lists.
Me, I use Magicpoint (now bundled with RedHat7.2, so you don't need to compile it yourself). I use it instead of PowerPoint, so in that sense it replaces it.
Clearly it *doesn't* replace powerpoint in having a GUI based composition facility and IMHO this is A Good Thing. Most documents I write in plain text in emacs, and if a PHB wants it in a different format I'll do format jockeying as a separate exercise after the content is done.
Magicpoint fits in with this very well. I can put down the visual content and presenter's notes into a single text file, and then add markup for the slides (in the presentation itself you add generalised markup, and then have an imported file which maps generalised markup to rendering markup). When you print out the text file, you have the slide content and presenter's notes together in the same source file which you will be using when you present. And even a big presentation won't be bigger than a few kilobytes.
It's *much* faster than using PowerPoint. For this reason you should make sure that your PHB continues to use PP, so she has less time to spend interfering with your work.
Slashdot Mirror
I still laugh at the idea of mixing gene splicing with steganography - "The Pigeon *is* the Message"
Dunstan
To be patented, something has to be both novel and inventive. The definition of inventive is that it should not be "obvious to someone skilled in the art". But it seems that the trend in the patent process has been towards granting patents where the inventive step is both small and questionable, with the onus being on the infringer to bring a case as to why the patent should be struck down.
This is where I have a problem. The onus ought to be on the patent examiner who is granting the patent to ensure that the invention is sufficiently inventive, but instead they seem to spend all their time looking for prior art - earlier patents which might predate the one under examination (and the inventor has to argue the case as to why the prior art cited isn't relevant).
The way the system works now, a company with deep pockets can file numerous trivial patents, and anyone who is working in the same area *has* to go to law in order to carry on what they were doing all along. If the patent holder chooses to fight for a long time, then the plaintiff will run out of money. Acquiring patents is cheap relative to the legal costs of taking them out. And you have no option - if you don't successfully take the patent out you either have to stop what you've been doing (perhaps for some time) or face damages which will be ruinous.
The final twist in the tail is proving that you did something before the person who is patenting it - there seem to be only two ways to establish that proof, either you publish a paper about what you did, or you file a patent yourself. It is very hard to prove prior art by any other means. So you can end up with the farcical situation where you get stopped from doing something which you considered too trivial to patent by someone else filing a patent which takes precedence as prior art.
Confused? You will be. Patents have a whole subculture of their own in law and precedent, and they are 99% to do with law and 1% to do with technology.
Dunstan
The main problem I saw with the ".com's" was their business plans. The typical .com would secure its first tranche of venture capital - say $2m - and firstly earmark half of it for marketting. Of what was left, over half of that would be earmarked for content development. As that got overspent, the budget for technology would get eroded and they would end up looking to lease as much of their equipment as possible rather than buy. They would get the next tranche of venture capital as they went live, which would be consumed in further marketing and servicing their leasing costs. They would then find that their income stream didn't even cover leasing costs, let alone repay the capital, and then the money would run out.
.com frenzy and the GNU/Linux frenzy came at the same time, and went through the discovery-hype-overexpectation-disillusionment-rea lism cycle at the same time, much as the railways did in Victorian Britain. And Internet Business and Free Software have both now arrived at the point where the overexpectation bubble has burst, speculators have lost money, and now lots of realistic people are going to settle down to making decent (but not indecent) livings out of it, as people have been doing for over 100 years with the railways.
It is pure coincidence that the
Dunstan
Even with a reference application (oracle 8.1.6) on a reference OS (Solaris 8), the patch levels for the 64 -bit version were 3 revs behind those for the 32-bit version when I last looked. What bothered me was that the bug I'd run into was fixed in the 32-bit version but still there in the 64-bit version. Guess which version I ran.
Dunstan
What I found interesting was the advice on finding out what customers are doing. A sales rep who's doing his job properly should have already negotiated walkabouts in machine rooms, and should have a relationship with his customers such that he knows what's there, and doesn't need to go trawling.
But the interest in odd little boxes doing specific jobs is Microsoft seeing their enemy absolutely spot on. Hell, in a previous job I put in an "experimental" DHCP server running RedHat 5.0 on a redundant 486, and two years later there were 1,000 users left dangling one morning because of a power loss - the first time its use impinged on the users. This sort of "cupboardware" frightens Microsoft, because it is cheap, effective and hassle free, and they don't want the guys further up the management tree to get the idea that anything in IT can be cheap, effective and hassle free.
Dunstan
While the Euro notes and coins have been issued today, it has been a de-facto currency since Jan 99 when the exchange rates of the participating countries were fixed. At that point the interest rates across the Euro zone was effectively fixed, and the likes of Germany and Greece had their economies tied together. All that has happened today is that the coinage has caught up with the economics.
One of the concerns is the existence of very high denomination notes (up to E500). Some of the Eurozone countries (such as Germany) have a tradition of large purchases being made in cash, and lobbied for high denomination notes. Of course, they will be ideal for drug dealers and other ciminals.
Still, I wish the Eurozone luck, and look forward to seeing which is the first country to either fall off or get chucked out - my money would be on Ireland where booming growth will lead to rampant inflation if they can't change their interest rate to suit.
Dunstan
I find it hard to take an award seriously where it is given for establishing a paradigm. It was Linus' use of the GPL for the Linux kernel which was the major step, and for putting the missing piece into the GNU project.
...
I think this is the wrong prize to the wrong person for the wrong reason. The course of free software would definitely have been different without Linus, but this smacks of "Linux Torvalds, the inventor of the Linux Operating System". Still, perhaps Linus will be more diplomatic about getting an award for establishing a paradigm than RMS would have been
Dunstan
Guys, reality check here. This is a consultation document written by a civil servant. At the same time we have Tony Blair schmoozing with Bill Gates in order to look good. Hell, the National Health Service recently announced a huge (hundred of millions IIRC) deal with Microsoft for a "unified buying scheme", and one of the sweeteners was that Gates would come and address a conference on IT in the NHS. You have to remember that the UK government is motivated largely by vanity, and that a lot of excellent civil servants have been sidelined because they upset that vanity.
During the last election campaign Blair paid a visit to Gates, who was in the UK promoting XP. It was very hard to see who was exploiting who for their own purposes.
Although this is a significant bit of consultation from within the government's paid service, there are much weightier reasons why we might end up with a government here which embraces free software - like Gates forgetting Blair's birthday or something. While govenment agencies require submissions to be in "industry standard" formats (i.e. Word or Excel documents) we've got an awfully long way to go.
Obligatory disclaimer - I'm a British Conservative, which influences my view on Blair's Britain a smidge.
Dunstan
No, the internet is totally international, but users, content providers, ISPs are all going to be subject to law somewhere. Sometimes this is fairly sound and sensible (e.g. paedophile rings which have been cracked by analysing their internet traffic patterns, but prosecuted on the basis of information stored on their disc drives). Sometimes it isn't (a UK ISP was fined for failing to cancel a Usenet posting which was deemed libelous - the court took the view that they were publishing Usenet rather than a carrier).
The internet may be international, like the sea, but the actors in the network, be they content providers, ISPs or users, are somewhere, and can be subject to law wherever they are. Your views on the law may influence where you decide to live.
If I spend $1,000 on proprietary software in the US, and import it across the wire, I'm still subject to paying UK import duty/VAT even though it's not coming through a port, and the retailer is still subject to sales tax wherever (s)he sold it. If I then make an illegal copy of that software and pass it to my friend, I'm still subject to action under UK law for breach of copyright.
Similarly, if I decode a DVD and make a copy of the content, then DMCA or no DMCA, it's still a copyright breach the same as if I copy a music CD onto a CD-R.
It seems as if the legal head-up-arse syndrome has come from an inability or unwillingness to tackle the subject of copyright infringement at the point where it happens, and instead to try to use law against the wrong targets. Remember, before CD-R the record companies were trying to get a levy introduced onto blank cassettes on the assumption that blank cassettes were only ever used for illegal copying - i.e. to levy for an unproven offence.
What's new isn't the need for law, or even the applicability of law, it's the newfound increase in difficulty of its enforcement. IMHO, there is a particular onus on lawmakers when they make law which forbids something which I can legitimately do today - I need a higher level of proof that such law is necessary and will be effective. Where such law is being introduced for my security then if the case is properly put I will consent to that loss if liberty (e.g. drink driving laws). Where such law is being introduced for someone's commercial benefit (e.g. the banning of reverse engineering or decoding) I don't find that the burden of proof has been met.
Dunstan
Your position sounds deeply troubling to me. Knowing the intricacies of the network in the office where you work shouldn't be grounds for either security or raises.
If you wanted to demonstrate maturity then you would look at getting yourself *out* of the position where your value to the place you work is based on your knowledge of the intricacies of their networks.
What does this mean? It means writing documents, drawing schematics etc. So that they can hire in an experienced network admin and, using your guides to the peculiarities of their setup, someone else who is skilled in the art can then manage the network as well as you can.
You can then use a suitably redacted version of this documentation as an exhibit to go with your resume - a future potential employer will see this as a much more valuable skill than being a network jockey in a particular environment.
You also need to be careful about using offers from other companies to get leverage on your current employer, because:
a) they won't be happy about it - they are only coughing up because you have ransom value
b) you'll find it harder to get potential employers to take you seriously if you've got a track record of turning offers down. They'll assume you're using them as a bargaining chip again, and won't play.
Dunstan
Not a fast track, but for those who are serious about getting a degree the Open University is geared towards those who need to study at their own pace. Dunno how it works in the US, but in GB the Open University gives opportunity to lots of people who other wise wouldn't have it - by providing them with a sound study framework, but enabling them to work to their own circumstances.
Check out http://www.open.edu or http://www.open.ac.uk
Dunstan
Defections from MS office to OpenOffice (probably badged as StafOffice 6) will be the most significant thing to happen next year in both private business and government (national and local, around the world). Why will this happen?
1) Not running Windows on the desktop seriously limits the vendor software that can be run on a desktop.
2) Office is now as expensive, if not more so, than Windows.
3) StarOffice has a big name (Sun) behind it, so the corporation can feel that "the CEO can call Scott".
4) If a big corporation or government starts exchanging documents in StarOffice/OpenOffice formats, their suppliers can meet this requirement without spending cash. Sun do this now.
Why, when most corporations employ loads of accountants to minimise the tax they pay, don't they put any effort into reducing their Microsoft Tax bills?
Dunstan
If a decent proportion of those of us who use free software were to leave some money to free software organisations in our wills then it would generate a significant income stream. Many charities get most of their funding through legacies from those who've benefited from them (e.g. Macmillan Cancer Nurses), and perhaps we should bequest money to, for example, the Free Software Foundation if we've benefited from free software through our lifetimes.
If you haven't got a will, then your New Year's Resolution should be to make one, and to remember free software in it. Statistically, sadly, a fair number of you who are reading this message will die in 2002, so if a good proportion of us make bequests to free software bodies then they will get quite a bit of income next year.
Dunstan
The programme you mention (Come to your Senses) is a prime example of the BBC creating a middlebrow personality (Adam Hart Davies) and then using them to brand programme series (Starting with Local Heroes - which both I and my children enjoyed, through What the Romans did for us ... What the Victorians did ...). They then wheel out their "personality" and use them as a spoiler against another programme which is standing on its content.
But then they have a pretty cynical approach to viewers anyway - someone will decide to kill off a popular programme (e.g. Mastermind) and take a familiar pattern. First you move it around the schedule - if it's a programme enjoyed by older viewers then you should shift it to a late evening slot after they've gone to bed. Then you shift it to a different night. Then you miss a couple of weeks for some sporting event, so that people who make a point of watching the programme don't know whether it's on or not. This should lose you enough viewers that you can say "finished due to falling audiences".
Dunstan
I pay for the BBC (which isn't state funded - it's funded by the Television Licence which you have to have at any address where there's a television) and moan constantly about the dumming down that goes on there year after year. But (as they so smugly keep on reminding us) the funding mechanism *does* enable them to be more speculative both with content, where the occasional gem surfaces, and technically.
They were very early with teletext services (and today the close captioning still runs via the teletext service). They were early with broadcasting using Nicam. Hell, they were early with broadcasting television at all. They were later than the US with Colour television which is A Good Thing as we run on PAL rather than Never Twice the Same Colour (NTSC - yuk).
They were also pretty early with providing internet services - and it was copyright rather than technology which stopped them putting teletext onto the web/gopher much earlier. They are proud (and yes, a bit smug too) about the amount of emailed listener feedback they get from around the world.
My big fear is that they spend a fortune on external consultants - not that the money is wasted, but that the MacKinsey style suits of the world will advise the senior management at the BBC to climb into bed with, for example, MicroSoft for content delivery. They have a good track record over the last few years of "outsourcing" some absolute jewels of internal resources (the library services, the music library services, the pronounciation unit), and losing the skill and expertise which has been built over more than fifty years.
The BBC seem to be particularly receptive to opinion from overseas listeners, so if you want to remind them that enabling free (whether beer or speech, but preferably speech) technology will increase their listener base in the developing world, then that is a good point to make.
Dunstan
The big flaw is almost everybody thinks that artificial intelligence ought to be like human intelligence. This isn't about numbers of neurons, or their strange interconnections, or about Turing tests, but about the strange things which go on in our brains which are impossible to model. Yesterday I was writing the name William in the condensation in the bathroom (my son Willam, 7, was in the bath), and having put the "W" with the points of the V's rounded rather than angular William remarked to me "That looks just like a bottom". I can't imagine an artificial version of that sort of intelligence - even matching a seven year old's ability to recognise the visual similarity (of a stylised representation of the real object), recognise that it was funny and recognise that it was an appropriate moment to crack the joke.
Instead we've used the concepts from AI work and applied them elsewhere, as fuzzy logic and neural networks. Some of this statistical logic has been seriously useful to us.
Back to 2001 - the part which would seem unbelieveable both then and in 1972 at the time of the last Apollo moon shot is that thirty years later we wouldn't have sent men back to the moon. Our space exploration is still at the level of "lob some instruments at Mars and hope they land the right way up".
Dunstan
Erm, I don't expect the growth in internet usage in China to be based on individuals buying windoze PeeCees and using dial up access. Expect it to be based around some sort of appliances, probably in communal facilities in small towns. Remember the small town US mayor who in the early days of telephony confidently predicted "someday *every* town in America will have a telephone". Remember, too, that a couple of days ago we were discussing how the uptake of software libre in China is significantly higher than in the West.
Dunstan
Outlook doesn't count - they haven't bundled it into the OS yet.
The bugs in IE don't count either as Felten showed Judge Jackson how to remove it from his Windows machine. Even though it's an integral part of the OS. Allegedly. Confused - you will be.
Dunstan
I think we can all start from the premise that these statistics are:
a) flawed
b) backward looking
What would be more interesting is some insight into where browsing is headed. For example, there will be some sites which will attract mobile traffic much more readily than others - traffic updates, or train running info, or today's tube (as in London Underground) breakdown. Then we are going to see amounts of traffic from appliances such as set-top boxes.
But then I suppose "We produce rubbish statistics" won't be as headline grabbing as "You Linux folks are all losers".
Dunstan
I first used KDE in the pre version 1 betas, and the look and feel hasn't changed much since then. This is A Good Thing, because it means they got it right in the first place. When I first tried out KDE the current state of the art in unix desktops was CDE. When I first saw KDE my view (and that of my then colleagues) was "OK, that's the X desktop sorted, now let's move on". Since then most of the change has been under the bonnet (hood), enabling applications running under KDE to play nicely together, together with new applications which use this functionality (Konqueror, Koffice).
It is a true tribute to KDE that a major version change doesn't look or feel much different.
Dunstan
I believe there are some (many even) within Microsoft who want to see improvements, but there is a fundamental conflict between presenting Windows as being a GUI administered simple OS and explaining that a server administrator needs expertise and experience.
Me, my expertise is in Solaris/SunOS, and I've won it over ten or more years. I come across people in this field who have a variety of levels of expertise, but those whose knowledge is superficial can't get away with presenting themselves as experts. I've dealt with a variety of Windows SA's who vary from excellent (often with Unix backgrounds), who know how to manage DLLs and hack config files, through to those who can't understand how to allocate subnetted IP addresses.
It's true that many Windows security problems are related to the poor level of expertise of the SA's, but MS are guilty of throwing mud (and FUD) at other OS's as "difficult to administer" when what they really mean is "poor SA's can't hide as easily".
I have respect for IT professionals who are good at their jobs, be they Unix, storage, networking, security or Windows. I have no respect for charlatans, of whom there are plenty in every field. Through the MCSE programme Microsoft is complicit with these charlatans, most of whom don't even know what they don't know (which is particularly dangerous).
A Solaris machine with an out-of-the box OS installation is totally unsuitable to be put facing the Internet, as is a Windows machine. Both Sun and Microsoft provide good material about running secure installations. The difference is that Microsoft have promoted a culture of flimsy sysadmin.
Dunstan
Three points:
1) The last time I was on the job market I always submitted my resume in both MSWord *and* plain text - which would allow both the MS free and the PHB to read it in their prefered format. Remember, when you submit your resume you're selling, and the person who you want to have read it is buying.
2) A requirement from any *public* body for items to be submitted in a proprietary format is effectively the state using its coercion to benefit a private company. Rather like the college putting a sign on the entrance saying "only Ford cars may be parked on campus".
3) A semantics peeve - piracy is a bloody and violent crime which is still widespread in some parts of the world, and which often results in the death of its victims. The term "illegal copying" is more accurate
Dunstan
Well, given the discussion about KWord's use of frames, I can't see that it will be that simple to import KWord into a non frame aware package.
Where things should be better is where there's a closer overlap in functionality between different packages. The first step - where we are now - is to have office packages working on *published* file formats. Following on, a degree of component sharing would make sense (as with the Gecko engine).
At this point the benefit of using free software kicks in with a vengeance, as interoperability issues are of interest to *both* parties rather than a cat and mouse game based around reverse engineering. Extending Bob Young's analogy, you would then find Ford helping BMW to transplant in their engine, rather than suing them for cutting through the welds which hold the bonnet (hood) shut.
Right now Microsoft's most valuable asset is probably the huge and growing base of documents in proprietary file formats, a pernicious form of enslavement. Our blow for freedom must be the use of open formats such as plain text and comma separated lists.
Dunstan
Me, I use Magicpoint (now bundled with RedHat7.2, so you don't need to compile it yourself). I use it instead of PowerPoint, so in that sense it replaces it.
Clearly it *doesn't* replace powerpoint in having a GUI based composition facility and IMHO this is A Good Thing. Most documents I write in plain text in emacs, and if a PHB wants it in a different format I'll do format jockeying as a separate exercise after the content is done.
Magicpoint fits in with this very well. I can put down the visual content and presenter's notes into a single text file, and then add markup for the slides (in the presentation itself you add generalised markup, and then have an imported file which maps generalised markup to rendering markup). When you print out the text file, you have the slide content and presenter's notes together in the same source file which you will be using when you present. And even a big presentation won't be bigger than a few kilobytes.
It's *much* faster than using PowerPoint. For this reason you should make sure that your PHB continues to use PP, so she has less time to spend interfering with your work.
Dunstan
Piracy is a violent crime which is still carried out in some parts of the world, and often results in the death of its victims.
For what you're describing I prefer the term "Illegal Copying".
Dunstan