...that they are partially correct and justified in hiding certain secret keys as ways of preventing unauthorized use of products.
But that's an oversimplification that I'm afraid the lawyers and the court won't be able to clearly pick apart. Even the Microsoft VP testimony about the issue was sprinkled with constant reminders that this was "a confusing" technology. It is confusing. But it's essential for everyone to understand what it's purpose is and how it can be misused, too.
The part that rubs the wrong way, of course, is that the exact same arguments could be used to prevent a competitive implementation of an interface that Microsoft wants to own for themselves.
Jack booted thugs coming to steal my free artistic ways and replace them with the tools of cheerless beancounters!
At least in my corporate environment they limit "unification activities" to "encouragement" to migrate to the One Borg Platform. But anyone who wants to keep their Mac is welcome to do so and to receive corporate support as long as they keep their suite of installed applications reasonably close to the corporate standard.
IBM is doing the Right Thing in capitalizing on the open standards, high reliability, free beer, community-developed software floating around.
All the other vendors give you a single unmistakeable route into a closed box of their design. If I was buying a solution, a vendor that didn't insist they had the One True Way® (and that it cost money) would get more of my trust. I would feel I had a backdoor alternative with a rack of Linux machines and open source software.
IBM acknowledges that you might want to run part of your business on extremely low cost tools.
Then, if you want tools that are a step up in sophistication, then they are there to fill in the gap.
However, in all fairness, IBM's been able to do this because of the huge reputation as ultra conservative banking mainframe vendor types and the foot in the door that they consequently have. That's why small random open source companies would have a harder time replicating IBM's kind of success.
Sounds to me as if your current company has typecast you as a HelpDesk person.
Break out of the mold by moving companies, even though it looks as if you'll end up having to change venue at the same time. That's easier when you're young and your family doesn't have deep roots into the locality.
Also, see if you can't collect some written references from those prior bosses who appreciated your little programming gems.
Those testimonials are necessary fodder for the wider search among an audience that doesn't know you and tends to default their evaluation criteria to "Got $Degree, In $Subject, With $GPA, From $Institution".
But insure your references "limit" their praise to those skills you're trying to expand upon, even if it doesn't do justice to your full range of skills if you were to include everything you can do on the HD.
You can easily see that it would do little good for them to write something along the lines of "wrote a few small great scripts and was one of the best of our 24 monkeys on the HellDesk!"
Microsoft has already been down this road with file compression code that went into MS DOS 6.
They're a business plain and simple. I'm sure they evaluate every decision and every public comment carefully in terms of cost, benefit, risk of getting sued and for how much money.
Just because some people [like me] hold that ethics exist which are above this kind of cost/benefit analysis does not mean that MS cannot make a successful business strategy from subjecting ethics to fiscally responsible analysis.
Shoot, it could well be argued that their entire antitrust trial is just a continuation of similar business practices. There may even be some at Microsoft who are actually surprised (but will not admit it for a few years) that they were able to continue as long as they have with their strategy.
I keep hearing about ICANN screwing things up, but don't know the details of how this is happening.
My question is this:
If there is some system already in place for registering and buying
myfavoritename.{com,net,org} then why can't the exact same system be used to expand the TLDs?
Are there good technical reasons for not proliferating TLDs to the same extent as all the many entries in the.com namespace (there must be millions by now)?
Or is it just a political quagmire, where "other interests" are looking for ways to address their pet concerns, make extra money, etc.?
How does it compare to, say, Qt, which, IIRC, can sit on top of X or Windows as the underlying layer? (Or has Apple simply invented a better lower layer than either of those and consider Cocoa on anything else to be a Stupid Idea?)
Games that force you to give large sums of "credits" or "gold" to be acknowledged by your congressman are preferred, regardless of the amount of sex/violence contained therein.
Whoa, there, buddy.
You're talking about a patented business method, there, and you have no right to use it without obtaining a license through proper channels!
Yes, yes. I'm used to sound bites like this since I live near a rural area. It's as bad as the Iowa caucus preceding presidential elections where all these guys in suits talk about how good ethanol enhanced gasoline would be for the country. Yes it would, but it's not so simple as it sounds.
Where's the follow-up analysis of exactly how much petroleum is used to raise an acre of corn, including natural gas at the electric plant that powers the wells for irrigation, not to mention the amount of energy that is used to produce the pesticides to keep the corn from being eaten before harvest?
Our culture is still addicted to liquid fuel hydrocarbons.
Your premise might have a great deal of substance.
But remember that MS has not just been using its monopoly to tax a broad base of small individuals.
It has been extending its means of taxation by leveraging its monopoly to trounce other large businesses.
While those businesses have no where near the financial resources of Microsoft, they are businesses nonetheless(Netscape, Sun, Oracle, AOL/TW), and therefore entitled to at least some of the same bent political process favoring businesses.
I know that x86 is just 1 arch for gcc, however it is an important one,
Yes, indeed.
Not knowing the first thing about compilers or the details of how gcc looks on the back end, I'm curious:
Does the instruction set agnostic nature of gcc severely impede how optimizing the compiler can be?
Not to complain too much, though. I've always been impressed that gcc runs on such an incredibly broad range of platforms. I've used for over 10 years and would frequently build it on new machines either where the compiler was not bundled and licensed for general use, or where the vendor supplied compiler was unable to compile my code.
They have been modifing the commercial format so that they still get there message across.
I've noticed that.
Commercials and shows used to be easy to distinguish at high speed:
camera cuts were slower in the shows as each scene developed at an orderly pace and you got to hear dialog between characters back and forth several times.
advertisements with hypersmiling models and pure white backdrops holding up products.
If I record certain shows targeted towards older demographic groups, it's dead easy to pick out the commercials while cruising through at 20x on the TiVo remote.
But, since I started recording CSI, it's been a lot more difficult to hit the end of commercials properly. The show is very fast paced, cutting from scene to scene very quickly.
What's especially difficult is when some of the commercials are for upcoming episodes of the same show!
First, of course, it's fun to watch Jane Fonda cavort around in skimpy outfits, especially given how "serious" she got later in life about various causes.
One of the best parts of the entire movie occurs when she's cruising around in some kind of pirate ship that sails across a frozen ocean of ice.
Propped amid cushions and pillows below decks, she questions her lover about how they are going to go anywhere now that the wind has died down. He indicates that he has a solution to that problem: they can make their own wind!
Cut to camera showing the ships sails puffing out and the ship moving forward.
Meanwhile, firmly planted in the stern of the boat is a large fan blowing into the sails and they are moving forward!
I watched this movie with a bunch of nerds who couldn't get into the romanticism of the moment; they were heard muttering something about Newton's 3rd Law.
When Rep Boucher's bill gets close to Congress, I'll actually send a letter, on paper, to my U.S. House representative indicating that this little grass root voter wholeheartedly supports Boucher's legislation and cares very much about this issue.
I suggest you do the same. People that care enough to write a coherent letter get counted. However, it doesn't work quite like Slashdot, though. You won't get modded up to +5 Funny for sprinkling baby powder on the letter.
Popularity Contest
on
Unix SAR?
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
There has to be a way.
I seem to recall something like sacct or something that run on my 4.2 BSD flavored boxes back in the 1980s that had exactly the kind of information you desire.
It was in a research group at a university, and we didn't charge people for CPU time. [Does anyone really charge for CPU time anymore? It's gotten to be almost "too cheap to meter".]
However, it was interesting because it told you about applications that really got a lot of usage. Apart from the usual suspects like/usr/bin/ls, the accounting information showed which home-grown programs were the most popular.
A co-worker's XY plotting program ranked among the most used programs on the machine according to system accounting. That helped him gain credence in my advisor's eyes for spending time creating this tool, even though it was not directly related to our research.
toner refill services that were top-notch. I've only seen one instance where we had a heavy-duty laser printer that actually got damaged from using a refilled toner cartridge.
About five years ago I was in the market for a printer for my home computer system. I was ready to go "dead tree free", but other members of the household were not ready to be that progressive.
Having heard about the exhorbitant prices of refill cartridges, I went the route of getting a used B&W laser printer with a cartridge that would be good for the next 10K pages. The cartridge wasn't dirt cheap, but on a $/page basis, I think it beats the inkjet.
I've been on the same toner cartridge for the past 3 years.
Paper and electricity are my only printer expenses now.
Did you know that it is illegal for a public company to have that much on hand and not pay dividends to shareholders?
I read that last fall when Ralph Nader brought up the issue of just how much tax avoidance Microsoft could obtain from hoarding cash instead of declaring a dividend to shareholders, like Bill Gates, who owns something like 20% of the company.
But just how precise and unambiguous are these legal requirements?
I get the impression that there's sufficient leeway in interpretation of what constitutes normal business needs for cash that their lawyers could plausibly come out with enough reasons to keep the SEC off their backs.
Then, too, as other posters have noted, with the Enron debacle characterized by heavy debt ratios (as well as more insidious Special Purpose Entities to take things off the books), a company having the exact opposite syndrome of no debt and much cash is not so likely to be publicly reprimanded.
It's too bad that China's official government is so fearful of alternative ideas. Everyday Chinese have got to figure out sooner or later that the reasons for this are no more complicated than the government has no inherently optimal basis for existence - the existing government just wants to retain power and control whatever the case.
Dissidents will have to go to greater measures to communicate with one another. Let the Internet Bars install official blocking software that is probably as porous as a moquito net. Then, communicate via a commercial and politically-correct sounding language.
"Enemies of the people" could refer to the government of China. Etc. Turn their own doublespeak back on them.
Everyone of the argument planks in the proposed bill is good, and not just for Peru. Every sovereign government based upon the ideas of representative democracy can expect similar gains if they were to follow the same principles. They are logical principles.
Free, unencumbered and open communication are the hallmarks of any society that hopes to better itself. Restricting communication to those who can afford to pay for a read/write access device, such as MS Word or Corel Wordperfect or whatever, is an inefficiency, pure and simple.
Enduring archival of public documents is, likewise, important for any society that wishes to learn from history instead of repeating the same mistakes. A written language used to be enough to guarantee such archival. Now, the essential medium is no longer paper, but the authoring and reading of documents is no longer just a matter of learning how to read and write, it's become of matter of having paid all of the taxes.
National security issues of knowing exactly what it is you are running. This is one issue that largely continues beneath the surface. It's very surprising to me that in the post 9/11 world that more hasn't been made of critical infrastructure running only programs you can see for yourself and compile for yourself.
Slashdot Mirror
...that they are partially correct and justified in hiding certain secret keys as ways of preventing unauthorized use of products.
But that's an oversimplification that I'm afraid the lawyers and the court won't be able to clearly pick apart. Even the Microsoft VP testimony about the issue was sprinkled with constant reminders that this was "a confusing" technology. It is confusing. But it's essential for everyone to understand what it's purpose is and how it can be misused, too.
The part that rubs the wrong way, of course, is that the exact same arguments could be used to prevent a competitive implementation of an interface that Microsoft wants to own for themselves.
Jack booted thugs coming to steal my free artistic ways and replace them with the tools of cheerless beancounters!
At least in my corporate environment they limit "unification activities" to "encouragement" to migrate to the One Borg Platform. But anyone who wants to keep their Mac is welcome to do so and to receive corporate support as long as they keep their suite of installed applications reasonably close to the corporate standard.
IBM is doing the Right Thing in capitalizing on the open standards, high reliability, free beer, community-developed software floating around.
All the other vendors give you a single unmistakeable route into a closed box of their design. If I was buying a solution, a vendor that didn't insist they had the One True Way® (and that it cost money) would get more of my trust. I would feel I had a backdoor alternative with a rack of Linux machines and open source software.
IBM acknowledges that you might want to run part of your business on extremely low cost tools.
Then, if you want tools that are a step up in sophistication, then they are there to fill in the gap.
However, in all fairness, IBM's been able to do this because of the huge reputation as ultra conservative banking mainframe vendor types and the foot in the door that they consequently have. That's why small random open source companies would have a harder time replicating IBM's kind of success.
Sounds to me as if your current company has typecast you as a HelpDesk person.
Break out of the mold by moving companies, even though it looks as if you'll end up having to change venue at the same time. That's easier when you're young and your family doesn't have deep roots into the locality.
Also, see if you can't collect some written references from those prior bosses who appreciated your little programming gems.
Those testimonials are necessary fodder for the wider search among an audience that doesn't know you and tends to default their evaluation criteria to "Got $Degree, In $Subject, With $GPA, From $Institution".
But insure your references "limit" their praise to those skills you're trying to expand upon, even if it doesn't do justice to your full range of skills if you were to include everything you can do on the HD.
You can easily see that it would do little good for them to write something along the lines of "wrote a few small great scripts and was one of the best of our 24 monkeys on the HellDesk!"
I've always been curious about biofeedback devices like this.
Is it possible to learn how to control one's own heart rate, given enough practice?
How about body temperature or stomach contractions?
Microsoft has already been down this road with file compression code that went into MS DOS 6.
They're a business plain and simple. I'm sure they evaluate every decision and every public comment carefully in terms of cost, benefit, risk of getting sued and for how much money.
Just because some people [like me] hold that ethics exist which are above this kind of cost/benefit analysis does not mean that MS cannot make a successful business strategy from subjecting ethics to fiscally responsible analysis.
Shoot, it could well be argued that their entire antitrust trial is just a continuation of similar business practices. There may even be some at Microsoft who are actually surprised (but will not admit it for a few years) that they were able to continue as long as they have with their strategy.
Why get all in a lather about RF lighting?
If solid state lighting takes off we'll get great efficiency and no 2.4 GHz spectrum pollution.
My browser is missing!
Even though the rendering engine could use some work, they didn't bother to review
I keep hearing about ICANN screwing things up, but don't know the details of how this is happening.
My question is this:
Are there good technical reasons for not proliferating TLDs to the same extent as all the many entries in theOr is it just a political quagmire, where "other interests" are looking for ways to address their pet concerns, make extra money, etc.?
I've seen hints of this thing called Cocoa.
How does it compare to, say, Qt, which, IIRC, can sit on top of X or Windows as the underlying layer? (Or has Apple simply invented a better lower layer than either of those and consider Cocoa on anything else to be a Stupid Idea?)
Come, now, are these for real, or were they just made up to inflame the trolls of Slashdot?
Games that force you to give large sums of "credits" or "gold" to be acknowledged by your congressman are preferred, regardless of the amount of sex/violence contained therein.
Whoa, there, buddy.
You're talking about a patented business method, there, and you have no right to use it without obtaining a license through proper channels!
just make it REQUIRE the script to be CRYPTOGRAPHICALLY SIGNED by a known entity
Not enough, methinks.
Imagine Grandma getting an automatic pop-up warning from an email she got from spamzrus.org:
(to the sounds of Dixie...) Click away, click away, click away.Yes, yes. I'm used to sound bites like this since I live near a rural area. It's as bad as the Iowa caucus preceding presidential elections where all these guys in suits talk about how good ethanol enhanced gasoline would be for the country. Yes it would, but it's not so simple as it sounds.
Where's the follow-up analysis of exactly how much petroleum is used to raise an acre of corn, including natural gas at the electric plant that powers the wells for irrigation, not to mention the amount of energy that is used to produce the pesticides to keep the corn from being eaten before harvest?
Our culture is still addicted to liquid fuel hydrocarbons.
Your premise might have a great deal of substance.
But remember that MS has not just been using its monopoly to tax a broad base of small individuals.
It has been extending its means of taxation by leveraging its monopoly to trounce other large businesses.
While those businesses have no where near the financial resources of Microsoft, they are businesses nonetheless(Netscape, Sun, Oracle, AOL/TW), and therefore entitled to at least some of the same bent political process favoring businesses.
Just as I said earlier.
My mistake, though, I guess he figures it's OK if you can go to the bathroom in 30 seconds.
Why is he this tolerant? Maybe going to the bathroom counts as a sufficiently similar experience to enduring commercials.
I know that x86 is just 1 arch for gcc, however it is an important one,
Yes, indeed.
Not knowing the first thing about compilers or the details of how gcc looks on the back end, I'm curious:
Not to complain too much, though. I've always been impressed that gcc runs on such an incredibly broad range of platforms. I've used for over 10 years and would frequently build it on new machines either where the compiler was not bundled and licensed for general use, or where the vendor supplied compiler was unable to compile my code.They have been modifing the commercial format so that they still get there message across.
I've noticed that.
Commercials and shows used to be easy to distinguish at high speed:
- camera cuts were slower in the shows as each scene developed at an orderly pace and you got to hear dialog between characters back and forth several times.
- advertisements with hypersmiling models and pure white backdrops holding up products.
If I record certain shows targeted towards older demographic groups, it's dead easy to pick out the commercials while cruising through at 20x on the TiVo remote.But, since I started recording CSI, it's been a lot more difficult to hit the end of commercials properly. The show is very fast paced, cutting from scene to scene very quickly.
What's especially difficult is when some of the commercials are for upcoming episodes of the same show!
The movie Barbarella is my favorite.
First, of course, it's fun to watch Jane Fonda cavort around in skimpy outfits, especially given how "serious" she got later in life about various causes.
One of the best parts of the entire movie occurs when she's cruising around in some kind of pirate ship that sails across a frozen ocean of ice.
Propped amid cushions and pillows below decks, she questions her lover about how they are going to go anywhere now that the wind has died down. He indicates that he has a solution to that problem: they can make their own wind!
Cut to camera showing the ships sails puffing out and the ship moving forward.
Meanwhile, firmly planted in the stern of the boat is a large fan blowing into the sails and they are moving forward!
I watched this movie with a bunch of nerds who couldn't get into the romanticism of the moment; they were heard muttering something about Newton's 3rd Law.
When Rep Boucher's bill gets close to Congress, I'll actually send a letter, on paper, to my U.S. House representative indicating that this little grass root voter wholeheartedly supports Boucher's legislation and cares very much about this issue.
I suggest you do the same. People that care enough to write a coherent letter get counted. However, it doesn't work quite like Slashdot, though. You won't get modded up to +5 Funny for sprinkling baby powder on the letter.
There has to be a way.
I seem to recall something like sacct or something that run on my 4.2 BSD flavored boxes back in the 1980s that had exactly the kind of information you desire.
It was in a research group at a university, and we didn't charge people for CPU time. [Does anyone really charge for CPU time anymore? It's gotten to be almost "too cheap to meter".]
However, it was interesting because it told you about applications that really got a lot of usage. Apart from the usual suspects like /usr/bin/ls, the accounting information showed which home-grown programs were the most popular.
A co-worker's XY plotting program ranked among the most used programs on the machine according to system accounting. That helped him gain credence in my advisor's eyes for spending time creating this tool, even though it was not directly related to our research.
toner refill services that were top-notch. I've only seen one instance where we had a heavy-duty laser printer that actually got damaged from using a refilled toner cartridge.
About five years ago I was in the market for a printer for my home computer system. I was ready to go "dead tree free", but other members of the household were not ready to be that progressive.
Having heard about the exhorbitant prices of refill cartridges, I went the route of getting a used B&W laser printer with a cartridge that would be good for the next 10K pages. The cartridge wasn't dirt cheap, but on a $/page basis, I think it beats the inkjet.
I've been on the same toner cartridge for the past 3 years.
Paper and electricity are my only printer expenses now.
Did you know that it is illegal for a public company to have that much on hand and not pay dividends to shareholders?
I read that last fall when Ralph Nader brought up the issue of just how much tax avoidance Microsoft could obtain from hoarding cash instead of declaring a dividend to shareholders, like Bill Gates, who owns something like 20% of the company.
But just how precise and unambiguous are these legal requirements?
I get the impression that there's sufficient leeway in interpretation of what constitutes normal business needs for cash that their lawyers could plausibly come out with enough reasons to keep the SEC off their backs.
Then, too, as other posters have noted, with the Enron debacle characterized by heavy debt ratios (as well as more insidious Special Purpose Entities to take things off the books), a company having the exact opposite syndrome of no debt and much cash is not so likely to be publicly reprimanded.
It's too bad that China's official government is so fearful of alternative ideas. Everyday Chinese have got to figure out sooner or later that the reasons for this are no more complicated than the government has no inherently optimal basis for existence - the existing government just wants to retain power and control whatever the case.
Dissidents will have to go to greater measures to communicate with one another. Let the Internet Bars install official blocking software that is probably as porous as a moquito net. Then, communicate via a commercial and politically-correct sounding language.
"Enemies of the people" could refer to the government of China. Etc. Turn their own doublespeak back on them.
Everyone of the argument planks in the proposed bill is good, and not just for Peru. Every sovereign government based upon the ideas of representative democracy can expect similar gains if they were to follow the same principles. They are logical principles.
Free, unencumbered and open communication are the hallmarks of any society that hopes to better itself. Restricting communication to those who can afford to pay for a read/write access device, such as MS Word or Corel Wordperfect or whatever, is an inefficiency, pure and simple.
Enduring archival of public documents is, likewise, important for any society that wishes to learn from history instead of repeating the same mistakes. A written language used to be enough to guarantee such archival. Now, the essential medium is no longer paper, but the authoring and reading of documents is no longer just a matter of learning how to read and write, it's become of matter of having paid all of the taxes.
National security issues of knowing exactly what it is you are running. This is one issue that largely continues beneath the surface. It's very surprising to me that in the post 9/11 world that more hasn't been made of critical infrastructure running only programs you can see for yourself and compile for yourself.