...that this will be much like the recent European draft on software patents.
That is:
the new agreement is a Microsoft Word document (haven't the DoJ officials ever asked their IT people to explain how much flexibility they have in the prices of Word and how much of an alternative there is?)
the original authors were all those helpful, knowledgable technical folks at Microsoft that the DOJ can't afford
I mean, even allowing for the fact that MS' competitors loaded the Public Comments merely out of greed (but, see, there are many impoverished opinions coming from the likes of Nader, with no pretense of material gain from excessively hobbling Microsoft), this new agreement goes nowhere close to addressing the many valid objections to the original settlement agreement.
What I find particularly offensive is all of the sage head-wagging and somber talk about how reasonable the new agreement is, how it will really work, etc., while everyone has seen just how ineffective the earlier consent decrees against MS have been.
Just because it's gone through this process of review doesn't mean that the new agreement is a good one.
This whole scandal with respect to Web search engines reminds me so much of a recent trend in magazine advertising.
Have you noticed how many magazines have full sections of "articles" with special page numbers or small headers and footers that say "Advertisement". You know the ones, Special Section on How High Tech Businesses Love $LOCALE_WITHOUT_HIGHTECH, etc.
Those articles and sections are usually pretty polished writing and look, for all intensive purposes, like bona fide "articles".
It got me to thinking about how much of a typical magazine's content might be similar articles, sans the "Advertisement" qualifying label.
You're right about scheduled reboots and not consolidating services on one machine coming about from Windows perceived lack of stability.
But, to be fair, Win2K is much more stable than earlier versions of Windows. Frankly, I think the competition from Linux and other Unices was the main motivating force behind that development.
But my main gripe with the stable and consistent part of Microsofts new legal filing was the unwritten codicil that ought to have been added -
...stable and consistent until products of competitors become a luscious new market for us and motivate us to "innovate and improve" "Windows"...
I was going to suggest the same thing. You could probably add to the list of diseases the tragic syndromes of being too short, athletically less than Olympian, or having a metabolism that modern diets wreck with type II diabetes.
Other "diseases" include lack of intelligence, lack of creativity, and lack of obeying authority.
It'll be interesting to see how this facet of eugenics plays out. I'm not sure that most parents really want Baby to inherit DNA from other sources than themselves - there's a matter of ego and pride involved.
Already, you can see in various cultures like China the effects of screening for "femaleness", another "tragic disease". There are some profound repercussions that have already been set in motion from that kind of mentality. I would not be surprised to see females more valued in the future as they become scarcer.
The Netwinder has in it a great idea, which will succeed at some point.
That is, Internet access through a dedicated appliance that is cheaper, easier to use and has a smaller footprint than a conventional general purpose PC.
Linux can help with this in one respect I'm sure: Windows is an expensive part of many PCs.
But the other ingredients are no less critical: nice form factor (take a lesson from Apple), good marketing.
If you really love mathematics, then go ahead and study it.
But take a few other courses (eg, CS, engineering).
In my experience, it's insufficient to be in the top 1% of mathematical ability to succeed in pure mathematics as a career. As a high school student, I was in that group.
But to succeed, the requirements are more like being in the top 0.01% of ability (finishing the Putnam with a rank described on one hand).
Of course, you run a higher than average risk of being too eccentric to adapt to conventional society. As I remember, my math profs tended to be out on the edge of the Gaussian in more ways than one.
I recently heard a presentation which indicated just how difficult the situation is getting with respect to power density. IIRC, in terms of W/cm, todays chips are surpassing the output of hotplates, moving towards the realm of nuclear reactors.
I'd heard the switch from bi-polar to CMOS in the 1990s helped to avert a similar imminent meltdown.
At these extremes, there have to be some research efforts into finding some way out of this mess.
But maybe there's little need for laptop computers to have a faster CPU. What are you going to do with it, type your email faster? Once you can show videos in Powerpoint, why is there any more need for speed in these things?
Futher the market for old technology devices, which can't be covered by such a law, will thrive.
It's hard to know where to begin to describe just how misbegotten this legislation is.
But on the same tack - I would expect the market for new technology devices to have a damper put on them if the legislation is passed. If I were a hardware manufacturer, I'd be quite leery of this kind of legislation.
Imagine Joe Consumer, with an opportunity to buy a post SSSCA music playing device. It has more memory than an old Diamond Rio, but it requires Joe to "synch it up" over the wireless network so that his credit card can be charged each time he listens to a particular song.
Next thing you know the volume level controls on the devices or the earphone output jacks will be hobbled so that Joe can't play his new song for his friends in a semi-public forum.
The upshot is that I hate to see such pecuniary interests erode our present freedoms.
Sheesh, at least let such a 1984-ish development be nominally for something to "protect me from terrorism" and not to protect the revenue stream of a Fritz Holling's big soft money contributors, the MPAA. I would be cautiously willing to consider the former motivation, while the latter has to be dismissed as disgusting.
Along the same lines as the article, which pointed out how VB gets transmogrified into VB.NET, I was reminded of an analogous example from the OSS world.
Ask to run Parkbench, NAS benchmarks, netperf and your favorite MPI application (which is what I am assuming motivates the existence of such a machine in your university) on the cluster they have set up for testing.
Tell them you want to ssh into it, build on it, and run those benchmark program on it for 32,64,128 nodes.
Repeat job postings from the same place can oftentimes be an indication that a psychotic boss is in place that each new employee finds out is untenable, and, furthermore, that the boss of the psychoboss is sufficiently clueless not to notice a pattern here.
It's funny if it's not you that's at the receiving end of bad management.
The problem is that most tech types quickly learn that good management is a very hard job.
I'm great with computers, but I know that I suck when it comes to dealing with people effectively. Generally, I see that very few good technical people are also good managers of people and projects, requiring certain kinds of interpersonal skills and organizational skills that programmers lack all too often.
That said, there's nothings that prevents would-be managers from trying to fake it. I'd say about 85% of managers are less competent than I'd like to see. Also, really good managers are like gold. If it is at all possible for you to work for one of these, then do it.
After the furor many years ago about how video rental stores should not disclose their customer's renting profiles (I forget, was it a Supreme Court nominee renting pr0n?), I would think that some similar restrictions would be in order for what WMP discloses to third parties.
I mean, if I actually rented those titles through WMP and Microsoft you might say there would be some excuse for their knowing what I've rented.
But if I bought or rented those titles elsewhere, why is it any of their business to know that information any more than it is the business of, say, The Weekly World News' to know what I've played?
If Be's case is good, then you could argue that it represents a kind of an asset of the company (granted you have to pay some legal bills first).
To make an analogy, when AOL-TW bought up Netscape, they acquired Netscape's whole proceeding against MS.
Now if Netscape just died as a bankrupt company, that suit probably would have been abandoned. As it stands, however, AOLTW could potentially get some serious cash if legal judgements go in favor of Netscape over Microsoft.
The key thing now, however, is AOL has the legal dollars to pursue the case where Netscape did not. Could Be be also be bought out for this reason?
If someone bought Be, they'd get the burden and the spoils of the suit.
Also, which company was it (Novell) that got its DR-DOS pummeled when Windows 95 came out? I thought that suit was still in the courts and looking as if it were good for a big settlement.
Many engineers have children, too, and would like to leave them something. Money, bonds, real estate, all work.
Quite so.
I heartily endorse a drastic curtailment on the length of time that currently applies to patents and to other works.
As far as a legacy is concerned, engineers and authors are entitled to the very same wonderful mechanisms of intergenerational wealth preservation that have already been put into place and which have served the wealthy very nicely, thank you.
Don't tell me you've forgotten the elimination of the Death Tax as part of last year's tax cut legislation? [Don't blame me - I was on the side of Bill Gates Sr. and other individuals that argued such legislation was misguided.]
Sure, let KDE and Gnome start on the surface with themes that provide a common lool `n feek.
But then, start digging down to the lower level inter object communications layers to get exchange of data at that level, even if it's something that's slower than molasses between KCOP and Bonobo. As long as it works!
Our organization is looking at these closely as an possible replacement for Sun machines on the desktop. Running Linux on Intel hardware is very compelling from a price/performance perspective.
The Good Thing® about HP supporting these is the assurance of the big name. Linux may be ready for the enterprise, but no one wants to be the pioneer, anymore than anyone wants to be the pioneer for WinXP in the corporate environement. Conservatism rules.
In corporate IT support, you'd get real nervous rolling out brand X hardware and a Linux distribution whose track record of worthiness is only proven on the desktops of individual expert hackers. When hundreds of newbies pound the keyboards, you want to be reassured and know what to expect to face in terms of support issues.
Enterprise-wide experience coming from a large company like HP (it could just as well have been IBM or Sun) is precisely helpful in this regard. The slightly outdated distribution is actually an encouraging sign that a lengthy test period has gone into the whole setup.
But evidently in the 1940's the Swiss were trying to make very thin watches with mechanical movements, such as the Audemars Piguet, coming in with a movement that was 1.64 mm thick.
IIRC, the Casio I had was probably about 3-4 mm thick.
The watch I wear now doesn't advertise thinness as a virtue and it is probably almost 1 cm thick.
My favorite illustration of how easily such studies can confound cause and effect is this:
Persons with dirty yellowish stains between their fingers have a propensity to die of lung cancer, emphysema and heart disease with a striking degree of regularity over the population at large.
The standard conclusion would be that washing one's hands to remove such stains would be a great way to improve one's health.
But, as you may have guessed by now, quitting smoking is the prime underlying factor in reducing such stains.
The Software Carpentry project, though loaded with good intention, in my view made a mistake in rejecting a really promising looking project (TAN, I think it was called) that proposed to store configuration information in XML files.
Based on all the experience with config.cache on UNIX and the problems with Windows Registry, there is a real opportunity for designing an improved system, one that is open, hierarchal and extensible.
Perhaps there just needs to be a little shove over the bridge, in some sense. Something like a tool for converting
There's a real trick, though, getting an easy-to-use XML hierarchal database for configuration to work well when local customization happens, when user/developers don't want to inherit the system wide default cached libraries and include files, for example. It can be done, but it needs to be done well.
Slashdot Mirror
...that this will be much like the recent European draft on software patents.
That is:
I mean, even allowing for the fact that MS' competitors loaded the Public Comments merely out of greed (but, see, there are many impoverished opinions coming from the likes of Nader, with no pretense of material gain from excessively hobbling Microsoft), this new agreement goes nowhere close to addressing the many valid objections to the original settlement agreement.
What I find particularly offensive is all of the sage head-wagging and somber talk about how reasonable the new agreement is, how it will really work, etc., while everyone has seen just how ineffective the earlier consent decrees against MS have been.
Just because it's gone through this process of review doesn't mean that the new agreement is a good one.
This whole scandal with respect to Web search engines reminds me so much of a recent trend in magazine advertising.
Have you noticed how many magazines have full sections of "articles" with special page numbers or small headers and footers that say "Advertisement". You know the ones, Special Section on How High Tech Businesses Love $LOCALE_WITHOUT_HIGHTECH, etc.
Those articles and sections are usually pretty polished writing and look, for all intensive purposes, like bona fide "articles".
It got me to thinking about how much of a typical magazine's content might be similar articles, sans the "Advertisement" qualifying label.
You're right about scheduled reboots and not consolidating services on one machine coming about from Windows perceived lack of stability.
But, to be fair, Win2K is much more stable than earlier versions of Windows. Frankly, I think the competition from Linux and other Unices was the main motivating force behind that development.
But my main gripe with the stable and consistent part of Microsofts new legal filing was the unwritten codicil that ought to have been added -
I don't think that many people find this undesirable.
I don't know. There are more than a few friends of mine that are parents that would love to have their kids obey them.
Maybe tomorrow these 'doctors' will be controlling our thoughts!
You don't have to wait for a MaybeTomorrow.
Prozac is here today.
This is great!
You simply have no idea just how much I'm itching to try out WMP on my Linux box, especially after reading all of today's coverage, including this .
most people consider ugliness a disease
Exactly.
I was going to suggest the same thing. You could probably add to the list of diseases the tragic syndromes of being too short, athletically less than Olympian, or having a metabolism that modern diets wreck with type II diabetes.
Other "diseases" include lack of intelligence, lack of creativity, and lack of obeying authority.
It'll be interesting to see how this facet of eugenics plays out. I'm not sure that most parents really want Baby to inherit DNA from other sources than themselves - there's a matter of ego and pride involved.
Already, you can see in various cultures like China the effects of screening for "femaleness", another "tragic disease". There are some profound repercussions that have already been set in motion from that kind of mentality. I would not be surprised to see females more valued in the future as they become scarcer.
The Netwinder has in it a great idea, which will succeed at some point.
That is, Internet access through a dedicated appliance that is cheaper, easier to use and has a smaller footprint than a conventional general purpose PC.
Linux can help with this in one respect I'm sure: Windows is an expensive part of many PCs.
But the other ingredients are no less critical: nice form factor (take a lesson from Apple), good marketing.
If you really love mathematics, then go ahead and study it.
But take a few other courses (eg, CS, engineering).
In my experience, it's insufficient to be in the top 1% of mathematical ability to succeed in pure mathematics as a career. As a high school student, I was in that group.
But to succeed, the requirements are more like being in the top 0.01% of ability (finishing the Putnam with a rank described on one hand).
Of course, you run a higher than average risk of being too eccentric to adapt to conventional society. As I remember, my math profs tended to be out on the edge of the Gaussian in more ways than one.
Water cooled notebooks.
I recently heard a presentation which indicated just how difficult the situation is getting with respect to power density. IIRC, in terms of W/cm, todays chips are surpassing the output of hotplates, moving towards the realm of nuclear reactors.
I'd heard the switch from bi-polar to CMOS in the 1990s helped to avert a similar imminent meltdown.
At these extremes, there have to be some research efforts into finding some way out of this mess.
But maybe there's little need for laptop computers to have a faster CPU. What are you going to do with it, type your email faster? Once you can show videos in Powerpoint, why is there any more need for speed in these things?
Futher the market for old technology devices, which can't be covered by such a law, will thrive.
It's hard to know where to begin to describe just how misbegotten this legislation is.
But on the same tack - I would expect the market for new technology devices to have a damper put on them if the legislation is passed. If I were a hardware manufacturer, I'd be quite leery of this kind of legislation.
Imagine Joe Consumer, with an opportunity to buy a post SSSCA music playing device. It has more memory than an old Diamond Rio, but it requires Joe to "synch it up" over the wireless network so that his credit card can be charged each time he listens to a particular song.
Next thing you know the volume level controls on the devices or the earphone output jacks will be hobbled so that Joe can't play his new song for his friends in a semi-public forum.
The upshot is that I hate to see such pecuniary interests erode our present freedoms.
Sheesh, at least let such a 1984-ish development be nominally for something to "protect me from terrorism" and not to protect the revenue stream of a Fritz Holling's big soft money contributors, the MPAA. I would be cautiously willing to consider the former motivation, while the latter has to be dismissed as disgusting.
Along the same lines as the article, which pointed out how VB gets transmogrified into VB.NET, I was reminded of an analogous example from the OSS world.
The Jython implementation of Python.
Like, for many people, dragging and dropping their way thru life, command line copying is strong protection.
Of course, the next time I issue a cp command I'll probably have a DMCA violation on my hands.
[Let me preface this by saying I don't know the difference between .NET and AVaporWareMarketingPloy.]
But it seems like there really are some good ideas in .NET somewhere, my free software zealotry notwithstanding.
So, uhh, why does this matter?
<ducks while running out door>
Benchmark, benchmark, benchmark.
Right on the money, there.
Ask to run Parkbench, NAS benchmarks, netperf and your favorite MPI application (which is what I am assuming motivates the existence of such a machine in your university) on the cluster they have set up for testing.
Tell them you want to ssh into it, build on it, and run those benchmark program on it for 32,64,128 nodes.
Then decide for yourself what to do.
clueless...companies who post
You forgot one.
Repeat job postings from the same place can oftentimes be an indication that a psychotic boss is in place that each new employee finds out is untenable, and, furthermore, that the boss of the psychoboss is sufficiently clueless not to notice a pattern here.
It's funny if it's not you that's at the receiving end of bad management.
The problem is that most tech types quickly learn that good management is a very hard job.
I'm great with computers, but I know that I suck when it comes to dealing with people effectively. Generally, I see that very few good technical people are also good managers of people and projects, requiring certain kinds of interpersonal skills and organizational skills that programmers lack all too often.
That said, there's nothings that prevents would-be managers from trying to fake it. I'd say about 85% of managers are less competent than I'd like to see. Also, really good managers are like gold. If it is at all possible for you to work for one of these, then do it.
Ahem.
After the furor many years ago about how video rental stores should not disclose their customer's renting profiles (I forget, was it a Supreme Court nominee renting pr0n?), I would think that some similar restrictions would be in order for what WMP discloses to third parties.
I mean, if I actually rented those titles through WMP and Microsoft you might say there would be some excuse for their knowing what I've rented.
But if I bought or rented those titles elsewhere, why is it any of their business to know that information any more than it is the business of, say, The Weekly World News' to know what I've played?
If Be's case is good, then you could argue that it represents a kind of an asset of the company (granted you have to pay some legal bills first).
To make an analogy, when AOL-TW bought up Netscape, they acquired Netscape's whole proceeding against MS.
Now if Netscape just died as a bankrupt company, that suit probably would have been abandoned. As it stands, however, AOLTW could potentially get some serious cash if legal judgements go in favor of Netscape over Microsoft.
The key thing now, however, is AOL has the legal dollars to pursue the case where Netscape did not. Could Be be also be bought out for this reason?
If someone bought Be, they'd get the burden and the spoils of the suit.
Also, which company was it (Novell) that got its DR-DOS pummeled when Windows 95 came out? I thought that suit was still in the courts and looking as if it were good for a big settlement.
Many engineers have children, too, and would like to leave them something. Money, bonds, real estate, all work.
Quite so.
I heartily endorse a drastic curtailment on the length of time that currently applies to patents and to other works.
As far as a legacy is concerned, engineers and authors are entitled to the very same wonderful mechanisms of intergenerational wealth preservation that have already been put into place and which have served the wealthy very nicely, thank you.
Don't tell me you've forgotten the elimination of the Death Tax as part of last year's tax cut legislation? [Don't blame me - I was on the side of Bill Gates Sr. and other individuals that argued such legislation was misguided.]
Yea, verily.
Sure, let KDE and Gnome start on the surface with themes that provide a common lool `n feek.
But then, start digging down to the lower level inter object communications layers to get exchange of data at that level, even if it's something that's slower than molasses between KCOP and Bonobo. As long as it works!
Our organization is looking at these closely as an possible replacement for Sun machines on the desktop. Running Linux on Intel hardware is very compelling from a price/performance perspective.
The Good Thing® about HP supporting these is the assurance of the big name. Linux may be ready for the enterprise, but no one wants to be the pioneer, anymore than anyone wants to be the pioneer for WinXP in the corporate environement. Conservatism rules.
In corporate IT support, you'd get real nervous rolling out brand X hardware and a Linux distribution whose track record of worthiness is only proven on the desktops of individual expert hackers. When hundreds of newbies pound the keyboards, you want to be reassured and know what to expect to face in terms of support issues.
Enterprise-wide experience coming from a large company like HP (it could just as well have been IBM or Sun) is precisely helpful in this regard. The slightly outdated distribution is actually an encouraging sign that a lengthy test period has gone into the whole setup.
Well, 2 mm may be hard to find these days.
But evidently in the 1940's the Swiss were trying to make very thin watches with mechanical movements, such as the Audemars Piguet, coming in with a movement that was 1.64 mm thick.
IIRC, the Casio I had was probably about 3-4 mm thick.
The watch I wear now doesn't advertise thinness as a virtue and it is probably almost 1 cm thick.
My favorite illustration of how easily such studies can confound cause and effect is this:
The standard conclusion would be that washing one's hands to remove such stains would be a great way to improve one's health.But, as you may have guessed by now, quitting smoking is the prime underlying factor in reducing such stains.
Which is why you use XML.
Yes!
The Software Carpentry project, though loaded with good intention, in my view made a mistake in rejecting a really promising looking project (TAN, I think it was called) that proposed to store configuration information in XML files.
Based on all the experience with config.cache on UNIX and the problems with Windows Registry, there is a real opportunity for designing an improved system, one that is open, hierarchal and extensible.
Perhaps there just needs to be a little shove over the bridge, in some sense. Something like a tool for converting
syntax into appropriate XML.There's a real trick, though, getting an easy-to-use XML hierarchal database for configuration to work well when local customization happens, when user/developers don't want to inherit the system wide default cached libraries and include files, for example. It can be done, but it needs to be done well.