What's wrong with politics that we do everything we can to stop from looking at it objectively?
Politics is inherently subjective; you're choosing someone to govern, to give authority over yourself to some degree. Like any human relationship, you'll need to establish trust with that person before you choose them.
And the candidate will do everything to convince as many as possible that such trust is well placed.
Unfortunately, well-developed deception skills can sell "I'm trustworthy" to many people.
Big disaffection by people who feel that a candidate has deceived them has a strong counter effect. You get the same strong opinions from people who have just gone through a bitter divorce.
As far as games go, if there were good software for creating and propagating delegation of authority through a web of trust, that would be interesting to see.
I would venture that several degrees of separation would be enough so that I would trust by proxy (my most trustworthy friend's trustworthy friends most trustworthy friend) someone that I wouldn't think of trusting directly.
It's clear why MS chokes on the enforced "share and share alike" nature of the GPL vs the "whatever" style BSD license.
BSD allows MS to slowly assimilate the best pieces of open source into their own product lines. The GPL allows open source to slowly assimilate them into the free and open community.
It's ironic that the GPL is such a strong driving force for commoditisation, the pure competition ultimate objective of the free market.
In the old days of X terminals that strictly only ran an X server, it was soon noticed that the extra local CPU power could be put to good use running various X clients, particularly the window manager that could otherwise suffer from network latency. So in that situation, some of the X clients could be run on the same machine as the server. X adapts nicely to letting clients originate anywhere.
A network client/server model gives X an intrinsic ability to partition work that other windowing systems don't have built-in.
Unfortunately, networks change, and clients and servers change in their capability, and even the applications change in the level of graphics, latency requirements, need for prodigious disk I/O, etc. If you consider the hardware and software of the mid-1980's when X was invented, things have changed dramatically.
A static client server model helped X obtain a well-defined network protocol. But, dynamic client/server model might have provided better performance over a greater range of conditions. OTOH, a general purpose distributed object model would probably not be as robust as X.
Due to the electoral college system, votes in swing states are much more valuable. Hence, note how swing states are getting a monotonous pounding from the big campaigns.
The knife edge balance in the swing states that is affected by Ralph's fly-weight is the reason he's of such interest.
Democrats and Republicans alike believe Ralph will bleed more voters away from Kerry than from Bush.
Hence, you get Democrats angry at Nader, despite his left-friendly agenda that many Dems like, and trying to keep him off the ballot.
And you get Republicans trying to help Nader get on the ballot, despite their utter disgust at Nader's policies.
If we didn't have the electoral system, maybe Ralph could run on his own merits instead of being an artificial swing piece.
Re:Balmer doesn't let us research it ourselves!
on
Ballmer on Linux
·
· Score: 1
They are being issued lots of patents. they are attempting to build a large patent portfolio around longhorn.
They're trying to mimic IBM's successful IP licensing strategy for increasing revenue (given that Windows and Office are near saturation and can't grow much faster than the speed of the upgrade treadmill).
Besides, with a broad patent portfolio, it helps to protect Microsoft.
Case A:
Someone comes in to Mr Big Pockets MS with a claim that MS is infringing on LittleProduct Innovation.
Mr Big Pocket's Lawyer: We'll just have a few code auditors look over your LittleProduct to see if any chunks of code even remotely looks as if it might conceivably infringe on one of our 10000 patents. If it does....then maybe we'll just let you slink back to your spiderhole with a cross-licensing agreement and be happy we didn't you spank you in court.
was established at least as far back as Roman times.
Given the secrecy of laws you'll pardon me for missing the legal interpretation where John Ashcroft repeals the Magna Carta and re-established the Divine Right of Kings and Bushes.
I guess we're going to nice simple system, easy-to-understand, based on only two precepts:
Slashdot just broke one of the 2 rules of peacekeeping conversation, don't talk about religion or politics.
There are 3 rules for polite conversation: avoid sex, politics or religion. You never find much talk of sex here on Slashdot, though.
Remember this list when meeting future in-laws, for example. Nothing to start things off on a good foot like:
"Can you believe how fucked $CANDIDATE is!?
"Uh, we *like* $CANDIDATE."
Of course, when you meet up with family members, it's also best to avoid topics dealing with intended inheritance.
Whole branches of extended families don't talk to one another because they thought great-uncle Joe conned Grandma to change her will at the last minute in his favor when she was out of it on the medications.
The interesting this is that the browser with the biggest drop in usage from January to August is IE5. I wonder if this means that users of IE5 decided to switch rather than upgrade this year.
It might have something to do with all the Mac users of IE 5 that learned about Microsoft's plans not to update IE on non-Windows platforms.
To be fair, some of MS reluctance probably has to do with Apple's embrace of Safari and the KHTML rendering engine that underlies Konqueror.
A few years ago during the browser wars MS paid Apple good money to distribute IE on the Mac. That's history now.
In the same light, I have to wonder how long AOL users are supposed to keep using IE (again, MS paid AOL the US$750million for the damages to Netscape).
How many people with valid licenses for Windows 3.1 are using those licenses? I would venture that many of those people who have multiple valid licenses for OS or other software products are using only the most recent versions.
Software rental is effectively a reality now.
It's just the time period of rental is longer than the software manufacturers would like.
Degradation into uselessness, upgrade treadmill, - whatever you want to call it - has already made temporary use of software a practical reality.
I'm glad you've found a way to make it work for you.
But it's a precarious world.
For folks with less mental acuity in West Virginia, they'll spend less time enjoying the beautiful mountains and forests of the state and most of it underground mining coal.
Or making metal in a mill, surrounded by concrete, bad smells, and loud noises
Or on their feet making fast food or cashiering in a convenience store.
But I agree, the key to a lower stress life is to live well within your means.
It's so hard to know, but one of those embedded devices could turn out to grow phenomenally.
That would (i) assure the long term viability of Linux (not that too many doubt that); (ii) push kernel development more strongly into the real-time, small-memory footprint direction as more developers and patches flow in that direction.
I have to imagine that when it comes down to a Has Feature X mega table showdown, that Word can win against most comers.
Features have different value to different customers. And it's hard to convince customers, even if they only use 20% of the features of Word, that they could get 98% of the functionality in a competing product that costs less or zero.
If Word doesn't cost too much - and it doesn't if the company is buying it for you or if you're using a pirated copy - then why not just choose a feature-overloaded word processor just in case you need it someday?
Word is invulnerable on a creature feature comparison test. And it rules when it comes to inertia, what secretaries are taught to use, and that the last 10 years of corporate strategic planning documents are encased in that format and it must be accessible.
And MS could fix those if they wanted to; they're just there to encourage migration toward the latest version and toward using other MS products, also of the latest version.
My experience has been that people with IT jobs that pay anything tolerable are glad they even have a job.
First, the .com and telecom overcapacity meltdown that led into the 2001 recession, then the growing outsourcing trend.
Meanwhile, "do more, better, faster, cheaper" mantra still plays with management and has continued to load too many additional chores onto people with no reasonable alternative in job choice. People have complained about the workload to a management that is completely out of touch with the problems and concerns of their employees.
As others have noted, the pent-up demand will lead to a spike in turnover if the economy ever gets into more than first gear.
More importantly, though, is what's happening right now.
Job stress, life stress
low morale, depression,
anger and resentment.
Not a pretty picture.
If I were a CIO I'd be looking to make my org a nicer place to work right now so that my reputation for attracting and retaining good people would be in place when the herd starts to stampede.
The _whole_ point of the GPL is to grant MORE rights then standard copyright allows
Absolutely.
But IP enforcement (Step 3) is still useful for those occassions when unscrupulous people attempt to incorporate GPL'd work into proprietary products and not make the source available.
As far as the term "pirate" is concerned; it's become as meaningless as "terrorist".
With Evolution, Connector and now Open Exchange the barriers to interoperability are breaking down.
Microsoft made a deft move by bundling together database and mail server technologies for Exchange (Outlook/Exchange gets used heavily at MyCorp).
It's good to see some opens source alternatives become available, not least because of the competitive pricing pressure it will put on those heavily used products.
Slashdot Mirror
Across the board, yes. But not evenly.
Here you can see how the board looks.
The facts show two things (one liked by the right, one liked by the left):
If you really want lower taxes, then cease being a person and start becoming a corporation.
Democracy is an imperfect process
It's like guaranteeing the right of free speech to encourage the open debate of ideas.
But then only letting some people up onto the speakers podium that can afford the fee.
We're not getting the full open debate of ideas and the sooner we realize it the better off we'll be.
What's wrong with politics that we do everything we can to stop from looking at it objectively?
Politics is inherently subjective; you're choosing someone to govern, to give authority over yourself to some degree. Like any human relationship, you'll need to establish trust with that person before you choose them.
And the candidate will do everything to convince as many as possible that such trust is well placed.
Unfortunately, well-developed deception skills can sell "I'm trustworthy" to many people.
Big disaffection by people who feel that a candidate has deceived them has a strong counter effect. You get the same strong opinions from people who have just gone through a bitter divorce.
As far as games go, if there were good software for creating and propagating delegation of authority through a web of trust, that would be interesting to see.
I would venture that several degrees of separation would be enough so that I would trust by proxy (my most trustworthy friend's trustworthy friends most trustworthy friend) someone that I wouldn't think of trusting directly.
even the *gasp* GPL
It's clear why MS chokes on the enforced "share and share alike" nature of the GPL vs the "whatever" style BSD license.
BSD allows MS to slowly assimilate the best pieces of open source into their own product lines. The GPL allows open source to slowly assimilate them into the free and open community.
It's ironic that the GPL is such a strong driving force for commoditisation, the pure competition ultimate objective of the free market.
It's generally frowned on to install an X server on a server
But it gets done all the time for security and tunneling convenience on remote hosts.
In the old days of X terminals that strictly only ran an X server, it was soon noticed that the extra local CPU power could be put to good use running various X clients, particularly the window manager that could otherwise suffer from network latency. So in that situation, some of the X clients could be run on the same machine as the server. X adapts nicely to letting clients originate anywhere.
A network client/server model gives X an intrinsic ability to partition work that other windowing systems don't have built-in.
Unfortunately, networks change, and clients and servers change in their capability, and even the applications change in the level of graphics, latency requirements, need for prodigious disk I/O, etc. If you consider the hardware and software of the mid-1980's when X was invented, things have changed dramatically.
A static client server model helped X obtain a well-defined network protocol. But, dynamic client/server model might have provided better performance over a greater range of conditions. OTOH, a general purpose distributed object model would probably not be as robust as X.
does every vote count?
Due to the electoral college system, votes in swing states are much more valuable. Hence, note how swing states are getting a monotonous pounding from the big campaigns.
The knife edge balance in the swing states that is affected by Ralph's fly-weight is the reason he's of such interest.
Democrats and Republicans alike believe Ralph will bleed more voters away from Kerry than from Bush.
Hence, you get Democrats angry at Nader, despite his left-friendly agenda that many Dems like, and trying to keep him off the ballot.
And you get Republicans trying to help Nader get on the ballot, despite their utter disgust at Nader's policies.
If we didn't have the electoral system, maybe Ralph could run on his own merits instead of being an artificial swing piece.
They are being issued lots of patents. they are attempting to build a large patent portfolio around longhorn.
They're trying to mimic IBM's successful IP licensing strategy for increasing revenue (given that Windows and Office are near saturation and can't grow much faster than the speed of the upgrade treadmill).
Besides, with a broad patent portfolio, it helps to protect Microsoft.
Case A:
Someone comes in to Mr Big Pockets MS with a claim that MS is infringing on LittleProduct Innovation.
Mr Big Pocket's Lawyer: We'll just have a few code auditors look over your LittleProduct to see if any chunks of code even remotely looks as if it might conceivably infringe on one of our 10000 patents. If it does....then maybe we'll just let you slink back to your spiderhole with a cross-licensing agreement and be happy we didn't you spank you in court.
Given the secrecy of laws you'll pardon me for missing the legal interpretation where John Ashcroft repeals the Magna Carta and re-established the Divine Right of Kings and Bushes.
I guess we're going to nice simple system, easy-to-understand, based on only two precepts:
Slashdot just broke one of the 2 rules of peacekeeping conversation, don't talk about religion or politics.
There are 3 rules for polite conversation: avoid sex, politics or religion. You never find much talk of sex here on Slashdot, though.
Remember this list when meeting future in-laws, for example. Nothing to start things off on a good foot like:
Of course, when you meet up with family members, it's also best to avoid topics dealing with intended inheritance.
Whole branches of extended families don't talk to one another because they thought great-uncle Joe conned Grandma to change her will at the last minute in his favor when she was out of it on the medications.
The interesting this is that the browser with the biggest drop in usage from January to August is IE5. I wonder if this means that users of IE5 decided to switch rather than upgrade this year.
It might have something to do with all the Mac users of IE 5 that learned about Microsoft's plans not to update IE on non-Windows platforms.
To be fair, some of MS reluctance probably has to do with Apple's embrace of Safari and the KHTML rendering engine that underlies Konqueror.
A few years ago during the browser wars MS paid Apple good money to distribute IE on the Mac. That's history now.
In the same light, I have to wonder how long AOL users are supposed to keep using IE (again, MS paid AOL the US$750million for the damages to Netscape).
obviously perpetrating fraud and theft.
No, not obvious.
You'd be surprised at just how hard it is to actually prove intent to defraud.
Especially when the alternative defense is there that it was "just an honest mistake".
Incompetence and stupidity are good legal defenses and for good reason. There's just so damn much of it out there that it's entirely credible.
The verbal rhetoric is pretty much worthless
Look at the record of their past actions, be it Senate voting records or executive orders.
For each of the actions, read the arguments made both for and against the position.
Then you can decide whether you generally agree or disagree with each of the candidates.
Censoring is not inherently bad.
This is tricky, though.
I know a lot of people of all kinds of different political persuasion that self-censor the material and sources to which they expose themselves.
We live in a complicated world and not one full of people who unchangingly always wear the same white and black hats.
But people don't like the stress of considering good guys that act bad, or bad guys that act good.
So they deliberately avoid seeing the whole truth so they can comfortably fall back into a pre-built world view.
And these people constitute the majority of the democratic electorate that helps elect my government.
A government, I might add, that refects those same values of not listening to all sides or considering that your enemy might have a point.
How many people with valid licenses for Windows 3.1 are using those licenses? I would venture that many of those people who have multiple valid licenses for OS or other software products are using only the most recent versions.
Software rental is effectively a reality now.
It's just the time period of rental is longer than the software manufacturers would like.
Degradation into uselessness, upgrade treadmill, - whatever you want to call it - has already made temporary use of software a practical reality.
I'm glad you've found a way to make it work for you.
But it's a precarious world.
For folks with less mental acuity in West Virginia, they'll spend less time enjoying the beautiful mountains and forests of the state and most of it underground mining coal.
Or making metal in a mill, surrounded by concrete, bad smells, and loud noises
Or on their feet making fast food or cashiering in a convenience store.
But I agree, the key to a lower stress life is to live well within your means.
I've watched the tech support guys fix problems, and they don't call the manufacturer or software publisher either, they fix the problem themselves
Eh, manufacturers and software publishers not supporting their products and being able to dump support costs onto the client?
An interesting world we live in.
little of the glamour.
It's so hard to know, but one of those embedded devices could turn out to grow phenomenally.
That would (i) assure the long term viability of Linux (not that too many doubt that); (ii) push kernel development more strongly into the real-time, small-memory footprint direction as more developers and patches flow in that direction.
Basically, the idea is to use a collection of smaller, more manueverable vehicles
A conceptually sound idea.
Maybe somebody ought to think about applying this kind of principle to the operation of software components:)
they ordered about US$4.7e8 worth of Microsoft products for the next 6 years.
I'll give them credit for covering both options, though.
OTOH, it's possible they could have got a better deal waving around a credible FOSS initiative, like others have done recently.
I have to imagine that when it comes down to a Has Feature X mega table showdown, that Word can win against most comers.
Features have different value to different customers. And it's hard to convince customers, even if they only use 20% of the features of Word, that they could get 98% of the functionality in a competing product that costs less or zero.
If Word doesn't cost too much - and it doesn't if the company is buying it for you or if you're using a pirated copy - then why not just choose a feature-overloaded word processor just in case you need it someday?
Word is invulnerable on a creature feature comparison test. And it rules when it comes to inertia, what secretaries are taught to use, and that the last 10 years of corporate strategic planning documents are encased in that format and it must be accessible.
Word's only and small vulnerabilities are
- cost,
- cross-platform, cross-version, cross-application interoperabilty.
And MS could fix those if they wanted to; they're just there to encourage migration toward the latest version and toward using other MS products, also of the latest version.How is NX different from the Low Bandwidth X (LBX) extension for the X windowing system that usually underlies KDE and Gnome?
Discussed in this recent article.
My experience has been that people with IT jobs that pay anything tolerable are glad they even have a job.
First, the .com and telecom overcapacity meltdown that led into the 2001 recession, then the growing outsourcing trend.
Meanwhile, "do more, better, faster, cheaper" mantra still plays with management and has continued to load too many additional chores onto people with no reasonable alternative in job choice. People have complained about the workload to a management that is completely out of touch with the problems and concerns of their employees.
As others have noted, the pent-up demand will lead to a spike in turnover if the economy ever gets into more than first gear.
More importantly, though, is what's happening right now.
Not a pretty picture.
If I were a CIO I'd be looking to make my org a nicer place to work right now so that my reputation for attracting and retaining good people would be in place when the herd starts to stampede.
the idea that an MS head is using firefox
and that he projects such a long time for security to happen gives him greater credibility among IT people that have a clue.
MS has lost so much credibility in so many ways in the past that they have nowhere to go but up. Why pretend anymore?
The _whole_ point of the GPL is to grant MORE rights then standard copyright allows
Absolutely.
But IP enforcement (Step 3) is still useful for those occassions when unscrupulous people attempt to incorporate GPL'd work into proprietary products and not make the source available.
As far as the term "pirate" is concerned; it's become as meaningless as "terrorist".
With Evolution, Connector and now Open Exchange the barriers to interoperability are breaking down.
Microsoft made a deft move by bundling together database and mail server technologies for Exchange (Outlook/Exchange gets used heavily at MyCorp).
It's good to see some opens source alternatives become available, not least because of the competitive pricing pressure it will put on those heavily used products.