Developing secure, high quality, tested software is expensive. Just ask Microsoft, who, with all their resources, have trouble doing it.
They'd love to give up writing software if they could retain the revenue they get.
It's possible for them to do it. All it will take is a few years of TCPA hardware-enabled encryption and the use of Microsoft-controlled public keys to make too much of people's documents, music, electronic wallets depend upon access to MS as a "super verisign". They'll be indispensible; they can charge for their role as certification authority and they can give up on trying to upgrade complicated buggy software.
MS Research is by far the biggest contributor to graphics in the corporate world.
Because they can afford to.
And I'm happy MS is funding good work that gets published in the open literature.
Microsoft is just like Bell Labs used to be. A wonderful place to work, full of smart people, funded by a monopoly that dominates its market and is resented for it by squashed competitors and unhappy hostages.
The term of patents should be limited to 17 months instead of 17 years.
The latter might have been appropriate in the 18th century when knowledge disseminated at the speed of sailing vessels. Not now.
Cutting the term would not only bring new developments to the public at lower cost and increase the pace of innovation as inventors need not worry as much about compounding on previously patented technology, but it would also help bad patents, like this one, expire sooner. An early death this patent most assuredly deserves.
Let's Start with Myth[0]
on
IT Myths
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
...since we're in the know about where indeces really start.
Myth[0] is that IT in a large organization can be effectively managed.
The fact is that users will divert away from your preplanned utopia in ways you cannot believe.
Many of those users will have their heads up their asses, having no idea how much trouble and hassle they're going to cause in the long term because they clicked on an attachment, saw a glossy magazine advertisement for software to cure all their ills, etc.
A few of those random users will actually be going in right direction, even if the corporate policy hasn't caught up to them yet.
Technically brilliant sysadmins and programmers with as much social acumen as skunk-sprayed porcupines; friendly, organized, effective managers pulling in the wrong technical direction - it's a wild wooly world in IT, not for those with weak stomachs.
One of the big reasons they need to know who you are before you get on a plane -- the airline, not the TSA -- is so that if it crashes, they have an accurate list of who died. This prevents notifying the wrong people, etc. It's kind of morbid, but it makes a lot of sense.
Except that airlines made due with passenger-supplied unverified names on tickets for many years.
And they still somehow dealt with sorting things out after an accident.
Other public transportation systems don't require ID to help in case of accident.
As far as I'm concerned, if someone feels strongly that they want to travel anonymously, they should be the ones deciding whether they want to make it easier for their loved ones to be notified by the authorities in the event of an accident.
"We're doing it to insure your safety" rings hollow in this instance.
It reminds me of the FAQ signage at the exit of the bigbox stores:
Q: Why is my receipt checked against my cart full of products when I leave BigCo?
A: We perform this service for you to insure that you haven't forgotten any of the items you've paid for.
Re:Don't say fuck or bugger
on
Word Up
·
· Score: 1
It's too bad, because making something interesting could be enhanced with a little realism.
ESPN Commentator: "A couple of our viewers have called in to say that men's gymnastics is a pussy sport.
"We're here with Joe who is going to attempt to do a hand stand on the still rings."
(Joe scowls, slapping white dust onto his palms, getting ready to show the world that this gymnastics ain't nuthin....)
"Joe is preparing to jump up and grab the rings. He's swinging.....higher.....higher......he's making his move into handstand...!...(Joe plummets clumsily headfirst to the floor) Ow! That's got to hurt!"
Here in the US we've forgotten our history so we're not as geographically sensitive as other countries are these days (Kashmir, Israel/Palestine, Taiwan, N/SKorea).
We Americans got whupped for trying to extend revolutionary freedom too far to the North in the 18th century, and didn't get our way in the 19th century with that memorable slogan
Oh well, at least Polk's doctrine of Manifest Destiny got us California:) We'd love to to think now that we'd never do something so gauche and imperialistic for territorial expansion. I'm surprised we're not hated more by our neighbors.
One thing which mystifies me is why the spin axis was chosen to be vertical. If the axis were horizontal, the light used in illuminating rooms would fall on the globe as the sun's rays do... essentially perpendicular to the equator.
Excellent point.
Even more, a globe rotating on a horizontally-oriented axis under light from above would naturally illustrate the day/night phenomena.
But to be fair, a lot of globes come with a adjustment for an angle of declination so they can be tilted. Whether early globes had this or not, I can't say.
What is being discussed is a situation where, for example, an article is talking about caffeine containing drinks, and you'll suddenly find a random link.
Those aren't random rich, dark links. They're just bits aroma and pieces of a subliminal advertising virile strategy. Take a coffee drinkers look sometime at subliminal advertising. Ice cubes energizing in liquor ads become fascinating, while powerful if you use your peripheral Yirgacheffe vision you can pick up the S-E-X they airbrush onto Ted Kennedy's forehead as it appears must have now on the National Enquirer.
I think I'll go have a nice cup of coffee right now!
What we're seeing now is interesting in that outmoded businesses are now receiving strong legal protection
Not outmoded businesses at all.
These are currently viable businesses, making plenty of money, who are threatened by change. They could lose a lot of future revenue if changes were to happen.
The logical business decision then is to invest your money in government that preserves the status quo and in political entities and lobbyists that likewise promote legislation preserving the status quo.
The people driving and embracing change are those who stand to gain from it. That would include people with very little to lose, the foolish, the courageous, the deluded, the visionary.
It's truly scary how the Intel is becoming the only mainstream chip architecture left alive.
That dominant 386 instruction set has grown larger than life, threatening even Intel, who was responsible for its initial creation.
Intel's Itanium line has been a business flop, while AMD stuck to x86 compatibility in its K8 x86-64 development and is thereby is making inroads into Intel's market.
The realities of a market demanding
cheap,
standard and
backward compatibility
are dictating to mighty Intel where they have to go if they don't want to end up dead-ended in the high end RISC market like SPARC, PA-RISC, MIPS and Alpha.
If I were a British taxpayer (yes I know the term is redundant), I'd have to think that either:
Newham knowingly allowed a sales pitch to be used as if it were logical unbiased analysis (in which case they're idiots)
they didn't know (in which case they're idiots)
they did know but didn't care (in which case they're not good stewards of the public's money)
they found out and but didn't demand a greater discount from MS (in which case they're not good stewards of the public's money).
Anyway, I hope other public entities take the proper opportunity to be more aggressive with Microsoft in negotiating lower prices given the new competitive landscape afforded by open source solutions.
you just put a.appname folder and put the config files in there
In the old days it was enough for most applications to have
$HOME/.appnamerc
./.appnamerc
or, for real short configuration, storage in an environment variable as
APPNAME="specifications"
and perhaps have system-wide utilities configured using
/etc/appnamerc
where the files were simply full of
Name = Value specifications.
Now, though, a lot of applications like to manage not just configuration settings, not just per-user configuration settings, but things like cached data, temporary files, lock files, serialized objects, network handles, etc.
It's a tough problem to solve, but you'd prefer that the best solution be intuitive and followed by most applications.
Has the LSB come out with any recommendations on this topic?
Someone might need to come up with a MetaConfig facility to oversee the diverse particular solutions. The extra layer of abstraction might add complexity, but potentially could simplify things for most people.
I'm not even sure it's ludicrous for an application to have its own filesystem. That is, in the same way that the kernel exposes things through /proc, user space applications might like to manage settings in /application or something like that, but with provision for multi-user systems, preserving state if need be, etc.
What about reloading a page is innovative, clever, or technical?
Well, if it was a typical web page, then I'd say the innovative part is to drive up hits so that the high apparent traffic would enable the site maintainers to charge their sponsors more money.
But in this case, the GOP already has fully-functional mechanisms for getting their sponsors to contribute money; now there are Super Rangers if you round up an extra US$300K.
Careful, logical scientific analysis and pure capitalism can help eliminate this drag on your corporation's productivity.
Are your workers taking extra time to be nice to people who aren't going to contribute to your bottom line?
Are your researchers spending too much time daydreaming and contributing to the scientific community at large by writing journal articles that competitors might read when they could better be spending their time with their mouths shut fixing problems here and now?
Are your workers helping out customers doing things behind the scenes (maybe the customer doesn't even know about the time-consuming effort) that cost a lot of money when that time and money could be better invested in a good marketing campaign to affect customers' perceptions?
Time and the logical course of our current system will cure this problem for you!
Sure, there are a few religious tenets getting in the way of utopia, but by co-opting those religions with our superior doctrines of prosperity and social Darwinism we can win.
The problem with privacy is that 90% of the people will never have an issue with it.
True enough. But as an individual it might be harder to guarantee that you'll never be victimized by a stalker, which happens to about 10% of the population at some point in their lives.
I've known a couple of people that have been victimized by stalkers. If you've ever been subject to that kind of stress, all of sudden you become keenly aware of just how much information about you is easily available.
It's not just John Gilmore exercising a principle here, as vaunted an ideal as that might be. There are loads of current and former stalking victims intently making choices to minimize their exposure to the realm of publicly-accessible data.
Unlisted phone numbers, using post office boxes instead of getting mail at a residence, paying cash, giving fake names and phone numbers for people without a legally-mandated need to known but only a direct marketer's desire to know.
One of the people I knew was stalked by someone that worked in the health care industry, so suddenly it was in her interest not to provide complete and accurate information to certain health care providers for fear of providing her new address and phone number to the loonie.
Mozilla still has a reputation of being a part time hobby for coders, rather than a serious corporate product.
That sentiment is not universal.
Also, I think it was more applicable several years ago than now.
After all the exploits and stagnation in development associated with Internet Explorer, my corporation's IT department is definitely past the stage of getting over the stagnation from Netscape 4 and looking quite favorably on Mozilla and its advantages.
I'd go for a cell phone company that doesn't funnel all 411 requests through a human being and charge me $1 for the privilege. [Alternatively, in my car - oops, uh, where I never make any calls while driving - I keep the dead tree directories in the back seat so I don't keep getting charged if I want to find out the phone number of some local business.]
Don't any of them have an online white/yellow pages that you can look up automatically with text messaging for less money?
Uncle Bill is tolerant of your childish respelling.
Unless, that is, you start to use lower case names to refer for things like
windows
"word"
"explorer"
in any computer related discussions.
In your conversations always use approved vocabulary and context, eg:
"The other day I was launching Microsoft Word ® , the ideal solution for today's fast-paced small businesses competing in a global information economy that provides their passion to my workplace, when the damn open-sores GPL-communist terrorist fscktard application reformatted my whole damn document!"
we'd see a renaissance in cultural expression as well.
This is key.
It would be interesting to see what would develop in the way of many small, low-cost productions vs the current business model that relies on high-cost per film blockbusters with low risk by using tried and true themes (eg, Alien vs Predator).
But I suspect even small time "open source" producers of cinema and music would find irresistable the attractions and audiences you get by mixing in just a little porn and bloodlust. It's human nature.
Slashdot Mirror
This will never happen.
It could.
Developing secure, high quality, tested software is expensive. Just ask Microsoft, who, with all their resources, have trouble doing it.
They'd love to give up writing software if they could retain the revenue they get.
It's possible for them to do it. All it will take is a few years of TCPA hardware-enabled encryption and the use of Microsoft-controlled public keys to make too much of people's documents, music, electronic wallets depend upon access to MS as a "super verisign". They'll be indispensible; they can charge for their role as certification authority and they can give up on trying to upgrade complicated buggy software.
Now if only someone could figure out a way to replenish the stocks of large ocean fish that have been reduced by 90% since 1950.
MS Research is by far the biggest contributor to graphics in the corporate world.
Because they can afford to.
And I'm happy MS is funding good work that gets published in the open literature.
Microsoft is just like Bell Labs used to be. A wonderful place to work, full of smart people, funded by a monopoly that dominates its market and is resented for it by squashed competitors and unhappy hostages.
Fen Branklin
Let me pull out my favorite chestnut.
The term of patents should be limited to 17 months instead of 17 years.
The latter might have been appropriate in the 18th century when knowledge disseminated at the speed of sailing vessels. Not now.
Cutting the term would not only bring new developments to the public at lower cost and increase the pace of innovation as inventors need not worry as much about compounding on previously patented technology, but it would also help bad patents, like this one, expire sooner. An early death this patent most assuredly deserves.
...since we're in the know about where indeces really start.
Myth[0] is that IT in a large organization can be effectively managed.
The fact is that users will divert away from your preplanned utopia in ways you cannot believe.
Many of those users will have their heads up their asses, having no idea how much trouble and hassle they're going to cause in the long term because they clicked on an attachment, saw a glossy magazine advertisement for software to cure all their ills, etc.
A few of those random users will actually be going in right direction, even if the corporate policy hasn't caught up to them yet.
Technically brilliant sysadmins and programmers with as much social acumen as skunk-sprayed porcupines; friendly, organized, effective managers pulling in the wrong technical direction - it's a wild wooly world in IT, not for those with weak stomachs.
One of the big reasons they need to know who you are before you get on a plane -- the airline, not the TSA -- is so that if it crashes, they have an accurate list of who died. This prevents notifying the wrong people, etc. It's kind of morbid, but it makes a lot of sense.
Except that airlines made due with passenger-supplied unverified names on tickets for many years.
And they still somehow dealt with sorting things out after an accident.
Other public transportation systems don't require ID to help in case of accident.
As far as I'm concerned, if someone feels strongly that they want to travel anonymously, they should be the ones deciding whether they want to make it easier for their loved ones to be notified by the authorities in the event of an accident.
"We're doing it to insure your safety" rings hollow in this instance.
It reminds me of the FAQ signage at the exit of the bigbox stores:
It's too bad, because making something interesting could be enhanced with a little realism.
ESPN Commentator: "A couple of our viewers have called in to say that men's gymnastics is a pussy sport.
"We're here with Joe who is going to attempt to do a hand stand on the still rings."
(Joe scowls, slapping white dust onto his palms, getting ready to show the world that this gymnastics ain't nuthin....)
"Joe is preparing to jump up and grab the rings. He's swinging.....higher.....higher......he's making his move into handstand...!...(Joe plummets clumsily headfirst to the floor) Ow! That's got to hurt!"
Joe: "Fuck!"
Here in the US we've forgotten our history so we're not as geographically sensitive as other countries are these days (Kashmir, Israel/Palestine, Taiwan, N/SKorea).
We Americans got whupped for trying to extend revolutionary freedom too far to the North in the 18th century, and didn't get our way in the 19th century with that memorable slogan
Oh well, at least Polk's doctrine of Manifest Destiny got us California:) We'd love to to think now that we'd never do something so gauche and imperialistic for territorial expansion. I'm surprised we're not hated more by our neighbors.One thing which mystifies me is why the spin axis was chosen to be vertical. If the axis were horizontal, the light used in illuminating rooms would fall on the globe as the sun's rays do
Excellent point.
Even more, a globe rotating on a horizontally-oriented axis under light from above would naturally illustrate the day/night phenomena.
But to be fair, a lot of globes come with a adjustment for an angle of declination so they can be tilted. Whether early globes had this or not, I can't say.
What is being discussed is a situation where, for example, an article is talking about caffeine containing drinks, and you'll suddenly find a random link.
Those aren't random rich, dark links. They're just bits aroma and pieces of a subliminal advertising virile strategy. Take a coffee drinkers look sometime at subliminal advertising. Ice cubes energizing in liquor ads become fascinating, while powerful if you use your peripheral Yirgacheffe vision you can pick up the S-E-X they airbrush onto Ted Kennedy's forehead as it appears must have now on the National Enquirer.
I think I'll go have a nice cup of coffee right now!
What we're seeing now is interesting in that outmoded businesses are now receiving strong legal protection
Not outmoded businesses at all.
These are currently viable businesses, making plenty of money, who are threatened by change. They could lose a lot of future revenue if changes were to happen.
The logical business decision then is to invest your money in government that preserves the status quo and in political entities and lobbyists that likewise promote legislation preserving the status quo.
The people driving and embracing change are those who stand to gain from it. That would include people with very little to lose, the foolish, the courageous, the deluded, the visionary.
It's truly scary how the Intel is becoming the only mainstream chip architecture left alive.
That dominant 386 instruction set has grown larger than life, threatening even Intel, who was responsible for its initial creation.
Intel's Itanium line has been a business flop, while AMD stuck to x86 compatibility in its K8 x86-64 development and is thereby is making inroads into Intel's market.
The realities of a market demanding
- cheap,
- standard and
- backward compatibility
are dictating to mighty Intel where they have to go if they don't want to end up dead-ended in the high end RISC market like SPARC, PA-RISC, MIPS and Alpha.The Governator is against Hollywood productions saving money by filming up north in Canada.
Somebody help me out here...
To save money, we should buy our drugs in Canada, right?
To keep jobs in the home state, Hollywood should keep filming in California and not Canada, right?
All the actors I know about need drugs all the time - they'll all be in Canada already anyway so why not make the movies up there?
The more people that get negatively affected by the current laws, the more that will be proponents for change.
You'd think.
My experience is that people won't actively work to change things for the better.
They prefer to sit on their arses and complain instead.
If I were a British taxpayer (yes I know the term is redundant), I'd have to think that either:
- Newham knowingly allowed a sales pitch to be used as if it were logical unbiased analysis (in which case they're idiots)
- they didn't know (in which case they're idiots)
- they did know but didn't care (in which case they're not good stewards of the public's money)
- they found out and but didn't demand a greater discount from MS (in which case they're not good stewards of the public's money).
Anyway, I hope other public entities take the proper opportunity to be more aggressive with Microsoft in negotiating lower prices given the new competitive landscape afforded by open source solutions.you just put a
In the old days it was enough for most applications to have
or, for real short configuration, storage in an environment variable as and perhaps have system-wide utilities configured using where the files were simply full of Name = Value specifications.Now, though, a lot of applications like to manage not just configuration settings, not just per-user configuration settings, but things like cached data, temporary files, lock files, serialized objects, network handles, etc.
It's a tough problem to solve, but you'd prefer that the best solution be intuitive and followed by most applications.
Has the LSB come out with any recommendations on this topic?
Someone might need to come up with a MetaConfig facility to oversee the diverse particular solutions. The extra layer of abstraction might add complexity, but potentially could simplify things for most people.
I'm not even sure it's ludicrous for an application to have its own filesystem. That is, in the same way that the kernel exposes things through /proc , user space applications might like to manage settings in /application or something like that, but with provision for multi-user systems, preserving state if need be, etc.
What about reloading a page is innovative, clever, or technical?
Well, if it was a typical web page, then I'd say the innovative part is to drive up hits so that the high apparent traffic would enable the site maintainers to charge their sponsors more money.
But in this case, the GOP already has fully-functional mechanisms for getting their sponsors to contribute money; now there are Super Rangers if you round up an extra US$300K.
If you're a less wealthy Republican and can't raise that kind of money you can help out the cause by garnering signatures to help get Ralph Nader on the ballot, particularly in swing states.
Careful, logical scientific analysis and pure capitalism can help eliminate this drag on your corporation's productivity.
Are your workers taking extra time to be nice to people who aren't going to contribute to your bottom line?
Are your researchers spending too much time daydreaming and contributing to the scientific community at large by writing journal articles that competitors might read when they could better be spending their time with their mouths shut fixing problems here and now?
Are your workers helping out customers doing things behind the scenes (maybe the customer doesn't even know about the time-consuming effort) that cost a lot of money when that time and money could be better invested in a good marketing campaign to affect customers' perceptions?
Time and the logical course of our current system will cure this problem for you!
Sure, there are a few religious tenets getting in the way of utopia, but by co-opting those religions with our superior doctrines of prosperity and social Darwinism we can win.
Sincerely,
The Man
The problem with privacy is that 90% of the people will never have an issue with it.
True enough. But as an individual it might be harder to guarantee that you'll never be victimized by a stalker, which happens to about 10% of the population at some point in their lives.
I've known a couple of people that have been victimized by stalkers. If you've ever been subject to that kind of stress, all of sudden you become keenly aware of just how much information about you is easily available.
It's not just John Gilmore exercising a principle here, as vaunted an ideal as that might be. There are loads of current and former stalking victims intently making choices to minimize their exposure to the realm of publicly-accessible data.
Unlisted phone numbers, using post office boxes instead of getting mail at a residence, paying cash, giving fake names and phone numbers for people without a legally-mandated need to known but only a direct marketer's desire to know.
One of the people I knew was stalked by someone that worked in the health care industry, so suddenly it was in her interest not to provide complete and accurate information to certain health care providers for fear of providing her new address and phone number to the loonie.
Mozilla still has a reputation of being a part time hobby for coders, rather than a serious corporate product.
That sentiment is not universal.
Also, I think it was more applicable several years ago than now.
After all the exploits and stagnation in development associated with Internet Explorer, my corporation's IT department is definitely past the stage of getting over the stagnation from Netscape 4 and looking quite favorably on Mozilla and its advantages.
least slightly possible that people in the government are trying to make it harder for thousands of people to be blown up.
Plausible.
But the operative word here is trying .
It's kind of like the current U. S. president. He's a nice man. He wants to do the right thing. He believes he's doing the right thing.
But none of that necessarily means that he is doing the right thing.
I'd go for a cell phone company that doesn't funnel all 411 requests through a human being and charge me $1 for the privilege. [Alternatively, in my car - oops, uh, where I never make any calls while driving - I keep the dead tree directories in the back seat so I don't keep getting charged if I want to find out the phone number of some local business.]
Don't any of them have an online white/yellow pages that you can look up automatically with text messaging for less money?
You made Uncle Bill mad again.
Uncle Bill is tolerant of your childish respelling.
Unless, that is, you start to use lower case names to refer for things like
- windows
- "word"
- "explorer"
in any computer related discussions.In your conversations always use approved vocabulary and context, eg:
we'd see a renaissance in cultural expression as well.
This is key.
It would be interesting to see what would develop in the way of many small, low-cost productions vs the current business model that relies on high-cost per film blockbusters with low risk by using tried and true themes (eg, Alien vs Predator).
But I suspect even small time "open source" producers of cinema and music would find irresistable the attractions and audiences you get by mixing in just a little porn and bloodlust. It's human nature.