Even though MS, sitting on US$6e10 cash can easily afford the penalty, I'd say to the EU:
Drop the fine entirely.
Prohibit bundling of new features on top of the basic OS unless all competitors including MS have an equal opportunity to that desktop.
Open the API's to complete, free access to make a level playing field for all comers to innovate on top of Windows, not just Microsoft and not just those willing to sign NDA's or pay a toll charge.
[I'm a US citizen and I don't think the EU decision is at all out of line. The US DOJ action does not seemed to have increased Microsoft's competition on the Windows desktop or innovation in general by one iota. But we're still getting charged.]
I agree completely and I also think Weinberg is quite intelligent.
Of course, the irony here is that Weinberg himself was motivated by economic arguments to move in 1982 from Harvard to the University of Texas, which could afford a prestigious Nobel Laureate because of oil money.
That would be the same U.S. state and the same industry that supports the current U.S. President who is proposing this space program.
fork and fracture. Perl isn't forked to hell. Nor is python
I was under the impression that both Perl and Python supported special features that are only available on certain operating systems. Some for Win32, some for MacOS X, some for POSIX.
If you try to run such code on the "wrong" platform, it won't work. The language might be technically OK, but the application written in it would be broken and forked.
It's a dilemma: there's value in having a language and its libraries platform independent, and there's also value in having a language with platform-dependent libraries that help you get something useful done.
Which is better? I don't know. I wish I didn't have to choose between the two, that all the useful things could be done independent of platform.
As economies everywhere are becoming more service-oriented, what are the main characteristics a software system must provide to work well in such environments?"
Low monetary cost of purchase and human cost of deployment.
Low monetary and human cost to maintain.
Easily adapted to suit changing business needs, including moving between different hardware and software systems.
From what I've seen, current software offerings only partially fulfill this laundry list.
Which means there's room for improved products.
Once the purchasing costs are pushed down low enough, what matters most is that service-industry employees are made more productive by using the software; i.e., human factors.
And, if your software can make cheaper human beings function more like expensive human beings, then that's a plus. [Throw the rotten vegetables at me, but recognize it's because passing off cheaper workers for more expensive workders been done so poorly, so frequently, and, face it, can never be done completely.]
I seem to recall several years ago that IBM invested US$10M in SuSE, too, when it was in more of a financial struggle.
I've always liked the SuSE distribution compared with Red Hat for their 7 CD's worth of lesser known applications. Early versions did have a tendency to default applications to use A4 papersizes, though.
Dell has been doing a pretty good business selling Linux servers though, as has HP and IBM.
The late 1990's Linux desktop fad as a business was premature and the market was not thought out well.
The initial Linux desktop market is technical, engineering, DCC, universities.
And, some limited special purpose kiosk use.
Application interoperability with MS file formats, templates, fonts, hardware compatibility had to improve substantially before you could get a broader market for desktop Linux. It's much closer now, but anyone deploying desktop Linux now will definitely get both the "Early Adopter" fame and still have to suffer some lumps, too.
retailers are going to collect information about what you buy. And none of that happened.
Yes, it did. And it is continuing to happen.
A large fraction of the consumer herd is very well characterized. But it's not in the interests of those database owners to make that known to consumers, only to potential clients, like direct marketers.
If the government were to mount an attempt (TIA, anyone?) to start gathering the kinds of information that already has been collected and sits in privately-owned databases, the outcry would be deafening.
Expect the insidious encroachment to continue, with only fringe tin-foil hat objections. Until the day that Something Happens because of this technology. At which point, the herd will start bellowing and the politicians will start posturing.
firewalls create problems while performing daily business tasks
AFAIK, there's no way around sacrificing convenience for security (or the other way).
If you really need some of those "convenient" business network traffic, you can try to setup a VPN so your Windows box remains behind a secure firewall.
What about other critical features being able to place figures and text-frames exactly where you want them (and not where LaTeX
Even though I'm a LaTeX fan, and think that it does a great job of formatting for conventional dead tree presentations, you do have a point.
For me, LaTeX is fantastic for technical papers that heavy on math, free, multi-platform, cross-referencing, bibliography features, ASCII text format that is much stabler than Word or Framemaker (my papers from the late 1980's will still crank through LaTeX), can use grep, cvs and other text handling tools. The output quality is so good that many scientific publishers use it.
But LaTeX does get annoying when you enter Viewgraph Land.
Automatic placement in the dead-tree world works fine, but not on the screen, where you want that label there.
There's some fudging with \special{} commands, using minipage environments that can get you by, but it's still less than an ideal solution.
I doubt I'm the first person that has done heavy math in LaTeX, exported to Encapsulated Postscript and imported the result into Framemaker.
It would be nice if there were a viewgraph authoring tool for LaTeX that would translate your mouse clicks into "Put the upper left corner of this sized parbox here."
If xfig, tgif, sodipodi or Dia supported that, there might be a landrush of users.
All MS are doing is giving their free software along with (hopefully not) your OS.
It's like suing a computer seller for including a free keyboard of vendor X and not giving a chance to vendor Y.
The european market is worth a hell of a lot more than they're being fined - they'll pay up, just to protect the right to sell in that market.
So you have to wonder, given that MS can set prices at will, how much extra padding could be built into every copy of Windows and Office sold in the EU to make up the fine.
My experience in Boston was that parking tickets could be considered more like an intermittent tax or fee. For many people, parking tickets lost their power as a stigma ("Mama, save me from that bad man , the parking ticket scofflaw!") and became just a cost of doing business.
an important reason why open source isn't easily co-opted or why it won't fizzle out easily.
The GPL.
Share and share alike. There's nothing like an idea whose time has come (although many of the principles were utilized in the scientific community for centuries).
The SEC must prove there was intent to defraud...stupidity...isn't a crime.
You're right.
I'm sure that will be the defense, if it ever even comes to that.
And in all likelihood there will only be a husk of a company left after all the legal fees and investor equity has been burned up. Not an attractive target for any private party.
Government action would be predicated on teh government actually caring to go after them and having enough evidence, weighed against the politics of the action, lobbyists, etc.
And, were I SCO, I would be careful not to let anything incriminating become part of a written record or email. Keep everything to just verbal exchanges, using innuendo and hints.
What could fuel a legal backlash against SCO is if a tie is made to someone with deep pockets (eg, MSFT). In that case, opposition lawyers might smell enough money that they'd go after any connection between them, eg Baystar. Especially armed with previous federal findings that MS is a monopoly and has abused its power in another instance (Netscape).
Why don't we buy North Korea if we're willing to spend billions of dollars a year on safety? Im sure the people in North Korea wouldn't mind not starving.
You're right and you're right.
But the reason we don't buy North Korea is that it's for sale by one person that dictates the terms - "Pay me a bunch now, and I'll keep letting you know when to make continuing future payments. And, I plan on continuing my role as great leader and accepting those payments, on behalf of The People, of course."
Payment is not to he citizens of North Korea (who have been living in a strange warped world created by state-controlled media, radio-tuners soldered into official position, etc.).
I recall reading how North Korean official explained to the citizens the USA labels on food aid bags of rice sent to alleviate famine in that country (the official line, of course, is that everyone there is living in a paradise.)
Those bags of rice were tribute sent by the USA to great Kim Jong Il and the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea.
Unless people have a respectable system of regular, free and open elections, they're living in a system that can get so out of tune with reality that violence is the only mechanism for change.
Probably the only thing worse would be if SCO were to send out dunning letters to worthy chartible organization that happen to make use of free and open source software in an effort to save money for helping people.
The sooner that this company's fradulent claims are shot down in flames in the courts and its criminal executive officers charged by the SEC and led in handcuffs to join Ken Lay, the better.
Were it me, I'd send back a letter indicating that my attorneys were in the process of closely examining your claim and will be contacting you shortly. To expedite our process, please submit supporting evidence of your claim to our counsel.
Also - surfing TO a website just to find out whether it's a spam site or not is nowadays also giving away WHO is doing the surfing.
Not necessarily. An automated email filter could throw those URLs into a little dogpen for some DDOS action:) Not a good idea for the same reason stated previously, that I could start sending out spam advertising for mycompetitor.com
More than buzzword compliant resumes, I've been more interested in people who could show me nice looking code and explain it intelligently to an audience that includes people with varying levels of expertise.
I figure that anyone sharp enough to have picked up one language and set of libraries and used it well can just as well do it again.
That said, I can see the temptation to use stupid HR tactics to try to screen out smokeblowers. Problem is that it's difficult to devise a system that simple, where a non-expert in HR can turn a crank and cull the dolts from the field with perfect accuracy (it's like defending against spam). You're likely to let posers through the gates (false positives) and cull out an occassional gem that looks unpolished (false negative).
There's a good reason people resort to informal social networks for recruiting (that is, asking around if anyone knows anyone that's good and looking for a new position) - it's because the crank turning procedures are so unsatisfying.
Re:Not everyone makes/desires a home-brew alternat
on
TiVo Will Die
·
· Score: 1
The key to selling TiVo is to convince the regular people that it's easy-to-use, provides a valuable service, and that it's priced within reason. Seeing as every person I know who has used my TiVo for a few minutes has purchased one, geek or not, I believe it has adequately met those criteria.
Absolutely right.
The critical sticking point for TiVo IMHO has been making the case to regular people. It's not exactly like anything they've had before.
They love it only after they get to know what it can do for them.
I hate to admit it, but what they need more than anything else is someone with marketing smarts.
Microsoft should acquire the Dept. of Justice -- clearing up several legal nuisances in one fell swoop.
It doesn't make sense to try to acquire a subsidiary like the DoJ when you might need help in other areas like the FCC, SEC and Congress.
Large companies that know what they're doing have lobbyists and compaign contributions designed to cover every one of those executive and legislative branch bases, regardless of the party affiliation.
Many companies now claim that they own everything that you do even on your own time
MyCorp has rules like this, but from what I understand, unless your creation is very closely aligned with your workplace functions, what you do on your own time with your own resources would be very difficult for the company to claim if you wanted to challenge it.
And, most reasonable companies aren't going to go after Joe's MP3 index catalog database management program if he spends his days doing VB to help managers mangle their Excel spreadsheets.
Some years ago I had dealings with MyCorp's legal department about a technical advance I had made and associated patents, etc. that the company was paying to file. I was curious about the "We own all of you" clause and got the explanation that, practically, the company wasn't interested in "unrelated" work you do on your own time.
Of course, an unreasonable company and a very lucrative invention might cause a fight, but I have to wonder how well such employment terms would hold up in court.
Slashdot Mirror
IMO, the power and phone lines should be gov't owned, just like the roads. They are a public utility.
Evidently there's legal definitions more focused than "public utility," viz. "essential facilities".
Even though MS, sitting on US$6e10 cash can easily afford the penalty, I'd say to the EU:
[I'm a US citizen and I don't think the EU decision is at all out of line. The US DOJ action does not seemed to have increased Microsoft's competition on the Windows desktop or innovation in general by one iota. But we're still getting charged.]
I agree completely and I also think Weinberg is quite intelligent.
Of course, the irony here is that Weinberg himself was motivated by economic arguments to move in 1982 from Harvard to the University of Texas, which could afford a prestigious Nobel Laureate because of oil money.
That would be the same U.S. state and the same industry that supports the current U.S. President who is proposing this space program.
fork and fracture. Perl isn't forked to hell. Nor is python
I was under the impression that both Perl and Python supported special features that are only available on certain operating systems. Some for Win32, some for MacOS X, some for POSIX.
If you try to run such code on the "wrong" platform, it won't work. The language might be technically OK, but the application written in it would be broken and forked.
It's a dilemma: there's value in having a language and its libraries platform independent, and there's also value in having a language with platform-dependent libraries that help you get something useful done.
Which is better? I don't know. I wish I didn't have to choose between the two, that all the useful things could be done independent of platform.
many distros will not ship non-free software by default.
Fine.
Move to a meta distribution model, like Gentoo.
Give the customer the option of downloading whatever software they feel comfortable getting according to the terms and conditions that apply to it.
As economies everywhere are becoming more service-oriented, what are the main characteristics a software system must provide to work well in such environments?"
- Low monetary cost of purchase and human cost of deployment.
- Low monetary and human cost to maintain.
- Easily adapted to suit changing business needs, including moving between different hardware and software systems.
From what I've seen, current software offerings only partially fulfill this laundry list.Which means there's room for improved products.
Once the purchasing costs are pushed down low enough, what matters most is that service-industry employees are made more productive by using the software; i.e., human factors.
And, if your software can make cheaper human beings function more like expensive human beings, then that's a plus. [Throw the rotten vegetables at me, but recognize it's because passing off cheaper workers for more expensive workders been done so poorly, so frequently, and, face it, can never be done completely.]
I seem to recall several years ago that IBM invested US$10M in SuSE, too, when it was in more of a financial struggle.
I've always liked the SuSE distribution compared with Red Hat for their 7 CD's worth of lesser known applications. Early versions did have a tendency to default applications to use A4 papersizes, though.
Dell's attempt was half-hearted.
On the desktop, to be sure.
Dell has been doing a pretty good business selling Linux servers though, as has HP and IBM.
The late 1990's Linux desktop fad as a business was premature and the market was not thought out well.
The initial Linux desktop market is technical, engineering, DCC, universities.
And, some limited special purpose kiosk use.
Application interoperability with MS file formats, templates, fonts, hardware compatibility had to improve substantially before you could get a broader market for desktop Linux. It's much closer now, but anyone deploying desktop Linux now will definitely get both the "Early Adopter" fame and still have to suffer some lumps, too.
retailers are going to collect information about what you buy. And none of that happened.
Yes, it did. And it is continuing to happen.
A large fraction of the consumer herd is very well characterized. But it's not in the interests of those database owners to make that known to consumers, only to potential clients, like direct marketers.
If the government were to mount an attempt (TIA, anyone?) to start gathering the kinds of information that already has been collected and sits in privately-owned databases, the outcry would be deafening.
Expect the insidious encroachment to continue, with only fringe tin-foil hat objections. Until the day that Something Happens because of this technology. At which point, the herd will start bellowing and the politicians will start posturing.
firewalls create problems while performing daily business tasks
AFAIK, there's no way around sacrificing convenience for security (or the other way).
If you really need some of those "convenient" business network traffic, you can try to setup a VPN so your Windows box remains behind a secure firewall.
What about other critical features being able to place figures and text-frames exactly where you want them (and not where LaTeX
Even though I'm a LaTeX fan, and think that it does a great job of formatting for conventional dead tree presentations, you do have a point.
For me, LaTeX is fantastic for technical papers that heavy on math, free, multi-platform, cross-referencing, bibliography features, ASCII text format that is much stabler than Word or Framemaker (my papers from the late 1980's will still crank through LaTeX), can use grep, cvs and other text handling tools. The output quality is so good that many scientific publishers use it.
But LaTeX does get annoying when you enter Viewgraph Land.
Automatic placement in the dead-tree world works fine, but not on the screen, where you want that label there.
There's some fudging with \special{} commands, using minipage environments that can get you by, but it's still less than an ideal solution.
I doubt I'm the first person that has done heavy math in LaTeX, exported to Encapsulated Postscript and imported the result into Framemaker.
It would be nice if there were a viewgraph authoring tool for LaTeX that would translate your mouse clicks into "Put the upper left corner of this sized parbox here."
If xfig, tgif, sodipodi or Dia supported that, there might be a landrush of users.
All MS are doing is giving their free software along with (hopefully not) your OS.
It's like suing a computer seller for including a free keyboard of vendor X and not giving a chance to vendor Y.
Here's some free crack to go with your McBurger!
Come back soon!
The european market is worth a hell of a lot more than they're being fined - they'll pay up, just to protect the right to sell in that market.
So you have to wonder, given that MS can set prices at will, how much extra padding could be built into every copy of Windows and Office sold in the EU to make up the fine.
Traffic tickets...
My experience in Boston was that parking tickets could be considered more like an intermittent tax or fee. For many people, parking tickets lost their power as a stigma ("Mama, save me from that bad man , the parking ticket scofflaw!") and became just a cost of doing business.
That in the USA we have different voltages, frequencies and plug shapes for power than you do in the UK.
Also, we drive on the right; you should catch the hang of it quickly if you cross your hands before putting them onto the keyboard.
an important reason why open source isn't easily co-opted or why it won't fizzle out easily.
The GPL.
Share and share alike. There's nothing like an idea whose time has come (although many of the principles were utilized in the scientific community for centuries).
The SEC must prove there was intent to defraud...stupidity...isn't a crime.
You're right.
I'm sure that will be the defense, if it ever even comes to that.
And in all likelihood there will only be a husk of a company left after all the legal fees and investor equity has been burned up. Not an attractive target for any private party.
Government action would be predicated on teh government actually caring to go after them and having enough evidence, weighed against the politics of the action, lobbyists, etc.
And, were I SCO, I would be careful not to let anything incriminating become part of a written record or email. Keep everything to just verbal exchanges, using innuendo and hints.
What could fuel a legal backlash against SCO is if a tie is made to someone with deep pockets (eg, MSFT). In that case, opposition lawyers might smell enough money that they'd go after any connection between them, eg Baystar. Especially armed with previous federal findings that MS is a monopoly and has abused its power in another instance (Netscape).
Why don't we buy North Korea if we're willing to spend billions of dollars a year on safety? Im sure the people in North Korea wouldn't mind not starving.
You're right and you're right.
But the reason we don't buy North Korea is that it's for sale by one person that dictates the terms - "Pay me a bunch now, and I'll keep letting you know when to make continuing future payments. And, I plan on continuing my role as great leader and accepting those payments, on behalf of The People, of course."
Payment is not to he citizens of North Korea (who have been living in a strange warped world created by state-controlled media, radio-tuners soldered into official position, etc.).
I recall reading how North Korean official explained to the citizens the USA labels on food aid bags of rice sent to alleviate famine in that country (the official line, of course, is that everyone there is living in a paradise.)
Those bags of rice were tribute sent by the USA to great Kim Jong Il and the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea.
Unless people have a respectable system of regular, free and open elections, they're living in a system that can get so out of tune with reality that violence is the only mechanism for change.
This is disgusting.
Probably the only thing worse would be if SCO were to send out dunning letters to worthy chartible organization that happen to make use of free and open source software in an effort to save money for helping people.
The sooner that this company's fradulent claims are shot down in flames in the courts and its criminal executive officers charged by the SEC and led in handcuffs to join Ken Lay, the better.
Were it me, I'd send back a letter indicating that my attorneys were in the process of closely examining your claim and will be contacting you shortly. To expedite our process, please submit supporting evidence of your claim to our counsel.
I doubt you'd hear anything more from the litigious bastards.
Also - surfing TO a website just to find out whether it's a spam site or not is nowadays also giving away WHO is doing the surfing.
Not necessarily. An automated email filter could throw those URLs into a little dogpen for some DDOS action:) Not a good idea for the same reason stated previously, that I could start sending out spam advertising for mycompetitor.com
those who really know their stuff
More than buzzword compliant resumes, I've been more interested in people who could show me nice looking code and explain it intelligently to an audience that includes people with varying levels of expertise.
I figure that anyone sharp enough to have picked up one language and set of libraries and used it well can just as well do it again.
That said, I can see the temptation to use stupid HR tactics to try to screen out smokeblowers. Problem is that it's difficult to devise a system that simple, where a non-expert in HR can turn a crank and cull the dolts from the field with perfect accuracy (it's like defending against spam). You're likely to let posers through the gates (false positives) and cull out an occassional gem that looks unpolished (false negative).
There's a good reason people resort to informal social networks for recruiting (that is, asking around if anyone knows anyone that's good and looking for a new position) - it's because the crank turning procedures are so unsatisfying.
The key to selling TiVo is to convince the regular people that it's easy-to-use, provides a valuable service, and that it's priced within reason. Seeing as every person I know who has used my TiVo for a few minutes has purchased one, geek or not, I believe it has adequately met those criteria.
Absolutely right.
The critical sticking point for TiVo IMHO has been making the case to regular people. It's not exactly like anything they've had before.
They love it only after they get to know what it can do for them.
I hate to admit it, but what they need more than anything else is someone with marketing smarts.
Microsoft should acquire the Dept. of Justice -- clearing up several legal nuisances in one fell swoop.
It doesn't make sense to try to acquire a subsidiary like the DoJ when you might need help in other areas like the FCC, SEC and Congress.
Large companies that know what they're doing have lobbyists and compaign contributions designed to cover every one of those executive and legislative branch bases, regardless of the party affiliation.
Many companies now claim that they own everything that you do even on your own time
MyCorp has rules like this, but from what I understand, unless your creation is very closely aligned with your workplace functions, what you do on your own time with your own resources would be very difficult for the company to claim if you wanted to challenge it.
And, most reasonable companies aren't going to go after Joe's MP3 index catalog database management program if he spends his days doing VB to help managers mangle their Excel spreadsheets.
Some years ago I had dealings with MyCorp's legal department about a technical advance I had made and associated patents, etc. that the company was paying to file. I was curious about the "We own all of you" clause and got the explanation that, practically, the company wasn't interested in "unrelated" work you do on your own time.
Of course, an unreasonable company and a very lucrative invention might cause a fight, but I have to wonder how well such employment terms would hold up in court.
1. For the lazy admin. Theres lot of them.
[Raises hand.]
I know security is important, but I know time is finite.
Slashdot stories like these are kind of like
Sure you could monitor the raw feeds and find out earlier and in greater detail, but that takes time and attention away from other stuff.