We all know that even Google eliminates common words from its searches, things like "the", "how", etc. So removing useless words from the search has precedent. It's more efficient.
Likewise, "free" gets mapped to NULL on MSN's search engine. You can see their reasoning behind this:
"After all, software certainly isn't free, is it? No reason to help people find warez sites or useless "free" vi4gra."
Verizon sells DSL service for ~$35/month, and they wanted ~$32/month from the company my friend works for
Classic.
There is so much haggling between monopolies and their corresponding regulatory commissions (staffed by appointees from politicians taking donations from aforementioned monopolies) about what the right price is for competitors to be allowed access to the equipment in the central office. Sounds like the local carrier was more influential than your friends DSL startup company. Imagine that. Money has inertia.
It reminds me of a similar argument where our local electric utility monopoly wanted to charge more for others to use the lines for distributing power. In essense, the power company had unwisely invested years ago in some expensive nuclear power plant, was thereby saddled with debt, and thought that the rate for using the powerlines should include the costs of servicing that debt.
Outside the tech and financial worlds most people haven't even heard of SCO.
Those other companies make the front page instead of just the business or tech sections because of billions of dollars going down the toilet, including lots of employees whose years accumulations of 401k's.
I don't know what kind of employee pension plan exists at SCO, but anyone outside the company with a self-directed IRA deliberately investing in SCOX is going to be getting "experienced" real quick.
Not recommending anything in particular, but you can chain together different tools to filter more completely than a single line of defense both against viruses and against spam.
IIRC, at MyCorp, Exchange servers are insulated from the outside by both PerlMX and Tumbleweed.
I've thought that this kind of phenomena is really electronic rather than nuclear.
Kind of like the tribo-electricity and tribo-luminescence. Purely electron transfer, some localized temporary ionization, but I would really doubt one could get as much eV as you typically need for nuclear reactions.
I could be wrong - perhaps the spherical symmetry of the collapse helps to localize the energy enough.
OTOH, maintaining spherical symmetry under some of these conditions can be difficult. Just ask the NIF folks if maintaining spherical symmetry is a cake walk.
companies are given patents or copyrights for products that involve huge costs to develop. If it wasn't for copyrights, these companies would not make the initial investment because it would be significantly harder to earn back the cost if everyone could just copy your product.
And yet it is still not clear from a quantative standpoint exactly how much of a term of exclusivity is optimal for patent protection and for copyright.
You're right: if the term is too short or non-existent, you'll get less new products than now.
But the opposite may be true, too.
Companies may be getting lengthier protection times than they need based on their internal estimates of return on investment. In that case, customers are simply paying what is tantamount to an unneeded special tax to those companies.
Society overall and technical progress might be better served in a system that grants companies exclusive rights until they recoup, say, twice as much revenue as they invested (or pick your favorite reasonable number).
Granted, there are devils in the accounting details, but you get my drift.
I really like many of the ideas presented in the roadmap.
But what would be really nice to see, too, are some estimates of what the biggest costs are alongside the benefits. That is, in terms of development roadblocks, obstacles. Some of the ideas, such as SVG I really like, but suspect there are huge development costs involved.
By putting out some estimates of how much effort and what kinds of expertise the different projects will require, developers will have a better idea of where they can contribute and how much effort they might have to put in before seeing some tangible results.
Excuse me, but even listeners to the BBC (British Broadcast Corporation) are assumed to know what "Super Tuesday" means... are Americans more ignorant about the American politcal system than Europeans?
Here in America we went to great lengths to search throughout Europe mostly to import our fine citizenry: ignorant, gullible, and emotion-charged peasants.
Because the developers have absolute control over how different components of the application talk to one another. If Calendar needs Something from Mail, it can just reach over and grab what it needs. Programming is faster. And end users of the AOL variety seem to like "integration" and don't care if they can't see under the hood and hook up their own applications to it.
But I agree with you. From a social perspective, I appreciate developers that take the time to create well-designed interfaces that are open published, easily comprehended, easily implemented. Whether that's done effectively by pipes, sockets, DCOP, Bonobo is a matter of opinion.
Illustrating the long term benefits of such an approach: it's so much more powerful to learn just grep instead of a different damned GUI-based "Finder" integrated into every different application.
Personally, I like using firefox as my "HTTP client/HTML renderer/Bookmarkmanager". For Mail etc. I use Evolution, which does have Kitchensink builtin.
You forget that MSFT is planning on using SVG as the basis to their next-generation display technology
Yeah, they get me excited, they get my hopes up, so I'm thinking, "Yeah, W3C standard SVG, world-wide confluence as a result of fantastic technical standard!"
And then it'll turn out to be ActiveSVG.NET, "different but better" than W3C SVG....
All the complaints I hear involve taxpayer money, privacy, and government abuse of such a system.
Hear where? On the right-wing rant talk radio shows broadcast on stations owned by one of the few big media conglomerates?
but consider the Comcast (and others) monopoly-type situation.
In the days when these local monopolies were established the city council typically were able to wring some monetary concessions from the cable company. That is, they're already in bed with them and have been getting money for having done so. It's not in the interests of the cable company or the city council to have competing fiber broadband available; it's only in the interest of consumers like yourself and in the interest of potential competitive providers of content.
Spam is going nowhere until good authentication techniques are implemented internet-wide.
Why not do what my ISP did to me when I established my account, paying by check.
Namely, I had to show them a driver's license.
It's the same principle, really. Before the authorities controlling the traffic let me out on the public road where I could do a great deal of damage I have to get tested and get a unique and authenticated proof that I've passed the test.
Why not the same for anyone capable of spewing IP packets?
And just as commercial drivers licenses give their possessors greater authority to drive large heavy dangerous vehicles, an IP-issuer license would be graded similarly based on how many MB/s your connection is capable of spewing.
Make Aunt Tillie learn a little more about viruses and worms a little more before she hooks that Windows ME box up to the cable modem...
Anyone who has written a paper with any significant amount of math, equation cross-referencing and citations using LaTeX knows just how much agony there is using Word.
Yes, and the same text file I produced in 1988 to create a book-quality typeset document works today on an entirely different machine, and it cost me not a cent. You can grep, diff, cvs commit all you want with these files, too. They're not locked into some impenetrable binary format that's likely to rust over the years as new versions come out.
I doubt there would be much of a case on that basis, since other media that RIAA members have produced in the past have not utilized copy protection technology.
But the content is copyrighted and so can not be copied for redistribution, even allowing for copying for fair use.
Where the legal attack would come is on re-distribution of Ogg versions of copyrighted material.
They don't even make $500 or $1000 bills anymore either.
Ben Franklin on the US$100 is as high as you can go in the USA (which is weird given that there's been considerable inflation since they stopped printing the very large denomination bills. I remember growing up in the 1960's when a $20 bill was considered "large", enough to buy most of a weeks groceries for a family.).
But, they do make Euro 500 notes.
Some authorities were concerned about this because these higher denomination bills make it easier for cash to be transported around for illegal purposes.
At one point I had heard that bundles of US$100 bills weighed in around 11 lbs per million dollars and that for quick calculations during drug busts they would simply weigh the money.
Carrying around bundles of E500 notes would certainly make money movement easier.
But it looks as if there is opposition to the large beasts.
Who are you to determine what an intelligent vote is or isn't?
I'll give it a shot.
intelligenta. possessing or showing intelligence or comprehension.
intelligencen. ability to learn, reason or understand.
Most voters I've talked to demonstrate:
scant willingness to learn,
let reason stop when it hits a tender emotion,
show limited understanding about almost any political subject you'd care to bring up.
Of course that's just my perception, and it certainly doesn't rule out that an intelligent vote could be cast by such people, but the empirical evidence is distressing.
Judging from the outcomes of the elections, the empirical evidence is strong.
Yes, the phone company and cable company will end up competing for our business. And, of course, the phone companies will have to press the government to get rid of the lop-sided taxes that afflict telephone bills (at least here in the U.S.; I'm assuming other countries have similar insidious taxes, whether line item or not).
But if I have cheap high BW service to my house, then I'll start using more services, such as pointing my web browser at work to connections to video cameras around my house to insure everything is OK. Or video conference with relatives instead of audio.
Because the BSD license allows you to keep your fork secret
The GPL allows you to create a secret fork, too. As long as you alone are the only one using it.
The important difference with respect to the BSD license is that under the GPL, you can't re-distribute the secret fork as a close binary. Under those circumstances, the GPL obliges you to make the source code available. This is the key reason the GPL gives MS such heartburn, as it effectively disempowers any "embrace and extend incompatibly" strategy -- all released changes to any standards used by GPL code are source transparent.
I have no problem with someone being prosecuted for abuse of the 911 system.
As long as the penalties are commensurate with the penalties received by non-technical non-programmer abusers of the 911 system, such as when Mrs Wilson's cat gets caught in a tree and she deems it an emergency and ties up the valuable operator.
Otherwise, it's unfair, it's posturing, playing on the general public's fear of "terrorism" and on their fear and ignorance of technology.
If you look back, the entire motivation for IP laws was to promote the greater creation of those works.
There doesn't seem to be any reason to believe that the current system of IP laws produces the greatest benefit for the least cost to society.
If not optimized, the laws just preserve some artificial revenue stream protection scheme.
Having invented a patentable idea, I can say that the term of the patent had absolutely nothing to do with my creation of that idea. It might have something to do with how much money the patent is worth to a company that wanted to buy it, but it had nothing to do with the creation of the idea.
More to the point, it's to goad corporate users who are currently very happy to sit with Win2K installations into upgrading.
Those Win2K using folks apparently didn't get the message from the big marketing drive and didn't think XP was worth the money and hassle to upgrade from 2K.
Since Longhorn is "far off" and official support for 2K dies pretty soon, these are the customers that MS is hoping will jump on the bait.
But those customers probably want to insure that XP-Reloaded is really an improvement over 2k (already quite adequate). Then, Longhorn will have an even tougher time convincing corporate IT to displace XP-Reloaded.
People need to multi-task in more jobs today because all the single-tasking jobs are getting automated or moved overseas.
You know, it's not so much the multi-tasks that's the problem, because doing different things is really more interesting.
It's that today's typical set of tasks are subject to constant interruption that's the problem.
I know woodworkers that do lots of different things, but they decide when to move from one task to another; not some buzzer, phone, email, or person bursting into the office with "Guess what!?!" Consequently, they're more relaxed.
Slashdot Mirror
We all know that even Google eliminates common words from its searches, things like "the", "how", etc. So removing useless words from the search has precedent. It's more efficient.
Likewise, "free" gets mapped to NULL on MSN's search engine. You can see their reasoning behind this:
"After all, software certainly isn't free, is it? No reason to help people find warez sites or useless "free" vi4gra."
Verizon sells DSL service for ~$35/month, and they wanted ~$32/month from the company my friend works for
Classic.
There is so much haggling between monopolies and their corresponding regulatory commissions (staffed by appointees from politicians taking donations from aforementioned monopolies) about what the right price is for competitors to be allowed access to the equipment in the central office. Sounds like the local carrier was more influential than your friends DSL startup company. Imagine that. Money has inertia.
It reminds me of a similar argument where our local electric utility monopoly wanted to charge more for others to use the lines for distributing power. In essense, the power company had unwisely invested years ago in some expensive nuclear power plant, was thereby saddled with debt, and thought that the rate for using the powerlines should include the costs of servicing that debt.
Outside the tech and financial worlds most people haven't even heard of SCO.
Those other companies make the front page instead of just the business or tech sections because of billions of dollars going down the toilet, including lots of employees whose years accumulations of 401k's.
I don't know what kind of employee pension plan exists at SCO, but anyone outside the company with a self-directed IRA deliberately investing in SCOX is going to be getting "experienced" real quick.
His current employers saw his work and hired him on the spot...
Uh, am I the only one that found this statement funny?
[Reminds me of the old joke, boss commenting to another boss, "Yes, Bob's retired. The only problem is he forgot to tell us about it."]
Not recommending anything in particular, but you can chain together different tools to filter more completely than a single line of defense both against viruses and against spam.
IIRC, at MyCorp, Exchange servers are insulated from the outside by both PerlMX and Tumbleweed.
I've thought that this kind of phenomena is really electronic rather than nuclear.
Kind of like the tribo-electricity and tribo-luminescence. Purely electron transfer, some localized temporary ionization, but I would really doubt one could get as much eV as you typically need for nuclear reactions.
I could be wrong - perhaps the spherical symmetry of the collapse helps to localize the energy enough.
OTOH, maintaining spherical symmetry under some of these conditions can be difficult. Just ask the NIF folks if maintaining spherical symmetry is a cake walk.
companies are given patents or copyrights for products that involve huge costs to develop. If it wasn't for copyrights, these companies would not make the initial investment because it would be significantly harder to earn back the cost if everyone could just copy your product.
And yet it is still not clear from a quantative standpoint exactly how much of a term of exclusivity is optimal for patent protection and for copyright.
You're right: if the term is too short or non-existent, you'll get less new products than now.
But the opposite may be true, too.
Companies may be getting lengthier protection times than they need based on their internal estimates of return on investment. In that case, customers are simply paying what is tantamount to an unneeded special tax to those companies.
Society overall and technical progress might be better served in a system that grants companies exclusive rights until they recoup, say, twice as much revenue as they invested (or pick your favorite reasonable number).
Granted, there are devils in the accounting details, but you get my drift.
You have just fullfilled Microsoft's goal in this suit. If they can obscure the growing use of Linux, they may yet survive...
Maybe.
But consider the analogy of growing stealth Linux deployments in the enterprise, gnawing away at Microsoft's empire.
It bears an eerie similarity to the stealth PC deployments on the enterprise desktop back in the early 1980s, gnawing away at the mainframe's empire.
In that sense, Linux could succeed using the very same pattern that Microsoft used to succeeded 20 years ago.
pI really like many of the ideas presented in the roadmap.
But what would be really nice to see, too, are some estimates of what the biggest costs are alongside the benefits. That is, in terms of development roadblocks, obstacles. Some of the ideas, such as SVG I really like, but suspect there are huge development costs involved.
By putting out some estimates of how much effort and what kinds of expertise the different projects will require, developers will have a better idea of where they can contribute and how much effort they might have to put in before seeing some tangible results.
Excuse me, but even listeners to the BBC (British Broadcast Corporation) are assumed to know what "Super Tuesday" means... are Americans more ignorant about the American politcal system than Europeans?
Here in America we went to great lengths to search throughout Europe mostly to import our fine citizenry: ignorant, gullible, and emotion-charged peasants.
What is so amazing in one integrated monster?
Because the developers have absolute control over how different components of the application talk to one another. If Calendar needs Something from Mail, it can just reach over and grab what it needs. Programming is faster. And end users of the AOL variety seem to like "integration" and don't care if they can't see under the hood and hook up their own applications to it.
But I agree with you. From a social perspective, I appreciate developers that take the time to create well-designed interfaces that are open published, easily comprehended, easily implemented. Whether that's done effectively by pipes, sockets, DCOP, Bonobo is a matter of opinion.
Illustrating the long term benefits of such an approach: it's so much more powerful to learn just grep instead of a different damned GUI-based "Finder" integrated into every different application.
Personally, I like using firefox as my "HTTP client/HTML renderer/Bookmarkmanager". For Mail etc. I use Evolution, which does have Kitchensink builtin.
You forget that MSFT is planning on using SVG as the basis to their next-generation display technology
Yeah, they get me excited, they get my hopes up, so I'm thinking, "Yeah, W3C standard SVG, world-wide confluence as a result of fantastic technical standard!"
And then it'll turn out to be ActiveSVG.NET, "different but better" than W3C SVG....
All the complaints I hear involve taxpayer money, privacy, and government abuse of such a system.
Hear where? On the right-wing rant talk radio shows broadcast on stations owned by one of the few big media conglomerates?
but consider the Comcast (and others) monopoly-type situation.
In the days when these local monopolies were established the city council typically were able to wring some monetary concessions from the cable company. That is, they're already in bed with them and have been getting money for having done so. It's not in the interests of the cable company or the city council to have competing fiber broadband available; it's only in the interest of consumers like yourself and in the interest of potential competitive providers of content.
Spam is going nowhere until good authentication techniques are implemented internet-wide.
Why not do what my ISP did to me when I established my account, paying by check.
Namely, I had to show them a driver's license.
It's the same principle, really. Before the authorities controlling the traffic let me out on the public road where I could do a great deal of damage I have to get tested and get a unique and authenticated proof that I've passed the test.
Why not the same for anyone capable of spewing IP packets?
And just as commercial drivers licenses give their possessors greater authority to drive large heavy dangerous vehicles, an IP-issuer license would be graded similarly based on how many MB/s your connection is capable of spewing.
Make Aunt Tillie learn a little more about viruses and worms a little more before she hooks that Windows ME box up to the cable modem...
Given the composition of the court, will the outcome be a surprise to anyone?
Anyone who has written a paper with any significant amount of math, equation cross-referencing and citations using LaTeX knows just how much agony there is using Word.
Yes, and the same text file I produced in 1988 to create a book-quality typeset document works today on an entirely different machine, and it cost me not a cent. You can grep, diff, cvs commit all you want with these files, too. They're not locked into some impenetrable binary format that's likely to rust over the years as new versions come out.
I doubt there would be much of a case on that basis, since other media that RIAA members have produced in the past have not utilized copy protection technology.
But the content is copyrighted and so can not be copied for redistribution, even allowing for copying for fair use.
Where the legal attack would come is on re-distribution of Ogg versions of copyrighted material.
The same legal tactic they employ now.
They don't even make $500 or $1000 bills anymore either.
Ben Franklin on the US$100 is as high as you can go in the USA (which is weird given that there's been considerable inflation since they stopped printing the very large denomination bills. I remember growing up in the 1960's when a $20 bill was considered "large", enough to buy most of a weeks groceries for a family.).
But, they do make Euro 500 notes.
Some authorities were concerned about this because these higher denomination bills make it easier for cash to be transported around for illegal purposes.
At one point I had heard that bundles of US$100 bills weighed in around 11 lbs per million dollars and that for quick calculations during drug busts they would simply weigh the money.
Carrying around bundles of E500 notes would certainly make money movement easier.
But it looks as if there is opposition to the large beasts.
Who are you to determine what an intelligent vote is or isn't?
I'll give it a shot.
intelligent a. possessing or showing intelligence or comprehension.
intelligence n. ability to learn, reason or understand.
Most voters I've talked to demonstrate:
Of course that's just my perception, and it certainly doesn't rule out that an intelligent vote could be cast by such people, but the empirical evidence is distressing.
Judging from the outcomes of the elections, the empirical evidence is strong.
What happens
The consumer wins.
Yes, the phone company and cable company will end up competing for our business. And, of course, the phone companies will have to press the government to get rid of the lop-sided taxes that afflict telephone bills (at least here in the U.S.; I'm assuming other countries have similar insidious taxes, whether line item or not).
But if I have cheap high BW service to my house, then I'll start using more services, such as pointing my web browser at work to connections to video cameras around my house to insure everything is OK. Or video conference with relatives instead of audio.
Because the BSD license allows you to keep your fork secret
The GPL allows you to create a secret fork, too. As long as you alone are the only one using it.
The important difference with respect to the BSD license is that under the GPL, you can't re-distribute the secret fork as a close binary. Under those circumstances, the GPL obliges you to make the source code available. This is the key reason the GPL gives MS such heartburn, as it effectively disempowers any "embrace and extend incompatibly" strategy -- all released changes to any standards used by GPL code are source transparent.
I have no problem with someone being prosecuted for abuse of the 911 system.
As long as the penalties are commensurate with the penalties received by non-technical non-programmer abusers of the 911 system, such as when Mrs Wilson's cat gets caught in a tree and she deems it an emergency and ties up the valuable operator.
Otherwise, it's unfair, it's posturing, playing on the general public's fear of "terrorism" and on their fear and ignorance of technology.
If you look back, the entire motivation for IP laws was to promote the greater creation of those works.
There doesn't seem to be any reason to believe that the current system of IP laws produces the greatest benefit for the least cost to society.
If not optimized, the laws just preserve some artificial revenue stream protection scheme.
Having invented a patentable idea, I can say that the term of the patent had absolutely nothing to do with my creation of that idea. It might have something to do with how much money the patent is worth to a company that wanted to buy it, but it had nothing to do with the creation of the idea.
Exactly.
More to the point, it's to goad corporate users who are currently very happy to sit with Win2K installations into upgrading.
Those Win2K using folks apparently didn't get the message from the big marketing drive and didn't think XP was worth the money and hassle to upgrade from 2K.
Since Longhorn is "far off" and official support for 2K dies pretty soon, these are the customers that MS is hoping will jump on the bait.
But those customers probably want to insure that XP-Reloaded is really an improvement over 2k (already quite adequate). Then, Longhorn will have an even tougher time convincing corporate IT to displace XP-Reloaded.
is your source of stress.
People need to multi-task in more jobs today because all the single-tasking jobs are getting automated or moved overseas.
You know, it's not so much the multi-tasks that's the problem, because doing different things is really more interesting.
It's that today's typical set of tasks are subject to constant interruption that's the problem.
I know woodworkers that do lots of different things, but they decide when to move from one task to another; not some buzzer, phone, email, or person bursting into the office with "Guess what!?!" Consequently, they're more relaxed .