While the D3D stuff was climbing the version releases to become tolerable compared to OpenGL, which was superior to it at the beginning.
Now D3D is good enough, has enough market share. MS can quit this tiresome OpenGL meeting.
Also, they can rest assured that the hardware makers that care about MS significant market share will do the work of insuring that Windows D3D drivers are written for their cards.
If the parties involved are actively seeking to fix the problem, in a timely manner, I see no harm in not shouting from the mountain top what the problem is.
I think it reflects well on discoverers of vulnerabilities if they notify the software maintainers first by backchannel means and describe the vulnerability with enough precision for the authors to be able to fix the problem in a timely manner. DoVs should get extra credit if they submit an actual patch that fixes the vulnerability (does not apply to proprietary binary products, clearly).
But the vulnerabiltiy is a ticking time bomb out there for users in the real world. The white hat DoV may have discovered the vulnerability after 3 black hats who are shoving it into their latest malware.
The discoverer of the vulnerability and the maintainers of the software are jointly responsible for doing everything in their power to expedite their work, to notify users of the vulnerability, and to provide a patch for them.
Finally, all software users have the responsibility to keep appraised of the latest security alerts and patches for vulnerabilities and to apply them.
If any of the 3 parties: discoverer, software maintainers, software users fall short on any of these responsibilities, then all users will suffer.
As a user, I must rely upon the goodwill of the DoVs and the maintainers.
Rather than move ponderable media back and forth via rockets for $2e4 per kg, why not setup energy collectors and beam it back to earth, or even to space stations, etc.?
However, the delay works to Lindows' economic favor, not MS.
Does it?
I could see that MS would like to kill Lindows early on.
OTOH, while this trial is up in the air, there's a degree of uncertainty about Lindows long term viability, which could affect both its sales and the ability to raise more investment capital to expand into larger markets.
I'm not sure whose getting more pain as a result, but I know that MS has far greater caseh reserves as well as a much more lucrative cash cow that typically thrives on preserving that status quo, by whatever means available.
A federal court has ordered Microsoft to produce more than 300 boxes of evidence to support its claims in a trademark suit against software startup Lindows.com, pushing back the jury trial in the case from April until December.
As a long-time observer of Microsoft's legal battles, this aspect looks tediously familiar.
Yes, I'm sure there's good reasons for pushing back the trial. There were good reasons, sometimes, for pushing back the anti-trust trial, too.
Would you trust important, internal financial data using a switched network as your only safety net?
No, I wouldn't.
And neither should your IT management accept sloppy handling of sensitive data.
You should mention some words to the effect of "our responsibility" and "legal liability".
And here's another log to toss on the fire: My corporation uses PeopleSoft for various HR related Web interfaces. And guess what? We use https for these transactions, despite our switched network, despite our firewall protecting us from the outside world.
So it can be done. Companies that care about protecting sensitive data do it. There's no excuse not to do it at your site, too.
I'm a man page user from way back, too, and I'll look for them first.
But I have noticed that various GNU utilities distribute man pages that are outdated and full of warnings to use the info files if you want to really know the latest about the application.
At least with man pages I only had to remember one function for getting around: the key bindings for more or less.
It would be nice if a holy grail root (XML?> format could be found that would enable all 3 forms of man page, info, and HTML format, much like DocBook permits the LDP to generate LaTeX, PDF, HTML, etc.
IIRC, groff had a promising HTML output feature in development, too.
This USA Today account of a small business owner that went through license flogging, a fine, then wiping clean and starting fresh with open source software.
It's clear the much feared BSA has made a mistake.
However, since their actions in the past have caused untold scrambling to find licenses on the part of many law-abiding but sloppy businesses, I think it is only fair that BSA likewise be caused to scramble. Because the BSA, likewise, has now been sloppy.
The university should have lawyer draft up some pompous letter indicating that
the BSA has not done its homework,
is accusing the university falsely,
has maligned the reputation of the university,
is beginning to cause the university to incur expenses to deal with the BSA's flimsy and false accusations and to repair its reputation as a law-abiding university, and
that, furthermore, the BSA should expect an invoice shortly for these expenses.
[I know, it will be only a paper tiger and never stand up. But I'm sure I'm not the only one that fantasizes about seeing the BSA have to eat their own dogfood for a change.]
Here everyone was wringing their hands at the potential for Saddam Hussein to use Iraqi civilians as "human shields" in the event of U.S. attack.
Now we're moving on to "archeological shields", as if prospect of humans casualities weren't enough.
[I'd say the U.S. mistimed its Afghanistan venture, though, since the Taliban had enough time to actively seek out and destroy that giant Buddha relic.]
In your calculations, did you account for the displaced volume of submerged bodies raising the level of the blood sea?
That effect could make the apparent blood level higher for fewer bodies, much in the same way that adding bricks to your toilet tank decreases the volume of each flush.
same rate that they charge their internal customers.
Good intention, but practically it has problems.
Since the money is just going from one arm of the company to the other, I can see where they could just set the price of CO access arbitrarily high. Need to put a box in the CO? That'll be $10,000 per month, plus power, plus installation, plus whatever. And the books show a nice $10k chunk of change moving internally from point A to point B in an artificial market.
As I recall, placing a price on what used to be a monopoly service has been one of the stickiest and biggest points of contention in the whole mess.
It's like that, too, with my local electric monopoly. They continually argue that new competitors should bear the price burdens of previous bad business decisions on their part, such as investing in a humongously expensive nuclear power plant.
Sometimes I think the government should expropriate the whole mess and sell it off piecemeal by auction, then give the proceeds to the erstwhile monopoly. That would help to settle the problem of current value or internal value not being the same as market value.
I can also believe that Richard holds his principles so strongly that he himself is constantly being rubbed the wrong way by nearly everyone around him.
History is witness, though, of many men of principle and vision, unwilling to sacrifice or compromise with the conventional wisdom. These are the key people that leave a legacy of progress from which all of society benefits.
More common, though, are plain garden variety assholes that do not possess principles or visions, or at least none apart from a primal need for ego maintenance and inflation.
I think Richard belongs to the former category of "perceived assholes" rather than the latter.
Government is one of the exeptions to the old adage "you get what you pay for".
Sounds like what we need is a little more free market in choosing a government.
Of course, what will happen is that prospective government service providers wil quickly catch on to the best in marketing practices: they'll simply promise to lower taxes and increase services.
I think we need more accountability. Government officials being locked in rooms for days at a time with random members of the electorate to quiz them about how their record compared with their promises.
Authorizing new taxes for government is a hard thing to do.
Around my neck of the woods people don't earn much money and love to complain about taxes, big gubbmint, (not to mention diatribes against the liberal media, where we hear Rush Limbaugh and Michael Savage for hours on end:)
Lately, taxpayers wanted to punish inefficient local government by rejecting a bond issue.
I agree that inefficient government should not be rewarded by giving them more money to squander.
But I have to wonder how a government run on a shoestring is ever going to be more than third rate. In the private sector, I know that quality people cost money, and they're worth it. If you get yourself a government of underpaid employees, then they'll perform just about like I'd expect. Kind of like we deserve, actually.
quite a shift since its inception. Moving from massive, room-filling mainframes to miniature gigabyte pocket drives and Qt-toting PDAs.
Yes and no.
I would venture to guess that today's PDA's are almost comparable in performance with the mainframes from 3 decades ago.
Not to understate the magnitude of their business refocus - the range of uses changes just as rapidly as the price, weight, power consumption change, even if there is little performance difference between a 360 and a PDA.
Please don't tell me you don't really know the answer to your question...
Those Macintosh and OS/2 versions will be supported "commensurate with their market positions."
That is, the Microsoft Windows XP versions with the new features and bug fixes and x86 performance tuning will be released first.
After you become disillusioned with this treatment you will have properly assimilated the implicit message:
"The best supported platform is ours."
"For more attention, better service and fewer problems, drop your current setup and go buy this other product we sell."
Even people running old flavors of Microsoft's own operating systems can testify to the many little voices that tell them they have to upgrade to XP (or whatever it happens to be at the time).
It's kind of like the way a slinky keeps pulling itself down the stairs, first one end pulls, then the other, and, before you know it, you're all the way down into the basement!
I was surprised to learn from the article how the early NT was so non x86 centric, shifting from i860 to R3000, etc. They even boast of the portability to different hardware because they weren't tied down to the x86 instruction set so tightly as were the 16 bit Windows developers at the time.
So, why, then, did the Alpha port of NT take so long? And, from what I understand, it relied heavily upon the ability of the early Alpha chip to run in some FX!32 compatibility mode to emulate the x86 instruction set.
The Alpha/NT story just doesn't seem to add up to me. There's some missing dark matter.
"You're only a victim of something once. After that you're an accomplice".
That's a particularly insightful saying, and it could do a lot of good for many people, such as victims of domestic violence, partners of addicts, etc. But it's not universally applicable.
Sometimes you're forced to adapt to an environment over which you have very little control. Concentration camps are one example. And it is particularly true, too, of younger people in school.
When you get down to it, though, most people I know, not just nerds, had an adolescence they'd rather forget about. The fraction that had it really good is a lot smaller than you might believe based on first hand experience. Cheerleaders, jocks and student council presidents have their own suite of problems - bet on it.
I, for one, spent my time as a social outcast. I remember many days of going to high school where I would never exercise my vocal chords for hours on end, simply because there were only 2 or 3 people in a school of 1000 that I felt comfortable conversing with.
Our Walmart style education system exacerbates the social problems that come into the schools through upbringing (parents are not pre-qualified). Some reform of our school systems, which are the de facto social systems for most adolescents, could go a long way to promoting healthier social interactions.
hack into computers in a minimum of keystrokes, and say "We're in."
Lately, instead of keystroking their way into a formidably protected computer system, they have some program that incrementally buzzes through about the 8 characters of the password.
The effect is very Matrix-like, and you feel for certain how imminent is the demise of the system once the odometer is whirring away on only the one last character. They're gone, dude.
Slashdot Mirror
While the D3D stuff was climbing the version releases to become tolerable compared to OpenGL, which was superior to it at the beginning.
Now D3D is good enough, has enough market share. MS can quit this tiresome OpenGL meeting.
Also, they can rest assured that the hardware makers that care about MS significant market share will do the work of insuring that Windows D3D drivers are written for their cards.
If the parties involved are actively seeking to fix the problem, in a timely manner, I see no harm in not shouting from the mountain top what the problem is.
I think it reflects well on discoverers of vulnerabilities if they notify the software maintainers first by backchannel means and describe the vulnerability with enough precision for the authors to be able to fix the problem in a timely manner. DoVs should get extra credit if they submit an actual patch that fixes the vulnerability (does not apply to proprietary binary products, clearly).
But the vulnerabiltiy is a ticking time bomb out there for users in the real world. The white hat DoV may have discovered the vulnerability after 3 black hats who are shoving it into their latest malware.
The discoverer of the vulnerability and the maintainers of the software are jointly responsible for doing everything in their power to expedite their work, to notify users of the vulnerability, and to provide a patch for them.
Finally, all software users have the responsibility to keep appraised of the latest security alerts and patches for vulnerabilities and to apply them.
If any of the 3 parties: discoverer, software maintainers, software users fall short on any of these responsibilities, then all users will suffer.
As a user, I must rely upon the goodwill of the DoVs and the maintainers.
Your point is well taken.
Rather than move ponderable media back and forth via rockets for $2e4 per kg, why not setup energy collectors and beam it back to earth, or even to space stations, etc.?
However, the delay works to Lindows' economic favor, not MS.
Does it?
I could see that MS would like to kill Lindows early on.
OTOH, while this trial is up in the air, there's a degree of uncertainty about Lindows long term viability, which could affect both its sales and the ability to raise more investment capital to expand into larger markets.
I'm not sure whose getting more pain as a result, but I know that MS has far greater caseh reserves as well as a much more lucrative cash cow that typically thrives on preserving that status quo, by whatever means available.
A federal court has ordered Microsoft to produce more than 300 boxes of evidence to support its claims in a trademark suit against software startup Lindows.com, pushing back the jury trial in the case from April until December.
As a long-time observer of Microsoft's legal battles, this aspect looks tediously familiar.
Yes, I'm sure there's good reasons for pushing back the trial. There were good reasons, sometimes, for pushing back the anti-trust trial, too.
But once again, the operative word here is delay.
Would you trust important, internal financial data using a switched network as your only safety net?
No, I wouldn't.
And neither should your IT management accept sloppy handling of sensitive data.
You should mention some words to the effect of "our responsibility" and "legal liability".
And here's another log to toss on the fire: My corporation uses PeopleSoft for various HR related Web interfaces. And guess what? We use https for these transactions, despite our switched network, despite our firewall protecting us from the outside world.
So it can be done. Companies that care about protecting sensitive data do it. There's no excuse not to do it at your site, too.
I'm a man page user from way back, too, and I'll look for them first.
But I have noticed that various GNU utilities distribute man pages that are outdated and full of warnings to use the info files if you want to really know the latest about the application.
At least with man pages I only had to remember one function for getting around: the key bindings for more or less.
It would be nice if a holy grail root (XML?> format could be found that would enable all 3 forms of man page, info, and HTML format, much like DocBook permits the LDP to generate LaTeX, PDF, HTML, etc.
IIRC, groff had a promising HTML output feature in development, too.
This USA Today account of a small business owner that went through license flogging, a fine, then wiping clean and starting fresh with open source software.
Am I the only one that wonders about a bacteria capable of producing an antibiotic so much stronger and effective than anything previously known?
Might it not be effective, too, in killing other kinds of beneficial cells, too?
It's clear the much feared BSA has made a mistake.
However, since their actions in the past have caused untold scrambling to find licenses on the part of many law-abiding but sloppy businesses, I think it is only fair that BSA likewise be caused to scramble. Because the BSA, likewise, has now been sloppy.
The university should have lawyer draft up some pompous letter indicating that
[I know, it will be only a paper tiger and never stand up. But I'm sure I'm not the only one that fantasizes about seeing the BSA have to eat their own dogfood for a change.]
Innovative.
Here everyone was wringing their hands at the potential for Saddam Hussein to use Iraqi civilians as "human shields" in the event of U.S. attack.
Now we're moving on to "archeological shields", as if prospect of humans casualities weren't enough.
[I'd say the U.S. mistimed its Afghanistan venture, though, since the Taliban had enough time to actively seek out and destroy that giant Buddha relic.]
In your calculations, did you account for the displaced volume of submerged bodies raising the level of the blood sea?
That effect could make the apparent blood level higher for fewer bodies, much in the same way that adding bricks to your toilet tank decreases the volume of each flush.
[I can't believe I'm even posting this...]
What percentage of the companies of the world make money selling software?
I recall reading a few years ago that 50% of the profits in PC software were made by one single company.
I would expect that particular company to be particularly opposed to the GPL concept of share and share alike.
And guess what? They are.
same rate that they charge their internal customers.
Good intention, but practically it has problems.
Since the money is just going from one arm of the company to the other, I can see where they could just set the price of CO access arbitrarily high. Need to put a box in the CO? That'll be $10,000 per month, plus power, plus installation, plus whatever. And the books show a nice $10k chunk of change moving internally from point A to point B in an artificial market.
As I recall, placing a price on what used to be a monopoly service has been one of the stickiest and biggest points of contention in the whole mess.
It's like that, too, with my local electric monopoly. They continually argue that new competitors should bear the price burdens of previous bad business decisions on their part, such as investing in a humongously expensive nuclear power plant.
Sometimes I think the government should expropriate the whole mess and sell it off piecemeal by auction, then give the proceeds to the erstwhile monopoly. That would help to settle the problem of current value or internal value not being the same as market value.
rub a lot of people the wrong way.
I can believe that he does.
I can also believe that Richard holds his principles so strongly that he himself is constantly being rubbed the wrong way by nearly everyone around him.
History is witness, though, of many men of principle and vision, unwilling to sacrifice or compromise with the conventional wisdom. These are the key people that leave a legacy of progress from which all of society benefits.
More common, though, are plain garden variety assholes that do not possess principles or visions, or at least none apart from a primal need for ego maintenance and inflation.
I think Richard belongs to the former category of "perceived assholes" rather than the latter.
It is a fertile hybrid which cannot breed with either of its parent species.
This is not all that impressive.
I know a whole bunch of people that are in exactly that same category.
Government is one of the exeptions to the old adage "you get what you pay for".
Sounds like what we need is a little more free market in choosing a government.
Of course, what will happen is that prospective government service providers wil quickly catch on to the best in marketing practices: they'll simply promise to lower taxes and increase services.
I think we need more accountability. Government officials being locked in rooms for days at a time with random members of the electorate to quiz them about how their record compared with their promises.
if those little voices are talking to people running Win9x, the little voices are right.
Yes.
But if you're running Win2K and it works for you, then I'd advise you to ignore those little voices.
...that the reply letter from Microsoft is going to be ... well, let's just say you could put it in a styrofoam cooler and use it on your fishing trip.
Authorizing new taxes for government is a hard thing to do.
Around my neck of the woods people don't earn much money and love to complain about taxes, big gubbmint, (not to mention diatribes against the liberal media, where we hear Rush Limbaugh and Michael Savage for hours on end:)
Lately, taxpayers wanted to punish inefficient local government by rejecting a bond issue.
I agree that inefficient government should not be rewarded by giving them more money to squander.
But I have to wonder how a government run on a shoestring is ever going to be more than third rate. In the private sector, I know that quality people cost money, and they're worth it. If you get yourself a government of underpaid employees, then they'll perform just about like I'd expect. Kind of like we deserve, actually.
quite a shift since its inception. Moving from massive, room-filling mainframes to miniature gigabyte pocket drives and Qt-toting PDAs.
Yes and no.
I would venture to guess that today's PDA's are almost comparable in performance with the mainframes from 3 decades ago.
Not to understate the magnitude of their business refocus - the range of uses changes just as rapidly as the price, weight, power consumption change, even if there is little performance difference between a 360 and a PDA.
Please don't tell me you don't really know the answer to your question...
Those Macintosh and OS/2 versions will be supported "commensurate with their market positions."
That is, the Microsoft Windows XP versions with the new features and bug fixes and x86 performance tuning will be released first.
After you become disillusioned with this treatment you will have properly assimilated the implicit message:
Even people running old flavors of Microsoft's own operating systems can testify to the many little voices that tell them they have to upgrade to XP (or whatever it happens to be at the time).
It's kind of like the way a slinky keeps pulling itself down the stairs, first one end pulls, then the other, and, before you know it, you're all the way down into the basement!
how they were so slow to bring NT to the Alpha.
Really.
I was surprised to learn from the article how the early NT was so non x86 centric, shifting from i860 to R3000, etc. They even boast of the portability to different hardware because they weren't tied down to the x86 instruction set so tightly as were the 16 bit Windows developers at the time.
So, why, then, did the Alpha port of NT take so long? And, from what I understand, it relied heavily upon the ability of the early Alpha chip to run in some FX!32 compatibility mode to emulate the x86 instruction set.
The Alpha/NT story just doesn't seem to add up to me. There's some missing dark matter.
"You're only a victim of something once. After that you're an accomplice".
That's a particularly insightful saying, and it could do a lot of good for many people, such as victims of domestic violence, partners of addicts, etc. But it's not universally applicable.
Sometimes you're forced to adapt to an environment over which you have very little control. Concentration camps are one example. And it is particularly true, too, of younger people in school.
When you get down to it, though, most people I know, not just nerds, had an adolescence they'd rather forget about. The fraction that had it really good is a lot smaller than you might believe based on first hand experience. Cheerleaders, jocks and student council presidents have their own suite of problems - bet on it.
I, for one, spent my time as a social outcast. I remember many days of going to high school where I would never exercise my vocal chords for hours on end, simply because there were only 2 or 3 people in a school of 1000 that I felt comfortable conversing with.
Our Walmart style education system exacerbates the social problems that come into the schools through upbringing (parents are not pre-qualified). Some reform of our school systems, which are the de facto social systems for most adolescents, could go a long way to promoting healthier social interactions.
hack into computers in a minimum of keystrokes, and say "We're in."
Lately, instead of keystroking their way into a formidably protected computer system, they have some program that incrementally buzzes through about the 8 characters of the password.
The effect is very Matrix-like, and you feel for certain how imminent is the demise of the system once the odometer is whirring away on only the one last character. They're gone, dude.