While I don't doubt what you say, the link you provided really doesn't help alot. It isn't easy to deduce that the galaxy is a barred spiral from the image and the write up even claims that the Milky Way is a "typical spiral galaxy", as opposed to the minority case (about 1/3rd) of being a barred spiral. Even now knowing what a barred spiral is, I can really say the image from COBE actually shows this. But the COBE image was derived from the same technique as this (polling infrared light), so I would assume they came to the same conclusion.
This argument isn't very solid. In the cases that it allows this, it's only when an AOL user is the adressee. I can (and have) use Trillian to send a message though the AOL network to another Trillian client. There is no benefit to AOL users and thus a compelling reason to keep the service up (to keep paying customers happy). If, 10 years down the line, AOL finds that 99% of the traffic on their IM network is through 3rd party clients, they could just decide to take the network down (my understanding of the FCC ruling would allow this).
AOL generates ad revenue on a per user basis, not on whether the ad actually made it to the client
This is a very naive breakdown of where ad revenue come from. Ultimitely, ad revenue comes from whether or not the ad is effective at getting a person to spend money on the company placing the ad. Even if AOL prices it's ads as a price/user on the network, companies will only continue to buy ad placements if they are effective. The first step to them being effective is having users actually see them but there are many many steps after that. It's more than clickthroughs, more than impressions, more than word-of-mouth stemming from an ad campaign, and more than branding.
A price policy like "per user on the network" tries to reflect the gain that a company gets by placing an ad. If 50% of the AIM network users are using Trillian, then it's likely that in the long run AOL will have to charge 50% less per user on the network, or have to change their price policy entirely. Otherwise the cost of placing an ad will outweight the benefit from placing it and companies will stop placing ads.
Currently, my app hits a rare bug in the Solaris implementation of the com.sun.image.codec.jpeg package that shuts the VM down without warning. Granted this isn't under the java heirarchy and all com.sun stuff is caveat emptor, but it was pretty bad (now I detect the platform and use a PNG encoder on solaris).
Wouldn't it be more like opening a brothel in Amsterdam, possibly serving clients from the U.S. on vacation there (and possibly not), and then saying "We didn't violate any Amsterdam laws".
Of course, the U.S. can enact such a law that says that people who serve prostitutes to Americans abroad are in violation of American law, and if they ever come to the U.S. they can be arrested. Helms-Burton is an example of such a law, only is penalizes companies that deal in nationalized Cuban property. The U.S. can make any law it wants. They could even say it's illegal to be Afghani. It's their country. If you violate the laws and then go to their soil, then they can put you in jail, because they have the authority on their land.
A previous netcraft survey backs your claim up, this is a trend:
Linux is the second most commonly used operating system. Linux has been consistently gaining share since this survey started, but, interestingly, not significantly to Windows detriment. Operating systems which have lost share have been Solaris and other proprietary operating systems, and to a small degree BSD.
Still, it's not like they will reduce the code of the installation because they are saving money on the OS. They cut the price by $350K. In my mind, they could have not cut the price at all, so this is a great step. And $350K to a CFO is 7 people-years (maybe less, probably more). Even if the total bill is $5 million, if s/he knows you could have saved 7 people-years, s/he's going to wonder why you didn't.
Yes, but the "fact" that Las Vegas casinos use/used pure oxygen turns out to be an Urban Legend. I'm not so trusting of the "fact" that Internet Cafe's in Taiwan are doing this.
No. The enemy state thing is a straw man. The original point is that Alan was working for RH, and he will quit simply because he won't like working for the new owners. Plus, being the guy he is, this opinion is being carried throughout the tech community.
This makes him look less attractive to future employers. There is now a percievable risk when employing Alan Cox. You may partner with someone he doesn't like and then he flies the co-op. Plus, he may have other prima-donna qualities that make him hard to have as an employee.
Sure, if you decide not to work for a foreign government it may signal to other foreign governments that they don't want to pay you to spy, but that really isn't that important for living. I say AC should do what he want, but there are karmic principles involved with makign the choices he is.
This is a snap judgement. I understand what laws are. I'm married to a woman who used to go to law school. I used to type out briefs and get into many discussions with her. You seem to feel that there are cut and dry laws, or at the very least case law that saying this guy was in the wrong. I disagree because I side with the ACLU, who has done the research and certainly disagreed. This guy was granted access by his employer. Misconduct on this level is a matter of contract law, not criminal.
My point was, however, that there shouldn't have been criminal charges in the first place. Sure, community service is a viable punishment. But this guys actions were at most civil in nature.
okay, the ASP i worked for was an accounting firm...
Ok, my comments were more directed at microsoft subscription licensing than an ASP. An ASP poriveds a service. Windows before XP licensing is like having the taped shows: you pay once and have the same content. XP is like having to pay continuesly for the right to watch those shows.
I fully agree that ASPs are different (having worked for an ASP). They run your systems. Rather than employing technical staff, you spread the cost out amongst the otehr subscribers.
my *POINT* is further illustrated by the dotcom crash.
now, without going back to your slashdotter highground,
Hmmmm
a lot of people are very sketchy when it comes to doing business online because they saw a 20/20 episode or something about failing dotcoms
Ok, but I don't see hot the crash itself further illustrates your point. The crash was because too many people though that the masses would flock to them. They built companies on VC and promises, not revenue and relationships. No one wanted to take the time to grow their business, they just wanted a big IPO so they could buy their way to a fully grown business. They didn't realize that a big business is more than 1000 employees worldwide, a market cap of over $1B, superbowl commercials, and a giant sign made out of steel: it's the revenue and relationships that let you sustain them.
Now, of course, the crash did make people more wary as to who they do business with. More speceifically, it's other companies getting burned as the company who is holding their data hostage dissolves itself in bankruptcy court. But before the crash, people were skeptical, as they are of all new businesses, but that was not among the biggest problems facing them. Even if you took away the skeptisism, the landscape would be the same.
There is a similar tracking requirement imposed on CD recorders (by
the patent licenses issued by Philips). It requires that each CD
burner record on the CD the serial number of the recorder, so that
every burned CD-R can be traced back to which individual CD-burner
recorded it.
if you're talking something established like cable there's no question in most peoples' minds
I can pay a fixed amount for one month of cable, use my VCR to tape as much content as I want, stop paying for cable, and watch my taped content as often and for however long I want. If cable didn't constantly have new programming, then I wouldn't subscribe, I'd just tape all of the content.
Contrast this to paying a subscription to the same copy of software and then I scratch my head.
my point is further illustrated by the dotcom crash.
Don't confuse pie-in-the-sky "if we build it they will come" business models with lack of trust. Dureing that whole period and even today internet sales were increasing. There were just too many people who thought they were automatically the next Amazon or Yahoo because they thought they were great.
And then what do you do when MS decides they need more money and you need to pay once for an upgrade as well as the yearly subscription? What happens when they decide they won't reactivate XP anymore so you must upgrade? Is this the software you want your business running on?
It's also feels worse because of MS's monopoly position. If a non-monopoly sets a troubling pricing scheme, then people just buy a different product. If a monopoly that has such a control on the market that it is almost impossible to buy a computer without that operating system installed sets a troubling pricing scheme, you have to think hard about what you are going to do.
One of the problems I find in this industry is that there are a lot of bullshitters out there that promise the world and can't deliver any of it. Even taking $5 million dollars and hiring a militia of programmers represents a risk on that cash that may give you an expected cost of more than $50 million when you factor in the lost opportunity of not installing the ERP system. Buying a ready-made proven system represents less risk (although, certainly not no risk). There's more to financial decisions that the money you spend, there's also the money you might lose.
MS has been ruled to be a monopoly by the DOJ, as you know, they just aren't doing much about it. Since MS is one company, though, they are not a trust. Trusts came about as a reaction to the anti-monopoly laws. The businessmen at the time figured out that they could avoid the wording of anti-monopoly laws by forming holding companies that own majority shares of several companies that together own the market but separately don't. Thus the "combination of firms".
Tursts and monopolies aren't illegal in and of themselves. They have to abuse their powers in specifc ways (leveraging into different markets; giving preffered treatement to external companies that help maintain their monopoly;etc). MS has been convicted of some of these. But they still have the right to set their prices to whatever they want as long as it isn't done unfairly to maintin the monopoly (like dumping). If anything, I'd say this model will has the opposite effect of dumping: it may give them a few good quarters but will hurt them in the long run.
At a medical ASP I used to work for, one of our biggest customers was deploying our app on 16-bit Netscape in win 3.11. Part of our test cycle included that configuration. One of our other big customers decided to upgrade to win 98, since out system was replacing the one they were currently using: on DOS. This was a year and a half ago, I'm doubtfull the first customer has any immediate plans to move from Win 3.11.
Well, if the original story is true, and I suspect it's not, then other cars will begin featuring such bearings or there will be 3rd party enhancement parts that have the bearing. The patent is alread already expired, or will be soon enough.
While disappointing, it is almost definite that it would cost more for a competent attorney. I don't know how much the ACLU was covering the legal fees. Even if the comp it all, or he got a state defence and the ACLU was just feeding them cases, there is the lost wages and the risk of losing his current job to consider.
The required community service is more disappointing to me. The guy was certainly in the wrong, but he isn't a criminal. Of course, if he likes doing community service, then it really isn't that big of a deal.
I'm sorry, but he was granted installation access rights to the machines that he used and his actions were not otherwise illegal (i.e. he wasn't cracking machines he did not have access to). Did he deserve disciplinary action from the company: yes, even to the point of firing him. Could there be a civil suit against him: possibly, but I would still argue no. Should criminal charges be laid: absolutely not, there was nothing criminal about his actions.
If you hire someone, and give them the trust to install anything on your machines, and they screw up against your policy, go ahead and fire them. But don't press criminal charges. The Employee Handbook decribes the conduct you expect from employees, not the law. The law is made by the law makers.
Slashdot Mirror
I didn't know either. This page was helpful. Now I'm wondering what subtype we are though.
While I don't doubt what you say, the link you provided really doesn't help alot. It isn't easy to deduce that the galaxy is a barred spiral from the image and the write up even claims that the Milky Way is a "typical spiral galaxy", as opposed to the minority case (about 1/3rd) of being a barred spiral. Even now knowing what a barred spiral is, I can really say the image from COBE actually shows this. But the COBE image was derived from the same technique as this (polling infrared light), so I would assume they came to the same conclusion.
3. AOL accepts e-mail from non-AOL SMTP servers
This argument isn't very solid. In the cases that it allows this, it's only when an AOL user is the adressee. I can (and have) use Trillian to send a message though the AOL network to another Trillian client. There is no benefit to AOL users and thus a compelling reason to keep the service up (to keep paying customers happy). If, 10 years down the line, AOL finds that 99% of the traffic on their IM network is through 3rd party clients, they could just decide to take the network down (my understanding of the FCC ruling would allow this).
AOL generates ad revenue on a per user basis, not on whether the ad actually made it to the client
This is a very naive breakdown of where ad revenue come from. Ultimitely, ad revenue comes from whether or not the ad is effective at getting a person to spend money on the company placing the ad. Even if AOL prices it's ads as a price/user on the network, companies will only continue to buy ad placements if they are effective. The first step to them being effective is having users actually see them but there are many many steps after that. It's more than clickthroughs, more than impressions, more than word-of-mouth stemming from an ad campaign, and more than branding.
A price policy like "per user on the network" tries to reflect the gain that a company gets by placing an ad. If 50% of the AIM network users are using Trillian, then it's likely that in the long run AOL will have to charge 50% less per user on the network, or have to change their price policy entirely. Otherwise the cost of placing an ad will outweight the benefit from placing it and companies will stop placing ads.
Currently, my app hits a rare bug in the Solaris implementation of the com.sun.image.codec.jpeg package that shuts the VM down without warning. Granted this isn't under the java heirarchy and all com.sun stuff is caveat emptor, but it was pretty bad (now I detect the platform and use a PNG encoder on solaris).
Wouldn't it be more like opening a brothel in Amsterdam, possibly serving clients from the U.S. on vacation there (and possibly not), and then saying "We didn't violate any Amsterdam laws".
Of course, the U.S. can enact such a law that says that people who serve prostitutes to Americans abroad are in violation of American law, and if they ever come to the U.S. they can be arrested. Helms-Burton is an example of such a law, only is penalizes companies that deal in nationalized Cuban property. The U.S. can make any law it wants. They could even say it's illegal to be Afghani. It's their country. If you violate the laws and then go to their soil, then they can put you in jail, because they have the authority on their land.
Still, it's not like they will reduce the code of the installation because they are saving money on the OS. They cut the price by $350K. In my mind, they could have not cut the price at all, so this is a great step. And $350K to a CFO is 7 people-years (maybe less, probably more). Even if the total bill is $5 million, if s/he knows you could have saved 7 people-years, s/he's going to wonder why you didn't.
Yes, but the "fact" that Las Vegas casinos use/used pure oxygen turns out to be an Urban Legend. I'm not so trusting of the "fact" that Internet Cafe's in Taiwan are doing this.
The first thing I went to after the main ebay page was the seller's ratings. Yup, there it is.
"Complaint : Won Item..3 e-mails- never received payment since 3/30. DOESN'T HONOR BIDS."
No. The enemy state thing is a straw man. The original point is that Alan was working for RH, and he will quit simply because he won't like working for the new owners. Plus, being the guy he is, this opinion is being carried throughout the tech community.
This makes him look less attractive to future employers. There is now a percievable risk when employing Alan Cox. You may partner with someone he doesn't like and then he flies the co-op. Plus, he may have other prima-donna qualities that make him hard to have as an employee.
Sure, if you decide not to work for a foreign government it may signal to other foreign governments that they don't want to pay you to spy, but that really isn't that important for living. I say AC should do what he want, but there are karmic principles involved with makign the choices he is.
you apparently don't understand what "laws" are.
This is a snap judgement. I understand what laws are. I'm married to a woman who used to go to law school. I used to type out briefs and get into many discussions with her. You seem to feel that there are cut and dry laws, or at the very least case law that saying this guy was in the wrong. I disagree because I side with the ACLU, who has done the research and certainly disagreed. This guy was granted access by his employer. Misconduct on this level is a matter of contract law, not criminal.
My point was, however, that there shouldn't have been criminal charges in the first place. Sure, community service is a viable punishment. But this guys actions were at most civil in nature.
okay, the ASP i worked for was an accounting firm...
Ok, my comments were more directed at microsoft subscription licensing than an ASP. An ASP poriveds a service. Windows before XP licensing is like having the taped shows: you pay once and have the same content. XP is like having to pay continuesly for the right to watch those shows.
I fully agree that ASPs are different (having worked for an ASP). They run your systems. Rather than employing technical staff, you spread the cost out amongst the otehr subscribers.
my *POINT* is further illustrated by the dotcom crash.
now, without going back to your slashdotter highground,
Hmmmm
a lot of people are very sketchy when it comes to doing business online because they saw a 20/20 episode or something about failing dotcoms
Ok, but I don't see hot the crash itself further illustrates your point. The crash was because too many people though that the masses would flock to them. They built companies on VC and promises, not revenue and relationships. No one wanted to take the time to grow their business, they just wanted a big IPO so they could buy their way to a fully grown business. They didn't realize that a big business is more than 1000 employees worldwide, a market cap of over $1B, superbowl commercials, and a giant sign made out of steel: it's the revenue and relationships that let you sustain them.
Now, of course, the crash did make people more wary as to who they do business with. More speceifically, it's other companies getting burned as the company who is holding their data hostage dissolves itself in bankruptcy court. But before the crash, people were skeptical, as they are of all new businesses, but that was not among the biggest problems facing them. Even if you took away the skeptisism, the landscape would be the same.
From the second link in the orginal article:
There is a similar tracking requirement imposed on CD recorders (by
the patent licenses issued by Philips). It requires that each CD
burner record on the CD the serial number of the recorder, so that
every burned CD-R can be traced back to which individual CD-burner
recorded it.
These schemes are described here:
http://www.licensing.philips.com/information/sid/
It wasn't clear in the post, but it was clear in the thread: because this game requires an add on, namely the HD/ethernet
if you're talking something established like cable there's no question in most peoples' minds
I can pay a fixed amount for one month of cable, use my VCR to tape as much content as I want, stop paying for cable, and watch my taped content as often and for however long I want. If cable didn't constantly have new programming, then I wouldn't subscribe, I'd just tape all of the content.
Contrast this to paying a subscription to the same copy of software and then I scratch my head.
my point is further illustrated by the dotcom crash.
Don't confuse pie-in-the-sky "if we build it they will come" business models with lack of trust. Dureing that whole period and even today internet sales were increasing. There were just too many people who thought they were automatically the next Amazon or Yahoo because they thought they were great.
And then what do you do when MS decides they need more money and you need to pay once for an upgrade as well as the yearly subscription? What happens when they decide they won't reactivate XP anymore so you must upgrade? Is this the software you want your business running on?
It's also feels worse because of MS's monopoly position. If a non-monopoly sets a troubling pricing scheme, then people just buy a different product. If a monopoly that has such a control on the market that it is almost impossible to buy a computer without that operating system installed sets a troubling pricing scheme, you have to think hard about what you are going to do.
One of the problems I find in this industry is that there are a lot of bullshitters out there that promise the world and can't deliver any of it. Even taking $5 million dollars and hiring a militia of programmers represents a risk on that cash that may give you an expected cost of more than $50 million when you factor in the lost opportunity of not installing the ERP system. Buying a ready-made proven system represents less risk (although, certainly not no risk). There's more to financial decisions that the money you spend, there's also the money you might lose.
MS has been ruled to be a monopoly by the DOJ, as you know, they just aren't doing much about it. Since MS is one company, though, they are not a trust. Trusts came about as a reaction to the anti-monopoly laws. The businessmen at the time figured out that they could avoid the wording of anti-monopoly laws by forming holding companies that own majority shares of several companies that together own the market but separately don't. Thus the "combination of firms".
Tursts and monopolies aren't illegal in and of themselves. They have to abuse their powers in specifc ways (leveraging into different markets; giving preffered treatement to external companies that help maintain their monopoly;etc). MS has been convicted of some of these. But they still have the right to set their prices to whatever they want as long as it isn't done unfairly to maintin the monopoly (like dumping). If anything, I'd say this model will has the opposite effect of dumping: it may give them a few good quarters but will hurt them in the long run.
At a medical ASP I used to work for, one of our biggest customers was deploying our app on 16-bit Netscape in win 3.11. Part of our test cycle included that configuration. One of our other big customers decided to upgrade to win 98, since out system was replacing the one they were currently using: on DOS. This was a year and a half ago, I'm doubtfull the first customer has any immediate plans to move from Win 3.11.
Well, if the original story is true, and I suspect it's not, then other cars will begin featuring such bearings or there will be 3rd party enhancement parts that have the bearing. The patent is alread already expired, or will be soon enough.
Office XP which a developer wouldn't use anyway
Somebody here has never had to write a requirements document that marketing wants to read.
While disappointing, it is almost definite that it would cost more for a competent attorney. I don't know how much the ACLU was covering the legal fees. Even if the comp it all, or he got a state defence and the ACLU was just feeding them cases, there is the lost wages and the risk of losing his current job to consider.
The required community service is more disappointing to me. The guy was certainly in the wrong, but he isn't a criminal. Of course, if he likes doing community service, then it really isn't that big of a deal.
I'm sorry, but he was granted installation access rights to the machines that he used and his actions were not otherwise illegal (i.e. he wasn't cracking machines he did not have access to). Did he deserve disciplinary action from the company: yes, even to the point of firing him. Could there be a civil suit against him: possibly, but I would still argue no. Should criminal charges be laid: absolutely not, there was nothing criminal about his actions.
If you hire someone, and give them the trust to install anything on your machines, and they screw up against your policy, go ahead and fire them. But don't press criminal charges. The Employee Handbook decribes the conduct you expect from employees, not the law. The law is made by the law makers.