Slashdot Mirror
Slashback: Spolsky, Mandrake, Geography
Update: not everyone agrees on everything. ipoverscsi writes: "SoftwareMarketSolution has a followup interview with Joel Spolsky comprised mainly of rebuttals from the comments section of an older article on Slashdot. A quote I found interesting regarding re-writing software: 'Don't even talk to me about spending money replacing something that works. The only question that is relevant is -- what does it cost to fix it if it doesn't work?'"
'First' seems to be relative. MattJ writes: "A week or two ago, Gavni Menzies' theory about Chinese explorations preceding Columbus were mentioned on Slashdot. He has now made his presentation to the Royal Geographical Society. According to MSNBC, the response from historians who saw it was somewhat muted. They say they need to wait for his book to come out to treat the theory fairly, but right now it looks like a tower of suppositions."
"Or, to vote for 'irresponsible disclosure,' please press No ...". juliao writes: "The IETF has dropped the draft proposal for responsible disclosure of bugs."
Fax early and often. jd142 writes: "A follow up to Friday's CBDTPA story. Electronic petitions and e-mail are unlikely to sway a Senator. Dead trees do. Luckily you can easily have a message faxed to your Senators. Letters are good too, so send both. This is a case where the more paper we can swamp them with, the better chance we have of killing this. And take the time to personalize your faxes and letters."
A matter of phrasing? I mentioned that StarOffice 6.0 was due for retail release in April; Jacques Le Marois from Mandrakesoft (among many others) wrote to point out that "MandrakeClub is the first and only place in the world where you can get StarOffice 6.0 currently!" They've worked out an OEM deal with Sun to let those who've paid for a "Silver" membership to MandrakeClub ($120 annually) download the software.
Exactly which MandrakeClub members were eligible for the payware StarOffice was the cause of some contention. "We also answer to your previous post about the ZDNet controversy. It's an interesting case of mis-information spread."
I suffer from NRTR*....
No Reason To Run *nix
While Windows 2000 doesnt always work, it's reliability is more than enough for me, and the fact that there are many many talented people out there programming good quality programs for windows, which are easier to install and generally are more aesthetically pleasing than their *nix cousins.
Running a *nix system takes a lot of time and effort, because without that, *nix is even worse as far as security than w2k.... however with my system, I run a Router/Firewall, and I'm protected from everything but my own stupidity, and to protect me from that, I use Eudora...
It's easy to pick on MS, especially when they've done all of the things that the *nix community needs to do, and done them better
You may be right, KDE3 and Evolution may be superior to windows, but that is 2 applications... As soon as I can boot up linux, think up something I want to do, search on download.com for a program, and if it's there, click and it works, then I'll permanantly switch... I know apt is getting good, I've used it, but there are still distros that fuck with apt and break that...
Boy that letter really sucks. See my other post about this. Let me take it point by point:
The Hollings bill will restrict my personal use rights. Congress and the courts have traditionally upheld my right to freely use content that I have legally acquired. But the Hollings bill takes away most of those rights and leaves me with virtually none. Until my fair use rights are ensured, any further encroachment on them must not occur.
Flat out wrong, at least as far as the Senators will see it. The bill in question specifically addresses fair use rights.
The Hollings bill will inevitably prevent innovation because it is the most sweeping regulation of the information technology sector in its history. The bill will give content companies the ability to veto devices like the VCR and the digital Walkman.
This really doesn't say anything, and sounds reactionary.
The Hollings bill is the wrong approach to solving the problem of piracy. A government-mandated standard will never be able to adapt to the rapidly changing digital world. The new "anti-piracy" measures will only harm law-abiding consumers. Every copy protection measure will be defeated by dedicated foreign pirates who sell the stolen goods illicitly. Copy protection will only defeat fair use.
Once again, this sounds reactionary and ill-informed. It might be true in some ways, but it doesn't really address any real issues. The industry knows that they don't have to defeat "foreign pirates", they only have to stop the average consumer.
The content companies said that the DMCA would allow them to deliver great broadband content. Yet four years later, the only outcome of the DMCA has been lawsuits against innovative companies and threats against consumers. We have no reason to believe that the Hollings bill will be any different.
Unfortunately, this is completely irrelevent. The point of this bill is not to provide broadband content, it's to stop piracy.
Once again I have to say: Laws are generally written to solve problems, not just to irritate you. Understand why this law is being written, and attack it based on the fact that the cure will create more problems that it solves. Places to attack: making devices more expensive for law-abiding citizens, privacy (will registration be required for music?), etc.
I particularly liked one of the follow-ups to my original post, where he complained that the music industry is attempting to shift the enforcement of copyright from their own lawyers (where it belongs) to the tech sector. If the music industry wants to attack copyright infringement, then let them go out and start identifying piraters. It's their problem, not the tech industry's problem. I think this would be an excellent point to make in a letter.
But that whiny letter is worse than useless. I recommend against using it.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
What I've heard from ex-interns:
You want to make it look like you put effort into it. Anything is better than nothing. Customization is better than sending the zillionth copy of a form. Envelopes are better than email. Handwriting is better than a printout.
Think of it from the point of view of the legislator. If you received a thousand messages a day, which would you think came from voters with a serious concern about the issue?
I also write a lot of letters and rarely receive even a form letter back. It's still worthwhile, probably. There's a lot of people out there (at least in the US) and it's important to vote and write and be a statistic, because it's those statistics that determine representation and policy.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
There are other issues about rewritting software, such as considering what is up and down stream from it. A sort program may work perfectly well, but may be wholy unusable as a filter.
Another reason that software may need to be looked at is that they no longer conform with the way people do things. Consider the multitude of program exits that existed before the CUA became widespread.
This is not dissimilar to redesigning peices of machinery to work with other elsewise incompatible machines.
OS/2 - because choice is a terrible thing to waste.
I remember a story somebody told me once. There use to be this neighborhood with a thousand little shops in a city in England. You could get almost anything you wanted there. Enter the bureaucrats. They see squalor and poverty. Enter the bulldozers, the high rise complexes, etc, Now the place really is poor, whereas before most were gainfully employed somehow, etc.
This is a great example of a content-free post masquerading as information. You should no more believe that than you should believe:
"Somone once told me that bureaucrats fixed all of the problems of a town. It was somewhere you've heard of but hopefully don't know anything about. I have no evidence, I don't know any corroborating details and I can't even point to an article on the web that might give the slightest credence to my claims."
What you say might be true, although obviously the details are all wrong: in the UK people don't say neighborhoods, that's an American term; the "thousand little shops" is patronizing and almost certainly untrue; the "before most were gainfully employed somehow" is vague and unlikely given the UK's social history. If you want your post to be actually useful and informative you'll need to provide at least some evidence.
Sorry for the rant, and its not like Slashdot isn't filled with these sorts of posts, but this is a particularly egregious example and its a sham it got modded up.
Sailing over the event horizon
from http://www.openoffice.org/FAQs/mostfaqs.html#7 :
The source code available at OpenOffice.org does not consist of all of the StarOffice code. Usually, the reason for this is that Sun pays to license third party code to include in StarOffice that which it does not have permission to make available in OpenOffice.org. Those things which are or will be present in StarOffice but are not available on OpenOffice.org include:
- Certain fonts (including, especially, Asian language fonts)
- The database component (Adabas D)
- Some templates
- Extensive Clip Art Gallery
- Some sorting functionality (Asian versions)
- Certain file filters
OTOH, I agree with you if you wanted to imply that OO will probably, for most home users, do a good job and have quite the same functionality, I know it does for me.
Err...you missed his point. He's refering to the fact that Word contains so many features because different people use different features.
For example, it is often said that 99% of people only use 5% of the features. However, each person uses a different 5%. Thus, if you only include 5% of the features, not that many people will want to use your product.
The point of #14 is that a content owner who releases content in a *protected* digital form has a way to technically enforce content usage rules (think DRM or conditional access). If this protected content is grabbed in the analog domain and redigitized, all of the protection and usage rules are stripped out. The content can then be distributed without constraint.
So it's not that analog is illegal, it's that protected digital -> analog -> unprotected digital is a security hole that they are trying to plug.
That's why the entertainment industries (both movie and music) have investigated the use of watermarks. Watermarks can be used to indicate that a piece of content was originally protected, and unprotected content found with this watermark has therefore had its protection stripped via security breach or D to A to D. If every recorder checked for this kind of watermark (and assuming they were not trivial to strip) illegally copied content would be a lot harder to use.
Could you please rephase this in grammatical english?
Could you please learn to spell rephrase before complaining about some elses language skills. Besides, for this person, english could be a second language. Imagine how you would feel if you were a beginner at German or French, and someone made fun of you. The internet is an international medium, you should keep that in mind.
"I'll take the red pill. No! Blue! AAAaaaahhhhhhhhh"
- Monty Python meets the Matrix
It's also worth noting Joel is discussing building commercially successful software.
The bill is not the SSSCA. That was the name when they were working on it, but they tweaked it an renamed it CBDTPA - Consumer Broadband and Digital Television Promotion Act.
Please use the new name when contacting your legislators. The authors of the bill have been paying attention to our critism. It is no longer a "secruity standards act". No one (except RIAA and MPAA) wants these security standards. It is now a "broadband promotion act" (cough cough). That's a good thing, isn't it? The bill says it will require exemptions for fair use, libraries, schools and researchers, etc. (coughbullshitcough)
If you reffer to it as SSSCA you risk being totally ignored. The SSSCA does not exist. They will point to the *new and improved* CBDTPA and it's lip-service to all of the issues and say CBDTPA is a good thing because it already addresses all of your concerns. Since all of the problems are fixed (coughbullshitcough) you must be in favor of CBDTPA!
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- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.