If I have DRM'd music from iTunes, I do, and my brother wants a copy, I can hand him one and authorize his computer. Is that legal? I'm pretty sure it is when my wife and I bother take copies on the iPod, or when I have my music on my laptop/desktop, but I don't know about authorizing his computer.
What if he moves the stuff to his iPhone/iPod then de-authorizes the computer, is that still legal?
If the stuff was not DRM'd, the authorize/deauthorize wouldn't be an issue (it's unclear if you can legally copy the stuff out of your family's world, but the authorization process certainly IMPLIES that it is okay). But maybe I buy a cool song and IM it to him.
That's more "illegal" copying. I'm not going to go trade my iTunes songs on P2P networks, because if I'm an iTunes customer, I probably don't hang out on P2P networks. However, if I kick a song from my Library to a co-worker without screwing around with the DRM, that's "illegal" copying, but maybe introduced them to a new artist whose work they go and buy.
Before they decided to lock things down, that's how people often got introduced to music.
However, DRM-free music is more valuable to me (because of the ability to play a song for someone), so I'll probably buy more. That increases there revenues, but probably increases the "illegal copying." Not in the mass piracy arena, but in the casual copying.
The music divisions forgot that they were in the business of maximizing profits, not preventing piracy. They also forgot that their customers were people that loved music, or liked certain songs. The MP3 collectors, with massive collections, we just computer geeks, not music geeks. Music geeks collect music of interest to them, computer geeks collect data. The Recording Execs got confused and lost sight of their business, which has been in a multiyear decline. Too much focus on fear, and not enough on people wanting music.
Quicktime is Apple's underlying media subsystem. It's not bolted on. The Quicktime Player is bolted on to wrap the functions and play videos. The Quicktime Pro program that they sell enables editing. There is no lock-in, because anyone can provide a media layer, and anyone can access Quicktime. Even Realbasic Apps can bundle Quicktime and do whatever they want. You could write your own media player with it's own DRM and send content to Quicktime (although hackers would grab the unencrypted layer inside of Quicktime).
There should be a way to roll-back the Quicktime update, because the Package should limit changes to the Quicktime Framework and Quicktime Player apps, but I don't know that there isn't Quicktime code everywhere. It should still exist, but it's not a media player, and it's not vendor lockin.
MS gets nailed for Vendor lock-in for bundling not core programs and not letting them be removed. On a Mac, if I don't want Safari, Quicktime Player, iTunes, etc., I just drag the Application to the trash and I never see it again. I still have the underlying OS Components of WebKit (I think that it's an OS Level Framework now) and Quicktime, but I don't have the applications. Microsoft REFUSED to allow the deletion of IE/WMP, and when forced by the courts to provide a version without them, removed the underlying OS components to break Windows.
That's why MS's bundling behavior was problematic, and Apples not so much. Apple lets you remove applications you want without hosing the OS. MS refused to let you remove the application without removing the OS Components, and you NEED media capability even if you don't want WMP, and you NEED the HTML component, because many applications use it once you make it a standard OS Component.
It's not NEARLY as clean as Apple's Applescript solution, but since you can script OLE Components, you should be able to set up a computer to migrate the documents. If they are on a file server, you should be able to set up a machine with whatever is the last version of Office that can read the old files, and have it walk through your document tree, looking for each appropriate document. Then it should be able to load it in Office and save it in a newer format.
That would get all your documents in the latest (Office 2003 or something), then you adapt the script to run on a machine with Office 2007 and do the same thing. Presto-chango, your documents are up to date and safe.
Regarding formatting... if you're talking about documents not updated in 5-10 years, you probably don't care that much. You might want the content (I need to go through old hard drives and rescue any high school and college papers I care about, that are now hitting the 10 year old point), but if you haven't used it in years, and then want to use it, you can take the time to reformat. You're preserving because 1% of those documents might be needed in the future, which makes it worthwhile to bring them forward with an automated solution.
So Myspace built itself up to be a massive site for people looking at pictures of young and/or underage girls. It started with the 20-something crowd, but the teenagers made it explode. Now Myspace is a huge site, and cuts a deal with the AG to stop things. Now, if an upstart site starts bringing in Myspace's target customers, who wants to bet that Myspace can sic those same AG's on the upstart competition.
The teenage market is REALLY important to getting a new social technology adopted, and Myspace basically agreed to reduce their service a bit, in return for defacto preventing any competition from targeting them at all.
The "Open Source Community" of itch scratchers writing software is mostly the minor projects of questionable value, like the 8 million free front-ends for MP3 players and non-sense like that.
The serious software of the Open Source World is all written by commercial entities or Universities, often with tight reigns on the system. Linux has most of its core people on the payroll of various Linux companies, Apache started as a project of systems guys that were sharing patches to the University written web server, that evolved into its own project. All those people were using the software professionally and just collaborating with others on an area where the company wasn't looking for a competitive advantage (and lots of them were in jobs at Universities, not corporate jobs).
The substantial Free Software is largely written by official groups that put it under the GPL for political or business reasons. Universities because there isn't a real alternative other than going through license offices at the school, and corporations when they can't earn a reasonable return on the product without the GPL but can accomplish some other business goal with it. Sun bought Star Office to create Open Office, because they could use it as a tool to deprive rival Microsoft of some revenue from the Office division. It's definitely worked, site licenses for Office are routinely negotiated lower.
Firefox: Mozilla project, funded by Netscape, then later AOL (Time Warner is #48 on the Fortune 500), still with substantial funding from AOL or AOL provided Revenue Open Office: Sun Microsoft Systems (#187) AbiWord: Started by SourceGear as an idea of developing a software suite, when they moved on it became a community project (with an existing product) with University supplied resources
Universities take public money and private grants, pay for stipends, tuition, and 65% "overhead" rates to the University. These grad students are seen as free labor, and it becomes easy to put them on a project that you'll GPL. The fact it, most of the popular stuff was written by professionals, some of which is still maintained by them. The itch scratchers exist, but have never been a substantial part of the high end of the Free Software world, even if they capture the imagination of evangelists.
So instead of downloading, burning, etc., only to find out they grabbed the wrong file and/or did something wrong, they spent a few dollars to get the program from Amazon. Accordingly to Ubuntu's website, Amazon is the US Retailer of authorized CDs. So getting from Amazon and they got the full, authorized Ubuntu CD for not much. Why on earth do you care?
It sounds like you only care about not paying for software, you seem really bothered that someone would pay for software, even software that you approved of licensed under a Free Software license. You are not a good evangelist for FOSS, because when someone not only adopted the software but spent money (some of which goes back to the project), you got upset. The FOSS world needs contributing programers that provide code, and bigger projects need customers that spend money (or corporate sponsorship). It doesn't need freeloaders that try to STOP people from supporting projects, although the nature of Free Software is that freeloaders, malcontents, enemies of your country, etc. can use the software just as legally as the upstanding citizen that buys/downloads it, uses it, and tells others, that's the point, everyone can use or modify it.
But don't pretend you are "supporting" FOSS OR Ubuntu when you tell your friends to A) get it, B) download instead of buy, then C) be annoyed that they buy it.
When I rolled out OpenBSD Systems before, I used to always buy a CD (way easier install). Not only that, if I wanted to install 5 computers, I bought 5 CDs. Why not just donate the money? It was a business purchase, and easy to justify paying $50/machine for software. A lot harder to justify writing a check out personally to Theo for no deliverables that wasn't a business expense. Some projects should consider the Radiohead model. Donations are well and good, but for business use, a business purchase is just as deductible as a donation to a 501(c)3 (either in that year or over time, depending on costs, business size, and depreciation schedules), and a CD is a clear consideration for money spent.
Didn't know that about WW II, interesting, thanks. That said, in 1812, the Brits burned down Washington. On 9/11, lower Manhattan was decimated. A few isolated hits on the West Coast don't quite have the same impact on the country as the others.
Absolutely, the threat is real, and we need to keep them contained. That means acknowledging that 9/11 did NOT change everything, just our perspective. These people are dangerous and crazy, but it's not terrorism that did it.
Despite these lunatics making life hard and expensive on Israelis for 15 years, Israel's economy and per capita income grew faster than just about any other "Western" country in that time frame. They may have half the per capita income as the US, but they've caught up with a bunch of European states, despite spending 7.5% of GDP (with US Aid kicking in another 2%) on defense. While it would be better for Israel to not have crazy people wanting to blow up pizza parlors, they are functioning with far worse than we are.
The bigger issue, as I see it, is the increased concentration of wealth over there because of high oil prices, and Europe's inability to integrate their Arab and Muslim immigrants. Leave them angry and isolated, and not only are they a growing percentage of the population there, but the percentage of "useful idiots" to appease them goes down. If 25% of France becomes crazy immigrants, then a party capturing 1/3 of the rest of the population (including integrated Arabs and Muslims that aren't crazy immigrants) can form a majority with the crazy people.
Containing radical Islam involves a war of ideas, spreading wealth to the common people in the middle east (because middle class people are more likely to rebel and depose of the current dictators), and some momentum shifts on population. If they just grow faster in the "war of the womb" then anywhere they go, they gain in power. There is a lot to worry about, but crazy assholes with box cutters just isn't one of them. Them getting nuclear material from Iran, Pakistan, or France is FAR more of a risk than more planes being hijacked.
Look 9/11 was a frightening day, because 30 minutes later and 50 stories lower and 50,000 people died. For the first time since the War of 1812, the US Mainland was hit in war. We were all generally terrified of becoming like Israel in the early 1990s at the beginning of the upswing that followed Oslo.
It's not the fear of a 3000 casualty hit and loss of buildings... it's the fear of something bigger.
The fact is Al Qaeda is relatively overblown. They may be the only group with a global reach, but their global reach isn't that significant. Think about it, they got 19 guys in to hijack planes when the assumption was don't fight hijackers, they generally let everything go peacefully. They hit two buildings, but before they were supposed to (they obviously wanted to simultaneously hit them after 9 AM to maximize damage), 30 minutes apart, and too high to maximize damage.
The fact is, for all the bluster of Islamic Terrorists, they haven't done anything impressive. The most impressive operation was Hezbollah's holding off of Israel, and even that was a joke. They claimed a military victory, but only in the Arab world can your land be occupied by a foreign power, you hold none of their territory, and your roads and bridges are destroyed yet you are victorious because it took more than a week to wipe you out. That, like 9/11, is overplayed. Israel retooled their military once they had a reminder that "surrounded by enemies" isn't just PR, it's real and requires your military be prepared for an actual war, not just policing malcontents in disputed land, and by the time people heard on the 4th plane that they weren't negotiating, they were blowing things up, the people on the plane took it over and ended the issue.
That said, we should keep an eye on things, because these people do just want to inflict lots of damage... fortunately they aren't that bright. If you haven't noticed, every middle eastern "nuclear weapons program," despite years of effort, somehow is always X years/months away, where X is always longer than the Manhattan project. I have no doubt that the Arab world has it's share of brilliant minds (they were the scientific leaders for centuries), but in the Arab world, decades of oppressive dictatorships have managed to kill or exile every independent thinker, and now they seem incapable of anything impressive, and their government projects are run by total morons.
If Al Qaeda had their act together, 9/11 would have been a start to a wave. Hitting soft targets every week would have caused massive financial collapse in America... if everyone was scared to go to shopping malls because bombs were going off weekly, consumer spending would have contracted and US economic might would have fell apart. Fortunately, the Islamic terrorists aren't that bright, and are more interested in big flashy things to make recruiting videos, not about actually waging war with the US. These movements need a steady supply of naive, bored young teenagers and 20 somethings, so their goal is projects that would be exciting to an upper middle class Arab youth that is bored with life.
Instead of living on daddies money and getting stoned in college while talking up socialism over the pizza put on the Gold Card, like their American counterparts, they can convinced to blow themselves up to fight the US/Israel/Zionism and martyr themselves. The terrorists #1 goal is recruiting more foot soldiers, actually hurting us is a distant second.
When I ran a Mac Network I could turn these on by editing the bundle I put in/Network/Applications. However, with no tools to distribute Firefox in a corporate setting, it's a pain in the butt.
I can put a Linux Server with mod_auth_kerb on my network, tease a Keytab out of Active Directory, and IE and Safari will automatically authenticate with my Kerberos Tickets. Firefox has it built in but I have to put the URL in the allowed domains for auth-negotiate. I assume NTLM has the same problems, but I've never played with it.
The most moronic part? IE makes it easy to add/define intranet locations, the pattern matching on Firefox starts from the left (maybe it does both now).
So if I want Negotiate on *.intranet.mycompany.com, I couldn't do it. But I could turn it on everywhere by typing http://https//. I found that rather foolish. It's a better, faster browser, but unless the IT guy wants to install it everywhere (or has real network management tools like the big boys, but then Firefox settings are still a pain), it doesn't go into small businesses in the 10-50 employee range.
The tools wouldn't be hard to create, and I bet that the raw form of them exists in many companies, but with a nice GUI, easy to setup, it just doesn't exist.
I could not disagree more - the scam is to allow big polluters a back door by buying credits and not having to clean up the mess they are putting into the athmosphere.
Do you know what else is a scam? The fact that I can go to work, earn money, then pay the power company to generate my electricity instead of generating it myself. What you're calling a scam is the same use of trade that we use everyone else in the economy, and allows specialization and creation of wealth.
Trade is the basis of a modern economy.
If a coal plant would spend $10M/unit of carbon reduction, and the treatment of landfills costs $100K/unit of carbon reduction, would you really prefer a law that requires coal plants to reduce by one unit (costing $10M), instead of requiring them to offset ten units anywhere, which costs them $1M? The coal plant saves $9M, and the environmental impact is ten times greater.
BTW: this process is how Al Gore was able to build a massive mansion, fly around on a private jet, yet claim a carbon-neutral lifestyle.
The question is, is the goal a massive reduction in carbon emissions, or is the goal a pseudo morality issue of dealing with the "sin" of pollution?
This is what I don't understand...why the hell are Iowa and NH always first and second in this process?
Historical process? The national conventions officially pick the candidates. Local party activists and elected officials were the delegates (or picked them). There was the fighting in 1968 (mentioned elsewhere), but I think that New Hampshire created the idea of elected delegates (similar to how our electoral college is chosen by statewide popular vote, while originally the state legislatures named the electors) from a primary. The Iowa Democrats decided to have a caucus day for party organization, where people would show up all at once and conduct party business, and name the delegates to the national convention or something similar. In 1980 the Republicans in Iowa decided that they wanted to be first in the nation as well, so they set up a primary... but legally New Hampshire was protected as first primary, so they called it a caucus.
The argument for leaving it alone... If you come up with an idea to reform Democracy, and everyone copies it, should you keep a benefit? On top of that, the people of Iowa and New Hampshire, by the nature of the situation, appear to take primaries VERY seriously. Polls of the people showing up to vote have spent more time on the matter than others do. They have created a culture around their Caucus/Primary process, and maybe it's not a bad thing to do.
The pushed up Super Tuesday debacle is bad, but what if you leave Iowa/NH alone for historical reasons, but then have rotating small state regional ones. Michigan is big, but gives you a midwest primary, SC a southern one, Wyoming popped up with a western state early, but seemed mostly ignored... throw Oregon in there and you've done a round of regional voting. Add Delaware if you think that Midatlantic states get short thrift.
If you did those over the span of 2 months, then moved to larger regional primaries... i.e. have 2 states/week for the next 2 months, then let the big states move, you'd get a more fair system. The small states could let candidates practice retail campaigning, which lets non-corporate or rich candidates compete, but the big states would pick in the end.
In the end, a Super Tuesday with the 10-20 largest states would mean that in any contested primary, they pick who wins.
I would also standardize delegate selection... either winner take all or proportional. But by most places being proportional (which has the added benefit of the chief backers of major candidates all getting to go to the convention), and California being winner take all (IIRC from 4 years ago). California has a HUGELY disproportional affect... possibly to the point of single handedly decided a contested race.
California, by population, is something like 25x-30x the size of New Hampshire... It shouldn't have 100x the influence.
In the early voting stages, we have a lot of candidates. Evangelicals may have liked Huckabee, but held their nose and voted Romney because while he's not one of them, he's closer than a Guiliani to them. Once Huckabee takes Iowa and proves to be a viable candidate, those that found Romney the best of the "real candidates" may switch because Huckabee is now a real candidate.
Guiliani planned to skip the early states and focus on Florida. The theory was that McCain was gone, and nobody had leadership gravitas but him. So going into Florida would be Romney, and Huckabee/Thompson (people expected Thompson, but Huckabee grabbed that part of the base). In that three way race, Guiliani wins security republicans, splits fiscal Republicans with Romney, and hopes that Florida's smaller portion of social conservatives leaves him with a win in a major state.
The issue with momentum is that the early states give people a viability kick. If there are 3 solid evangelical candidates, only one is going to be seen as serious, because if you split the vote 3 ways, you lose. So as soon as one wins a race, the others supporters pick their favorite of the viable candidates.
That's how the rolling primary season is supposed to work. Candidates prove viability and therefore start gathering supporters, or fail to prove viability and drop out, letting their supporters move to the most similar candidate that is viable.
The existence of a Super Tuesday meant that elections after that have been meaningless, and ones before that are support important. That's what has been screwing up the elections, and letting "winners" of a small state with split delegate counts to screw things up.
Post Iowa and New Hampshire, the Democratic race is down to three candidates, HRC, Obama, and Edwards. All are pulling in support. Edwards is in third, but not by much in the delegate count. All the other guys should either prove viability and get out. The GOP is a bit more open because Michigan, South Carolina, and Florida are all good proving grounds for different candidates... Romney/McCain in Michigan, Thompson/Huckabee in SC, and Guiliani in Florida. But Super Tuesday makes this all screwy, and the horse race garbage isn't helpful.
A rolling primary had advantages, and a national one does, but what we have this year is just stupid.
You were portraying him as motivated by power, even if that wasn't your intention.
He's motivated by his desire for the world to embrace Free Software. It's not quite "make the world a better place," but he clearly hates copyrighted proprietary software, and wants to have as little as it as possible so that he can easily ignore it and focus on his right to tinker.
He lost control of the movement when it became "Open Source," which let people intentionally marginalize the FSF and RMS. The goal of them was to "take Free Software and make it palatable to businesses," meaning, ditch the philosophy and just take the software, and maybe the development model that sprung up around Apache and Linux. Open Source won because it's a better brand.
Free Software requires reading explanations and manifestos to understand. Open Source is a descriptive name. Sure there is the legal mumbo jumbo about derivatives needing to be open source as well, but the part that a USER of Free Software would care about is the open source nature.
Open Source's brand wins, OSI guys take control of movement because of name change.
GNU System has the code, it's put on a Linux Kernel. OS isn't called GNU, it's called Linux. When Tech Reporters want to talk to the "boss," they go to the CEO of Linux, Linus Torvalds. If the GNU system had a good brand, and Linus had been invited to contribute his kernel to GNU (or they had already written a simple kernel so people could run GNU), then Tech Reporters would ask the head of GNU for a quote, and that would be RMS.
Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.
I've read them, I understand them, I like them.... and I still think that it's a lousy brand.
GNU = GNU's Not Unix was a silly and snarky inside joke to fellow Geeks, particularly post-AT&T/BSD legal fight over whether BSD is Unix or not.
It's still a lousy brand, and lost.
I like Stallman's philosophy, I think that his two meanings in English is interesting.
It's still a lousy brand and his brand lost. If you need a manifesto to explain it, it's not a good brand. If he had gone with Freedom Software, it would have still been bad (most people don't think about Freedom), but not as horrible.
He took a name that was confusingly similar to the "service mark" that lousy software that is given away called Freeware, and branded his movement on it.
I was generously quoting RMS, I've read his work. However, to pretend that on the communication side, he hasn't lost the two biggest brands that he created, the Free Software Movement (to the Open Source Guys) and the GNU Project (that's become the Linux Operating System), means ignoring the reality.
So we can sit here and talk about how brilliant the man is (which isn't in dispute by me), or acknowledge that as brilliant a man as he is, his branding efforts that have NOT changed since the early GNU days (HURD was given an even dumber name) demonstrates that he doesn't learn from his mistakes in the communication arena. So people with possible influence over him, like Bruce Perens who this thread started with, who asked why people don't listen to him, need to actually understand why people don't listen to him. Since he is so good at predicting our problems 1-2 decades before they happen, we should listen to him, but aren't. We can sit around complaining and implying that people are too dumb to get it (which you inadvertently done, I criticize branding, you assume I haven't read the manifesto that I cite in my writing), or we can figure out why the brilliant creator of this movement ISN'T the strategic planner that the "leaders" are listening to.
There is a REAL problem with RMS's communication skills and branding ideas, and since his part of the world is controlled 100% by him (FSF land), unless people can persuade him to change the approach, we will continue to have RMS predict problems, identify problems, and then have us do nothing because the Eric S. Raymond's of the world will not listen and do their own thing, and have consistently hijacked the movement.
Linux may be amongst the least "technically interesting" of the Free Software Projects, but it's the brand's flagship, so pretending that it not going GPL v3 is irrelevant is silly.
There is a real problem with the direction hardware is going, RMS is right. The anti-GPL 3 people (myself included), ignore the fact that in the long run, generic PC hardware will become a shrinking market, an expensive market (like the Unix workstation market), then possibly no market. The market forces pushing for cheaper and more locked down will be a problem. Linus thinks that there is a hardware/software line that he won't cross, he just wants the code returned, and doesn't care about tinkering on locked down hardware, he's happy to have more code. RMS is focused on a world where there is no hardware that isn't locked down, and we're ignoring that risk, happy with code, and ignoring that code is being used on systems without the freedom to tinker.
I've never seen Stallman as a control-freak. I know he's got that reputation because he wants people to call GNU/Linux "GNU/Linux", but that's just pedantry you can expect from a geek. He doesn't seem to have had any problems ceding control over software projects he's started, and his general aim seems to be to try to explain why acting ethically is in everybody's best interests rather than to amass followers. In fact, something people have often suggested, which he is adamantly against, is a way of stopping Free Software from being used in particular ways that people don't like (e.g. on non-Free operating systems, military purposes, etc). If he were a control freak, he'd be trying silly stuff like that rather than denouncing it.
I didn't say control freak, you did. He isn't obsessed over control with software, although he's shown some examples of acting that way. However, when shown better code, he normally backs down and turns in over, which isn't an unreasonable solution, and is the "pure geek" one at that.
The GNU/Linux thing is because the systems were primarily the GNU system running on the Linux kernel, which he thought should recognize the GNU nature of the system. People on Slashdot like to make obnoxious comments about, "should we call it the GNU/X/Apache/Linux system," but Stallman's argument is real. His project wrote an entire operating system, and were then turning to the kernel. Linus wrote a simple kernel to replace the 8086-80286 targetted Minix kernel with an 80386 one and posted it. People decided to use the GNU tools instead of the simple, for educational purposes only, Minix ones, and the "Linux System" was born, using probably 95% GNU code and 5% Linus's simple kernel. All of a sudden, those GNU tools that people used where they liked them better than the standard Unix ones, were being used in the system rms envisioned, only they were calling it Linux.
Although, there is a bit of irony, since he blasted the generally freer BSD license for the advertising clause, then tried to push the horrible sounding GNU/Linux system. The fact is, GNU wrote the Unix-like operating system, yet the Linux name stuck because GNU sounds horrible AND became known as a project, not an OS. People were using GNU Tools, and nobody was going to call it Slackware GNU, because it sounds bad. If they had even done something lame like Freenix, that might have stuck. I think that the loss was on the branding front, same as Free Software lost out to Open Source, and the ideological driven push by Richard Stallman lost out to small minded thinkers targeting corporate development.
He wanted a movement. He wanted user freedom. He wants the freedom to tinker. These are his goals, and he used software and licensing as a tool to do it. Read his explanations on when to use the LGPL and when to use the GPL. If you are making a Free version an existing library, use the LGPL to make it easier to work with. If it is new functionality, put the GPL on it, so if people use the code, they need to contribute to the body of GPL'd software. His goal is a growing pile of GPL'd code (which he started) that is an enticement. He wants each developer to look at the GPL'd landscape and say, "Wow, if I will GPL my app, I can saved hundreds of thousands of dollars with this free libraries... let me do just that." Like minded people releasing GPL'd software isn't the goal, it's the means to get people that don't really agree to release GPL'd software. That's the goal of the FSF, in the article linked, he writes, "If we amass a collection of powerful GPL-covered libraries that have no parallel available to proprietary software, they will provide a range of useful modules to serve as building blocks in new free programs. This will be a significant advantage for further free software development, and some projects will decide to make software free in order to use these libraries. University projects can easily be i
So Linus announces 90 day notice: project intends to switch to GPL 3, which is similar in intent but different in detail to v2.0. The core of the code is owned by him because either he wrote it, or it is a derivative work. Anyone objecting, please notify within 90 days to have your code removed before it is released under GPL 3. If you notify after 90 days, you will remove the code, but it's distribution in downstream versions will remain, and you will have to contact the distributers if you want your code removed.
I also would suggest that for non-derivative chunks, you contact them specifically. Any of the file systems PORTED to Linux from companies own OSes clearly are not Linux derivatives, because they existed before the Linux version. I would not include them unless specifically relicensed until GPL 3... I think that the blanket notice is probably fine for minor things like device drivers that are 1. clear derivative works, and 2. of no real value to the author, so if he notifies after day 91 and some stuff has included it, he doesn't have standing to complain because there is no real loss.
Relicensing IBM's file system without permission might be more problematic.
I agree with you and think that your legal advisors are probably correct. The minor "copyright holders" are relatively insignificant, and most of their work, patches, bug fixes, etc., are derivative works, not really independent copyrighted works. I find it unlikely that a court would grant standing to an estate of someone that contributed code for free to a project under a free license, complaining about it's migration to a newer but similar free license, because there is no harm.
Just like descendants get screwed when state AG's refuse to bring action when non-profits violate the intention of donors in their statements, and the AG is the only one with standing to enforce, but they tend to care about the living and their benefits from the non-profit, far more than the intentions of the dead donor that endowed them.
RMS is absolutely brilliant, no doubt about it. Anyone who has known him in real life can attest to his brilliance. He body of work speaks for itself, he has consistently predicted things that would happen and proposed solutions. His being the "smartest guy in the room" gives him tremendous abilities to logically predict trends well before those of us normally gifted" people, and with the ability to look like magic divination to those that are of normal intelligence or lower. These facts are not in dispute.
However, for all RMS's brilliance, his lack of social grace, to put it mildly, undermines him as the CEO of the Free Software/Open Source Enterprise. Indeed, the fact that his "movement" was hijacked and renamed Open Source, and his operating system was hijacked and renamed from GNU to Linux, is a testament to that.
Big companies don't hire CEO's that can forecast the future. CEO's hire rooms of people that do that. Companies hire CEOs that can communicate the vision of the company to the outside world AND the people inside the company. The forecasting ability of Stallman is tremendous, but the lack of communication skills is devastating for him as leader of the movement. It's tragic, because he wants to hold the reigns because this is 100% all his idea, but he's a lousy spokesman for his own ideas, and lost control by not finding a better one.
The Biggest Elephant in the Room: Copyright ownership and standing
The most important thing to the FSF is copyright assignment to maintain a single owner to have standing to enforce. If this is so important to free software, why was that not incorporated into the license. You could have a provision that did roughly the following:
1. You are free to modify for your own use, no need to even agree to license
2. You are free to distribute modifications, if you do, you agree that your modifications are a derivative work, and all copyright is maintained by the maintainer of the software (define this in the license, first person to distribute becomes maintainer, unless a new maintainer is named by them)
3. You are free to fork, but you have to rename the software, you then become maintainer of the fork, owning all derivative changes from here on out of your version
That might not have been an obvious problem in the 80s, but given the Emacs vs. Xemacs ownership of code issue (Xemacs could use Emacs, but not vice versa because FSF requires ownership of all copyrights), arguments about relicensing, etc., this was obvious by the time v3 was created. Some solution should have been found to maintain single ownership of projects for the purpose of standing that didn't require a lot of paperwork.
Examples of this: 1. GNU vs. Linux... Linux sounds like Unix (people knew Unix, liked Unix, but couldn't afford Unix), and the fact that it's a play on a name is irrelevant. Digital Unix, Xenix, HP-UX, etc., all prepped people for a *ux/*ix name for a Unix. GNU? Hard to pronounce, a silly inside joke, etc., lousy brand. The system didn't become Linux instead of GNU by fluke, Linux's superior name and brand displaced GNU.
2. Free Software / Open Source: Open Source is descriptive... there is more to it than the source being viewable, but that's the main action item, the rest is details. Free Software? confusingly vague, similar to Freeware (an already existing term with a lousy brand), and required a "manifesto" to understand. In fact, the existence of a "manifesto" was problematic, because we only here the word "manifesto" used in conjunction with "crazy people" and "revolutionaries," with a tremendous overlap between them. Free Software, captured the ideal if you understood the concept... clever for someone with a 180 IQ to create, interesting for people in the 130-150 range to understand and ponder, and meaninglessly abstract for someone in the normal range... bad branding #2, and RMS lost his movement.
So a superior technology, pushed by both Apple and Sony over their technically inferior but cheaper technology, could win? They could win despite the technically inferior but cheaper technology being backed by Microsoft and the other usual suspects of technically inferior technology?
Players are already cheap enough people are willing to buy them now. Player price is not really an issue anymore (not that it ever was, something that never stuck in the heads of HD-DVD supporters).
When VHS was becoming popular, players were $1000. With 25 years of inflation that's like $3500. The BR Players launched at what, $1000 and HD DVD at $500? For early adopters and Home Theatre buffs, that's nothing... $400-$500 is routine to pay for the remote control at the high end. They launched CHEAP for the early adopter market, and inside of a year were pretty cheap.
Players are a one time cost. The Gamecube was routinely half the price of the PS2 and Xbox, and didn't outsell them. Cheaper doesn't always win. Once the object is "cheap enough" then it's not about price, it's about whether people want it.
For early adopters in 2005-2006, $500-$1000 for a new digital toy is reasonable... My DirecTV HD Tivo cost $1000, and they sold them as fast as they could make them for a while, then dropped the price to $400 and sold them to the next tier of buyers, and kept dropping from there.
The player price matters, but to the early adopter, $1000 was reasonable in year one, $500 in year two. Once you get to the advanced side of the market that isn't willing to pay anything to play (people with $10k - $30k home theatres, the early adopter market, could buy a $1000 BR player AND a $500 HD Player), but has $5000 sets, $200-$300 for a good player gets reasonable.
Under $200, you compete for mass market, and under $100 for the late adopters. By $50, you are going after the technology avoiders.
If BR launched at $5000 and HD DVD at $1000, I'd buy the player price, but at $1000 and $500, that dropped to $500/$300 or so after about two years... player price didn't matter. People buying a $500 TV won't spend more than $100 for the player, but the market for the $3000 sets isn't gone, and $500 for a player isn't unreasonable there. All the big box stores are pushing BR, technophiles pushing BR, etc. The only people pushing HD that I can see are Slashdot anti-DRM people that for some reason think that HD-DVD is better DRM-wise which doesn't appear to be the case in reality.
As for the American dream, you missed my point in my original post - it never really existed! at least for most. There has always been a huge underclass, mainly working in low wage jobs, so that a few could live a good life. The "American Dream" is a myth perpetrated by advertising men to convince folks that their life is somehow incomplete, but wouldn't be if they only bought Product X. It's an historical accident that the US went through a period where the ratio of peons:priviledged got closer to equity. That's going away.
The American Dream, pre-marketing myth, was that anyone could come to America, no matter how poor, how little they understand English, whatever their religion, etc., and try to succeed and keep the fruits of their labor. The American Dream was that if you worked hard, you could succeed to the best of your ability.
In America, any Native Son could grow up and become the President of the United States. The Head of State COULD be anyone. In Europe, to be Head of State, the best solution was for your father to be Head of State, and be the oldest son. Any other path involved being related to the Head of State, and the right people dying off. You can joke all you want about Bush being President because his father was, but only TWO Presidents are the son's of other Presidents in the US... what percentage of Monarchs are related to the previous Monarch?:)
Before the New Deal and the "New American Dream," there was no IRS, INS, W-2, W-4, 1099, I-9, SSA, etc. You wanted work, you got up early and looked for work. Some jobs lasted a day, some a week, some months, but whatever your wages were, you kept them. The Media loves to mock the "Mexican Day Laborer" that stands around at Home Depot looking for work for a day... my grandfather was telling me that during the Great Depression, that's how his father got work essentially. There was no "employment law," you went and got work.
This was in contrast to Europe (particularly England) where all national wealth either theoretically belonged to the Crown or was owned by a small class of aristocrats. In the US, not everyone owned land, but everyone COULD own land. Sure they might not be able to afford it, but you could legally buy land. You didn't have to be the Heir to the the current Heir to the old Feudal Lord that owned the land and just rented it out to the people.
After WWII, the suburbs were created because massive numbers of men ages 18-30 showed back up, got married, and wanted houses quickly. The rest of the country felt that nothing was too good for the men returning victorious, and numerous benefits were created for Vets (and a desire to keep them from immediately flooding the labor market and causing massive unemployment, so the Gov't got some to go to college, etc.). America had unprecedented wealth, both because WWII R&D translated into massive improvements in manufacturing creating massive wealth, and as a percentage of global wealth, America exploded because it hadn't just had its cities leveled for the second time in 30 years. This resulted in massive money for conveniences (kitchen appliances that we take for granted generally date to the 1950s through 1970s), freeing up leisure time.
The middle class as a concept, spoiled, pampered, wealthy, was founded in this time frame. Wealth exploded, and the "Greatest Generation" happened to be in the position to move up with it. They gave their children unprecedented advantages, and the Baby Boomers became the first generation to define education as lasting through age 22. Public education started with 1-8, then 1-10, 1-12 and K-12, and now Pre-K:16. What happens as things become standard, they stop attracting a premium. A high school diploma received a premium wage when most people went through 8th grade, college did as the diploma was normal.
The fact is, unless you "NEED" the education (technical, specialized education), the ever increasing baseline of education to signal "I'm
Different directions -- Need Both
on
HTML V5 and XHTML V2
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· Score: 5, Insightful
Most of the web is non well-formed, so it's variations of HTML 4 with non-standard components. An HTML 5, that remains a non-XML language, presents a reasonable way forward for "web sites." Without the need to be well-formed, the tools to create are easier and can be sloppy, particularly for moderately admined sites. Creating a new HTML 5 might succeed in migrating those sites. If you avoid most breaks with HTML 4, beyond the worst offenders, Browsers could target an HTML 5, and webmasters would only need to change 5%-10% of the content to keep up. That would mean a less degrading "legacy" mode than the HTML 4 renderers we have now.
So while the HTML 4 renderers floating around wouldn't be trashed, they could be ignored, left as is, and focus on an HTML 5 one. Migrating to XHTML is non-trivial for people with out-dated tools and lack of knowledge. You can't ignore those sites as a browser maker, but HTML 5 might give a reasonable path to modernizing the "non-professional" WWW.
XHTML has some great features, by being well-formed XML, you can use XML libraries for parsing the pages. This makes it much easier to "scrape" data off pages and handle inter-system communication, which HTML is not equipped for.
It's interesting in that HTML and XHTML look almost identical (for good reasons, XHTML was a port of HTML to XML) but are technically very different, HTML being an SGML language, and XHTML an XML language. Both programs have their uses, HTML is "easier" for people to hack together because if you do it wrong, the HTML renderer makes a best guess. XHTML is easier to use professionally, because if there is a problem, you can catch it as being an invalid XML document. Professionals worry about cross-browser issues, amateurs worry about getting it out there.
XHTML "failed" to replace HTML because it satisfies the needs of professionals to have a standardized approach to minimize cross-browser issues, but lacks the simplicity needed for amateurs and lousy professionals.
Rev'ing both specs would be a forward move that might simplify browser writing in the long term while giving a migration path. XHTML needs a less confusing and forward looking path, and HTML needs to be Rev'd after being left for dead to drop the really problematic entries and give people a path forward.
There are a couple of reasons for this. Most are mentioned elsewhere, so I'm not going into details. 1. Is the per-transaction fee with the merchants, they don't want to do a bunch of tiny transactions and eat fees. 2. Breakage, every point on used in the system is excess profit. 3. Increase spending - companies found that the majority of gift card receivers spent MORE than the card was for. Makes sense, if you get a gift card for $25, and decide between $20 and $30 items, your choice is "lose" $5 and get the $20, or spend $5 and get the $30 to use all the value... that's why they push gift cards for the holidays. 4. Abstraction from cost, you think (I have X points, I need Y, let me get it) and not the cost of the items. It probably helps with the International business to charge constant "points" across regions and just price the points locally. Sure beats having to price everything EVERYWHERE. International pricing isn't simply the exchange rate + VAT once you have real marketing projects. But if they price the points right, they can single-price the stuff, keeping marketing costs down. 5. Accounting Rules. Depending on their accounting rules they may (or may not) be able to book this revenue. If the points never expire, they shouldn't be able to book it, as they collect the cash and have a liability (to provide you with a service), that becomes revenue when you use the points... that's typically why gift cards expire after 1-2 years depending on state (actually, eaten with monthly small transaction fees), so they can start eating up the balance that's sitting on the books as a liability to by taking the transaction fees out.
Since the points are probably non-refundable and the service virtual, they may have convinced their auditors that the revenue is incurred when the points are received, as there is no liability. OTOH: if they pay the content providers on a per-deal basis, this may not apply. But revenue recognition plays a role in these decisions as well.
6. Kids/Allowances, I assume that with passwords, etc., you can only allow the parent to log in and put "points on the account" that the kids can spend. Rather than having to fish out the credit card or give an 8-year old access to it, you can recharge their points weekly/monthly, and know that it's a fixed expenditure. That makes it MUCH easier for parents to control the spending without having to fight with their kids over it. It's easy to say "well that's parenting," but I like to focus my parenting time enjoying my time with my kids and focus my "parenting" on things that will impart values to them, fighting over video games is not at the top of my list.
Much easier to add 1000 points/week to the kid's account and let them stockpile points for things they want than have to have them run to you for each purchase. It's the same reason parents give kids the allowance, it let's them learn money management on their own through trial and error, instead of preaching parents.
Ask.com right now sits on 4.7% of the Internet queries. If 1% of the population are "very concerned about privacy" and half of them switch their searches, that would bring them from 4.7% to 5.2%. That wouldn't challenge Google, but it would increase Ask.com's search base by 10%. A 10% revenue growth COULD bring them an extra 20%-30% profits given how high their fixed costs are as a percentage of total costs.
Ask.com doesn't have to beat Google, just increase their profits at a greater rate than their expected return on capital.
If you are building a Web Application for which you have a database simply because you need persistent storage, what you are saying makes a lot of sense. In that case, flat files would also be fine, and your storage mechanism is all about speed, and if MySQL with a SQL front-end gives you speed, great.
If your core information is the database, the opposite is true. The basic CRUD tools that Rails beautifully scaffolds aren't really OO applications, they are basic data sets. You need sets of data, extracted via one or more tables with possible filters, SQL expresses that beautifully. The core of those systems are a set of data that aren't OO. Having a teacher from a set of teachers isn't OO programming just because you've made teachers an object instead of an array of teacher objects (or structs, or whatever).
If you are doing e-commerce sites, the tools for the CRUD administration are WAY more complicated than showing the objects on the site, which may mean that different languages serve the purpose here.
Your issues with DB business logic vs. web layer business logic assumes a single application, and as you scale up, it's not so simple. While object reuse gives a reason to do so, Rails is so tied to it's build your data models with persistence with almost no code that sharing the objects doesn't get you very far. Basically, if you put the logic in Rails land than if you need to build a third party solution that can't be Rails code for whatever reason you have to share out your objects through some web interface. That's not a horrible solution, but it's of questionable value vs. just having it talk to the database. It's one extra layer to monitor and debug.
Regarding vendor lock-in, that's REALLY overstated in databases. The fact is, switching databases for major data applications is non-trivial regardless. For open source "applications" with a data store, the ability to switch from MySQL -> PostgreSQL and back is important, but that's the trivial case... no data in the system, no need for fancy integrity maintenance. If you have even a few dozen gigabytes of data in a PostgreSQL or MS SQL database you can move the data from one to the other, but you'll have to manually update logic.
Once performance matters, you need to optimize for the database that you are in, and flexibility here is over rated. Changing your database schema in a production environment is rather difficult and best to avoid, but people talk about lock-in as though they want to swap databases regularly. Even if you data environment has 200 Stored Procedures, a large number for a small-medium sized database, even if those procedures average 1 man-hours each to rewrite and debug (which is probably reasonable if most are trivial methods to get some abstraction away from the tables), you're still ONLY talking 200 man-hours, which would be 5 man weeks. Even at 10-50 man weeks, it's still less than one quarter for a small DBA team or 2-5 people. So even in the case of vendor lock-in, the rewriting of the procedures, if documented, isn't THAT big a deal, and certainly not a justification for losing ALL the advantages that they can give you.
I'm busy doing a database cleanup operation. Since everything talks directly to the DB tables, through a Rails (though poorly implemented Rails) system, migrating on the live system to something that we want is turning out the be a nightmare. The most likely course of action is going to be building and testing a live transaction that moves ALL the existing tables to another schema, creates views for them in the old schema, with PostgreSQL rules to talk to the new tables, JUST so that chunks of the database can be rebuild at one time.
Had a lot of these trivial operations been done in stored procedure functions, the migration would be pretty painless, because we'd create new tables, rewrite the sprocs to talk to the new tables, then bring the data in behind us.
The tools for the Web Apps are better, but that depends on the environment being suitabl
That said, it doesn't seem like their different developer studios have a lot of synergy though: The end result is a company that has very diverse offerings, and will be difficult to market as a single entity. It's not like either company needed the other for stability purposes though: Both WoW and Guitar Hero are the kind of franchises that allow a company to have a nice R&D budget and take risks with new franchises.
I wouldn't assume synergies in the development teams, high performance complex software suites requires a tight knit group. The synergies will be back office, the easy integration (accounting, payroll, human resources) that are the only thing that actually does pan outs in mergers, plus marketing, distribution, etc.
Creating a game is "easy" and I put it in quotes because only a few companies do it well, but there is a lot to getting a successful game out. Distribution is a BIG part of the profits, and being bigger means avoiding middlemen. Marketing, PR, etc., there is a lot on the other side of the game business.
EA being huge gives them the ability to bully competition in the marketplace. Also, when you deal with Consoles, there is a desire to only deal with big publishers because of all the security of the systems, so being big helps here as well.
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If I have DRM'd music from iTunes, I do, and my brother wants a copy, I can hand him one and authorize his computer. Is that legal? I'm pretty sure it is when my wife and I bother take copies on the iPod, or when I have my music on my laptop/desktop, but I don't know about authorizing his computer.
What if he moves the stuff to his iPhone/iPod then de-authorizes the computer, is that still legal?
If the stuff was not DRM'd, the authorize/deauthorize wouldn't be an issue (it's unclear if you can legally copy the stuff out of your family's world, but the authorization process certainly IMPLIES that it is okay). But maybe I buy a cool song and IM it to him.
That's more "illegal" copying. I'm not going to go trade my iTunes songs on P2P networks, because if I'm an iTunes customer, I probably don't hang out on P2P networks. However, if I kick a song from my Library to a co-worker without screwing around with the DRM, that's "illegal" copying, but maybe introduced them to a new artist whose work they go and buy.
Before they decided to lock things down, that's how people often got introduced to music.
However, DRM-free music is more valuable to me (because of the ability to play a song for someone), so I'll probably buy more. That increases there revenues, but probably increases the "illegal copying." Not in the mass piracy arena, but in the casual copying.
The music divisions forgot that they were in the business of maximizing profits, not preventing piracy. They also forgot that their customers were people that loved music, or liked certain songs. The MP3 collectors, with massive collections, we just computer geeks, not music geeks. Music geeks collect music of interest to them, computer geeks collect data. The Recording Execs got confused and lost sight of their business, which has been in a multiyear decline. Too much focus on fear, and not enough on people wanting music.
Quicktime is Apple's underlying media subsystem. It's not bolted on. The Quicktime Player is bolted on to wrap the functions and play videos. The Quicktime Pro program that they sell enables editing. There is no lock-in, because anyone can provide a media layer, and anyone can access Quicktime. Even Realbasic Apps can bundle Quicktime and do whatever they want. You could write your own media player with it's own DRM and send content to Quicktime (although hackers would grab the unencrypted layer inside of Quicktime).
There should be a way to roll-back the Quicktime update, because the Package should limit changes to the Quicktime Framework and Quicktime Player apps, but I don't know that there isn't Quicktime code everywhere. It should still exist, but it's not a media player, and it's not vendor lockin.
MS gets nailed for Vendor lock-in for bundling not core programs and not letting them be removed. On a Mac, if I don't want Safari, Quicktime Player, iTunes, etc., I just drag the Application to the trash and I never see it again. I still have the underlying OS Components of WebKit (I think that it's an OS Level Framework now) and Quicktime, but I don't have the applications. Microsoft REFUSED to allow the deletion of IE/WMP, and when forced by the courts to provide a version without them, removed the underlying OS components to break Windows.
That's why MS's bundling behavior was problematic, and Apples not so much. Apple lets you remove applications you want without hosing the OS. MS refused to let you remove the application without removing the OS Components, and you NEED media capability even if you don't want WMP, and you NEED the HTML component, because many applications use it once you make it a standard OS Component.
It's not NEARLY as clean as Apple's Applescript solution, but since you can script OLE Components, you should be able to set up a computer to migrate the documents. If they are on a file server, you should be able to set up a machine with whatever is the last version of Office that can read the old files, and have it walk through your document tree, looking for each appropriate document. Then it should be able to load it in Office and save it in a newer format.
That would get all your documents in the latest (Office 2003 or something), then you adapt the script to run on a machine with Office 2007 and do the same thing. Presto-chango, your documents are up to date and safe.
Regarding formatting... if you're talking about documents not updated in 5-10 years, you probably don't care that much. You might want the content (I need to go through old hard drives and rescue any high school and college papers I care about, that are now hitting the 10 year old point), but if you haven't used it in years, and then want to use it, you can take the time to reformat. You're preserving because 1% of those documents might be needed in the future, which makes it worthwhile to bring them forward with an automated solution.
So Myspace built itself up to be a massive site for people looking at pictures of young and/or underage girls. It started with the 20-something crowd, but the teenagers made it explode. Now Myspace is a huge site, and cuts a deal with the AG to stop things. Now, if an upstart site starts bringing in Myspace's target customers, who wants to bet that Myspace can sic those same AG's on the upstart competition.
The teenage market is REALLY important to getting a new social technology adopted, and Myspace basically agreed to reduce their service a bit, in return for defacto preventing any competition from targeting them at all.
The "Open Source Community" of itch scratchers writing software is mostly the minor projects of questionable value, like the 8 million free front-ends for MP3 players and non-sense like that.
The serious software of the Open Source World is all written by commercial entities or Universities, often with tight reigns on the system. Linux has most of its core people on the payroll of various Linux companies, Apache started as a project of systems guys that were sharing patches to the University written web server, that evolved into its own project. All those people were using the software professionally and just collaborating with others on an area where the company wasn't looking for a competitive advantage (and lots of them were in jobs at Universities, not corporate jobs).
The substantial Free Software is largely written by official groups that put it under the GPL for political or business reasons. Universities because there isn't a real alternative other than going through license offices at the school, and corporations when they can't earn a reasonable return on the product without the GPL but can accomplish some other business goal with it. Sun bought Star Office to create Open Office, because they could use it as a tool to deprive rival Microsoft of some revenue from the Office division. It's definitely worked, site licenses for Office are routinely negotiated lower.
Firefox: Mozilla project, funded by Netscape, then later AOL (Time Warner is #48 on the Fortune 500), still with substantial funding from AOL or AOL provided Revenue
Open Office: Sun Microsoft Systems (#187)
AbiWord: Started by SourceGear as an idea of developing a software suite, when they moved on it became a community project (with an existing product) with University supplied resources
Universities take public money and private grants, pay for stipends, tuition, and 65% "overhead" rates to the University. These grad students are seen as free labor, and it becomes easy to put them on a project that you'll GPL. The fact it, most of the popular stuff was written by professionals, some of which is still maintained by them. The itch scratchers exist, but have never been a substantial part of the high end of the Free Software world, even if they capture the imagination of evangelists.
So instead of downloading, burning, etc., only to find out they grabbed the wrong file and/or did something wrong, they spent a few dollars to get the program from Amazon. Accordingly to Ubuntu's website, Amazon is the US Retailer of authorized CDs. So getting from Amazon and they got the full, authorized Ubuntu CD for not much. Why on earth do you care?
It sounds like you only care about not paying for software, you seem really bothered that someone would pay for software, even software that you approved of licensed under a Free Software license. You are not a good evangelist for FOSS, because when someone not only adopted the software but spent money (some of which goes back to the project), you got upset. The FOSS world needs contributing programers that provide code, and bigger projects need customers that spend money (or corporate sponsorship). It doesn't need freeloaders that try to STOP people from supporting projects, although the nature of Free Software is that freeloaders, malcontents, enemies of your country, etc. can use the software just as legally as the upstanding citizen that buys/downloads it, uses it, and tells others, that's the point, everyone can use or modify it.
But don't pretend you are "supporting" FOSS OR Ubuntu when you tell your friends to A) get it, B) download instead of buy, then C) be annoyed that they buy it.
When I rolled out OpenBSD Systems before, I used to always buy a CD (way easier install). Not only that, if I wanted to install 5 computers, I bought 5 CDs. Why not just donate the money? It was a business purchase, and easy to justify paying $50/machine for software. A lot harder to justify writing a check out personally to Theo for no deliverables that wasn't a business expense. Some projects should consider the Radiohead model. Donations are well and good, but for business use, a business purchase is just as deductible as a donation to a 501(c)3 (either in that year or over time, depending on costs, business size, and depreciation schedules), and a CD is a clear consideration for money spent.
Didn't know that about WW II, interesting, thanks. That said, in 1812, the Brits burned down Washington. On 9/11, lower Manhattan was decimated. A few isolated hits on the West Coast don't quite have the same impact on the country as the others.
Absolutely, the threat is real, and we need to keep them contained. That means acknowledging that 9/11 did NOT change everything, just our perspective. These people are dangerous and crazy, but it's not terrorism that did it.
Despite these lunatics making life hard and expensive on Israelis for 15 years, Israel's economy and per capita income grew faster than just about any other "Western" country in that time frame. They may have half the per capita income as the US, but they've caught up with a bunch of European states, despite spending 7.5% of GDP (with US Aid kicking in another 2%) on defense. While it would be better for Israel to not have crazy people wanting to blow up pizza parlors, they are functioning with far worse than we are.
The bigger issue, as I see it, is the increased concentration of wealth over there because of high oil prices, and Europe's inability to integrate their Arab and Muslim immigrants. Leave them angry and isolated, and not only are they a growing percentage of the population there, but the percentage of "useful idiots" to appease them goes down. If 25% of France becomes crazy immigrants, then a party capturing 1/3 of the rest of the population (including integrated Arabs and Muslims that aren't crazy immigrants) can form a majority with the crazy people.
Containing radical Islam involves a war of ideas, spreading wealth to the common people in the middle east (because middle class people are more likely to rebel and depose of the current dictators), and some momentum shifts on population. If they just grow faster in the "war of the womb" then anywhere they go, they gain in power. There is a lot to worry about, but crazy assholes with box cutters just isn't one of them. Them getting nuclear material from Iran, Pakistan, or France is FAR more of a risk than more planes being hijacked.
Look 9/11 was a frightening day, because 30 minutes later and 50 stories lower and 50,000 people died. For the first time since the War of 1812, the US Mainland was hit in war. We were all generally terrified of becoming like Israel in the early 1990s at the beginning of the upswing that followed Oslo.
It's not the fear of a 3000 casualty hit and loss of buildings... it's the fear of something bigger.
The fact is Al Qaeda is relatively overblown. They may be the only group with a global reach, but their global reach isn't that significant. Think about it, they got 19 guys in to hijack planes when the assumption was don't fight hijackers, they generally let everything go peacefully. They hit two buildings, but before they were supposed to (they obviously wanted to simultaneously hit them after 9 AM to maximize damage), 30 minutes apart, and too high to maximize damage.
The fact is, for all the bluster of Islamic Terrorists, they haven't done anything impressive. The most impressive operation was Hezbollah's holding off of Israel, and even that was a joke. They claimed a military victory, but only in the Arab world can your land be occupied by a foreign power, you hold none of their territory, and your roads and bridges are destroyed yet you are victorious because it took more than a week to wipe you out. That, like 9/11, is overplayed. Israel retooled their military once they had a reminder that "surrounded by enemies" isn't just PR, it's real and requires your military be prepared for an actual war, not just policing malcontents in disputed land, and by the time people heard on the 4th plane that they weren't negotiating, they were blowing things up, the people on the plane took it over and ended the issue.
That said, we should keep an eye on things, because these people do just want to inflict lots of damage... fortunately they aren't that bright. If you haven't noticed, every middle eastern "nuclear weapons program," despite years of effort, somehow is always X years/months away, where X is always longer than the Manhattan project. I have no doubt that the Arab world has it's share of brilliant minds (they were the scientific leaders for centuries), but in the Arab world, decades of oppressive dictatorships have managed to kill or exile every independent thinker, and now they seem incapable of anything impressive, and their government projects are run by total morons.
If Al Qaeda had their act together, 9/11 would have been a start to a wave. Hitting soft targets every week would have caused massive financial collapse in America... if everyone was scared to go to shopping malls because bombs were going off weekly, consumer spending would have contracted and US economic might would have fell apart. Fortunately, the Islamic terrorists aren't that bright, and are more interested in big flashy things to make recruiting videos, not about actually waging war with the US. These movements need a steady supply of naive, bored young teenagers and 20 somethings, so their goal is projects that would be exciting to an upper middle class Arab youth that is bored with life.
Instead of living on daddies money and getting stoned in college while talking up socialism over the pizza put on the Gold Card, like their American counterparts, they can convinced to blow themselves up to fight the US/Israel/Zionism and martyr themselves. The terrorists #1 goal is recruiting more foot soldiers, actually hurting us is a distant second.
Kerberos and NTLM turned off by default.
/Network/Applications. However, with no tools to distribute Firefox in a corporate setting, it's a pain in the butt.
When I ran a Mac Network I could turn these on by editing the bundle I put in
I can put a Linux Server with mod_auth_kerb on my network, tease a Keytab out of Active Directory, and IE and Safari will automatically authenticate with my Kerberos Tickets. Firefox has it built in but I have to put the URL in the allowed domains for auth-negotiate. I assume NTLM has the same problems, but I've never played with it.
The most moronic part? IE makes it easy to add/define intranet locations, the pattern matching on Firefox starts from the left (maybe it does both now).
So if I want Negotiate on *.intranet.mycompany.com, I couldn't do it. But I could turn it on everywhere by typing http://https//. I found that rather foolish. It's a better, faster browser, but unless the IT guy wants to install it everywhere (or has real network management tools like the big boys, but then Firefox settings are still a pain), it doesn't go into small businesses in the 10-50 employee range.
The tools wouldn't be hard to create, and I bet that the raw form of them exists in many companies, but with a nice GUI, easy to setup, it just doesn't exist.
I could not disagree more - the scam is to allow big polluters a back door by buying credits and not having to clean up the mess they are putting into the athmosphere.
Do you know what else is a scam? The fact that I can go to work, earn money, then pay the power company to generate my electricity instead of generating it myself. What you're calling a scam is the same use of trade that we use everyone else in the economy, and allows specialization and creation of wealth.
Trade is the basis of a modern economy.
If a coal plant would spend $10M/unit of carbon reduction, and the treatment of landfills costs $100K/unit of carbon reduction, would you really prefer a law that requires coal plants to reduce by one unit (costing $10M), instead of requiring them to offset ten units anywhere, which costs them $1M? The coal plant saves $9M, and the environmental impact is ten times greater.
BTW: this process is how Al Gore was able to build a massive mansion, fly around on a private jet, yet claim a carbon-neutral lifestyle.
The question is, is the goal a massive reduction in carbon emissions, or is the goal a pseudo morality issue of dealing with the "sin" of pollution?
This is what I don't understand...why the hell are Iowa and NH always first and second in this process?
Historical process? The national conventions officially pick the candidates. Local party activists and elected officials were the delegates (or picked them). There was the fighting in 1968 (mentioned elsewhere), but I think that New Hampshire created the idea of elected delegates (similar to how our electoral college is chosen by statewide popular vote, while originally the state legislatures named the electors) from a primary. The Iowa Democrats decided to have a caucus day for party organization, where people would show up all at once and conduct party business, and name the delegates to the national convention or something similar. In 1980 the Republicans in Iowa decided that they wanted to be first in the nation as well, so they set up a primary... but legally New Hampshire was protected as first primary, so they called it a caucus.
The argument for leaving it alone... If you come up with an idea to reform Democracy, and everyone copies it, should you keep a benefit? On top of that, the people of Iowa and New Hampshire, by the nature of the situation, appear to take primaries VERY seriously. Polls of the people showing up to vote have spent more time on the matter than others do. They have created a culture around their Caucus/Primary process, and maybe it's not a bad thing to do.
The pushed up Super Tuesday debacle is bad, but what if you leave Iowa/NH alone for historical reasons, but then have rotating small state regional ones. Michigan is big, but gives you a midwest primary, SC a southern one, Wyoming popped up with a western state early, but seemed mostly ignored... throw Oregon in there and you've done a round of regional voting. Add Delaware if you think that Midatlantic states get short thrift.
If you did those over the span of 2 months, then moved to larger regional primaries... i.e. have 2 states/week for the next 2 months, then let the big states move, you'd get a more fair system. The small states could let candidates practice retail campaigning, which lets non-corporate or rich candidates compete, but the big states would pick in the end.
In the end, a Super Tuesday with the 10-20 largest states would mean that in any contested primary, they pick who wins.
I would also standardize delegate selection... either winner take all or proportional. But by most places being proportional (which has the added benefit of the chief backers of major candidates all getting to go to the convention), and California being winner take all (IIRC from 4 years ago). California has a HUGELY disproportional affect... possibly to the point of single handedly decided a contested race.
California, by population, is something like 25x-30x the size of New Hampshire... It shouldn't have 100x the influence.
In the early voting stages, we have a lot of candidates. Evangelicals may have liked Huckabee, but held their nose and voted Romney because while he's not one of them, he's closer than a Guiliani to them. Once Huckabee takes Iowa and proves to be a viable candidate, those that found Romney the best of the "real candidates" may switch because Huckabee is now a real candidate.
Guiliani planned to skip the early states and focus on Florida. The theory was that McCain was gone, and nobody had leadership gravitas but him. So going into Florida would be Romney, and Huckabee/Thompson (people expected Thompson, but Huckabee grabbed that part of the base). In that three way race, Guiliani wins security republicans, splits fiscal Republicans with Romney, and hopes that Florida's smaller portion of social conservatives leaves him with a win in a major state.
The issue with momentum is that the early states give people a viability kick. If there are 3 solid evangelical candidates, only one is going to be seen as serious, because if you split the vote 3 ways, you lose. So as soon as one wins a race, the others supporters pick their favorite of the viable candidates.
That's how the rolling primary season is supposed to work. Candidates prove viability and therefore start gathering supporters, or fail to prove viability and drop out, letting their supporters move to the most similar candidate that is viable.
The existence of a Super Tuesday meant that elections after that have been meaningless, and ones before that are support important. That's what has been screwing up the elections, and letting "winners" of a small state with split delegate counts to screw things up.
Post Iowa and New Hampshire, the Democratic race is down to three candidates, HRC, Obama, and Edwards. All are pulling in support. Edwards is in third, but not by much in the delegate count. All the other guys should either prove viability and get out. The GOP is a bit more open because Michigan, South Carolina, and Florida are all good proving grounds for different candidates... Romney/McCain in Michigan, Thompson/Huckabee in SC, and Guiliani in Florida. But Super Tuesday makes this all screwy, and the horse race garbage isn't helpful.
A rolling primary had advantages, and a national one does, but what we have this year is just stupid.
You were portraying him as motivated by power, even if that wasn't your intention.
He's motivated by his desire for the world to embrace Free Software. It's not quite "make the world a better place," but he clearly hates copyrighted proprietary software, and wants to have as little as it as possible so that he can easily ignore it and focus on his right to tinker.
He lost control of the movement when it became "Open Source," which let people intentionally marginalize the FSF and RMS. The goal of them was to "take Free Software and make it palatable to businesses," meaning, ditch the philosophy and just take the software, and maybe the development model that sprung up around Apache and Linux. Open Source won because it's a better brand.
Free Software requires reading explanations and manifestos to understand.
Open Source is a descriptive name. Sure there is the legal mumbo jumbo about derivatives needing to be open source as well, but the part that a USER of Free Software would care about is the open source nature.
Open Source's brand wins, OSI guys take control of movement because of name change.
GNU System has the code, it's put on a Linux Kernel. OS isn't called GNU, it's called Linux. When Tech Reporters want to talk to the "boss," they go to the CEO of Linux, Linus Torvalds. If the GNU system had a good brand, and Linus had been invited to contribute his kernel to GNU (or they had already written a simple kernel so people could run GNU), then Tech Reporters would ask the head of GNU for a quote, and that would be RMS.
Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.
Time to change behavior so this stops happening.
I've read them, I understand them, I like them.... and I still think that it's a lousy brand.
GNU = GNU's Not Unix was a silly and snarky inside joke to fellow Geeks, particularly post-AT&T/BSD legal fight over whether BSD is Unix or not.
It's still a lousy brand, and lost.
I like Stallman's philosophy, I think that his two meanings in English is interesting.
It's still a lousy brand and his brand lost. If you need a manifesto to explain it, it's not a good brand. If he had gone with Freedom Software, it would have still been bad (most people don't think about Freedom), but not as horrible.
He took a name that was confusingly similar to the "service mark" that lousy software that is given away called Freeware, and branded his movement on it.
I was generously quoting RMS, I've read his work. However, to pretend that on the communication side, he hasn't lost the two biggest brands that he created, the Free Software Movement (to the Open Source Guys) and the GNU Project (that's become the Linux Operating System), means ignoring the reality.
So we can sit here and talk about how brilliant the man is (which isn't in dispute by me), or acknowledge that as brilliant a man as he is, his branding efforts that have NOT changed since the early GNU days (HURD was given an even dumber name) demonstrates that he doesn't learn from his mistakes in the communication arena. So people with possible influence over him, like Bruce Perens who this thread started with, who asked why people don't listen to him, need to actually understand why people don't listen to him. Since he is so good at predicting our problems 1-2 decades before they happen, we should listen to him, but aren't. We can sit around complaining and implying that people are too dumb to get it (which you inadvertently done, I criticize branding, you assume I haven't read the manifesto that I cite in my writing), or we can figure out why the brilliant creator of this movement ISN'T the strategic planner that the "leaders" are listening to.
There is a REAL problem with RMS's communication skills and branding ideas, and since his part of the world is controlled 100% by him (FSF land), unless people can persuade him to change the approach, we will continue to have RMS predict problems, identify problems, and then have us do nothing because the Eric S. Raymond's of the world will not listen and do their own thing, and have consistently hijacked the movement.
Linux may be amongst the least "technically interesting" of the Free Software Projects, but it's the brand's flagship, so pretending that it not going GPL v3 is irrelevant is silly.
There is a real problem with the direction hardware is going, RMS is right. The anti-GPL 3 people (myself included), ignore the fact that in the long run, generic PC hardware will become a shrinking market, an expensive market (like the Unix workstation market), then possibly no market. The market forces pushing for cheaper and more locked down will be a problem. Linus thinks that there is a hardware/software line that he won't cross, he just wants the code returned, and doesn't care about tinkering on locked down hardware, he's happy to have more code. RMS is focused on a world where there is no hardware that isn't locked down, and we're ignoring that risk, happy with code, and ignoring that code is being used on systems without the freedom to tinker.
I didn't say control freak, you did. He isn't obsessed over control with software, although he's shown some examples of acting that way. However, when shown better code, he normally backs down and turns in over, which isn't an unreasonable solution, and is the "pure geek" one at that.
The GNU/Linux thing is because the systems were primarily the GNU system running on the Linux kernel, which he thought should recognize the GNU nature of the system. People on Slashdot like to make obnoxious comments about, "should we call it the GNU/X/Apache/Linux system," but Stallman's argument is real. His project wrote an entire operating system, and were then turning to the kernel. Linus wrote a simple kernel to replace the 8086-80286 targetted Minix kernel with an 80386 one and posted it. People decided to use the GNU tools instead of the simple, for educational purposes only, Minix ones, and the "Linux System" was born, using probably 95% GNU code and 5% Linus's simple kernel. All of a sudden, those GNU tools that people used where they liked them better than the standard Unix ones, were being used in the system rms envisioned, only they were calling it Linux.
Although, there is a bit of irony, since he blasted the generally freer BSD license for the advertising clause, then tried to push the horrible sounding GNU/Linux system. The fact is, GNU wrote the Unix-like operating system, yet the Linux name stuck because GNU sounds horrible AND became known as a project, not an OS. People were using GNU Tools, and nobody was going to call it Slackware GNU, because it sounds bad. If they had even done something lame like Freenix, that might have stuck. I think that the loss was on the branding front, same as Free Software lost out to Open Source, and the ideological driven push by Richard Stallman lost out to small minded thinkers targeting corporate development.
He wanted a movement. He wanted user freedom. He wants the freedom to tinker. These are his goals, and he used software and licensing as a tool to do it. Read his explanations on when to use the LGPL and when to use the GPL. If you are making a Free version an existing library, use the LGPL to make it easier to work with. If it is new functionality, put the GPL on it, so if people use the code, they need to contribute to the body of GPL'd software. His goal is a growing pile of GPL'd code (which he started) that is an enticement. He wants each developer to look at the GPL'd landscape and say, "Wow, if I will GPL my app, I can saved hundreds of thousands of dollars with this free libraries... let me do just that." Like minded people releasing GPL'd software isn't the goal, it's the means to get people that don't really agree to release GPL'd software. That's the goal of the FSF, in the article linked, he writes, "If we amass a collection of powerful GPL-covered libraries that have no parallel available to proprietary software, they will provide a range of useful modules to serve as building blocks in new free programs. This will be a significant advantage for further free software development, and some projects will decide to make software free in order to use these libraries. University projects can easily be i
So Linus announces 90 day notice: project intends to switch to GPL 3, which is similar in intent but different in detail to v2.0. The core of the code is owned by him because either he wrote it, or it is a derivative work. Anyone objecting, please notify within 90 days to have your code removed before it is released under GPL 3. If you notify after 90 days, you will remove the code, but it's distribution in downstream versions will remain, and you will have to contact the distributers if you want your code removed.
I also would suggest that for non-derivative chunks, you contact them specifically. Any of the file systems PORTED to Linux from companies own OSes clearly are not Linux derivatives, because they existed before the Linux version. I would not include them unless specifically relicensed until GPL 3... I think that the blanket notice is probably fine for minor things like device drivers that are 1. clear derivative works, and 2. of no real value to the author, so if he notifies after day 91 and some stuff has included it, he doesn't have standing to complain because there is no real loss.
Relicensing IBM's file system without permission might be more problematic.
I agree with you and think that your legal advisors are probably correct. The minor "copyright holders" are relatively insignificant, and most of their work, patches, bug fixes, etc., are derivative works, not really independent copyrighted works. I find it unlikely that a court would grant standing to an estate of someone that contributed code for free to a project under a free license, complaining about it's migration to a newer but similar free license, because there is no harm.
Just like descendants get screwed when state AG's refuse to bring action when non-profits violate the intention of donors in their statements, and the AG is the only one with standing to enforce, but they tend to care about the living and their benefits from the non-profit, far more than the intentions of the dead donor that endowed them.
RMS is absolutely brilliant, no doubt about it. Anyone who has known him in real life can attest to his brilliance. He body of work speaks for itself, he has consistently predicted things that would happen and proposed solutions. His being the "smartest guy in the room" gives him tremendous abilities to logically predict trends well before those of us normally gifted" people, and with the ability to look like magic divination to those that are of normal intelligence or lower. These facts are not in dispute.
However, for all RMS's brilliance, his lack of social grace, to put it mildly, undermines him as the CEO of the Free Software/Open Source Enterprise. Indeed, the fact that his "movement" was hijacked and renamed Open Source, and his operating system was hijacked and renamed from GNU to Linux, is a testament to that.
Big companies don't hire CEO's that can forecast the future. CEO's hire rooms of people that do that. Companies hire CEOs that can communicate the vision of the company to the outside world AND the people inside the company. The forecasting ability of Stallman is tremendous, but the lack of communication skills is devastating for him as leader of the movement. It's tragic, because he wants to hold the reigns because this is 100% all his idea, but he's a lousy spokesman for his own ideas, and lost control by not finding a better one.
The Biggest Elephant in the Room: Copyright ownership and standing
The most important thing to the FSF is copyright assignment to maintain a single owner to have standing to enforce. If this is so important to free software, why was that not incorporated into the license. You could have a provision that did roughly the following:
1. You are free to modify for your own use, no need to even agree to license
2. You are free to distribute modifications, if you do, you agree that your modifications are a derivative work, and all copyright is maintained by the maintainer of the software (define this in the license, first person to distribute becomes maintainer, unless a new maintainer is named by them)
3. You are free to fork, but you have to rename the software, you then become maintainer of the fork, owning all derivative changes from here on out of your version
That might not have been an obvious problem in the 80s, but given the Emacs vs. Xemacs ownership of code issue (Xemacs could use Emacs, but not vice versa because FSF requires ownership of all copyrights), arguments about relicensing, etc., this was obvious by the time v3 was created. Some solution should have been found to maintain single ownership of projects for the purpose of standing that didn't require a lot of paperwork.
Examples of this:
1. GNU vs. Linux... Linux sounds like Unix (people knew Unix, liked Unix, but couldn't afford Unix), and the fact that it's a play on a name is irrelevant. Digital Unix, Xenix, HP-UX, etc., all prepped people for a *ux/*ix name for a Unix. GNU? Hard to pronounce, a silly inside joke, etc., lousy brand. The system didn't become Linux instead of GNU by fluke, Linux's superior name and brand displaced GNU.
2. Free Software / Open Source: Open Source is descriptive... there is more to it than the source being viewable, but that's the main action item, the rest is details. Free Software? confusingly vague, similar to Freeware (an already existing term with a lousy brand), and required a "manifesto" to understand. In fact, the existence of a "manifesto" was problematic, because we only here the word "manifesto" used in conjunction with "crazy people" and "revolutionaries," with a tremendous overlap between them. Free Software, captured the ideal if you understood the concept... clever for someone with a 180 IQ to create, interesting for people in the 130-150 range to understand and ponder, and meaninglessly abstract for someone in the normal range... bad branding #2, and RMS lost his movement.
3. Emacs vs. Xemacs: the exchange ab
So a superior technology, pushed by both Apple and Sony over their technically inferior but cheaper technology, could win? They could win despite the technically inferior but cheaper technology being backed by Microsoft and the other usual suspects of technically inferior technology?
This must be unprecedented!
Players are already cheap enough people are willing to buy them now. Player price is not really an issue anymore (not that it ever was, something that never stuck in the heads of HD-DVD supporters).
When VHS was becoming popular, players were $1000. With 25 years of inflation that's like $3500. The BR Players launched at what, $1000 and HD DVD at $500? For early adopters and Home Theatre buffs, that's nothing... $400-$500 is routine to pay for the remote control at the high end. They launched CHEAP for the early adopter market, and inside of a year were pretty cheap.
Players are a one time cost. The Gamecube was routinely half the price of the PS2 and Xbox, and didn't outsell them. Cheaper doesn't always win. Once the object is "cheap enough" then it's not about price, it's about whether people want it.
For early adopters in 2005-2006, $500-$1000 for a new digital toy is reasonable... My DirecTV HD Tivo cost $1000, and they sold them as fast as they could make them for a while, then dropped the price to $400 and sold them to the next tier of buyers, and kept dropping from there.
The player price matters, but to the early adopter, $1000 was reasonable in year one, $500 in year two. Once you get to the advanced side of the market that isn't willing to pay anything to play (people with $10k - $30k home theatres, the early adopter market, could buy a $1000 BR player AND a $500 HD Player), but has $5000 sets, $200-$300 for a good player gets reasonable.
Under $200, you compete for mass market, and under $100 for the late adopters. By $50, you are going after the technology avoiders.
If BR launched at $5000 and HD DVD at $1000, I'd buy the player price, but at $1000 and $500, that dropped to $500/$300 or so after about two years... player price didn't matter. People buying a $500 TV won't spend more than $100 for the player, but the market for the $3000 sets isn't gone, and $500 for a player isn't unreasonable there. All the big box stores are pushing BR, technophiles pushing BR, etc. The only people pushing HD that I can see are Slashdot anti-DRM people that for some reason think that HD-DVD is better DRM-wise which doesn't appear to be the case in reality.
The American Dream, pre-marketing myth, was that anyone could come to America, no matter how poor, how little they understand English, whatever their religion, etc., and try to succeed and keep the fruits of their labor. The American Dream was that if you worked hard, you could succeed to the best of your ability.
:)
In America, any Native Son could grow up and become the President of the United States. The Head of State COULD be anyone. In Europe, to be Head of State, the best solution was for your father to be Head of State, and be the oldest son. Any other path involved being related to the Head of State, and the right people dying off. You can joke all you want about Bush being President because his father was, but only TWO Presidents are the son's of other Presidents in the US... what percentage of Monarchs are related to the previous Monarch?
Before the New Deal and the "New American Dream," there was no IRS, INS, W-2, W-4, 1099, I-9, SSA, etc. You wanted work, you got up early and looked for work. Some jobs lasted a day, some a week, some months, but whatever your wages were, you kept them. The Media loves to mock the "Mexican Day Laborer" that stands around at Home Depot looking for work for a day... my grandfather was telling me that during the Great Depression, that's how his father got work essentially. There was no "employment law," you went and got work.
This was in contrast to Europe (particularly England) where all national wealth either theoretically belonged to the Crown or was owned by a small class of aristocrats. In the US, not everyone owned land, but everyone COULD own land. Sure they might not be able to afford it, but you could legally buy land. You didn't have to be the Heir to the the current Heir to the old Feudal Lord that owned the land and just rented it out to the people.
After WWII, the suburbs were created because massive numbers of men ages 18-30 showed back up, got married, and wanted houses quickly. The rest of the country felt that nothing was too good for the men returning victorious, and numerous benefits were created for Vets (and a desire to keep them from immediately flooding the labor market and causing massive unemployment, so the Gov't got some to go to college, etc.). America had unprecedented wealth, both because WWII R&D translated into massive improvements in manufacturing creating massive wealth, and as a percentage of global wealth, America exploded because it hadn't just had its cities leveled for the second time in 30 years. This resulted in massive money for conveniences (kitchen appliances that we take for granted generally date to the 1950s through 1970s), freeing up leisure time.
The middle class as a concept, spoiled, pampered, wealthy, was founded in this time frame. Wealth exploded, and the "Greatest Generation" happened to be in the position to move up with it. They gave their children unprecedented advantages, and the Baby Boomers became the first generation to define education as lasting through age 22. Public education started with 1-8, then 1-10, 1-12 and K-12, and now Pre-K:16. What happens as things become standard, they stop attracting a premium. A high school diploma received a premium wage when most people went through 8th grade, college did as the diploma was normal.
The fact is, unless you "NEED" the education (technical, specialized education), the ever increasing baseline of education to signal "I'm
Most of the web is non well-formed, so it's variations of HTML 4 with non-standard components. An HTML 5, that remains a non-XML language, presents a reasonable way forward for "web sites." Without the need to be well-formed, the tools to create are easier and can be sloppy, particularly for moderately admined sites. Creating a new HTML 5 might succeed in migrating those sites. If you avoid most breaks with HTML 4, beyond the worst offenders, Browsers could target an HTML 5, and webmasters would only need to change 5%-10% of the content to keep up. That would mean a less degrading "legacy" mode than the HTML 4 renderers we have now.
So while the HTML 4 renderers floating around wouldn't be trashed, they could be ignored, left as is, and focus on an HTML 5 one. Migrating to XHTML is non-trivial for people with out-dated tools and lack of knowledge. You can't ignore those sites as a browser maker, but HTML 5 might give a reasonable path to modernizing the "non-professional" WWW.
XHTML has some great features, by being well-formed XML, you can use XML libraries for parsing the pages. This makes it much easier to "scrape" data off pages and handle inter-system communication, which HTML is not equipped for.
It's interesting in that HTML and XHTML look almost identical (for good reasons, XHTML was a port of HTML to XML) but are technically very different, HTML being an SGML language, and XHTML an XML language. Both programs have their uses, HTML is "easier" for people to hack together because if you do it wrong, the HTML renderer makes a best guess. XHTML is easier to use professionally, because if there is a problem, you can catch it as being an invalid XML document. Professionals worry about cross-browser issues, amateurs worry about getting it out there.
XHTML "failed" to replace HTML because it satisfies the needs of professionals to have a standardized approach to minimize cross-browser issues, but lacks the simplicity needed for amateurs and lousy professionals.
Rev'ing both specs would be a forward move that might simplify browser writing in the long term while giving a migration path. XHTML needs a less confusing and forward looking path, and HTML needs to be Rev'd after being left for dead to drop the really problematic entries and give people a path forward.
There are a couple of reasons for this. Most are mentioned elsewhere, so I'm not going into details.
1. Is the per-transaction fee with the merchants, they don't want to do a bunch of tiny transactions and eat fees.
2. Breakage, every point on used in the system is excess profit.
3. Increase spending - companies found that the majority of gift card receivers spent MORE than the card was for. Makes sense, if you get a gift card for $25, and decide between $20 and $30 items, your choice is "lose" $5 and get the $20, or spend $5 and get the $30 to use all the value... that's why they push gift cards for the holidays.
4. Abstraction from cost, you think (I have X points, I need Y, let me get it) and not the cost of the items. It probably helps with the International business to charge constant "points" across regions and just price the points locally. Sure beats having to price everything EVERYWHERE. International pricing isn't simply the exchange rate + VAT once you have real marketing projects. But if they price the points right, they can single-price the stuff, keeping marketing costs down.
5. Accounting Rules. Depending on their accounting rules they may (or may not) be able to book this revenue. If the points never expire, they shouldn't be able to book it, as they collect the cash and have a liability (to provide you with a service), that becomes revenue when you use the points... that's typically why gift cards expire after 1-2 years depending on state (actually, eaten with monthly small transaction fees), so they can start eating up the balance that's sitting on the books as a liability to by taking the transaction fees out.
Since the points are probably non-refundable and the service virtual, they may have convinced their auditors that the revenue is incurred when the points are received, as there is no liability. OTOH: if they pay the content providers on a per-deal basis, this may not apply. But revenue recognition plays a role in these decisions as well.
6. Kids/Allowances, I assume that with passwords, etc., you can only allow the parent to log in and put "points on the account" that the kids can spend. Rather than having to fish out the credit card or give an 8-year old access to it, you can recharge their points weekly/monthly, and know that it's a fixed expenditure. That makes it MUCH easier for parents to control the spending without having to fight with their kids over it. It's easy to say "well that's parenting," but I like to focus my parenting time enjoying my time with my kids and focus my "parenting" on things that will impart values to them, fighting over video games is not at the top of my list.
Much easier to add 1000 points/week to the kid's account and let them stockpile points for things they want than have to have them run to you for each purchase. It's the same reason parents give kids the allowance, it let's them learn money management on their own through trial and error, instead of preaching parents.
Ask.com right now sits on 4.7% of the Internet queries. If 1% of the population are "very concerned about privacy" and half of them switch their searches, that would bring them from 4.7% to 5.2%. That wouldn't challenge Google, but it would increase Ask.com's search base by 10%. A 10% revenue growth COULD bring them an extra 20%-30% profits given how high their fixed costs are as a percentage of total costs.
Ask.com doesn't have to beat Google, just increase their profits at a greater rate than their expected return on capital.
If you are building a Web Application for which you have a database simply because you need persistent storage, what you are saying makes a lot of sense. In that case, flat files would also be fine, and your storage mechanism is all about speed, and if MySQL with a SQL front-end gives you speed, great.
If your core information is the database, the opposite is true. The basic CRUD tools that Rails beautifully scaffolds aren't really OO applications, they are basic data sets. You need sets of data, extracted via one or more tables with possible filters, SQL expresses that beautifully. The core of those systems are a set of data that aren't OO. Having a teacher from a set of teachers isn't OO programming just because you've made teachers an object instead of an array of teacher objects (or structs, or whatever).
If you are doing e-commerce sites, the tools for the CRUD administration are WAY more complicated than showing the objects on the site, which may mean that different languages serve the purpose here.
Your issues with DB business logic vs. web layer business logic assumes a single application, and as you scale up, it's not so simple. While object reuse gives a reason to do so, Rails is so tied to it's build your data models with persistence with almost no code that sharing the objects doesn't get you very far. Basically, if you put the logic in Rails land than if you need to build a third party solution that can't be Rails code for whatever reason you have to share out your objects through some web interface. That's not a horrible solution, but it's of questionable value vs. just having it talk to the database. It's one extra layer to monitor and debug.
Regarding vendor lock-in, that's REALLY overstated in databases. The fact is, switching databases for major data applications is non-trivial regardless. For open source "applications" with a data store, the ability to switch from MySQL -> PostgreSQL and back is important, but that's the trivial case... no data in the system, no need for fancy integrity maintenance. If you have even a few dozen gigabytes of data in a PostgreSQL or MS SQL database you can move the data from one to the other, but you'll have to manually update logic.
Once performance matters, you need to optimize for the database that you are in, and flexibility here is over rated. Changing your database schema in a production environment is rather difficult and best to avoid, but people talk about lock-in as though they want to swap databases regularly. Even if you data environment has 200 Stored Procedures, a large number for a small-medium sized database, even if those procedures average 1 man-hours each to rewrite and debug (which is probably reasonable if most are trivial methods to get some abstraction away from the tables), you're still ONLY talking 200 man-hours, which would be 5 man weeks. Even at 10-50 man weeks, it's still less than one quarter for a small DBA team or 2-5 people. So even in the case of vendor lock-in, the rewriting of the procedures, if documented, isn't THAT big a deal, and certainly not a justification for losing ALL the advantages that they can give you.
I'm busy doing a database cleanup operation. Since everything talks directly to the DB tables, through a Rails (though poorly implemented Rails) system, migrating on the live system to something that we want is turning out the be a nightmare. The most likely course of action is going to be building and testing a live transaction that moves ALL the existing tables to another schema, creates views for them in the old schema, with PostgreSQL rules to talk to the new tables, JUST so that chunks of the database can be rebuild at one time.
Had a lot of these trivial operations been done in stored procedure functions, the migration would be pretty painless, because we'd create new tables, rewrite the sprocs to talk to the new tables, then bring the data in behind us.
The tools for the Web Apps are better, but that depends on the environment being suitabl