So now, we are about to create a few Microsoft companies, an OS company and an Application company. Great, two monopolies. Does anyone think that a smaller Microsoft applications division will produce software for other OS's. They would have no reason to. They'd have less money to waste, and just concentrate on the most popular OS, which will still be Windows.
This is all true, but one good thing that may come from a breakup is the release of more APIs. If MS is split into an OS and an App company, and the App company wants to make Office 2002, it will need additional MS APIs that weren't previously released to third parties. If the Judge puts the screws to their head, (and I imagine he will), MS(OS Corp) will not be able to make special deals with MS(App Corp). Therefore, in order to continue their grasp on the Office software industry, they'll have to open up more information to their third parties, and companies other than MS will be able to make better Windows software.
I certainly hope they roll this product out soon. Before long, some white guy in a black suit will outlaw peer to peer networks because of the RIAA. Dispite how my stomach turns with the kitsch involved here, I hope these guys are successful.
Why?
Because if they are a success and pull down a couple billion dollars real fast, it'll grab the lawmakers' attention. They, as we know, tend to value money over most everything else. Therefore, in a lawyer/lawmaker's mind, these must be good guys. If they read in Newsweek that this super-hip (cooler than the Gap) and totally legit tech is a cousin to Napster and Gnutella, they may realize that banning "Technologies Related to Napster" may be a bad idea.
Of course, I may be wrong. If so, I hope these guys go the way of Linuxcare.
What if I post negative comments about a company which are forbidden by UCITA? On a Canadian website, on an American site? On a Kuwaiti site?
I don't much think that where you post the information is going to matter. As we have seen with the MPAA, arrogant US corporations can have their laws enforced all over the world.
Then again, this might make a great shield for companies who create a substandard product.
True. Although I hate to think how stupid the corps take us for. After a little while even our feeble mental weights will veer away from companies that have classically built horrible products. Just look at Packard Bell -- despite all the good (recent) press in the world, they still haven't lived down their image of making third rate, un-usable, un-upgradable PCs. Eventually, if UCITA becomes law in all 50 states, I think the consumer software industry will eventually slip away from US firms. If the industry (and hence the economy as a whole) slips away from us because of shoddy engineering and laws to bolster such behavior, most stupid Americans will just blame foreigners and go vote for Pat Buchanan.
Then where will we be?
We have to stop this law now!
Re:It's not too OLD to code, but rather too YOUNG.
on
Too Old To Code?
·
· Score: 1
Well, when I was 18, I thought I was hot stuff, too. I was pissed that I couldn't get a 'geek job' even though I was well versed in C++, Java, HTML, Javascript, Perl, etc, etc, etc. Then I went to college.
I'm 20 now, still in school, and about to start my first 'geek' job. In the two short years since starting college, I have learned an incredible amount that I wouldn't have known otherwise. My advice to you: Go to school. Don't get cocky when you start programming courses, if you act like you don't know anything, you'll be amazed at how much you actually learn. Even if you don't end up with a degree, do the school thing. You'd be amazed at how it turns an employer's head when you say "I'm a Software Engineering student/ Computer Science student at..."
Anyways, without any college, getting a decent job will be tough because kids who know C and HTML, in my experience, are a dime a dozen.
If the RIAA had any sense, they wouldn't be trying so desperately to alienate fans because this may come back and bite them on the ass.
The RIAA sells records (tapes, CDs), not concert tickets. The simple fact that they're doing this shows that they don't care about the artist or the artist's future. They really ought to stop talking about how Napster and MP3 are not compensating the artist, and start talking about how Napster and MP3 are not compensating the RIAA. Of course, although truthful, the idea that elderly white men in black suits are not getting paid for Kid Rock's latest record doesn't really wash with the CD-buying public.
That means they should be unambiguously worded and in a language that the person who executes the license understands.
You mean Perl, right? Seriously though, all licenses have to be worded that way precisely because it is so unambiguous. "Lawyerese" is diffucult for the layperson to understand because lawyers can pick "normal" English sentences apart and find about twenty different meanings for each one. As software licenses, in a court case or similar situation, will be picked apart by lawyers eventually, they have to be written in such a way that the lawyers will only be able to find one interpretation.
Maybe shrink wrap licenses should be the "lite" version of the license that explains what the terms are, with the original source license available for the lawyers to tangle over.
Whoo! I think you've just violated the DMCA! That is clearly an algorithm (a program, if you will) that will allow people to get around the spirit with which that license was released if not the word of it. In fact, sir, you should be expecting a call any minute now from my sizable legal staff! You will, of course, have to consent to having this comment removed from/. .
You may produce and distribute, in executable form only, programs which you created... ...with the Software!
By this, I'm sure they mean you can only distribute the binaries, in executable form that are created with the compiler. Since "the Software" doesn't create your source code (if it does, I'm going to get it right away!) you are still free to do with it whatever your little heart desires.
I can tell you that after working so long with Miva, PHP begins to look bizarre and with strange syntax. It would be difficult to switch between to extensive work with both at the same time. Really? After working with Miva for about a year and a half, I became enamored with PHP after having discovered it. It was really like a breath of fresh air!
MivaScript has some very serious problems. First off, it has no serious database support. I can't access anything using SQL except for ODBC datasources. No support for Oracle. No support for Sybase. No support for mSQL. On top of that, you can only query the db. You can't insert or update values when using SQL in MivaScript. The xbase3 support in MivaScript is just miserable. Miva's xbase3 implementation doesn't even support multiple tables in a single database!
The other big problem I've got with MivaScript is the way it mixes the document and the program. Over several passes over one document, it is possible to get an utterly different page each time.
MivaScript also isn't as flexible as Coldfusion or PHP. You can't create external functions for MivaScript. You can't compile in new functionality (like PHP's support for the GD libraries) for MivaScript. Still, I do admit that the learning curve for MivaScript is very gentle. I learned the entire language in about a night. As long as you aren't doing anything too large, MivaScript is a nice quick solution that'll allow you to hack something together in an hour or two.
However, if you're doing anything like the big kids do, you really don't want to do it in Miva.
The coolest thing they offer (I think) is Miva Mia, which for testing before deployment beats the daylights out of Microsoft POS.. Oops..PWS. Miva Mia is by far the easiest to setup, no frills personal web server for Win32.
I don't mean to sound really harsh about Miva. After all, it's where I cut my teeth on server side scripting. Just don't be too resistant to giving these other technologies a fair shake!
The spin I picked up from the M$NBC article seemed to suggest that because the source was freely available, anyone could have exploited this hole. It smelled to me like they were trying to make this out to be a bad thing. Oh well. Only a fool would use the default password anyways.
Say due to some "bug" in the software, you get locked out of your mission critical system. How do you get back in?
If the software is so poorly written that it locks even the root user out, how can we believe that the backdoor is sufficiently hidden? The more reasonable solution is to write good code in the first place.
Oh yeah, like this hasent happened before. I hear that microsoft has a deal with the CIA to install remote servers on all computers. So now the CIA can steal our porno!
No way, we'd catch on once we see a Linux box with a blue screen!
Thrilling. I love it. The greatest thing is that I'm sitting here with dvwssr.dll open in a text editor. The password is stored in cleartext. Backwords, yes, it took me a full thirty seconds to find it. Oh yes here it is:
!seineew era sreenigne epacsteN
You think they could've, I dunno, ENCRYPTED IT? I mean, its one thing (unscrupulous as it is) to put a backdoor in software, but its just plain stupid to store the p/w in cleartext on every machine that runs frontpage in the world.
The speech isn't in what the program does, its in the source code (not the binary, I assume) of the program. The source really isn't the program, its just some instructions (schematics, if you will) that tell the compiler what to build. Of course, an interesting question in that case is this: What if I (being some kind of evil genius) write my entire program in binary? The code I write is the code I run. Of course, this is hypothetical, but being that this code is speech and action rolled into one, is it protected or not?
I am an OS/2 user but I've never heard about problems with AMD. I've been using AMDs myself since 1993. Can you elaborate? Didn't IBM actually sell AMD stuff under the IBM name for a while around when Warp 3 came out? I remember my friend opening up his PC and seeing this big ibm-blue DX4/100 chip with an IBM logo emblazoned on it. I would've thought that they would've made sure that OS/2 ran on AMDs really well.
The interesting point here isn't that people have finally stopped paying attention to advertisements. People never paid any attention to ads in the first place. The thing here is that with the internet, and with Free PC, advertisers knew that people weren't acting on the ads they had. With television, there is no feedback, no way for advertisers to tell that they're being shafted. With the internet, people selling ad space can no longer optimistically estimate how many people see and act on their adds because the advertisers have concrete numbers. Proof, if you will, that no one cares about what they have to say.
Bob needs to understand that Crusoe is not Linux, even if Linus works for Transmeta. I actually wrote quite a long response to the article, but after looking at it a little bit, I've realized that it is very difficult to analyze an incoherent article like that. I think the Animal Farm references are inappropriate. OSS isn't about politics, it's about software. If we do it better than Microsoft, so be it. I really loved his pun though, I mean how many people would have thought to call Open Source "Open Sores"? That adds some real credibility to the article!
By the way, if an article could be a troll, that would've been one. (It sure got me!)
The thing is, bugs are no more inherent in computer science than they are in any other branch of science or engineering. If 747's fell out of the sky 15% of the time, people would see it as a major problem. You are absolutely correct about the idea that people expect to have bugs in the products they buy. However, one highly disturbing thing that I've noticed is that many software engineers I know expect to write buggy software. They just shrug they're shoulders and say, "There's no sense in trying to make it better. Hey, software can't be perfect."
I can easily see the American software business going to the same place as the American automobile business went back in the 80's. We're used to being the only kids on the block and its made alot of us arrogant and complacent. If a company comes along that actually uses sound software engineering techniques to produce solid software, you'll see people drop Windows like a bad habit. The only problem is, is this company going to be the Toyota of 2020, or are we going to get our acts together and save ourselves?
Of course if UCITA gets passed we'll see more and more of this kind of horrible software coming from the bowels of the software sweat shops.
Are you saying that consumers don't have the right to copy the content for personal use. For example, when hard drives get larger and cheaper, as you mentioned, what if I want to copy a DVD I own onto my laptop's hard drive so I can watch it on a plane without wasting battery life powering a DVD drive.
I don't believe we should even mention the piracy issue. We have to rise above it. Although what you say is valid, many people do equate copying videos with piracy. (You can only watch that FBI warning at the start of a VHS tape so many times before you're brainwashed.)
If we want to win this fight, I think we'll have to transcend squabbling about the piracy issue. We have to trumpet the fact loud and clear: DeCSS has nothing whatsoever to do with copy-protection. It is no feat at all to copy DVDs. DVD piracy can be accomplished, and indeed is accomplished, without DeCSS. We have to let the people know that DeCSS is not, and cannot be, used as a tool to copy DVDs. It can only be used as a tool to play back DVDs.
I think the real crime is that the MPAA is given a ready outlet for their misinformation in otherwise well respected news organizations like the Los Angeles Times.
Mr. Valenti is either misinformed or a bald-faced liar.
I don't think he's misinformed.
On another note: Why doesn't the open source community have some kind of advocacy group like the MPAA?
Bring in some Chinese slave laborers or Malaysian kids working for.25 a day and let them protest--they are the ones who are getting screwed.
Yeah! Great idea! Why don't we just bring some slave laborers in and let them talk?
The reason alot of college students are protesting is because the people who are getting screwed have no voice. When was the last time that a Malaysian kid held a press conference? When was the last time you saw a Chinese slave laborer on Larry King?
I've noticed that a lot of people here tend to think "I got mine so screw you!"
What are we going to do when the tables are turned? It seems awful to me that so many people here are so cold-hearted, especially living in the booming times that we do.
Slashdot Mirror
So now, we are about to create a few Microsoft companies, an OS company and an Application company. Great, two monopolies. Does anyone think that a smaller Microsoft applications division will produce software for other OS's. They would have no reason to. They'd have less money to waste, and just concentrate on the most popular OS, which will still be Windows.
This is all true, but one good thing that may come from a breakup is the release of more APIs. If MS is split into an OS and an App company, and the App company wants to make Office 2002, it will need additional MS APIs that weren't previously released to third parties. If the Judge puts the screws to their head, (and I imagine he will), MS(OS Corp) will not be able to make special deals with MS(App Corp). Therefore, in order to continue their grasp on the Office software industry, they'll have to open up more information to their third parties, and companies other than MS will be able to make better Windows software.
I certainly hope they roll this product out soon. Before long, some white guy in a black suit will outlaw peer to peer networks because of the RIAA. Dispite how my stomach turns with the kitsch involved here, I hope these guys are successful.
Why?
Because if they are a success and pull down a couple billion dollars real fast, it'll grab the lawmakers' attention. They, as we know, tend to value money over most everything else. Therefore, in a lawyer/lawmaker's mind, these must be good guys. If they read in Newsweek that this super-hip (cooler than the Gap) and totally legit tech is a cousin to Napster and Gnutella, they may realize that banning "Technologies Related to Napster" may be a bad idea.
Of course, I may be wrong. If so, I hope these guys go the way of Linuxcare.
What if I post negative comments about a company which are forbidden by UCITA? On a Canadian website, on an American site? On a Kuwaiti site?
I don't much think that where you post the information is going to matter. As we have seen with the MPAA, arrogant US corporations can have their laws enforced all over the world.
Then again, this might make a great shield for companies who create a substandard product.
True. Although I hate to think how stupid the corps take us for. After a little while even our feeble mental weights will veer away from companies that have classically built horrible products. Just look at Packard Bell -- despite all the good (recent) press in the world, they still haven't lived down their image of making third rate, un-usable, un-upgradable PCs. Eventually, if UCITA becomes law in all 50 states, I think the consumer software industry will eventually slip away from US firms. If the industry (and hence the economy as a whole) slips away from us because of shoddy engineering and laws to bolster such behavior, most stupid Americans will just blame foreigners and go vote for Pat Buchanan.
Then where will we be?
We have to stop this law now!
Well, when I was 18, I thought I was hot stuff, too. I was pissed that I couldn't get a 'geek job' even though I was well versed in C++, Java, HTML, Javascript, Perl, etc, etc, etc. Then I went to college.
I'm 20 now, still in school, and about to start my first 'geek' job. In the two short years since starting college, I have learned an incredible amount that I wouldn't have known otherwise. My advice to you: Go to school. Don't get cocky when you start programming courses, if you act like you don't know anything, you'll be amazed at how much you actually learn. Even if you don't end up with a degree, do the school thing. You'd be amazed at how it turns an employer's head when you say "I'm a Software Engineering student/ Computer Science student at..."
Anyways, without any college, getting a decent job will be tough because kids who know C and HTML, in my experience, are a dime a dozen.
If the RIAA had any sense, they wouldn't be trying so desperately to alienate fans because this may come back and bite them on the ass.
The RIAA sells records (tapes, CDs), not concert tickets. The simple fact that they're doing this shows that they don't care about the artist or the artist's future. They really ought to stop talking about how Napster and MP3 are not compensating the artist, and start talking about how Napster and MP3 are not compensating the RIAA. Of course, although truthful, the idea that elderly white men in black suits are not getting paid for Kid Rock's latest record doesn't really wash with the CD-buying public.
...Dildog, of @Stake, found the hole, which is quite similar to the recent Outlook security that allows for automatic scripting.
At first read, I thought Dildog was one of the office assistants!
That means they should be unambiguously worded and in a language that the person who executes the license understands.
You mean Perl, right? Seriously though, all licenses have to be worded that way precisely because it is so unambiguous. "Lawyerese" is diffucult for the layperson to understand because lawyers can pick "normal" English sentences apart and find about twenty different meanings for each one. As software licenses, in a court case or similar situation, will be picked apart by lawyers eventually, they have to be written in such a way that the lawyers will only be able to find one interpretation.
Maybe shrink wrap licenses should be the "lite" version of the license that explains what the terms are, with the original source license available for the lawyers to tangle over.
>Do this:
/. .
>
> 1.edit source code;
> 2.distribute source code;
> 3.compile with Borland;
> 4.distribute binary only;
> 5.go to 1.
Whoo! I think you've just violated the DMCA! That is clearly an algorithm (a program, if you will) that will allow people to get around the spirit with which that license was released if not the word of it. In fact, sir, you should be expecting a call any minute now from my sizable legal staff! You will, of course, have to consent to having this comment removed from
;)
You may produce and distribute, in executable form only, programs which you created ...
...with the Software!
By this, I'm sure they mean you can only distribute the binaries, in executable form that are created with the compiler. Since "the Software" doesn't create your source code (if it does, I'm going to get it right away!) you are still free to do with it whatever your little heart desires.
I can tell you that after working so long with Miva, PHP begins to look bizarre and with strange syntax. It would be difficult to switch between to extensive work with both at the same time.
Really? After working with Miva for about a year and a half, I became enamored with PHP after having discovered it. It was really like a breath of fresh air!
MivaScript has some very serious problems. First off, it has no serious database support. I can't access anything using SQL except for ODBC datasources. No support for Oracle. No support for Sybase. No support for mSQL. On top of that, you can only query the db. You can't insert or update values when using SQL in MivaScript. The xbase3 support in MivaScript is just miserable. Miva's xbase3 implementation doesn't even support multiple tables in a single database!
The other big problem I've got with MivaScript is the way it mixes the document and the program. Over several passes over one document, it is possible to get an utterly different page each time.
MivaScript also isn't as flexible as Coldfusion or PHP. You can't create external functions for MivaScript. You can't compile in new functionality (like PHP's support for the GD libraries) for MivaScript. Still, I do admit that the learning curve for MivaScript is very gentle. I learned the entire language in about a night. As long as you aren't doing anything too large, MivaScript is a nice quick solution that'll allow you to hack something together in an hour or two.
However, if you're doing anything like the big kids do, you really don't want to do it in Miva.
The coolest thing they offer (I think) is Miva Mia, which for testing before deployment beats the daylights out of Microsoft POS.. Oops..PWS. Miva Mia is by far the easiest to setup, no frills personal web server for Win32.
I don't mean to sound really harsh about Miva. After all, it's where I cut my teeth on server side scripting. Just don't be too resistant to giving these other technologies a fair shake!
The spin I picked up from the M$NBC article seemed to suggest that because the source was freely available, anyone could have exploited this hole. It smelled to me like they were trying to make this out to be a bad thing. Oh well. Only a fool would use the default password anyways.
Never forget what the MS in MSNBC means.
Say due to some "bug" in the software, you get locked out of your mission critical system. How do you get back in?
If the software is so poorly written that it locks even the root user out, how can we believe that the backdoor is sufficiently hidden? The more reasonable solution is to write good code in the first place.
Oh yeah, like this hasent happened before. I hear that microsoft has a deal with the CIA to install remote servers on all computers. So now the CIA can steal our porno!
No way, we'd catch on once we see a Linux box with a blue screen!
Thrilling. I love it. The greatest thing is that I'm sitting here with dvwssr.dll open in a text editor. The password is stored in cleartext. Backwords, yes, it took me a full thirty seconds to find it. Oh yes here it is:
!seineew era sreenigne epacsteN
You think they could've, I dunno, ENCRYPTED IT? I mean, its one thing (unscrupulous as it is) to put a backdoor in software, but its just plain stupid to store the p/w in cleartext on every machine that runs frontpage in the world.
The speech isn't in what the program does, its in the source code (not the binary, I assume) of the program. The source really isn't the program, its just some instructions (schematics, if you will) that tell the compiler what to build. Of course, an interesting question in that case is this:
What if I (being some kind of evil genius) write my entire program in binary? The code I write is the code I run. Of course, this is hypothetical, but being that this code is speech and action rolled into one, is it protected or not?
Interesting, this just goes to show that a corporation can violate a person's rights more than the state can. This may set a precedent after all!
I am an OS/2 user but I've never heard about problems with AMD. I've been using AMDs myself since 1993. Can you elaborate?
Didn't IBM actually sell AMD stuff under the IBM name for a while around when Warp 3 came out? I remember my friend opening up his PC and seeing this big ibm-blue DX4/100 chip with an IBM logo emblazoned on it. I would've thought that they would've made sure that OS/2 ran on AMDs really well.
The interesting point here isn't that people have finally stopped paying attention to advertisements. People never paid any attention to ads in the first place. The thing here is that with the internet, and with Free PC, advertisers knew that people weren't acting on the ads they had. With television, there is no feedback, no way for advertisers to tell that they're being shafted. With the internet, people selling ad space can no longer optimistically estimate how many people see and act on their adds because the advertisers have concrete numbers. Proof, if you will, that no one cares about what they have to say.
Bob needs to understand that Crusoe is not Linux, even if Linus works for Transmeta. I actually wrote quite a long response to the article, but after looking at it a little bit, I've realized that it is very difficult to analyze an incoherent article like that. I think the Animal Farm references are inappropriate. OSS isn't about politics, it's about software. If we do it better than Microsoft, so be it.
I really loved his pun though, I mean how many people would have thought to call Open Source "Open Sores"? That adds some real credibility to the article!
By the way, if an article could be a troll, that would've been one. (It sure got me!)
The thing is, bugs are no more inherent in computer science than they are in any other branch of science or engineering. If 747's fell out of the sky 15% of the time, people would see it as a major problem. You are absolutely correct about the idea that people expect to have bugs in the products they buy. However, one highly disturbing thing that I've noticed is that many software engineers I know expect to write buggy software. They just shrug they're shoulders and say, "There's no sense in trying to make it better. Hey, software can't be perfect."
I can easily see the American software business going to the same place as the American automobile business went back in the 80's. We're used to being the only kids on the block and its made alot of us arrogant and complacent. If a company comes along that actually uses sound software engineering techniques to produce solid software, you'll see people drop Windows like a bad habit. The only problem is, is this company going to be the Toyota of 2020, or are we going to get our acts together and save ourselves?
Of course if UCITA gets passed we'll see more and more of this kind of horrible software coming from the bowels of the software sweat shops.
P.S.
;)
Does anybody remember the name of Microsoft's Unix, that was released either late 70's or early 80's?
I think they called it DOS.
Are you saying that consumers don't have the right to copy the content for personal use. For example, when hard drives get larger and cheaper, as you mentioned, what if I want to copy a DVD I own onto my laptop's hard drive so I can watch it on a plane without wasting battery life powering a DVD drive.
I don't believe we should even mention the piracy issue. We have to rise above it. Although what you say is valid, many people do equate copying videos with piracy. (You can only watch that FBI warning at the start of a VHS tape so many times before you're brainwashed.)
If we want to win this fight, I think we'll have to transcend squabbling about the piracy issue. We have to trumpet the fact loud and clear: DeCSS has nothing whatsoever to do with copy-protection. It is no feat at all to copy DVDs. DVD piracy can be accomplished, and indeed is accomplished, without DeCSS. We have to let the people know that DeCSS is not, and cannot be, used as a tool to copy DVDs. It can only be used as a tool to play back DVDs.
I think the real crime is that the MPAA is given a ready outlet for their misinformation in otherwise well respected news organizations like the Los Angeles Times.
Mr. Valenti is either misinformed or a bald-faced liar.
I don't think he's misinformed.
On another note: Why doesn't the open source community have some kind of advocacy group like the MPAA?
Bring in some Chinese slave laborers or Malaysian kids working for .25 a day and let them protest--they are the ones who are getting screwed.
Yeah! Great idea! Why don't we just bring some slave laborers in and let them talk?
The reason alot of college students are protesting is because the people who are getting screwed have no voice. When was the last time that a Malaysian kid held a press conference? When was the last time you saw a Chinese slave laborer on Larry King?
I've noticed that a lot of people here tend to think "I got mine so screw you!"
What are we going to do when the tables are turned? It seems awful to me that so many people here are so cold-hearted, especially living in the booming times that we do.