This is similar to the technology made popular by X-drive that allows users to create a virtual drive that actual exists on a remote server. The problem with this technology is that it is expensive for the service provider (hard drive space and bandwidth) and from what I've seen from the online file storage market is that a lot of them (e.g. X-drive) have given up on the consumer market because of economies of scale and will instead try to capture the business market. Online file storage seems to be at best a break-even part of teh business instead of one that will generate enough profits to cover the cost of software development.
Eazel Software Catalog
This seems similar to RedHat's download page, where one can obtain software from a web interface instead of via FTP. One hopes that they also plan to have something like RedHat's up2date or Debian's apt-get to distinguish themselves, if not then it isn't worth signing up for. Again, I don't see this as a great profit generator.
I recently submitted an article about how I found a piece of spyware that is installed by a number of music sharing systems including AudioGalaxy and iMesh on my machine. Of course, Slashdot rejected it. Since it is ontopic for this discussion here it is:
The SpyWare Invasion
While writing a proxy server for a class I noticed that for each URL I clicked, a number of POST requests were being sent to d2.webhancer.com and d3.webhancer.com. Wondering what was up I decided to go to the Web Hancer website where I found out that WebHancer is a company that claims to have an installed base of millions of WebHancer agents that report web browsing statistics to their corporate headquarters.
WebHancer currently charges businesses $12,000 a month to access these usage statistics. I found the webHancer agent on my Windows machine (after a quick 'ps -W | grep gent')in "C:\Program Files\webHancer\Programs\whAgent.exe" and deleted it. What I am wondering is how the Web Hancer agent got on my machine since I don't recall being asked whether I wanted to install any spyware. Also exactly how many of their millions of anonymous usage statistics are being generated by unsuspecting users?
Which program did I install that decided to place this Trojan on my machine and is there a blacklist of such programs? AudioGalaxy
Finally, while searching for info on Web Hancer I found Ad-Aware which claims to locate and uninstall such spyware.
So I go pay them $15, and turn around and place the exact same download on my own server, but only charge $5.
Perfectly legal, right?
Therein lies the rub. GPLing a piece of software effectively drives its cost to $0. No matter how high or low you charge for it, there'll be someone who bought it and has access to the source who can charge less and someone further down the chain who can charge even less until we get to the last link in the chain who will allow it free to be downloaded or at cost of distribution media.
If I was one of the Libranet developers I'd simply stop distributing the software if it costs them that much to distribute it. No one says you can't hack GPLed code on your own, as long as the people they give it to can access the source they should have no problems. Heck, I just spoke to someone who is hacking C99 compliance into gcc and as long as all the people he gives the binary to (i.e. no one) have access to the source he doesn't have to deal with having to pay excessive bandwidth costs, people complaining about bugs or lack of features, complaints about potential GPL violations, Slashdot editors questioning his motives, etc. All he has to worry about is hacking the code, which what it's all about anyway.
You are wrong. Nintendo is outselling Sony 3 to 1
on
Mario's Revenge?
·
· Score: 2
I'm sorry, but Nintendo will NOT be taking Sony's top spot, whether we like it or not (M$ does have a chance though).
Why? Because the majority of Nintendo's games are still marketed at the 6-12 age group. For every Goldeneye and Conker, there's 50 Pokemon and Hot Wheels games.
The inability of people to see the advantages of Nintendo's target demographic is part of the genius that is Nintendo. What is particularly amusing is that you fail to realize that Nintendo makes more money than Sony from console games sales. In fact last year Nintendo made over $700 million more than Sony from games sales (in fact it made more than Sony and Sega combined). This is besides the fact that Nintendo licensing deals give them a bigger chunk of change than Sony's do.
Think about it for a second. Who has more money to buy games? Baby boomers and soccer moms who want to give their spoilt little angels whatever they want including every considerable flavor of Pokeman merhcandise or teenagers who can't even afford to buy $17 CDs (let alone $35 - $55 games) and get most of their music from Napster?
Huh? What?!? The ICQ API has been available for quite a while on Windows, I am sure of this because a friend of mine who writes encryption based ICQ plugins told me about using it almost a year ago.
As for the protocol being XML based. It isn't if not we'd already know about it because all the ICQ clones would be using an XML based protocol instead of the ICQ protocol (yes, it's available on the web).
One other quick question, which I still haven't seen answered. When Slashdot was bought, and the parent company(ies) were going to have IPOs, I believe that you and CmdrTaco would be donating some of the income to Free Software or other projects you supported. Have you done so yet, and to which causes?
We just had a discussion on kuro5hin about how unlike Larry Augustin (VA Linux CEO) and the other suits at VA Linux, ESR and CmdrTaco didn't sell VA Linux stock when they had the chance. With VA Linux currently trading at around $3 there isn't much money to be made from the stock especially after taxes.
Drakantus is right - the other ones we try to keep an eye out for. If there's not something in the mainstream media, then write a review! Compare and contrast! Write a user guide!
You say this now but Slashdot has never acted like it's interested in lengthy user submissions. I've stopped bothering when my last attempt at an editorial sat in the submission queue for about week and I had to mail you guys about it only to be told someone would get around to reading it "soon". That's why my stories go on kuro5hin because I know they'll get read and I'll get feedback.
As for short submissions, I've basically stopped those as well after this story where you editted all the coherence out of my submission and made me sound like a raving zealot instead of maintaining the original theme of the submission.
Quite frankly I don't understand why with the authors slashdot has no one writes anything longer than a paragraph about a submission. Is reading submissions that much work that we can't get the kind of review, comparison, or user guide that you've just suggested?
At the height of Slashdot's reporting on Napster (twice or thrice a week) I couldn't understand what relevance it had with regards to being "News for Nersa" or "Stuff that Matters", some service that is primarily used to pirate songs was getting sued, big deal.
Now that Napster has been rendered useless as a file sharing service by the RIAA and a court of law, why is Napster still news? Everyone I know has moved on from Napster and now uses a service that surpasses Napster's poorly designed service in one way or the other. For simply sharing and obtaining music there are iMesh, Audiogalaxy, Music City, Ohaha, Gnutella and a host of others. For uses of P2P beyond simply grabbing MP3s we have Mojo Nation, Freenet and Publius.
Why doesn't slashdot start reporting on these systems instead of beating the dead Napster horse?
I don't know about VA, but Red Hat is actually doing OK. They're on track to make a profit this year.
The point isn't whether RedHat can make a profit or not but whether they were justified in IPOing and fostering expectations as unrealistic as they made early on in their creation. A consulting firm with two friends making websites and balancing the budget can be profitable, it doesn't mean they should IPO and try to become a multimillion dollar corporation.
Public companies have higher standards than merely turning a profit to justify an investors expenditure. Sizable return on investment (i.e. better than if the investor just stuck the money in the bank) and high potential growth are also factors. No one has yet convinced me that supporting Linux is not a market with low barrier to entry. Dell, Compaq and IBM have already lead the way in showing the folly of thinking a first mover can win out in the Linux hardware world, I wonder who is going to prove RedHat wrong in the software space.
By paying people to develop software, they have the knowledge in house to provide superior support. Their people don't need to grovel over the code because they wrote it.
Any company that has developers doing support or being in any way connected to support services deserves to be on Fucked Company. Do you think Sun and Microsoft have their kernel programmers answering phones?
That's in the USA. I imagine that it's Mandrake or SuSe in Europe, TurboLinux in Asia.
Red Hat is probably the solution for support. That's in the USA. I imagine that it's Mandrake or SuSe in Europe, TurboLinux in Asia.
SuSe has had difficulties. Turbolinux has had similar problems. The fact of the matter is that reality is strongly countering the unbridled optimism that most of the first-mover Linux companies had in the potential commercial viability of support services.
20 or so years ago Jerry Pournelle, writing in Byte, said that in the future (i.e. now) the money wouldn't be in selling software, it would be in selling support (like Red Hat) and documentation (like O'Reilly). He was right.
How was he right? Microsoft, Oracle, IBM, Computer Associates, Sun, SAS Institute, etc are making billions in revenue and profit from selling software. Who is making anything remotely close to what the afforementioned companies are doing by selling services?
Because of that, a lot of the money is going to be made by old-line companies with a lot of cash and the patience to weather bad economic times, like IBM and (if I can do anything about it) HP.
I have always puzzled over the business plans of companies like VA Linux, RedHat, Eazel, Ximian and the like that plan to make money of selling comodity software. Specifically I'd like to know how they justified their plans for IPOing or spending millions in VC money from peddling GPL software.
I'm not an MBA but it is painfully obvious to me that GPLed software is unfavorable towards reaping rich financial rewards. Take software for instance. Lets say RedHat spends $1 million on paying kernel hackers and writing GPLed software and plans to make up for this in support. The fact of the matter is since RedHat's software is free of licensing costs and is GPLed, anyone can create a value added service from their software and spend less than they do but provide better support and/or extensions to their software by working off what RedHat has already done without having to invest the same amount of money.
The same is true of hardware. VA Linux thought it could become big time selling Linux servers but failed to realize that anyone can put together a Linux box and sell it. Once Dell, IBM, Compaq, etc decided to invest their considerable experience, market knowledge and distribution chains into the Linux server market it simply became who could afford to spend the most to make the most (just like Walmart vs. your local grocery store).
What I'd like to know is exactly how people were convinced that these companies could make money? If you work or have worked for one of these companies, please can you explain to me how they planned to make a profit?
PS: I am pro-Open Source and have worked on Free Software and plan to give away a considerable amount of software (20,000 code application in a few months) but I can't see the sense in believing that Open Source translates into corporate profits unless you plan to use Open Source products as a hook to selling your actual product (e.g. IBM).
Besides, how many of the so-called artists being "stolen" from are actual artists. The songwriters and producers make most of the money off of people like Britney. They developed a product and they sold it.
Do you have a problem with this? Any pretty girl with a good voice can do Britney Spears' job but very few people can write or produce hit records. The people who deserve the money are the song writers and producers not the dime-a-dozen poptart teen idols.
Now take a look at a band like Fugazi. During the 80's and 90's major labels offered them millions of dollars to sign with them but they never did. Instead, they produced their own albums and sold their own product through distributors, catalogs and at shows. For $8 when most CD's cost 14.99. And you know what, they sold millions of albums and there are a lot of other artists out there doing the same thing. I'm looking forward to the day when more artists ditch the labels and sell their product over the internet. It's happening for some and hopefully more real artists will follow suit.
What I don't understand is why people keep thinking that Napster == money to the artist. Napster is about getting music for free. It isn't about buying music online, paying artists directly or supporting independent artists. Napster screws the RIAA and the artists even if they are independent or not. Slashdot recently had an article where an independent group with a strong web presence (TMBG) that supports online music expressed reservations about Napster for circumventing the connection between the band and the artist.
As for your friends who signed ballbreaker deals with the RIAA labels, they should have gone independent instead. Most of the musicI listento is from independent groups that were too hardcore for the RIAA labels or didn't fit their expectations, yet these artists are now richer than most RIAA artists who sell twice or thrice as much as they do because they didn't sign any ballbreaker deals, massive advertising nor having to sellout.
NOTE: I am not against independent artists (I listen mostly to non-RIAA groups) nor am I against paying artists directly (i.e. Fairtunes). I am against people obtaining free music then claiming that using Napster somehow benefits the artists.
Do I steal music? Yes. Do I do it to get something for nothing? No. Do I do it to screw artists? No. Do I pay for any and all reasonably-priced software, games, music, and literature? You betcha. But I am boycotting the music / literature / entertainment monopolies that are charging me a fortune just to keep their stock prices high. If an artist falls by the wayside then I feel justified in knowing that I did it to offer freedom to 10x more artists in the future.
You do realize you've claimed that by preventing 1 artist from making a living from selling his/her music you have prevented 10x that amount from doing so in the future. So if the goal of you and your cohorts is achieved and the RIAA is driven out of business leading to distributed music becoming free(which is what Napster has propagated) exactly how have you freed the artists?
Let me guess, "They are free to no longer have to worry about album sales, because there aren't any?".
So Napster's effectively gone away. If Mr. Berry's figures are to beleived, this means that the RIAA doesn't have a few ingenious crackers and hackers on their hands trading MP3z on undergound IRC and Usenet channels. They have 30 MILLION FRUSTRATED, ANGRY, PISSED OFF users from all classes and races! Worse, they have a veritable legion of crackers and hackers who want to support these people's dirty MP3 habits in order to make money/points/karma/etc...
Your analysis would be correct if the RIAA had no plans to create an online music distribution system similar to Napster. But we all know that various RIAA members have expressed interests in online music delivery including Sony, BMG and EMI. The reason the RIAA has cleared the scene of Scour.net and Napster is so that people stop getting used to the idea that online music should be free. Once all the free online music services for the masses have been eliminated the RIAA can step in to fix the MP3 cravings with an online service that charges a mere $10 - $20 a month.
As for hackers creating a rival service, as long as the RIAA owns the copyrights on the music that people want to hear the law will be on their side. This means that any hacker(s) who create(s)
a popular online music distribution system must be ready to contend with lawsuits and harassments from law enforcement and RIAA lawyers. Since most hackers already know where to get MP3's without the common tools (Gnutella, Napster, Scour, etc) it is unlikely that any hacker will put himself through the RIAA wringer just to enable other people to be able to download free music. Corporate investors will also tread warily with regards to facing the RIAA after what has happened to Scour and Napster.
Quite frankly, the RIAA is about to prove that "He with the most lawyers wins".
Simply breaking any old encryption is not, nor is it a copyright issue.
This is what has constantly amused me as I've seen the string of stories on Slashdot proclaiming how enterprising hackers plan to turn the DMCA on itself. The DMCA does not ban reverse engineering or breaking of encryption per se. I've read the DMCA and it specifically targets circumvention of copyright protection systems. Unless AIMSter users are encrypting music to which they own the copyright then they're so called claims of reversing the DMCA are so much piss in the wind. The DMCA would simply be a license to pirate/steal/share digital works and protect yourself by encrypting them if that was the case. The RIAA, MPAA and congressmen who drafted the DMCA are not that stupid.
Bottom Line: If you are not encrypting work to which you own the copyright then the DMCA does not apply to you.
Second, he's actually in the clear from the moral point of view. As evidenced by him spending about $10,000 to set up Fairtunes, a site which allows fans to donate directly to artists, he cares about seeing that artists don't get ripped off. I've personally donated $25 through Fairtunes. To get the same amount of cash into artists' hands, I'd have to spend over $300 on CDs.
I originally was completely against the idea of a Napster clone that would be outside the RIAA's legeal reach because I am personally opposed to the fact that Napster prevents artists from making money of thier music and the thought of someone else making money of the work of artists either was distasteful to me. But now that I know that the creator of Fairtunes is behind it, some of my reservations have been removed and I have certain requests.
The main problem with Napster is that it does not give one an interface to pay the artist for their work. I've often downloaded songs off Napster and wished that I could click some link and send the artist a few bucks directly. Using Fairtunes and the like is rather inconvenient. Currently to use Fairtunes one has to
Add artists to your shopping cart as usual
Proceed to the checkout page
Note the total amount of your shopping cart
Click the PayPal button (to mail us the contents of your shopping cart)
Now if the OpenNAP servers that will be on Sealand supported a protocol/client combo that integrated Fairtunes with Napster, I'd be very interested in using this service. Simply replace the ads and HTML crap that Napster streams with "Pay The Artist" links and add an encrypted layer for actually making payments to the artists via Fairtunes. Heck, I'd even work on it if it was Open Sourced(TM).
This topic has been addressed several times already on Slashdot but here it goes again. For 99% of the uses of a database today where data integrity is not of the utmost importance, the data sets being handled are relatively small, and the ability to scale to millions of hits a minute is unecessary, the simple RDBMS's like Access and MySQL can handle the job.
Oracle and DB2 are meant to primarily run on systems that will receive a lot of traffic (both reads and writes) and where data integrity is important (i.e. failure recovery, transactions, integrity checking, etc). Sites like
eBay, Yahoo and Amazon are probably better off running Oracle and the like while smaller sites that have traffic that consists primarily of reads and where the integrity of data isn't extremely important can use MySQL or even Access.
Banks and Fortune 500s are also examples of companies that need the additional features of Enterprise database systems. Realistically for most people's needs Access or MySQL are all that is required.
I believe that people should try to get into a work life where all their work is motivating for them, and where they and their employer have a common interest, if they have an employer. Thedre shoudl not be this kind of situation where a boss is going to lift the creative work of an employee just because it happens to fit into the boss's firm's business plan.
Nice sentiment but this is not the situation that is being described in the Ask Slashdot. He's halfway through writing an application and his boss coincidentally asked him to write a similar app for a client. If he simply finishes his application on company time and gives that to the client then the work beklongs to the company after all that's what they are paying him to do. I personally see two options:
Excuse himself from writing the application for the client stating the reasons why. This should forestall any future lawsuits but may make his work life difficult once his boss realizes he is writing software in his free time that competes with his company and also there may not be any other project for him to work on.
Reimplement the product for the client making sure not to use any of his previously developed code which will mean more work but then there won't be any copyright issues to deal with. This does not guarantee however that his boss won't take issue once he releases a similar product.
Quite frankly both options seem fraught with peril so the best advice I can give is talk to a lawyer
I wonder: the analogy to the 1960s may work, but should ex-hippies really be the target audience? Are they the ones running all the servers nowadays?
They aren't running the servers but they are the ones telling the server jockeys what to run. They are the CTOs, CIOs and CEOs. They are the ones who need to be convinced that "Linux is ready for the Enterprise" and who better to do that the the behemoth from their earlier years, IBM, the Microsoft of their generation
Maybe someone should just tell them about OpenBSD, save some time and money.
The DARPA program is called Composable High Assurance Trusted Systems (CHATS) which implies that they are interested in Trusted Systems not systems that claim to be secure because a bunch of hackers allegedly have fixed all the buffer overflows. Being "secure" and being a trusted system are completely different things.
Maybe micheal meant to mention TrustedBSD which is attempting to become certified as a Trusted System?
Consider your history. Why are there now two desktop environments for Linux? Well, we have reached this state because of liscensing issues. The Gnome project formed purely because people were unhappy with the KDE qt liscense.
The origin of the projects is no longer important. So if MIT suddenly is given the source code for all the printer drivers in use on their campus, should RMS give up the Free Software Foundation? (click here if that didn't make sense to you) Why continue to divide out labor on two projects which both hope to achieve the same thing?
Because they plan to do this in completely different ways, also once they are mature the differences willbeself evident.
Imagine how much more polished the Linux desktop environment would be if all effort were focused on just one. Twice as much effort would be expended on it every day.
Anyone who has read Frederick Brooke's Mythical Man Month knows that your statements are a big misconception. Doubling the number of developers on a project does not double the amount of time taken to finish the project because new developers have to be brought up to speed and the layers of communication increase which leads to more errorsoccuring due to miscommunication. Basically there is a certain level of complexity where throwing more developers at a product produces little net gain. KDE and GNOME are at that level of complexity.
KDE is mainly C++, GNOME is mainly C (if you do not realize there is a fundamental difference in these languages then go to comp.lang.c or comp.lang.c++ and state this and see the responses you'll get). GNOME uses all sorts of CORBA stuff while KDE does not. GNOME uses OrBit while the few KDE developers who know CORBA used Mico. Both projects are extremely undocumented and very few, if any, have a complete grasp of the entire system in either case.
Quite frankly,if KDE and GNOME merged the efforts involved in adjusting to the merger would slow down development a lot more than any perceived current lack of developers does.
In addition, some functionality that was a part of one or the other system would be lost (because stuff always gets trimmed in a merger).
A better suggestion is for KDE and GNOME to start actively pursing interoperability. Unfortunately this is one place were Open Source may fail. It is unlikely that GNOME interoperability is high on the list of any KDE developer's list of itches he/she wants scratched and vice versa. Thus since they are all simply volunteers they can't be made to do it like would happen in a professional development environment, where a manager can just assign a bunch of coders this task.
I'm reading his responses, and they're not the responses of someone who wants to engage Allchin in a dialogue about Allchin's salient points.
What salient points do you want RMS to discuss?
START CONVERSATION
Microsoft: We'd like to embrace and extend GPL software but the GPL prevents this.
RMS: That's the point.
END CONVERSATION.
As RMS never grows tired of stating, he is a representative of the Free Software Movement which is about freedom at all costs, while most people including yourself are members of the Open Source movement which is willing to compromise with closed source developers.
They're the responses of someone who's been spouting the same party line for the last twenty years and who will gladly and graciously take any opportunity to do the same anew. This isn't a criticism of the free software movement.
Yes, it is. You're so called tired party line is the ethos of the Free Software Movement. People like you and ESR are members of the Open Source Movement which RMS keeps pointing out in the article (did you read it all?), he is not a part off. The Free Software Movement is not about compromise it is about "Give me freedom, or give me death".
As I am posting this there are 5 posts moderated to +3 or higher and it is quite obvious that none of these posters actually read the article. Anyway here's the capsule summary for all the moderators and posters who refused to read the story.
Google does
not plan to "open source" or give away the Dejà archives. Instead a lot of former Dejà users, specifically a Frank Davies who is a student and research assistant at Columbia University, would prefer if the archives did not belong to a commercial entity but instead to the Library of Congress or to an Open Source non-profit.
The freaking article is entitle Deja 'Revolt' Against Google, how anyone could have completely misread it and gave the horrible write up we just got is quite amazing.
This leads me to the main question: Major sites such as Google, eBay and Amazon, have become a valuable part of the 'Net and have become an intrinsic part of the World Wide Web experience for many people. Yet, these companies are yet to prove their viability and could collapse at any time if their investors grow tired of shouldering their debts and underperformance. What will happen to the 'Net when the next big dotcomm to fall is eBay or Amazon, or Google? Especially since Google's USENET archive and WWW cache have become invaluable to a number of people.
Does this justify asking the government to step in and take over these resources so they are preserved for posterity as Frank Davies and many others have suggested or is would this be undue interference by the government?
Slashdot Mirror
They plan to make money off of Eazel Online Storage and Eazel Software Catalog.
Eazel Online Storage
This is similar to the technology made popular by X-drive that allows users to create a virtual drive that actual exists on a remote server. The problem with this technology is that it is expensive for the service provider (hard drive space and bandwidth) and from what I've seen from the online file storage market is that a lot of them (e.g. X-drive) have given up on the consumer market because of economies of scale and will instead try to capture the business market. Online file storage seems to be at best a break-even part of teh business instead of one that will generate enough profits to cover the cost of software development.
Eazel Software Catalog
This seems similar to RedHat's download page, where one can obtain software from a web interface instead of via FTP. One hopes that they also plan to have something like RedHat's up2date or Debian's apt-get to distinguish themselves, if not then it isn't worth signing up for. Again, I don't see this as a great profit generator.
I recently submitted an article about how I found a piece of spyware that is installed by a number of music sharing systems including AudioGalaxy and iMesh on my machine. Of course, Slashdot rejected it. Since it is ontopic for this discussion here it is:
The SpyWare Invasion
While writing a proxy server for a class I noticed that for each URL I clicked, a number of POST requests were being sent to d2.webhancer.com and d3.webhancer.com. Wondering what was up I decided to go to the Web Hancer website where I found out that WebHancer is a company that claims to have an installed base of millions of WebHancer agents that report web browsing statistics to their corporate headquarters.
WebHancer currently charges businesses $12,000 a month to access these usage statistics. I found the webHancer agent on my Windows machine (after a quick 'ps -W | grep gent')in "C:\Program Files\webHancer\Programs\whAgent.exe" and deleted it. What I am wondering is how the Web Hancer agent got on my machine since I don't recall being asked whether I wanted to install any spyware. Also exactly how many of their millions of anonymous usage statistics are being generated by unsuspecting users?
Which program did I install that decided to place this Trojan on my machine and is there a blacklist of such programs? AudioGalaxy
Finally, while searching for info on Web Hancer I found Ad-Aware which claims to locate and uninstall such spyware.
So I go pay them $15, and turn around and place the exact same download on my own server, but only charge $5.
Perfectly legal, right?
Therein lies the rub. GPLing a piece of software effectively drives its cost to $0. No matter how high or low you charge for it, there'll be someone who bought it and has access to the source who can charge less and someone further down the chain who can charge even less until we get to the last link in the chain who will allow it free to be downloaded or at cost of distribution media.
If I was one of the Libranet developers I'd simply stop distributing the software if it costs them that much to distribute it. No one says you can't hack GPLed code on your own, as long as the people they give it to can access the source they should have no problems. Heck, I just spoke to someone who is hacking C99 compliance into gcc and as long as all the people he gives the binary to (i.e. no one) have access to the source he doesn't have to deal with having to pay excessive bandwidth costs, people complaining about bugs or lack of features, complaints about potential GPL violations, Slashdot editors questioning his motives, etc. All he has to worry about is hacking the code, which what it's all about anyway.
I'm sorry, but Nintendo will NOT be taking Sony's top spot, whether we like it or not (M$ does have a chance though).
Why? Because the majority of Nintendo's games are still marketed at the 6-12 age group. For every Goldeneye and Conker, there's 50 Pokemon and Hot Wheels games.
The inability of people to see the advantages of Nintendo's target demographic is part of the genius that is Nintendo. What is particularly amusing is that you fail to realize that Nintendo makes more money than Sony from console games sales. In fact last year Nintendo made over $700 million more than Sony from games sales (in fact it made more than Sony and Sega combined). This is besides the fact that Nintendo licensing deals give them a bigger chunk of change than Sony's do.
Think about it for a second. Who has more money to buy games? Baby boomers and soccer moms who want to give their spoilt little angels whatever they want including every considerable flavor of Pokeman merhcandise or teenagers who can't even afford to buy $17 CDs (let alone $35 - $55 games) and get most of their music from Napster?
Think about it.
Huh? What?!? The ICQ API has been available for quite a while on Windows, I am sure of this because a friend of mine who writes encryption based ICQ plugins told me about using it almost a year ago.
As for the protocol being XML based. It isn't if not we'd already know about it because all the ICQ clones would be using an XML based protocol instead of the ICQ protocol (yes, it's available on the web).
One other quick question, which I still haven't seen answered. When Slashdot was bought, and the parent company(ies) were going to have IPOs, I believe that you and CmdrTaco would be donating some of the income to Free Software or other projects you supported. Have you done so yet, and to which causes?
We just had a discussion on kuro5hin about how unlike Larry Augustin (VA Linux CEO) and the other suits at VA Linux, ESR and CmdrTaco didn't sell VA Linux stock when they had the chance. With VA Linux currently trading at around $3 there isn't much money to be made from the stock especially after taxes.
For those with a technical bent who were disappointed by the lack of information on SMT in the linked artilce, here are some better resources:
Introduction to Simultaneous Multi-threading from UMass .
Quick Quiz on SMT.
Caches for Simultaneous Multithreaded Processors: An Introduction
Drakantus is right - the other ones we try to keep an eye out for. If there's not something in the mainstream media, then write a review! Compare and contrast! Write a user guide!
You say this now but Slashdot has never acted like it's interested in lengthy user submissions. I've stopped bothering when my last attempt at an editorial sat in the submission queue for about week and I had to mail you guys about it only to be told someone would get around to reading it "soon". That's why my stories go on kuro5hin because I know they'll get read and I'll get feedback.
As for short submissions, I've basically stopped those as well after this story where you editted all the coherence out of my submission and made me sound like a raving zealot instead of maintaining the original theme of the submission.
Quite frankly I don't understand why with the authors slashdot has no one writes anything longer than a paragraph about a submission. Is reading submissions that much work that we can't get the kind of review, comparison, or user guide that you've just suggested?
At the height of Slashdot's reporting on Napster (twice or thrice a week) I couldn't understand what relevance it had with regards to being "News for Nersa" or "Stuff that Matters", some service that is primarily used to pirate songs was getting sued, big deal.
Now that Napster has been rendered useless as a file sharing service by the RIAA and a court of law, why is Napster still news? Everyone I know has moved on from Napster and now uses a service that surpasses Napster's poorly designed service in one way or the other. For simply sharing and obtaining music there are iMesh, Audiogalaxy, Music City, Ohaha, Gnutella and a host of others. For uses of P2P beyond simply grabbing MP3s we have Mojo Nation, Freenet and Publius.
Why doesn't slashdot start reporting on these systems instead of beating the dead Napster horse?
I don't know about VA, but Red Hat is actually doing OK. They're on track to make a profit this year.
The point isn't whether RedHat can make a profit or not but whether they were justified in IPOing and fostering expectations as unrealistic as they made early on in their creation. A consulting firm with two friends making websites and balancing the budget can be profitable, it doesn't mean they should IPO and try to become a multimillion dollar corporation.
Public companies have higher standards than merely turning a profit to justify an investors expenditure. Sizable return on investment (i.e. better than if the investor just stuck the money in the bank) and high potential growth are also factors. No one has yet convinced me that supporting Linux is not a market with low barrier to entry. Dell, Compaq and IBM have already lead the way in showing the folly of thinking a first mover can win out in the Linux hardware world, I wonder who is going to prove RedHat wrong in the software space.
By paying people to develop software, they have the knowledge in house to provide superior support. Their people don't need to grovel over the code because they wrote it.
Any company that has developers doing support or being in any way connected to support services deserves to be on Fucked Company. Do you think Sun and Microsoft have their kernel programmers answering phones?
That's in the USA. I imagine that it's Mandrake or SuSe in Europe, TurboLinux in Asia. Red Hat is probably the solution for support. That's in the USA. I imagine that it's Mandrake or SuSe in Europe, TurboLinux in Asia.
SuSe has had difficulties. Turbolinux has had similar problems. The fact of the matter is that reality is strongly countering the unbridled optimism that most of the first-mover Linux companies had in the potential commercial viability of support services.
20 or so years ago Jerry Pournelle, writing in Byte, said that in the future (i.e. now) the money wouldn't be in selling software, it would be in selling support (like Red Hat) and documentation (like O'Reilly). He was right.
How was he right? Microsoft, Oracle, IBM, Computer Associates, Sun, SAS Institute, etc are making billions in revenue and profit from selling software. Who is making anything remotely close to what the afforementioned companies are doing by selling services?
Because of that, a lot of the money is going to be made by old-line companies with a lot of cash and the patience to weather bad economic times, like IBM and (if I can do anything about it) HP.
Is that why you advised them against Open Sourcing OpenMail even though it would be a great addition to the repository of Open Source software?
I agree with your suggestions to them but I would like to hear it from the horse's mouth (so to speak).
I have always puzzled over the business plans of companies like VA Linux, RedHat, Eazel, Ximian and the like that plan to make money of selling comodity software. Specifically I'd like to know how they justified their plans for IPOing or spending millions in VC money from peddling GPL software.
I'm not an MBA but it is painfully obvious to me that GPLed software is unfavorable towards reaping rich financial rewards. Take software for instance. Lets say RedHat spends $1 million on paying kernel hackers and writing GPLed software and plans to make up for this in support. The fact of the matter is since RedHat's software is free of licensing costs and is GPLed, anyone can create a value added service from their software and spend less than they do but provide better support and/or extensions to their software by working off what RedHat has already done without having to invest the same amount of money.
The same is true of hardware. VA Linux thought it could become big time selling Linux servers but failed to realize that anyone can put together a Linux box and sell it. Once Dell, IBM, Compaq, etc decided to invest their considerable experience, market knowledge and distribution chains into the Linux server market it simply became who could afford to spend the most to make the most (just like Walmart vs. your local grocery store).
What I'd like to know is exactly how people were convinced that these companies could make money? If you work or have worked for one of these companies, please can you explain to me how they planned to make a profit?
PS: I am pro-Open Source and have worked on Free Software and plan to give away a considerable amount of software (20,000 code application in a few months) but I can't see the sense in believing that Open Source translates into corporate profits unless you plan to use Open Source products as a hook to selling your actual product (e.g. IBM).
Besides, how many of the so-called artists being "stolen" from are actual artists. The songwriters and producers make most of the money off of people like Britney. They developed a product and they sold it.
Do you have a problem with this? Any pretty girl with a good voice can do Britney Spears' job but very few people can write or produce hit records. The people who deserve the money are the song writers and producers not the dime-a-dozen poptart teen idols.
Now take a look at a band like Fugazi. During the 80's and 90's major labels offered them millions of dollars to sign with them but they never did. Instead, they produced their own albums and sold their own product through distributors, catalogs and at shows. For $8 when most CD's cost 14.99. And you know what, they sold millions of albums and there are a lot of other artists out there doing the same thing. I'm looking forward to the day when more artists ditch the labels and sell their product over the internet. It's happening for some and hopefully more real artists will follow suit.
What I don't understand is why people keep thinking that Napster == money to the artist. Napster is about getting music for free. It isn't about buying music online, paying artists directly or supporting independent artists. Napster screws the RIAA and the artists even if they are independent or not. Slashdot recently had an article where an independent group with a strong web presence (TMBG) that supports online music expressed reservations about Napster for circumventing the connection between the band and the artist.
As for your friends who signed ballbreaker deals with the RIAA labels, they should have gone independent instead. Most of the music I listen to is from independent groups that were too hardcore for the RIAA labels or didn't fit their expectations, yet these artists are now richer than most RIAA artists who sell twice or thrice as much as they do because they didn't sign any ballbreaker deals, massive advertising nor having to sellout.
NOTE: I am not against independent artists (I listen mostly to non-RIAA groups) nor am I against paying artists directly (i.e. Fairtunes). I am against people obtaining free music then claiming that using Napster somehow benefits the artists.
Do I steal music? Yes. Do I do it to get something for nothing? No. Do I do it to screw artists? No. Do I pay for any and all reasonably-priced software, games, music, and literature? You betcha. But I am boycotting the music / literature / entertainment monopolies that are charging me a fortune just to keep their stock prices high. If an artist falls by the wayside then I feel justified in knowing that I did it to offer freedom to 10x more artists in the future.
You do realize you've claimed that by preventing 1 artist from making a living from selling his/her music you have prevented 10x that amount from doing so in the future. So if the goal of you and your cohorts is achieved and the RIAA is driven out of business leading to distributed music becoming free(which is what Napster has propagated) exactly how have you freed the artists?
Let me guess, "They are free to no longer have to worry about album sales, because there aren't any?".
So Napster's effectively gone away. If Mr. Berry's figures are to beleived, this means that the RIAA doesn't have a few ingenious crackers and hackers on their hands trading MP3z on undergound IRC and Usenet channels. They have 30 MILLION FRUSTRATED, ANGRY, PISSED OFF users from all classes and races! Worse, they have a veritable legion of crackers and hackers who want to support these people's dirty MP3 habits in order to make money/points/karma/etc...
Your analysis would be correct if the RIAA had no plans to create an online music distribution system similar to Napster. But we all know that various RIAA members have expressed interests in online music delivery including Sony, BMG and EMI. The reason the RIAA has cleared the scene of Scour.net and Napster is so that people stop getting used to the idea that online music should be free. Once all the free online music services for the masses have been eliminated the RIAA can step in to fix the MP3 cravings with an online service that charges a mere $10 - $20 a month.
As for hackers creating a rival service, as long as the RIAA owns the copyrights on the music that people want to hear the law will be on their side. This means that any hacker(s) who create(s) a popular online music distribution system must be ready to contend with lawsuits and harassments from law enforcement and RIAA lawyers. Since most hackers already know where to get MP3's without the common tools (Gnutella, Napster, Scour, etc) it is unlikely that any hacker will put himself through the RIAA wringer just to enable other people to be able to download free music. Corporate investors will also tread warily with regards to facing the RIAA after what has happened to Scour and Napster.
Quite frankly, the RIAA is about to prove that "He with the most lawyers wins".
Simply breaking any old encryption is not, nor is it a copyright issue.
This is what has constantly amused me as I've seen the string of stories on Slashdot proclaiming how enterprising hackers plan to turn the DMCA on itself. The DMCA does not ban reverse engineering or breaking of encryption per se. I've read the DMCA and it specifically targets circumvention of copyright protection systems. Unless AIMSter users are encrypting music to which they own the copyright then they're so called claims of reversing the DMCA are so much piss in the wind. The DMCA would simply be a license to pirate/steal/share digital works and protect yourself by encrypting them if that was the case. The RIAA, MPAA and congressmen who drafted the DMCA are not that stupid.
Bottom Line: If you are not encrypting work to which you own the copyright then the DMCA does not apply to you.
I originally was completely against the idea of a Napster clone that would be outside the RIAA's legeal reach because I am personally opposed to the fact that Napster prevents artists from making money of thier music and the thought of someone else making money of the work of artists either was distasteful to me. But now that I know that the creator of Fairtunes is behind it, some of my reservations have been removed and I have certain requests.
The main problem with Napster is that it does not give one an interface to pay the artist for their work. I've often downloaded songs off Napster and wished that I could click some link and send the artist a few bucks directly. Using Fairtunes and the like is rather inconvenient. Currently to use Fairtunes one has to
- Add artists to your shopping cart as usual
- Proceed to the checkout page
- Note the total amount of your shopping cart
- Click the PayPal button (to mail us the contents of your shopping cart)
- Go to: www.paypal.com
- Send paypal@fairtunes.com the same amount of money as your shopping cart.
Now if the OpenNAP servers that will be on Sealand supported a protocol/client combo that integrated Fairtunes with Napster, I'd be very interested in using this service. Simply replace the ads and HTML crap that Napster streams with "Pay The Artist" links and add an encrypted layer for actually making payments to the artists via Fairtunes. Heck, I'd even work on it if it was Open Sourced(TM).This topic has been addressed several times already on Slashdot but here it goes again. For 99% of the uses of a database today where data integrity is not of the utmost importance, the data sets being handled are relatively small, and the ability to scale to millions of hits a minute is unecessary, the simple RDBMS's like Access and MySQL can handle the job.
Oracle and DB2 are meant to primarily run on systems that will receive a lot of traffic (both reads and writes) and where data integrity is important (i.e. failure recovery, transactions, integrity checking, etc). Sites like eBay, Yahoo and Amazon are probably better off running Oracle and the like while smaller sites that have traffic that consists primarily of reads and where the integrity of data isn't extremely important can use MySQL or even Access.
Banks and Fortune 500s are also examples of companies that need the additional features of Enterprise database systems. Realistically for most people's needs Access or MySQL are all that is required.
Nice sentiment but this is not the situation that is being described in the Ask Slashdot. He's halfway through writing an application and his boss coincidentally asked him to write a similar app for a client. If he simply finishes his application on company time and gives that to the client then the work beklongs to the company after all that's what they are paying him to do. I personally see two options:
- Excuse himself from writing the application for the client stating the reasons why. This should forestall any future lawsuits but may make his work life difficult once his boss realizes he is writing software in his free time that competes with his company and also there may not be any other project for him to work on.
- Reimplement the product for the client making sure not to use any of his previously developed code which will mean more work but then there won't be any copyright issues to deal with. This does not guarantee however that his boss won't take issue once he releases a similar product.
Quite frankly both options seem fraught with peril so the best advice I can give is talk to a lawyerI wonder: the analogy to the 1960s may work, but should ex-hippies really be the target audience? Are they the ones running all the servers nowadays?
They aren't running the servers but they are the ones telling the server jockeys what to run. They are the CTOs, CIOs and CEOs. They are the ones who need to be convinced that "Linux is ready for the Enterprise" and who better to do that the the behemoth from their earlier years, IBM, the Microsoft of their generation
Maybe someone should just tell them about OpenBSD, save some time and money.
The DARPA program is called Composable High Assurance Trusted Systems (CHATS) which implies that they are interested in Trusted Systems not systems that claim to be secure because a bunch of hackers allegedly have fixed all the buffer overflows. Being "secure" and being a trusted system are completely different things.
Maybe micheal meant to mention TrustedBSD which is attempting to become certified as a Trusted System?
From the same thread.
Finagle's First Law
Consider your history. Why are there now two desktop environments for Linux? Well, we have reached this state because of liscensing issues. The Gnome project formed purely because people were unhappy with the KDE qt liscense.
The origin of the projects is no longer important. So if MIT suddenly is given the source code for all the printer drivers in use on their campus, should RMS give up the Free Software Foundation? (click here if that didn't make sense to you)
Why continue to divide out labor on two projects which both hope to achieve the same thing?
Because they plan to do this in completely different ways, also once they are mature the differences willbeself evident.
Imagine how much more polished the Linux desktop environment would be if all effort were focused on just one. Twice as much effort would be expended on it every day.
Anyone who has read Frederick Brooke's Mythical Man Month knows that your statements are a big misconception. Doubling the number of developers on a project does not double the amount of time taken to finish the project because new developers have to be brought up to speed and the layers of communication increase which leads to more errorsoccuring due to miscommunication. Basically there is a certain level of complexity where throwing more developers at a product produces little net gain. KDE and GNOME are at that level of complexity.
KDE is mainly C++, GNOME is mainly C (if you do not realize there is a fundamental difference in these languages then go to comp.lang.c or comp.lang.c++ and state this and see the responses you'll get). GNOME uses all sorts of CORBA stuff while KDE does not. GNOME uses OrBit while the few KDE developers who know CORBA used Mico. Both projects are extremely undocumented and very few, if any, have a complete grasp of the entire system in either case.
Quite frankly,if KDE and GNOME merged the efforts involved in adjusting to the merger would slow down development a lot more than any perceived current lack of developers does. In addition, some functionality that was a part of one or the other system would be lost (because stuff always gets trimmed in a merger).
A better suggestion is for KDE and GNOME to start actively pursing interoperability. Unfortunately this is one place were Open Source may fail. It is unlikely that GNOME interoperability is high on the list of any KDE developer's list of itches he/she wants scratched and vice versa. Thus since they are all simply volunteers they can't be made to do it like would happen in a professional development environment, where a manager can just assign a bunch of coders this task.
Finagle's First Law
What salient points do you want RMS to discuss? As RMS never grows tired of stating, he is a representative of the Free Software Movement which is about freedom at all costs, while most people including yourself are members of the Open Source movement which is willing to compromise with closed source developers.
They're the responses of someone who's been spouting the same party line for the last twenty years and who will gladly and graciously take any opportunity to do the same anew. This isn't a criticism of the free software movement.
Yes, it is. You're so called tired party line is the ethos of the Free Software Movement. People like you and ESR are members of the Open Source Movement which RMS keeps pointing out in the article (did you read it all?), he is not a part off. The Free Software Movement is not about compromise it is about "Give me freedom, or give me death".
Finagle's First Law
The freaking article is entitle Deja 'Revolt' Against Google, how anyone could have completely misread it and gave the horrible write up we just got is quite amazing.
This leads me to the main question: Major sites such as Google, eBay and Amazon, have become a valuable part of the 'Net and have become an intrinsic part of the World Wide Web experience for many people. Yet, these companies are yet to prove their viability and could collapse at any time if their investors grow tired of shouldering their debts and underperformance. What will happen to the 'Net when the next big dotcomm to fall is eBay or Amazon, or Google? Especially since Google's USENET archive and WWW cache have become invaluable to a number of people.
Does this justify asking the government to step in and take over these resources so they are preserved for posterity as Frank Davies and many others have suggested or is would this be undue interference by the government?
Finagle's First Law