I believe that companies should defend their investments as well, but I also believe that if a company is doing something ridiculous that will inevitably hurt me, I should vote with my dollar and not give it to them. Amazon's patent is a joke! Part of the product I buy from amazon is the feeling I get from doing a transaction with them. If I feel negatively because of this ridiculous lawsuit, than I am getting less for my money. Further more, in situations like this, we were appointed judge and jury when we entered the book buying market with a fistful of dollars. Personally, I feel that we were all made judge and jury in computer technology patent issues after IBM set a team of lawyers, not scientists, working around the clock to simply gain patents to use in lawsuits against smaller companies and the patent office went along with it. They were granted thousands of patents on obvious, old technologies that they only brought up when threatened by smaller companies whose products depended on, say, the indent function. This technique was also adopted by Microsoft after IBM used it against them. When the patent office became unable to protect us from this nonsense on that fateful day, we became judge and jury. Who else is there? jeb.
Unfortunately, this sort of effort would almost certainly require the use of the key and punctuation on a keyboard. IIRC, both were patented by IBM long ago, and they would certainly sue for infringement on this one. jeb.
Personally, I'm amazed at how many europeans go out of their way to post on/. etc., about how ridiculous they think the US is. Making a laugh of ourselves in the global community? In my personal rankings of factors that influence my position on US legal, political, or other issues, I'd say that comes in just about dead last. jeb.
I don't think it's necessary at all to affect their bottom line to justifify taking on a boycott. If the PR generated is sufficient to achieve the goal of having amazon drop this ridiculous lawsuit (and possibly draw a little more attention to this ridiculous patent situation), then fine. PR Tool it is. jeb.
Your points have little relevance to the suit. Everyone knows that these tools exist and I'm sure the RIAA would love to destroy them, but how? I think the suit is BS, but I don't think the RIAA is dumb for filing it, just immoral. I mean, they have a very strong vested interest in protecting their business. Napster is an overwhelmingly larger threat to them than FTP. FTP Mp3 sites are largely the domain of w4R3z d00dz. Napster has been enormously popular with all sorts of normal, CD-buying people. Plus, there's no obvious thing to kill with stock FTP. If they bring down Napster, they're set.
IIRC, the RIAA made a big stink when MiniDisc (and DAT) were released that they would allow this. hence the development of SCMS (they couldn't go back and change the CD format) which was designed to make it impossible to make second gen copied of DATs and MiniDisc when they had the SCMS bit set. This messed up the release of both technologies, and the RIAA's disapproval of both has a lot to do with why they were never really adopted on a large scale. This is really nothing new at all.
Personally, I think this is really funny. Even if it is all peacefully resolved now, it would be funny if the gnap guy just sent back all of Napster's quoted press in response to the RIAA and changed "music" to "OSS". The Napster releases are like, "It's all about community and sharing." That would be too funny. Anyone know how napster plan to make money, anyway?
Okay, so let's say the Judge rules that MS has used it's Monopoly power for illegal, anticompetive ends and then M$ is somehow no longer made nearly the power it is now, by breakup or something similar. How would this be good? Increased government regulation in this arena can have no positive outcomes. The government is like anti-Midas: anything it touches turns to shit. Do you honestly think Linux would have grown to the power it is today without Microsoft? Let's say windows only had a 35% desktop market share, and the rest of the market was split up between Be, MacOS, some Unix derivatives, and some other new crappy windows-like operating systems. I do not believe that the OSS community would have had the motivation to come together and produce something like GNU/Linux without something like M$ to push against. I firmly believe a lot of OSS hacking is done for it's "fuck M$" value. Look at Applix, pride of those who would have Linux replace windows 9X on my mom's desktop. Without MS Office in it's gilded place, would OSS really have done this on its own? No, OSS would have told my mom to learn vi. Microsoft's position effectively functioned as a highly competitive one for OSS. M$ provided the benchmark and the motivation for OSS to exist. This is nothing new: AT%T's Unix, and effectively, highend OS, monopoly of times long since passed spurned the writing of Andrew S. Tannenbaum's "Operating Systems: Design and Implementation," which an article posted on slashdot only last thursday cites as the beginning of the OSS movement in general. All of this came from being disgruntled with a corporation on power, which is a form of competition. This probably wouldn't have happened without this impetus of dissatisfaction. If I was Jon Katz and Wired was paying me to write this response, I'd feel compelled to call it something like, "New Competition in the Connected Era". If the government artifically reduces M$ ability to compete, by breaking it up or draining it's coffers with class-action rebates, how will this help the cause of increasing software quality? It won't make Linux run better. It won't make anyone go out and write better code. The quality of software will be furthered by old fashioned competition. People switched to Linux when it got better than Windows. How will M$ having less money or power make Linux get better? It will mean the Fed will need more money, departments, committees bureas, and red tape to "protect" the rest of the high-tech industry from the de-fanged M$. It will slow the entire process of innovation down. M$ should have been defeated in the market arena. It was inevitable. It's almost laughable how out of touch there strategy appears to be now. Some things should have been regulated by the Fed: namely, M$ violation of their contract with Sun regarding the Java standard. That is illegal. That will harm the consumer and slow the advance of technological innovation, but if the Fed was to force M$ to comply with the contract, the bricks of the M$ wall would continue to fall as they have been. They are already losing it: WinCE is a laughable in the PDA market compared to PalmOS, and will likely never really compete against things like Jini. Pervasive tiny connectivity is one of the Next Big Things, and/. head can tell you that. M$ is nowhere. They are still not realizing that "The Network Is the Computer" as Sun puts it. You know how many IT depts are gonna jump on 0 admin thin clients? Prolly lots. IT is really just a process of trying to minimize headaches, and the thinner the clients, the less headaches you have. Also, they have approximately 0 wireless strategy at this point. The next big thing is the total of these: de-power the desktop (making it impossible to run a million licensed copies of lard-ass Word all over your company), simplify it, connect your small devices like phones and organizers, and maintain pervasive, wireless, two way connectivity. After that, increase the bandwidth and decrease the size. THis is the clear path. Linux is moving towards it as a community, Sun, Handspring, and others are as corporations,/. is as a geek guild, M$ is in the dark! Who needs the Fed to take out their fangs when they are about to be trampled in the stampede anyway? jeb.
I think this is a great idea, I'd love to see it done. I hate coding simple (not to mention complex) structures that I know have already been dealt with before. The thing is, I think this is something that will suffer due to the "Achilles' Heel" of OSS, which is that without the fiscal benefits, no one wants to do the lame stuff. I think this is why interfaces to everything will be consistently less "tweaked" than their non-OSS brethren: tweaking GUIs is boring. As awesome as this would be, it would be a tremendous amount of work to get it all going properly and the make-or-break parts of it would be especially boring. What would make this work would be extensive documentation, ratings, testing, etc., aka: the boring stuff. Does anyone see a way that OSS will eventually deal with the boring stuff? Are their people out there that really like come up with comprehensive documentation for components? Look at the JDK API docs at java.sun.com for some clues as to how huge and critical and undertaking just documenting some of this stuff would be. To those who say, "but building an OS is surely a larger undertaking...": yeah, it is. But is interesting and fun and the rewards are directly experienced by you. Carefully documenting, testing, and all-in-all preparing for distribution some component you wrote for another project is of no direct benefit to you, valuable as it is to the community. I don't know people who like doing this kind of stuff.
This is good advice. In really dire circumstances, it can work. One time, I had ordered some components from a company that promptly folded. They had my money, I had no gear. Their normal phone lines were disconnected. Through whois-derived faxing, emailing, and hacking about with their voicemail system, I was able to bitch to enough people to get a refund. In a lot of voicemail systems, you can press # or * and it'll error on something like, "invalid selection" and give you a new menu. Of course, there will be the old, "If you know the extensiion of the person your trying to reach..." when you get to this, hit a bunch of digits. If it doesn't get to anyone, sometimes the VM system will offer you a directory, this is the jackpot. Write down all these numbers for calling and faxing. If you bombard them with enough angry letters, they may get scared or annoyed and send you your money. This worked for me that one time even when the company had released official press releases that they were no longer doing refunds. I got my f!@#$#ing $1200 bucks back. This leads me to my next lesson. Beware of internet retailers who's prices are "too good to be true". Chances are they won't be true for long.
Slashdot Mirror
Still in use (heavily) at Brown, too, but only in the CS dept.
I believe that companies should defend their investments as well, but I also believe that if a company is doing something ridiculous that will inevitably hurt me, I should vote with my dollar and not give it to them. Amazon's patent is a joke! Part of the product I buy from amazon is the feeling I get from doing a transaction with them. If I feel negatively because of this ridiculous lawsuit, than I am getting less for my money. Further more, in situations like this, we were appointed judge and jury when we entered the book buying market with a fistful of dollars. Personally, I feel that we were all made judge and jury in computer technology patent issues after IBM set a team of lawyers, not scientists, working around the clock to simply gain patents to use in lawsuits against smaller companies and the patent office went along with it. They were granted thousands of patents on obvious, old technologies that they only brought up when threatened by smaller companies whose products depended on, say, the indent function. This technique was also adopted by Microsoft after IBM used it against them. When the patent office became unable to protect us from this nonsense on that fateful day, we became judge and jury. Who else is there? jeb.
Unfortunately, this sort of effort would almost certainly require the use of the key and punctuation on a keyboard. IIRC, both were patented by IBM long ago, and they would certainly sue for infringement on this one. jeb.
Personally, I'm amazed at how many europeans go out of their way to post on /. etc., about how ridiculous they think the US is. Making a laugh of ourselves in the global community? In my personal rankings of factors that influence my position on US legal, political, or other issues, I'd say that comes in just about dead last. jeb.
I don't think it's necessary at all to affect their bottom line to justifify taking on a boycott. If the PR generated is sufficient to achieve the goal of having amazon drop this ridiculous lawsuit (and possibly draw a little more attention to this ridiculous patent situation), then fine. PR Tool it is. jeb.
Your points have little relevance to the suit. Everyone knows that these tools exist and I'm sure the RIAA would love to destroy them, but how? I think the suit is BS, but I don't think the RIAA is dumb for filing it, just immoral. I mean, they have a very strong vested interest in protecting their business. Napster is an overwhelmingly larger threat to them than FTP. FTP Mp3 sites are largely the domain of w4R3z d00dz. Napster has been enormously popular with all sorts of normal, CD-buying people. Plus, there's no obvious thing to kill with stock FTP. If they bring down Napster, they're set.
IIRC, the RIAA made a big stink when MiniDisc (and DAT) were released that they would allow this. hence the development of SCMS (they couldn't go back and change the CD format) which was designed to make it impossible to make second gen copied of DATs and MiniDisc when they had the SCMS bit set. This messed up the release of both technologies, and the RIAA's disapproval of both has a lot to do with why they were never really adopted on a large scale. This is really nothing new at all.
Personally, I think this is really funny. Even if it is all peacefully resolved now, it would be funny if the gnap guy just sent back all of Napster's quoted press in response to the RIAA and changed "music" to "OSS". The Napster releases are like, "It's all about community and sharing." That would be too funny. Anyone know how napster plan to make money, anyway?
jeb.
Okay, so let's say the Judge rules that MS has used it's Monopoly power for illegal, anticompetive ends and then M$ is somehow no longer made nearly the power it is now, by breakup or something similar. How would this be good? Increased government regulation in this arena can have no positive outcomes. The government is like anti-Midas: anything it touches turns to shit. Do you honestly think Linux would have grown to the power it is today without Microsoft? Let's say windows only had a 35% desktop market share, and the rest of the market was split up between Be, MacOS, some Unix derivatives, and some other new crappy windows-like operating systems. I do not believe that the OSS community would have had the motivation to come together and produce something like GNU/Linux without something like M$ to push against. I firmly believe a lot of OSS hacking is done for it's "fuck M$" value. Look at Applix, pride of those who would have Linux replace windows 9X on my mom's desktop. Without MS Office in it's gilded place, would OSS really have done this on its own? No, OSS would have told my mom to learn vi. Microsoft's position effectively functioned as a highly competitive one for OSS. M$ provided the benchmark and the motivation for OSS to exist. This is nothing new: AT%T's Unix, and effectively, highend OS, monopoly of times long since passed spurned the writing of Andrew S. Tannenbaum's "Operating Systems: Design and Implementation," which an article posted on slashdot only last thursday cites as the beginning of the OSS movement in general. All of this came from being disgruntled with a corporation on power, which is a form of competition. This probably wouldn't have happened without this impetus of dissatisfaction. If I was Jon Katz and Wired was paying me to write this response, I'd feel compelled to call it something like, "New Competition in the Connected Era". If the government artifically reduces M$ ability to compete, by breaking it up or draining it's coffers with class-action rebates, how will this help the cause of increasing software quality? It won't make Linux run better. It won't make anyone go out and write better code. The quality of software will be furthered by old fashioned competition. People switched to Linux when it got better than Windows. How will M$ having less money or power make Linux get better? It will mean the Fed will need more money, departments, committees bureas, and red tape to "protect" the rest of the high-tech industry from the de-fanged M$. It will slow the entire process of innovation down. M$ should have been defeated in the market arena. It was inevitable. It's almost laughable how out of touch there strategy appears to be now. Some things should have been regulated by the Fed: namely, M$ violation of their contract with Sun regarding the Java standard. That is illegal. That will harm the consumer and slow the advance of technological innovation, but if the Fed was to force M$ to comply with the contract, the bricks of the M$ wall would continue to fall as they have been. They are already losing it: WinCE is a laughable in the PDA market compared to PalmOS, and will likely never really compete against things like Jini. Pervasive tiny connectivity is one of the Next Big Things, and /. head can tell you that. M$ is nowhere. They are still not realizing that "The Network Is the Computer" as Sun puts it. You know how many IT depts are gonna jump on 0 admin thin clients? Prolly lots. IT is really just a process of trying to minimize headaches, and the thinner the clients, the less headaches you have. Also, they have approximately 0 wireless strategy at this point. The next big thing is the total of these: de-power the desktop (making it impossible to run a million licensed copies of lard-ass Word all over your company), simplify it, connect your small devices like phones and organizers, and maintain pervasive, wireless, two way connectivity. After that, increase the bandwidth and decrease the size. THis is the clear path. Linux is moving towards it as a community, Sun, Handspring, and others are as corporations, /. is as a geek guild, M$ is in the dark! Who needs the Fed to take out their fangs when they are about to be trampled in the stampede anyway? jeb.
I think this is a great idea, I'd love to see it done. I hate coding simple (not to mention complex) structures that I know have already been dealt with before. The thing is, I think this is something that will suffer due to the "Achilles' Heel" of OSS, which is that without the fiscal benefits, no one wants to do the lame stuff. I think this is why interfaces to everything will be consistently less "tweaked" than their non-OSS brethren: tweaking GUIs is boring. As awesome as this would be, it would be a tremendous amount of work to get it all going properly and the make-or-break parts of it would be especially boring. What would make this work would be extensive documentation, ratings, testing, etc., aka: the boring stuff. Does anyone see a way that OSS will eventually deal with the boring stuff? Are their people out there that really like come up with comprehensive documentation for components? Look at the JDK API docs at java.sun.com for some clues as to how huge and critical and undertaking just documenting some of this stuff would be. To those who say, "but building an OS is surely a larger undertaking...": yeah, it is. But is interesting and fun and the rewards are directly experienced by you. Carefully documenting, testing, and all-in-all preparing for distribution some component you wrote for another project is of no direct benefit to you, valuable as it is to the community. I don't know people who like doing this kind of stuff.
This is good advice. In really dire circumstances, it can work. One time, I had ordered some components from a company that promptly folded. They had my money, I had no gear. Their normal phone lines were disconnected. Through whois-derived faxing, emailing, and hacking about with their voicemail system, I was able to bitch to enough people to get a refund. In a lot of voicemail systems, you can press # or * and it'll error on something like, "invalid selection" and give you a new menu. Of course, there will be the old, "If you know the extensiion of the person your trying to reach..." when you get to this, hit a bunch of digits. If it doesn't get to anyone, sometimes the VM system will offer you a directory, this is the jackpot. Write down all these numbers for calling and faxing. If you bombard them with enough angry letters, they may get scared or annoyed and send you your money. This worked for me that one time even when the company had released official press releases that they were no longer doing refunds. I got my f!@#$#ing $1200 bucks back. This leads me to my next lesson. Beware of internet retailers who's prices are "too good to be true". Chances are they won't be true for long.
Wasn't this posted as "Turning an academic eye on Linux" or something when it was on Salon a few days ago?