One of my explanations as to why DOS outsold Macintosh is consultants. If you went out and got a computer consultant, it was far more likely that they would be a DOS consultant than a Mac consultant. The reason why is that, once people bought a system they were far more likely to need an after-support consultant for DOS programs than for MAC programs. This meant that mac-leaning consultants were simply harder to find.
Back around 1980, I was out pricing systems for a customer. When I asked about a more expensive system, the sales/consultant person chided me about choosing a system based on the size of my finders fee rather than how well the system would work for my customer. I was charging on a time and materials basis, so this wasn't true at all for me. The suggestion, however, disturbed me. It didn't insult me, it just disturbed me because I couldn't wrap my mind around the concept of essentially betraying my client.
I couldn't understand her suggestion (the salesperson was a she) until, months later, I ran across a colleague who was actually doing precisely what that sales person had suggested I was doing. This real-life example kicked the concept across the 'unthinkable' boundary. Once I was able to wrap my mind around the concept, I was disgusted. My solution was resolving to design my future consulting contracts so that I didn't have a conflict of interest between myself and my client.
A side effect of this episode was that I came to understand the concept of "That's unthinkable!" as having literal meaning (if you can say it in the moment, then it's probably not true).
In any event, I think that - for many geeks - the idea of promoting something that isn't the best possible under the circumstances is unthinkable enough that we don't seriously consider the possibility that Cringely proposed -- that bad software survives through kingdom building. Worse yet is the idea the we might be doing it ourselves (albeit unconsciously).
One guy puts out a paper, somebody else appropriates it and publishes it in another book without asking the original author. This is (up to this point) a pretty straight-forward example of copyright violation.
The only twist is that the published paper was (at the time) the only available copy of the milleniums-old document. I rather doubt that the paper indicated which parts of the document were actually in the scrolls and which parts were interpolated.
As an act of civil disobedience, I can say that the (illegal) publication could be viewed as a bold act -- They did, at least, force the release of the originals.
Despite the boldness of their action, they still need to to accept the cost of the action.
As for the Qimron's complaints about the 'cost' of forcing people to rush to publish, I think that the it gets firmly into the realm of the open-source debates... The rights couple of well paid hacks to a monopoly on knowlege -- in the presumption that the annointed know better than the masses --- vs. the "thousands of eyes" premise that letting anybody and everybody see the original might allow for insights that the annointed would not have had, might not have wanted, or simply might not have cared about.
In the religious world, knowing that such-and-such sentance was not in the original, but was -- simply made up by the interpolator can make a big difference to the level of authority that that piece of text will recieve.
It's interesting that Yodaiken took such a sh*t kicking for implementing one of the first anti-patents of the Open Source era. Then, many months later, people go googley eyed about pretty much the same idea.
Shoot first, ask questions later. Don't worry about the fact that the dead don't answer.
It still boggles my mind that writing one's own instructions for a device (DVD player) and sharing
them with the world can be called "illegal" in the first place.
A prominent Vancouver lawyer is quoted as once saying "The legal system has nothing to do with justice." I would be inclined to agree. The question is: What are the rules and how can you get a judge to interpret them? In the legal system it's justice be damned if the rules say "line him up against the wall and shoot him".
Even the truth can be little more than an interesting side-issue.
If you don't like the way that the rules are being written and enforced, get involved in politics. That's where the rules are set. Don't think that registering a vote every few years is the limit of acceptable participation. (well, actually, I'd consider it the lower limit of acceptable participation).
Nothing would scare politicians like 10K angry geeks getting involved in the upcoming election. With DECSS, Napster, Microsoft et. al. all
on the cusp, I'd say it's about time.
All that it requires for evil to triumph is for the good to do nothing -- Ghandi
But when a long
train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under
absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government -- US Declaration of Independance.
If he is still saying "not enough," it is because he does not feel that he should be expected to be grateful for the halting, and inadequate attempts of his society to catch up with the basic rights he ought to have inherited automatically... by virtue of his membership in the human family and his American birthright. -- Martin Luther King
Those who are unwilling to fight for their freedom don't deserve it. -- Malcom X
My reading was that this section was limiting what could and could not be part of a software license. If your reading agrees with the courts' reading then there is nothing to worry about. Otherwise there is.
I think that it may depend on the wording of the declaration. If it says something like "I believe that this is a new and unique invention", and you disagree with that contention, then it's completely legitimate to refuse to sign it until you agree with the accuracy of what you're signing.
More worrisome about the GPL is this clause which seems to make the GPL illegal:
SECTION 307. INTERPRETATION AND REQUIREMENTS FOR GRANT.
a) A license grants:
(1) the contractual rights that are expressly described; and
(2) a contractual right to use any informational rights within the licensor?s control at the time of contracting which are
necessary in the ordinary course to exercise the expressly described rights. ....
(d) A party is not entitled to any rights in new versions of, or improvements or modifications to, information made by the
other party. A licensor?s agreement to provide new versions, improvements, or modifications requires that the licensor
provide them as developed and made generally commercially available from time to time by the licensor.
(e) Neither party is entitled to receive copies of source code, schematics, master copy, design material, or other
information used by the other party in creating, developing, or implementing the information.
Dunno about you, but this would seem to be a direct frontal attack on the intent and purpose of the GPL. If nothing else, this would make the question of whether or not this law applies to GPL code a matter of life and death. If it does apply, then core values within the GPL would be negated.
If I'm right here, I think that this calls for some serious investigation and response.
Actually, it's a bit worse than not forcing warranties... It actually allows vendors to exclude warrenties for merchantability.
SECTION 403. IMPLIED WARRANTY: MERCHANTABILITY OF COMPUTER PROGRAM.
(a) Unless the warranty is disclaimed or modified, a licensor that is a merchant with respect to computer programs of the
kind warrants:
Previous state laws, in many states, have disallowed exclusions of warranties of merchantability and suitiability. In any state where the UCTIA is passed without serious editing, consumers may actually loose their rights.
In my reading of it, one of the things this law is about is entrenching click-through licenses, and the way that they remove rights from consumers.
The whole point is that you don't HAVE to license RSAREF to use RSA any more -- In other words, everybody can now use the international versions of pgp/gpg without looking over their shoulder.
In many ways, Pascal was a better language, but Pascal had some inane limitations that stemmed from
Wirth's academic orientation....
Wirth didn't really intend for Pascal to be a general-use language (second paragraph). It was intended as quick, cheap general-purpose language that was easy to compile for and easy to learn, while allowing students to play with most of the early concepts of CS. The expectation was that, once they learned Pascal, students would go on to a 'real' language like Algol/68 or (later) Modula.
The problem is that, once students learned Pascal, they tried to do everything in it, rather than going on to a 'real' language.
This human quirk is precisely why many companies will try and get their products into schools and universities -- once people get used to product 'X' they'd rather pay the price of staying with it than learn a new, possibly better, system.
If you look at Pascal as a light-duty 'introductory' programming language that was supposed to be easy to write compilers for (probably in a language other than Pascal), then it makes LOTS more sense. (e.g. the lack of compile-time math is fine if you want to actually discourage people from using pascal in large systems, and it makes the compiler a bit easier to write).
The only place that Pascal really fails is that it's actually 'good enough' that it didn't completely discourage students from using it on real world problems.
He didn't create it, but he was a large part of making it popular. I pretty much learned C from 'the C bible'. This is true of many other people. The book defined what Ritchie created. People followed it (partly to remain compatible with Unix, partly because this was the document.
He may not have been a high creator, but he could definitely be called a high priest of the C language.
Get a business model patent on getting patents on an obvious (and heavily used) process and then suing everybody using the process (recursive). Then go out and sue everybody using that business model!
There's nothing wrong with patents. What we're talking about is stupid patents and overbroad patents that prevent people from doing what we're already doing. Imagine, if you would, a patent against using ginger to cure an upset stomach or against the use of lumpectomys to take out cancer.
I say a patent against, because what a patent does is prevent people from using a method unless you pay the patent holder. When a patent is for something new and novel it is a good thing because it allows the patent holder to use their government-granted monopoly to the process to cover the cost of inventing it. This is an incentive to inbention. When a patent is for something that's "old hat", it's bad, because then we have to pay a licensing fee just to breathe (if they allow it at all).
Antipatents would allow us to publicly document the 'obvious' uses of eating, breathing and walking. They would not, however, prevent the patenting of a cyber-motion unit that read signals direct from the brain stem, and allowed someone like Stephen Hawking to walk and talk with mechanical support.
A real antipatent would be to patent a process and then require that anybody using the patent agree to anti-patent any patents that depend on it.
If I had the money to burn right now, I'd register a domain just for this project. As it is, I have LinuxBeachhead.com that I'd be willing to throw at the idea, if someone is willing to provide the coding.
How come they require such an enormous heatsink if they've revamped the engineering?
They may have revamped the engineering, but they haven't revamped the engineers.
The physics of higher clock speeds aside, this is a team that has inhereted design methodologies from the 8086. If you are using a team of engineers who worked on the earlier Intel and/or were trained by them, chances are that they'll be used to the same power-hungry tactics employed in previous chips. It looks to me like many of the improvements are 'more-bigger'. The obvious implication is that power supplies and heatsinks are going to be more-bigger too.
Compared to Intel, Transmetta brought in a relatively young team and re-designed from scratch. This cleaner design allowed them to build for the low-power market more easily because they didn't have the old baggage that Intel's teams do.
For me, the question was "Why do non-unix systems take so long to go to sleep/wake up?" My thought is that it's a result of a convoluted non-modular design that doesn't allow you to isolate what needs to occur during a sleep cycle (really, not much more than synching disks and taking care of some peripherals).
Even if they had used SCO Unix, it would have been far cheaper
than that equivalent SGI platform.
Yeah, but it wouldn't have been as stable, it wouldn't have had SGI support, it might not have had renderman support and it might not have been quite as nice to develop in-house stuff on. (If you don't think that they don't develop some of their own in-house graphics SW, you're nuts.)
My reading of the article was that the wavefront propogated at superlight speeds. This has apparently been done before, but with a difference. In previous experiments, the shape of the pulse was mangled in propogation -- in other words, all that you could tell at the other end was that something had happened. In this case, they were apparently able to propgate both the existence of the pulse and it's shape.
I think that the thing about waveform is about being able to prove that what came out is what went in. If you drive a car in one end of a mile-long railgun (at 55MPH) and, one second later, a smpking blob of molten metal pops out the other end (again, at 55MPH) , you can try to argue that the car went through the tunnel at 3600MPH. Other people might seriously question the claim.
In this case, the pulse shape of the light beam made it through intact. In the analogy, this would imply that there was enough left of the car to compare serial numbers.
I think that we've beaten the "if any good sysadmin knows to change the password, then why didn't Microsoft force Newbie sysadmins to do the same" horse to death.
The next question is: how come this isn't big news?
I think that there's a benign answer to this one: It's not sexy anymore.
When the Piranha thing became known, MS had just been beaten to death over all sorts of security bugs, including their backdoor fiasco. The general subject was hot news.
Now a security company (friendly to MS, of course), sends out a press release with everything short of "Back door security vulnerability virus!!!! in neon pink.
For MS apologists, this would look like a silver smoke grenade to cover their own back door. They're going to push it all they can. Sites like MSN could probably be expected to push it to the max.
Properly spun, it would look, to many news editors, like 'the next big headline'. The last thing that they'll want is to be scooped. Given the time constraints and lack of technical savy on the part of many journalists, they're most likely to eat the press release and regurgitate with minimal digestion.
In this case, however, back doors and default passwords have been out of the news for a while now. Sites affected are likely to be small to medium (yahoo and Hotmail better have sysadmins who know to change the password). It's simply not sexy.
As an analogy: If some US sailor had dropped a hand grenade and blown up two of his buddies on a US Nuclear Sub 6 weeks ago, it would have been front page news at the sub's home port, and rated a light aside anywhere else. If it happened this week, with the Kursk a multi-billion dollar mass coffin on the bottom of the ocean, it would be front page news. The news itself wouldn't be any different, but the context would.
Never assign beligerance to something that can be adequately explained by mere stupidity.
"Ease of use" implies sane defaults. In the case of Passwords, a sane default is forcing the user to choose one of their own. (this may be a 'stupid' password, but a stupid password that needs to be guessed is better than a password that any script kiddie can put in a script. -- and that is better than no password which is easy for somebody to guess by accident. (I hit return, and it let me in). It's like the difference between a blast door, a screen door, and no door whatsoever.
As for the difference between a proprietary system and an O/S system, when you buy from microsoft, you have to accept their defaults. If RedHat or Debian insisted on distributing systems that installed with root passwords I'd always have the option of building my own distribution and giving that to my friends without having to worry about them sueing my ass off for saving my newbie friends' butts.
This is rather like the US army blaming Vietnamese kids for stepping on land mines. If they knew what and where they were, they wouldn't step on them. More directly, it's like RedHat installing the system with an empty root password. If you've got a UNIX veteran installing the system who KNOWS about the login, KNOWS how dangerous it is and doesn't just forget to change all these, not necessarily documented, default user passwords then you're fine.
On the other hand, the users who don't know to fix this without having to be told are the most at risk. Given that MS claims to be the OS for ignorant users ("linux is for experts") this is kinda like the pesticide manufacturers promoting cherry and bubble-gum flavoured pesticides (I kid you not!)
It also sounds like the SQL server may CREATE an user with a blank password. If this is the case, the it would become a case of a login that didn't previously exist suddenly gives remote users the ability to seriously 'own' your machine.
In any case, this is rather like Linux installing with a blank root password. (or MySql installer adding a root user with no password, if that's what this bug does). Any half-ass distribution source should know far better than to do something like that.
You can blame the Royal Swiss Navy for not replacing the screen doors on their submarines, but it was a stupid manufacturer who installed them in the first place.
Slashdot Mirror
terrorist - One that engages in the use of terror to achieve one's goals.
I think that that would apply to Diablo...
Back around 1980, I was out pricing systems for a customer. When I asked about a more expensive system, the sales/consultant person chided me about choosing a system based on the size of my finders fee rather than how well the system would work for my customer. I was charging on a time and materials basis, so this wasn't true at all for me. The suggestion, however, disturbed me. It didn't insult me, it just disturbed me because I couldn't wrap my mind around the concept of essentially betraying my client.
I couldn't understand her suggestion (the salesperson was a she) until, months later, I ran across a colleague who was actually doing precisely what that sales person had suggested I was doing. This real-life example kicked the concept across the 'unthinkable' boundary. Once I was able to wrap my mind around the concept, I was disgusted. My solution was resolving to design my future consulting contracts so that I didn't have a conflict of interest between myself and my client.
A side effect of this episode was that I came to understand the concept of "That's unthinkable!" as having literal meaning (if you can say it in the moment, then it's probably not true).
In any event, I think that - for many geeks - the idea of promoting something that isn't the best possible under the circumstances is unthinkable enough that we don't seriously consider the possibility that Cringely proposed -- that bad software survives through kingdom building. Worse yet is the idea the we might be doing it ourselves (albeit unconsciously).
The only twist is that the published paper was (at the time) the only available copy of the milleniums-old document. I rather doubt that the paper indicated which parts of the document were actually in the scrolls and which parts were interpolated.
As an act of civil disobedience, I can say that the (illegal) publication could be viewed as a bold act -- They did, at least, force the release of the originals. Despite the boldness of their action, they still need to to accept the cost of the action.
As for the Qimron's complaints about the 'cost' of forcing people to rush to publish, I think that the it gets firmly into the realm of the open-source debates ... The rights couple of well paid hacks to a monopoly on knowlege -- in the presumption that the annointed know better than the masses --- vs. the "thousands of eyes" premise that letting anybody and everybody see the original might allow for insights that the annointed would not have had, might not have wanted, or simply might not have cared about.
In the religious world, knowing that such-and-such sentance was not in the original, but was -- simply made up by the interpolator can make a big difference to the level of authority that that piece of text will recieve.
If you don't like the way that the rules are being written and enforced, get involved in politics. That's where the rules are set. Don't think that registering a vote every few years is the limit of acceptable participation. (well, actually, I'd consider it the lower limit of acceptable participation).
Nothing would scare politicians like 10K angry geeks getting involved in the upcoming election. With DECSS, Napster, Microsoft et. al. all on the cusp, I'd say it's about time.
-- Ghandi
But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government
-- US Declaration of Independance.
If he is still saying "not enough," it is because he does not feel that he should be expected to be grateful for the halting, and inadequate attempts of his society to catch up with the basic rights he ought to have inherited automatically ... by virtue of his membership in the human family and his American birthright.
-- Martin Luther King
Those who are unwilling to fight for their freedom don't deserve it.
-- Malcom X
My reading was that this section was limiting what could and could not be part of a software license. If your reading agrees with the courts' reading then there is nothing to worry about. Otherwise there is.
I think that it may depend on the wording of the declaration. If it says something like "I believe that this is a new and unique invention", and you disagree with that contention, then it's completely legitimate to refuse to sign it until you agree with the accuracy of what you're signing.
SECTION 307. INTERPRETATION AND REQUIREMENTS FOR GRANT.
-
a) A license grants:
- (1) the contractual rights that are expressly described; and
- (2) a contractual right to use any informational rights within the licensor?s control at the time of contracting which are
necessary in the ordinary course to exercise the expressly described rights.
....
- (d) A party is not entitled to any rights in new versions of, or improvements or modifications to, information made by the
other party. A licensor?s agreement to provide new versions, improvements, or modifications requires that the licensor
provide them as developed and made generally commercially available from time to time by the licensor.
- (e) Neither party is entitled to receive copies of source code, schematics, master copy, design material, or other
information used by the other party in creating, developing, or implementing the information.
Dunno about you, but this would seem to be a direct frontal attack on the intent and purpose of the GPL. If nothing else, this would make the question of whether or not this law applies to GPL code a matter of life and death. If it does apply, then core values within the GPL would be negated.If I'm right here, I think that this calls for some serious investigation and response.
Previous state laws, in many states, have disallowed exclusions of warranties of merchantability and suitiability. In any state where the UCTIA is passed without serious editing, consumers may actually loose their rights.
In my reading of it, one of the things this law is about is entrenching click-through licenses, and the way that they remove rights from consumers.
The whole point is that you don't HAVE to license RSAREF to use RSA any more -- In other words, everybody can now use the international versions of pgp/gpg without looking over their shoulder.
One word:
Wintendo
The problem is that, once students learned Pascal, they tried to do everything in it, rather than going on to a 'real' language. This human quirk is precisely why many companies will try and get their products into schools and universities -- once people get used to product 'X' they'd rather pay the price of staying with it than learn a new, possibly better, system.
If you look at Pascal as a light-duty 'introductory' programming language that was supposed to be easy to write compilers for (probably in a language other than Pascal), then it makes LOTS more sense. (e.g. the lack of compile-time math is fine if you want to actually discourage people from using pascal in large systems, and it makes the compiler a bit easier to write). The only place that Pascal really fails is that it's actually 'good enough' that it didn't completely discourage students from using it on real world problems.
He may not have been a high creator, but he could definitely be called a high priest of the C language.
Get a business model patent on getting patents on an obvious (and heavily used) process and then suing everybody using the process (recursive). Then go out and sue everybody using that business model!
I say a patent against, because what a patent does is prevent people from using a method unless you pay the patent holder. When a patent is for something new and novel it is a good thing because it allows the patent holder to use their government-granted monopoly to the process to cover the cost of inventing it. This is an incentive to inbention. When a patent is for something that's "old hat", it's bad, because then we have to pay a licensing fee just to breathe (if they allow it at all).
Antipatents would allow us to publicly document the 'obvious' uses of eating, breathing and walking. They would not, however, prevent the patenting of a cyber-motion unit that read signals direct from the brain stem, and allowed someone like Stephen Hawking to walk and talk with mechanical support.
If I had the money to burn right now, I'd register a domain just for this project. As it is, I have LinuxBeachhead.com that I'd be willing to throw at the idea, if someone is willing to provide the coding.
They may have revamped the engineering, but they haven't revamped the engineers.
The physics of higher clock speeds aside, this is a team that has inhereted design methodologies from the 8086. If you are using a team of engineers who worked on the earlier Intel and/or were trained by them, chances are that they'll be used to the same power-hungry tactics employed in previous chips. It looks to me like many of the improvements are 'more-bigger'. The obvious implication is that power supplies and heatsinks are going to be more-bigger too.
Compared to Intel, Transmetta brought in a relatively young team and re-designed from scratch. This cleaner design allowed them to build for the low-power market more easily because they didn't have the old baggage that Intel's teams do.
Intel -- Just short of Intelligent.
For me, the question was "Why do non-unix systems take so long to go to sleep/wake up?" My thought is that it's a result of a convoluted non-modular design that doesn't allow you to isolate what needs to occur during a sleep cycle (really, not much more than synching disks and taking care of some peripherals).
I think that the thing about waveform is about being able to prove that what came out is what went in. If you drive a car in one end of a mile-long railgun (at 55MPH) and, one second later, a smpking blob of molten metal pops out the other end (again, at 55MPH) , you can try to argue that the car went through the tunnel at 3600MPH. Other people might seriously question the claim.
In this case, the pulse shape of the light beam made it through intact. In the analogy, this would imply that there was enough left of the car to compare serial numbers.
The next question is: how come this isn't big news?
I think that there's a benign answer to this one: It's not sexy anymore.
When the Piranha thing became known, MS had just been beaten to death over all sorts of security bugs, including their backdoor fiasco. The general subject was hot news.
Now a security company (friendly to MS, of course), sends out a press release with everything short of " Back door security vulnerability virus!!!! in neon pink.
For MS apologists, this would look like a silver smoke grenade to cover their own back door. They're going to push it all they can. Sites like MSN could probably be expected to push it to the max.
Properly spun, it would look, to many news editors, like 'the next big headline'. The last thing that they'll want is to be scooped. Given the time constraints and lack of technical savy on the part of many journalists, they're most likely to eat the press release and regurgitate with minimal digestion.
In this case, however, back doors and default passwords have been out of the news for a while now. Sites affected are likely to be small to medium (yahoo and Hotmail better have sysadmins who know to change the password). It's simply not sexy.
As an analogy: If some US sailor had dropped a hand grenade and blown up two of his buddies on a US Nuclear Sub 6 weeks ago, it would have been front page news at the sub's home port, and rated a light aside anywhere else. If it happened this week, with the Kursk a multi-billion dollar mass coffin on the bottom of the ocean, it would be front page news. The news itself wouldn't be any different, but the context would.
Never assign beligerance to something that can be adequately explained by mere stupidity.
As for the difference between a proprietary system and an O/S system, when you buy from microsoft, you have to accept their defaults. If RedHat or Debian insisted on distributing systems that installed with root passwords I'd always have the option of building my own distribution and giving that to my friends without having to worry about them sueing my ass off for saving my newbie friends' butts.
More directly, it's like RedHat installing the system with an empty root password. If you've got a UNIX veteran installing the system who KNOWS about the login, KNOWS how dangerous it is and doesn't just forget to change all these, not necessarily documented, default user passwords then you're fine.
On the other hand, the users who don't know to fix this without having to be told are the most at risk. Given that MS claims to be the OS for ignorant users ("linux is for experts") this is kinda like the pesticide manufacturers promoting cherry and bubble-gum flavoured pesticides (I kid you not!)
It also sounds like the SQL server may CREATE an user with a blank password. If this is the case, the it would become a case of a login that didn't previously exist suddenly gives remote users the ability to seriously 'own' your machine.
In any case, this is rather like Linux installing with a blank root password. (or MySql installer adding a root user with no password, if that's what this bug does). Any half-ass distribution source should know far better than to do something like that.
You can blame the Royal Swiss Navy for not replacing the screen doors on their submarines, but it was a stupid manufacturer who installed them in the first place.