No flame from here. I think you have this dead on. This was a management problem.
The real clue for me was the refusal to use Open Source products in their infrastructure. I can understand that if your product is open source but you feel that OS strategy is only useful in narrow situations. But linuxcare's whole business model depends on the proposition that OS is better. Those complaints the team raised about OS are pretty much right out of the NT complaints about linux.
So while rushing to an IPO can be defended on a number of grounds, such as trying to facilitate rapid expansion, overconfidence about the company's capabilities, this objection seems to me to be indicative of something else. It looks like they were trying to ride a fad to completion, one they were actually quite skeptical about.
Note that their partners are still quite enthusiastic about the company, despite its weaknesses.
One lesson I've seen appear again and again is that a company is only a valuable as the sum total of its talent. This includes marketting and management talent, but by definition these are social people who usually take care of themselves. Some companies use CTO as the tech advocate to management. Others have people like Jobs. He puts more restrictions and demands on his people than anyone-- but his own skills are excellent, and let him do this.
Reading Red Herring won't help you design a product anymore than watching Nascar will help you design a car. The revolution of last half of the 20th century is not that more jobs are becoming knowledge based, but that external demands and the vastly increased diversity, scope and depth of skills needed in business are turning management into 'just another skills job'.
I've said it once, and I'll say it again. Burn All TLDs!!! OK, I really, really am serious. We simply don't need them.
Think about it. Companies will always buy their domain name with every possible TLD no matter how many there are. So it isn't like we'll get any more domain names appearing when we create more and more restrictive rules.
Meanwhile, the trademark disputes won't stop. They'll just get more lucrative. What's the point of trying to pigeonhole every site by its Jungian archetype? TLDs like.gov can exist, certainly, but why make those last three letters so important? Let's just open it up.
Anything should be allowed to be a TLD. If coke wants to buy.coke, then fine. We've grown out of this authoritarian need to control everything. Let's just let go, and reorganize at a higher level.
Funny as it sounds Burn All TLDs is really what I think we need to do. Leave it ALL open for everyone. If slashdot wants.slashdot or.flame or.grits, what other than an anal need to organize everything should stop them?
I get the feeling that, like all the other times I have said this, I'll either get moderated into the floor or ignored. But this really is an important thing to think about. We all assign some magic importance to it, but it is just an organizing convention from the prehistoric past.
Arpanet is gone. Time for us to find our names for ourselves.
While I sympathize with your situation, I don't think you are right. Instead of trying to go point by point, enough to say that these arguments simply didn't convince Judge Jackson compared to the mountain of evidence provided by DoJ.
While some of that may be MS related (MS's transparent tactics didn't endear them to anyone there, and their previous lack of good faith when it comes to the Consent Decree), most of the ruling was pretty clear-cut.
But with that said, I am personally hoping the remedy is changed. First, I don't think it will accomplish anything lasting in terms of returning competition to the desktop. Second, I don't like the idea of the Government becoming involved on a lasting basis in the software industry-- once in, you'll get 'policy experts' whose only job is to tell us how to do our jobs, and we'll never be able to get rid of them.
Instead, I think we ought to be discussing good remedies. For one thing, each company affected (netscape, corel, etc) can use the finding of fact in a civil suit. The government could follow Cringley's suggestion and fine MS; it has tens of billions in cash reserves sitting around. Third, it could open the source to windows in a non-restrictive license. Fourth, it could implement full disclosure of MS file formats and APIs, forcing MS to fully document all of these, and imposing a waiting period of not less than one year on changes to these formats. Finally, it could impose non-discriminatory, fully disclosed prices on products to OEMs.
All IMHO, of course, and you can take or leave some or all of them. But I think it is pretty clear that MS has the monopoly. What we need to look at are remedies which will actually remedy something. Breaking up MS is both too extreme and won't solve anything.
MS's big problem right now, of course, is that they've played so much dirty poker trying to get cheap, one time benefits that now that the stakes are high, noone wants to take any chances. If they had been ruthless but honorable during the trial and before, the proposals would probably be less radical.
Here are two related ones. First, you could try a browsing profiler. The program monitors what you are looking at (over time, so single or occasional visits are filtered out). Then it checks pages regularly for updates, and notifies you when something new is added.
The other is similar, except that it is targetted more at news sites than at static pages. It is the opposite of the search engine. It monitors what you are browsing, generates a series of characteristics (say you are into roleplaying games with werewolves, news sites talking about Burundi, and movie reviews of action movies). Then it generates searches based on those characteristics, and can notify you as new pages pop into existence.
Just a thought. Looking back, it looks somewhat like the 'what's related' button in Netscape. hmmmm....
For the power and security a site like slashdot needs, I am surprised that they haven't switched to Microsoft Windows NT. The boys from Seattle have really done it this time: the all new version for 2000 is hard to beat! Security, stability, scalability, performance-- it's the whole package!
I know it's tempting to go for one of those fly by night 'shareware' operating systems like LinusOS. But, come on now. Slashdot is a big, grown up site. We need NT! Besides, if they get enough business, maybe the Department of Justice won't close down the internet.
Anyway, just another thought from cyberspace-- I'll sign off for now. Gotta get Outlook working again. I've been having trouble ever since I got that joke email-- hope it isn't a virus. If a virus can get past Windows security, can you imagine how many viruses infect LinusOS? I shudder to think.
My feeling is that server-side network standards emerge from a need on the client side. Where do those requirements come from? End users, of course.
I don't think that Corel 8, StarOffice or even the general interface is very mature yet. It certainly isn't broadly adopted.
Should that happen, the self-help aspect of Open Source would kick in, and you would start seeing people develop apps for their needs. For instance, multi-user spreadsheets and word processors. These exist, but aren't very good right now.
But network standards don't come from the top down. They go from bottom level user requirements, up the line to the standards you need to satisfy the users. Or put another way, plumbing development follows kitchen and bathroom requirements more closely than it does pump requirements. Both have to be satisfied, but only one will give you complaints from homeowners.
I think that your three points are dead on, but I'm not sure that this means that they 'get it'. I just remember a quote from Warren Buffett, quoting someone else about Noah. "You get more points for building arks than for predicting rain". In other words, they may or may not understand the realities of Open Source, but even if they do, that doesn't mean that SCO as an institution can adapt.
Let's have some sympathy for SCO. They face a competitor with more developers, more QA people and a larger, faster growing market share. Their opponent's costs are zero, and their price is extremely reasonable (not zero-- remember support and equipment costs for linux users). This competitor has not only outsourced everything, it has also somehow gotten its customers to do product development!
Everything SCO does is influenced by its business model. The problem is that it turns out that software is better made and sold the way healthcare is than the way milk is. Look how Apple thrashed around before Gil Amelio and later Steve Jobs went in and performed major surgery.
The problem is that profit opportunities presented by Linux are tremendous, but require companies to rethink themselves. Providing server tools and hood ornaments will work for a while, but eventually they have to start thinking of software as a service. This means reworking everything-- sales/marketting, management, development, QA, everything. You're practically building a brand new company from scratch.
Someday, maybe next year, maybe in ten years, the Open Source paradigm will be replaced by something better. It will require all of us to reevaluate our assumptions. It won't be easy, because we won't even recognize the newcomer until it is too late. In fact, that replacement might already be out there. When that time comes, we'll each have to decide how ourselves and our companies will react.
Maybe we'll ignore the problem and use our by-then-significant power to try to put off the inevitable (MS). Maybe we'll give the problem lip service, try to make changes at the margins so that we can keep going more or less as we are (SCO, IMHO, and plenty of others). Or maybe we'll realize that this is the Way Things Will Be, and refocus completely. (Netscape? maybe...)
When all our treasured assumptions are trashed by something new on the horizon, will we adapt or wait until it is too late? "Destruction is easy, and Creation is hard" goes the cliche-- well Change is the hardest one of them all.
I don't envy SCO's position, and I totally understand their cautious tone. I don't blame them for being wary. Nope, not one bit.
The review says "wearable" every 3rd sentence, but then cautions that it has no battery. So what am I supposed to do? Have an operation to install 120 V outlet in my chest?
No, it can be a little more convenient than that. My company sells a gel-cushion-over-pvc gadget that you strap on your back. Then you run a subdermal line up your notochord (from the small of your back to the base of your neck). The BioPower unit on your back acts as lower lumbar support when you are sitting in your car or office, and through inductance draws power from the line, which in turn gets its power directly from your life force.
You'll feel a little hungrier, maybe sleep more often, but unless your life energies are being sucked away by something else already (eg you haven't eaten well, are watching the Fox Network, or work for MS) there should be plenty of power for all the personal electronics you use. And with the lower lumbar support, many users experience less back and neck pain.
Our company targets these for field service techs and sales reps. We surgically implant a GPS receiver and two way radio. This allows an employer to monitor where his people are, what they are saying, and to contact them whenever and whereever necessary.
In some post long ago, someone called RMS a 'kook' for standing up for freedom. I replied that maybe he is crazy, and maybe I am too, and that if standing up for freedom means being crazy, then that's fine.
I hope those of you who seriously detract from Stallman's ideals do so only out of some bitter need to put other people down, or for pure trolling fun - you MUST understand that if you don't stand up for yourselves, or support the people who stand up for you, you will lose. You will lose everything from the right to pick what brand of peanut butter you eat to the right to call Stallman a whacko.
This isn't meant as an attack, though I am sure it will read like one. I just don't think many people understand the principles that RMS and ESR are standing for. It doesn't help that RMS characterizes everyone who opposes him as an agent of evil-- hopefully, this will be food for thought and not a troll.
RMS calls free software an issue of freedom. But think about this as a person who wants to keep the fruits of their hard work. Or wants to see it used right. What RMS is really talking about is mandatory disclosure and a fixed $0.00 price tag on software. Is this right? I don't think so, but many do. Is this 'freedom'? No. Freedom is me getting to do whatever I want with my code, including selling it to whoever I want at whatever price I want with whatever conditions I want.
It is easy to just say "it's us or the corporations". But let's get all the critiques on the table, then, and see who is for freedom and who isn't.
If commercials on television don't revulse you, if you can't see the social conditioning inherent in modern advertising, if the idea that someone might tatoo themselves with the NIKE symbol does not make you ill and sad, then you're already lost.
OK, so to promote freedom, would you ban these commercials? Or just put out restrictions on what can or can't be said on TV? Or on their shirt? 'Social Conditioning' as used by anti-business zealots, could mean virtually any kind of persuasion. So while RMS is to be loved for advertising his development model, Nike should make people ill and sad for doing the same thing?
Free for RMS, then, means I am free to tell you what to do with the fruits of your creativity. At least until another tyrranical majority finds someone else to pick on. Because if we aren't pushing Open Source on the basis of the better value and lower cost it brings to the end users, we'll get stomped on by the marketplace. Of course, RMS would do away with the markets-- how? Laws, of course, which ultimately boils down to the use of force to make end users' decisions for them, and more laws to tell coders that their creativity belongs to someone else.
ESR is doing a great thing. What everyone should realize is that he and others (including the people at Valinux and RedHat and the other 'evil sellout corps') are the ones fighting for freedom. Open Source is a better choice for the consumer. People don't need it shoved down their throats-- they are willing to pay money for it. That is the reason for the movement's success. Better products at lower prices.
Prevent people from getting better products at lower prices, and you are restricting freedom. Telling a programmer that he must release his source and charge nothing for it is wrong. If it is the better way to create happy endusers and programmers, then it'll happen anyway.
That word 'freedom' is one of the most important words we have. It is also one of the most easily abused. Take a good look at what people are propagandizing for. If you think RMS is right, fine. There are tens of thousands of people like you. But don't call telling other people how they should do their job freedom.
Previewing this, I guess it is a little more of a rant than I intended. But it really annoys me that people have so much hate in them. ESR and other classical liberals (or economic conservatives, or libertarians, or whatever the label is this week) always take great pains to respect differences of opinion. Then they get trashed by zealots who call them either stupid or evil.
Agree with the above, don't agree, whatever. But at least take a minute to try to understand what both sides are all about. Even if you decide that RMS is right and this post is crap, at least realize that the only thing you do by demonizing those you don't agree with is blind yourself. In the end, (and I don't mean Blue here, I mean it in the general sense) you only fool yourself.
This is why we must end the TLD Tyranny! Come, my brothers, you know this is the Right Thing.
What is a TLD but some kind of sorting convention? Who cares is you are for profit, not for profit, for profit but educational, not for profit but also a net provider-- none of this matters anymore now that the Internet is privatized!
Have you seen Slashdot? Perfect example of a.org that should be a.com-- they are owned by a corporation and are a profit making institution!!!
We don't need TLDs for anything. If somebody wants a TLD, let them register.open and have all open source project domains use that as their TLD. Or not. Who cares?
Besides, TLDs don't give us more domain names because everyone cross registers. Trademarks still apply. So End the TLD Tyranny! Join the nearly one dozen people who have seen the light! Burn all TLDs!!
1/3/5/6 (taxes are inevitable). First, singling out the internet for taxation is not inevitable. That is not to say that thousands of people are out there working very hard to tax the internet-- after all, they have dozens top-down social engineering proposals to create, and that costs money. If that means killing a few startups, well, they're just corporations. Not like they employ people or anything. Or maybe you work for one of the maybe three startups which are turning tremendous profits.
By definition, regulation means taking a decision from people and placing it in the realm of government. Most people who want regulation say "People are making evil and/or stupid decisions, so if we regulate, then I make them for you." The reality goes like this: "I don't like the decisions everyone else is making, so I'll put it to a vote, and two years later I have to do it their way, too."
If we're serious about openness, we should remember that the only reason that so many startups are around is that they aren't getting killed by a death of a thousand cuts from regulations and taxes. If you aren't, you can tell everyone that you want your way and that everyone should 'stop whining'... Even Microsoft was a garage operation once-- killing the internet's growth is a simple matter of a form here and a 'minor' tax there. They add up to kill industries.
We also need guarantees that when we order DSL or Cable Modems, they'll be installed in 10 working days (or less), and that outages are fixed promptly. Beyond that, the government should butt out.
Beyond what? Every conceivable regulation? You're hurting the people you are claiming to help. Companies are giving computers away for free! ISPs are fixing stuff-- maybe not as fast as you like, but that's why we have competition. Every one of your suggestions for a regulation is adding another tiny cost to the price of doing business on the internet. And this isn't even stuff like privacy legislation-- you're suggesting a law to ban the everyday annoyances of life. Well, if it means that much to you, pay a higher cost for 24hr repairs. Just because there is a law that makes 'them' fix it on your schedule (and incidentally, outlaws cheap services for people who don't need extra features) doesn't reduce the cost of that service. Cheap internet is creating itself-- putting it on a government timetable will make it take more time, not less, and will make the internet that much less interesting when it gets to universal access.
What bothered me so much about this post is that the article was really good, and made me rethink many of my opinions. Then, this response came up, and I remembered why I think the way I do on this. Here's my laundry list:
The Open Source business model is enforced by contracts, not laws. If Open Source wasn't more palatable to the consumer, more stable and more efficient than Closed Source as a development model, it wouldn't exist.
Regulations inherently force people to do things that they wouldn't do otherwise. Sometimes this is good (ie laws which protect people's rights, laws which keep the market open, etc.) More often, it is tinkering by people who know the One True Way to do something, and have to resort to force to make people do it. Just because someone has to do something won't make it cheaper or more efficient. In fact, usually, the regulation specifies how to do something, because that is easier to enforce. Then you kill innovation by making technology a political question rather than a technical one.
Censorware: there is nothing wrong with censorware as long as you aren't forced to use it by law. And usually, you aren't. If you use taxpayer-funded datalines, you have to deal with taxpayer-voted filters. Fair is fair. The problem is when companies which produce filterware don't reveal their block lists and are therefore making stupid stupid misjudgements-- without letting communities know just what they are blocking!
'Line-Ucks'. I am not trolling-- hear me out! I used Linux back when noone knew how to pronounce it. I remember user groups arguing constantly over the issue. I still defiantly pronounce it with the long I. Why? Well: "I am Leeenoos Torvalds and I pronounce Leeeenoooks Leeenooks." One listen, then all the L'nux people declared victory and went home. I still don't buy it, even if all sane people disagree.
Anyway, long answer, but the point is this: open standards and open networks are good statements of principle. But we have to be very careful that we don't let the 'mandatory 10 day installation by Presidential Proclamation' people regulate the liberty out of the internet.
oh, and speaking of regulation: End the TLD Tyranny!
OK, you won't usually hear completely crazy ideas coming from me. But this is different. Those SF people were the usual anti-freedom antitech luddites, but this is an excuse to promote my agenda:
End all TLDs!!!!
This sounds funny and/or sarcastic; I fully expect this time to be moderated into the floor. But ever since Ralph Nader's group started advocating whole new TLDs just for their pet causes, it has occurred to me that the whole notion of.org.net.whatever is silly.
It made sense in the old days, when you needed to know at a glance if you could access a site for regulatory reasons (ie certain mil domains accessing com domains, etc). But what purpose do they serve now?
More web addresses? It doesn't address the limited number of *.*.*.* addresses (there are other solutions for that). Most companies reserve all possible TLDs which could violate their trademarks-- add more TLDs and you won't even see more lawsuits-- the same squatters and the same trademark holders, just more names to fight over.
It hardly serves as an organizing principle. Is an American private school a.com,.edu, or.city.state.us? The latter is ruling of self-appointed Masters of American Domains at USC. They want coke to be coke.atlanta.us. Why? Really, I can't tell. I don't need to look at a web address to tell if I am at a gov't, private or network provider's homepage.
What we need aren't more top-level domains, but less. We have to drop this.com hack and type http://slashdot. Current dot-whatevers can keep their distinctions, but let's let EVERYTHING be a TLD.
End the TLD Tyranny. In your heart, you know I'm right.
As government institutions, they follow a number of arcane rules on procurement. So an Open Source alternative will have an uphill fight to gain acceptance. Some thoughts:
Most government agencies work off of bids for products. This usually doesn't match the business model of the OS corps, so it makes us look worse on paper. Also, the government is notoriously inept at signing seemingly good contracts with vendors of proprietary equipment. Of course, when the vendor's equipment saddles them with a transition cost of going to a competitor or Opens Source alternative, they again look at the options and decide that it is most cost effective to pay more for the proprietary product. This is akin to 'no money down', huge monthly payments.
Another problem is the idea of working with a traditional vendor vs. newer better ones. Government procurement 'experts' are not typically very up on modern technology, and typically have arcane rules designed around reality circa five-10 years ago. Mention a modern business model and they look at you like you just landed from mars.
Procurement, even at the local level, is usually a bureaucratic and time-consuming process. In the past, the reward was a huge captive market. But the economics of software makes not worth it except for large companies with large legal departments (like MS).
Finally, especially in school systems, it is nearly impossible for a company to deal with someone who has authority. Most times, the multiple steps in the process mean that you have to deal with conflicting agendas and have a product that is all things to all people.
Not to throw a wet blanket like this, but take a deep breath and ask around before trying to be a government contractor. Unless you are very lucky and clever, you'll get annihilated by it.
I have heard from most of my friends in the Ivy League that those schools tend to be excellent grad schools, but mediocre undergrad schools. For that matter, compare their cs and engineering departments to MIT, Cal Tech, Purdue, CMU or Georgia Tech. They might be great at teaching philosophy, political 'science' or literature, but those aren't fields which lend themselves to quantitative analysis of how many innovations and innovators they produce (just a survey of 'reputation' isn't enough-- in these fields, where you are from is most of your reputation anyway!).
I think it is important, though, to remember that distance learning is great up to a point. Really, learning requires many things: supervised lab time, team projects, one on one instruction, etc. Distance learning is appropriate as a substitute for lectures, but there is much more to a college education than that. A school which uses distance learning resources (videotapes, internet texts, interactive homework/study aids, etc) to enhance education is great. One which tries to fit everything into a particular set of technologies which do not lend themselves to that kind of implementation is doomed to failure.
I'm not sure that there is anything you can do. First, in my experience, schools have very old computers- circa 1988. I learned to program on TRS-80s. I was told that Pascal was an ideal scientific language, and COBOL the language of business. They'd heard of C and C++, but considered it 'too difficult' (after COBOL, no less!) This is current as of the early 90's.
The old saying that 'those who can't do, teach' isn't usually true, I find. CS in public schools is one area where it is. If you want to be rewarded for doing a good job, not be bullied around by your union, get paid decently, not be micromanaged ridiculously by the state, and feel like you are actually accomplishing something, try the private sector.
Are there solutions? Yes, but they're out of the scope of your question. Your immediate problem is giving your teachers some clue about what has been going on in CS in the last 10-20 years. Which is virtually everything.
One possibility is to try to get the high school equivalent of a special topics class. Or a co-op program-- which some High Schools support. If these options aren't available, start a club. Especially in the Open Source field, you'll find programmers LOVE to talk.
If you want to push programming on the linux platform as the solution for your school, you'll have a tough sell ahead of you. Obvious selling points:
Free, works with hardware already procured and destined for trash.
Includes sample code (the source) and developement tools for dozens of languages (don't try to explain the differences between bash, Perl, HTML and C-- they won't get it.
Out of the box internet ready.
Procure it for a linux club first. If you have a teacher who knows linux already, you are in a very small minority. Just a machine or two for the geeks in your school. Do not use the word 'hacking' ever. EVER! Sure, it isn't cracking or illegal, but it raises a red flag. Present it as something to make and serve web pages with. Teachers like that and can get it quickly. Good computer teachers will appreciate the chance to dust off their C skills while watching normally uninterested students ooohing and ahhhing over the web page stuff.
If possible, make it part of something that is already budgetted (like programming classes or a club). Don't let them 'study' the problem-- that means they are waiting for you to graduate. Don't let them try to hire someone just for this-- they'll be cut out of the budget over the summer. Instead, keep it cheap, minimize teachers' time committments and keep a low profile.
It isn't the office suite monopoly that maintains MS' dominance. It's not even the OS monopoly. It's the combination of them that is so lethal. It's like that classic hack where you get two intruder processes running as root. Whenever the sysadmin kills one of them, the other immediately restarts it. The only way to kill them is to kill them both simultaneously (not as easy as it sounds) or reboot. The two together are orders of magnitude stronger than either alone.
I agree with almost everything you say... which is why, if MS is smart, they will port Office to Linux. Here's my scenario:
First, MS continues badmouthing Linux, but changes its strategy. Current efforts to brand it as unstable and insecure are failing. MS can't take the next likely option: claim that Linux has poor support options, because MS's customer support is legendarily bad. The place to hit Linux is where it has an acknowledged weakness: the GUI.
Attack Linux as a poor desktop solution whenever possible. Win2K purposely blurs the distinction between desktop and server; keep doing this and market W2k as the answer to all needs at once.
When Linux reaches 10% market share, release MS Office for Linux. Don't implement all the features. Do a poor port, similar to the Mac version, that has fewer features, clashes with Linux's interface, and is much slower-- especially in places where a user will be frustrated. Make documents look poorer in Linux than in W2k.
Then show the result. StarOffice isn't a mature product, IMHO (it is good, but still needs a great deal of work). WordPerfect 8 is in a similar position (I've been using it for 6 months for windows, and it is still slow and clunky). Well-meaning Linux ompanies eager to expand market share will promise that MS Office runs on Linux, without warning of the drawbacks. Companies will ask for Office, to ease their transitions. Remember, the market is saturated. Offices that want Linux are having to switch from Windows, and migrating everything your office does on computers all at once is very difficult.
Horror stories will emerge. Linux will have failed to deliver. Poor GUI will be blamed, because it only takes a few bad anecdotes to kill a product. People will say "it's good for web, file and print servers, but don't use it with an office suite." And that will be that.
If your technology can't keep its promises, then that's it. Managers won't wait for patches, and they won't wait for upgrades. If they've just switched operating systems and had a disaster, there is no way they will 'fix' it by switching office suites, too. They will blame Linux (not Office for Linux) and switch back. And tell all their friends what a disaster it was. This is what we call a poison pill.
So let's hope and pray that MS doesn't do this, or that if it does, that we as Linux advocates have the patience and wisdom to handle it carefully. Remember, be careful what you wish for. I'd say to sysadmins that if it happens, that you give it a long hard look before recommending to your corporation-- then recommend StarOffice or Corel Suite 8, or whatever open source equivalent is out there.
we don't allow phone users or dirver's license holders to remain anonymous, although their records are kepot private...not sure why online identities must be different.
We have public phones, don't we? And tone blocking against caller id. Regarding driver's licenses, this is because a driver poses a physical hazard to other citizens. We don't have a license to talk.
I looked at your user info and note that, like me, you include no contact or identifying information. This isn't a bad thing! It encourages free exchange, and there are some legitimate things that are better said anonymously. Of course, it could be said that the government is a 'trusted third party' that would never ever look, without proper search warrants. Of course, 400 FBI files of the administration's political opponents were supposed to be confidential, too. There is no difference, in the end between 'trusted party access' and 'uncontrolled access' when it comes to personal information. Trusted by who? When you hold the information already, the agency need only trust itself-- this smacks of key escrow.
Government shouldn't be dictating to individuals how our technology should work. If the technology that works best for people happens to also identify them, well, what can you do? Private privacy services (such as anonymous remailers) will emerge, and privacy will have a cost.
To argue for a government-mandated internet identity tracking system because people shouldn't have anything to hide is wrong. The burden is on the government to establish a need to know, not on us to foot the bill (in lower performance, higher taxes or ISP fees, etc) to satisfy the government's idle curiosity.
If you really want to help the Open Source community, talk to a computer teacher in a local middle school/high school. Find out how it works and what effect your donation to that department would have. Then help them out-- directly through funds or (better!) indirectly through computers and time spent helping kids learn to code.
I'll bet this even improves your own skills. It will do more than giving to any organization- even the EFF (another good cause).
My read of the press release is that the links are created dynamically and automatically. Keep in mind, this may be marketting-garbled mush, but it sounds like they are using a daemon to dynamically assign symlinks whereever duplication is found.
They claim this will save 80%-90% hard drive space. I'm very skeptical of that, even if it is all they are claiming it is.
Is there a patent? Mayhaps someone can write a filesystem which implements this. I'm really doubtful that this is anything that will more than marginally affect effective hard drive capacities, and at some cost in overhead, but it might be worth playing with on a UNIX.
Simple, take at an idiot and a genius (for the sake of the argument, we'll name the idiot Dave and the genius Brian-- from KODT, no real people impugned). Dave and Brian will have to sort the phone book into alphabetical order. For their convenience, the book is available in HTML format (!) The winner get's Dave's Hackmaster+12.
Ready? GO!
Dave's sweating bullets, playing with the file, pacing, playing with his mouse, nibbling on his fingernails. To no avail! He's struggling to cut and paste it in Word, but Word didn't convert the HTML right, so it looks like a Jon Katz article.
Brian is sitting back and sipping lightly on his mint julep, content as a cow chewing hay and prozac. He knew that the phone book is already in alphabetical order.
Software is smart, hardware is fast. By the same token, intelligence represents efficiency, effort is measured by brain activity.
That's why my dream team would be some of the slackest people on earth, such as me. Surfers, hippies, UNIX gurus and top physicists-- the first two don't even try, and the second two use minimal brain power to accomplish the most. Ideally, these are SubGenius types who don't get into idea fugues.
The cynicism of the American citizen kinda dooms the whole process. A lot of us look at the state of affairs and take it as a given, thus losing the fight before the battle is even engaged.
Thank you so much for writing this. I read the 'analysis' of how to oppose this bill, and couldn't believe my eyes. Much of this is just cynical posturing. "Deep down he isn't that evil"?!
How do you hear about a good piece of software? By reading the source code in detail, or by reading a summary, listening to friends who tried it, and reading about it on mailing lists and newsgroups. And trying it out, of course. Well, a state legislator can't test legislation, and while many do read the bills, they are long and complicated-- and you don't have more than one or two people to answer the phone and help you handle the legal (not legislative) stuff. So you have to rely on people you have worked with and usually agree with, reading the summary, and checking with groups that you usually support.
They want to hear from their constituents- as the article pointed out- but if you go in with the attitude that the guy is ignorant or a crook, you won't get anywhere. Especially since he is probably neither-- how much do YOU know about education, labor, healthcare, law enforcement, disaster relief, small business, taxes, housing, agriculture, zoning and development and the environment? Name three bills that aren't media-darling social issues if you still think there isn't a torrent of information to stay on top of. So give him the information he needs to do his job, in a form which he can quickly and easily digest and use (paper is better-- government computer connectivity is pretty weak). Treat him as an ally who is having the wool pulled over his eyes.
Of course, if we were all voting regularly, volunteering in campaigns, and supporting our local candidates with our time, work, and specialist information, we wouldn't be in this situation. Your party should be having or have already had its precinct convention-- this isn't usually more than about 25 people who come together to help your party's candidates win. Don't have a party? Well, call up a county commissioner/freeholder/whatever, or your state rep/senator-- if you really mean it when you say you pick each on their personal merits, there is bound to be one of yours who you like. Offer to help them out. Not in exchange for some vote or something-- if they are your kind of guy, they will already be voting your way anyway. Help them to do what they are trying to do. Because without the help of volunteers, they won't be able to get anything done.
Of course, it is much easier to say that they are all crooks, and to self-righteously turn your nose up at the whole process. It saves plenty of time, feels great, and marks you as sophisticated and media savvy. And, of course, wrong. Helping a party/candidate is hard work-- and takes up valuable role-playing time (I know my Werewolf game suffered from volunteering in a campaign). Compromising on some issues so that other things you want will happen is uncomfortable. Dealing with people you don't always agree with all the time isn't easy. And finally, feeling like you are getting nowhere because the other side always seems to have more votes/media attention/money/whatever is pretty terrible. But in a democracy, that is how you get things done. Big national political figures were once just like the local guy you are helping-- and who would you trust, some guy who wants something out of you, or someone who supported you before you were 'important' and who has been on your side for years?
Sound a little like and Open Source project? It should, because it works exactly the same way. Your best bet for fighting UCITA is to do it with respect and courtesy-- remember, you are the public's ally. Don't demonize your opponents, just talk about the legislation.
(just say "I used a one-time pad, which I will not supply. Instead I will provide you with a plaintext version of it.") That seems to me to remove all of the teeth from this otherwise god-awful law.. am I mistaken?
(IMHO, IANAL) Yes! Because, place yourself as a law enforcement agency, and ask yourself, "how can I enforce this law". The answer isn't and can't be, "Well, I guess we don't." Instead, they will have to be more invasive and confrontational to make certain that you aren't dancing around it.
This is a terrible development-- much worse than the cameras and monitoring devices that the British are also implementing to monitor their citizen's activities. We have the potential to live in a world where virtually everything we do is subject to observation, review and regulation-- where we become terminals and peripherals to a central social control. Or this technology will let us be distributed, parallel, and at liberty to make our own decisions.
Massive parallelism, neural networks, distributed systems, genetic algorithms, Open Source development models-- my feeling is that these technologies should be the model for our social system-- a world of individuals with as much of the decision-making offloaded to the 'client side' as possible. (Excuse me if I am stretching the metaphor too far, but I think it still holds.)
In a parliamentary system, you have less direct say over your government, since you have to deal with a party rather than a person. But you still should fight this tooth and nail. Once the burden of proof is on you to prove that you aren't hiding something, you'll never be able to escape that.
I don't think there is anything wrong with someone mailing a games developer asking for a Linux port and from what the Loki bloke said he actually said that "mailbombing" was a bad idea.
I think he means by mailbombing the tons of emails they are getting from linux people.
They have a certain number of people who they employ to process and answer mail. So if they get flooded it detracts from their other capabilities and costs them money-- the opposite of what we want for Loki.
A lesser problem is that we don't want to end up with the reputation of Amiga users. They were pushy, opinionated and loud. Businesses sometimes didn't support Amiga because they didn't want to deal with that kind of irate customer. So before you fire off an angry or critical email at a software company you overall like, try to remember a time when you might have been working behind a cash register, and how you felt dealing with irate or just loud customers.
The nice thing about Open Source for a business is that their customers happily improve their products for them, strengthening stability, improving the interface, and adding features. So we're the best customers in the industry, and should stay that way.
I do want (desperately) to run StarCraft on my Linux box, so I suggest heavy use of Web petitions to show them in a less bandwidth hungry manner our longing for combat.
I'd say it is your company's to sell. I mean, this isn't one of 500 domain names scooped up to block a legitimate organization from registering it. If it was bought (or better yet, actually used) in good faith, then I say sell it.
IANAL, but I do think that the law is geared towards allowing your name to be your property if there is a good faith intent to use it, rather than speculating or ransoming good names.
I am not a Christian, and I have noticed the same thing. It bothers me to see this kind of intolerance on/., not the least of which is because I wonder when he will get around to my religion. Perhaps we have the same religion-- if so, I ask him to show the respect which he would like shown to him. I'm not sure why he has such an attitude, however, I think I might know the answer.
Katz is trying very hard to become a Big Media Celebrity. That's why he recycles what the other Big Media Celebrities say. Pundits don't usually have to have degrees in computer science-- they only rarely know how to use MS FrontPage (good for you, Jon!). But they usually have to be good writers.
Jon Katz is not a good writer. He is mediocre by professional standards. His writing is usually grammatically correct, but lacks polish and good organization. It isn't very concise, but that's a sin that you can find everywhere-- I won't hold that against him. What I will hold against him is at he is recycling the same MarcuseLite that has been circulating in lit crit circles for three decades.
There are plenty of writers whose opinions I find regular fault with. But I can at least respect their innovation, style, or their personal perspective. Katz is, frankly, a hack, and SlashDot can do better.
My impression has been that Slashdot keeps him on payroll because of activity logs. The idea is that people are challenged, provoked to discussion, outraged. But that isn't the case. Katz bothers people because he is so mediocre, and his features are given a special place here. People are frustrated that someone so obviously a wannabe is taking up bandwidth and money that could be going to ESR or RMS or, frankly, virtually any writer who can turn out competent copy-- as opposed to 'open source movie reviews'.
Slashdot needs a new columnist. They might be someone we agree with, whose columns eloquently distill our feelings as a community. Or they might be someone who we disagree with, who challenges us and gives us new feelings and perspectives. Better yet, they might at times do either. But they have to be someone we can respect, someone who may outrage us at times, but also demonstrates eloquence, intelligence and understanding of our community.
Slashdot Mirror
No flame from here. I think you have this dead on. This was a management problem.
The real clue for me was the refusal to use Open Source products in their infrastructure. I can understand that if your product is open source but you feel that OS strategy is only useful in narrow situations. But linuxcare's whole business model depends on the proposition that OS is better. Those complaints the team raised about OS are pretty much right out of the NT complaints about linux.
So while rushing to an IPO can be defended on a number of grounds, such as trying to facilitate rapid expansion, overconfidence about the company's capabilities, this objection seems to me to be indicative of something else. It looks like they were trying to ride a fad to completion, one they were actually quite skeptical about.
Note that their partners are still quite enthusiastic about the company, despite its weaknesses.
One lesson I've seen appear again and again is that a company is only a valuable as the sum total of its talent. This includes marketting and management talent, but by definition these are social people who usually take care of themselves. Some companies use CTO as the tech advocate to management. Others have people like Jobs. He puts more restrictions and demands on his people than anyone-- but his own skills are excellent, and let him do this.
Reading Red Herring won't help you design a product anymore than watching Nascar will help you design a car. The revolution of last half of the 20th century is not that more jobs are becoming knowledge based, but that external demands and the vastly increased diversity, scope and depth of skills needed in business are turning management into 'just another skills job'.
I've said it once, and I'll say it again. Burn All TLDs!!! OK, I really, really am serious. We simply don't need them.
Think about it. Companies will always buy their domain name with every possible TLD no matter how many there are. So it isn't like we'll get any more domain names appearing when we create more and more restrictive rules.
Meanwhile, the trademark disputes won't stop. They'll just get more lucrative. What's the point of trying to pigeonhole every site by its Jungian archetype? TLDs like .gov can exist, certainly, but why make those last three letters so important? Let's just open it up.
Anything should be allowed to be a TLD. If coke wants to buy .coke, then fine. We've grown out of this authoritarian need to control everything. Let's just let go, and reorganize at a higher level.
Funny as it sounds Burn All TLDs is really what I think we need to do. Leave it ALL open for everyone. If slashdot wants .slashdot or .flame or .grits, what other than an anal need to organize everything should stop them?
I get the feeling that, like all the other times I have said this, I'll either get moderated into the floor or ignored. But this really is an important thing to think about. We all assign some magic importance to it, but it is just an organizing convention from the prehistoric past.
Arpanet is gone. Time for us to find our names for ourselves.
While I sympathize with your situation, I don't think you are right. Instead of trying to go point by point, enough to say that these arguments simply didn't convince Judge Jackson compared to the mountain of evidence provided by DoJ.
While some of that may be MS related (MS's transparent tactics didn't endear them to anyone there, and their previous lack of good faith when it comes to the Consent Decree), most of the ruling was pretty clear-cut.
But with that said, I am personally hoping the remedy is changed. First, I don't think it will accomplish anything lasting in terms of returning competition to the desktop. Second, I don't like the idea of the Government becoming involved on a lasting basis in the software industry-- once in, you'll get 'policy experts' whose only job is to tell us how to do our jobs, and we'll never be able to get rid of them.
Instead, I think we ought to be discussing good remedies. For one thing, each company affected (netscape, corel, etc) can use the finding of fact in a civil suit. The government could follow Cringley's suggestion and fine MS; it has tens of billions in cash reserves sitting around. Third, it could open the source to windows in a non-restrictive license. Fourth, it could implement full disclosure of MS file formats and APIs, forcing MS to fully document all of these, and imposing a waiting period of not less than one year on changes to these formats. Finally, it could impose non-discriminatory, fully disclosed prices on products to OEMs.
All IMHO, of course, and you can take or leave some or all of them. But I think it is pretty clear that MS has the monopoly. What we need to look at are remedies which will actually remedy something. Breaking up MS is both too extreme and won't solve anything.
MS's big problem right now, of course, is that they've played so much dirty poker trying to get cheap, one time benefits that now that the stakes are high, noone wants to take any chances. If they had been ruthless but honorable during the trial and before, the proposals would probably be less radical.
#include IANALHere are two related ones. First, you could try a browsing profiler. The program monitors what you are looking at (over time, so single or occasional visits are filtered out). Then it checks pages regularly for updates, and notifies you when something new is added.
The other is similar, except that it is targetted more at news sites than at static pages. It is the opposite of the search engine. It monitors what you are browsing, generates a series of characteristics (say you are into roleplaying games with werewolves, news sites talking about Burundi, and movie reviews of action movies). Then it generates searches based on those characteristics, and can notify you as new pages pop into existence.
Just a thought. Looking back, it looks somewhat like the 'what's related' button in Netscape. hmmmm....
For the power and security a site like slashdot needs, I am surprised that they haven't switched to Microsoft Windows NT. The boys from Seattle have really done it this time: the all new version for 2000 is hard to beat! Security, stability, scalability, performance-- it's the whole package!
I know it's tempting to go for one of those fly by night 'shareware' operating systems like LinusOS. But, come on now. Slashdot is a big, grown up site. We need NT! Besides, if they get enough business, maybe the Department of Justice won't close down the internet.
Anyway, just another thought from cyberspace-- I'll sign off for now. Gotta get Outlook working again. I've been having trouble ever since I got that joke email-- hope it isn't a virus. If a virus can get past Windows security, can you imagine how many viruses infect LinusOS? I shudder to think.
My feeling is that server-side network standards emerge from a need on the client side. Where do those requirements come from? End users, of course.
I don't think that Corel 8, StarOffice or even the general interface is very mature yet. It certainly isn't broadly adopted.
Should that happen, the self-help aspect of Open Source would kick in, and you would start seeing people develop apps for their needs. For instance, multi-user spreadsheets and word processors. These exist, but aren't very good right now.
But network standards don't come from the top down. They go from bottom level user requirements, up the line to the standards you need to satisfy the users. Or put another way, plumbing development follows kitchen and bathroom requirements more closely than it does pump requirements. Both have to be satisfied, but only one will give you complaints from homeowners.
I think that your three points are dead on, but I'm not sure that this means that they 'get it'. I just remember a quote from Warren Buffett, quoting someone else about Noah. "You get more points for building arks than for predicting rain". In other words, they may or may not understand the realities of Open Source, but even if they do, that doesn't mean that SCO as an institution can adapt.
Let's have some sympathy for SCO. They face a competitor with more developers, more QA people and a larger, faster growing market share. Their opponent's costs are zero, and their price is extremely reasonable (not zero-- remember support and equipment costs for linux users). This competitor has not only outsourced everything, it has also somehow gotten its customers to do product development!
Everything SCO does is influenced by its business model. The problem is that it turns out that software is better made and sold the way healthcare is than the way milk is. Look how Apple thrashed around before Gil Amelio and later Steve Jobs went in and performed major surgery.
The problem is that profit opportunities presented by Linux are tremendous, but require companies to rethink themselves. Providing server tools and hood ornaments will work for a while, but eventually they have to start thinking of software as a service. This means reworking everything-- sales/marketting, management, development, QA, everything. You're practically building a brand new company from scratch.
Someday, maybe next year, maybe in ten years, the Open Source paradigm will be replaced by something better. It will require all of us to reevaluate our assumptions. It won't be easy, because we won't even recognize the newcomer until it is too late. In fact, that replacement might already be out there. When that time comes, we'll each have to decide how ourselves and our companies will react.
Maybe we'll ignore the problem and use our by-then-significant power to try to put off the inevitable (MS). Maybe we'll give the problem lip service, try to make changes at the margins so that we can keep going more or less as we are (SCO, IMHO, and plenty of others). Or maybe we'll realize that this is the Way Things Will Be, and refocus completely. (Netscape? maybe...)
When all our treasured assumptions are trashed by something new on the horizon, will we adapt or wait until it is too late? "Destruction is easy, and Creation is hard" goes the cliche-- well Change is the hardest one of them all.
I don't envy SCO's position, and I totally understand their cautious tone. I don't blame them for being wary. Nope, not one bit.
The review says "wearable" every 3rd sentence, but then cautions that it has no battery. So what am I supposed to do? Have an operation to install 120 V outlet in my chest?
No, it can be a little more convenient than that. My company sells a gel-cushion-over-pvc gadget that you strap on your back. Then you run a subdermal line up your notochord (from the small of your back to the base of your neck). The BioPower unit on your back acts as lower lumbar support when you are sitting in your car or office, and through inductance draws power from the line, which in turn gets its power directly from your life force.
You'll feel a little hungrier, maybe sleep more often, but unless your life energies are being sucked away by something else already (eg you haven't eaten well, are watching the Fox Network, or work for MS) there should be plenty of power for all the personal electronics you use. And with the lower lumbar support, many users experience less back and neck pain.
Our company targets these for field service techs and sales reps. We surgically implant a GPS receiver and two way radio. This allows an employer to monitor where his people are, what they are saying, and to contact them whenever and whereever necessary.
In some post long ago, someone called RMS a 'kook' for standing up for freedom. I replied that maybe he is crazy, and maybe I am too, and that if standing up for freedom means being crazy, then that's fine.
I hope those of you who seriously detract from Stallman's ideals do so only out of some bitter need to put other people down, or for pure trolling fun - you MUST understand that if you don't stand up for yourselves, or support the people who stand up for you, you will lose. You will lose everything from the right to pick what brand of peanut butter you eat to the right to call Stallman a whacko.
This isn't meant as an attack, though I am sure it will read like one. I just don't think many people understand the principles that RMS and ESR are standing for. It doesn't help that RMS characterizes everyone who opposes him as an agent of evil-- hopefully, this will be food for thought and not a troll.
RMS calls free software an issue of freedom. But think about this as a person who wants to keep the fruits of their hard work. Or wants to see it used right. What RMS is really talking about is mandatory disclosure and a fixed $0.00 price tag on software. Is this right? I don't think so, but many do. Is this 'freedom'? No. Freedom is me getting to do whatever I want with my code, including selling it to whoever I want at whatever price I want with whatever conditions I want.
It is easy to just say "it's us or the corporations". But let's get all the critiques on the table, then, and see who is for freedom and who isn't.
If commercials on television don't revulse you, if you can't see the social conditioning inherent in modern advertising, if the idea that someone might tatoo themselves with the NIKE symbol does not make you ill and sad, then you're already lost.
OK, so to promote freedom, would you ban these commercials? Or just put out restrictions on what can or can't be said on TV? Or on their shirt? 'Social Conditioning' as used by anti-business zealots, could mean virtually any kind of persuasion. So while RMS is to be loved for advertising his development model, Nike should make people ill and sad for doing the same thing?
Free for RMS, then, means I am free to tell you what to do with the fruits of your creativity. At least until another tyrranical majority finds someone else to pick on. Because if we aren't pushing Open Source on the basis of the better value and lower cost it brings to the end users, we'll get stomped on by the marketplace. Of course, RMS would do away with the markets-- how? Laws, of course, which ultimately boils down to the use of force to make end users' decisions for them, and more laws to tell coders that their creativity belongs to someone else.
ESR is doing a great thing. What everyone should realize is that he and others (including the people at Valinux and RedHat and the other 'evil sellout corps') are the ones fighting for freedom. Open Source is a better choice for the consumer. People don't need it shoved down their throats-- they are willing to pay money for it. That is the reason for the movement's success. Better products at lower prices.
Prevent people from getting better products at lower prices, and you are restricting freedom. Telling a programmer that he must release his source and charge nothing for it is wrong. If it is the better way to create happy endusers and programmers, then it'll happen anyway.
That word 'freedom' is one of the most important words we have. It is also one of the most easily abused. Take a good look at what people are propagandizing for. If you think RMS is right, fine. There are tens of thousands of people like you. But don't call telling other people how they should do their job freedom.
Previewing this, I guess it is a little more of a rant than I intended. But it really annoys me that people have so much hate in them. ESR and other classical liberals (or economic conservatives, or libertarians, or whatever the label is this week) always take great pains to respect differences of opinion. Then they get trashed by zealots who call them either stupid or evil.
Agree with the above, don't agree, whatever. But at least take a minute to try to understand what both sides are all about. Even if you decide that RMS is right and this post is crap, at least realize that the only thing you do by demonizing those you don't agree with is blind yourself. In the end, (and I don't mean Blue here, I mean it in the general sense) you only fool yourself.
This is why we must end the TLD Tyranny! Come, my brothers, you know this is the Right Thing.
What is a TLD but some kind of sorting convention? Who cares is you are for profit, not for profit, for profit but educational, not for profit but also a net provider-- none of this matters anymore now that the Internet is privatized!
Have you seen Slashdot? Perfect example of a .org that should be a .com-- they are owned by a corporation and are a profit making institution!!!
We don't need TLDs for anything. If somebody wants a TLD, let them register .open and have all open source project domains use that as their TLD. Or not. Who cares?
Besides, TLDs don't give us more domain names because everyone cross registers. Trademarks still apply. So End the TLD Tyranny! Join the nearly one dozen people who have seen the light! Burn all TLDs!!
1/3/5/6 (taxes are inevitable). First, singling out the internet for taxation is not inevitable. That is not to say that thousands of people are out there working very hard to tax the internet-- after all, they have dozens top-down social engineering proposals to create, and that costs money. If that means killing a few startups, well, they're just corporations. Not like they employ people or anything. Or maybe you work for one of the maybe three startups which are turning tremendous profits.
By definition, regulation means taking a decision from people and placing it in the realm of government. Most people who want regulation say "People are making evil and/or stupid decisions, so if we regulate, then I make them for you." The reality goes like this: "I don't like the decisions everyone else is making, so I'll put it to a vote, and two years later I have to do it their way, too."
If we're serious about openness, we should remember that the only reason that so many startups are around is that they aren't getting killed by a death of a thousand cuts from regulations and taxes. If you aren't, you can tell everyone that you want your way and that everyone should 'stop whining'... Even Microsoft was a garage operation once-- killing the internet's growth is a simple matter of a form here and a 'minor' tax there. They add up to kill industries.
We also need guarantees that when we order DSL or Cable Modems, they'll be installed in 10 working days (or less), and that outages are fixed promptly. Beyond that, the government should butt out.
Beyond what? Every conceivable regulation? You're hurting the people you are claiming to help. Companies are giving computers away for free! ISPs are fixing stuff-- maybe not as fast as you like, but that's why we have competition. Every one of your suggestions for a regulation is adding another tiny cost to the price of doing business on the internet. And this isn't even stuff like privacy legislation-- you're suggesting a law to ban the everyday annoyances of life. Well, if it means that much to you, pay a higher cost for 24hr repairs. Just because there is a law that makes 'them' fix it on your schedule (and incidentally, outlaws cheap services for people who don't need extra features) doesn't reduce the cost of that service. Cheap internet is creating itself-- putting it on a government timetable will make it take more time, not less, and will make the internet that much less interesting when it gets to universal access.
What bothered me so much about this post is that the article was really good, and made me rethink many of my opinions. Then, this response came up, and I remembered why I think the way I do on this. Here's my laundry list:
The Open Source business model is enforced by contracts, not laws. If Open Source wasn't more palatable to the consumer, more stable and more efficient than Closed Source as a development model, it wouldn't exist.
Regulations inherently force people to do things that they wouldn't do otherwise. Sometimes this is good (ie laws which protect people's rights, laws which keep the market open, etc.) More often, it is tinkering by people who know the One True Way to do something, and have to resort to force to make people do it. Just because someone has to do something won't make it cheaper or more efficient. In fact, usually, the regulation specifies how to do something, because that is easier to enforce. Then you kill innovation by making technology a political question rather than a technical one.
Censorware: there is nothing wrong with censorware as long as you aren't forced to use it by law. And usually, you aren't. If you use taxpayer-funded datalines, you have to deal with taxpayer-voted filters. Fair is fair. The problem is when companies which produce filterware don't reveal their block lists and are therefore making stupid stupid misjudgements-- without letting communities know just what they are blocking!
'Line-Ucks'. I am not trolling-- hear me out! I used Linux back when noone knew how to pronounce it. I remember user groups arguing constantly over the issue. I still defiantly pronounce it with the long I. Why? Well: "I am Leeenoos Torvalds and I pronounce Leeeenoooks Leeenooks." One listen, then all the L'nux people declared victory and went home. I still don't buy it, even if all sane people disagree.
Anyway, long answer, but the point is this: open standards and open networks are good statements of principle. But we have to be very careful that we don't let the 'mandatory 10 day installation by Presidential Proclamation' people regulate the liberty out of the internet.
oh, and speaking of regulation: End the TLD Tyranny!
OK, you won't usually hear completely crazy ideas coming from me. But this is different. Those SF people were the usual anti-freedom antitech luddites, but this is an excuse to promote my agenda:
End all TLDs!!!!
This sounds funny and/or sarcastic; I fully expect this time to be moderated into the floor. But ever since Ralph Nader's group started advocating whole new TLDs just for their pet causes, it has occurred to me that the whole notion of .org .net .whatever is silly.
It made sense in the old days, when you needed to know at a glance if you could access a site for regulatory reasons (ie certain mil domains accessing com domains, etc). But what purpose do they serve now?
More web addresses? It doesn't address the limited number of *.*.*.* addresses (there are other solutions for that). Most companies reserve all possible TLDs which could violate their trademarks-- add more TLDs and you won't even see more lawsuits-- the same squatters and the same trademark holders, just more names to fight over.
It hardly serves as an organizing principle. Is an American private school a .com, .edu, or .city.state.us? The latter is ruling of self-appointed Masters of American Domains at USC. They want coke to be coke.atlanta.us. Why? Really, I can't tell. I don't need to look at a web address to tell if I am at a gov't, private or network provider's homepage.
What we need aren't more top-level domains, but less. We have to drop this .com hack and type http://slashdot. Current dot-whatevers can keep their distinctions, but let's let EVERYTHING be a TLD.
End the TLD Tyranny. In your heart, you know I'm right.
As government institutions, they follow a number of arcane rules on procurement. So an Open Source alternative will have an uphill fight to gain acceptance. Some thoughts:
Most government agencies work off of bids for products. This usually doesn't match the business model of the OS corps, so it makes us look worse on paper. Also, the government is notoriously inept at signing seemingly good contracts with vendors of proprietary equipment. Of course, when the vendor's equipment saddles them with a transition cost of going to a competitor or Opens Source alternative, they again look at the options and decide that it is most cost effective to pay more for the proprietary product. This is akin to 'no money down', huge monthly payments.
Another problem is the idea of working with a traditional vendor vs. newer better ones. Government procurement 'experts' are not typically very up on modern technology, and typically have arcane rules designed around reality circa five-10 years ago. Mention a modern business model and they look at you like you just landed from mars.
Procurement, even at the local level, is usually a bureaucratic and time-consuming process. In the past, the reward was a huge captive market. But the economics of software makes not worth it except for large companies with large legal departments (like MS).
Finally, especially in school systems, it is nearly impossible for a company to deal with someone who has authority. Most times, the multiple steps in the process mean that you have to deal with conflicting agendas and have a product that is all things to all people.
Not to throw a wet blanket like this, but take a deep breath and ask around before trying to be a government contractor. Unless you are very lucky and clever, you'll get annihilated by it.
First Post!
I have heard from most of my friends in the Ivy League that those schools tend to be excellent grad schools, but mediocre undergrad schools. For that matter, compare their cs and engineering departments to MIT, Cal Tech, Purdue, CMU or Georgia Tech. They might be great at teaching philosophy, political 'science' or literature, but those aren't fields which lend themselves to quantitative analysis of how many innovations and innovators they produce (just a survey of 'reputation' isn't enough-- in these fields, where you are from is most of your reputation anyway!).
I think it is important, though, to remember that distance learning is great up to a point. Really, learning requires many things: supervised lab time, team projects, one on one instruction, etc. Distance learning is appropriate as a substitute for lectures, but there is much more to a college education than that. A school which uses distance learning resources (videotapes, internet texts, interactive homework/study aids, etc) to enhance education is great. One which tries to fit everything into a particular set of technologies which do not lend themselves to that kind of implementation is doomed to failure.
I'm not sure that there is anything you can do. First, in my experience, schools have very old computers- circa 1988. I learned to program on TRS-80s. I was told that Pascal was an ideal scientific language, and COBOL the language of business. They'd heard of C and C++, but considered it 'too difficult' (after COBOL, no less!) This is current as of the early 90's.
The old saying that 'those who can't do, teach' isn't usually true, I find. CS in public schools is one area where it is. If you want to be rewarded for doing a good job, not be bullied around by your union, get paid decently, not be micromanaged ridiculously by the state, and feel like you are actually accomplishing something, try the private sector.
Are there solutions? Yes, but they're out of the scope of your question. Your immediate problem is giving your teachers some clue about what has been going on in CS in the last 10-20 years. Which is virtually everything.
One possibility is to try to get the high school equivalent of a special topics class. Or a co-op program-- which some High Schools support. If these options aren't available, start a club. Especially in the Open Source field, you'll find programmers LOVE to talk.
If you want to push programming on the linux platform as the solution for your school, you'll have a tough sell ahead of you. Obvious selling points:
Free, works with hardware already procured and destined for trash.
Includes sample code (the source) and developement tools for dozens of languages (don't try to explain the differences between bash, Perl, HTML and C-- they won't get it.
Out of the box internet ready.
Procure it for a linux club first. If you have a teacher who knows linux already, you are in a very small minority. Just a machine or two for the geeks in your school. Do not use the word 'hacking' ever. EVER! Sure, it isn't cracking or illegal, but it raises a red flag. Present it as something to make and serve web pages with. Teachers like that and can get it quickly. Good computer teachers will appreciate the chance to dust off their C skills while watching normally uninterested students ooohing and ahhhing over the web page stuff.
If possible, make it part of something that is already budgetted (like programming classes or a club). Don't let them 'study' the problem-- that means they are waiting for you to graduate. Don't let them try to hire someone just for this-- they'll be cut out of the budget over the summer. Instead, keep it cheap, minimize teachers' time committments and keep a low profile.
It isn't the office suite monopoly that maintains MS' dominance. It's not even the OS monopoly. It's the combination of them that is so lethal. It's like that classic hack where you get two intruder processes running as root. Whenever the sysadmin kills one of them, the other immediately restarts it. The only way to kill them is to kill them both simultaneously (not as easy as it sounds) or reboot. The two together are orders of magnitude stronger than either alone.
I agree with almost everything you say... which is why, if MS is smart, they will port Office to Linux. Here's my scenario:
First, MS continues badmouthing Linux, but changes its strategy. Current efforts to brand it as unstable and insecure are failing. MS can't take the next likely option: claim that Linux has poor support options, because MS's customer support is legendarily bad. The place to hit Linux is where it has an acknowledged weakness: the GUI.
Attack Linux as a poor desktop solution whenever possible. Win2K purposely blurs the distinction between desktop and server; keep doing this and market W2k as the answer to all needs at once.
When Linux reaches 10% market share, release MS Office for Linux. Don't implement all the features. Do a poor port, similar to the Mac version, that has fewer features, clashes with Linux's interface, and is much slower-- especially in places where a user will be frustrated. Make documents look poorer in Linux than in W2k.
Then show the result. StarOffice isn't a mature product, IMHO (it is good, but still needs a great deal of work). WordPerfect 8 is in a similar position (I've been using it for 6 months for windows, and it is still slow and clunky). Well-meaning Linux ompanies eager to expand market share will promise that MS Office runs on Linux, without warning of the drawbacks. Companies will ask for Office, to ease their transitions. Remember, the market is saturated. Offices that want Linux are having to switch from Windows, and migrating everything your office does on computers all at once is very difficult.
Horror stories will emerge. Linux will have failed to deliver. Poor GUI will be blamed, because it only takes a few bad anecdotes to kill a product. People will say "it's good for web, file and print servers, but don't use it with an office suite." And that will be that.
If your technology can't keep its promises, then that's it. Managers won't wait for patches, and they won't wait for upgrades. If they've just switched operating systems and had a disaster, there is no way they will 'fix' it by switching office suites, too. They will blame Linux (not Office for Linux) and switch back. And tell all their friends what a disaster it was. This is what we call a poison pill.
So let's hope and pray that MS doesn't do this, or that if it does, that we as Linux advocates have the patience and wisdom to handle it carefully. Remember, be careful what you wish for. I'd say to sysadmins that if it happens, that you give it a long hard look before recommending to your corporation-- then recommend StarOffice or Corel Suite 8, or whatever open source equivalent is out there.
we don't allow phone users or dirver's license holders to remain anonymous, although their records are kepot private...not sure why online identities must be different.
We have public phones, don't we? And tone blocking against caller id. Regarding driver's licenses, this is because a driver poses a physical hazard to other citizens. We don't have a license to talk.
I looked at your user info and note that, like me, you include no contact or identifying information. This isn't a bad thing! It encourages free exchange, and there are some legitimate things that are better said anonymously. Of course, it could be said that the government is a 'trusted third party' that would never ever look, without proper search warrants. Of course, 400 FBI files of the administration's political opponents were supposed to be confidential, too. There is no difference, in the end between 'trusted party access' and 'uncontrolled access' when it comes to personal information. Trusted by who? When you hold the information already, the agency need only trust itself-- this smacks of key escrow.
Government shouldn't be dictating to individuals how our technology should work. If the technology that works best for people happens to also identify them, well, what can you do? Private privacy services (such as anonymous remailers) will emerge, and privacy will have a cost.
To argue for a government-mandated internet identity tracking system because people shouldn't have anything to hide is wrong. The burden is on the government to establish a need to know, not on us to foot the bill (in lower performance, higher taxes or ISP fees, etc) to satisfy the government's idle curiosity.
If you really want to help the Open Source community, talk to a computer teacher in a local middle school/high school. Find out how it works and what effect your donation to that department would have. Then help them out-- directly through funds or (better!) indirectly through computers and time spent helping kids learn to code.
I'll bet this even improves your own skills. It will do more than giving to any organization- even the EFF (another good cause).
My read of the press release is that the links are created dynamically and automatically. Keep in mind, this may be marketting-garbled mush, but it sounds like they are using a daemon to dynamically assign symlinks whereever duplication is found.
They claim this will save 80%-90% hard drive space. I'm very skeptical of that, even if it is all they are claiming it is.
Is there a patent? Mayhaps someone can write a filesystem which implements this. I'm really doubtful that this is anything that will more than marginally affect effective hard drive capacities, and at some cost in overhead, but it might be worth playing with on a UNIX.
Simple, take at an idiot and a genius (for the sake of the argument, we'll name the idiot Dave and the genius Brian-- from KODT, no real people impugned). Dave and Brian will have to sort the phone book into alphabetical order. For their convenience, the book is available in HTML format (!) The winner get's Dave's Hackmaster+12.
Ready? GO!
Dave's sweating bullets, playing with the file, pacing, playing with his mouse, nibbling on his fingernails. To no avail! He's struggling to cut and paste it in Word, but Word didn't convert the HTML right, so it looks like a Jon Katz article.
Brian is sitting back and sipping lightly on his mint julep, content as a cow chewing hay and prozac. He knew that the phone book is already in alphabetical order.
Software is smart, hardware is fast. By the same token, intelligence represents efficiency, effort is measured by brain activity.
That's why my dream team would be some of the slackest people on earth, such as me. Surfers, hippies, UNIX gurus and top physicists-- the first two don't even try, and the second two use minimal brain power to accomplish the most. Ideally, these are SubGenius types who don't get into idea fugues.
The cynicism of the American citizen kinda dooms the whole process. A lot of us look at the state of affairs and take it as a given, thus losing the fight before the battle is even engaged.
Thank you so much for writing this. I read the 'analysis' of how to oppose this bill, and couldn't believe my eyes. Much of this is just cynical posturing. "Deep down he isn't that evil"?!
How do you hear about a good piece of software? By reading the source code in detail, or by reading a summary, listening to friends who tried it, and reading about it on mailing lists and newsgroups. And trying it out, of course. Well, a state legislator can't test legislation, and while many do read the bills, they are long and complicated-- and you don't have more than one or two people to answer the phone and help you handle the legal (not legislative) stuff. So you have to rely on people you have worked with and usually agree with, reading the summary, and checking with groups that you usually support.
They want to hear from their constituents- as the article pointed out- but if you go in with the attitude that the guy is ignorant or a crook, you won't get anywhere. Especially since he is probably neither-- how much do YOU know about education, labor, healthcare, law enforcement, disaster relief, small business, taxes, housing, agriculture, zoning and development and the environment? Name three bills that aren't media-darling social issues if you still think there isn't a torrent of information to stay on top of. So give him the information he needs to do his job, in a form which he can quickly and easily digest and use (paper is better-- government computer connectivity is pretty weak). Treat him as an ally who is having the wool pulled over his eyes.
Of course, if we were all voting regularly, volunteering in campaigns, and supporting our local candidates with our time, work, and specialist information, we wouldn't be in this situation. Your party should be having or have already had its precinct convention-- this isn't usually more than about 25 people who come together to help your party's candidates win. Don't have a party? Well, call up a county commissioner/freeholder/whatever, or your state rep/senator-- if you really mean it when you say you pick each on their personal merits, there is bound to be one of yours who you like. Offer to help them out. Not in exchange for some vote or something-- if they are your kind of guy, they will already be voting your way anyway. Help them to do what they are trying to do. Because without the help of volunteers, they won't be able to get anything done.
Of course, it is much easier to say that they are all crooks, and to self-righteously turn your nose up at the whole process. It saves plenty of time, feels great, and marks you as sophisticated and media savvy. And, of course, wrong. Helping a party/candidate is hard work-- and takes up valuable role-playing time (I know my Werewolf game suffered from volunteering in a campaign). Compromising on some issues so that other things you want will happen is uncomfortable. Dealing with people you don't always agree with all the time isn't easy. And finally, feeling like you are getting nowhere because the other side always seems to have more votes/media attention/money/whatever is pretty terrible. But in a democracy, that is how you get things done. Big national political figures were once just like the local guy you are helping-- and who would you trust, some guy who wants something out of you, or someone who supported you before you were 'important' and who has been on your side for years?
Sound a little like and Open Source project? It should, because it works exactly the same way. Your best bet for fighting UCITA is to do it with respect and courtesy-- remember, you are the public's ally. Don't demonize your opponents, just talk about the legislation.
(just say "I used a one-time pad, which I will not supply. Instead I will provide you with a plaintext version of it.") That seems to me to remove all of the teeth from this otherwise god-awful law.. am I mistaken?
(IMHO, IANAL) Yes! Because, place yourself as a law enforcement agency, and ask yourself, "how can I enforce this law". The answer isn't and can't be, "Well, I guess we don't." Instead, they will have to be more invasive and confrontational to make certain that you aren't dancing around it.
This is a terrible development-- much worse than the cameras and monitoring devices that the British are also implementing to monitor their citizen's activities. We have the potential to live in a world where virtually everything we do is subject to observation, review and regulation-- where we become terminals and peripherals to a central social control. Or this technology will let us be distributed, parallel, and at liberty to make our own decisions.
Massive parallelism, neural networks, distributed systems, genetic algorithms, Open Source development models-- my feeling is that these technologies should be the model for our social system-- a world of individuals with as much of the decision-making offloaded to the 'client side' as possible. (Excuse me if I am stretching the metaphor too far, but I think it still holds.)
In a parliamentary system, you have less direct say over your government, since you have to deal with a party rather than a person. But you still should fight this tooth and nail. Once the burden of proof is on you to prove that you aren't hiding something, you'll never be able to escape that.
I don't think there is anything wrong with someone mailing a games developer asking for a Linux port and from what the Loki bloke said he actually said that "mailbombing" was a bad idea.
I think he means by mailbombing the tons of emails they are getting from linux people.
They have a certain number of people who they employ to process and answer mail. So if they get flooded it detracts from their other capabilities and costs them money-- the opposite of what we want for Loki.
A lesser problem is that we don't want to end up with the reputation of Amiga users. They were pushy, opinionated and loud. Businesses sometimes didn't support Amiga because they didn't want to deal with that kind of irate customer. So before you fire off an angry or critical email at a software company you overall like, try to remember a time when you might have been working behind a cash register, and how you felt dealing with irate or just loud customers.
The nice thing about Open Source for a business is that their customers happily improve their products for them, strengthening stability, improving the interface, and adding features. So we're the best customers in the industry, and should stay that way.
I do want (desperately) to run StarCraft on my Linux box, so I suggest heavy use of Web petitions to show them in a less bandwidth hungry manner our longing for combat.
I'd say it is your company's to sell. I mean, this isn't one of 500 domain names scooped up to block a legitimate organization from registering it. If it was bought (or better yet, actually used) in good faith, then I say sell it.
IANAL, but I do think that the law is geared towards allowing your name to be your property if there is a good faith intent to use it, rather than speculating or ransoming good names.
I am not a Christian, and I have noticed the same thing. It bothers me to see this kind of intolerance on /., not the least of which is because I wonder when he will get around to my religion. Perhaps we have the same religion-- if so, I ask him to show the respect which he would like shown to him. I'm not sure why he has such an attitude, however, I think I might know the answer.
Katz is trying very hard to become a Big Media Celebrity. That's why he recycles what the other Big Media Celebrities say. Pundits don't usually have to have degrees in computer science-- they only rarely know how to use MS FrontPage (good for you, Jon!). But they usually have to be good writers.
Jon Katz is not a good writer. He is mediocre by professional standards. His writing is usually grammatically correct, but lacks polish and good organization. It isn't very concise, but that's a sin that you can find everywhere-- I won't hold that against him. What I will hold against him is at he is recycling the same MarcuseLite that has been circulating in lit crit circles for three decades.
There are plenty of writers whose opinions I find regular fault with. But I can at least respect their innovation, style, or their personal perspective. Katz is, frankly, a hack, and SlashDot can do better.
My impression has been that Slashdot keeps him on payroll because of activity logs. The idea is that people are challenged, provoked to discussion, outraged. But that isn't the case. Katz bothers people because he is so mediocre, and his features are given a special place here. People are frustrated that someone so obviously a wannabe is taking up bandwidth and money that could be going to ESR or RMS or, frankly, virtually any writer who can turn out competent copy-- as opposed to 'open source movie reviews'.
Slashdot needs a new columnist. They might be someone we agree with, whose columns eloquently distill our feelings as a community. Or they might be someone who we disagree with, who challenges us and gives us new feelings and perspectives. Better yet, they might at times do either. But they have to be someone we can respect, someone who may outrage us at times, but also demonstrates eloquence, intelligence and understanding of our community.