These things are things I've felt for quite some time, and have articulated in various clumsy ways. It's so nice to see that someone else really understands what I'm thinking, and has packaged it up into such well written words.
On a mailing list about the evils of Microsoft and the antitrust trial, I complained that I was tired of being a consumer, and that I felt somewhat ambivalent towards both the DOJ and Microsoft because they both treated me like one. Nobody got what I meant. The website (and I would assume the book) explain it perfectly.
We're setting up a corporate intranet. I want to be sure that the people in my department have personal space to publish things on their own internal web pages. People were afraid of the idea, and didn't understand why it was so important to me. Again, the site explains it perfectly.
There are numerous other thoughts I've had on various aspects of how our culture is organized that this site expresses well too. I'm very impressed and will buy the book today. Thank you Slashdot for pointing it out!
I don't disagree that SCO makes a decent OS, but when SCO bought UnixWare, I dumped it fast, and here's why:
Price jumped from $150 to $700.
I started having all kinds of problems compiling my Open Source software because of the funky XOPEN and POSIX ifdefs all over the system header files that were nearly impossible to get right.
When the new version of UnixWare came out, and my SCSI Zip and Jaz drives stopped working, the SCO tech's response was "You haven't found a bug because those devices aren't in our supported hardware list.". I realized that if I had complained on a Linux newsgroup, the problem would've been fixed in hours.
SCO shot themselves in the foot with their stupid pricing and belief that only large customers used their product and/or deserved decent support. I don't care how good or bad their products are, I expected them to go down the tubes.
Re:Ever try dowloading high encryption software?
on
Geographic Screening
·
· Score: 1
That's not what he's doing at all. Where on earth do you get that impression? He only mentions Canada three times in the entire, and then mainly to identify the geographic location of the company involved. The one time he mentions Canadian law, he says that it's freer than American law.
The scary thing is you uttered this utter stupidity and were moderated up to a 5. What kind of stupid people moderate Slashdot. This is utterly ridiculous.
You are saying that Unix does not allow one to create a temporary file anywhere other than where TEMP indicates? I wasn't aware of this, how restrictive.
If an application developer ignores procedure, that is hardly an OS problem. How would you react if I said that Linux sucks because I installed an app that keeps all of its files and libraries in/etc?
I have two answers to this. One, UNIX programs often can't create temp files anywhere other than where they're supposed to, or in the user's directory. Everything else is unwriteable by the program.
Windows has a tradition of applications assuming they have the local hard-drive to themselves. Application writers for Windows often write as if this were the case. As you point out, this IS largely an application problem, and some of the most applications that most flagrantly ignore the TEMP variable are Microsoft's own. It's difficult to maintain a convention when the vendor's of the operating system itself don't seem to be able to.
FYI backward compatibility is a good thing. I don't mind if older filesystems (FAT) are supported. I certainly have no problem whatsoever using filenames of any length.
This is largely an OS maturity issue. In the dark ages, UNIX had a 14 character filename problem because directory entries were 16 bytes apiece (2 bytes for i-node #) on older UNIX filesystems. The last time I saw any code that had accomodations for this was about 5 years ago. I assume that 8.3 programs will also eventually disappear.
This is a great advantage. As a programmer, I should not have to worry about whether someone deletes my currently open file from under me. If I were using direct disk writes, then this would be disastrous. Many system processes (on any OS I'm sure) also maintain open files. I certainly wouldn't want to disrupt those.
However, it is sometimes desirable to do this anyway, so Win2K has taken steps so that new DLLs can be installed without having to reboot or close the apps using them.
This demonstrates a lack of understanding on your part. I can delete a file out from under a running process, and the process won't be affected unless it closes the file. I often use this technique when installing new copies of an executable. After being burned by having 'cp' write over my currently executing shell with a new image, and having my shell core-dump for it, I now have a policy of removing executables before I install the new one. All the currently running copies of the old executable continue running just fine after it's removed because it isn't actually removed from the filesystem until the last thing that has it open closes it.
I consider the fact that Windows doesn't do this to be a legacy filesystem design problem that should've been revisited and fixed in NT. It's strongly reminiscent of DOS, which had a very simplistic view of what a filesystem was for. The W2K solution to this problem is a bletcherous wart. I didn't know it did this, and was most disgusted when I learned of it.
And I have to agree with the author's overall general assessment. It's kind of annoying that indentation matters, but since I've always been scrupulous about that in the past, it doesn't really affect me much. At least, not until I have a line longer than fits on the editor window.:-)
As for Python's consistency... I find that to be very nice. I find perl's utter lack thereof to be highly annoying. I don't care what Larry Wall says about the problem domain, computer languages are supposed to be very precise and clean because, ultimately, what they do is describe a very precise and detailed set of tiny instructions for doing something. Of course, I'm something of a hyprocrite because I use (and sort of like) C++ regularily, but hey...:-)
Also, Python was designed with introspection and reflection in mind. This makes the whole mechanism by which scopes and identifiers are actually handled much more transparent and easier to work with than perl's. I'm designing something that sets up execution environments (complete with special namespaces) for things to operate in. I don't know how I'd even think about going about this with perl. From hints I've gotten, I suspect it's possible, but I'm betting it's a huge pain.
The main thing they are upset about is the destruction of their regional coding scheme. This allows them to sell movies in Britain for double the price of the US ones. It also allows them to make sure a DVD isn't available in a particular country until the movie has come out in that country. A DVD player in Britain won't play American DVDs.
I fought the building of Microsoft every legal way I knew how. It was built anyway. The vast majority of people I talk to have no idea why its existence is a bad idea. Even after I explain it, they usually sort of think of me as some likeable crackpot.
I find this lack of opinion strange since Microsoft controls so many aspects of their day to day life. What they do at work is largely controlled by Microsoft applications. The assumptions Microsoft makes about how people work become reality because people use their applications. But, that fact just doesn't seem to impact on people.
Similarily with the DVD/CSS battle. I don't know how to explain the deadly serious implications of this battle to people who don't understand. What's at stake is the ability to build technology the way we want it. If it were some corporation deciding what aspects of genetic research were moral to pursue, people would be screaming. This is only slightly less important, but people haven't a clue.
If Jon Katz wish to talk about this, let him. We need as many voices screaming as loudly as possible about this as possible. The DVD thing alone gives me the heebie jeebie's.
Perhaps you should look at yourself to find the reason non-liberal Christains are so widely despised online. I find the moralistic hypocrisy expressed in this post to be repugnant and distasteful in the extreme.
Actually, the reordering to avoid register hits should help with translating to VLIW. Every VLIW molecule has to have instructions that are independent of eachother. It should be easier to collect a bunch of these instructions together from a heavily optimized RISC program than it would be for CISC.
CISCs emulation advantage of each instruction doing a lot will be what helps optimization for those instructions. A different reason than RISC.
Hmmm... VLIW instruction sets actually have the potential to seriously outperform RISC. A VLIW architecture essentially makes the processor 'multithreaded'. All the instructions in a word are executed at the same time, and if two of them affect the same registers, well, the behavior is undefined.
This is in contrast to RISC, in which, in some sense, all the instructions in the pipeline are being executed simultaneously, but dependencies between registers and pipelines stalls from branches are handled by lots of logic that heats things up and slows things down.
Of course, writing code that always has every instruction slot in your VLIW filled with an instruction is very hard. It's even very hard to write a compiler that will do it for you. VLIW actually very strongly resembles microcode.
So, I'm not sure if your evaluation is totally on base here.
Re:Cub and Rainbow Foods...
on
AOL Nation
·
· Score: 1
No, it's not the same. It's more like if Campbell's Soup bought Burlington Northern (a railroad company), Cub, and Rainbow Foods (two grocery stores). That's a closer analagous merging.
This merger disturbs me for vague reasons I can't put my finger on, but could be put under the rubric of 'Corporate Feudalism'.
It disturbs me to see a number of large corporations who are generally in control of a fair number of things, and who have enough money to gain the ear of government simply by blitz campaigning without even resorting lobbyists or shady campaign finance deals.
Large corporations and government make an unpleasant mixture. Both are big enough to affect the other, and the centralization inherent in a large corporation makes them easier to control. Witness the fact that the government would much rather make US-West try to censor what goes over it's lines than try to censor a million people sending e-mail.
Also, from a copyright standpoint... The more smaller players there are, the looser copyright laws will be. It's more beneficial for a large number of smaller players to share information than a few, big players.
This isn't IBMs problem. Customers still demand SNA. In fact, it's considered a huge change in the mainframe industry that versions of MVS that don't have TCP/IP are considered obsolete and unsupported by IBM.
SNA also has a few advantages over TCP/IP.
With TCP/IP, you have to overprovision your network by a fairly large margin in order to handle peak loads. The way SNA works, those peaks don't happen, and so you don't have to overprovision as heavily.
Also, for similar reasons, response times are more predictable with SNA than TCP/IP, so it's more suited to certain kinds of real-time response applications, such as airline ticket sales.:-)
Not that I'm a big booster for SNA. It's a stupidly designed protocol that deserves a quick death, but it isn't going to happen anytime soon.
I have a webpage with some of my thoughts on this.
At one time, Multitech made modems that understood the UUCP G protocol, which is an XMODEM like response for every packet protocol. Multitechs would recognize when a UUCP conversation was happening, and start sending response packets back to the server, knowing that the modem's error correction would ensure the packet would be delivered reliably. This improved things dramatically because you only had the latency induced by your serial link, and not the communication over the phone lines, and the other computer's serial link.
Something similar could be done with PPP. In fact, I bet the PPP headers could even be stripped off by one modem and added back in by the other. Also, once USB modems start happening, the latency induced by serial communications will be cut dramatically.
My only worry is that a lot of modem software expects to talk to serial hardware, and so USB modems won't be as popular as they should be for this reason.
Anyway, read my webpage for more details, as well as some ideas for improving IP routing of time sensitive data without using QoS.
At one time, Multitech made modems that understood the UUCP G protocol, which is an XMODEM like response for every packet protocol. Multitechs would recognize when a UUCP conversation was happening, and start sending response packets back to the server, knowing that the modem's error correction would ensure the packet would be delivered reliably. This improved things dramatically because you only had the latency induced by your serial link, and not the communication over the phone lines, and the other computer's serial link.
Something similar could be done with PPP. In fact, I bet the PPP headers could even be stripped off by one modem and added back in by the other. Also, once USB modems start happening, the latency induced by serial communications will be cut dramatically.
My only worry is that a lot of modem software expects to talk to serial hardware, and so USB modems won't be as popular as they should be for this reason.
Anyway, read my webpage for more details, as well as some ideas for improving IP routing of time sensitive data without using QoS.
I think of it as a form of vigilante justice. Sometimes, that's the only kind of justice you can get, especially when your opponent has billions of dollars to spend on lawyers.
As for shooting Bill Gates... I don't think I would, even if I were allowed. However I count up the damages inflicted on me, none of them include 'loss of life or limb'. Even the strictest of rules, the eye for an eye rule, dictates that such an action would be unjust.
I think the person who used corporate speak justification had it exactly right. When corporations learn to play by rules of morality as well as the written ones, then I will also play by those rules in dealing with them.
I have half a suspicion that all these people making all these remarks about faster not being better are secretly peaved that AMD is beating the pants off of Intel.:-)
An Athlon is about 10% faster than a Pentium III of equivalent speed, and they will both benefit from motherboard and bus technology improvements. I'm very pleased about this. Competition is good.
As far as desktop apps are concerned, this isn't a big deal, especially for Linux. But for games, or heavy development like compiling large source trees, it's very nice. Even with all the speed bottlenecks in a system, a faster CPU does make a difference.
The people who reply to this with responses like "What could that $25 milion have done that's more useful?" are asking for central planning.
Who's to say what the most useful expenditure of money is? Some person sitting on a pedestal somewhere making pronouncements about what should and shouldn't be done? Or, would you rather have the masses of humanity decide by voting?
I say both approaches are wrong because they both presume to say what someone else should do with their money.
If some investors want to throw money after a crank, let them! So, there's a 99.99% chance it's a total fraud, it's their money. Besides, what if it isn't?
Humanity advances by those among us who are willing to take risks. I've often heard people comment, with regards to food, "Whoever figured out this stuff was edible?", and the corallary, "Whoever figured out that was poisonous?". Well, it was because someone was hungry or stupid enough to take a risk, and now all of us benefit from the knowledge gained.
I got a Thawte certificate because their website promised that if laws ever changed in the country their database was in such that they had to divulge its contents, they were prepared to move their database within hours. I also got it because of their support for PGP public key signing.
Now, they're being bought out by Verisign who I have no such trust in, and who isn't, IMHO, a good member of the community. I'm not at all happy about this.
I think I'm going to ask the my Thawte certificate be revoked, and all my data wiped from their databases. I do NOT trust Verisign at all. They seem more like opportunists out to make a buck than people who really understand the paranoid world of security.
I already started boycotting Amazon, and getting my friends to do so. I find their patent on '1-click shopping' to be utterly ridiculous, and I told them so in e-mail.
I also search for books on Amazon and buy them elsewhere. If they weren't pursuing eforcement of this silly patent, I wouldn't bother, and, in fact, would buy from them because I like the way things work on their site.
This isn't a very catchy name. I prefer 'corporate feudalism'. I think it much more correctly captures the essence of the problem, and is reminiscent of a form of government we understand the evils of.
As far as Katz is concerned, I always think he's being rather nieve (sp?) in his estimations of the power of the Net. I stoped reading Wired when their glowing descriptions of technological utopia began to wear on me.
Not that I want him to stop seeing his writing. He always makes me think, and the little doses of tech utopia here are easier to stomache than the steady diet that was Wired.
Slashdot Mirror
These things are things I've felt for quite some time, and have articulated in various clumsy ways. It's so nice to see that someone else really understands what I'm thinking, and has packaged it up into such well written words.
On a mailing list about the evils of Microsoft and the antitrust trial, I complained that I was tired of being a consumer, and that I felt somewhat ambivalent towards both the DOJ and Microsoft because they both treated me like one. Nobody got what I meant. The website (and I would assume the book) explain it perfectly.
We're setting up a corporate intranet. I want to be sure that the people in my department have personal space to publish things on their own internal web pages. People were afraid of the idea, and didn't understand why it was so important to me. Again, the site explains it perfectly.
There are numerous other thoughts I've had on various aspects of how our culture is organized that this site expresses well too. I'm very impressed and will buy the book today. Thank you Slashdot for pointing it out!
I don't disagree that SCO makes a decent OS, but when SCO bought UnixWare, I dumped it fast, and here's why:
SCO shot themselves in the foot with their stupid pricing and belief that only large customers used their product and/or deserved decent support. I don't care how good or bad their products are, I expected them to go down the tubes.
That's not what he's doing at all. Where on earth do you get that impression? He only mentions Canada three times in the entire, and then mainly to identify the geographic location of the company involved. The one time he mentions Canadian law, he says that it's freer than American law.
The scary thing is you uttered this utter stupidity and were moderated up to a 5. What kind of stupid people moderate Slashdot. This is utterly ridiculous.
You are saying that Unix does not allow one to create a temporary file anywhere other than where TEMP indicates? I wasn't aware of this, how restrictive.
If an application developer ignores procedure, that is hardly an OS problem. How would you react if I said that Linux sucks because I installed an app that keeps all of its files and libraries in /etc?
I have two answers to this. One, UNIX programs often can't create temp files anywhere other than where they're supposed to, or in the user's directory. Everything else is unwriteable by the program.
Windows has a tradition of applications assuming they have the local hard-drive to themselves. Application writers for Windows often write as if this were the case. As you point out, this IS largely an application problem, and some of the most applications that most flagrantly ignore the TEMP variable are Microsoft's own. It's difficult to maintain a convention when the vendor's of the operating system itself don't seem to be able to.
FYI backward compatibility is a good thing. I don't mind if older filesystems (FAT) are supported. I certainly have no problem whatsoever using filenames of any length.
This is largely an OS maturity issue. In the dark ages, UNIX had a 14 character filename problem because directory entries were 16 bytes apiece (2 bytes for i-node #) on older UNIX filesystems. The last time I saw any code that had accomodations for this was about 5 years ago. I assume that 8.3 programs will also eventually disappear.
This is a great advantage. As a programmer, I should not have to worry about whether someone deletes my currently open file from under me. If I were using direct disk writes, then this would be disastrous. Many system processes (on any OS I'm sure) also maintain open files. I certainly wouldn't want to disrupt those.
However, it is sometimes desirable to do this anyway, so Win2K has taken steps so that new DLLs can be installed without having to reboot or close the apps using them.
This demonstrates a lack of understanding on your part. I can delete a file out from under a running process, and the process won't be affected unless it closes the file. I often use this technique when installing new copies of an executable. After being burned by having 'cp' write over my currently executing shell with a new image, and having my shell core-dump for it, I now have a policy of removing executables before I install the new one. All the currently running copies of the old executable continue running just fine after it's removed because it isn't actually removed from the filesystem until the last thing that has it open closes it.
I consider the fact that Windows doesn't do this to be a legacy filesystem design problem that should've been revisited and fixed in NT. It's strongly reminiscent of DOS, which had a very simplistic view of what a filesystem was for. The W2K solution to this problem is a bletcherous wart. I didn't know it did this, and was most disgusted when I learned of it.
And I have to agree with the author's overall general assessment. It's kind of annoying that indentation matters, but since I've always been scrupulous about that in the past, it doesn't really affect me much. At least, not until I have a line longer than fits on the editor window. :-)
As for Python's consistency... I find that to be very nice. I find perl's utter lack thereof to be highly annoying. I don't care what Larry Wall says about the problem domain, computer languages are supposed to be very precise and clean because, ultimately, what they do is describe a very precise and detailed set of tiny instructions for doing something. Of course, I'm something of a hyprocrite because I use (and sort of like) C++ regularily, but hey... :-)
Also, Python was designed with introspection and reflection in mind. This makes the whole mechanism by which scopes and identifiers are actually handled much more transparent and easier to work with than perl's. I'm designing something that sets up execution environments (complete with special namespaces) for things to operate in. I don't know how I'd even think about going about this with perl. From hints I've gotten, I suspect it's possible, but I'm betting it's a huge pain.
*grin*
Sounds like a good handle. Why don't you register under it and stop being an AC? :-)
The main thing they are upset about is the destruction of their regional coding scheme. This allows them to sell movies in Britain for double the price of the US ones. It also allows them to make sure a DVD isn't available in a particular country until the movie has come out in that country. A DVD player in Britain won't play American DVDs.
I fought the building of Microsoft every legal way I knew how. It was built anyway. The vast majority of people I talk to have no idea why its existence is a bad idea. Even after I explain it, they usually sort of think of me as some likeable crackpot.
I find this lack of opinion strange since Microsoft controls so many aspects of their day to day life. What they do at work is largely controlled by Microsoft applications. The assumptions Microsoft makes about how people work become reality because people use their applications. But, that fact just doesn't seem to impact on people.
Similarily with the DVD/CSS battle. I don't know how to explain the deadly serious implications of this battle to people who don't understand. What's at stake is the ability to build technology the way we want it. If it were some corporation deciding what aspects of genetic research were moral to pursue, people would be screaming. This is only slightly less important, but people haven't a clue.
If Jon Katz wish to talk about this, let him. We need as many voices screaming as loudly as possible about this as possible. The DVD thing alone gives me the heebie jeebie's.
Perhaps you should look at yourself to find the reason non-liberal Christains are so widely despised online. I find the moralistic hypocrisy expressed in this post to be repugnant and distasteful in the extreme.
Actually, the reordering to avoid register hits should help with translating to VLIW. Every VLIW molecule has to have instructions that are independent of eachother. It should be easier to collect a bunch of these instructions together from a heavily optimized RISC program than it would be for CISC.
CISCs emulation advantage of each instruction doing a lot will be what helps optimization for those instructions. A different reason than RISC.
Hmmm... VLIW instruction sets actually have the potential to seriously outperform RISC. A VLIW architecture essentially makes the processor 'multithreaded'. All the instructions in a word are executed at the same time, and if two of them affect the same registers, well, the behavior is undefined.
This is in contrast to RISC, in which, in some sense, all the instructions in the pipeline are being executed simultaneously, but dependencies between registers and pipelines stalls from branches are handled by lots of logic that heats things up and slows things down.
Of course, writing code that always has every instruction slot in your VLIW filled with an instruction is very hard. It's even very hard to write a compiler that will do it for you. VLIW actually very strongly resembles microcode.
So, I'm not sure if your evaluation is totally on base here.
Yep. :-)
No, it's not the same. It's more like if Campbell's Soup bought Burlington Northern (a railroad company), Cub, and Rainbow Foods (two grocery stores). That's a closer analagous merging.
This merger disturbs me for vague reasons I can't put my finger on, but could be put under the rubric of 'Corporate Feudalism'.
It disturbs me to see a number of large corporations who are generally in control of a fair number of things, and who have enough money to gain the ear of government simply by blitz campaigning without even resorting lobbyists or shady campaign finance deals.
Large corporations and government make an unpleasant mixture. Both are big enough to affect the other, and the centralization inherent in a large corporation makes them easier to control. Witness the fact that the government would much rather make US-West try to censor what goes over it's lines than try to censor a million people sending e-mail.
Also, from a copyright standpoint... The more smaller players there are, the looser copyright laws will be. It's more beneficial for a large number of smaller players to share information than a few, big players.
I don't know. All this bigness is scary.
This isn't IBMs problem. Customers still demand SNA. In fact, it's considered a huge change in the mainframe industry that versions of MVS that don't have TCP/IP are considered obsolete and unsupported by IBM.
SNA also has a few advantages over TCP/IP.
With TCP/IP, you have to overprovision your network by a fairly large margin in order to handle peak loads. The way SNA works, those peaks don't happen, and so you don't have to overprovision as heavily.
Also, for similar reasons, response times are more predictable with SNA than TCP/IP, so it's more suited to certain kinds of real-time response applications, such as airline ticket sales. :-)
Not that I'm a big booster for SNA. It's a stupidly designed protocol that deserves a quick death, but it isn't going to happen anytime soon.
I have a webpage with some of my thoughts on this.
At one time, Multitech made modems that understood the UUCP G protocol, which is an XMODEM like response for every packet protocol. Multitechs would recognize when a UUCP conversation was happening, and start sending response packets back to the server, knowing that the modem's error correction would ensure the packet would be delivered reliably. This improved things dramatically because you only had the latency induced by your serial link, and not the communication over the phone lines, and the other computer's serial link.
Something similar could be done with PPP. In fact, I bet the PPP headers could even be stripped off by one modem and added back in by the other. Also, once USB modems start happening, the latency induced by serial communications will be cut dramatically.
My only worry is that a lot of modem software expects to talk to serial hardware, and so USB modems won't be as popular as they should be for this reason.
Anyway, read my webpage for more details, as well as some ideas for improving IP routing of time sensitive data without using QoS.
I have a webpage
with some of my thoughts on this.At one time, Multitech made modems that understood the UUCP G protocol, which is an XMODEM like response for every packet protocol. Multitechs would recognize when a UUCP conversation was happening, and start sending response packets back to the server, knowing that the modem's error correction would ensure the packet would be delivered reliably. This improved things dramatically because you only had the latency induced by your serial link, and not the communication over the phone lines, and the other computer's serial link.
Something similar could be done with PPP. In fact, I bet the PPP headers could even be stripped off by one modem and added back in by the other. Also, once USB modems start happening, the latency induced by serial communications will be cut dramatically.
My only worry is that a lot of modem software expects to talk to serial hardware, and so USB modems won't be as popular as they should be for this reason.
Anyway, read my webpage for more details, as well as some ideas for improving IP routing of time sensitive data without using QoS.
I think of it as a form of vigilante justice. Sometimes, that's the only kind of justice you can get, especially when your opponent has billions of dollars to spend on lawyers.
As for shooting Bill Gates... I don't think I would, even if I were allowed. However I count up the damages inflicted on me, none of them include 'loss of life or limb'. Even the strictest of rules, the eye for an eye rule, dictates that such an action would be unjust.
I think the person who used corporate speak justification had it exactly right. When corporations learn to play by rules of morality as well as the written ones, then I will also play by those rules in dealing with them.
I have half a suspicion that all these people making all these remarks about faster not being better are secretly peaved that AMD is beating the pants off of Intel. :-)
An Athlon is about 10% faster than a Pentium III of equivalent speed, and they will both benefit from motherboard and bus technology improvements. I'm very pleased about this. Competition is good.
As far as desktop apps are concerned, this isn't a big deal, especially for Linux. But for games, or heavy development like compiling large source trees, it's very nice. Even with all the speed bottlenecks in a system, a faster CPU does make a difference.
You just got into it. :-)
The next century technically doesn't start until 2001. :-)
This movie is great! Your attempt to form a preconception based on a few sketchy previews is misguided, and (IMHO) leads you to the wrong conclusion.
I wasn't expecting anything anywhere near as good as what I saw. I've never heard the audience laugh so hard at a movie.
The people who reply to this with responses like "What could that $25 milion have done that's more useful?" are asking for central planning.
Who's to say what the most useful expenditure of money is? Some person sitting on a pedestal somewhere making pronouncements about what should and shouldn't be done? Or, would you rather have the masses of humanity decide by voting?
I say both approaches are wrong because they both presume to say what someone else should do with their money.
If some investors want to throw money after a crank, let them! So, there's a 99.99% chance it's a total fraud, it's their money. Besides, what if it isn't?
Humanity advances by those among us who are willing to take risks. I've often heard people comment, with regards to food, "Whoever figured out this stuff was edible?", and the corallary, "Whoever figured out that was poisonous?". Well, it was because someone was hungry or stupid enough to take a risk, and now all of us benefit from the knowledge gained.
I got a Thawte certificate because their website promised that if laws ever changed in the country their database was in such that they had to divulge its contents, they were prepared to move their database within hours. I also got it because of their support for PGP public key signing.
Now, they're being bought out by Verisign who I have no such trust in, and who isn't, IMHO, a good member of the community. I'm not at all happy about this.
I think I'm going to ask the my Thawte certificate be revoked, and all my data wiped from their databases. I do NOT trust Verisign at all. They seem more like opportunists out to make a buck than people who really understand the paranoid world of security.
I already started boycotting Amazon, and getting my friends to do so. I find their patent on '1-click shopping' to be utterly ridiculous, and I told them so in e-mail.
I also search for books on Amazon and buy them elsewhere. If they weren't pursuing eforcement of this silly patent, I wouldn't bother, and, in fact, would buy from them because I like the way things work on their site.
This isn't a very catchy name. I prefer 'corporate feudalism'. I think it much more correctly captures the essence of the problem, and is reminiscent of a form of government we understand the evils of.
As far as Katz is concerned, I always think he's being rather nieve (sp?) in his estimations of the power of the Net. I stoped reading Wired when their glowing descriptions of technological utopia began to wear on me.
Not that I want him to stop seeing his writing. He always makes me think, and the little doses of tech utopia here are easier to stomache than the steady diet that was Wired.