Well, it would be committing hari-kari to stop pressing CDs now when that's their primary market.
Agreed that future formats will be 'secure' -- it's inevitable. But until then, we've got the CD Audio format, which probably can't be starved off the market for at least a decade, if ever. --
OS/2 was heavily hyped by the computer press throughout the 1980s. It had an enormous amount of build-up, but when it came down to it, not much market traction. Meanwhile, it was associated with the very unpopular Microchannel initiative, as well as the general perception that IBM was out of touch with the PC industry.
From the perspective of a journalist, what was there positive to say about a product that for years had failed to generate significant popularity among their readership? I'm saying this because the "Team OS/2" perspective on the situation often has time starting in 1992 with the shipment of OS/2 2.1, when in fact the product had been out for five years with very little adoption outside of True Blue shops. It's easy to blame MS, ZD, and IBM, but the real culprits are the people that didn't have the foresight or intelligence to make the same purchasing decisions you did.
So when your main publications are "PC Magazine" and "PC Week", can you help not to heavily cover Microsoft. After all, MS (and in the old days, Novell) are what 90% of their PC readership were using. Does this make them crappy journalists chasing the market? Yes, but "prolific whores" is an enormous exaggeration.
On a side note, I notice that "PC Week" is folding, to be replaced by "eWeek", which will presumably have a more server- and network-centric perspective on things (such as rags like InfoWorld have always had), and will probably have a much more positive perspective on Linux (and if it was still around, OS/2). If anything, this means that desktop computing has pretty much become totally stagnant and uninteresting, crushed under the weight of Microsoft monopoly. Frankly, this change will be long overdue -- the days of folks setting up Novell networks under the nose of the SNA guys and tweaking 1-2-3 macros to get better output than the mainframe could produce are long dead, and the idea of a MS-focused "PC" publication should go with it. --
Your "Audio DVD" scenerio seemed more likely a couple years ago, when a elite corps of "Audiophile" early adopters was driving the market. But now, who is going to buy into this "upgrade" that will be indistinguishable from a normal CD unless you have a really good stereo?
If anything, this whole MP3 schbang proves that the market values other features like transportability over quality. CD-quality is too good for a huge number of users with boom boxes and computer speakers. The record industry knows this -- they've been tossing about DVD-Audio for years, and they've never gotten substantially behind it. If they thought there was a market, they would be selling it.
(Not to mention that if they used an improved encryption scheme, DVDAudio would be incompatible with the DVD installed base. It's a pretty new market, and the consumers won't be happy to see their hardware obsoleted so quickly.)
Rather than trying to upsell the market to new-and-improved, they should be trying to downsell to the MP3 market. If an 'honest consumer' could buy a sub-CD quality album electronically for $3-$5, a good chunk of the MP3 trading would go away. Of course the non-warez MP3 version would be in a 'secure' format, acomplishing the same thing that DVD-Audio would. --
So, are you saying that you could manage slashdot's presentation controls on the client side with HTML and CSS? Maybe... but it would take a fair amount of javascript too. --
The XML format used for 'Slashboxes' is actually called RSS and is also used by My Netscape. More info can be found at http://www.xmltree.com/ and http://www.scripting.com/. There's actually hundreds of sites using this format.
This is actually a pretty minimal use of XML. The entire Slashdot application itself could be driven by XML as the delivery mechinism. Right now, changing your viewing options requires a roundtrip to the server and a slow PL script.
An alternative could just dump down the articles and comments to your browser in XML format and then have those comments sorted/filtered/formatted quickly on the client side by XSLT, using either a server- or a user-supplied stylesheet, making Slashdot a much faster and more flexible applicaiton.
This could be done today, but only with IE 5. I suspect when Mozilla matures and more people understand this stuff, we will seem more purely XML-to-the-client driven web sites, going beyond the simple 'between sites' B2B-type applications. --
Well actually the reality is that the guy didn't see the problem coming when he should have. (1) Customer wants 3000 pages of documentation. (2) Customer uses five year old version of Word. (3) Customer refuses to use anything else. The whole situation has Huge Pain In The Ass written all over it.
So, he could have provided some 'consulting' to help the customers put a real documentation system in place, including the proper tools. (The key word here is "tools", which may or may not include XML/SGML formats.)
Or, he could have just charged the hell out of them for forcing so many headaches on his plate. I probably would have just done the latter, because they seem pretty clueless. --
Don't forget that 90% of "everyone" is Microsoft Word, and that "partial" understanding of documents doesn't cut it in the real world where interoperablity (with Word) is a huge problem.
Even in a heavily Microsoft shop, we've got Word/Excel interoperability problems with Lotus Notes and with our RDBMS systems.
A standard WP format would go a long way to solve these things. XHTML + CSS3 might be providing this - we just now need to get the vendors to implement it. The nice thing about a real standard is that it can be compliance tested, and mandated during Government/Corporate procurement. --
I think what you are getting at is the classic "broken" business operation where people are throwing all of their business data into unstructured formats like Word or Excel files, or even paper forms and so on. Of course, you can stay in business with shoddy internal office practices, so there's not much incentive for people to change. Especially when the only programs they are familiar with is MS Office. That is, until you throw the web into the situation.
They can stumble along doing tedious reformatting into HTML, or somehow use the cumbersome conversion tools MS gives you. But that's never going to solve the real problem. The real answer involves investing in back-end office automation systems and trying to lift the users out of the document muck.
(I suspect that is what happened to the Ask Slashdot person -- somehow finding a client that wants 3,000 pages of documentation and at the same time insists on using a five year old version of Word. What they should be investing in a system to help manage large amounts of documentation, before hiring out the tech writing tasks. Part of the answer is a SGML/XML format, but a bigger part is the tools to manage that format and it's content.)
Luckily, Microsoft has invented lots of neat kludges to help preserve the client-side document mess. Word long ago expanded to become a database front end, and it's would be fairly easy to write 'templates' for things like press releases that automatically generate an XML file with a home-brew DTD or stick the information into a database. You can also write simple server-side scripts that do the same thing with COM. (In the long run, Office+Exchange will turn into a XML-based 'groupware' system that should provide better back-end access to this data.)
The big catch here is that 'the solution' requires investment in back-end systems and (gasp) some programming. It's not realistic to expect users to generate XML by hand, and the shrinkwrapped toolset is not here yet. However, anything that you can do to get data off people's C: drives is a big step forward. Good luck. --
Presumably you could handle most of the document formatting via vanilla XHTML and CSS.
However, one problem is that there currently isn't a sufficient standard to support printed output, along with things like margins, page numbering, headers/footers, foot/end notes, and so on.
An alert slashdotter pointed this out to me just the other day - the proposed CSS3 Page Media Properties spec addresses most of these issues. However, it's not done yet, and has not been implemented anywhere that I know of. So, it might be a year or more before we have a truly open format that could be used for word processing programs. --
It's not really XML based... More like HTML with some XML-like stuff sprinkled in.
Byte has a short description of the Word format that you might want to look at.
I've looked a little at the Excel format. Once thing that seems clear it that the O2000 formats are almost human readable. It shouldn't be that difficult for someone to whip a converter -- well, it should be easier than parsing the binary formats. --
The icon now lives in your machine. It has been "distributed" to you.
Has it? Or is the bitmap "output that not constitute a work based on the Program "? Of course the Crash Word Macro hasn't been downloaded to my WinTerm.
You are running a Java interface within your browser to access a Word descendent
And thus the murky world of CORBA (or in that case DCOM). My closed client only links with the client DCOM libraries. The GPL server version of word only liks with the server DCOM libraries, which are "major components of the operating system". Instant GPL violation, at least in spirit, if not in fact.
Of course, if you squint hard enough at the GPL, anything is possible! --
Well, my word processor also outputs a dancing animatronic paper clip!
(Along with toolbar buttons and menus, and outline representations of the document, and macro programs with nice GUIs that might be GPLed on their own, and so on.)
I hate to belabor this whole thing, because the GPL is just one of those things that everyone has their own take on. But to answer your question, "does it matter if the black box is accessed over the web?" -- I think it does, or to be more specific, it matters if the program is running the memory space of my black box versus your black box. (This is why I though Perens' question about CORBA much more interesting than the ASP-err-host/terminal model.)
The GPL doesn't say Letting someone run the program is distributing it. In fact, it seems to say the opposite. --
I have been provided with the program's functionality so it's GPLed. End of story.
You don't consider a "program's functionality" to be "output", as referred to by the GPL?
Maybe it's not as clear cut as it seems to me. You can run the program. You can recieve the output. You can provide input. All of these things are distinct from what the GPL refers to as "copying" or "distribution". --
OK - I am ignorant. A quick look at www.w3c.org shows that CSS2 and CSS3 (in progress) appear to address these issues. Probably not implemented anywhere yet, but thanks for the tip. --
(A) Confusing the UK TV Tax or some vendor's seat licence restrictions with the GPL is silly.
(B) You might try reading the GPL:
Activities other than copying, distribution and modification are not covered by this License; they are outside its scope. The act of running the Program is not restricted, and the output from the Program is covered only if its contents constitute a work based on the Program (independent of having been made by running the Program). Whether that is true depends on what the Program does.
Note that it makes no distinction between running locally, over a terminal interface, or where the server is hosted. --
Re:A half-assed victory for GPL, a demise for OSS
on
GPL Violation - NVIDIA
·
· Score: 1
I know that for Macs at least, a video card needs to identify itself to OpenFirmware to be used. Sparcs are probably the same story.
(I amend my previous statement because some/all Alphas have an 8086 emulator to initialize x86 hardware.)
Anyway, you can't use any ol PC PCI card in your non-x86. Some ATI cards contain the OF boot code for example, and some do not (and are x86 only). --
Re:A half-assed victory for GPL, a demise for OSS
on
GPL Violation - NVIDIA
·
· Score: 1
There is 0 chance that your Alpha, PPC, or Sparc machine will even POST with an Nvidia card installed. The firmware only supports the PC BIOS.
So the hardware support is a non-issue. Go buy something else with driver that meet your criteria (and if you are a non-x86 user, you already are).
I'm glad you bring up the insanity of our particular form of American "overpopulation". Hundreds of miles of empty space, but when you get there, there's a traffic jam.
It's really not a "population" issue in this country, it's a land use issue. Specifically, the way we build our cities is beyond braindead. In an industrial, technical economy there's no reason that millions of people couldn't live sensibly in Utah, Montana, North Dakota, or anywhere else. Yet our friends in the wide open spaces continue to make the same stoopid mistakes that we have made in California.
At one time Silicon valley was some low lying factories and office parks amidst orchards and quaint prewar suburbs. Four million people and a hundred billion dollars later, it's a concrete nightmare of hour-plus commutes and million dollar 1960s two bedroom ranch homes. But, hey, it's also every other American city's model for the new economy.
So is it State involvement in population control or immigration control? Or is it state involvement in what you can build where and how you commute to work? As you point out, the Gubernmint is already hip deep there with full legal authority and with terrible results.
Maybe I'm ignorant, but XHTML doesn't take into account things required for printed output, such as page numbering, page breaks, headers/footers, margins, and so on. --
Agreed that a broad interpretation of the Constitution in general should include a broad interpretation of the Second Amendment. However, the Second Amendment has probably double the political weight behind it as the rest of the amendments combined. Is it really worth hanging the ACLU over this issue?
BTW, Clinton is a "conservative politician", although one that is oddly disliked by most other conservative politicians. As is Gore. Stallman's comments about defeating Bush represent the typical futility of the American Left, encouraging people to elect "Bad" to defeat "Even Worse". Without some sort of positive alternative (like he has in the software world), his comments were out of place and really unwarranted.
Still, the question opened the door for Stallman to advocate non-software related political movements, so I guess what he said was fair. Hopefully people that agree with the Free Software movement will see past these possibly disagreeable remarks. --
Some of us older farts remember Stallman's plans to deliver a complete "GNU System" long before the Linux kernel had been invented. It was generally considered impossible or quixotic.
So, now his dream has been realized and millions of copies of the "GNU System" are all over the Internet and your local CompuJunk store. The problem is that what people are buying/downloading is not the philosophical "GNU", but a product "XYZ Linux". I don't think that Stallman is looking for credit so much as he is looking to change the approach people take to the system - a philosophy or a product?
I have to admit that I'm part of the problem here - I use Linux OSes because they work well for what they do. While I admire the goals of the free software movement, the bottom line is that Linux is a product that works great and the price is right. If it were not the case, I'd be using something else non-free. I'd guess that's the case with many Linux users, the product (a free unix that runs on your hardware) outweighs the philosophy. --
Re:You might be able to use the DMCA, anyway...
on
Thus Spake Stallman
·
· Score: 2
Yup, apparently the DMCA covers such trivial things as the Serial Copy Management System, which is simply a copy/don't copy bit that could easily be ignored, and built-in Macrovision defeaters (such as in Go video decks), which are $5 at Radio Shack.
(On a side note, I've heard that this has already hampered free software to some extent, with Matrox unwilling to release specs for their TV card because someone could just flip a bit and turn off MacroVision.)
I'm not sure how this would be implemented, but I could imagine that your software could contain some sort of "GPL Licenced" signature that must be encoded in the binary. Removing the signature would be trival, but might be considered a violation of the DMCA. Although, perhaps Stallman would rather have folks work to overturn/subvert the DMCA than figure out a way to implement it. --
Isn't "distribution" the act of transferring the program media, and not the act of running the program?
Companies like Microsoft handle licencing as a run-time issue, not a distribution issue. This leads to interesting paradoxes such as it being illegal to make a copy of a Word CD (except for backup purposes), but MS themselves continually spams-er-distributes my place of work with unlicenced Word CDs that we would need to pay for if we decided to install them.
In your ASP Word example, you really having nothing more than the ol' Host-Terminal model, which is nothing new, and not considered "distribution", as far as I know. If my ISP offers a shell service where I can telnet into a Linux box, they are really acting as an ASP for bash and vi and pine and so on. Do they now have to host the source code for the entire Linux distribution they are using?
Admittedly, this gets more complex if, say, the ASP was using a modified version of Apache to host a peoplesoft front end. But in that case, the ASP probably didn't write the modifications, and probably got them 'distributed' from someone else. --
Good point. With a little trickery, the OS company with a staff of a couple hundred could go on selling the Windows 2000 base OS and nothing else. Meanwhile the Apps company can brew up all that famous Microsoft innovation for years to come.
This gets at what I was saying -- without the dev tools, DCOM, IIS, and yes IE, the Windows company is doomed in the long run and the 'breakup' really is not one. The current plan is too unfair to the OS side and leaves the Apps side plenty of monopolistic latitude. --
Agreed, but with Office/IE on 90% of desktops any third party solution would have an uphill battle.
I guess what I'd like to see is something more proactive than XML-based application like Glade and Gnumeric. I'd like to see the Unix/Non-MSOffice community define broad, flexible XML-based file formats (or DTDs or Schemas) for Word Processor, Spreadsheet, and Presentation applications and submit those proposals to the appropriate standards bodies. (This would be a great opportunity for IBM, despite their interest in Lotus' 3% office marketshare.)
Right now no such standards exist, but if they did, there's a good chance that customers (especially the US Government) would force MS Office to adopt them. --
Slashdot Mirror
Well, it would be committing hari-kari to stop pressing CDs now when that's their primary market.
Agreed that future formats will be 'secure' -- it's inevitable. But until then, we've got the CD Audio format, which probably can't be starved off the market for at least a decade, if ever.
--
OS/2 was heavily hyped by the computer press throughout the 1980s. It had an enormous amount of build-up, but when it came down to it, not much market traction. Meanwhile, it was associated with the very unpopular Microchannel initiative, as well as the general perception that IBM was out of touch with the PC industry.
From the perspective of a journalist, what was there positive to say about a product that for years had failed to generate significant popularity among their readership? I'm saying this because the "Team OS/2" perspective on the situation often has time starting in 1992 with the shipment of OS/2 2.1, when in fact the product had been out for five years with very little adoption outside of True Blue shops. It's easy to blame MS, ZD, and IBM, but the real culprits are the people that didn't have the foresight or intelligence to make the same purchasing decisions you did.
So when your main publications are "PC Magazine" and "PC Week", can you help not to heavily cover Microsoft. After all, MS (and in the old days, Novell) are what 90% of their PC readership were using. Does this make them crappy journalists chasing the market? Yes, but "prolific whores" is an enormous exaggeration.
On a side note, I notice that "PC Week" is folding, to be replaced by "eWeek", which will presumably have a more server- and network-centric perspective on things (such as rags like InfoWorld have always had), and will probably have a much more positive perspective on Linux (and if it was still around, OS/2). If anything, this means that desktop computing has pretty much become totally stagnant and uninteresting, crushed under the weight of Microsoft monopoly. Frankly, this change will be long overdue -- the days of folks setting up Novell networks under the nose of the SNA guys and tweaking 1-2-3 macros to get better output than the mainframe could produce are long dead, and the idea of a MS-focused "PC" publication should go with it.
--
Your "Audio DVD" scenerio seemed more likely a couple years ago, when a elite corps of "Audiophile" early adopters was driving the market. But now, who is going to buy into this "upgrade" that will be indistinguishable from a normal CD unless you have a really good stereo?
If anything, this whole MP3 schbang proves that the market values other features like transportability over quality. CD-quality is too good for a huge number of users with boom boxes and computer speakers. The record industry knows this -- they've been tossing about DVD-Audio for years, and they've never gotten substantially behind it. If they thought there was a market, they would be selling it.
(Not to mention that if they used an improved encryption scheme, DVDAudio would be incompatible with the DVD installed base. It's a pretty new market, and the consumers won't be happy to see their hardware obsoleted so quickly.)
Rather than trying to upsell the market to new-and-improved, they should be trying to downsell to the MP3 market. If an 'honest consumer' could buy a sub-CD quality album electronically for $3-$5, a good chunk of the MP3 trading would go away. Of course the non-warez MP3 version would be in a 'secure' format, acomplishing the same thing that DVD-Audio would.
--
So, are you saying that you could manage slashdot's presentation controls on the client side with HTML and CSS? Maybe... but it would take a fair amount of javascript too.
--
The XML format used for 'Slashboxes' is actually called RSS and is also used by My Netscape. More info can be found at http://www.xmltree.com/ and http://www.scripting.com/. There's actually hundreds of sites using this format.
This is actually a pretty minimal use of XML. The entire Slashdot application itself could be driven by XML as the delivery mechinism. Right now, changing your viewing options requires a roundtrip to the server and a slow PL script.
An alternative could just dump down the articles and comments to your browser in XML format and then have those comments sorted/filtered/formatted quickly on the client side by XSLT, using either a server- or a user-supplied stylesheet, making Slashdot a much faster and more flexible applicaiton.
This could be done today, but only with IE 5. I suspect when Mozilla matures and more people understand this stuff, we will seem more purely XML-to-the-client driven web sites, going beyond the simple 'between sites' B2B-type applications.
--
Well actually the reality is that the guy didn't see the problem coming when he should have. (1) Customer wants 3000 pages of documentation. (2) Customer uses five year old version of Word. (3) Customer refuses to use anything else. The whole situation has Huge Pain In The Ass written all over it.
So, he could have provided some 'consulting' to help the customers put a real documentation system in place, including the proper tools. (The key word here is "tools", which may or may not include XML/SGML formats.)
Or, he could have just charged the hell out of them for forcing so many headaches on his plate. I probably would have just done the latter, because they seem pretty clueless.
--
Don't forget that 90% of "everyone" is Microsoft Word, and that "partial" understanding of documents doesn't cut it in the real world where interoperablity (with Word) is a huge problem.
Even in a heavily Microsoft shop, we've got Word/Excel interoperability problems with Lotus Notes and with our RDBMS systems.
A standard WP format would go a long way to solve these things. XHTML + CSS3 might be providing this - we just now need to get the vendors to implement it. The nice thing about a real standard is that it can be compliance tested, and mandated during Government/Corporate procurement.
--
I think what you are getting at is the classic "broken" business operation where people are throwing all of their business data into unstructured formats like Word or Excel files, or even paper forms and so on. Of course, you can stay in business with shoddy internal office practices, so there's not much incentive for people to change. Especially when the only programs they are familiar with is MS Office. That is, until you throw the web into the situation.
They can stumble along doing tedious reformatting into HTML, or somehow use the cumbersome conversion tools MS gives you. But that's never going to solve the real problem. The real answer involves investing in back-end office automation systems and trying to lift the users out of the document muck.
(I suspect that is what happened to the Ask Slashdot person -- somehow finding a client that wants 3,000 pages of documentation and at the same time insists on using a five year old version of Word. What they should be investing in a system to help manage large amounts of documentation, before hiring out the tech writing tasks. Part of the answer is a SGML/XML format, but a bigger part is the tools to manage that format and it's content.)
Luckily, Microsoft has invented lots of neat kludges to help preserve the client-side document mess. Word long ago expanded to become a database front end, and it's would be fairly easy to write 'templates' for things like press releases that automatically generate an XML file with a home-brew DTD or stick the information into a database. You can also write simple server-side scripts that do the same thing with COM. (In the long run, Office+Exchange will turn into a XML-based 'groupware' system that should provide better back-end access to this data.)
The big catch here is that 'the solution' requires investment in back-end systems and (gasp) some programming. It's not realistic to expect users to generate XML by hand, and the shrinkwrapped toolset is not here yet. However, anything that you can do to get data off people's C: drives is a big step forward. Good luck.
--
Presumably you could handle most of the document formatting via vanilla XHTML and CSS.
However, one problem is that there currently isn't a sufficient standard to support printed output, along with things like margins, page numbering, headers/footers, foot/end notes, and so on.
An alert slashdotter pointed this out to me just the other day - the proposed CSS3 Page Media Properties spec addresses most of these issues. However, it's not done yet, and has not been implemented anywhere that I know of. So, it might be a year or more before we have a truly open format that could be used for word processing programs.
--
It's not really XML based... More like HTML with some XML-like stuff sprinkled in.
Byte has a short description of the Word format that you might want to look at.
I've looked a little at the Excel format. Once thing that seems clear it that the O2000 formats are almost human readable. It shouldn't be that difficult for someone to whip a converter -- well, it should be easier than parsing the binary formats.
--
The icon now lives in your machine. It has been "distributed" to you.
Has it? Or is the bitmap "output that not constitute a work based on the Program "? Of course the Crash Word Macro hasn't been downloaded to my WinTerm.
You are running a Java interface within your browser to access a Word descendent
And thus the murky world of CORBA (or in that case DCOM). My closed client only links with the client DCOM libraries. The GPL server version of word only liks with the server DCOM libraries, which are "major components of the operating system". Instant GPL violation, at least in spirit, if not in fact.
Of course, if you squint hard enough at the GPL, anything is possible!
--
Well, my word processor also outputs a dancing animatronic paper clip!
(Along with toolbar buttons and menus, and outline representations of the document, and macro programs with nice GUIs that might be GPLed on their own, and so on.)
I hate to belabor this whole thing, because the GPL is just one of those things that everyone has their own take on. But to answer your question, "does it matter if the black box is accessed over the web?" -- I think it does, or to be more specific, it matters if the program is running the memory space of my black box versus your black box. (This is why I though Perens' question about CORBA much more interesting than the ASP-err-host/terminal model.)
The GPL doesn't say Letting someone run the program is distributing it. In fact, it seems to say the opposite.
--
I have been provided with the program's functionality so it's GPLed. End of story.
You don't consider a "program's functionality" to be "output", as referred to by the GPL?
Maybe it's not as clear cut as it seems to me. You can run the program. You can recieve the output. You can provide input. All of these things are distinct from what the GPL refers to as "copying" or "distribution".
--
OK - I am ignorant. A quick look at www.w3c.org shows that CSS2 and CSS3 (in progress) appear to address these issues. Probably not implemented anywhere yet, but thanks for the tip.
--
(A) Confusing the UK TV Tax or some vendor's seat licence restrictions with the GPL is silly.
(B) You might try reading the GPL:
Activities other than copying, distribution and modification are not covered by this License; they are outside its scope. The act of running the Program is not restricted, and the output from the Program is covered only if its contents constitute a work based on the Program (independent of having been made by running the Program). Whether that is true depends on what the Program does.
Note that it makes no distinction between running locally, over a terminal interface, or where the server is hosted.
--
I know that for Macs at least, a video card needs to identify itself to OpenFirmware to be used. Sparcs are probably the same story.
(I amend my previous statement because some/all Alphas have an 8086 emulator to initialize x86 hardware.)
Anyway, you can't use any ol PC PCI card in your non-x86. Some ATI cards contain the OF boot code for example, and some do not (and are x86 only).
--
There is 0 chance that your Alpha, PPC, or Sparc machine will even POST with an Nvidia card installed. The firmware only supports the PC BIOS.
So the hardware support is a non-issue. Go buy something else with driver that meet your criteria (and if you are a non-x86 user, you already are).
--
I'm glad you bring up the insanity of our particular form of American "overpopulation". Hundreds of miles of empty space, but when you get there, there's a traffic jam.
It's really not a "population" issue in this country, it's a land use issue. Specifically, the way we build our cities is beyond braindead. In an industrial, technical economy there's no reason that millions of people couldn't live sensibly in Utah, Montana, North Dakota, or anywhere else. Yet our friends in the wide open spaces continue to make the same stoopid mistakes that we have made in California.
At one time Silicon valley was some low lying factories and office parks amidst orchards and quaint prewar suburbs. Four million people and a hundred billion dollars later, it's a concrete nightmare of hour-plus commutes and million dollar 1960s two bedroom ranch homes. But, hey, it's also every other American city's model for the new economy.
So is it State involvement in population control or immigration control? Or is it state involvement in what you can build where and how you commute to work? As you point out, the Gubernmint is already hip deep there with full legal authority and with terrible results.
Good luck to you in Salt Lake.
--
Maybe I'm ignorant, but XHTML doesn't take into account things required for printed output, such as page numbering, page breaks, headers/footers, margins, and so on.
--
Agreed that a broad interpretation of the Constitution in general should include a broad interpretation of the Second Amendment. However, the Second Amendment has probably double the political weight behind it as the rest of the amendments combined. Is it really worth hanging the ACLU over this issue?
BTW, Clinton is a "conservative politician", although one that is oddly disliked by most other conservative politicians. As is Gore. Stallman's comments about defeating Bush represent the typical futility of the American Left, encouraging people to elect "Bad" to defeat "Even Worse". Without some sort of positive alternative (like he has in the software world), his comments were out of place and really unwarranted.
Still, the question opened the door for Stallman to advocate non-software related political movements, so I guess what he said was fair. Hopefully people that agree with the Free Software movement will see past these possibly disagreeable remarks.
--
Some of us older farts remember Stallman's plans to deliver a complete "GNU System" long before the Linux kernel had been invented. It was generally considered impossible or quixotic.
So, now his dream has been realized and millions of copies of the "GNU System" are all over the Internet and your local CompuJunk store. The problem is that what people are buying/downloading is not the philosophical "GNU", but a product "XYZ Linux". I don't think that Stallman is looking for credit so much as he is looking to change the approach people take to the system - a philosophy or a product?
I have to admit that I'm part of the problem here - I use Linux OSes because they work well for what they do. While I admire the goals of the free software movement, the bottom line is that Linux is a product that works great and the price is right. If it were not the case, I'd be using something else non-free. I'd guess that's the case with many Linux users, the product (a free unix that runs on your hardware) outweighs the philosophy.
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Yup, apparently the DMCA covers such trivial things as the Serial Copy Management System, which is simply a copy/don't copy bit that could easily be ignored, and built-in Macrovision defeaters (such as in Go video decks), which are $5 at Radio Shack.
(On a side note, I've heard that this has already hampered free software to some extent, with Matrox unwilling to release specs for their TV card because someone could just flip a bit and turn off MacroVision.)
I'm not sure how this would be implemented, but I could imagine that your software could contain some sort of "GPL Licenced" signature that must be encoded in the binary. Removing the signature would be trival, but might be considered a violation of the DMCA. Although, perhaps Stallman would rather have folks work to overturn/subvert the DMCA than figure out a way to implement it.
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Isn't "distribution" the act of transferring the program media, and not the act of running the program?
Companies like Microsoft handle licencing as a run-time issue, not a distribution issue. This leads to interesting paradoxes such as it being illegal to make a copy of a Word CD (except for backup purposes), but MS themselves continually spams-er-distributes my place of work with unlicenced Word CDs that we would need to pay for if we decided to install them.
In your ASP Word example, you really having nothing more than the ol' Host-Terminal model, which is nothing new, and not considered "distribution", as far as I know. If my ISP offers a shell service where I can telnet into a Linux box, they are really acting as an ASP for bash and vi and pine and so on. Do they now have to host the source code for the entire Linux distribution they are using?
Admittedly, this gets more complex if, say, the ASP was using a modified version of Apache to host a peoplesoft front end. But in that case, the ASP probably didn't write the modifications, and probably got them 'distributed' from someone else.
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Good point. With a little trickery, the OS company with a staff of a couple hundred could go on selling the Windows 2000 base OS and nothing else. Meanwhile the Apps company can brew up all that famous Microsoft innovation for years to come.
This gets at what I was saying -- without the dev tools, DCOM, IIS, and yes IE, the Windows company is doomed in the long run and the 'breakup' really is not one. The current plan is too unfair to the OS side and leaves the Apps side plenty of monopolistic latitude.
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Agreed, but with Office/IE on 90% of desktops any third party solution would have an uphill battle.
I guess what I'd like to see is something more proactive than XML-based application like Glade and Gnumeric. I'd like to see the Unix/Non-MSOffice community define broad, flexible XML-based file formats (or DTDs or Schemas) for Word Processor, Spreadsheet, and Presentation applications and submit those proposals to the appropriate standards bodies. (This would be a great opportunity for IBM, despite their interest in Lotus' 3% office marketshare.)
Right now no such standards exist, but if they did, there's a good chance that customers (especially the US Government) would force MS Office to adopt them.
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