Part of the problem is that under the deal as it stands Microsoft will never have to open its API's to the world, and never "share" them (with humongous NDA's to boot) with not-for-profit entities.
Might even let them obbliterate not-for-profit (read: open source) software that has reverse engineered the API's in court.
According to Cringely. I haven't the time nor the will to read the entire tentative settlement.
But... if turnover is relatively low, and Lords are appointed for life (kinda like the U.S. supreme court) there's less chance of this being a problem than one would think.
Theoretically the Congress could inflate the Supreme Court (or any U.S. federal bench) as much as they wanted and hand the nominations to the President to throw around, but it hasn't happened except for twice. The "Midnight Justices" of the early 19th century, who were tossed out of office by the courts, and F.D.R.'s attempt to stack the bench with people who would support the New Deal, which was generally approved.
Wait until Blair's out of office and the Lords he would appoint wouldn't be as sensitive to the Commons, and you always would have the Thatcher & Major appointees to boot... and once they've gotten to working together, they start to listen to each other more than the Government (in the Parliamentary sense)... it won't be that bad.
So, will it make the main page next week when he talks about how "bad" Linux and Mozilla are? As the backseat editors like to say, "Rob, start spell-checking that title now; you know it's coming."
For that matter, i wonder what he'll have to say about Linux. Ten years and they're still on version 2.[4,5]. That might actually make him happy.
Actually, they sorta have taken it upon themselves. When this was first announced, the plan was to spread it as a virus. You get some mail, you open it up, you click the big shiny (assuming you've turned off auto-open attachments), it hooks itself into your computer, records everything, and sends a magic message to the FBI whenever you use PGP (and probably similar programs).
I use Mozilla. I have McAffee Virus Scan installed on my system. One of the parts of it is Download / E-mail Scan. Whenever i download a file and it gets written into the cache, McAffee checks it for viruses. Whenever i POP my mail off the server, McAffee checks it for viruses. When i followed a link from startrek.com to one of the producer's homepages Download Scan intercepted his server's attempt to infect my machine with Nimda.
So, if the FBI sticks to its initial plan, and spreads this thing virally (and there are still conflicting reports about that), instead of having informants plant the software on suspects' machines (which they have done, and requires a wiretap warrant) then yes, magic lantern (or at least its delivery vector) is something that virus scanners "should" intercept and defuse.
Oh i doubt that the FBI blackmailed Symantec and NAI to get this in. On the contrary:
they're trying to retain the confidence of the middle-american software purchaser (both private and commercial) that would revolt* against them as "un-american" if they obstructed anything the FBI proposed.
they'd probably face some sort of frivolous or trumped up charge of aiding terrorism or maybe even sedition if they'd announced plans to detect magic lantern. not that such a charge would stick (on appeal).
[*]said middle-american probably doesn't understand the security implications of permitting a class of trojan software to do its work (not that i do, but i acknowledge it has the potential to be quite a problem). said middle-american would also dismiss the raising of any privacy or civil rights concerns with a hearty "NONE OF THAT MATTERS ANY MORE! WE'RE AT WAR NOW!" and probably a "don't bring any of that unamerican talk into my $location" or a "the FBI is on our side, they wouldn't do anything to hurt us." for good measure.
interesting enough...
on
URIICA
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· Score: 0, Flamebait
...but i don't think it'll take off. the anarchists want to keep anarchy and the corporate types will want power to stay with the institutions they control: ICANN most specifically.
Ballmer: Certainly, as Bill talked about, we have opportunities for improvement in security, in virus protection, in the way we license and sell our products, and the reminders on that are always in front of us.
Rice Pudding:I think this pretty much sums up a lot of what is wrong with Microsoft:
1) Security
2) The way they license and sell products.
Or it could just be that they haven't learned from the fiascos that were PCHealth and System Restore in WinME and are planning to corner the one area where rental software (or something like it) has been a pretty uniform success: Anti-Virus. People pay fifteen bucks for six months of DAT's. Microsoft might just want to figure out why people will pay for that, but not $50 a month for Office ^XP^2005
I looked at this and said... wait a minute, hasn't this already been sorta done? Despite not being a full featured box, Firecard is a PCI-card running Linux... for the purposes of supporting a firewall (as you could have guessed from the name if you'd not read the story -- Nov 14 2001... but it's cool that they've taken it to the next level.
First, there are very excellent refutations of her shakier points on the page, and i'd like to congratulate all of them... but since this is slashdot, let's take this opportunity to point and laugh at some of the ones we disagree with:-P
Digital photography suits a throw away society that looks for instant results. It has its merits but doesn't compete with the quality and expression available from traditional photography.
I swear this wasn't by JonKatz, unless he was using an alias. This sounds like the same argument made against photography with respect to painting and the type of technical illustration.
Digital photography is a blunt tool. Simplistic in terms of its operation, the record it leaves behind and in its production of a flatter, less interesting end-image. Not only does it do away with the record of an event's progression as captured on a contact sheet, but the photography itself is aesthetically less dramatic.
Contact sheets are nice. In fact, my digital camera presents its images for initial download as a virtual contact sheet... and if i felt really uppity, i could go down to kinko's and print it out on their color laser printer. And as for the lack of aesthetic quality in the photography... anyone who's decent at taking still pictures should have the same facility with a comparable digital camera, should take the same calibre of pictures, and if you're worried about not being able to dramatically highlight certain parts of the photograph by dodging and burning all i have to say is you're light-years ahead of j03 w4r3z d00d who just cr4x0r3d Photoshop, if you'll condescend to use your iMac for more than getting into PC v. Mac flame wars.
I sincerely hope that this was an undergraduate thesis and not doctoral-level stuff. I sure wouldn't want to have to defend it!:) It seems not only is Ms. West presenting a weak argument, it seems that an application of common sense would suggest the exact OPPOSITE hypotheses to the ones she chose to defend. Allow me...
except if it's for a graduate degree it's for one in fine arts, not computer science or social sciences... so if you were defending your pro-digital dissertation, unless it was for an MFA in graphic design, you'd be challgenged with her arguments, and people with the same opinions (and biases) would be giving the thumbs-up/thumbs-down.
it might be too charitable to say she's playing to her audience, as she probably deeply believes what she says... but that's the conventional wisdom on the south end of campus either way
Excuse me! I'm going to walk out of U of I with a B.S. in Economics and a B.A. in Psych... and two (or three) years experience working with computer networks from a variety of angles. I think i'm competant to discern the differences among a 5cr1Tp k1DD13, the writer of code redhackedbychinese!!, and Steve Jackson.
I think a ten-question qualification exam might be more appropriate.
The issue for me is not sound quality as much. I like MP3 and i like Ogg... I like Ogg because it has underdog appeal, and the files are a little smaller for comparable quality (not same bitrate). But the one thing that has not going all over Ogg instead of MP3 is this pesky little issue...
I run a PII 333, with relatively pimp expansion cards (geforce 2, sblive)... and for some reason, probably how winamp handles the Ogg decoding plugin, my system is more prone to hanging at the beginning of songs. Keyboard and mouse lag is the worst. When another program is demanding resources, the Ogg file skips. I guess it's just a more intense algorithm... but unless i get an Athlon, i'll have to pay with more hard drive space devoted to the CD's i've ripped.
I would want those responsible extradited, tried, and punished in accordance with the U.S. criminal code, and whatever international treaties apply. Even if they killed me.
Our respect for life and law, and our seperation of guilty and innocent are what sets us apart from terrorists.
But more importantly, Afghanistan is a strategic nightmare and the diplomatic intracies are equally perillous. Bombing won't make bin Laden confess and surrender. A ground war will disintegrate our support in the region, and politically destabilize it: should we buy what he wants with our blood?
And i fully expect, "Sure! If it means we get to send some terrorists to hell!" to be your answer.
The second, and more important message, is bin Laden's ultimate goals. He cautions us against falling into a trap of turning it into the West versus Islam, and Bush has indeed been extremely cautious about getting the support of the Middle East.
Tomahawk cruise missiles aren't going to get bin Laden to sign a confession and surrender to the 10th mountain division. He wants us to invade. He wants us to start gunning down children (and we will after they start walking out to infantry platoons carying grenades). He wants our soldiers to start making racist slurs. He wants us to start attacking other predominantly muslim countries where he has a few sponsors.
And when that happens, any support we have any farther east than Greece will collapse like the twin towers... and bin Laden will have his Islam v. Greater America holy war. I will admit that I read that into the essay.
But I think that was his point. He just couldn't say those words on the 14th. From the essay:
The only way to get Bin Laden is to go in there with ground troops. When people speak of "having the belly to do what needs to be done" they're thinking in terms of having the belly to kill as many as needed. Having the belly to overcome any moral qualms about killing innocent people. Let's pull our heads out of the sand. What's actually on the table is Americans dying. And not just because some Americans would die fighting their way through Afghanistan to Bin Laden's hideout. It's much bigger than that, folks.
Even though we've secured partial cooperation from Pakistan and Uzbekistan (which he goes on to talk about), I don't think they'll stay on our side once things get as ugly as i fear they will.
I'm not a pacifist, but I am a college student opposed to military retalliation. I don't have some sort of cheap, ideological objection to the U.S. asserting itself. I don't have a religious objection to violence.
I just think the events of September eleventh, regardless of their scale, are still criminal actions requiring a diplomatic and judicial solution. And i also don't think you can deter fanatics bent on martyrdom with the threat of death.
I'm not a hippy. I just think the use of military response in this particular set of circumstances is a grave mistake.
All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the peacemakers for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger.
I don't think our leaders had to tell us that the country was attacked. The jumbo jets flying into the skyscrapers did that just fine.
The barbarians must be destroyed.
It sounds to me like you're going to U of I. But that's just owing to my own similar experience (and department names). At U of I, at least... the college of commerce is "owned" by the Big 5 accounting firms, and they want our curriculum to turn out auditors and consultants... so that's what the whole curriculum is geared towards. Everyone has to know how to pick apart financial statements, because that's what auditors do. Everyone has to know about strategic management, because that's what consultants need.
As for your classmates' and instructors' attitudes... what else would you expect? These guys (classmates) don't care about anything than impressing "the boss", who's using IE on Win 2000, with a 1280 x 1024 flatscreen LCD over the corporate intranet... and anything that looks less than perfect on his machine, and his alone isn't going to impress him enough to give out more money and promotions. So, why worry about those contract-programmer lackeys using Linux, and those enginerds using HP-UX. It had better be back-ended by a database written to play The Star Spangled Banner when your immediate supervisor goes looking at it. It's called kissing ass: the only life-skill you'll ever need.
Yes, i was being sarcastic. I'm leaving the college of commerce at the end of this semester and majoring in psychology... so, yes, since i hate it so much, i am doing something about it.:-P
Hey, tried sligh.com but i couldn't get in at first... kept complaining about not having the Flash plugin installed, which i know to be B.S. Turns out, the javascript only redirects you straight to the page if you run MSIE... but if you set the location bar to default.htm (which it may already do depending on your browser) and hit enter... you'll go right in.
There's been a lot of talk about why individuals open the source on projects, or contribute to OSS projects... but i think the congressman might be more interested in why a for-profit business would:
give money to an OSS project (like IBM in the GNOME Foundation)
Pay for in house people to do OSS on the clock or
Release the source for software they wrote in house.
It can be a smart business decision.
When a company needs something to do business, it can either make it or buy it. For the most part, if the thing in question doesn't give the company some sort of edge on the competition, they'll buy it from someone who's in the business of making that type of product: it's usually cheaper than learning a how to make $thing well, buying the assets to make $thing, and the competition could buy it off the shelf from someone else in the $thing-making business. Dell doesn't make ethernet cards. They buy them from 3Com.
But software's a little different. Lots of companies that aren't in the software industry (or even a particular certain segment of the software industry) need in-house programmers for stuff like writing custom inventory tracking solutions and customer service operator front ends for the company's ubber-database. Things like inventory tracking can really shave money off a company's costs... and an operator's front end is pretty specific to the databases in question.
But office productivity suites aren't of any strategic value. People only think about the IMAP server program when it crashes. By and large, these companies will choose to buy such packages off the shelf. It's cheaper to do it that way.
But sometimes it's not. And if you can pool your spare programmer*hours with some other companies for a better way, you might want to go open source to keep one company from misbehaving or profiting off the final product at your expense... especially if the software is some type of necessary evil that you need for overhead, but isn't related to what you make money doing.
Sometimes a firm wants the strategic leverage that comes from having the capability to move into the supplier's turf. This is what IBM's support of the GNOME Foundation is all about... idealism aside: they want to have a bargaining chip against Microsoft that comes from a Ready-For-Primetime Linux Desktop GUI when they sit down to negiotiate the contract for Windows FU.
Companies can often open source their software when they know they're not making money off it anymore and don't want the cost of supporting or distributing it anymore. AOL doesn't need Netscape; ID doesn't need the original DOOM. So they've both been released under open source licenses. Farmed most of the support and continuing development to all the free labor in "the community".
But most open source software, to my knowledge, does come out of the academic and hobbyist community, and political motives aside these people are better off opening their source if they're not in a position to start a business around it.... If you run just as good a chance of loosing as making money if you tried to market, support, and continue developing it, and you make a living some other way, you're probably better off taking the sure payback of $0.00.
Sorry, Nolle but the Internet does respect a basic economic law. Not supply and demand: natural monopoly.
The internet is a public good, it cost so much to build the thing that a market couldn't reap enough benefit to warrant the investment. But, the combined use of lots of people be socially worth the cost if indirectly paid for (taxpayers and ISP subscribers).
And most of the slashdot crowd is right: if entertainment firms want better performance they ought to build their own networks. However, that's kinda what the rest of the article talks about. While some of the people talked about sorting data by priority on the main line, some of those interviewed did mention things like (ostensibly) caching and direct pipelines from "content providers" to major ISP's.
But the "get the hippies out" crowd needs to remember that the 'Net sucks in their eyes because it wasn't worth it to build their own network back in the sixties any more than it would have been cost-effective to build their own Interstate highway systems. And we should all thank $deity that AT&T didn't get wholly on the ARPANet bandwagon. Like the long-distance voice network or the highway system, the internet could have been a monopoly or a public good, and I for one am glad it's the latter.
> if these people committed a crime (and they
> have all been photographed doing so) how is
> this different than a wanted poster?
i think the perpetual speeder who doesn't get pulled over is a better driver than the daydreaming geezer who conforms to the speed limits.
maybe this is an outgrowth of me not being socialized normally, but i think that if they want you, they should have to catch you. i come from a police family, and i've always felt pride in my father and uncles and other relatives because there's an emotional, predatory quality of the hunt in their work.
this is different from a wanted poster, in that with a wanted poster you're dealing with a heinous offense or a serious offender, and the police have put some effort into catching the perpitrator already. it's not a case of letting the general public do their work for them and sorting it all out after the fact.
i'm not in favor of random property damage or assault, but some things are more heinous than others. not only is this represented in differing severity of punishments, but i think that the scarcity of manpower should also force attention to more serious offenses.
i guess i don't like it for the same reasons i don't like the idea of collecting a bunch of marketing info on me and using data mining to sort it all out. there's no sport in it. as a matter of principle, i think we're all safer (from institutions) if it's possible to beat the system. i'll leave comming up with examples to someone a little more cynical / paranoid.
i was at class, so i missed most of the fray on this, but it looks really cool. i've just got one request for the devel team, and i may pass it along.
i really liked the feel that the original trade wars had... sorta a Star Wars meets Star Trek ambience, which may not be legally possible given the current environment and the business plan they have, but it deserves a shot. yeah, the ships in ANSI blue and red is cool... but unless it's got that plausible pankake-squashed look to the ships... right now it looks like Anarchy Online and not TW2002.
of course, come the day, i'll probably not pay to play either of them, and just stick to FPS LAN games and TW2002 on free telnet BBS's.
i don't MMORPG right now anyway... for what it's worth __
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I think taco's making a specific allusion to MafiaBoy, who got off with probation for his DDOS attack last year.
Part of the problem is that under the deal as it stands Microsoft will never have to open its API's to the world, and never "share" them (with humongous NDA's to boot) with not-for-profit entities.
Might even let them obbliterate not-for-profit (read: open source) software that has reverse engineered the API's in court.
According to Cringely. I haven't the time nor the will to read the entire tentative settlement.
But... if turnover is relatively low, and Lords are appointed for life (kinda like the U.S. supreme court) there's less chance of this being a problem than one would think.
Theoretically the Congress could inflate the Supreme Court (or any U.S. federal bench) as much as they wanted and hand the nominations to the President to throw around, but it hasn't happened except for twice. The "Midnight Justices" of the early 19th century, who were tossed out of office by the courts, and F.D.R.'s attempt to stack the bench with people who would support the New Deal, which was generally approved.
Wait until Blair's out of office and the Lords he would appoint wouldn't be as sensitive to the Commons, and you always would have the Thatcher & Major appointees to boot... and once they've gotten to working together, they start to listen to each other more than the Government (in the Parliamentary sense)... it won't be that bad.
So, will it make the main page next week when he talks about how "bad" Linux and Mozilla are? As the backseat editors like to say, "Rob, start spell-checking that title now; you know it's coming."
For that matter, i wonder what he'll have to say about Linux. Ten years and they're still on version 2.[4,5]. That might actually make him happy.
Actually, they sorta have taken it upon themselves. When this was first announced, the plan was to spread it as a virus. You get some mail, you open it up, you click the big shiny (assuming you've turned off auto-open attachments), it hooks itself into your computer, records everything, and sends a magic message to the FBI whenever you use PGP (and probably similar programs).
I use Mozilla. I have McAffee Virus Scan installed on my system. One of the parts of it is Download / E-mail Scan. Whenever i download a file and it gets written into the cache, McAffee checks it for viruses. Whenever i POP my mail off the server, McAffee checks it for viruses. When i followed a link from startrek.com to one of the producer's homepages Download Scan intercepted his server's attempt to infect my machine with Nimda.
So, if the FBI sticks to its initial plan, and spreads this thing virally (and there are still conflicting reports about that), instead of having informants plant the software on suspects' machines (which they have done, and requires a wiretap warrant) then yes, magic lantern (or at least its delivery vector) is something that virus scanners "should" intercept and defuse.
- they're trying to retain the confidence of the middle-american software purchaser (both private and commercial) that would revolt* against them as "un-american" if they obstructed anything the FBI proposed.
- they'd probably face some sort of frivolous or trumped up charge of aiding terrorism or maybe even sedition if they'd announced plans to detect magic lantern. not that such a charge would stick (on appeal).
[*]said middle-american probably doesn't understand the security implications of permitting a class of trojan software to do its work (not that i do, but i acknowledge it has the potential to be quite a problem). said middle-american would also dismiss the raising of any privacy or civil rights concerns with a hearty "NONE OF THAT MATTERS ANY MORE! WE'RE AT WAR NOW!" and probably a "don't bring any of that unamerican talk into my $location" or a "the FBI is on our side, they wouldn't do anything to hurt us." for good measure.For what it's worth, the needless injection was around before star trek, used in the smallpox-irradication mass vaccinations of the 60's and 70's. However groups have steadily dropped the use of liquid "hyposprays" because blood can backwash onto the jet head, potentially infecting people in line. In fact all of the military branches have dropped their use since 1997.
The technology is starting to make a comeback, however. Powder-based systems which opperate much more quickly don't have the risk of backwash, and have disposable heads (as do new designs for liquid media).
...but i don't think it'll take off. the anarchists want to keep anarchy and the corporate types will want power to stay with the institutions they control: ICANN most specifically.
Or it could just be that they haven't learned from the fiascos that were PCHealth and System Restore in WinME and are planning to corner the one area where rental software (or something like it) has been a pretty uniform success: Anti-Virus. People pay fifteen bucks for six months of DAT's. Microsoft might just want to figure out why people will pay for that, but not $50 a month for Office ^XP^2005
Totally kidding
I looked at this and said... wait a minute, hasn't this already been sorta done? Despite not being a full featured box, Firecard is a PCI-card running Linux... for the purposes of supporting a firewall (as you could have guessed from the name if you'd not read the story -- Nov 14 2001... but it's cool that they've taken it to the next level.
First, there are very excellent refutations of her shakier points on the page, and i'd like to congratulate all of them... but since this is slashdot, let's take this opportunity to point and laugh at some of the ones we disagree with :-P
I swear this wasn't by JonKatz, unless he was using an alias. This sounds like the same argument made against photography with respect to painting and the type of technical illustration.
Contact sheets are nice. In fact, my digital camera presents its images for initial download as a virtual contact sheet... and if i felt really uppity, i could go down to kinko's and print it out on their color laser printer. And as for the lack of aesthetic quality in the photography... anyone who's decent at taking still pictures should have the same facility with a comparable digital camera, should take the same calibre of pictures, and if you're worried about not being able to dramatically highlight certain parts of the photograph by dodging and burning all i have to say is you're light-years ahead of j03 w4r3z d00d who just cr4x0r3d Photoshop, if you'll condescend to use your iMac for more than getting into PC v. Mac flame wars.
except if it's for a graduate degree it's for one in fine arts, not computer science or social sciences... so if you were defending your pro-digital dissertation, unless it was for an MFA in graphic design, you'd be challgenged with her arguments, and people with the same opinions (and biases) would be giving the thumbs-up/thumbs-down.
it might be too charitable to say she's playing to her audience, as she probably deeply believes what she says... but that's the conventional wisdom on the south end of campus either way
Excuse me! I'm going to walk out of U of I with a B.S. in Economics and a B.A. in Psych... and two (or three) years experience working with computer networks from a variety of angles. I think i'm competant to discern the differences among a 5cr1Tp k1DD13, the writer of code redhackedbychinese!!, and Steve Jackson.
I think a ten-question qualification exam might be more appropriate.
to: alt.virii, alt.h4x0r, comp.sec.black-hat
subject: l33t h4x0r5 w4nt3d!!!!!111111
W3 wnat j00! if j00 c4n rwit3 b4d-455 viri1 liek s1rc4M, & c0d3 rde, w3 w4nt j00 to h4x0r f0r u5!!!!11111
phr34k in2 th3 b0X3n 0f l4m3r5 ru0nd th3 wl0rd 4nd t4a5h0r th33r MP3Z... l3g4lly!!!!111111 m4k3 m0n3y f45t!!!!!!11111111```````
w3'll 3v3n g3ts j00 a t3ch-g33nisu v33sa 1f j00 rw0t3 c0d3 rde 4nd l1v35 n1 ch1n0r!!!!!!1111
--The RIAA... ph33r us!!!!!!11111
The issue for me is not sound quality as much. I like MP3 and i like Ogg... I like Ogg because it has underdog appeal, and the files are a little smaller for comparable quality (not same bitrate). But the one thing that has not going all over Ogg instead of MP3 is this pesky little issue...
I run a PII 333, with relatively pimp expansion cards (geforce 2, sblive)... and for some reason, probably how winamp handles the Ogg decoding plugin, my system is more prone to hanging at the beginning of songs. Keyboard and mouse lag is the worst. When another program is demanding resources, the Ogg file skips. I guess it's just a more intense algorithm... but unless i get an Athlon, i'll have to pay with more hard drive space devoted to the CD's i've ripped.
I would want those responsible extradited, tried, and punished in accordance with the U.S. criminal code, and whatever international treaties apply. Even if they killed me.
Our respect for life and law, and our seperation of guilty and innocent are what sets us apart from terrorists.
But more importantly, Afghanistan is a strategic nightmare and the diplomatic intracies are equally perillous. Bombing won't make bin Laden confess and surrender. A ground war will disintegrate our support in the region, and politically destabilize it: should we buy what he wants with our blood?
And i fully expect, "Sure! If it means we get to send some terrorists to hell!" to be your answer.
Tomahawk cruise missiles aren't going to get bin Laden to sign a confession and surrender to the 10th mountain division. He wants us to invade. He wants us to start gunning down children (and we will after they start walking out to infantry platoons carying grenades). He wants our soldiers to start making racist slurs. He wants us to start attacking other predominantly muslim countries where he has a few sponsors.
And when that happens, any support we have any farther east than Greece will collapse like the twin towers... and bin Laden will have his Islam v. Greater America holy war. I will admit that I read that into the essay.
But I think that was his point. He just couldn't say those words on the 14th. From the essay:
Even though we've secured partial cooperation from Pakistan and Uzbekistan (which he goes on to talk about), I don't think they'll stay on our side once things get as ugly as i fear they will.
I'm not a pacifist, but I am a college student opposed to military retalliation. I don't have some sort of cheap, ideological objection to the U.S. asserting itself. I don't have a religious objection to violence.
I just think the events of September eleventh, regardless of their scale, are still criminal actions requiring a diplomatic and judicial solution. And i also don't think you can deter fanatics bent on martyrdom with the threat of death.
I'm not a hippy. I just think the use of military response in this particular set of circumstances is a grave mistake.
Have you forgotten where the link in your sigfile leads? An anti-war editorial written by an Afghan.
So, are you an unapoligetic hypocrite, or is a hundred million dollars (in explosives) all it really takes to change your real beliefs?
It sounds to me like you're going to U of I. But that's just owing to my own similar experience (and department names). At U of I, at least... the college of commerce is "owned" by the Big 5 accounting firms, and they want our curriculum to turn out auditors and consultants... so that's what the whole curriculum is geared towards. Everyone has to know how to pick apart financial statements, because that's what auditors do. Everyone has to know about strategic management, because that's what consultants need.
As for your classmates' and instructors' attitudes... what else would you expect? These guys (classmates) don't care about anything than impressing "the boss", who's using IE on Win 2000, with a 1280 x 1024 flatscreen LCD over the corporate intranet... and anything that looks less than perfect on his machine, and his alone isn't going to impress him enough to give out more money and promotions. So, why worry about those contract-programmer lackeys using Linux, and those enginerds using HP-UX. It had better be back-ended by a database written to play The Star Spangled Banner when your immediate supervisor goes looking at it. It's called kissing ass: the only life-skill you'll ever need.
Yes, i was being sarcastic. I'm leaving the college of commerce at the end of this semester and majoring in psychology... so, yes, since i hate it so much, i am doing something about it. :-P
Hey, tried sligh.com but i couldn't get in at first... kept complaining about not having the Flash plugin installed, which i know to be B.S. Turns out, the javascript only redirects you straight to the page if you run MSIE... but if you set the location bar to default.htm (which it may already do depending on your browser) and hit enter... you'll go right in.
There's been a lot of talk about why individuals open the source on projects, or contribute to OSS projects... but i think the congressman might be more interested in why a for-profit business would:
It can be a smart business decision.
When a company needs something to do business, it can either make it or buy it. For the most part, if the thing in question doesn't give the company some sort of edge on the competition, they'll buy it from someone who's in the business of making that type of product: it's usually cheaper than learning a how to make $thing well, buying the assets to make $thing, and the competition could buy it off the shelf from someone else in the $thing-making business. Dell doesn't make ethernet cards. They buy them from 3Com.
But software's a little different. Lots of companies that aren't in the software industry (or even a particular certain segment of the software industry) need in-house programmers for stuff like writing custom inventory tracking solutions and customer service operator front ends for the company's ubber-database. Things like inventory tracking can really shave money off a company's costs... and an operator's front end is pretty specific to the databases in question.
But office productivity suites aren't of any strategic value. People only think about the IMAP server program when it crashes. By and large, these companies will choose to buy such packages off the shelf. It's cheaper to do it that way.
But sometimes it's not. And if you can pool your spare programmer*hours with some other companies for a better way, you might want to go open source to keep one company from misbehaving or profiting off the final product at your expense... especially if the software is some type of necessary evil that you need for overhead, but isn't related to what you make money doing.
Sometimes a firm wants the strategic leverage that comes from having the capability to move into the supplier's turf. This is what IBM's support of the GNOME Foundation is all about... idealism aside: they want to have a bargaining chip against Microsoft that comes from a Ready-For-Primetime Linux Desktop GUI when they sit down to negiotiate the contract for Windows FU.
Companies can often open source their software when they know they're not making money off it anymore and don't want the cost of supporting or distributing it anymore. AOL doesn't need Netscape; ID doesn't need the original DOOM. So they've both been released under open source licenses. Farmed most of the support and continuing development to all the free labor in "the community".
But most open source software, to my knowledge, does come out of the academic and hobbyist community, and political motives aside these people are better off opening their source if they're not in a position to start a business around it.... If you run just as good a chance of loosing as making money if you tried to market, support, and continue developing it, and you make a living some other way, you're probably better off taking the sure payback of $0.00.
Sorry, Nolle but the Internet does respect a basic economic law. Not supply and demand: natural monopoly.
The internet is a public good, it cost so much to build the thing that a market couldn't reap enough benefit to warrant the investment. But, the combined use of lots of people be socially worth the cost if indirectly paid for (taxpayers and ISP subscribers).
And most of the slashdot crowd is right: if entertainment firms want better performance they ought to build their own networks. However, that's kinda what the rest of the article talks about. While some of the people talked about sorting data by priority on the main line, some of those interviewed did mention things like (ostensibly) caching and direct pipelines from "content providers" to major ISP's.
But the "get the hippies out" crowd needs to remember that the 'Net sucks in their eyes because it wasn't worth it to build their own network back in the sixties any more than it would have been cost-effective to build their own Interstate highway systems. And we should all thank $deity that AT&T didn't get wholly on the ARPANet bandwagon. Like the long-distance voice network or the highway system, the internet could have been a monopoly or a public good, and I for one am glad it's the latter.
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alt.geek
> have all been photographed doing so) how is
> this different than a wanted poster?
i think the perpetual speeder who doesn't get pulled over is a better driver than the daydreaming geezer who conforms to the speed limits.
maybe this is an outgrowth of me not being socialized normally, but i think that if they want you, they should have to catch you. i come from a police family, and i've always felt pride in my father and uncles and other relatives because there's an emotional, predatory quality of the hunt in their work.
this is different from a wanted poster, in that with a wanted poster you're dealing with a heinous offense or a serious offender, and the police have put some effort into catching the perpitrator already. it's not a case of letting the general public do their work for them and sorting it all out after the fact.
i'm not in favor of random property damage or assault, but some things are more heinous than others. not only is this represented in differing severity of punishments, but i think that the scarcity of manpower should also force attention to more serious offenses.
i guess i don't like it for the same reasons i don't like the idea of collecting a bunch of marketing info on me and using data mining to sort it all out. there's no sport in it. as a matter of principle, i think we're all safer (from institutions) if it's possible to beat the system. i'll leave comming up with examples to someone a little more cynical / paranoid.
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alt.geek
i was at class, so i missed most of the fray on this, but it looks really cool. i've just got one request for the devel team, and i may pass it along.
i really liked the feel that the original trade wars had... sorta a Star Wars meets Star Trek ambience, which may not be legally possible given the current environment and the business plan they have, but it deserves a shot. yeah, the ships in ANSI blue and red is cool... but unless it's got that plausible pankake-squashed look to the ships... right now it looks like Anarchy Online and not TW2002.
of course, come the day, i'll probably not pay to play either of them, and just stick to FPS LAN games and TW2002 on free telnet BBS's.
i don't MMORPG right now anyway... for what it's worth__
alt.geek