Anyone else find it funny that IBM is supporting this project? Given the history of Compaq reverse-engineering *their* BIOS to jumpstart the PC industry?
Maybe you personally won't, but there exists *someone* that will. If Linus goes crazy and refuses to fix some bug, rest assured that *someone* out there will take the code, fix it, and release the patch for the world to have. Then you (and 99.9% of the users) can get the fix without ever touching one line of code. But if Microsoft refuses to fix Word97, then the users are screwed.
So you personally don't have to ever touch code, but you benefit from it being open nonetheless...
The funny thing about option #2 you list above (Buy Palm Outright) is that they'd be getting the BeOS this way too! Remember when they debated between BeOS and NeXT for the next (pun intended) version of MacOS?
But you have to strike a balance between zillions of office suites and one. If you have zillions, then all the developers are spread out so thin that no work gets done on any of them. (That's where we might be headed with Star Office, Abi Word, K Office, now Gobe...) If you have just one, then there's no competition and thus no incentive for progress on that one. (See MS Office recently... what's really the difference between Word 97, 2000 and XP?)
But what's the optimum number of projects so that we get ample competition with ample development on each one?
Like, can they kill the person doing the distributing and be free from prosecution for murder?
Re:I almost posted about this (Re: How Incredibly.
on
KDE 3.0 is Out
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· Score: 1
I agree that this is a problem, but isn't it poor planning on the part of the KDE developers that allowed this to happen?
I mean, why would they open up the anonymous ftp until *all* the mirrors had a chance to sync up? Shouldn't they use password protected ftp or some other mechanism to get the binaries to the mirrors *before* opening up the anonymous ftp servers?
Even mailing a harddrive over snail mail to the mirrors and having them all set it up before opening up anonymous ftp anywhere would be better than asking the mirrors to get it from anonymous ftp along with the rest of us!
Linux is one of the few major OSes that uses a stack entirely separate from the BSD reference design. Because of this, there are unique bugs and flukes with the Linux stack not seen in what's implemented on most other OSes.
It also gives us diversity. What if some problem is found tommorrow with the BSD TCP/IP stack? If the whole internet is running the BSD stack, then we're all screwed. But in a diverse environment, we've got options and we'll get back on our feet a whole lot quicker. (Same argument applies for a problem found in the Linux TCP/IP stack or the NT stack which has probably diverged enough from its BSD roots by now.)
This is also why an entire world of nothing but NT servers would be a bad thing. Or an entire world of nothing but Linux servers for that matter. One virus could bring down the whole network overnight. In many organizations with nothing but NT boxes, code red and nimda did just that.
It's also different because the Netscape and Mozilla source trees remain synched up -- each time the want to make a new version of Netscape, they take the current Mozilla sources, pass it through QA, rebranding, etc, and release it.
Here it looks (to me at least) like we have two separate, divergent source trees. Any cool new stuff that Sun comes up with will not necessarily make it into Open Office (unless re-implemented). That means as time goes on, the products will diverge more and more to the point where they are very distinct.
I agree with you that artificial scaricity is a useful thing for the reasons you mention, but I think our current policies towards it are outdated. The pace of change of modern technology is much faster now than it was in the 18th century when our laws were established, and I think the duration of patents, copyrights, etc. on modern ideas is far too long.
If I develop a new fancy, whiz-bang way of making my computer do something, I should be given artifical scarcity rights for it to encourage that kind of thinking. But for 20 years?!? That's many generations in our field.
I envision a system where these kind of patents last for maybe 5 years. That gives the developers a gravy train for a while to encourage innovation, but it puts control back in the hands of the people after a more reasonable period of time. So others can benefit from the innovation and build off of it sooner.
So, I agree with you that artificial scarcity is useful. But I think it would be more useful if its duration were shorter.
Re:Author interviewed on NPR
on
Emergence
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· Score: 1
Speaking of KUOW, this guy actually gave a talk at the HUB on the UW campus a month or so ago that I went to. He seemed a pretty intelligent fellow, though I haven't read his book.
I don't contest that it's illegal and even immoral for people to use this as a chance to get OS X for twenty bucks. But I still think Apple is in the wrong here.
It's ok to go after the people that steal their software, but it's wrong to go after the people that spread information about how to do it.
This is just like decss madness. People that used it to steal dvd's were breaking the law. But people that used it for legitimate uses (like watching dvds they owned under linux) were not. And people that spread the information for others to do with as they saw fit were most certainly not doing anything wrong.
Here, there is a legitimate use -- installing 10.1 on a fresh partition without having to install 10 first for people that legally own 10 and 10.1. But you can also use it to steal OS X.
Apple should go after the people that are stealing their stuff, not the people that are spreading information that has both illegal and legal uses. Of course we know that going after the end users is near to impossible, so instead they do the easy thing of going after the people spreading information. And the DMCA allows them to do this... For shame...
The important thing is not (always) some arbitrary absolute measurement of "speed", but rather the apparent (to the user) speed of the system. If you're reading mail, you probably won't care, or even notice, that your compile takes 49 seconds instead of 47.
On the desktop, yes. But not always on the server.
The patent can still stand after something has been standardized, but I dont think people should be charged to use it.
So what's left then? If the holder of the patent-now-a-standard can neither prevent anyone from using it nor charge anyone to use it, what's the point of the patent still standing?
I agree with your sentiment, though. I believe that once something becomes a standard, no one should be able to claim a patent on it anymore. Standards should, by definition, be freely available to all. And nothing should be able to claim standards compliance without being certified as such by some independent, neutral party to prevent "embrace and extend" tactics.
Stock based compensation always (IMHO) suffers from this fatal flaw:
You as one individual make up a greater percentage of the total company workforce than your stocks are of the total company market cap.
so if you're one worker at a 1000 person company, unless you own or are granted options for 1/1000 of the company's stock, you're going to gain more by having them pay you, or give you food, or give you a membership at a health club, or whatever, than by forgoing these benefits to take stock based compensation, or "increase shareholder value", or whatever they're calling it these days.
Eazel, Ximian, RedHat, etc. have no more right to make money than Digital Convergence does. No corporation has a right to make money.
We as a community just happen to think that Eazel's and Ximian's and RedHat's products are waaaay cooler than DC's. So we support their moneymaking efforts and may even try to come up with some more for them, unlike DC's.
But that doesn't mean they have a right to make money. If they decide to screw us some time down the road, we'll stop supporting them real quick! Just like if DC comes out and sincerely apologizes for all their misdeeds, we'll welcome it.
But no corporation, no matter what they do, has a right to make money!
Yes, I am boring and I don't care all that much if $BigGroceryStore knows that I buy brand X peanut butter with brand Y jam.
But the other problem is that it gives $BigGroceryStore an unfair advantage over $LittleCornerShop. The little independent grocery store doesn't have the resources to gather and analyze that kind of data to compete with the mega stores.
I suppose this is just another step in the "ahh they're replacing my coffee shop with a Starbucks!" rant that we've all heard a million times before....
They also have all the mappings listed in the regular DNS sense, too. From the page:
Clients who host their DNS with Name.Space are mirrored in the domain ".XS2.NET"
for compatibility with legacy domains. (i.e. name.space = name.space.xs2.net)
No, this is just another example of MS being a copycat. They realized that this was the direction that Netscape was headed and they had to get there first. Netscape and/or Java was trying to commodotize the operating system, which would be devastating to Windows.
Microsoft does make some pretty good products. But they're not innovative. That's not the same as saying they're not good.
IE is a better (?) version of Netscape.
Word is a better (?) version of wordstar, wordperfect, etc..
Exchange is a better (?) version of Notes/Domino
Windows is a better (?) version of the Mac GUI(Which actually came from Xerox PARC.)
....insert any MS product here.
There's a big difference between being smart and being creative. Microsoft is a collection of some of the most intelligent people in the world. But they're not innovative or creative.
This isn't intended as MS-bashing. Refining ideas that other people come up with is an important part of the industry. I hope they're allowed to keep doing this.
But, and here's where it gets important, I hope they're not allowed to strongarm the rest of the industry and prevent people from doing this to them! We need open protocols and file formats. That way everyone will be able to work off each other's ideas and the industry will continue to grow through competition.
what a joke - the power's got to be generated SOMEWHERE - so there WILL BE pollution
The point is that the electric plants are waaay more efficient than an internal combustion engine, so it's much cleaner in the long run to have the power generated there.
Should realized capital gains be taxed? Isn't this equivalent to 'double taxation', i.e. once when the money is initially earned and again when a capital gain is realized?
umm.. no. If I make $100 I pay tax on that $100. If I then invest it and it becomes $120 I pay additional tax on $20, not on $120.
I thought (and still think) that the BeOS has a lot going for it. I'm saddened to see that it hasn't taken off more than it did.
Yeah, it's not Free as in Speech, but the API's are very clean and elegant, it's got great SMP support and the thing really flys for me. The UI is also very intuitive and easy to use/learn.
Unfortunately there are all of about three applications for it, so no one uses it. (Catch 22: More apps <--> More users)
Slashdot Mirror
Anyone else find it funny that IBM is supporting this project? Given the history of Compaq reverse-engineering *their* BIOS to jumpstart the PC industry?
Maybe you personally won't, but there exists *someone* that will. If Linus goes crazy and refuses to fix some bug, rest assured that *someone* out there will take the code, fix it, and release the patch for the world to have. Then you (and 99.9% of the users) can get the fix without ever touching one line of code. But if Microsoft refuses to fix Word97, then the users are screwed.
So you personally don't have to ever touch code, but you benefit from it being open nonetheless...
The funny thing about option #2 you list above (Buy Palm Outright) is that they'd be getting the BeOS this way too! Remember when they debated between BeOS and NeXT for the next (pun intended) version of MacOS?
Well, now they can have both!
But you have to strike a balance between zillions of office suites and one. If you have zillions, then all the developers are spread out so thin that no work gets done on any of them. (That's where we might be headed with Star Office, Abi Word, K Office, now Gobe...) ... what's really the difference between Word 97, 2000 and XP?)
If you have just one, then there's no competition and thus no incentive for progress on that one. (See MS Office recently
But what's the optimum number of projects so that we get ample competition with ample development on each one?
Like, can they kill the person doing the distributing and be free from prosecution for murder?
I agree that this is a problem, but isn't it poor planning on the part of the KDE developers that allowed this to happen?
I mean, why would they open up the anonymous ftp until *all* the mirrors had a chance to sync up? Shouldn't they use password protected ftp or some other mechanism to get the binaries to the mirrors *before* opening up the anonymous ftp servers?
Even mailing a harddrive over snail mail to the mirrors and having them all set it up before opening up anonymous ftp anywhere would be better than asking the mirrors to get it from anonymous ftp along with the rest of us!
Linux is one of the few major OSes that uses a stack entirely separate from the BSD reference design. Because of this, there are unique bugs and flukes with the Linux stack not seen in what's implemented on most other OSes.
It also gives us diversity. What if some problem is found tommorrow with the BSD TCP/IP stack? If the whole internet is running the BSD stack, then we're all screwed. But in a diverse environment, we've got options and we'll get back on our feet a whole lot quicker. (Same argument applies for a problem found in the Linux TCP/IP stack or the NT stack which has probably diverged enough from its BSD roots by now.)
This is also why an entire world of nothing but NT servers would be a bad thing. Or an entire world of nothing but Linux servers for that matter. One virus could bring down the whole network overnight. In many organizations with nothing but NT boxes, code red and nimda did just that.
Diversity is good. Darwin teaches us that.
... to beige now that we know the universe is not a minty green?
It's also different because the Netscape and Mozilla source trees remain synched up -- each time the want to make a new version of Netscape, they take the current Mozilla sources, pass it through QA, rebranding, etc, and release it.
Here it looks (to me at least) like we have two separate, divergent source trees. Any cool new stuff that Sun comes up with will not necessarily make it into Open Office (unless re-implemented). That means as time goes on, the products will diverge more and more to the point where they are very distinct.
Also see the Berlin project. (already mentioned somewhere else in this thread.)
http://berlin.sourceforge.net/
It's goal (at least as far as I understand it) is to replace X while focusing on *desktop* uses -- ie, speed over network invisibility.
I think whenever you're debugging something that runs in the kernel (read: device drivers) on any platform, you're going to be rebooting 10^8 times.
That's the nice thing about vmware, or user mode OS on top of OS, or what have you....
I agree with you that artificial scaricity is a useful thing for the reasons you mention, but I think our current policies towards it are outdated. The pace of change of modern technology is much faster now than it was in the 18th century when our laws were established, and I think the duration of patents, copyrights, etc. on modern ideas is far too long.
If I develop a new fancy, whiz-bang way of making my computer do something, I should be given artifical scarcity rights for it to encourage that kind of thinking. But for 20 years?!? That's many generations in our field.
I envision a system where these kind of patents last for maybe 5 years. That gives the developers a gravy train for a while to encourage innovation, but it puts control back in the hands of the people after a more reasonable period of time. So others can benefit from the innovation and build off of it sooner.
So, I agree with you that artificial scarcity is useful. But I think it would be more useful if its duration were shorter.
Speaking of KUOW, this guy actually gave a talk at the HUB on the UW campus a month or so ago that I went to. He seemed a pretty intelligent fellow, though I haven't read his book.
I don't contest that it's illegal and even immoral for people to use this as a chance to get OS X for twenty bucks. But I still think Apple is in the wrong here.
... For shame ...
It's ok to go after the people that steal their software, but it's wrong to go after the people that spread information about how to do it.
This is just like decss madness. People that used it to steal dvd's were breaking the law. But people that used it for legitimate uses (like watching dvds they owned under linux) were not. And people that spread the information for others to do with as they saw fit were most certainly not doing anything wrong.
Here, there is a legitimate use -- installing 10.1 on a fresh partition without having to install 10 first for people that legally own 10 and 10.1. But you can also use it to steal OS X.
Apple should go after the people that are stealing their stuff, not the people that are spreading information that has both illegal and legal uses. Of course we know that going after the end users is near to impossible, so instead they do the easy thing of going after the people spreading information. And the DMCA allows them to do this
Real Player 8 gets a bit upset from time to time
hmmm.... convenient that RealPlayer is competing with Windows Media, eh?
</conspiracy theorist>
The important thing is not (always) some arbitrary absolute measurement of "speed", but rather the apparent (to the user) speed of the system. If you're reading mail, you probably won't care, or even notice, that your compile takes 49 seconds instead of 47.
On the desktop, yes. But not always on the server.
The patent can still stand after something has been standardized, but I dont think people should be charged to use it.
So what's left then? If the holder of the patent-now-a-standard can neither prevent anyone from using it nor charge anyone to use it, what's the point of the patent still standing?
I agree with your sentiment, though. I believe that once something becomes a standard, no one should be able to claim a patent on it anymore. Standards should, by definition, be freely available to all. And nothing should be able to claim standards compliance without being certified as such by some independent, neutral party to prevent "embrace and extend" tactics.
You as one individual make up a greater percentage of the total company workforce than your stocks are of the total company market cap.
so if you're one worker at a 1000 person company, unless you own or are granted options for 1/1000 of the company's stock, you're going to gain more by having them pay you, or give you food, or give you a membership at a health club, or whatever, than by forgoing these benefits to take stock based compensation, or "increase shareholder value", or whatever they're calling it these days.
We as a community just happen to think that Eazel's and Ximian's and RedHat's products are waaaay cooler than DC's. So we support their moneymaking efforts and may even try to come up with some more for them, unlike DC's.
But that doesn't mean they have a right to make money. If they decide to screw us some time down the road, we'll stop supporting them real quick! Just like if DC comes out and sincerely apologizes for all their misdeeds, we'll welcome it.
But no corporation, no matter what they do, has a right to make money!
But the other problem is that it gives $BigGroceryStore an unfair advantage over $LittleCornerShop. The little independent grocery store doesn't have the resources to gather and analyze that kind of data to compete with the mega stores.
I suppose this is just another step in the "ahh they're replacing my coffee shop with a Starbucks!" rant that we've all heard a million times before....
Clients who host their DNS with Name.Space are mirrored in the domain ".XS2.NET" for compatibility with legacy domains. (i.e. name.space = name.space.xs2.net)
Microsoft does make some pretty good products. But they're not innovative. That's not the same as saying they're not good.
- IE is a better (?) version of Netscape.
- Word is a better (?) version of wordstar, wordperfect, etc..
- Exchange is a better (?) version of Notes/Domino
- Windows is a better (?) version of the Mac GUI(Which actually came from Xerox PARC.)
- ....insert any MS product here.
There's a big difference between being smart and being creative. Microsoft is a collection of some of the most intelligent people in the world. But they're not innovative or creative.This isn't intended as MS-bashing. Refining ideas that other people come up with is an important part of the industry. I hope they're allowed to keep doing this.
But, and here's where it gets important, I hope they're not allowed to strongarm the rest of the industry and prevent people from doing this to them! We need open protocols and file formats. That way everyone will be able to work off each other's ideas and the industry will continue to grow through competition.
The point is that the electric plants are waaay more efficient than an internal combustion engine, so it's much cleaner in the long run to have the power generated there.
umm.. no. If I make $100 I pay tax on that $100. If I then invest it and it becomes $120 I pay additional tax on $20, not on $120.
I'm still only taxed once on each dollar I made.
Yeah, it's not Free as in Speech, but the API's are very clean and elegant, it's got great SMP support and the thing really flys for me. The UI is also very intuitive and easy to use/learn.
Unfortunately there are all of about three applications for it, so no one uses it. (Catch 22: More apps <--> More users)