I find it curious that this new technology should coincide so closely with the expiry of the Trinitron (TM) patent. Could it be that they've been keeping this new technology under wraps for a while, just waiting for the Trinitron cash cow to expire -- that they didn't want to cannibalise the Trinitron market until such times as its intrinsic value dropped? A pity that it's unlikely that we'll find out the truth on that matter.
The Australian Excite@Home (provided by Cable and Wireless Optus) already has at least one annoying firewall-like feature that has nothing to do with security. They implement so-called "transparent proxying", meaning that all outgoing connections on port 80 go via their proxy box, regardless of your browser's proxy settings. This has had me spitting chips on one occasion when their proxy died. On other occasions it's merely annoying, because you're never quite sure whether it's dishing up data that is actually current.
Can I have LED paint? It would be nifty to dip a brush in a bucket of goo, paint a stroke, apply a voltage across it, and have the paint emit light a la an LED. I have no idea if this is possible (I think I get a C in electronics, generally), but from all that talk of using inkjets to paint on circuits, why not? The only problem I can envisage is polarity, but then I'm not even sure whether these things are fussy about that. Sounds like it could be a lot of fun.
Given how bloody awful this law could be, it's not looking all that bad so far. In particular, I believe that, should the changes recommended by the reviewing committee be accepted, it should be perfectly legal to distribute open source DVD playing software. Consider the following extract from the report (paragraph 4.25).
The Committee recommends that the meaning of circumvention device in item 4 of the Copyright Amendment (Digital Agenda) Bill 1999 be amended to specifically include devices whose primary purpose or use is the circumvention, or facilitating the circumvention, of an effective technological protection measure, and devices which are promoted, advertised, or marketed as having the purpose of circumventing an effective technological protection measure.
Although an open source DVD playing program could conceptually be used to circumvent the "technological prevention measures" (because the code for decrypting the image data must exist in the program somewhere), but so long as the primary purpose of the program as written is to facilitate the viewing of a DVD (ie, it's a DVD player, and that's all), then the program should be allowed under the proposed law.
On the whole, the most interesting part of the report is the chapter from which I have quoted (chapter 4). It is available in PDF.
Internet Names Worldwide, as it is now pretentiously known, is one of the major registrars and does not "simply apply on your behalf" any more than Network Solutions does. The reasonableness checks that go into a.com.au application existed even when the service was free, so how did it suddenly become expensive? Basically, the applicant has to provide the registration number of a registered business name. I know: I have epsilon.com.au.
On top of which, in case you hadn't guessed, I'm Australian myself. When I say we are as ludicrous as ever, I am primarily referring to our useless and assinine Internet censorship laws, plus the technologically ignorant politicians who pushed for them.
Standard registration fee for two years on a.com.au domain: AUS$137.50. Standard registration fee for two years on a.com,.net, or.org domain from the same registrar: AUS$121.00. Want to know why the.com.au costs 15% more? I can summarise it for you in one word: monopoly. It used to be free until some capitalists realised what they were missing out on.
Your characterisation of those who believe the Bible is a straw man. I could do the same for those who subscribe to the various "anthropic principles". The Weak Anthropic Principle, for example, suggests that the improbability of life arising is of no matter, since only those universes which contain observers (and thus life) are observed. One could go on to say that all probabilities are irrelevant, since we are just one of an infinite number of universes in which, no doubt, all things can and do happen.
Everything becomes arbitrary, subject to the whims of chance in an infinite number of universes. Anything is possible and even your senses cannot be trusted (infinite possibilities include universes where your sense data bears no relationship to reality). The laws of physics could change tomorrow, pi could be rounded down to three...
Or not. Most people who hold to the Weak Anthropic Principle don't take it to this extreme, and most people who believe in the Biblical God don't believe that He changes things around at random, even if he can.
Place your bets now. Will there be life found elsewhere in our solar system? Secondary bets may be placed on the following, for those who prefer to wager on human nature rather than nature itself. Will the presence of life on other planets create significant doubt amongst creationists? Will the absence of life on planets which have all the supposed necessary ingredients create significant doubt amongst evolutionists?
What has Microsoft done that isn't a "workalike" for something produced either in academia or in some other corporation? I'm asking out of a sense of irony, by the way.
"Many eyes" are not the absolute enemy of creativity -- it's just that genuinely novel (cf. "innovative") ideas are damn rare.
Particularly gruesome video games (like the one where you are being attacked by zombies and have to shoot them to bits) are already curtained off in all the Australian video game arcades I've seen. It looks like a really token gesture, because although it prevents casual glancing at the screen, I can imagine that every curious kid wants to know what's behind the curtain, and it must be trivial to take a peek.
I don't know if this weak curtaining thing is mandated by Australian censorship -- sorry, classification -- laws or whether it is self imposed, but I suspect the former. There's no requirement for the game to be set apart from other games as mentioned in this particular law: the machines with the curtain rails poking out oddly from the body of the game stand right next to the ones with the exposed screens.
The article in question quotes someone as saying "the law's not going to do any good." Well, duh! It's political grandstanding, same as usual, and the only "good" it's meant to do is to increase the popularity of its proponents with the moral majority -- and it will work in its own small way. It's also yet another law in the ever increasing pile of the stuff that most Western democracies are miring themselves in. That fact, more than "restraint of free speech", is what I find offensive.
Scene: Microsoft and Sony Suits, in a plush but generic corporate boardroom, commence negotiation.
MS: We are very interested in running Sony Playstation titles on our new X-Box. Sony: We are not interested in licensing our technology to you for that purpose. MS: We hear that you are also losing interest in licensing our Windows technology. Sony: Ah, well, when I said that we weren't interested in licensing our Playstation technology to you, what I really meant was that we are interested. Yes. Definitely very interested. MS: Good! Now to details...
Although all the examples given in the article are truly awful and worthy of concern, it's clear that the article uses the classic journalistic technique of sensationalism. There's no balance -- not even a suggestion of it. It paints an extreme picture of the world, leaving out all the bits that don't mesh with this extreme.
This is an important issue, but don't rely on sensationalist news to inform you of the world's woes. Most people will just get steamed up about it, and that's the idea: it makes good reading -- you get involved in it. Getting steamed up isn't actually very useful, however. Examine the problems rationally, obtain information from non-sensationalist sources, and act where you can.
In the case of a distributed cracking effort, the client is given hunk of ciphertext and a block of keys to try on it. A malicious client can send back false negatives (well, 99.999% of them will be true negatives, but you know what I mean) to corrupt the search effort, or send back false positives which waste CPU time at the central server due to verification overhead.
Proposed solution 1: Bait
In addition to tracking which blocks have been checked, the server must also maintain a record of which host (by IP address or other provided data such as email address) checked which blocks. The server then occasionally provides the client with a known ciphertext and a block that contains the correct key. If the client provides a negative response, all blocks known to have been submitted by the client are marked as unchecked. If the server wishes the client to remain ignorant of being caught, it should continue to provide the client with blocks of ciphertext and keys, and discard the results.
The same technique can be used for false positives: systems that give false positives can be put in a blacklist and their results ignored. The server can continue to provide blocks and ignore the results in order to deceive the client.
Weaknesses in this solution include the fact that it is normally more convenient to have a fixed hunk of ciphertext. Cipher feedback modes may necessitate that the cracking attempt be started at the head of the ciphertext. Unless there is a range of ciphertexts to attack, it will be obvious to the client which hunks are bait, and which are real.
Proposed solution 2: The Chinese Lottery
Based on an idea found in
Applied Cryptography. A cracking effort does not have to be centrally organised: this is done purely to increase efficiency by decreasing redundancy. In a super-large keyspace, however, the redundancy caused by duplicated effort isn't nearly as big an overhead as most people think.
To be precise, the efficiency of an uncoordinated effort decreases over time, initially following a roughly linear curve, but tapering off as the area of the keyspace already searched becomes larger. For example, when 5% of the keyspace has been searched, there is a 95% chance that any random trial will try a key that has not been tried before. When 50% of the keyspace has been searched, the system tries new keys with 50% efficiency.
The (somewhat surprising, I think) result of this is that if it takes time T to search 50% of a keyspace at 100% efficiency (no double-checking any keys), then a system that picks keys at random can check the same portion of the keyspace in time T*1.39 on average. Although the random system is operating at 50% efficiency by the time it hits the 50% mark, its history of greater efficiency means that its average efficiency is closer to 72%.
This is a clear loss of efficiency relative to the coordinated approach, but with two major benefits. First, there is no communication or memory overhead in the cracking algorithm! None! The system is stateless and need only report success to someone when it actually finds something. The client need only check in with a central server to see if the lottery is over and if there is new work to do. The second benefit is a consequence of the first: because there is no need to report progress, clients can't submit false negatives. Indeed, there is no part of the protocol where negatives are reported!
Of course, if we go for the chinese lottery solution, then the nature of the central organiser goes from one of coordinator to one of "site where the software is developed and discussed" and possibly "where decisions are made about what problems to feed the clients". I really like the chinese lottery idea: it's really distributed!
Without knowing the specifics of your case (how small the market, etc), it's a bit difficult to give a detailed answer, but probably the most important thing to realise about software is the following.
In my experience, most companies who are putting software into a mission-critical situation would prefer to pay for their software than have it for free. And what they perceive they are getting for their money is not the software itself, but rather a committment from the seller that the software will be supported. Your software doesn't have to be unreliable in order to justify a support contract; nor does it have to be heavily burdened with various flavours of intellectual property rights in order to persuade companies to part with large wads of dosh in exchange for it.
My suggestion would be to not make a big deal of the software license terms. Put it under a GPL or BSD style license, or even in the public domain, but just don't make a selling point out of it. Those who are interested enough to care will ask and be happy with the answer.
Make it available for download on a website, since it will be too small to justify the pricey-CD thing, but dress it up a bit like an evaluation copy -- probably best done by making it say "THIS IS AN UNSUPPORTED EVALUATION COPY", but it depends on the specifics of the case. Remember: the suits want to buy your committment, not your software! Do have a CD, though: make it part of your support contract, just so they have something physical and professional-looking to put on a shelf. Heck, if it's a small market, you can customise it by changing the "unsupported" message to indicate their name and the fact that you are supporting them. Such a comforting reminder!:-)
The benefits of this approach are many. One is that you can skimp on lawyers. You'll still need them for your support contract terms, for example. [Reminder to those who aren't catching on: support contract does not mean unreliable software; indeed, the ideal case is where you sell a support contract and never have a call from the customer because the software just works all the time. You think they'd be unhappy with paying for that level of service?] The customer is also happy because they don't have to count licenses or install dongles or do other obnoxious things associated with restrictive licensing. You can review their support contract service level agreement at regular intervals based on their usage, however.
Once you've got some suits paying you for your support, you should then aim to delight them with your responsiveness to their questions. You might want to hire a suitably talented monkey to handle the trivial stuff, but always be available to address the concerns of those you are being paid to support. Most proprietary houses set such dreadful standards of support that they shouldn't be hard to outdo. So long as they feel you are always poised and ready to answer your email or phone calls, they'll be happy and keep forking out the support contract fees.
Of course, there's the other class of people: the ones that don't pay. They are your friends too. Anyone with a clue who is using your software and providing you with bug reports is an ally. Be responsive to people who aren't paying you but who are doing you a great service by reporting real bugs, or simply providing ongoing testing (particularly for new releases). People without a clue who can't get it to work can be foisted off on some "users" mailing list or newsgroup: nobody should expect Linus to help them install their kernel.
I could go on, but I think by now you can see the pattern that is emerging, and decide whether it is appropriate to your situation.
Dan Gillmor has been addressing the question of trust in his weblog over the past couple of days. Of what I have read there, one thing in particular seems to ring true. When information is disseminated by or on behalf of a corporation, it seems to go through a corporate amorality filter. After it has been through this process, it will only contain that aspect of the overall picture which the corporation wishes to present. In the case of this particular complaint, the filter may have judged, "this kind of thing is not newsworthy in its own right, and it does not promote our own ends: therefore it is rejected." Is it too cynical to suppose that self-interest plays a part in the filtering process of an amoral corporation?
In many cases, the truthfulness of the filtered information is not a big issue. Indeed, the corporate amorality filter does not really have a clear concept of true and false, but of spin. Everything is phrased so that it has the right spin. Certainly the filter shies clear of stuff that might get them embroiled in litigation for slander, libel, or defamation (etc), but the simplistic concepts of true and false don't really factor into the equation. When Microsoft claims that its innovation is good for the industry and consumers, there's nothing in that statement which they can get into legal trouble over, and hence no reason not to make the statement, given that it is the view they wish to present. Whether or not it is true by any measure is not the issue: the point is that it's a legally allowable statement that they wish to be perceived as true.
So what do you do? You get cynical, but not too cynical. You have to assume that all the information you get has gone through some kind of filter. Even when Slashdot wasn't a corporate entity, all the information still went through the Taco Filter. You have to make allowances for where the information is coming from. In a very few cases, you will find people that have a dedication to frank and open honesty -- people who do have a notion of true and false instead of just spin, and these are valuable. You still have to take the filter into account, but to a substantially smaller degree.
So where can the Linux community get its news from? The simple answer is that we always need more than one source, simply so we can average out the effect of the various filters. Slashdot, for example, gives me a fairly rich range of stories to pick from, but I know for sure (based on the submissions that I've had rejected) that its filter is not ideal to my needs. And Slashdot does seem to have the advantage of an open comment system that, although noisy, doesn't seem to have been abused by thems that could do so if they wanted to.
Short version: the price of reliable news is eternal vigilance.
The accompanying software is guaranteed to operate in exact accordance with the source code provided, under condition that it is compiled using an error-free compiler and executed on error-free hardware.
First of all, based on this definition of "trusted", the open source issue is irrelevant. Software could be "trusted" whether you could know the source or not, so long as the thing was designed to a precise formal specification and underwent sufficiently rigorous testing. None of the software I use (directly) is "trusted" in this sense.
That doesn't mean I don't trust my software. I put a certain amount of trust in it -- some more than others. But this is "trust" in the more usual sense. The sense in which it is used in the article above is an unfortunate jargonisation of a word with a well-defined meaning in everyday use. Let us rather refer to these systems as formal systems. That's probably an overloading of the term "formal", but at least there's less chance of getting confused relative to "trusted". Of course, you would expect such a formal system to be highly trustworthy by merit of the rigorous design and testing, and critical systems should almost certainly be constructed in a formal manner.
In general, I think more systems should be handled in a more formal manner. Indeed, in my opinion, lack of formality is one of the major reasons we have crap software. Usually we have specifications written by marketroids or by hackers scratching whatever itch is pestering them most at the moment. This doesn't make for good formality. Even when formality is attempted, it's rarely done well.
What's surprising about open source is that it seems to have a generally higher reliability than many commercial offerings, despite the fact that the development process is unfunded and chaotic. In that sense, it is relatively trustworthy, despite being informal. This isn't an absolute statement: there's a huge spectrum of quality, and it's mostly the top end of the quality that's interesting.
It would be interesting if a formal open source system were to be developed. The code contribution process could still be informal, but the specification and testing would have to be more organised. Infrastructure systems like DNS and TCP/IP stacks would do well from this, I think. Would there be enough interested parties to write the test harnesses? Who knows.
I thought that this article had more soul (found on Fark last week).
It's sad but understandable that pinball is going the way of the dodo. A good pinball machine is a masterwork of engineering and art, and a good game of pinball manages to be captivating in a way that I've never experienced with a video game. For all that, they are insanely complex mechanical devices with a tendency to break down under normal use. Solid state has a lot going for it, and a pinball machine is the ultimate in electromechanical. How solid state can you make a solenoid?
<NOSTALGIA> Pinball and Tommy (the rock opera version) played significant roles in my childhood. Pinball was my first experience of affinity with technology. It was something that I could relate to and watch with endless fascination. As a sub-teen child, pinball mesmerised me. I recall a time that I was playing Gottlieb's Hit The Deck (a circa 1978 machine, so I was probably around the 10 mark myself), and I was One With The Machine. I was only dimly aware of the others that gathered around me to watch this young pinball wizard do his thing. After a couple of decades' pinball experience, my all time favourite machine is Williams' Fun House. </NOSTALGIA>
Oddly enough, I visited someone today, and noticed a new piece of furniture in the corner: they had acquired a Hit The Deck pinball machine! It was in fairly poor condition, unfortunately: my conclusion was that it had developed an advanced degree of cantankerousness that affects many old electromechanical devices, and it will not be truly playable without a major overhaul, which is probably not possible.
While there, however, I did get to study the interior of the machine and its circuit diagram. That's when All Was Revealed: pinball machines are just big finite state machines! Well, duh! But really, even though I suck at electronics, I could understand this circuit diagram. It was just relays, switches, solenoids, and lights! It was a hard-wired computer program; a series of ANDs and ORs that I could grok immediately.
A friend of mine suggested building a pinball machine as a project, and I told him that they are too complex. But having seen this particular machine -- an old and simple one, I grant you -- I feel that I could at least take on the task of reconditioning one with new relays and things. For some reason, this fact makes me feel a whole lot better about the future of pinball. I don't know if new machines will ever be built, but I feel assured that I could grab an old, broken machine and get it back up to a playable state if I ever needed to.
All scientific knowledge is supposed to be tentative, and if pressed I'm sure that most scientists would say, "no, we don't really know whether black holes exist, it's just the best theory that we have (and it is a very good theory)." But when statements like this "big black holes" press release come out, it doesn't even look remotely like the ideas are tentative. Here they discuss some of the finer points of the personal life of black holes -- is the reader supposed to understand this in the context that we don't actually know whether the things exist at all? Not very likely, is it?
Now, I realise that putting a standard disclaimer on every scientific statement to the effect that "this is only the best theory we have and may in fact be a load of phlogiston," is inconvenient to say the least, but I think we could do with the occasional reminder. There seems to be a pervasive attitude that science is the single best mechanism to determine facts about the physical universe (as opposed to moral truths, for example), and thus it doesn't really matter that our theories may be wildly inaccurate because they are by definition the best knowledge that we have. Perhaps it is the best knowledge that we have, but to my way of thinking that should demonstrate that our best isn't very good at the moment. It concerns me that we talk about big bangs and black holes with such great confidence when the hard evidence is so thin. In a century from now these theories might be as credible as the tooth fairy theory of tooth to coin transformation: how much faith should we put in them?
I'd feel a lot more at ease if we could in general be a little more honest about the amount of stuff we don't know in any particular subject. This is a pervasive issue; black holes just happen to be a case in point at the moment.
The problem with this is that the nature of many patents is such that it is feasible for others to reverse-engineer the invention.
Of course. In fact, some things are immediately obvious upon looking at them without the need for any formal reverse engineering techniques. The main window of opportunity here is "time to market", rather than "time to reverse engineer", although that will also be a major contributing factor in any non-trivial invention.
To demonstrate the "time to market" concept, imagine that you are a manufacturer, and you see that a competitor has a new and innovative product, and you decide that you must produce something similar to remain competitive. How much time elapses between the moment you make the decision, and the moment the product actually hits the shelf? This is the time to market.
The time will vary based on many factors, but if the idea is a good one then being first to market will be plenty rewarding enough without patent incentives. Of course if the idea is so trivial to implement that time to market is negligible, then true, you won't make any money by offering to keep it a secret. If it's that simple to implement, then there's a good chance everyone will do it themselves anyhow rather than buying a product. Specific examples would help here, but this thread is old and tired now, so I won't bother.
I'll try not to be rabidly anti-IP, but I believe there is a case for abolishing patents based on what you say, rather than tweaking the system.
Most of us have wished it wasn't so difficult to get a patent. The more inventive you are, the more likely you've wished it. A lot of us would love to be able to support ourselves with our explorations of the possible... so that we could spend our lives inventing more.
But we're 'little guys'. The cost, the search, lawyers, the years to approval -- all are scary!
So it goes something like this: you have a neat-o idea, and you think, "wow! I should patent that!" but the patent system scares you off. The patents have failed to act as an incentive to publish your idea, which was their very reason for existing in the first place. Not only are you not going to patent your idea, you are not likely to release it into the public domain because you don't want to give up on the opportunity for patenting it, despite the fact that there't not much chance you'll actually do so. The mere possibility that you could (theoretically) make money out of this idea by patenting it, is causing you to jealously guard it as your property rather than share it! Patents are an active disincentive to publish!
If patents did not exist, however, you might consider one of two possible courses of action. One is to think that your idea is a good one, but probably not something that you are going to make any money out of, so you publish it somewhere in a specialist newsgroup or something. If the idea has legs, it will run on its own. You'll probably get some fame and recognition, and that can be financially rewarding in the long run, depending on how good the idea really was.
On the other hand, maybe you think the idea is so good that you can make money out of it yourself. But how do you sell an idea without a patent to protect you? I'd suggest this approach: contact a company that could use the idea, and see if any are interested in the general concept. Invite one company to see it demonstrated. It doesn't matter if this gives the game away, because you then offer to sell them one important thing: an offer to not go and tell all their competitors the same thing. If this idea really confers a competitive advantage, then they'll appreciate the head start and pay for it.
This has the advantage that nobody has exasperating restrictions placed on their freedom in terms of not being able to do patented things, and nobody gets to choke-point key ideas. Inventors may not Make Money Fast this way, but frankly we can do with a decrease in the rate of invention for the sake of fewer moronic restrictions on the programs that we are allowed to write, especially given the quality of the average "invention" embodied in patents these days.
I read your "story that Slashdot will never post" right up to the bit where one person in the dialogue compared selling the hellmouth posts to selling someone's beat up old car. I'm sick to death of people pulling out the tired old analogy of intellectual property as physical property. It's a bogus argument! Scram! Shoo! Hit the "back" button!
If Slashdot refuses to publish your story it is because it sucks, not because it is critical of them. It's whiney, uninteresting, lacks novelty, and contains at least one boneheadedly bogus analogy (at which point I stopped reading). That's not to say that you don't have something of a point: I agree that publishing Slashdot posts like that is a bit dubious, but the issue is complex, and it's not like anyone can claim any real sort of financial loss or unfair financial gain on someone else's part. A missed opportunity to see your name in print is about as much as you can claim.
At the very least, I think Slashdot should have put up a poll about whether it was a kosher thing to do, though. It's reasonable to argue that the posts are the property of the Slashdot community, and hence let the community decide.
There's a huge number of sites out there in Spanish, German, French, and Japanese that I frequent at least occasionally...
<PEDANTIC> Frequent occasionally? If you do it occasionally, then you occasion them, not frequent them. Drat this English thing, hmm? No doubt it would have been clearer if you'd said it in Lojban. But then, of course, approximately zero percent of the Slashdot audience would have understood it (myself included). </PEDANTIC>
Slashdot Mirror
[Disclosure: I was a Sony employee at one time.]
The Australian Excite@Home (provided by Cable and Wireless Optus) already has at least one annoying firewall-like feature that has nothing to do with security. They implement so-called "transparent proxying", meaning that all outgoing connections on port 80 go via their proxy box, regardless of your browser's proxy settings. This has had me spitting chips on one occasion when their proxy died. On other occasions it's merely annoying, because you're never quite sure whether it's dishing up data that is actually current.
Can I have LED paint? It would be nifty to dip a brush in a bucket of goo, paint a stroke, apply a voltage across it, and have the paint emit light a la an LED. I have no idea if this is possible (I think I get a C in electronics, generally), but from all that talk of using inkjets to paint on circuits, why not? The only problem I can envisage is polarity, but then I'm not even sure whether these things are fussy about that. Sounds like it could be a lot of fun.
Given how bloody awful this law could be, it's not looking all that bad so far. In particular, I believe that, should the changes recommended by the reviewing committee be accepted, it should be perfectly legal to distribute open source DVD playing software. Consider the following extract from the report (paragraph 4.25).
Although an open source DVD playing program could conceptually be used to circumvent the "technological prevention measures" (because the code for decrypting the image data must exist in the program somewhere), but so long as the primary purpose of the program as written is to facilitate the viewing of a DVD (ie, it's a DVD player, and that's all), then the program should be allowed under the proposed law.
On the whole, the most interesting part of the report is the chapter from which I have quoted (chapter 4). It is available in PDF.
It's not clear how coffee could be maintained at a point above boiling, assuming typical atmospheric pressure.
Internet Names Worldwide, as it is now pretentiously known, is one of the major registrars and does not "simply apply on your behalf" any more than Network Solutions does. The reasonableness checks that go into a .com.au application existed even when the service was free, so how did it suddenly become expensive? Basically, the applicant has to provide the registration number of a registered business name. I know: I have epsilon.com.au.
On top of which, in case you hadn't guessed, I'm Australian myself. When I say we are as ludicrous as ever, I am primarily referring to our useless and assinine Internet censorship laws, plus the technologically ignorant politicians who pushed for them.
Standard registration fee for two years on a .com.au domain: AUS$137.50. Standard registration fee for two years on a .com, .net, or .org domain from the same registrar: AUS$121.00. Want to know why the .com.au costs 15% more? I can summarise it for you in one word: monopoly. It used to be free until some capitalists realised what they were missing out on.
Your characterisation of those who believe the Bible is a straw man. I could do the same for those who subscribe to the various "anthropic principles". The Weak Anthropic Principle, for example, suggests that the improbability of life arising is of no matter, since only those universes which contain observers (and thus life) are observed. One could go on to say that all probabilities are irrelevant, since we are just one of an infinite number of universes in which, no doubt, all things can and do happen.
Everything becomes arbitrary, subject to the whims of chance in an infinite number of universes. Anything is possible and even your senses cannot be trusted (infinite possibilities include universes where your sense data bears no relationship to reality). The laws of physics could change tomorrow, pi could be rounded down to three...
Or not. Most people who hold to the Weak Anthropic Principle don't take it to this extreme, and most people who believe in the Biblical God don't believe that He changes things around at random, even if he can.
Place your bets now. Will there be life found elsewhere in our solar system? Secondary bets may be placed on the following, for those who prefer to wager on human nature rather than nature itself. Will the presence of life on other planets create significant doubt amongst creationists? Will the absence of life on planets which have all the supposed necessary ingredients create significant doubt amongst evolutionists?
What has Microsoft done that isn't a "workalike" for something produced either in academia or in some other corporation? I'm asking out of a sense of irony, by the way.
"Many eyes" are not the absolute enemy of creativity -- it's just that genuinely novel (cf. "innovative") ideas are damn rare.
I don't know if this weak curtaining thing is mandated by Australian censorship -- sorry, classification -- laws or whether it is self imposed, but I suspect the former. There's no requirement for the game to be set apart from other games as mentioned in this particular law: the machines with the curtain rails poking out oddly from the body of the game stand right next to the ones with the exposed screens.
The article in question quotes someone as saying "the law's not going to do any good." Well, duh! It's political grandstanding, same as usual, and the only "good" it's meant to do is to increase the popularity of its proponents with the moral majority -- and it will work in its own small way. It's also yet another law in the ever increasing pile of the stuff that most Western democracies are miring themselves in. That fact, more than "restraint of free speech", is what I find offensive.
Scene: Microsoft and Sony Suits, in a plush but generic corporate boardroom, commence negotiation.
MS: We are very interested in running Sony Playstation titles on our new X-Box.
Sony: We are not interested in licensing our technology to you for that purpose.
MS: We hear that you are also losing interest in licensing our Windows technology.
Sony: Ah, well, when I said that we weren't interested in licensing our Playstation technology to you, what I really meant was that we are interested. Yes. Definitely very interested.
MS: Good! Now to details...
Although all the examples given in the article are truly awful and worthy of concern, it's clear that the article uses the classic journalistic technique of sensationalism. There's no balance -- not even a suggestion of it. It paints an extreme picture of the world, leaving out all the bits that don't mesh with this extreme.
This is an important issue, but don't rely on sensationalist news to inform you of the world's woes. Most people will just get steamed up about it, and that's the idea: it makes good reading -- you get involved in it. Getting steamed up isn't actually very useful, however. Examine the problems rationally, obtain information from non-sensationalist sources, and act where you can.
The Problem
Proposed solution 1: Bait
Proposed solution 2: The Chinese Lottery
Of course, if we go for the chinese lottery solution, then the nature of the central organiser goes from one of coordinator to one of "site where the software is developed and discussed" and possibly "where decisions are made about what problems to feed the clients". I really like the chinese lottery idea: it's really distributed!
Without knowing the specifics of your case (how small the market, etc), it's a bit difficult to give a detailed answer, but probably the most important thing to realise about software is the following.
In my experience, most companies who are putting software into a mission-critical situation would prefer to pay for their software than have it for free. And what they perceive they are getting for their money is not the software itself, but rather a committment from the seller that the software will be supported. Your software doesn't have to be unreliable in order to justify a support contract; nor does it have to be heavily burdened with various flavours of intellectual property rights in order to persuade companies to part with large wads of dosh in exchange for it.
My suggestion would be to not make a big deal of the software license terms. Put it under a GPL or BSD style license, or even in the public domain, but just don't make a selling point out of it. Those who are interested enough to care will ask and be happy with the answer.
Make it available for download on a website, since it will be too small to justify the pricey-CD thing, but dress it up a bit like an evaluation copy -- probably best done by making it say "THIS IS AN UNSUPPORTED EVALUATION COPY", but it depends on the specifics of the case. Remember: the suits want to buy your committment, not your software! Do have a CD, though: make it part of your support contract, just so they have something physical and professional-looking to put on a shelf. Heck, if it's a small market, you can customise it by changing the "unsupported" message to indicate their name and the fact that you are supporting them. Such a comforting reminder! :-)
The benefits of this approach are many. One is that you can skimp on lawyers. You'll still need them for your support contract terms, for example. [Reminder to those who aren't catching on: support contract does not mean unreliable software; indeed, the ideal case is where you sell a support contract and never have a call from the customer because the software just works all the time. You think they'd be unhappy with paying for that level of service?] The customer is also happy because they don't have to count licenses or install dongles or do other obnoxious things associated with restrictive licensing. You can review their support contract service level agreement at regular intervals based on their usage, however.
Once you've got some suits paying you for your support, you should then aim to delight them with your responsiveness to their questions. You might want to hire a suitably talented monkey to handle the trivial stuff, but always be available to address the concerns of those you are being paid to support. Most proprietary houses set such dreadful standards of support that they shouldn't be hard to outdo. So long as they feel you are always poised and ready to answer your email or phone calls, they'll be happy and keep forking out the support contract fees.
Of course, there's the other class of people: the ones that don't pay. They are your friends too. Anyone with a clue who is using your software and providing you with bug reports is an ally. Be responsive to people who aren't paying you but who are doing you a great service by reporting real bugs, or simply providing ongoing testing (particularly for new releases). People without a clue who can't get it to work can be foisted off on some "users" mailing list or newsgroup: nobody should expect Linus to help them install their kernel.
I could go on, but I think by now you can see the pattern that is emerging, and decide whether it is appropriate to your situation.
Dan Gillmor has been addressing the question of trust in his weblog over the past couple of days. Of what I have read there, one thing in particular seems to ring true. When information is disseminated by or on behalf of a corporation, it seems to go through a corporate amorality filter. After it has been through this process, it will only contain that aspect of the overall picture which the corporation wishes to present. In the case of this particular complaint, the filter may have judged, "this kind of thing is not newsworthy in its own right, and it does not promote our own ends: therefore it is rejected." Is it too cynical to suppose that self-interest plays a part in the filtering process of an amoral corporation?
In many cases, the truthfulness of the filtered information is not a big issue. Indeed, the corporate amorality filter does not really have a clear concept of true and false, but of spin. Everything is phrased so that it has the right spin. Certainly the filter shies clear of stuff that might get them embroiled in litigation for slander, libel, or defamation (etc), but the simplistic concepts of true and false don't really factor into the equation. When Microsoft claims that its innovation is good for the industry and consumers, there's nothing in that statement which they can get into legal trouble over, and hence no reason not to make the statement, given that it is the view they wish to present. Whether or not it is true by any measure is not the issue: the point is that it's a legally allowable statement that they wish to be perceived as true.
So what do you do? You get cynical, but not too cynical. You have to assume that all the information you get has gone through some kind of filter. Even when Slashdot wasn't a corporate entity, all the information still went through the Taco Filter. You have to make allowances for where the information is coming from. In a very few cases, you will find people that have a dedication to frank and open honesty -- people who do have a notion of true and false instead of just spin, and these are valuable. You still have to take the filter into account, but to a substantially smaller degree.
So where can the Linux community get its news from? The simple answer is that we always need more than one source, simply so we can average out the effect of the various filters. Slashdot, for example, gives me a fairly rich range of stories to pick from, but I know for sure (based on the submissions that I've had rejected) that its filter is not ideal to my needs. And Slashdot does seem to have the advantage of an open comment system that, although noisy, doesn't seem to have been abused by thems that could do so if they wanted to.
Short version: the price of reliable news is eternal vigilance.
What about undefined constructs in the language?
Then it is guaranteed to operate in an undefined manner. How simple is that?
My preferred warranty:
First of all, based on this definition of "trusted", the open source issue is irrelevant. Software could be "trusted" whether you could know the source or not, so long as the thing was designed to a precise formal specification and underwent sufficiently rigorous testing. None of the software I use (directly) is "trusted" in this sense.
That doesn't mean I don't trust my software. I put a certain amount of trust in it -- some more than others. But this is "trust" in the more usual sense. The sense in which it is used in the article above is an unfortunate jargonisation of a word with a well-defined meaning in everyday use. Let us rather refer to these systems as formal systems. That's probably an overloading of the term "formal", but at least there's less chance of getting confused relative to "trusted". Of course, you would expect such a formal system to be highly trustworthy by merit of the rigorous design and testing, and critical systems should almost certainly be constructed in a formal manner.
In general, I think more systems should be handled in a more formal manner. Indeed, in my opinion, lack of formality is one of the major reasons we have crap software. Usually we have specifications written by marketroids or by hackers scratching whatever itch is pestering them most at the moment. This doesn't make for good formality. Even when formality is attempted, it's rarely done well.
What's surprising about open source is that it seems to have a generally higher reliability than many commercial offerings, despite the fact that the development process is unfunded and chaotic. In that sense, it is relatively trustworthy, despite being informal. This isn't an absolute statement: there's a huge spectrum of quality, and it's mostly the top end of the quality that's interesting.
It would be interesting if a formal open source system were to be developed. The code contribution process could still be informal, but the specification and testing would have to be more organised. Infrastructure systems like DNS and TCP/IP stacks would do well from this, I think. Would there be enough interested parties to write the test harnesses? Who knows.
I thought that this article had more soul (found on Fark last week).
It's sad but understandable that pinball is going the way of the dodo. A good pinball machine is a masterwork of engineering and art, and a good game of pinball manages to be captivating in a way that I've never experienced with a video game. For all that, they are insanely complex mechanical devices with a tendency to break down under normal use. Solid state has a lot going for it, and a pinball machine is the ultimate in electromechanical. How solid state can you make a solenoid?
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Pinball and Tommy (the rock opera version) played significant roles in my childhood. Pinball was my first experience of affinity with technology. It was something that I could relate to and watch with endless fascination. As a sub-teen child, pinball mesmerised me. I recall a time that I was playing Gottlieb's Hit The Deck (a circa 1978 machine, so I was probably around the 10 mark myself), and I was One With The Machine. I was only dimly aware of the others that gathered around me to watch this young pinball wizard do his thing. After a couple of decades' pinball experience, my all time favourite machine is Williams' Fun House.
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Oddly enough, I visited someone today, and noticed a new piece of furniture in the corner: they had acquired a Hit The Deck pinball machine! It was in fairly poor condition, unfortunately: my conclusion was that it had developed an advanced degree of cantankerousness that affects many old electromechanical devices, and it will not be truly playable without a major overhaul, which is probably not possible.
While there, however, I did get to study the interior of the machine and its circuit diagram. That's when All Was Revealed: pinball machines are just big finite state machines! Well, duh! But really, even though I suck at electronics, I could understand this circuit diagram. It was just relays, switches, solenoids, and lights! It was a hard-wired computer program; a series of ANDs and ORs that I could grok immediately.
A friend of mine suggested building a pinball machine as a project, and I told him that they are too complex. But having seen this particular machine -- an old and simple one, I grant you -- I feel that I could at least take on the task of reconditioning one with new relays and things. For some reason, this fact makes me feel a whole lot better about the future of pinball. I don't know if new machines will ever be built, but I feel assured that I could grab an old, broken machine and get it back up to a playable state if I ever needed to.
All scientific knowledge is supposed to be tentative, and if pressed I'm sure that most scientists would say, "no, we don't really know whether black holes exist, it's just the best theory that we have (and it is a very good theory)." But when statements like this "big black holes" press release come out, it doesn't even look remotely like the ideas are tentative. Here they discuss some of the finer points of the personal life of black holes -- is the reader supposed to understand this in the context that we don't actually know whether the things exist at all? Not very likely, is it?
Now, I realise that putting a standard disclaimer on every scientific statement to the effect that "this is only the best theory we have and may in fact be a load of phlogiston," is inconvenient to say the least, but I think we could do with the occasional reminder. There seems to be a pervasive attitude that science is the single best mechanism to determine facts about the physical universe (as opposed to moral truths, for example), and thus it doesn't really matter that our theories may be wildly inaccurate because they are by definition the best knowledge that we have. Perhaps it is the best knowledge that we have, but to my way of thinking that should demonstrate that our best isn't very good at the moment. It concerns me that we talk about big bangs and black holes with such great confidence when the hard evidence is so thin. In a century from now these theories might be as credible as the tooth fairy theory of tooth to coin transformation: how much faith should we put in them?
I'd feel a lot more at ease if we could in general be a little more honest about the amount of stuff we don't know in any particular subject. This is a pervasive issue; black holes just happen to be a case in point at the moment.
Of course. In fact, some things are immediately obvious upon looking at them without the need for any formal reverse engineering techniques. The main window of opportunity here is "time to market", rather than "time to reverse engineer", although that will also be a major contributing factor in any non-trivial invention.
To demonstrate the "time to market" concept, imagine that you are a manufacturer, and you see that a competitor has a new and innovative product, and you decide that you must produce something similar to remain competitive. How much time elapses between the moment you make the decision, and the moment the product actually hits the shelf? This is the time to market.
The time will vary based on many factors, but if the idea is a good one then being first to market will be plenty rewarding enough without patent incentives. Of course if the idea is so trivial to implement that time to market is negligible, then true, you won't make any money by offering to keep it a secret. If it's that simple to implement, then there's a good chance everyone will do it themselves anyhow rather than buying a product. Specific examples would help here, but this thread is old and tired now, so I won't bother.
I'll try not to be rabidly anti-IP, but I believe there is a case for abolishing patents based on what you say, rather than tweaking the system.
So it goes something like this: you have a neat-o idea, and you think, "wow! I should patent that!" but the patent system scares you off. The patents have failed to act as an incentive to publish your idea, which was their very reason for existing in the first place. Not only are you not going to patent your idea, you are not likely to release it into the public domain because you don't want to give up on the opportunity for patenting it, despite the fact that there't not much chance you'll actually do so. The mere possibility that you could (theoretically) make money out of this idea by patenting it, is causing you to jealously guard it as your property rather than share it! Patents are an active disincentive to publish!
If patents did not exist, however, you might consider one of two possible courses of action. One is to think that your idea is a good one, but probably not something that you are going to make any money out of, so you publish it somewhere in a specialist newsgroup or something. If the idea has legs, it will run on its own. You'll probably get some fame and recognition, and that can be financially rewarding in the long run, depending on how good the idea really was.
On the other hand, maybe you think the idea is so good that you can make money out of it yourself. But how do you sell an idea without a patent to protect you? I'd suggest this approach: contact a company that could use the idea, and see if any are interested in the general concept. Invite one company to see it demonstrated. It doesn't matter if this gives the game away, because you then offer to sell them one important thing: an offer to not go and tell all their competitors the same thing. If this idea really confers a competitive advantage, then they'll appreciate the head start and pay for it.
This has the advantage that nobody has exasperating restrictions placed on their freedom in terms of not being able to do patented things, and nobody gets to choke-point key ideas. Inventors may not Make Money Fast this way, but frankly we can do with a decrease in the rate of invention for the sake of fewer moronic restrictions on the programs that we are allowed to write, especially given the quality of the average "invention" embodied in patents these days.
If Slashdot refuses to publish your story it is because it sucks, not because it is critical of them. It's whiney, uninteresting, lacks novelty, and contains at least one boneheadedly bogus analogy (at which point I stopped reading). That's not to say that you don't have something of a point: I agree that publishing Slashdot posts like that is a bit dubious, but the issue is complex, and it's not like anyone can claim any real sort of financial loss or unfair financial gain on someone else's part. A missed opportunity to see your name in print is about as much as you can claim.
At the very least, I think Slashdot should have put up a poll about whether it was a kosher thing to do, though. It's reasonable to argue that the posts are the property of the Slashdot community, and hence let the community decide.
<PEDANTIC>
Frequent occasionally? If you do it occasionally, then you occasion them, not frequent them. Drat this English thing, hmm? No doubt it would have been clearer if you'd said it in Lojban. But then, of course, approximately zero percent of the Slashdot audience would have understood it (myself included).
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