That's my first reaction to the news. Critical infrastructure should have redundancy everywhere, including the support staff.
To give a stupid but obvious example what if Childs was run over by a car? OK, he wouldn't care but all the rest of SF would.
So they should never have put the network online until the information was in several places (the brains of several people if formal electronic/paper records were too inflexible).
Stll, this sounds like political infighting more than ever. Given the situation why were they trying to fire a critical person like Childs? Sounds like some bureaucrat with an ego as big as Childs would be involved to cause this, rather than Childs "going rogue". And he (the bureaucrat) was more skilled in the political game. Of course this person would be covering his tracks, and not be obvious in any way. So Childs and the whole of SF lost. His firing does not make sense otherwise, given his critical position.
Okay, look. The word "monopoly" has as its prefix the stem "mono-," from the Greek, meaning "one." That means there can only be ONE "monopoly."
A phrase such as "monopolistic company LIKE Versign..." is absurd on the face of it. If there are other companies LIKE Verisign, then there is no monopoly.
OK then it's an oligopoly. Same difference (How's that phrase for clear communication?)
You have a small club of companies that can issue certificates. No other company can enter the club. The oligopolistic companies have almost all the advantages a monopolist would have. This point, at least is valid in the article.
Oddly, the word "rhetoric," also from the Greek (rheteros, "a speech") used to be a positive appellation for the study of good, clear communication of thoughts and ideas. But it has also succumbed to the buzz-word dementia, and now usually means "empty words."
Uh, please check your facts before you post. The word is Greek, but comes from rhetor
meaning orator or teachecr of rhetoric. Rheteros does not mean anything in Greek or English as far as I could find.
It's the only way to make eliminate problems, or suspicions of problems, like this one.
It's not hard. The voting machines would work the same, but produce paper ballots printing the voter's choice and also encoding it in bar code (if you are afraid of bar codes print it a second time with an OCR-friendly font). The voter then verifies that the ballot prints what was chosen and casts this ballot (and he can print many ballots to fix errors, but can cast only one).
At the end of the day the ballots are scanned and we get the result. In case of problems we go back to the ballots to check them. The result is as fast as the electronic, and as reliable as the paper version.
So why is everyone pushing evoting trying to kill the paper trail? That is what creates the problems. And it is totally unnecessary.
If you could alter the shape of the molecules that are on the surface of the object (for example using current passing through nanowires under the surface) this could alter the force in different parts of the surface and actually cause the moving parts to move.
For a meaningful design though, there would have to be a very good model of the strength of the force as the surface shape changes.
If they can do that then it could well end up being an opportunity, and not a problem for nanotechnology.
You're wrong about many of the Linux appliances. They don't change anything in the OS and thus aren't obligated to provide their own source to anyone.
You are wrong. Even if they change the building process to fit their hardware that's a change. They have to give full source for that one line in the build file, even to competitors.
Even if it could be done it's not illegal and makes for a cheaper product.
What they do is take a standard PC platform, install a standard Linux distro, install their proprietary software and sell the system for hundreds or thousands of dollars more than the hardware costs. Thus they make a good profit and recoup their investment in developing their software.
Huh... Examples please, or quit trolling. There are no examples for two good reasons you sweep under the table:
1. A x86 CPU would be no good in an appliance, and so it is not used. You have to compile the source to a new chipset. You can outsource this, but then that company has to provide the source. So you can always get the source, even to compete with them.
2. If you overprice your product your competitors will get the source and make cheaper products. So you have to price competitively.
In the end it's a win/win for everyone. More and cheaper products for consumers, more opportunities for companies to create new and innovative products. The software gets developed and improved a lot better, and you are freed from essentially paying a tax to some huge company just to use their copyrighted stuff.
It's also completely legal, so why the outrage? Companies and consumers choose it of their own free will and get a better deal. What is the problem?
I mean if you are going to do this you might as well go for the top man. Would Obama and McCain take the two first spots? That would be the real test to this approach. I honestly can't guess. Although I am sure that Colin Powell would score very high there as well.
Since companies want to make a profit, they'll always go for the low-hanging fruit.
If you mean that to be the strategy that maximizes their profits, I agree. And if a licence that has the goal of free software, it should allow for that.
There are many companies that make specialized Linux "appliances" without modifying Linux, without paying for Linux, and without contributing to Linux.
First they do not make Linux appliances. They make router appliances, portable media player appliances etc. that have Linux based software. Clients of these companies don't care (most don't even know) this.
Second you can say the same thing for users that install Linux in their PCs. They get Linux without modifying Linux, without paying for Linux, and without contributing to Linux.
You can say that also that derivative distros do not contribute to their "parents", so CentOS does not contribute to RedHat, gOS does not contribute to Ubuntu etc.
These are all true, but so what? These are the rules of free software. The contributions or non-contributions are all available to anyone for use or redistribution.
They don't do it because there's something about Linux that they can't get elsewhere, they do it because it's cheaper than paying for a license.
Sounds good to me. It makes business sense and is within the rules. Why are they morally inferior to Joe User who downloads the latest Ubuntu version for his home PC?
Of course I am not talking about violations like quite possibly this one. These are a nuisance but the courts eventually deal with them.
What these companies are really selling is proprietary software that could run on any Linux PC, but they bundle it with a closed box so they can charge more money for it.
Now you are WAY off base. You got carried away by your Linux "appliances". They not only charge less for it, they are also obligated to help their competitors in the same market.
First of all whether they make extensive changes or just change the compilation options they have to provide full source, build scripts and build instructions by the copyleft provisions in the GPL license. They must also allow anyone getting them to use them for anything, including a competing product.
Now about cost and effect on the market. Let's take PMPs as an example (if you feel I am wrong in some other appliance please say so). Without the open source available today only companies the size of Sony would be able to make PMPs (you have to build a complete embedded OS, support all sorts of audio/video codecs, write a media player, a UI etc). These PMPs would of course come at Sony prices.
Now though any small company can buy the latest RISC/DSP/whatever CPU and compile Linux for it, as well as GPLd media players and codecs. Result: Much lower development cost -> more companies can develop similar applianxces -> more competition -> much lower prices for the consumer.
They could do the same with Windows (and historically people have) but then the cost of a Windows license would come out of their profits.
They could NOT do it for the OEM prices Microsoft charges without a huge price hike. The cost would come out of our pockets. There would also be less competition meaning more price hikes. Again coming out of our pockets. This goes for both the Media Center Edition and the various WinCE/embedded versions.
And I fail to see the reason for your moral outrage. If they make a legal use of a successfull operating system what is the problem?
This is particularly interesting now because with the cheap EEE-type netbooks the exact same thing is happening to mini-notebooks. This has caused Microsoft to bring XP back and offer it for prices like $3-$20 to stem the tide. It will be interesting to see what happens. But as you ca
First of all their packets are fake. They do not originate from the IP contained in their header. if anyone has grounds for complaint it is the user.
Second the user gets whatever information is presented, but is under no obligation to route it or process it in any specific way. The ISP cannot expect the user to do anything with a packet in a predefined way.
Of course these are just arguments this argument is not rational, not that they won't try it:-)
As the open source model has already beein proven as a viable business model, they will create antitrust issues if they do not offer an automatic non exclusive license to open source projects (say those using licences from opensource.org)
This goes particularly for Google, whose business model does depend on open source licenses. If, for example Android v2 is covered by dozens of patents, what good is its Apache licence? (Note: If you want to link to Android your application is not a derivative under the Apache licence. So you get no patent licences)
Also let's say Google owns a patent licence, but has not used it yet. Would it block all other OS projects from using it? What happened to "Do no evil?"
For all these reasons, granting automatic licenses to OS projects is probably the best way to avoid bad press, not to mention legal challenges.
Fool the system by giving it false information. The recognition program never gets a chance to work.
BTW it is easy to fix this if the machine asks the people to move. This will work... for about a week, until they start creating animations of old people that can move on command for EEEs or other such netbooks.
which you missed. NASA has no capability of doing even that right now. Obviously it will be different from the original Saturn V. Much lighter by using better materials for instance (the other important bit, better fuels, has not seen much improvement in 40 years). No one says they should copy it.
Still with "Von Braun's body... a moulderin' in the ground" it turns out that the 1960's US has much stronger space hardware than the 2000 US.
Of course they should not try to emulate the old glory that has long since faded. But they should at least match it (using today's technology) before trying to build bigger stuff. Starting from specs we know are feasible offers a much better chance of a working plan. After all it was done in the 60s in less than 5 years. Can it be done again today in the same time frame? I hope so.
What happened to owning your own property? Why should central authority have the abiity to override everything?
In any case without legislation making this mandatory the solution is very simple: Use only stuff that is built on open architectures, using only open source SW. Mod anything that limits your freedom.
If Windows turns Open Source, can Linux use parts of the Windows kernel to patch hardware issues? Is this possible?
It depends on the lisence. Yes it it is GPL-compatible, no otherwise.
My gut reaction is that in this scenario it is best for MS to make it really open (no terms grabbing ownership of others' contributions or other sneaky stuff) but NOT GPL-compatible. This would force a separation that would stop MS form being assimilated (for a change).
Of course this won't be for power users but it will add support to those users for free and keep them for exploring alternatives.
Not to mention that with open source a lot of things will be added such as: NTFS or any linux FS support (getting rid of the 128GB per drive limitation) good SATA support, IPv6 support, having a lot of things ported from WINE etc.
It would be very useful. And STILL not a threat to MS business models. After all I am saying that this is a good idea for users AND Microsoft.
the OS was fundamentally done by the time Red Hat became invovled.
What is gone are the days when the company owns it all. Do you also see a problem with the Microsoft OSs networking since they use IP that is not owned by MS?
These days every company (but M$) needs to borrow from the software noosphere. And copylefted licences force them also to put stuff back. Soon this will be true for M$ as well (we hope).
This is what RedHat does. It took Linux, but also gave back to Linux. And it survives very well selling support to its customers.
You know it is relatively easy to create a sandbox type scheme as well:
1. Create a limited permissions user.
2. Create a shortcut to run IE as that user, and use that to surf.
In practice it is simple to do, but creates all sorts of problems with file ownership of downloaded stuff. You have to remember to change the owner every time you download something.
I wonder why MS didn't make something like this available on XP automatically since the essentials are there. I can't think of any reason other than marketing.
That's pre-supposing there's something desirable to download.
I always thought it would be very smart to open source Windows 98 with a licence that forbids commercial distribution. Many people still use it, and are forced to abandon it because of lack of support. And since cost is for them usually an issue they end up trying Linux and never going back.
Open sourcing it would keep outside support coming, and keep these people in the Microsoft universe. On the other hand it will not cut into their current OS revenue because it will not allow commercial distribution, making it a win/win for them.
No, IBM after the PS/2 fiasco crashed, and then rebooted, focusing on overall customer experience and satisfaction (as mch as a big corporation can). Let's hope this also happens to Microsoft.
Slashdot Mirror
That's my first reaction to the news. Critical infrastructure should have redundancy everywhere, including the support staff.
To give a stupid but obvious example what if Childs was run over by a car? OK, he wouldn't care but all the rest of SF would.
So they should never have put the network online until the information was in several places (the brains of several people if formal electronic/paper records were too inflexible).
Stll, this sounds like political infighting more than ever. Given the situation why were they trying to fire a critical person like Childs? Sounds like some bureaucrat with an ego as big as Childs would be involved to cause this, rather than Childs "going rogue". And he (the bureaucrat) was more skilled in the political game. Of course this person would be covering his tracks, and not be obvious in any way. So Childs and the whole of SF lost. His firing does not make sense otherwise, given his critical position.
Ah, the fun of weaving conspiracy theories :-)
Okay, look. The word "monopoly" has as its prefix the stem "mono-," from the Greek, meaning "one." That means there can only be ONE "monopoly."
A phrase such as "monopolistic company LIKE Versign..." is absurd on the face of it. If there are other companies LIKE Verisign, then there is no monopoly.
OK then it's an oligopoly. Same difference (How's that phrase for clear communication?)
You have a small club of companies that can issue certificates. No other company can enter the club. The oligopolistic companies have almost all the advantages a monopolist would have. This point, at least is valid in the article.
Oddly, the word "rhetoric," also from the Greek (rheteros, "a speech") used to be a positive appellation for the study of good, clear communication of thoughts and ideas. But it has also succumbed to the buzz-word dementia, and now usually means "empty words."
Uh, please check your facts before you post. The word is Greek, but comes from rhetor meaning orator or teachecr of rhetoric. Rheteros does not mean anything in Greek or English as far as I could find.
How sad.
Indeed.
It's the only way to make eliminate problems, or suspicions of problems, like this one.
It's not hard. The voting machines would work the same, but produce paper ballots printing the voter's choice and also encoding it in bar code (if you are afraid of bar codes print it a second time with an OCR-friendly font). The voter then verifies that the ballot prints what was chosen and casts this ballot (and he can print many ballots to fix errors, but can cast only one).
At the end of the day the ballots are scanned and we get the result. In case of problems we go back to the ballots to check them. The result is as fast as the electronic, and as reliable as the paper version.
So why is everyone pushing evoting trying to kill the paper trail? That is what creates the problems. And it is totally unnecessary.
If you could alter the shape of the molecules that are on the surface of the object (for example using current passing through nanowires under the surface) this could alter the force in different parts of the surface and actually cause the moving parts to move.
For a meaningful design though, there would have to be a very good model of the strength of the force as the surface shape changes.
If they can do that then it could well end up being an opportunity, and not a problem for nanotechnology.
Any example of what you have in mind?
And why is it so bad/illegal/morally wrong that you have such a big problem with it?
BTW, an appliance must be instant on and instant off. A PC does not make a good appliace.
You're wrong about many of the Linux appliances. They don't change anything in the OS and thus aren't obligated to provide their own source to anyone.
You are wrong. Even if they change the building process to fit their hardware that's a change. They have to give full source for that one line in the build file, even to competitors.
Even if it could be done it's not illegal and makes for a cheaper product.
What they do is take a standard PC platform, install a standard Linux distro, install their proprietary software and sell the system for hundreds or thousands of dollars more than the hardware costs. Thus they make a good profit and recoup their investment in developing their software.
Huh... Examples please, or quit trolling. There are no examples for two good reasons you sweep under the table:
1. A x86 CPU would be no good in an appliance, and so it is not used. You have to compile the source to a new chipset. You can outsource this, but then that company has to provide the source. So you can always get the source, even to compete with them.
2. If you overprice your product your competitors will get the source and make cheaper products. So you have to price competitively.
In the end it's a win/win for everyone. More and cheaper products for consumers, more opportunities for companies to create new and innovative products. The software gets developed and improved a lot better, and you are freed from essentially paying a tax to some huge company just to use their copyrighted stuff.
It's also completely legal, so why the outrage? Companies and consumers choose it of their own free will and get a better deal. What is the problem?
Have they learned nothing from Bill? And before his body^H^H^H^Hchair was even cold too!
I mean if you are going to do this you might as well go for the top man. Would Obama and McCain take the two first spots? That would be the real test to this approach. I honestly can't guess. Although I am sure that Colin Powell would score very high there as well.
Since companies want to make a profit, they'll always go for the low-hanging fruit.
If you mean that to be the strategy that maximizes their profits, I agree. And if a licence that has the goal of free software, it should allow for that.
There are many companies that make specialized Linux "appliances" without modifying Linux, without paying for Linux, and without contributing to Linux.
First they do not make Linux appliances. They make router appliances, portable media player appliances etc. that have Linux based software. Clients of these companies don't care (most don't even know) this.
Second you can say the same thing for users that install Linux in their PCs. They get Linux without modifying Linux, without paying for Linux, and without contributing to Linux.
You can say that also that derivative distros do not contribute to their "parents", so CentOS does not contribute to RedHat, gOS does not contribute to Ubuntu etc.
These are all true, but so what? These are the rules of free software. The contributions or non-contributions are all available to anyone for use or redistribution.
They don't do it because there's something about Linux that they can't get elsewhere, they do it because it's cheaper than paying for a license.
Sounds good to me. It makes business sense and is within the rules. Why are they morally inferior to Joe User who downloads the latest Ubuntu version for his home PC?
Of course I am not talking about violations like quite possibly this one. These are a nuisance but the courts eventually deal with them.
What these companies are really selling is proprietary software that could run on any Linux PC, but they bundle it with a closed box so they can charge more money for it.
Now you are WAY off base. You got carried away by your Linux "appliances". They not only charge less for it, they are also obligated to help their competitors in the same market.
First of all whether they make extensive changes or just change the compilation options they have to provide full source, build scripts and build instructions by the copyleft provisions in the GPL license. They must also allow anyone getting them to use them for anything, including a competing product.
Now about cost and effect on the market. Let's take PMPs as an example (if you feel I am wrong in some other appliance please say so). Without the open source available today only companies the size of Sony would be able to make PMPs (you have to build a complete embedded OS, support all sorts of audio/video codecs, write a media player, a UI etc). These PMPs would of course come at Sony prices.
Now though any small company can buy the latest RISC/DSP/whatever CPU and compile Linux for it, as well as GPLd media players and codecs. Result: Much lower development cost -> more companies can develop similar applianxces -> more competition -> much lower prices for the consumer.
They could do the same with Windows (and historically people have) but then the cost of a Windows license would come out of their profits.
They could NOT do it for the OEM prices Microsoft charges without a huge price hike. The cost would come out of our pockets. There would also be less competition meaning more price hikes. Again coming out of our pockets. This goes for both the Media Center Edition and the various WinCE/embedded versions.
And I fail to see the reason for your moral outrage. If they make a legal use of a successfull operating system what is the problem?
This is particularly interesting now because with the cheap EEE-type netbooks the exact same thing is happening to mini-notebooks. This has caused Microsoft to bring XP back and offer it for prices like $3-$20 to stem the tide. It will be interesting to see what happens. But as you ca
Can we somehow use iptables scripts in windows? Failing that, could someone make a quick and dirty filter implementing this functionality for windows?
On what grounds?
First of all their packets are fake. They do not originate from the IP contained in their header. if anyone has grounds for complaint it is the user.
Second the user gets whatever information is presented, but is under no obligation to route it or process it in any specific way. The ISP cannot expect the user to do anything with a packet in a predefined way.
Of course these are just arguments this argument is not rational, not that they won't try it :-)
As the open source model has already beein proven as a viable business model, they will create antitrust issues if they do not offer an automatic non exclusive license to open source projects (say those using licences from opensource.org)
This goes particularly for Google, whose business model does depend on open source licenses. If, for example Android v2 is covered by dozens of patents, what good is its Apache licence? (Note: If you want to link to Android your application is not a derivative under the Apache licence. So you get no patent licences)
Also let's say Google owns a patent licence, but has not used it yet. Would it block all other OS projects from using it? What happened to "Do no evil?"
For all these reasons, granting automatic licenses to OS projects is probably the best way to avoid bad press, not to mention legal challenges.
BTW it is easy to fix this if the machine asks the people to move. This will work ... for about a week, until they start creating animations of old people that can move on command for EEEs or other such netbooks.
Building and deploying a Saturn V equivalent
which you missed. NASA has no capability of doing even that right now. Obviously it will be different from the original Saturn V. Much lighter by using better materials for instance (the other important bit, better fuels, has not seen much improvement in 40 years). No one says they should copy it.
Still with "Von Braun's body ... a moulderin' in the ground" it turns out that the 1960's US has much stronger space hardware than the 2000 US.
Of course they should not try to emulate the old glory that has long since faded. But they should at least match it (using today's technology) before trying to build bigger stuff. Starting from specs we know are feasible offers a much better chance of a working plan. After all it was done in the 60s in less than 5 years. Can it be done again today in the same time frame? I hope so.
Building and deploying a Saturn V equivalent bafore they get ambitious. Bacause NASA has long lost even this capability.
In any case without legislation making this mandatory the solution is very simple: Use only stuff that is built on open architectures, using only open source SW. Mod anything that limits your freedom.
Microsaur stock is still a good value with over 80% of the market using its products.
Wasn't that ~95% not so long ago?
This has always worked so far. The most you can fear is having a "viral lisence" insult hurled at you. No big deal.
If Windows turns Open Source, can Linux use parts of the Windows kernel to patch hardware issues? Is this possible?
It depends on the lisence. Yes it it is GPL-compatible, no otherwise.
My gut reaction is that in this scenario it is best for MS to make it really open (no terms grabbing ownership of others' contributions or other sneaky stuff) but NOT GPL-compatible. This would force a separation that would stop MS form being assimilated (for a change).
Not to mention that with open source a lot of things will be added such as: NTFS or any linux FS support (getting rid of the 128GB per drive limitation) good SATA support, IPv6 support, having a lot of things ported from WINE etc.
It would be very useful. And STILL not a threat to MS business models. After all I am saying that this is a good idea for users AND Microsoft.
the OS was fundamentally done by the time Red Hat became invovled.
What is gone are the days when the company owns it all. Do you also see a problem with the Microsoft OSs networking since they use IP that is not owned by MS?
These days every company (but M$) needs to borrow from the software noosphere. And copylefted licences force them also to put stuff back. Soon this will be true for M$ as well (we hope).
This is what RedHat does. It took Linux, but also gave back to Linux. And it survives very well selling support to its customers.
ReactOS already exists
and it also boots. That is the least (and very nearly the most) that you can say for it.
1. Create a limited permissions user.
2. Create a shortcut to run IE as that user, and use that to surf.
In practice it is simple to do, but creates all sorts of problems with file ownership of downloaded stuff. You have to remember to change the owner every time you download something.
I wonder why MS didn't make something like this available on XP automatically since the essentials are there. I can't think of any reason other than marketing.
That's pre-supposing there's something desirable to download.
I always thought it would be very smart to open source Windows 98 with a licence that forbids commercial distribution. Many people still use it, and are forced to abandon it because of lack of support. And since cost is for them usually an issue they end up trying Linux and never going back.
Open sourcing it would keep outside support coming, and keep these people in the Microsoft universe. On the other hand it will not cut into their current OS revenue because it will not allow commercial distribution, making it a win/win for them.
IBM though, has adapted.
No, IBM after the PS/2 fiasco crashed, and then rebooted, focusing on overall customer experience and satisfaction (as mch as a big corporation can). Let's hope this also happens to Microsoft.