Understanding is "horizonal" - there's always, always further, beyond wherever you reach. Thus, there's almost never the luxury of understanding everything that's relevant.
Instead, you can only identify what may be sufficient for your purposes, and aim to understand enough for adequate confidence about the risks.
Somehow Apple must to be blame. Android is open source goodness and with so many eyes looking over the code it couldn't have flaws.
that may have been intended as stinging sarcasm, but the problem is with a component of HTC's proprietary Sense overlay. that sorta takes any point out of your mockery.
lisp was my favorite language until i found python. i still like lisp a lot - i develop some emacs extensions, like allout, and enjoy delving into the code. i'm also a big shell scripting fan, and i even love scheme's compactness. however, whenever i return to python from any other computer language, i am struck by its comprehensibility.
it's unfortunate, but "comprehensibility" is hard to pin down, and critically important. particularly in dynamic situations - which is when scripting is most needed. the more that a language has syntactic clutter, and/or is excessively naive (so a lot of code needs to be written and rewritten for simple things) or sophisticated (requiring the programmer to be so clever that they and others inevitably have a hard time understanding what they've written), the harder it is to evolve a system. of any language i've seen, python strikes the best balance, by far, in all of those realms.
it's kinda whacky that the GNU folks have stuck with the choice of guile after all this time, and in the face of others leaving that quest. witness MIT migrating from scheme to python for their introductory programming courses...
Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place. Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are, by definition, not smart enough to debug it. -- Brian Kernighan
unlinking, and relinking when necessary, is a good suggestion. it's nice to have a useful workaround out of a slashdot discussion!
(no, i'm not being snarky - i hadn't even looked at the unlink option since i first started using dropbox, since i never use it on any but my own computers.)
thanks!
(it's also amazing to me that they don't use SSH / SSL.)
(i see you've fallen for the whole "tinfoil hat protects your brain pan" scheme. any pastafarian knows that only lightly cooked spaghetti - al dente - can protect your noodle without disastrous side effects.)
What a bunch of fluff. The relevant developers don't care about "best practices" or any other voluntary standard. And how the f*** are users supposed to establish trust in certain apps? The platform does not significantly monitor an application's ongoing behavior, nor is anyone performing serious code-reviews or blackbox testing. Google COULD HAVE set up profiling tests similar to those run in TFA, but didn't.
your indignation suggests unwarranted faith in techniques that the article's authors acknowledge could be easily fooled (they say, "gamed"), since they trace only data flow, not control flow - and that is all they can reasonably do. so all that android-instituted behavioral tests would achieve is another level of misplaced trust. great goal.
really, android's existing sandboxing scheme is much more worthy of ongoing trust than the described profiling scheme. the sandboxing scheme cannot claim the granularity of the profiling scheme, but it realiably covers what it claims to cover. the profiling scheme cannot.
Re:Why support companies that pull crap like this?
on
Droid X Gets Rooted
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
We buy things that do certain things. If they do those things that you care about well, they serve their purpose and end up being worth the money. Things like jail-breaking are just icing.
well said - but for me, at least, the "icing" part underestimates the value of openness.
i'm near completing my second year of owning an android G1, and the thing has been spectacularly useful things i've owned. somewhere near the beginning of my second year i was increasingly frustrated with the limited apps storage space, though, and general thrashing of the android 1.6 install (perhaps due to my crowding it with apps, but i was trying to cut out unnecessary stuff, honest). rooting with cyanogenmod became pretty easy, and enabled me to use part of my 8 GB card (now 16GB:) for app storage. i'm now running android 2.1, thanks to cyanogen, and the phone is working better than it ever did at stock 1.5 or 1.6. it continues to be spectacularly useful 2 years out, where it was running out of steam at the end of one year while sticking with the stock system.
mind you, android 2 is not likely to ever be released for my phone by my vendor, and it would have been increasingly untenable for me to stick with this phone anywhere near as long as i have - despite loving the format (really decent physical keyboard, generally decent other stuff), and not seeing satisfying alternatives. for those reasons and others i could see staying with this thing for a while more - and if htc had locked out alternative os loads, i would not have had the choice.
consequently, as far as i can tell motorola phones, with their signed-boot restrictions, offer no lasting value to me, whatsoever, and are not in the running. i'll be eventually be looking for another android-based phone with a hardware keyboard - but it doesn't have to be soon, and it definitely won't be one that limits the long-term utility of the thing so drastically.
exactly what is useful can sometimes be difficult to gauge in advance, and that's where openness - allowing more options over the life of even an appliance - can be worth a lot.
others have responded better than i can, except i see one aspect missing from the other comments. google's action signals a significant shift in the way it relates to what amounts to an intransigent bully in charge of the biggest ball game (economy) in town.
prior behavior (by google and every other big player) has been mostly accommodation - walking gently around the bully in the hopes of staying in good graces, to not get shut-out from the game. google's recent actions - effectively accusing the govt. of the corporate spying, dropping the google.cn censorship, etc. - amounts to shrugging its shoulders and saying, "playing by your rules is not worth the grief". the way i see it, clinton's response is a signal that google's is not just a unilateral, empty gesture - this is policy shift is endorsed by both.
the departure is not from engagement, but rather from continuing to unequivocally accept china's rules of the game.
in order to have any real significance, google actually has to be willing to turn down some huge opportunities. they've demonstrated willingness to commit to big stakes in, eg, the way they influenced the terms of the spectrum auction, so i see no reason to view any of this as feeble gestures, but rather a genuine shift. interesting.
anyone interested in this distinction might appreciate the model described in finite and infinite games by james p. carse. it's a kind of convolution of the tao te ching, distilled down to:
A finite game is played for the purpose of winning. An infinite game is played for the purpose of continuing the play.
carse might say that performance-orientated people (paul) are occupied with the resulting claim - title, status, accomplishment, authority, etc - that they can make looking back on the win. those that are mastery-oriented (matt) are more concerned with developing ability to continue the play into the ("horizonal" - always in the advancing distance) future.
Surprise causes finite play to end; it is the reason for infinite play to continue.
and
To be serious is to press for a specified conclusion. To be playful is to allow for possibility, whatever the cost to oneself.
and
Because infinite players prepare themselves to be surprised by the future, they play in complete openness. It is not an openness as in candor, but an openness as in vulnerability. It is not a matter of exposing one's unchanging identity, the true self that has always been, but a way of exposing one's ceaseless growth, the dynamic self that is yet to be. The infinite player does not expect to only be amused by surprise, but to be transformed by it, for surprise does not alter some abstract past, but [by discovery of what actually happened,] one's own personal past.
(i wonder whether those interested in this kind of topic would more tend towards the mastery/infinite-play perspective?)
anyway, one of the most illuminating books i have read, along with the tao te ching (and, the one other on my paltry list, the politics of experience by r. d. laing).
hmm. i'm running more in the background now than i was before, because there are some apps which have background jobs (eg, google voice, selfhelp) which i couldn't afford to have on the phone at all, space wise. no problems now, except for some problematic apps (eg, where).
i would often try killing background tasks (using advanced task manager, very nice), but never got signficant improvement - to the point of killing all.
(on second thought, i suppose the eeprom must be used, to preserve dynamic parts of the filesystem across reboots. in any case, the phone performance gets awful as apps increase.)
You seem to be confusing RAM and internal flash storage.
i don't think so, but i could be mistaken.
the specs are 192 MB RAM and 256 MB EEPROM. i believe that the eeprom holds the firmware loader and static OS elements, while the RAM is used for active operating memory and varying elements of the internal-phone filesystem, including apk storage, data caches for things like gmail and the browser, and so on.
i can tell you that the space available for the.apks starts at something like 75 MB total. that's quickly consumed (with some substantial apps taking several MB apiece), and i experienced awful performance problems even though i left 12 to 17 MB (depending on how recently i cleared the caches).
i understand the bind that google/android is up against, and think it is terrible both in principle and in personal impact.
in order to limit copy-access to android app executables, android depends on sequestering apps in phone storage. while most app producers don't care about limiting access to their executables (apk's), some commercial vendors do. (some common evidence of this is the way that most apps are available for copying by android backup programs like MyBackup Pro, but some aren't.) of course, root access defeats this sequestering - and, in fact, the biggest performance advantage on machines like my G1 is due to jiggering things, with symlinks, etc, so that app storage (as well as some resource cache storage) is physically on the SD card.
the terrible bind is that, on phones like the G1, the phone-storage RAM (192 MB) is a critical resource shared across operational and storage functions, so that the phone works terribly if you have too many apps. and "too many", for a phone that's supposed to be very multi-purpose and extensible, is disturbingly few. it really is a fatal flaw - until i upgraded to cyanogen's mod, things like scrolling would fail to respond most of the time, returning to the home screen or starting an app could take on the order of minutes, etc. and this after i removed a lot of apps, including ones that were occasionally crucial. after upgrading to cyanogen the device works like an, um, dream. i can run everything i need, and more, and the phone is sliced-bread-caliber useful with quick, smooth responsiveness. happy dance!-) now they're bringing down the boot on my savior. darn.
it seems obvious to me that google can't afford to allow undermining of their key provision for proprietary vendors who don't want their.apk's loose in the wild. it's a platform-policy agreement they made. it seems equally obvious to me that this is a damn shame - a profound architectural restriction solely for the purpose of a few overly restrictive vendors, who also happen to be some of the big vendors.
(from many comments, elsewhere, about similar relief from upgrading to cyanogen, i see that my experience with the G1 is not unusual. going back to the standard android release is not an option, so figure i'll stick with my cyanogen install until my contract is up, sometime early next year, and by then there should be other android devices with a physical keyboard and without the cripplingly insufficient amount of RAM. i truly am sad that google is in this bind, and feel that the current arrangement for securing apk's is profoundly flawed, and finding a different approach deserves substantial effort.)
commercial viability. Every big high-tech company has such a division. My own employer, Sun, has Sun Labs, which is always coming out with interesting stuff that mostly has nothing to do with our business model. I think it's mainly a prestige thing, to convince folks that you're a cutting-edge company.
I think it's more than that.
Considering the security/stability abyss where Windows is situated, Microsoft needs some salient models for reliable computing to aim for. They don't have to switch over to the things that implement the pure goals, or even migrate there - but they must have some implementations of those goals so they know what the realities of a reliable OS would be.
Note, too, that they don't have to be the ones owning the whole model, since the thing they'll eventually be selling will be far removed from the model implementation. Thus they can afford to foster external research in developing the model, by publishing their findings - including the code. (Maybe "published source" is a better term for their limited limited openness?)
as ever, the amount of tangents in the slashdot discussion is both interesting and distressing. for the subject at hand, it would be interesting to hear about some authoritative responses from the gentoo officials, but i see nary a trace of that - no official responses in gentoo-devel or gentoo-user, and the single focused response included on planet gentoo makes no claim to authority (and would be more compelling if the logic or even grammar were more polished).
maybe it's too soon - but i sure am curious about how this is going to shape up. i'm not unhappy with gentoo - the bottom line, for me, is that it's presented fewer maintenance roadblocks than any of the distributions i've tried, over the years, including slackware, redhat, fedora, a little ubuntu, and a little less plain debian. turbulence and churn upgrading has felt difficult in the last year, however. i would be sad to lose gentoo - and i think that lack of effective, constructive response to the challenge that robbins has identified would mean losing it.
OLPC and this are feel good ideas when too much of this world does have clean drinking water and adequate medicine or food for the day. (i'm assuming you meant "does not have"...)
sometimes it's necessary to give someone some fish, but it's almost *always* valuable to do what you can help them learn to fish, in the meanwhile. (sometimes, giving the fish without providing the education leaves them a lot worse off - witness the trail of aid disasters in the 20th century...) this device has a lot of genuine promise for fostering education, communication, and collaboration. the OLPC project offers a whole package which seems specifically aimed at delivering those opportunities. i don't think it should be dismissed as a misguided indulgence.
> Consider it more like Roger Daltrey in his prime having two different > guitars: one for studio work that he cares for and frets over the > settings, and one "disposable" he uses on stage that he can smash to bits.
> understood physics and unforeseen weather patterns can > create unpredictable situations and stresses. In software > engineering, the rules of the system are predefined and > well understood. While a lot of research goes into ways > of doing specific tasks "better", the tradeoffs to each > design are usually well understood.
that misses an important aspect of software development. many of the hard issues are not about fundamental algorithmic principles, but about supporting development at the frontiers of what's being developed.
software is an intrinsically compositional art, so that the frontiers and even criteria for standards are constantly (and sometimes erratically) shifting. *that* is where many of the challanges in software standards lie - each choice you make precludes some avenues, and some of the time those other avenues are going to prevail, despite your expectations. the software standards landscape is littered with failed standards, just because things turned in different directions than anticipated, for many different reasons.
yet, waiting to see how things shake out before declaring a standard can lead to fragmentation and missed opportunity. the art, as i understand it, is in choosing the place and time to take a stand, and gathering salient input so that you make choices that will support the best opportunities - for intricate notions of "best"...
your attitude dismisses as hero worship the opinion of a bunch of people - me, included - that rms made a difference without which there may not be free/open source software. we may be right or we may be wrong, but the way you frame it doesn't even entertain the notion, it just belittles the value we see in his contributions. that's ok with me - you're entitled to see or not see what you wish - *except* that it's the kind of noise that can interfere with others seeing the importance, and potentially reducing the effectiveness of the movement - a movement most of you want to see succeed.
> I do not believe that the RIAA members are hurt by piracy > in any material way at the moment. I have indeed seen no > evidence that is not better explained by other means > including a lack of competitive content and a perception > that they are anticonsumer.
Huh?
The "perception that they are anticonsumer" explains their actions? The executives are sitting around wondering "What can we do to hurt our customers today? Ooh, i got a good one, lets make it harder to play our music!"
No, there are motives somewhere behind those actions, there always are, misguided or not. You can bet they've been shitting in their pants for a while about the "break once/run everywhere" problem that others mention in this discussion. It's hard to compete with that. (The grateful dead and others realized you're better off leveraging it. Other progressive-thinking artists aiming for modest success, instead of the extremely-rare-but-alluring spectacular wins, and enjoyable art-making and art-sharing head in that direction, also - and head towards some "alternative systems of distribution".)
Some evidence of this pants-shitting is the vested interests pursuit of one of the most costly commodities around - legislation. Can you say DMCA? They're getting some of what they want - and if it keeps up, that's where the harm is going to come, crippling the nation's ability to compete in the information/media markets of the future. All in a futile effort to try to stop leveraging of new economies in the scaling of communications.
More generally, "alternative system of distribution" is a way to label many of the aspects of the new world - p2p, open source, permitted bootlegging, podcasts, new publishing models in general - including what will eventually emerge as the legitemized, competitive alternatives to piracy. Until then, some potentially equitable models are going to be outlawed, along with ones that could never be equitable (wishful thinking aside), because the playing field takes time to level. Let us hope that the levelling is allowed to happen sooner, with a bit of foresight, rather than later, with a bunch of heads up^Win the, um, sand.
> Our conclusion is that currently proposed technical > measures will not be able to completely stop the > illegitimate distribution of pirated content. > We believe that content producers must take steps > to compete with the piracy as an alternative.
The way i see it, the business of content producers is based in mediating communications in ways that are becoming outdated, and specifically that have scaling economies that are being dwarfed by contemporary technologies. They have three options:
1. Hang on to the old ways, instituting measures that prevent
realizing the benefits of the new ways. Aka, become Part Of
The Problem, generally leading to option 2.
2. Die out.
3. Fundamentally reorient/retool.
I gather that twentieth century steel manufacturers in the US demonstrated the sheer power of obstinate arrogance to decimate a nation's industry. I'll be that would be dwarfed by the damage the honchos in the established recording/media industry could do if they continue to dig in their heels.
And i have to admit, it's probably monumentally easier to say/see this than it would be if my livelihood was based in the old ways...
Slashdot Mirror
Fun fact. Check the reverse DNS of any Google server IP address, and it'll probably reside under xxxx.1e100.net
True. Cool!
Whereas, whois google.com yields some quite other, unexpected spew. Unexpected by me, at least.
Understanding is "horizonal" - there's always, always further, beyond wherever you reach. Thus, there's almost never the luxury of understanding everything that's relevant. Instead, you can only identify what may be sufficient for your purposes, and aim to understand enough for adequate confidence about the risks.
Somehow Apple must to be blame. Android is open source goodness and with so many eyes looking over the code it couldn't have flaws.
that may have been intended as stinging sarcasm, but the problem is with a component of HTC's proprietary Sense overlay. that sorta takes any point out of your mockery.
well said.
lisp was my favorite language until i found python. i still like lisp a lot - i develop some emacs extensions, like allout, and enjoy delving into the code. i'm also a big shell scripting fan, and i even love scheme's compactness. however, whenever i return to python from any other computer language, i am struck by its comprehensibility.
it's unfortunate, but "comprehensibility" is hard to pin down, and critically important. particularly in dynamic situations - which is when scripting is most needed. the more that a language has syntactic clutter, and/or is excessively naive (so a lot of code needs to be written and rewritten for simple things) or sophisticated (requiring the programmer to be so clever that they and others inevitably have a hard time understanding what they've written), the harder it is to evolve a system. of any language i've seen, python strikes the best balance, by far, in all of those realms.
it's kinda whacky that the GNU folks have stuck with the choice of guile after all this time, and in the face of others leaving that quest. witness MIT migrating from scheme to python for their introductory programming courses...
unlinking, and relinking when necessary, is a good suggestion. it's nice to have a useful workaround out of a slashdot discussion!
(no, i'm not being snarky - i hadn't even looked at the unlink option since i first started using dropbox, since i never use it on any but my own computers.)
thanks!
(it's also amazing to me that they don't use SSH / SSL.)
(i see you've fallen for the whole "tinfoil hat protects your brain pan" scheme. any pastafarian knows that only lightly cooked spaghetti - al dente - can protect your noodle without disastrous side effects.)
What a bunch of fluff. The relevant developers don't care about "best practices" or any other voluntary standard. And how the f*** are users supposed to establish trust in certain apps? The platform does not significantly monitor an application's ongoing behavior, nor is anyone performing serious code-reviews or blackbox testing. Google COULD HAVE set up profiling tests similar to those run in TFA, but didn't.
your indignation suggests unwarranted faith in techniques that the article's authors acknowledge could be easily fooled (they say, "gamed"), since they trace only data flow, not control flow - and that is all they can reasonably do. so all that android-instituted behavioral tests would achieve is another level of misplaced trust. great goal.
really, android's existing sandboxing scheme is much more worthy of ongoing trust than the described profiling scheme. the sandboxing scheme cannot claim the granularity of the profiling scheme, but it realiably covers what it claims to cover. the profiling scheme cannot.
We buy things that do certain things. If they do those things that you care about well, they serve their purpose and end up being worth the money. Things like jail-breaking are just icing.
well said - but for me, at least, the "icing" part underestimates the value of openness.
i'm near completing my second year of owning an android G1, and the thing has been spectacularly useful things i've owned. somewhere near the beginning of my second year i was increasingly frustrated with the limited apps storage space, though, and general thrashing of the android 1.6 install (perhaps due to my crowding it with apps, but i was trying to cut out unnecessary stuff, honest). rooting with cyanogenmod became pretty easy, and enabled me to use part of my 8 GB card (now 16GB:) for app storage. i'm now running android 2.1, thanks to cyanogen, and the phone is working better than it ever did at stock 1.5 or 1.6. it continues to be spectacularly useful 2 years out, where it was running out of steam at the end of one year while sticking with the stock system.
mind you, android 2 is not likely to ever be released for my phone by my vendor, and it would have been increasingly untenable for me to stick with this phone anywhere near as long as i have - despite loving the format (really decent physical keyboard, generally decent other stuff), and not seeing satisfying alternatives. for those reasons and others i could see staying with this thing for a while more - and if htc had locked out alternative os loads, i would not have had the choice.
consequently, as far as i can tell motorola phones, with their signed-boot restrictions, offer no lasting value to me, whatsoever, and are not in the running. i'll be eventually be looking for another android-based phone with a hardware keyboard - but it doesn't have to be soon, and it definitely won't be one that limits the long-term utility of the thing so drastically.
exactly what is useful can sometimes be difficult to gauge in advance, and that's where openness - allowing more options over the life of even an appliance - can be worth a lot.
beautiful story - thanks!
oy vey.
others have responded better than i can, except i see one aspect missing from the other comments. google's action signals a significant shift in the way it relates to what amounts to an intransigent bully in charge of the biggest ball game (economy) in town.
prior behavior (by google and every other big player) has been mostly accommodation - walking gently around the bully in the hopes of staying in good graces, to not get shut-out from the game. google's recent actions - effectively accusing the govt. of the corporate spying, dropping the google.cn censorship, etc. - amounts to shrugging its shoulders and saying, "playing by your rules is not worth the grief". the way i see it, clinton's response is a signal that google's is not just a unilateral, empty gesture - this is policy shift is endorsed by both.
the departure is not from engagement, but rather from continuing to unequivocally accept china's rules of the game.
in order to have any real significance, google actually has to be willing to turn down some huge opportunities. they've demonstrated willingness to commit to big stakes in, eg, the way they influenced the terms of the spectrum auction, so i see no reason to view any of this as feeble gestures, but rather a genuine shift. interesting.
anyone interested in this distinction might appreciate the model described in finite and infinite games by james p. carse. it's a kind of convolution of the tao te ching, distilled down to:
carse might say that performance-orientated people (paul) are occupied with the resulting claim - title, status, accomplishment, authority, etc - that they can make looking back on the win. those that are mastery-oriented (matt) are more concerned with developing ability to continue the play into the ("horizonal" - always in the advancing distance) future.
and
and
(i wonder whether those interested in this kind of topic would more tend towards the mastery/infinite-play perspective?)
anyway, one of the most illuminating books i have read, along with the tao te ching (and, the one other on my paltry list, the politics of experience by r. d. laing).
ken
hmm. i'm running more in the background now than i was before, because there are some apps which have background jobs (eg, google voice, selfhelp) which i couldn't afford to have on the phone at all, space wise. no problems now, except for some problematic apps (eg, where).
i would often try killing background tasks (using advanced task manager, very nice), but never got signficant improvement - to the point of killing all.
(on second thought, i suppose the eeprom must be used, to preserve dynamic parts of the filesystem across reboots. in any case, the phone performance gets awful as apps increase.)
You seem to be confusing RAM and internal flash storage.
i don't think so, but i could be mistaken.
the specs are 192 MB RAM and 256 MB EEPROM. i believe that the eeprom holds the firmware loader and static OS elements, while the RAM is used for active operating memory and varying elements of the internal-phone filesystem, including apk storage, data caches for things like gmail and the browser, and so on.
i can tell you that the space available for the .apks starts at something like 75 MB total. that's quickly consumed (with some substantial apps taking several MB apiece), and i experienced awful performance problems even though i left 12 to 17 MB (depending on how recently i cleared the caches).
i understand the bind that google/android is up against, and think it is terrible both in principle and in personal impact.
in order to limit copy-access to android app executables, android depends on sequestering apps in phone storage. while most app producers don't care about limiting access to their executables (apk's), some commercial vendors do. (some common evidence of this is the way that most apps are available for copying by android backup programs like MyBackup Pro, but some aren't.) of course, root access defeats this sequestering - and, in fact, the biggest performance advantage on machines like my G1 is due to jiggering things, with symlinks, etc, so that app storage (as well as some resource cache storage) is physically on the SD card.
the terrible bind is that, on phones like the G1, the phone-storage RAM (192 MB) is a critical resource shared across operational and storage functions, so that the phone works terribly if you have too many apps. and "too many", for a phone that's supposed to be very multi-purpose and extensible, is disturbingly few. it really is a fatal flaw - until i upgraded to cyanogen's mod, things like scrolling would fail to respond most of the time, returning to the home screen or starting an app could take on the order of minutes, etc. and this after i removed a lot of apps, including ones that were occasionally crucial. after upgrading to cyanogen the device works like an, um, dream. i can run everything i need, and more, and the phone is sliced-bread-caliber useful with quick, smooth responsiveness. happy dance!-) now they're bringing down the boot on my savior. darn.
it seems obvious to me that google can't afford to allow undermining of their key provision for proprietary vendors who don't want their .apk's loose in the wild. it's a platform-policy agreement they made. it seems equally obvious to me that this is a damn shame - a profound architectural restriction solely for the purpose of a few overly restrictive vendors, who also happen to be some of the big vendors.
(from many comments, elsewhere, about similar relief from upgrading to cyanogen, i see that my experience with the G1 is not unusual. going back to the standard android release is not an option, so figure i'll stick with my cyanogen install until my contract is up, sometime early next year, and by then there should be other android devices with a physical keyboard and without the cripplingly insufficient amount of RAM. i truly am sad that google is in this bind, and feel that the current arrangement for securing apk's is profoundly flawed, and finding a different approach deserves substantial effort.)
ken
I think it's more than that.
Considering the security/stability abyss where Windows is situated, Microsoft needs some salient models for reliable computing to aim for. They don't have to switch over to the things that implement the pure goals, or even migrate there - but they must have some implementations of those goals so they know what the realities of a reliable OS would be.
Note, too, that they don't have to be the ones owning the whole model, since the thing they'll eventually be selling will be far removed from the model implementation. Thus they can afford to foster external research in developing the model, by publishing their findings - including the code. (Maybe "published source" is a better term for their limited limited openness?)
that's eloquently stated.
as ever, the amount of tangents in the slashdot discussion is both interesting and distressing. for the subject at hand, it would be interesting to hear about some authoritative responses from the gentoo officials, but i see nary a trace of that - no official responses in gentoo-devel or gentoo-user, and the single focused response included on planet gentoo makes no claim to authority (and would be more compelling if the logic or even grammar were more polished).
maybe it's too soon - but i sure am curious about how this is going to shape up. i'm not unhappy with gentoo - the bottom line, for me, is that it's presented fewer maintenance roadblocks than any of the distributions i've tried, over the years, including slackware, redhat, fedora, a little ubuntu, and a little less plain debian. turbulence and churn upgrading has felt difficult in the last year, however. i would be sad to lose gentoo - and i think that lack of effective, constructive response to the challenge that robbins has identified would mean losing it.
sometimes it's necessary to give someone some fish, but it's almost *always* valuable to do what you can help them learn to fish, in the meanwhile. (sometimes, giving the fish without providing the education leaves them a lot worse off - witness the trail of aid disasters in the 20th century...) this device has a lot of genuine promise for fostering education, communication, and collaboration. the OLPC project offers a whole package which seems specifically aimed at delivering those opportunities. i don't think it should be dismissed as a misguided indulgence.
time will tell.
"tank", as in:
Two fish are in a tank. One says to the other "I'll man the cannon, you drive."
> Consider it more like Roger Daltrey in his prime having two different
> guitars: one for studio work that he cares for and frets over the
> settings, and one "disposable" he uses on stage that he can smash to bits.
umm, pete townshend?
> understood physics and unforeseen weather patterns can
> create unpredictable situations and stresses. In software
> engineering, the rules of the system are predefined and
> well understood. While a lot of research goes into ways
> of doing specific tasks "better", the tradeoffs to each
> design are usually well understood.
that misses an important aspect of software development. many of the hard issues are not about fundamental algorithmic principles, but about supporting development at the frontiers of what's being developed.
software is an intrinsically compositional art, so that the frontiers and even criteria for standards are constantly (and sometimes erratically) shifting. *that* is where many of the challanges in software standards lie - each choice you make precludes some avenues, and some of the time those other avenues are going to prevail, despite your expectations. the software standards landscape is littered with failed standards, just because things turned in different directions than anticipated, for many different reasons.
yet, waiting to see how things shake out before declaring a standard can lead to fragmentation and missed opportunity. the art, as i understand it, is in choosing the place and time to take a stand, and gathering salient input so that you make choices that will support the best opportunities - for intricate notions of "best"...
your attitude dismisses as hero worship the opinion of a bunch of people - me, included - that rms made a difference without which there may not be free/open source software. we may be right or we may be wrong, but the way you frame it doesn't even entertain the notion, it just belittles the value we see in his contributions. that's ok with me - you're entitled to see or not see what you wish - *except* that it's the kind of noise that can interfere with others seeing the importance, and potentially reducing the effectiveness of the movement - a movement most of you want to see succeed.
> I do not believe that the RIAA members are hurt by piracy
> in any material way at the moment. I have indeed seen no
> evidence that is not better explained by other means
> including a lack of competitive content and a perception
> that they are anticonsumer.
Huh?
The "perception that they are anticonsumer" explains their actions? The executives are sitting around wondering "What can we do to hurt our customers today? Ooh, i got a good one, lets make it harder to play our music!"
No, there are motives somewhere behind those actions, there always are, misguided or not. You can bet they've been shitting in their pants for a while about the "break once/run everywhere" problem that others mention in this discussion. It's hard to compete with that. (The grateful dead and others realized you're better off leveraging it. Other progressive-thinking artists aiming for modest success, instead of the extremely-rare-but-alluring spectacular wins, and enjoyable art-making and art-sharing head in that direction, also - and head towards some "alternative systems of distribution".)
Some evidence of this pants-shitting is the vested interests pursuit of one of the most costly commodities around - legislation. Can you say DMCA? They're getting some of what they want - and if it keeps up, that's where the harm is going to come, crippling the nation's ability to compete in the information/media markets of the future. All in a futile effort to try to stop leveraging of new economies in the scaling of communications.
More generally, "alternative system of distribution" is a way to label many of the aspects of the new world - p2p, open source, permitted bootlegging, podcasts, new publishing models in general - including what will eventually emerge as the legitemized, competitive alternatives to piracy. Until then, some potentially equitable models are going to be outlawed, along with ones that could never be equitable (wishful thinking aside), because the playing field takes time to level. Let us hope that the levelling is allowed to happen sooner, with a bit of foresight, rather than later, with a bunch of heads up^Win the, um, sand.
> Our conclusion is that currently proposed technical
> measures will not be able to completely stop the
> illegitimate distribution of pirated content.
> We believe that content producers must take steps
> to compete with the piracy as an alternative.
The way i see it, the business of content producers is based in mediating communications in ways that are becoming outdated, and specifically that have scaling economies that are being dwarfed by contemporary technologies. They have three options:
1. Hang on to the old ways, instituting measures that prevent
realizing the benefits of the new ways. Aka, become Part Of
The Problem, generally leading to option 2.
2. Die out.
3. Fundamentally reorient/retool.
I gather that twentieth century steel manufacturers in the US demonstrated the sheer power of obstinate arrogance to decimate a nation's industry. I'll be that would be dwarfed by the damage the honchos in the established recording/media industry could do if they continue to dig in their heels.
And i have to admit, it's probably monumentally easier to say/see this than it would be if my livelihood was based in the old ways...