Your real password is a hash of your "friendly" password. Passwords are munged before being sent over the network, the munging being done according to a unique key in a dongle you stick into a USB port. Just don't lose the... oh... nevermind.
Of course, something like this would have to be built into the operating system. Perhaps there could be a checkbox on the Windows password dialog that said [x] use MungeMatic Password(TM).
I suppose you could store the munger key on a floppy or a CD too, but then the same idiots who use pa$$word would make dozens of copies.
And of course, this can't protect you from people sitting at your terminal with your dongle; but if that's happening, you've got bigger problems anyway.
Another possible solution? Just charge people for password changes.
Any Definition Will Be Arbitrary
on
Defining "Planet"
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Any Definition for "planet" will be arbitrary. Is a little ball of snow and ice on a highly elongated orbit a planet? No. It's a comet. Is a gas giant that generates more heat internally than it receives from the star it orbits a planet? Maybe, maybe not. OK, perhaps that's not arbitrary. If the thing gives more heat then it gets, then perhaps you could classify it as a brown dwarf, but what if the star it orbits flares up? Then does it suddenly become a planet because it starts receiving more heat?
I think the only thing we can conclude is that the definitions for "planet", "moon", "ring material", "asteroid", "comet" and "brown dwarf" are all arbitrary. It's all a matter of perspective.
So, here are my definitions:
Planet -- orbits a star, is big enough so that gravitational pull forces it to appear round or smoothly eliptical to the naked eye.
Asteroid -- orbits a star, If it's not round due to gravity, it's definitely an asteroid. Problem--this makes Ceres a planet.
Moon -- orbits a planet, unless it's not round then it's just a "captured asteroid". Problem--this makes Deimos and Phobos non-moons.
Ring material -- If the human eye perceives the planet as having rings, then any ojbect within the region containing the perceived rings is "ring material" regardless of how big it is or how it's shaped.
Comet -- any item that forms a tail when passing close to the star.
Brown dwarf -- Gives off more heat then it gets.
Really, when you get right down to it, all of these things are just "stuff that's not space". Choosing to call them "planet" or "comet" makes as much sense as choosing to call one city Cincinnati and another Buffalo. Somebody's gotta name the thing. Now, people have been living in Buffalo a long time, and they've been calling Pluto a planet a long time too. Whaddya say we make a deal? Get Buffalo to change its name to Cincinnati, and we can stop calling Pluto a planet. Now, what do I call a single hydrogen atom on a hyperbolic trajectory with Jupiter?
No need to call in contractors and get permits, etc
That's why a 6.8 earthquake in China kills thousands, and a 6.8 quake in Seattle killed nobody.
As much as I dislike the hassle of dealing with government beurocracy and regulation, I realize that when it comes to building codes, they are there for a reason.
I'd rather just have multiple passwords for different things. Inconvenient? Perhaps, but at least I don't have one single point of failure. Really, as far as I can see, both of these services are just offering me a single point of failure. Was the market really crying out for that? Maybe I should design a bridge with one support column and patent it.
In the short-run, the US Revolutionary war begat war, such as the war of 1812, which never would have occured if we'd stayed a colonly. The bloody French revolution and probably a few others were inspired by our revolution.
WWII begat peace--except for the Cold War.
What kept the Cold War from getting hot? Mutual Assured Destruction. It seems to be keeping Pakistan and India from going full-out like gangbusters too, but they are still having a "Warm War" in Kashmir.
So, if war doesn't beget peace, what does? Well, if I knew that, I'd bottle it and sell it... hmm... chamomile tea makes you drowsy, and there's no alter ego to it like alcohol which can bring peace and war... so I guess that's it. Chamomile tea begets peace. Load up a 747 and bomb them with Celestial Seasonings.
For the deep, dark parts of Windows dynamics are good. I guess I should qualify what I said. Dynamics are good in the following situations: 1. You conrol/own all of them like Microsoft does for Windows (when a MS DLL needs updating, Microsoft knows that some other vendor isn't going to do it, so they don't have to worry about some other vendor breaking their apps... they get to break other vendor's apps). 2. You want to be able to patch binaries.
Of course, I think you may need to qualify what you said. Obviously, whole DLLs aren't being cached. Instead, little bits of code are being cached. I'm not sure how fine the granularity is on the cache. If you have a 500k cache and most of your cycles are in 2k of the code, then it would be nice to be able to cache code in 2k blocks, and my original statement stands since the cache would figure out that the 5 apps running spend most of their time in 2k of code. The cache would have to hold 10k of code, but that's still a small portion of a 500k cache.
OTOH, if caches are only capable of pulling in large blocks, they could only pull in one dynamic at a time anyway. The others would miss every time the task switched.
To be fair, the utility of the cache is reduced somewhat by not having sharing, but not 100%. If I turn off my cache, I won't simulate static linking--I'll just simulate... umm... not having a cache.
Well, I was going to say this earlier, but the network hung. All I can do now is expound on this...
The largest EXE on my box is a little over 3 megs (it's AbiWord, by the way). The largest DLL on my box is a little over 5 megs (it's the bulk of the image loader/editor that came with a cheopo digicam I bought). Let's be really, really conservative and say that AbiWord decides to load that DLL. Yeah, I know it would never happen but this is just a worst-case scenario. That's 8 megs resident in memory. Now, how many windows do I typicly have open? 5 or 6, and many times it's the same app like IE or MSVC. Even under a worst-case scenario like 8 separate huge apps open, that's 64megs. Now of course this worst-case scenario is an extreme. I wager a more typical scenario with everything self-contained would result in less than 32 megs of code resident in memory. What's 32 megs cost? They don't even sell 32 meg modules most places. A lot of boxes are coming with half a gig, and if you want more you just grab for some loose change and snap it in.
Of course, apps aren't the only thing on the box. The System Information in Windows shows a lot of DLLs loaded by Windows, many of them legacy support. On a box with 128 megs of ram, I sometimes break over 50% resource utilization, but there's no noticeable impact on performance so who cares?
Now, weigh the cost of RAM against all the hours spent putzing with different dynamic library versions.
Plainly, dynamic libraries are a holdover from the days when memory costs and address-space limits were something to think about.
Now, I'm not saying that there aren't circumstances where dynamics are a good idea. For example, it would have been nice if Microsoft had installed MFC DLLs with earlier versions of Windows. I shudder to think of all the bandwidth wasted downloading those.
The "solution" of maintaining different versions of DLLs and giving them unique IDs is almost an admission of defeat that dynamics don't work. It's probably better to think of it as a way to ween people of dynamics, and of providing those who still want to use them with the option.
Slashdot has figured out what it's two most valuable commodities are, and found a way to sell them: "First Post!" and a way around the "Slashdot effect".
Of course I don't care much about First Post, and if something really interests me I either grep for a mirror or wait a few days, but if this brings in some dough to keep/. running, I say more power to 'em.
Yeah, but you have to hand it to the marketing genius who realized that...
...The megapixel number increases proportionally to the square of the dimensions.
...The increase from 1 megapixel to 2 megapixels sounds like twice the resolution.
...Most people are too lazy to multiply.
...Most people just want the biggest number. I mean, after all, how often have you heard a car manufacturer advertise horsepower, and make no mention of power/weight. Or they mention 0 to 60, but how often does that really matter? What I want to know is how fast can it go 50 to 70 so I can pass that granny in the Cadillac?
...The same thing that the guys who laid out Sears know: guys will find their way to the back where the tools are. People who know better will inquire beyond megapixels.
Most people starving in the world today don't starve because of resource problems. They starve because of their own wars, not our wars. They starve because some communist crackpot gets into power and gives the ministry of agriculture to some guru who thinks you can plant according to chicken entrails. They starve because somebody gets the idea that it would be a good idea to take farms away from farmers and give them to members of the "correct" race.
The US isn't involved in any material way in most of these cases.
Just throwing money at these problems has historicly not worked. Welfare, be it individual or national, doesn't promote self-sufficiency. Yes, the Marshall plan worked in Europe, but only after we asserted total control. OTOH, feeding North Korea is just feeding their army. We could give NK all the money in the world to help their agriculture, they'd just build more missiles. How do you suggest solving a problem like that?
OK, but where's the Motherboard and the display controller? Are they integrated with the CPU? No battery, no power supply, no keyboard, no CD or DVD drive, no gaurantee you can integrate it all without letting the smoke out... I still think I'd rather get a ThinkPad.
You bastard! Why did you leave out clothing? That forced me to picture a naked slashdotter eating and drinking while reading/. on a Windows PC in their home.
If you want to mow your granny's lawn, that's fine. OTOH, if a bunch of wealthy landowners got together and decided to subsidize free lawn-mowing for everybody in Fairfax county, that's a different story. I agree that applying business laws to nebulous associations like the Free Software movement is a dicey proposition, but when something looks like a duck and quaks like a duck, it's a duck and from the point of view of consumers and businesses, the Free Software movement is a big honking duck. As another guy said, think of it as "GPL Incorporated".
In your next argument, you say that BeOS didn't compete with Linux because they were in different markets--"free" and "non free". That's ridiculous. Software is software. Would you say that IE didn't compete with Netscape because Netscape was in the "unbundled" market?
To rebut your final argument: Nuking an entire city is no different than shooting the enemy with a rifle, except in scale.:)
Under the right circumstances, ordinary pieces of metal (like plumbing) exposed to acid can make "batteries" by chance. More intriguing is the "un batteried" iron obelisk I recall hearing about in India--an iron monument that has resisted rusting for hundreds of years.
I think it's likely that the ancients put some vinegar in this metal container, discovered that it corroded badly, and threw it away.
Of course we can't rule out that they knew something about electricity, but I think we need some clay tablets describing the use of electric devices to confirm it before we can say "ancient battery" with confidence.
LGPL'd is a different animal now isn't it? It's almost as good as BSD. No, MSFT couldn't just sell stuff for X. *NIX users would poo-poo it, and Windows* users don't run X.
2nd point about diversity: That's what they call a "static analysis". Sure, if you just add a new, popular, GPL'd OS it increases diversity at that point in time. However, the dynamics of this is that it creates a disensentive for people to enter, or to stay, in the OS market. A lot of people on/. blame MSFT for the death of BeOS, but I think the blame rests squarly on Linux, which competed in the "alternative OS" space with BeOS.
3rd point about companies adding value simply isn't true for GPL'd software. MSFT could add all the value it wanted to Linux, but at the end of the day every geek who cares will still be "can you burn me a copy?" to their friends. No sale.
4th point about industry whining: Of course *everybody* whines. The squeaky wheel gets the grease. It's just a tactic. What do you think the Free Software people are doing when they complain about something MSFT does?
If "the industry" can't produce a better product than a bunch of volunteers, they don't deserve to be in business.
If volunteers can't produce a better a better product than the industry, they don't deserve immunity from laws against product-dumping and anti-trust. Actually, *nobody* deserves immunity from product-dumping and anti-trust. I've quoted that part of your post because it's a popular argument used by FS advocates. Businesses aren't saying they are "entitled" to be in business without creating a competitive product. What they *are* saying is that they deserve to compete on an equal and fair footing in terms of price and market share, in accordance with anti-trust and other established practices. In other words, please explain how a variety of hardware companies bundling Linux for free is more fair and beneficial to consumers than one software company bundling IE.
My sig is about how people who buy into the "GPL will make me free" mentality are really just prostituting themselves. My message is about how *some* types of businesses profit at the expense of others, and why I believe that this shift in business model will not be beneficial to the general public in the long run.
The misconception here is caused by not realizing that while IBM benefits from GNU/Linux, the GPL means that it's not exclusively IBM who benefits. Hell, even Microsoft could benefit if they pulled their collective head out of their ass.
I use IBM as a stand-in for "business". I suppose I could have said "corporate america", but using a concrete example like IBM makes it more vivid. No, MSFT would not benefit. They would have to exchange a highly lucrative business model for one that's dubious at best.
Having a popular, free, multi-platform OS doesn't help one company, or hurt another,
It helps the class of companies that consume software, and hurts the class of companies that produce it. For a service-oriented company like IBM, it's helpful. For them, software is just something they can spend hours tweaking and customizing, and milk billables for each hour. For Microsoft it hurts because for them software is a product.
it helps the consumers by ensuring that there's a healthy selection of companies to work with.
If you can show me hard statistical analysis to indicate that when GPL'd software enters a class of applications, the diversity increases, then I'll concede your point. This is a tricky thing to prove either way. The pro-GPL advocates will point to all the Linux distros, the anti-GPL advocates will point to the fact that all the Linux distros are just variations on a theme, which is something less than true diversity.
IBM might be benefitting now (good for them) but they're also ensuring that neither they, nor any other computer company, will be so dominant again.
No they aren't. There is nothing that can prevent a GPL'd software from dominating a sector. Worse yet, once that occurs, competition is limited to those who can either compete based on the GPL's limited business model, or who can produce packages of sufficient quality to justify charging a premium above zero cost.
The Intel chip won't sell for $3000 in 2 years. The are just milking the early adapters, who are probably also patient enough to put up with some bugs, as long as Intel remedies it with a new chip (!). You know there will be bugs.
Granted, this is a steeper premium than say, the new PIV vs. PIII, but it's a leap up in architecture and it's aimed at servers. I say, Itanium $500 or less in 2 years.
The C99 standard has a lot of answers for this, such as intN_t where N=8,16,32... etc. They even have intptr_t for those who wish to convert void* to int and back. Also, intmax_t which holds whatever the largest integer data type is, and a few other special types. If you don't have <inttypes.h> on your system, read the standard, roll your own (which isn't hard), and USE IT.
Well, they obviously "taught" you something in elementary school. What I mean to say, in case you didn't catch it, is that you sound like you've been indoctrinated.
What do you suggest we do? Encourage inner city Blacks with field trips to the track? I can just hear some of those black commedians now, joking about yet another way to kill "da brothas" and how it's part of a CIA plot encouraging them to drive dangerous vehicles.
Look, discrimination is when the NASCAR company says "he's a great dirt track racer with incredible potential, but he's a N***** so forget about it".
If you can find any example of something like that happening in the past 20 years, I'll concede your point.
Cultural inertia != discrimination. "I'm poor because my mother is an Irish immigrant" is not discrimination. "No Irish need apply" is discrimination. Get it?
Slashdot Mirror
When I read this, I momentarily thought he left because he had a Transient Ischemic Attack.
Can anybody else think of overloads for this acronym? TIA for contributions. :)
Your real password is a hash of your "friendly" password. Passwords are munged before being sent over the network, the munging being done according to a unique key in a dongle you stick into a USB port. Just don't lose the... oh... nevermind.
Of course, something like this would have to be built into the operating system. Perhaps there could be a checkbox on the Windows password dialog that said [x] use MungeMatic Password(TM).
I suppose you could store the munger key on a floppy or a CD too, but then the same idiots who use pa$$word would make dozens of copies.
And of course, this can't protect you from people sitting at your terminal with your dongle; but if that's happening, you've got bigger problems anyway.
Another possible solution? Just charge people for password changes.
Any Definition for "planet" will be arbitrary. Is a little ball of snow and ice on a highly elongated orbit a planet? No. It's a comet. Is a gas giant that generates more heat internally than it receives from the star it orbits a planet? Maybe, maybe not. OK, perhaps that's not arbitrary. If the thing gives more heat then it gets, then perhaps you could classify it as a brown dwarf, but what if the star it orbits flares up? Then does it suddenly become a planet because it starts receiving more heat?
I think the only thing we can conclude is that the definitions for "planet", "moon", "ring material", "asteroid", "comet" and "brown dwarf" are all arbitrary. It's all a matter of perspective.
So, here are my definitions:
Planet -- orbits a star, is big enough so that gravitational pull forces it to appear round or smoothly eliptical to the naked eye.
Asteroid -- orbits a star, If it's not round due to gravity, it's definitely an asteroid. Problem--this makes Ceres a planet.
Moon -- orbits a planet, unless it's not round then it's just a "captured asteroid". Problem--this makes Deimos and Phobos non-moons.
Ring material -- If the human eye perceives the planet as having rings, then any ojbect within the region containing the perceived rings is "ring material" regardless of how big it is or how it's shaped.
Comet -- any item that forms a tail when passing close to the star.
Brown dwarf -- Gives off more heat then it gets.
Really, when you get right down to it, all of these things are just "stuff that's not space". Choosing to call them "planet" or "comet" makes as much sense as choosing to call one city Cincinnati and another Buffalo. Somebody's gotta name the thing. Now, people have been living in Buffalo a long time, and they've been calling Pluto a planet a long time too. Whaddya say we make a deal? Get Buffalo to change its name to Cincinnati, and we can stop calling Pluto a planet. Now, what do I call a single hydrogen atom on a hyperbolic trajectory with Jupiter?
No need to call in contractors and get permits, etc
That's why a 6.8 earthquake in China kills thousands, and a 6.8 quake in Seattle killed nobody.
As much as I dislike the hassle of dealing with government beurocracy and regulation, I realize that when it comes to building codes, they are there for a reason.
I'd rather just have multiple passwords for different things. Inconvenient? Perhaps, but at least I don't have one single point of failure. Really, as far as I can see, both of these services are just offering me a single point of failure. Was the market really crying out for that? Maybe I should design a bridge with one support column and patent it.
War begets neither war nor peace.
In the short-run, the US Revolutionary war begat war, such as the war of 1812, which never would have occured if we'd stayed a colonly. The bloody French revolution and probably a few others were inspired by our revolution.
WWII begat peace--except for the Cold War.
What kept the Cold War from getting hot? Mutual Assured Destruction. It seems to be keeping Pakistan and India from going full-out like gangbusters too, but they are still having a "Warm War" in Kashmir.
So, if war doesn't beget peace, what does? Well, if I knew that, I'd bottle it and sell it... hmm... chamomile tea makes you drowsy, and there's no alter ego to it like alcohol which can bring peace and war... so I guess that's it. Chamomile tea begets peace. Load up a 747 and bomb them with Celestial Seasonings.
For the deep, dark parts of Windows dynamics are good. I guess I should qualify what I said. Dynamics are good in the following situations: 1. You conrol/own all of them like Microsoft does for Windows (when a MS DLL needs updating, Microsoft knows that some other vendor isn't going to do it, so they don't have to worry about some other vendor breaking their apps... they get to break other vendor's apps). 2. You want to be able to patch binaries.
Of course, I think you may need to qualify what you said. Obviously, whole DLLs aren't being cached. Instead, little bits of code are being cached. I'm not sure how fine the granularity is on the cache. If you have a 500k cache and most of your cycles are in 2k of the code, then it would be nice to be able to cache code in 2k blocks, and my original statement stands since the cache would figure out that the 5 apps running spend most of their time in 2k of code. The cache would have to hold 10k of code, but that's still a small portion of a 500k cache.
OTOH, if caches are only capable of pulling in large blocks, they could only pull in one dynamic at a time anyway. The others would miss every time the task switched.
To be fair, the utility of the cache is reduced somewhat by not having sharing, but not 100%. If I turn off my cache, I won't simulate static linking--I'll just simulate... umm... not having a cache.
Well, I was going to say this earlier, but the network hung. All I can do now is expound on this...
The largest EXE on my box is a little over 3 megs (it's AbiWord, by the way). The largest DLL on my box is a little over 5 megs (it's the bulk of the image loader/editor that came with a cheopo digicam I bought). Let's be really, really conservative and say that AbiWord decides to load that DLL. Yeah, I know it would never happen but this is just a worst-case scenario. That's 8 megs resident in memory. Now, how many windows do I typicly have open? 5 or 6, and many times it's the same app like IE or MSVC. Even under a worst-case scenario like 8 separate huge apps open, that's 64megs. Now of course this worst-case scenario is an extreme. I wager a more typical scenario with everything self-contained would result in less than 32 megs of code resident in memory. What's 32 megs cost? They don't even sell 32 meg modules most places. A lot of boxes are coming with half a gig, and if you want more you just grab for some loose change and snap it in.
Of course, apps aren't the only thing on the box. The System Information in Windows shows a lot of DLLs loaded by Windows, many of them legacy support. On a box with 128 megs of ram, I sometimes break over 50% resource utilization, but there's no noticeable impact on performance so who cares?
Now, weigh the cost of RAM against all the hours spent putzing with different dynamic library versions.
Plainly, dynamic libraries are a holdover from the days when memory costs and address-space limits were something to think about.
Now, I'm not saying that there aren't circumstances where dynamics are a good idea. For example, it would have been nice if Microsoft had installed MFC DLLs with earlier versions of Windows. I shudder to think of all the bandwidth wasted downloading those.
The "solution" of maintaining different versions of DLLs and giving them unique IDs is almost an admission of defeat that dynamics don't work. It's probably better to think of it as a way to ween people of dynamics, and of providing those who still want to use them with the option.
Slashdot has figured out what it's two most valuable commodities are, and found a way to sell them: "First Post!" and a way around the "Slashdot effect".
Of course I don't care much about First Post, and if something really interests me I either grep for a mirror or wait a few days, but if this brings in some dough to keep /. running, I say more power to 'em.
Hey buddy, use a spell checker next time... oh... nevermind.
And thats when you get your "ass pecked".
Where do I go to apply for my free stuff?
here
Yeah, but you have to hand it to the marketing genius who realized that...
...The megapixel number increases proportionally to the square of the dimensions.
...The increase from 1 megapixel to 2 megapixels sounds like twice the resolution.
...Most people are too lazy to multiply.
...Most people just want the biggest number. I mean, after all, how often have you heard a car manufacturer advertise horsepower, and make no mention of power/weight. Or they mention 0 to 60, but how often does that really matter? What I want to know is how fast can it go 50 to 70 so I can pass that granny in the Cadillac?
...The same thing that the guys who laid out Sears know: guys will find their way to the back where the tools are. People who know better will inquire beyond megapixels.
Most people starving in the world today don't starve because of resource problems. They starve because of their own wars, not our wars. They starve because some communist crackpot gets into power and gives the ministry of agriculture to some guru who thinks you can plant according to chicken entrails. They starve because somebody gets the idea that it would be a good idea to take farms away from farmers and give them to members of the "correct" race.
The US isn't involved in any material way in most of these cases.
Just throwing money at these problems has historicly not worked. Welfare, be it individual or national, doesn't promote self-sufficiency. Yes, the Marshall plan worked in Europe, but only after we asserted total control. OTOH, feeding North Korea is just feeding their army. We could give NK all the money in the world to help their agriculture, they'd just build more missiles. How do you suggest solving a problem like that?
OK, but where's the Motherboard and the display controller? Are they integrated with the CPU? No battery, no power supply, no keyboard, no CD or DVD drive, no gaurantee you can integrate it all without letting the smoke out... I still think I'd rather get a ThinkPad.
Crusoe is their old chip. I think you want to compare it with Astro, coming out RSN.
...that they shall both be called "stalagites" and that everybody will be happy.
You bastard! Why did you leave out clothing? That forced me to picture a naked slashdotter eating and drinking while reading /. on a Windows PC in their home.
If you want to mow your granny's lawn, that's fine. OTOH, if a bunch of wealthy landowners got together and decided to subsidize free lawn-mowing for everybody in Fairfax county, that's a different story. I agree that applying business laws to nebulous associations like the Free Software movement is a dicey proposition, but when something looks like a duck and quaks like a duck, it's a duck and from the point of view of consumers and businesses, the Free Software movement is a big honking duck. As another guy said, think of it as "GPL Incorporated".
In your next argument, you say that BeOS didn't compete with Linux because they were in different markets--"free" and "non free". That's ridiculous. Software is software. Would you say that IE didn't compete with Netscape because Netscape was in the "unbundled" market?
To rebut your final argument: Nuking an entire city is no different than shooting the enemy with a rifle, except in scale. :)
Under the right circumstances, ordinary pieces of metal (like plumbing) exposed to acid can make "batteries" by chance. More intriguing is the "un batteried" iron obelisk I recall hearing about in India--an iron monument that has resisted rusting for hundreds of years.
I think it's likely that the ancients put some vinegar in this metal container, discovered that it corroded badly, and threw it away.
Of course we can't rule out that they knew something about electricity, but I think we need some clay tablets describing the use of electric devices to confirm it before we can say "ancient battery" with confidence.
LGPL'd is a different animal now isn't it? It's almost as good as BSD. No, MSFT couldn't just sell stuff for X. *NIX users would poo-poo it, and Windows* users don't run X.
2nd point about diversity: That's what they call a "static analysis". Sure, if you just add a new, popular, GPL'd OS it increases diversity at that point in time. However, the dynamics of this is that it creates a disensentive for people to enter, or to stay, in the OS market. A lot of people on /. blame MSFT for the death of BeOS, but I think the blame rests squarly on Linux, which competed in the "alternative OS" space with BeOS.
3rd point about companies adding value simply isn't true for GPL'd software. MSFT could add all the value it wanted to Linux, but at the end of the day every geek who cares will still be "can you burn me a copy?" to their friends. No sale.
4th point about industry whining: Of course *everybody* whines. The squeaky wheel gets the grease. It's just a tactic. What do you think the Free Software people are doing when they complain about something MSFT does?
If "the industry" can't produce a better product than a bunch of volunteers, they don't deserve to be in business.
If volunteers can't produce a better a better product than the industry, they don't deserve immunity from laws against product-dumping and anti-trust. Actually, *nobody* deserves immunity from product-dumping and anti-trust. I've quoted that part of your post because it's a popular argument used by FS advocates. Businesses aren't saying they are "entitled" to be in business without creating a competitive product. What they *are* saying is that they deserve to compete on an equal and fair footing in terms of price and market share, in accordance with anti-trust and other established practices. In other words, please explain how a variety of hardware companies bundling Linux for free is more fair and beneficial to consumers than one software company bundling IE.
My sig is about how people who buy into the "GPL will make me free" mentality are really just prostituting themselves. My message is about how *some* types of businesses profit at the expense of others, and why I believe that this shift in business model will not be beneficial to the general public in the long run.
The misconception here is caused by not realizing that while IBM benefits from GNU/Linux, the GPL means that it's not exclusively IBM who benefits. Hell, even Microsoft could benefit if they pulled their collective head out of their ass.
I use IBM as a stand-in for "business". I suppose I could have said "corporate america", but using a concrete example like IBM makes it more vivid. No, MSFT would not benefit. They would have to exchange a highly lucrative business model for one that's dubious at best.
Having a popular, free, multi-platform OS doesn't help one company, or hurt another,
It helps the class of companies that consume software, and hurts the class of companies that produce it. For a service-oriented company like IBM, it's helpful. For them, software is just something they can spend hours tweaking and customizing, and milk billables for each hour. For Microsoft it hurts because for them software is a product.
it helps the consumers by ensuring that there's a healthy selection of companies to work with.
If you can show me hard statistical analysis to indicate that when GPL'd software enters a class of applications, the diversity increases, then I'll concede your point. This is a tricky thing to prove either way. The pro-GPL advocates will point to all the Linux distros, the anti-GPL advocates will point to the fact that all the Linux distros are just variations on a theme, which is something less than true diversity.
IBM might be benefitting now (good for them) but they're also ensuring that neither they, nor any other computer company, will be so dominant again.
No they aren't. There is nothing that can prevent a GPL'd software from dominating a sector. Worse yet, once that occurs, competition is limited to those who can either compete based on the GPL's limited business model, or who can produce packages of sufficient quality to justify charging a premium above zero cost.
The Intel chip won't sell for $3000 in 2 years. The are just milking the early adapters, who are probably also patient enough to put up with some bugs, as long as Intel remedies it with a new chip (!). You know there will be bugs.
Granted, this is a steeper premium than say, the new PIV vs. PIII, but it's a leap up in architecture and it's aimed at servers. I say, Itanium $500 or less in 2 years.
The C99 standard has a lot of answers for this, such as intN_t where N=8,16,32... etc. They even have intptr_t for those who wish to convert void* to int and back. Also, intmax_t which holds whatever the largest integer data type is, and a few other special types. If you don't have <inttypes.h> on your system, read the standard, roll your own (which isn't hard), and USE IT.
Well, they obviously "taught" you something in elementary school. What I mean to say, in case you didn't catch it, is that you sound like you've been indoctrinated.
What do you suggest we do? Encourage inner city Blacks with field trips to the track? I can just hear some of those black commedians now, joking about yet another way to kill "da brothas" and how it's part of a CIA plot encouraging them to drive dangerous vehicles.
Look, discrimination is when the NASCAR company says "he's a great dirt track racer with incredible potential, but he's a N***** so forget about it".
If you can find any example of something like that happening in the past 20 years, I'll concede your point.
Cultural inertia != discrimination. "I'm poor because my mother is an Irish immigrant" is not discrimination. "No Irish need apply" is discrimination. Get it?