Being a non-profit isn't enough. The quality and integrity of the management is at least as important in a for profit business. After all, as a cynical former coworker pointed out, just because the company isn't trying to make a profit doesn't mean that there aren't any people making one. There are few things that can sap your motivation as badly as seeing a greedy and/or incompetent leader milking a nominally humanitarian cause for personal gain. I know. I've been there.
OTOH, when things go well at a non-profit it can be wonderful. We have a mission statement, but nobody seems to know or care about it. But it isn't like most places, where that's because the mission statement is just empty words. It's because we know what our mission is without needing to be told. There's something great about a job where everyone knows what they're trying to do, and what they're trying to do is a little bit more noble than just enhancing shareholder value.
Yes, but you can see what Javascript is there just by browsing the page source, which is exactly what I did. There was a nice little note proudly proclaiming that the page had been hand written in notepad, but no sneaky Javascript computations.
The one thing that surprised me a bit was that the author didn't take advantage of the opportunity to put a bit of leech computing onto his own web page. He mentions (on the second page) that:
Of course, you would not label such a button 'Click here to submit hidden data', but what if it were labeled 'Next Page'? How many times have you pressed a button like that without even thinking about it? When the user presses the button, the leech submits the hidden data and redirects to the next page. As long as the user gets to the next page, they will not have any reason to think that the button had any other function.
Then I remembered that there was, in fact, just such a button on the first page. But when I went back to check, there wasn't actually a Javascript applet there trying to leech a little bit of computing power from me. There wasn't even a cute little message thanking me for checking to see if there was such a Javascript applet. Too bad, he missed a great chance.
Maybe more than $100. Just try to find a PC from one of the big OEMs that doesn't bundle some MS application software, either Office or Works Suite, with Windows. The OEM XP Home I got on my new machine (Hey! I have to have some system to play games and do my taxes.) was $99, although that was from PC Club rather than one of the top 10 vendors. Add in Works Suite and you're talking more like $150; Office would bump that to quite a bit more.
And don't underestimate $100 savings, either. Some cheap machines these days are retailing in the $500 range, so knocking $100 of the price is a relatively large chunk of the cost. Those may not be hot gaming machines, but they might be pretty decent for mundane office use.
If you like the way that Mozilla works but find that it's too slow, you might want to try one of the browsers that's based on the Gecko rendering engine but does away with the rest of Mozilla's overhead. I use Galeon as my primary browser (which is admittedly easier since I use GNOME as my desktop) and it is great. It pops up windows very quickly, for instance, and its tabbed browsing is actually more mature than Mozilla's. I find that it gives me the parts of Mozilla that I like the most without the weight slowing it down.
A better phrasing would have been "Was the judge correct in ordering Microsoft to reveal the coding for its Windows program to the States' AGs".
How about "Was the judge correct in allowing the states to look at the code for Windows?" That's what the issue really is here. MS is making claims about the ease of doing things with its code, but doesn't want anyone to be able to look at the code and judge for themselves how true those claims are. The states are essentially asking for a chance to look themselves, and the judge has accepted their argument. It's a basic issue of fairness, IMO; if MS wants to make claims based on the code, the code must be available as evidence to refute (or support) those claims.
Wrong. What it's really proof of is that it's now standard practice for anyone who has a hope of getting an Oscar to release their movie late in the year. It's well known that Hollywood has a strong tendency to release specific types of movies at particular times. Big action adventure movies are most frequently released in the summer, family movies are frequently released between Thanksgiving and Christmas, and movies that are considered to be serious Oscar contenders are also generally released late in the year. Now that may be because the people who schedule things believe that the voters have short memories, but the release pattern has a lot to do with it.
I think that your understanding is fundamentally wrong here. The thing that prohibits me from making and selling copies of a work I buy from you is standard copyright. It doesn't have anything to do with the distinction between a license and a sale. That means that if I buy a print from you I have the right to resell the physical print as I damn well please. If I buy a book of prints from you, I have the right to tear the pages out of the binding, frame the individual pages, and to sell them for less than you charge for individual prints. That's the doctrine of first sale, which was established by the U.S. Supreme Court a long time ago.
What software writers want to claim is something different. They say that when I buy software I don't necessarily have my normal rights under first sale. I might not be allowed to transfer my right to the software to somebody else, for instance. To try to enact those rules, they claim to sell you only a license to use the software, and not actually a copy of the software itself.
What the judge has ruled in this case is that the nature of a transaction is governed by the nature of the transaction and not by what it's called by the seller. IOW, if I pay you a single, up front fee for a box of software that I'm allowed to use in perpetuity, that constitutes a sale whether you want to call it a sale or a license. That means that I have normal first sale rights- specifically the right to break up the pieces of a purchase and sell them separately as was done in this case- even if the "license agreement" that you try to impose specifically prohibits me from doing so.
It depends a lot on the stage of development. For a mature product it's probably true that source availability is less valuable. There are fewer bugs to be caught, and they're probably deeper in the code and thus more difficult to catch anyway. In the Free Software world there are also likely to be just one or only a few projects around, making code sharing more difficult.
But in the early stages of a project, though, source availability can be tremendously useful. A good example of this that I'm personally familiar with is with Linux DVD players. Different projects have focused on different parts of the overall picture, and the availability of code from other projects has allowed a lot of borrowing between projects to shore up their strengths. The player I use, for instance, had a very good MPEG player but lacked good menu support or the ability to read encrypted disks. But they were able to build a menu system by taking the code for menus from one place and a decryption library from another. Source availability makes that kind of thing possible.
Probably Germany's best (though slim) chance to defeat the USSR would have been to talk Japan into attacking the USSR from the east (and leaving the US strictly alone). Initally, I suspect that Hitler was too arrogant to ask his Asian ally for help, even though he needed it desperately.
Interesting speculation, but probably incorrect. Germany did ask for Japanese help against the USSR and was flatly refused. The Japanese were terrified of the USSR entering into the war in East Asia- they had gotten their clocks cleaned when they tangled with the Soviets earlier- and bent over backward to avoid giving the Soviets a reason to attack. This included an absolute refusal to attack Soviet flagged ships. This allowed the U.S. to send about 50% of its Lend-Lease cargo to the USSR through Vladivostok without risk of attack just by reflagging the ships as Soviet.
One of the subpoints to Fallacy 13 (The Industry Knows where it's going) is
"There haven't been any new ideas in a decade"
My response
"There is no new thing under the sun"
--Ecclesiastes
It's a flawed conclusion anyway. There have almost certainly been some great new ideas developed in the past 10 years. It's just that almost all really great ideas take a long time to get off the ground. The reason that all of the useful technology that we're using today is over 10 years old is because it almost always takes at least 10 years to go from good idea to good product. Take a look at how long it took the web, the GUI, or even the microprocessor to go from neat ideas to dominant technology. They all took a long time to develop into widespread use. I'm confident that there have been great ideas developed in the past 10 years, and by 2012 we'll be wondering how we ever lived without them.
Source code *is* useless to about 99% of the people that use the program.
But it does not follow from this that source code is useless. If the value that you get from giving the code to the tiny fraction of people who will actually do something useful with it is larger than the cost of doing the distribution, then distributing it is worthwhile. Given the low cost of source distribution these days, that may make distributing worthwhile even if only one or two people will ever look at the code.
Besides, users get value from having the source even if they never modify it. I find that it's very useful to compile programs for my system. They wind up being optimized for my processor and take advantage of the other resources that are on my system. This may not be a big thing, but there are certainly more people out there who compile than who write, and source availability helps them.
No, no, no. Remember, Planc's constant (which defines the size of uncertainty) is in Js. That means that if you know when the meeting happened you can't know how much energy was expended there. The conjugate of position is momentum, so to be uncertain where the meeting took place we'd need to know its mass and velocity.
Authorized? I'm not sure if that is the word. Microsoft can't authorize someone to come into my office and poke around. I believe only the government can do that, and only with proper documentation (ie. A warrant)
That depends on your view of the legal status of EULAs. Double check that Microsoft EULA some time, and I'm sure that you'll find wording that requires you to turn around and assume the position if they want to audit your software useage for license violations. I have no idea if that clause of the EULA would stand up in court, but in theory at least by installing their software you have given them the right to come into your office and check around.
I suspect that a big chunk of this is the difference between being a software vendor and a gobetween. Microsoft believes that they're going to keep doing business with you in the future. Screwing up their relationship with you will cost them more in lost business than the immediate benefit of the increased licensing money, so they play reasonably nice. The scariest thing they can imagine is somebody looking for good alternatives to their software, and obnoxious licensing audits are one such thing.
The BSA, OTOH, is not in the business of selling software themselves. They don't have to worry about doing business with you in the future, so they have no incentive to be nice about things. They just want to beat you upside the head and extract money out of you, so predatory and obnoxious behavior that makes you hate them is no problem. In many ways, a reputation for ruthlessness is beneficial for their business, since it means they can extort money from future victims even more easily.
It's amazing how it takes them several pages before the article stops looking like a press release from the BSA, but there are actually some interesting comments when you get a bit deeper into the article. I thought that the following was very interesting:
The BSA estimates that pirated software was responsible for about $3 billion in lost revenues to software publishers in the U.S. in 2000 -- although, to be strictly fair, that number assumes that every copy of stolen software would have been bought if it weren't stolen, which inflates the number somewhat.
That's the first time I can ever remember a news outlet that didn't buy the "every copy would have been paid for" line of crap from the BSA. Even here, though, it's pretty weak. Assuming that every copy would have been paid for inflates the numbers more than "somewhat". If the BSA isn't careful, though, the news is going to stop telling just their side of the story soon.
There is no such thing as correct spelling. There is only consensus.
This assumes that the only function of a dictionary is descriptive. A good dictionary also serves a normative function, describing what the accepted (i.e. consensus) spelling and meaning of words is. You can't just accept any old spelling and usage of words on the net, or you wind up in Humpty Dumpty world where anyone is allowed to use and spell words however they choose. Down that path lies madness and, if taken to the extreme, the death of the purpose of a dictionary. After all, if anyone is allowed to define a new meaning and/or spelling for a word at will there is no point in collecting those spellings and meanings anymore as they are subject to arbitrary change. IOW, you need some kind of filtering out of misuse and misspelling (at least according to consensus) so that the dictionary can function at all. Unless that filtering is done automatically- which is obviously a terribly difficult problem and quite possibly Turing complete- all you've done is build such an enormous database that it will be difficult to use.
I'm not sure if using USENET is such a great idea. While there are some areas where it has a great signal to noise ratio and intelligent commentary, there are a ton of places where it's simply awful. It's loaded with misinformation, flameage, and proof of the correctness of Godwin's Law. I doubt that I'd be very excited about chatting with a bot that learned to communicate by reading the USENET archives.
OTOH, you might be able to do some very clever work on using the page cache as a knowledge store for a chatbot. You'd just take the incoming message, try to find some keywords in it (probably using previous parts of the conversation to help) and use them to search Google for relevant information. Then you'd reformat the information you found into something like a conversational reply and send it.
Great. Now you only have to devise a program that can figure out which words that you're looking at are spelled and used correctly and you'll be in business. Good luck, dude.
The only problem is that now that you've mentioned your zero match querry on Slashdot, there will be an entry in Google soon. After all, the thread will be archived and then added to Google's list of pages. Pretty soon there will be a page that includes pipefitter and tollboth.
One other potential advantage is that it clearly presents what kind of changes Linus is interested in accepting. One reported big problem in the past is that Linus has a tendency to drop patches that change too much or have an insufficient explanation of what they do. By making it obvious what kind of changes he does accept and how the messages describing them should be written, it will make it easier for people to learn how to write a change the Linus will accept.
If security is so difficult to quantify, then the goofball shouldn't have tried to quantify it in the first place. The uproar started because he tried to use statistics to prove that Windows was more secure. If it's really not possible to judge security accurately, than he never should have written the first article.
Obviously you've never suffered from an unreliable email system. I generally ask for a return receipt when, and only when, I have a genuine question about whether my mail is arriving. Email is nice, and it's generally reliable, but it's not perfect.
I use scene selection on DVD quite frequently, although mostly on disks that I own. A lot of what I watch is disks of TV series, and I find the ability to instantly skip over the opening sequence and the credits to be very useful, even on disks that I've never seen before. If there are 3 episodes on the disk, do you really need to see the intro three times? It's also useful when there are multiple episodes on a single disk because it means that you can skip to the one that you're interested in without having to seek for the start or end.
Incidentally, though, this "blind people used e-book reader" argument seems a bit thin on the ground,
Well, the two reasons you listed are probably linked. After all, if only a handful of people have use the software, it's not terribly surprising that you haven't heard many stories about how useful it is. The "satisfied customers" test is only useful if there has been a genuine chance for their to be some customers to be satisfied.
More importantly, I think that the idea of making E-books useful to blind readers remains a good example, whether or not any specific blind person has used it for that yet. It's an example of a legitimate, non-copyright-infringing use for the product that has been forclosed by the combination of Adobe's restrictive policies and the DMCA. Adobe didn't stop to think about the possibility that blind people wouldn't be able to use their product, and the law says that nobody else can correct their mistake with an add-on. That's idiotic, and it's good to point out how stupid it is.
Slashdot Mirror
Being a non-profit isn't enough. The quality and integrity of the management is at least as important in a for profit business. After all, as a cynical former coworker pointed out, just because the company isn't trying to make a profit doesn't mean that there aren't any people making one. There are few things that can sap your motivation as badly as seeing a greedy and/or incompetent leader milking a nominally humanitarian cause for personal gain. I know. I've been there.
OTOH, when things go well at a non-profit it can be wonderful. We have a mission statement, but nobody seems to know or care about it. But it isn't like most places, where that's because the mission statement is just empty words. It's because we know what our mission is without needing to be told. There's something great about a job where everyone knows what they're trying to do, and what they're trying to do is a little bit more noble than just enhancing shareholder value.
Yes, but you can see what Javascript is there just by browsing the page source, which is exactly what I did. There was a nice little note proudly proclaiming that the page had been hand written in notepad, but no sneaky Javascript computations.
The one thing that surprised me a bit was that the author didn't take advantage of the opportunity to put a bit of leech computing onto his own web page. He mentions (on the second page) that:
Then I remembered that there was, in fact, just such a button on the first page. But when I went back to check, there wasn't actually a Javascript applet there trying to leech a little bit of computing power from me. There wasn't even a cute little message thanking me for checking to see if there was such a Javascript applet. Too bad, he missed a great chance.
Maybe more than $100. Just try to find a PC from one of the big OEMs that doesn't bundle some MS application software, either Office or Works Suite, with Windows. The OEM XP Home I got on my new machine (Hey! I have to have some system to play games and do my taxes.) was $99, although that was from PC Club rather than one of the top 10 vendors. Add in Works Suite and you're talking more like $150; Office would bump that to quite a bit more.
And don't underestimate $100 savings, either. Some cheap machines these days are retailing in the $500 range, so knocking $100 of the price is a relatively large chunk of the cost. Those may not be hot gaming machines, but they might be pretty decent for mundane office use.
If you like the way that Mozilla works but find that it's too slow, you might want to try one of the browsers that's based on the Gecko rendering engine but does away with the rest of Mozilla's overhead. I use Galeon as my primary browser (which is admittedly easier since I use GNOME as my desktop) and it is great. It pops up windows very quickly, for instance, and its tabbed browsing is actually more mature than Mozilla's. I find that it gives me the parts of Mozilla that I like the most without the weight slowing it down.
How about "Was the judge correct in allowing the states to look at the code for Windows?" That's what the issue really is here. MS is making claims about the ease of doing things with its code, but doesn't want anyone to be able to look at the code and judge for themselves how true those claims are. The states are essentially asking for a chance to look themselves, and the judge has accepted their argument. It's a basic issue of fairness, IMO; if MS wants to make claims based on the code, the code must be available as evidence to refute (or support) those claims.
Wrong. What it's really proof of is that it's now standard practice for anyone who has a hope of getting an Oscar to release their movie late in the year. It's well known that Hollywood has a strong tendency to release specific types of movies at particular times. Big action adventure movies are most frequently released in the summer, family movies are frequently released between Thanksgiving and Christmas, and movies that are considered to be serious Oscar contenders are also generally released late in the year. Now that may be because the people who schedule things believe that the voters have short memories, but the release pattern has a lot to do with it.
I think that your understanding is fundamentally wrong here. The thing that prohibits me from making and selling copies of a work I buy from you is standard copyright. It doesn't have anything to do with the distinction between a license and a sale. That means that if I buy a print from you I have the right to resell the physical print as I damn well please. If I buy a book of prints from you, I have the right to tear the pages out of the binding, frame the individual pages, and to sell them for less than you charge for individual prints. That's the doctrine of first sale, which was established by the U.S. Supreme Court a long time ago.
What software writers want to claim is something different. They say that when I buy software I don't necessarily have my normal rights under first sale. I might not be allowed to transfer my right to the software to somebody else, for instance. To try to enact those rules, they claim to sell you only a license to use the software, and not actually a copy of the software itself.
What the judge has ruled in this case is that the nature of a transaction is governed by the nature of the transaction and not by what it's called by the seller. IOW, if I pay you a single, up front fee for a box of software that I'm allowed to use in perpetuity, that constitutes a sale whether you want to call it a sale or a license. That means that I have normal first sale rights- specifically the right to break up the pieces of a purchase and sell them separately as was done in this case- even if the "license agreement" that you try to impose specifically prohibits me from doing so.
It depends a lot on the stage of development. For a mature product it's probably true that source availability is less valuable. There are fewer bugs to be caught, and they're probably deeper in the code and thus more difficult to catch anyway. In the Free Software world there are also likely to be just one or only a few projects around, making code sharing more difficult.
But in the early stages of a project, though, source availability can be tremendously useful. A good example of this that I'm personally familiar with is with Linux DVD players. Different projects have focused on different parts of the overall picture, and the availability of code from other projects has allowed a lot of borrowing between projects to shore up their strengths. The player I use, for instance, had a very good MPEG player but lacked good menu support or the ability to read encrypted disks. But they were able to build a menu system by taking the code for menus from one place and a decryption library from another. Source availability makes that kind of thing possible.
Interesting speculation, but probably incorrect. Germany did ask for Japanese help against the USSR and was flatly refused. The Japanese were terrified of the USSR entering into the war in East Asia- they had gotten their clocks cleaned when they tangled with the Soviets earlier- and bent over backward to avoid giving the Soviets a reason to attack. This included an absolute refusal to attack Soviet flagged ships. This allowed the U.S. to send about 50% of its Lend-Lease cargo to the USSR through Vladivostok without risk of attack just by reflagging the ships as Soviet.
It's a flawed conclusion anyway. There have almost certainly been some great new ideas developed in the past 10 years. It's just that almost all really great ideas take a long time to get off the ground. The reason that all of the useful technology that we're using today is over 10 years old is because it almost always takes at least 10 years to go from good idea to good product. Take a look at how long it took the web, the GUI, or even the microprocessor to go from neat ideas to dominant technology. They all took a long time to develop into widespread use. I'm confident that there have been great ideas developed in the past 10 years, and by 2012 we'll be wondering how we ever lived without them.
But it does not follow from this that source code is useless. If the value that you get from giving the code to the tiny fraction of people who will actually do something useful with it is larger than the cost of doing the distribution, then distributing it is worthwhile. Given the low cost of source distribution these days, that may make distributing worthwhile even if only one or two people will ever look at the code.
Besides, users get value from having the source even if they never modify it. I find that it's very useful to compile programs for my system. They wind up being optimized for my processor and take advantage of the other resources that are on my system. This may not be a big thing, but there are certainly more people out there who compile than who write, and source availability helps them.
No, no, no. Remember, Planc's constant (which defines the size of uncertainty) is in Js. That means that if you know when the meeting happened you can't know how much energy was expended there. The conjugate of position is momentum, so to be uncertain where the meeting took place we'd need to know its mass and velocity.
Come on people, this is very simple physics.
That depends on your view of the legal status of EULAs. Double check that Microsoft EULA some time, and I'm sure that you'll find wording that requires you to turn around and assume the position if they want to audit your software useage for license violations. I have no idea if that clause of the EULA would stand up in court, but in theory at least by installing their software you have given them the right to come into your office and check around.
I suspect that a big chunk of this is the difference between being a software vendor and a gobetween. Microsoft believes that they're going to keep doing business with you in the future. Screwing up their relationship with you will cost them more in lost business than the immediate benefit of the increased licensing money, so they play reasonably nice. The scariest thing they can imagine is somebody looking for good alternatives to their software, and obnoxious licensing audits are one such thing.
The BSA, OTOH, is not in the business of selling software themselves. They don't have to worry about doing business with you in the future, so they have no incentive to be nice about things. They just want to beat you upside the head and extract money out of you, so predatory and obnoxious behavior that makes you hate them is no problem. In many ways, a reputation for ruthlessness is beneficial for their business, since it means they can extort money from future victims even more easily.
It's amazing how it takes them several pages before the article stops looking like a press release from the BSA, but there are actually some interesting comments when you get a bit deeper into the article. I thought that the following was very interesting:
That's the first time I can ever remember a news outlet that didn't buy the "every copy would have been paid for" line of crap from the BSA. Even here, though, it's pretty weak. Assuming that every copy would have been paid for inflates the numbers more than "somewhat". If the BSA isn't careful, though, the news is going to stop telling just their side of the story soon.
This assumes that the only function of a dictionary is descriptive. A good dictionary also serves a normative function, describing what the accepted (i.e. consensus) spelling and meaning of words is. You can't just accept any old spelling and usage of words on the net, or you wind up in Humpty Dumpty world where anyone is allowed to use and spell words however they choose. Down that path lies madness and, if taken to the extreme, the death of the purpose of a dictionary. After all, if anyone is allowed to define a new meaning and/or spelling for a word at will there is no point in collecting those spellings and meanings anymore as they are subject to arbitrary change. IOW, you need some kind of filtering out of misuse and misspelling (at least according to consensus) so that the dictionary can function at all. Unless that filtering is done automatically- which is obviously a terribly difficult problem and quite possibly Turing complete- all you've done is build such an enormous database that it will be difficult to use.
I'm not sure if using USENET is such a great idea. While there are some areas where it has a great signal to noise ratio and intelligent commentary, there are a ton of places where it's simply awful. It's loaded with misinformation, flameage, and proof of the correctness of Godwin's Law. I doubt that I'd be very excited about chatting with a bot that learned to communicate by reading the USENET archives.
OTOH, you might be able to do some very clever work on using the page cache as a knowledge store for a chatbot. You'd just take the incoming message, try to find some keywords in it (probably using previous parts of the conversation to help) and use them to search Google for relevant information. Then you'd reformat the information you found into something like a conversational reply and send it.
Great. Now you only have to devise a program that can figure out which words that you're looking at are spelled and used correctly and you'll be in business. Good luck, dude.
The only problem is that now that you've mentioned your zero match querry on Slashdot, there will be an entry in Google soon. After all, the thread will be archived and then added to Google's list of pages. Pretty soon there will be a page that includes pipefitter and tollboth.
One other potential advantage is that it clearly presents what kind of changes Linus is interested in accepting. One reported big problem in the past is that Linus has a tendency to drop patches that change too much or have an insufficient explanation of what they do. By making it obvious what kind of changes he does accept and how the messages describing them should be written, it will make it easier for people to learn how to write a change the Linus will accept.
If security is so difficult to quantify, then the goofball shouldn't have tried to quantify it in the first place. The uproar started because he tried to use statistics to prove that Windows was more secure. If it's really not possible to judge security accurately, than he never should have written the first article.
Obviously you've never suffered from an unreliable email system. I generally ask for a return receipt when, and only when, I have a genuine question about whether my mail is arriving. Email is nice, and it's generally reliable, but it's not perfect.
I use scene selection on DVD quite frequently, although mostly on disks that I own. A lot of what I watch is disks of TV series, and I find the ability to instantly skip over the opening sequence and the credits to be very useful, even on disks that I've never seen before. If there are 3 episodes on the disk, do you really need to see the intro three times? It's also useful when there are multiple episodes on a single disk because it means that you can skip to the one that you're interested in without having to seek for the start or end.
Well, the two reasons you listed are probably linked. After all, if only a handful of people have use the software, it's not terribly surprising that you haven't heard many stories about how useful it is. The "satisfied customers" test is only useful if there has been a genuine chance for their to be some customers to be satisfied.
More importantly, I think that the idea of making E-books useful to blind readers remains a good example, whether or not any specific blind person has used it for that yet. It's an example of a legitimate, non-copyright-infringing use for the product that has been forclosed by the combination of Adobe's restrictive policies and the DMCA. Adobe didn't stop to think about the possibility that blind people wouldn't be able to use their product, and the law says that nobody else can correct their mistake with an add-on. That's idiotic, and it's good to point out how stupid it is.