3. That they're going to this trouble means that they want their customers protected. While they say (in the brief) that users
would leave for the competition if their anonymity were compromised, that's really not true for the vast majority of thier customer
base. Most AOL users aren't the type to post anything of interest at all on the Internet. (anyone remember USENET in the mid
to late 90s, and how bad AOL users were ragged on for "me too" posts?)
Bear in mind, though, that many people (possibly including AOL) view this as the thin edge of the wedge. If you expose the identity of anonymous/pseudonymous posters today, what will you do tomorrow? Will prosecutors demand chat-room transcripts to prove that deviants were trying to lure underage girls into sex? If they can get that, will divorce lawyers start wanting email and chat records to prove who's at fault or unfit to be parents? If they can get that, will employers want web-surfing records to show the illicit interests of their employees in termination hearings? Will prosecutors want the names of visitors to drug-related web sites to look for possible buyers? Each one cuts out a bit of privacy and seems like a reasonable step from the previous one, but nobody wants their web-browsing habits to be available to anyone with a sharp lawyer and a vauge reason to be interested. AOL understands that they need to draw the line now so that they don't have to draw it further back later.
More pragmatically, they don't want to establish a precident. If AOL rolls over and agrees to serve up the name of anyone who posts possibly defamatory information on a chat board, pretty soon that will be routine and they'll need to hire people just to serve up names to lawyers. And, of course, they'll lose the customers who see the privacy loss as significant. But serving up names won't satisfy people digging for information, and they'll get requests for more information, which they'll either have to fight or agree to; either way will require more work. Eventually they'll have to draw a line about what information is generally available for the asking and which has to be fought over. They want to draw that line as far in the "give nothing" direction as possible, because there will be fewer requests to fight over, fewer requests to serve, and fewer customers who decide to move to a more privacy friendly ISP.
Also, it depends on how they had their Win2k box set up. Active Directory is a mess and could be slowing it down along with a
bunch of other services that come with it by default that weren't part of NT.
Of course that's hardly a ringing endorsement. "You can't get the best results with our new OS because the wonderful new features we're advertizing so much slow things down." The argument about Win2000 needing SQL2000 is plausible, but you do have to wonder whether it's really a good idea to be running software that's so dependant on the OS to get peak performance.
Unfortunately, Congress with the help of Federal Courts and the Supreme Court have made laws which do abridge the freedom
of speech.
This is not exactly true. Congress has made (and the Supreme Court has accepted) laws that don't agree with you about the exact meaning of the phrase "freedom of speech". You assume that it means the absolute right to say anything you damn well please under any conditions you please. Apparently the U.S. Supreme Court disagrees with you. You can't prove that your position is correct, because there is a legitimate issue of the legal meaning of the term "freedom of speech".
It's also important to realize that even under the most liberal interpretation of freedom of speech (that you may say what you choose in what manner you choose), you are not necessarily legally freed of the potential consequences of your speech. If your speech does someone harm, you should be civilly and criminally liable for it in exactly the same way that you should be liable if your actions do harm. You shouldn't be allowed to harm others without consequence just because the agent of that harm is speech rather than physical violence; ordering a murder should be illegal even though the order is speech not action. This view is supported by the long-term stance of the Supreme Court; you may be made to suffer for what you have said if it does harm (e.g. inciting riot, criminal conspiracy, slander, etc.), but it's very difficult to get a prior legal restraint on saying it.
That depends on how the prices are labeled. If they use UPC symbols you may be right; it's their responsability to have the right data in their computer when they look up the price. But swapping the stick on price lables that used to be so common and are still used in some places is a different matter. Swapping those is as easy as pie, and it's unreasonable to expect the company to be able to tell when they've been swapped. Switching price tags is theft by deceit, and so is changing the price that their web page sends to you. The whole thing about this being "negotiating" is a crock of shit; negotiation requires a meeting of minds, and you can't have a meeting of the minds with a computer.
AFAIK it is theft. There are laws that say that switching the price tags on merchandise to get a lower price is theft. So even though the guy at the cash register tells you that the price is such and such, you're still guilty of theft if the price comes up that way because you manipulated their pricing system. Editing web based pricing information is basically the same thing, and I bet that any DA worth his salt could convince a judge to agree.
I'm not personally a fan of Senator Hatch, but I think that he made a good faith effort to do the right thing. The goal of the DMCA was to encourage copyright dependant industries like the music industry to release their products in new and innovative ways. It tried to acheive this by giving them additional legal protections so that when they did release their material in digital form people wouldn't be able to duplicate it and drive them out of business. It hasn't worked out that way, but that has less to do with Sen. Hatch's competence than you seem to think.
The deep problem is that the goal of providing fair use to consumers and protection to producers is fundamentally contradictory. Fair use is defined after the fact in a courtroom, so it's literally impossible even to know what fair use is, much less design a system that allows it while preventing whole sale copying. This is not a problem that can be solved by any kind of cleverness. The recording industry has also refused to implement any kind of on-line distribution scheme, and industry intransigence isn't something that you can predict. Say what you will about Sen. Hatch, at least he's trying to do good. He hasn't just taken a check from the industry to write the legislation they wanted and ignored their abuses. Instead he's trying to go back and fix the problems that were caused by what he did the first time around. At least in the case of the DMCA it's legislation that can be reversed; the anti-circumvention provisions can be altered to prevent the kinds of abuses that have been publicized here.
This theory sounds nice, but the facts don't seem to be there. It turns out that the stuff that people are most interested in downloading from Napster is exactly the same stuff that the RIAA has been churning out by the bucketload: Britney Spears, N'Synch, and their ilk. Besides, people thinking for themselves isn't a big worry for the industry so long as they can maintain something like their current distribution scheme. It doesn't matter what people want to listen to, just so long as when they want to hear it their money goes through the big record companies. I'm actually wondering when one of those companies is going to figure out the "throw it at the wall and see what sticks" approach to marketing; don't spend money hyping the acts, put out the mp3s, watch what people download, and sell them the CDs with those same mp3s and more songs that aren't out there for free.
No, what the record companies are really afraid of is that mp3s will provide a real alternative for established acts that don't need record company hype. A big act with some staying power, like Metallica to choose one that's been in the center of the controversy, could put out an album and sell a lot of copies without any hype whatsoever. What happens when their contract is over and their free not just to sign with a different label but to say fuck you to all of the labels? They could go in for themselves, contract actual disk production to flat fee per copy/lowest bidder CD duplicator, and rely on a site like Napster or MP3.com plus word of mouth for marketing. They wouldn't have to split their royalties with a big record company, so they could make more money than they are now while selling disks for a lot less. The big record companies have to be scared shitless that all of their top acts will ditch them- or at least use the plausible threat of ditching them as leverage for much better contracts.
An approximately similar strategy would be for the pharmaceutical companies (who are to illegal drugs what the RIAA is to pirated music: the legally-sanctioned provider of a more expensive alternative)
I'm sorry, but I can't let this quote pass. I hate big Pharma about as much as anyone, but to suggest that they're behind the war on drugs is stupid and dishonest. Recreational drugs have nothing to do with medical products like Pepcid, Claritin, or whatever else they're trying to sell so much of today. Nobody is going to try to snort coke to cure their alergies or smoke pot for their diabetes. The number of applications for which any currently illicit drug is suggested as an alternative to commercial medications- even by the wildest advocates of medical marijuana- is a tiny fraction of the total market.
If you want to look for a group that's behind the war on drugs, you'll have to look elsewhere. You're likely to find it in a combination of:
The religious zealots, who seem to believe that anything pleasurable is inherently evil
The Alcohol and Tobacco industries, whose legal recreational drugs are at risk of competetion
The Legal/Penal complex, which sees the war on drugs as a source of infinite funding
Opportunistic politicians who see it as a source of votes
The Pharmaceutical industry has a lot to answer for, but don't add things that aren't their fault on top of things that are.
Except that copy protection is never going to be effective in preventing industrial scale duplication, only casual home duplication. Why? Because the idustrial duplicators have real resources to throw at the problem. After all, to be big enough to be more than a minor annoyance to the legitimate sellers, the illegal duplicators have to invest in enough duplicating equipment to produce significant numbers of copies, which implies serious resources. Anyone with those kinds of resources will also be able to break the copy protection scheme, even if it's just a brute force approach like raw bitwise copying or re-encoding the analog signal. The only way to shut down industrial scale illegal duplication is to track it down physically and arrest the operators.
So if IBM can cut server OS development and maintenence costs by 50% by having much of the work done by the Linux community, that increases their profit margins. And it also benefits the Linux community, since they'd be developing and maintaining Linux anyway, and this adds IBM and IBM server customers to the people who have an interest in helping develop and maintain Linux.
I think that this precisely underlines why Free/Open Source software is such a great idea. When you share, everyone wins. Getting more people onto the platform increases the development effort much less than the support base, so the average effort per user is less. As long as IBM is truly sharing by adding some effort into the system rather than leeching off everybody else, bringing them onboard helps everybody. Admittedly, adding new platforms as IBM is doing is more effort than more users on already supported platforms, but there's also potentially more benefit. Adding users with different needs adds new features (which is why it's more effort), but many of them will provide trickledown benefits to other users who wouldn't necessarily have been willing to develop them by themselves. And IBM is playing fair by putting in the development effort of adding those new platforms and features themselves rather than demanding that others do the work.
64 bit is going to be helpful if you're interested in high precision floating point math. A 64 bit processor can do operations on 64 bit FP numbers as a single operation, rather than 4 operations as you'd need with a 32 bit processor, so there's a big speed up in heavy duty number crunching. That's why you always see people doing really chunky numerical modeling- like predicting the weather- using 64 bit computers instead of cheaper 32 bit ones. Not what everyone needs, mind you, but the people who do need it are willing to pay.
This is probably IBM anticipating. After all, just because there's no demand now doesn't mean that there won't be demand when the system is available. Getting the system ready ahead of demand is smart; it means that when people running PPC want more horsepower, IBM will be able to provide them with a nice smooth path to 64 bit PPC. This looks like it's just a regular part of IBM's Linux strategy. They want to make it available everywhere, so companies can upgrade to more and more powerful systems without having to relearn everything.
Maybe we tend to believe it because the comment itself is credible. We know that part of the Oracle license is that benchmarks can't be printed without permission, so the claim that Oracle won't let them publish the benchmarks without that permission isn't obviously problematic. In fact, it makes sense that if Oracle had turned out better that they would have let the benchmarks be published. It basically boils down to your assesment of the credibility of the people making the claim under these circumstances; if you think that they're credible and wouldn't say a thing like that without evidence, you can believe it. It you think they're bullshitters, you don't believe it. It's really very simple.
Of course, we all know that there are three kinds of lies: lies, damn lies, and benchmarks. Just because Postgres won at Oracle's benchmarks doesn't mean that the test was particularly meaningful to Oracle. Oracle's main selling point is that it's a scalable, enterprise class system. Benchmarks performed on typical small-scale systems like what you'd use for a small company web-site aren't necessarily translateable to the big iron where Oracle really lives. There's nothing particularly hard to believe about the idea that Oracle has been so optimized for high end applications that it can be beaten at the low end by a RDBMS that's been developed for low end systems.
I don't think that DirectX is exactly "embrace and extend", which is usually reserved for their tendency to add proprietary extensions to existing standards (e.g. IE extensions for HTML). DirectX is more of their even more classic developer lock-in efforts. Microsoft has worked very hard to make it easy to develop for Windows, and to make it so that projects developed using MS development tools are not easy to port to other systems. Of course developers who become dependent on those tools also have a hard time switching to other systems, too. DirectX is just one more example of the whole MSDN phenomenon, and not really "embrace and extend".
There is a mention in the article that there's a possibility of adding capability tags as a FS attribute, so you'll be able to add necessary capabilities to an otherwise unprivileged application rather than the rather backward approach of running the app as root and counting on it to give up needed privileges. Unfortunately that support does not yet exist, so it's still theoretical. If you're really interested in a more sophisticated security system, you might want to look at the NSA Security Enhanced Linux.
That's a fault with the underlying hardware, not Unix itself.
No, it's a problem with Unix. In Unix, root is god; he has complete control over the system. If root wants to read Joe Shmoe's files, bcc: all incoming and outgoing email to a computer in China, or rm -rf/, then that's what's going to happen. Any exploitable bug- not just buffer overruns but any other kind of problem like a tempfile that depends on user provided information- in a program that's running SUID will let an attacker turn himself into root (and then do anything he wants). This is a problem with the Unix security model, not with the processor architecture.
With a more sophisticated priviledge model- one that gave priviledged programs only enough power to do what they need to do- a broken program would only allow the user to do the same kinds of things that the broken program did. A broken mail program would only let a user do things relevant to moving mail, and not read all the files in/home/jshmoe/private. A broken PPP program would only let you do things about ppp, not rewrite/etc/shadow. There would still be a few programs (like login authentication) truly critical to system security, and a bad program could still cause problems, but the situation wouldn't be as critical.
The set of code which need to be
trusted (ie the kernel and very few programs) should be as small as possible.
There are some approaches to improving security. Capabilty models look like the best hope for the future.
I'm not sure that I'd agree that capabilities are necessarily the best hope for the future. At the very least they have to overcome the obstacle that they require a substantial reorientation of people's views toward the way that operating systems behave. I'm not saying that we don't ultimately need to do so, just that it's a substantial obstacle.
The real problem with the Unix model is that it utterly fails to implement any real least priviledge system. Every program that needs any priviledges not available to an ordinary user gets full root priviledge, so that a single security crack in any SUID root program opens up the whole system. That's worse than just account level granularity. There's literally only two levels of operation, peon and god. It's a terrible security model, and only an outrageous level of code auditing has any hope of preserving anything like real world data security. That people have been willing to go as far as they have in auditing the code is commendable (and, of course, any system can benefit from the level of auditing that OBSD has instituted) but it's not a reliable route to high grade security.
Actually, the Intellimouse wasn't designed by Microsoft, either. The chip that makes it work is designed and built by Agilent. Amusingly, though, Microsoft apparently turned down an exclusive deal for the technology, so Agilent is now selling them to everyone under the sun. That's why the other guys were able to follow up on Microsoft's "innovation" so rapidly; they just bought the innovative part from the same third party.
No thread participant could provide an example of a new user-facing product category that had originated in the FS/OS world.
Well, the web started out in the FS/OS world- remember that Mosaic was the original basis of both Netscape and IE- or is that still too old for you? Of course the counter point is that nobody can come up with a new, user-facing product category that originated at Microsoft, either. Everything they do is copied from somebody else. Their implementations may be nice, but they're still copies of others' technology.
I could leave it at that, but RMS is so condescending it makes me retch:
"I have no opinion 'intellectual property rights,' and if you are thoughtful you will have none either."
Did you actually read what he said, or were you just looking for a nice quote that you could use out of context to give you an excuse to say something nasty about him? If you had a shred of honesty you would have noted that the full context was:
I have no opinion "intellectual property rights," and if you are thoughtful you will have none either. That term is a catch-all, covering copyrights, patents, trademarks, and other disparate legal systems; they are so different, in the laws and in their effects, that any statement about all of them at
once is almost surely foolish. To think intelligently about copyrights, patents or trademarks, you must think about them separately.
He's not saying that he's against IP rights generally but that they're such a diverse issue that treating them as a monolithic concept is stupid. I'd say that's a very fair comment and shows that he has probably thought about the issue a lot more than most talking heads who blather about the necessity of protecting intellectual property in the media.
One very nice aspect of Stallman's commentary is that he provided a solid example of Microsoft's behavior relative to Free Software. He mentioned their decision to embrace and extend Kerberos in Win2000. I thought that this was a particularly good choice because it showed:
An example of free software so innovative that Microsoft wanted to use it (scratch the "Free Software stifles innovation")
How a BSD-style license, which Microsoft advocated, let them take it and
How Microsoft then turned around and screwed the people who had written the software in the first place by deliberately destroying interoperability
Having a nice solid example is a big step up from the generic rantings so popular on slashdot. Instead of "Microsoft wants a license that lets them swipe free software for their own ends", Stallman has shown that Microsoft has used more permissive licenses to swipe free software and screw existing users.
Optical and wireless would be really hard to do properly, due to the amount of polling needed on the wireless frequency to get smooth movement, I think.
That's actually not the thing that's keeping optical mice from being wireless. The optical sensor is already going at about 1500 scans per second, so that's not what's keeping you down. I asked my dad (who worked on the design of the new optical sensors at Agilent) and he says that the problem is with power consumption. They currently use way more current than conventional mice. I'll have to check mine at home but I think that they're rated at 250 mA vs. 20 mA for a standard mouse, so they'd run down the batteries too fast. They hope to be able to bring the current draw down in the next version so that cordless optical mice will be possible.
This is not exactly a typical failure mode, though, and I doubt that the guy would be bitching about needing a tougher mouse if that were the problem. He'd be asking about chew protection for cables. It might actually be a real market; I have a cow orker who has had parrot problems with some of her cables. Maybe a braided steel cable protector is in order...
Actually, they think that a lot of the "junk DNA" started out as places where viruses inserted their genes into ours to reproduce. Our defenses then inactivated the viral genes but they stuck around as dead weight. Since they weren't doing anything, they were free to mutate, eventually turning into pretty much nothing but noise. Natural selection can gradually chop out useless chunks of DNA since there's no obvious benefit to keeping it and a small advantage to removing it (it takes a bit less energy to replicate your DNA) but you'd expect the process to be slow. OTOH it's possible that there are some non-obvious advantages to having lots of non-coding DNA; I wonder if it makes recombination less risky, for instance.
Well, the BSD license is OK in Stallman's book, too. He thinks that it's not the best license because it doesn't guarantee continued software freedom, but he agrees that it is a Free license and is GPL compatible. He does comment that the phrase "the BSD license" is unclear because it might refer to the old BSD license with the advertizing clause and suggests that the X license is a clearer example of the concept.
Slashdot Mirror
Bear in mind, though, that many people (possibly including AOL) view this as the thin edge of the wedge. If you expose the identity of anonymous/pseudonymous posters today, what will you do tomorrow? Will prosecutors demand chat-room transcripts to prove that deviants were trying to lure underage girls into sex? If they can get that, will divorce lawyers start wanting email and chat records to prove who's at fault or unfit to be parents? If they can get that, will employers want web-surfing records to show the illicit interests of their employees in termination hearings? Will prosecutors want the names of visitors to drug-related web sites to look for possible buyers? Each one cuts out a bit of privacy and seems like a reasonable step from the previous one, but nobody wants their web-browsing habits to be available to anyone with a sharp lawyer and a vauge reason to be interested. AOL understands that they need to draw the line now so that they don't have to draw it further back later.
More pragmatically, they don't want to establish a precident. If AOL rolls over and agrees to serve up the name of anyone who posts possibly defamatory information on a chat board, pretty soon that will be routine and they'll need to hire people just to serve up names to lawyers. And, of course, they'll lose the customers who see the privacy loss as significant. But serving up names won't satisfy people digging for information, and they'll get requests for more information, which they'll either have to fight or agree to; either way will require more work. Eventually they'll have to draw a line about what information is generally available for the asking and which has to be fought over. They want to draw that line as far in the "give nothing" direction as possible, because there will be fewer requests to fight over, fewer requests to serve, and fewer customers who decide to move to a more privacy friendly ISP.
Of course that's hardly a ringing endorsement. "You can't get the best results with our new OS because the wonderful new features we're advertizing so much slow things down." The argument about Win2000 needing SQL2000 is plausible, but you do have to wonder whether it's really a good idea to be running software that's so dependant on the OS to get peak performance.
This is not exactly true. Congress has made (and the Supreme Court has accepted) laws that don't agree with you about the exact meaning of the phrase "freedom of speech". You assume that it means the absolute right to say anything you damn well please under any conditions you please. Apparently the U.S. Supreme Court disagrees with you. You can't prove that your position is correct, because there is a legitimate issue of the legal meaning of the term "freedom of speech".
It's also important to realize that even under the most liberal interpretation of freedom of speech (that you may say what you choose in what manner you choose), you are not necessarily legally freed of the potential consequences of your speech. If your speech does someone harm, you should be civilly and criminally liable for it in exactly the same way that you should be liable if your actions do harm. You shouldn't be allowed to harm others without consequence just because the agent of that harm is speech rather than physical violence; ordering a murder should be illegal even though the order is speech not action. This view is supported by the long-term stance of the Supreme Court; you may be made to suffer for what you have said if it does harm (e.g. inciting riot, criminal conspiracy, slander, etc.), but it's very difficult to get a prior legal restraint on saying it.
That depends on how the prices are labeled. If they use UPC symbols you may be right; it's their responsability to have the right data in their computer when they look up the price. But swapping the stick on price lables that used to be so common and are still used in some places is a different matter. Swapping those is as easy as pie, and it's unreasonable to expect the company to be able to tell when they've been swapped. Switching price tags is theft by deceit, and so is changing the price that their web page sends to you. The whole thing about this being "negotiating" is a crock of shit; negotiation requires a meeting of minds, and you can't have a meeting of the minds with a computer.
AFAIK it is theft. There are laws that say that switching the price tags on merchandise to get a lower price is theft. So even though the guy at the cash register tells you that the price is such and such, you're still guilty of theft if the price comes up that way because you manipulated their pricing system. Editing web based pricing information is basically the same thing, and I bet that any DA worth his salt could convince a judge to agree.
I'm not personally a fan of Senator Hatch, but I think that he made a good faith effort to do the right thing. The goal of the DMCA was to encourage copyright dependant industries like the music industry to release their products in new and innovative ways. It tried to acheive this by giving them additional legal protections so that when they did release their material in digital form people wouldn't be able to duplicate it and drive them out of business. It hasn't worked out that way, but that has less to do with Sen. Hatch's competence than you seem to think.
The deep problem is that the goal of providing fair use to consumers and protection to producers is fundamentally contradictory. Fair use is defined after the fact in a courtroom, so it's literally impossible even to know what fair use is, much less design a system that allows it while preventing whole sale copying. This is not a problem that can be solved by any kind of cleverness. The recording industry has also refused to implement any kind of on-line distribution scheme, and industry intransigence isn't something that you can predict. Say what you will about Sen. Hatch, at least he's trying to do good. He hasn't just taken a check from the industry to write the legislation they wanted and ignored their abuses. Instead he's trying to go back and fix the problems that were caused by what he did the first time around. At least in the case of the DMCA it's legislation that can be reversed; the anti-circumvention provisions can be altered to prevent the kinds of abuses that have been publicized here.
This theory sounds nice, but the facts don't seem to be there. It turns out that the stuff that people are most interested in downloading from Napster is exactly the same stuff that the RIAA has been churning out by the bucketload: Britney Spears, N'Synch, and their ilk. Besides, people thinking for themselves isn't a big worry for the industry so long as they can maintain something like their current distribution scheme. It doesn't matter what people want to listen to, just so long as when they want to hear it their money goes through the big record companies. I'm actually wondering when one of those companies is going to figure out the "throw it at the wall and see what sticks" approach to marketing; don't spend money hyping the acts, put out the mp3s, watch what people download, and sell them the CDs with those same mp3s and more songs that aren't out there for free.
No, what the record companies are really afraid of is that mp3s will provide a real alternative for established acts that don't need record company hype. A big act with some staying power, like Metallica to choose one that's been in the center of the controversy, could put out an album and sell a lot of copies without any hype whatsoever. What happens when their contract is over and their free not just to sign with a different label but to say fuck you to all of the labels? They could go in for themselves, contract actual disk production to flat fee per copy/lowest bidder CD duplicator, and rely on a site like Napster or MP3.com plus word of mouth for marketing. They wouldn't have to split their royalties with a big record company, so they could make more money than they are now while selling disks for a lot less. The big record companies have to be scared shitless that all of their top acts will ditch them- or at least use the plausible threat of ditching them as leverage for much better contracts.
I'm sorry, but I can't let this quote pass. I hate big Pharma about as much as anyone, but to suggest that they're behind the war on drugs is stupid and dishonest. Recreational drugs have nothing to do with medical products like Pepcid, Claritin, or whatever else they're trying to sell so much of today. Nobody is going to try to snort coke to cure their alergies or smoke pot for their diabetes. The number of applications for which any currently illicit drug is suggested as an alternative to commercial medications- even by the wildest advocates of medical marijuana- is a tiny fraction of the total market.
If you want to look for a group that's behind the war on drugs, you'll have to look elsewhere. You're likely to find it in a combination of:
The Pharmaceutical industry has a lot to answer for, but don't add things that aren't their fault on top of things that are.
Except that copy protection is never going to be effective in preventing industrial scale duplication, only casual home duplication. Why? Because the idustrial duplicators have real resources to throw at the problem. After all, to be big enough to be more than a minor annoyance to the legitimate sellers, the illegal duplicators have to invest in enough duplicating equipment to produce significant numbers of copies, which implies serious resources. Anyone with those kinds of resources will also be able to break the copy protection scheme, even if it's just a brute force approach like raw bitwise copying or re-encoding the analog signal. The only way to shut down industrial scale illegal duplication is to track it down physically and arrest the operators.
I think that this precisely underlines why Free/Open Source software is such a great idea. When you share, everyone wins. Getting more people onto the platform increases the development effort much less than the support base, so the average effort per user is less. As long as IBM is truly sharing by adding some effort into the system rather than leeching off everybody else, bringing them onboard helps everybody. Admittedly, adding new platforms as IBM is doing is more effort than more users on already supported platforms, but there's also potentially more benefit. Adding users with different needs adds new features (which is why it's more effort), but many of them will provide trickledown benefits to other users who wouldn't necessarily have been willing to develop them by themselves. And IBM is playing fair by putting in the development effort of adding those new platforms and features themselves rather than demanding that others do the work.
64 bit is going to be helpful if you're interested in high precision floating point math. A 64 bit processor can do operations on 64 bit FP numbers as a single operation, rather than 4 operations as you'd need with a 32 bit processor, so there's a big speed up in heavy duty number crunching. That's why you always see people doing really chunky numerical modeling- like predicting the weather- using 64 bit computers instead of cheaper 32 bit ones. Not what everyone needs, mind you, but the people who do need it are willing to pay.
This is probably IBM anticipating. After all, just because there's no demand now doesn't mean that there won't be demand when the system is available. Getting the system ready ahead of demand is smart; it means that when people running PPC want more horsepower, IBM will be able to provide them with a nice smooth path to 64 bit PPC. This looks like it's just a regular part of IBM's Linux strategy. They want to make it available everywhere, so companies can upgrade to more and more powerful systems without having to relearn everything.
Maybe we tend to believe it because the comment itself is credible. We know that part of the Oracle license is that benchmarks can't be printed without permission, so the claim that Oracle won't let them publish the benchmarks without that permission isn't obviously problematic. In fact, it makes sense that if Oracle had turned out better that they would have let the benchmarks be published. It basically boils down to your assesment of the credibility of the people making the claim under these circumstances; if you think that they're credible and wouldn't say a thing like that without evidence, you can believe it. It you think they're bullshitters, you don't believe it. It's really very simple.
Of course, we all know that there are three kinds of lies: lies, damn lies, and benchmarks. Just because Postgres won at Oracle's benchmarks doesn't mean that the test was particularly meaningful to Oracle. Oracle's main selling point is that it's a scalable, enterprise class system. Benchmarks performed on typical small-scale systems like what you'd use for a small company web-site aren't necessarily translateable to the big iron where Oracle really lives. There's nothing particularly hard to believe about the idea that Oracle has been so optimized for high end applications that it can be beaten at the low end by a RDBMS that's been developed for low end systems.
I don't think that DirectX is exactly "embrace and extend", which is usually reserved for their tendency to add proprietary extensions to existing standards (e.g. IE extensions for HTML). DirectX is more of their even more classic developer lock-in efforts. Microsoft has worked very hard to make it easy to develop for Windows, and to make it so that projects developed using MS development tools are not easy to port to other systems. Of course developers who become dependent on those tools also have a hard time switching to other systems, too. DirectX is just one more example of the whole MSDN phenomenon, and not really "embrace and extend".
There is a mention in the article that there's a possibility of adding capability tags as a FS attribute, so you'll be able to add necessary capabilities to an otherwise unprivileged application rather than the rather backward approach of running the app as root and counting on it to give up needed privileges. Unfortunately that support does not yet exist, so it's still theoretical. If you're really interested in a more sophisticated security system, you might want to look at the NSA Security Enhanced Linux.
No, it's a problem with Unix. In Unix, root is god; he has complete control over the system. If root wants to read Joe Shmoe's files, bcc: all incoming and outgoing email to a computer in China, or rm -rf /, then that's what's going to happen. Any exploitable bug- not just buffer overruns but any other kind of problem like a tempfile that depends on user provided information- in a program that's running SUID will let an attacker turn himself into root (and then do anything he wants). This is a problem with the Unix security model, not with the processor architecture.
With a more sophisticated priviledge model- one that gave priviledged programs only enough power to do what they need to do- a broken program would only allow the user to do the same kinds of things that the broken program did. A broken mail program would only let a user do things relevant to moving mail, and not read all the files in /home/jshmoe/private. A broken PPP program would only let you do things about ppp, not rewrite /etc/shadow. There would still be a few programs (like login authentication) truly critical to system security, and a bad program could still cause problems, but the situation wouldn't be as critical.
I'm not sure that I'd agree that capabilities are necessarily the best hope for the future. At the very least they have to overcome the obstacle that they require a substantial reorientation of people's views toward the way that operating systems behave. I'm not saying that we don't ultimately need to do so, just that it's a substantial obstacle.
The real problem with the Unix model is that it utterly fails to implement any real least priviledge system. Every program that needs any priviledges not available to an ordinary user gets full root priviledge, so that a single security crack in any SUID root program opens up the whole system. That's worse than just account level granularity. There's literally only two levels of operation, peon and god. It's a terrible security model, and only an outrageous level of code auditing has any hope of preserving anything like real world data security. That people have been willing to go as far as they have in auditing the code is commendable (and, of course, any system can benefit from the level of auditing that OBSD has instituted) but it's not a reliable route to high grade security.
Actually, the Intellimouse wasn't designed by Microsoft, either. The chip that makes it work is designed and built by Agilent. Amusingly, though, Microsoft apparently turned down an exclusive deal for the technology, so Agilent is now selling them to everyone under the sun. That's why the other guys were able to follow up on Microsoft's "innovation" so rapidly; they just bought the innovative part from the same third party.
Well, the web started out in the FS/OS world- remember that Mosaic was the original basis of both Netscape and IE- or is that still too old for you? Of course the counter point is that nobody can come up with a new, user-facing product category that originated at Microsoft, either. Everything they do is copied from somebody else. Their implementations may be nice, but they're still copies of others' technology.
Did you actually read what he said, or were you just looking for a nice quote that you could use out of context to give you an excuse to say something nasty about him? If you had a shred of honesty you would have noted that the full context was:
He's not saying that he's against IP rights generally but that they're such a diverse issue that treating them as a monolithic concept is stupid. I'd say that's a very fair comment and shows that he has probably thought about the issue a lot more than most talking heads who blather about the necessity of protecting intellectual property in the media.
One very nice aspect of Stallman's commentary is that he provided a solid example of Microsoft's behavior relative to Free Software. He mentioned their decision to embrace and extend Kerberos in Win2000. I thought that this was a particularly good choice because it showed:
Having a nice solid example is a big step up from the generic rantings so popular on slashdot. Instead of "Microsoft wants a license that lets them swipe free software for their own ends", Stallman has shown that Microsoft has used more permissive licenses to swipe free software and screw existing users.
That's actually not the thing that's keeping optical mice from being wireless. The optical sensor is already going at about 1500 scans per second, so that's not what's keeping you down. I asked my dad (who worked on the design of the new optical sensors at Agilent) and he says that the problem is with power consumption. They currently use way more current than conventional mice. I'll have to check mine at home but I think that they're rated at 250 mA vs. 20 mA for a standard mouse, so they'd run down the batteries too fast. They hope to be able to bring the current draw down in the next version so that cordless optical mice will be possible.
This is not exactly a typical failure mode, though, and I doubt that the guy would be bitching about needing a tougher mouse if that were the problem. He'd be asking about chew protection for cables. It might actually be a real market; I have a cow orker who has had parrot problems with some of her cables. Maybe a braided steel cable protector is in order...
Actually, they think that a lot of the "junk DNA" started out as places where viruses inserted their genes into ours to reproduce. Our defenses then inactivated the viral genes but they stuck around as dead weight. Since they weren't doing anything, they were free to mutate, eventually turning into pretty much nothing but noise. Natural selection can gradually chop out useless chunks of DNA since there's no obvious benefit to keeping it and a small advantage to removing it (it takes a bit less energy to replicate your DNA) but you'd expect the process to be slow. OTOH it's possible that there are some non-obvious advantages to having lots of non-coding DNA; I wonder if it makes recombination less risky, for instance.
Well, the BSD license is OK in Stallman's book, too. He thinks that it's not the best license because it doesn't guarantee continued software freedom, but he agrees that it is a Free license and is GPL compatible. He does comment that the phrase "the BSD license" is unclear because it might refer to the old BSD license with the advertizing clause and suggests that the X license is a clearer example of the concept.