It's like there's a new car being sold and the bonnet (that's "hood" to you) is held on by an elastic band. You start selling knives and instructions for removing the "hoods". This is, of course, saving the lives of some of the people who drive those cars and many of the people behind them. Still, Ford is going to try to pin it on you and deny any responsibility for selling cars with the hood held on with elastic bands.
This is 100% solved with standard basic web security. The only reason it's not done is that Facebook & co want an extra few hundred dollars to go with the pile they already have. HTTPS should have been active from the beginning.
To give him what he's due; his article did mention that it was a Beta and he had hope for quick fixes. It's the slashdot summary which completely missed that.
But I predict that the Doc Foundation will have to offer a paid version or paid support or something to keep the lights on. Even your Mom will charge rent for the Basement after a while.
The paid version will be "Red Hat Enterprise Linux" though you will be able to get it free as "CentOS" if you don't care about brands. The paid support will be Canonical support or Red Hat support, though you will be able to get community support if you don't care about deadlines and SLAs enough to pay.
The main threat however, implicit in your posting, which is that there might be a proprietary version without full code, is impossible. They have the right to use the OpenOffice.org code under the GPL and could only do a proprietary fork if Oracle signed over it's rights in the code. Oracle will never do that.
The source code contributions to LO are not likely to be signed over to Oracle. This means that Oracle can only use them under the standard Open Office licenses and rules out using the contributions in StarOffice or any other proprietary version. That's the main reason why Sun was already ignoring all the GoOO contributions.
No Damnit; That is not the rule. The rule is really simple. Whatever I give you just type it into the bloody cash register. Then give me whatever it tells you to give me. I don't bloody expect you to think; just do what the bastards trained you to and leave it to the computer. Godddamit all these under-class types trying to get above their station.
(at this point, to avoid accusations of prejudice against people behind cash registers I invoke either my signature or username depending on how you feel. )
No; if you wrote code you are free to do anything you want.... Oh; sorry you meant:
So I'm making minor modifications to somone else's code and trying to pass it of as my own and the damn license forces me to share it according to the author's wishes. Damn evil author not providing charity for important me. Shame I'm not good enough to start the project myself.
Because, if you wrote most of it yourself, you could easily (re)write the GPL piece too and do what you wanted. Nobody is forcing you to do anything with software you wrote your self.
That's now completely wrong; Cross-licensing is the old way. The new way goes
A develops something; hives half the patents to a holding company (C)
B develops something;
A sues B
B countersues A
A and B settle
A and B issue press releases that they have cross-licensed their technology
C sues B anyway.
B goes bankrupt,.
Cross licensing deals are no longer trustworthy with companies like Microsoft. The only way is a true deathmatch and even that isn't certain. Hive off your patents into a NPE and sue baby sue.
That's a lie, TekGoblin, if that's your real name. You are hereby summonsed to appear in a lawsuit before Judge T. John Ward. To be sued for your infringement of our patents on "a method and apparatus for limited truth delivery through use of over-extensive categories".
Ahh yes, server hosting, well-known pastime for many the average consumer.
Your comment makes sense until you think about why server hosting is not a standard pastime.
There are now lots of little router appliances that could easily be little servers for individual consumers. It makes complete sense since communication media is more or less symmetric and even if you use the cheapest possible components on the uplink you normally end up with plenty of spare capacity. File sharing software has shown that the consumers are able and willing to use this.
The thing which blocks these servers in the market is a largely implicit but partly deliberate conspiracy between consumer ISPs and the media industry to try to make them difficult so that they get to control and reduce communication from consumer to consumer whilst increasing the amount of media sales (==things like IPTV or even YouTube which are effective television).
Show me another industry which willingly reports it's customers (the consumer) to people who want to sue them (the media industry) when it has no obligation to do so. If it weren't the media industry they were reporting to, this would be in the newspapers every day and those ISPs would be out of business in weeks.
But that's again trying a bit to define what we're looking at in a way which results in a very narrow view.
Absolutely; but I'm trying to show that that view is the one which tells us most about the future. In other words; I'm defining the "smart phone" market separately from the "feature phone" market; with a separation between people who use a phone for calling and have a few other useful things and people who have a mobile communication application platform with them which they are gradually building more and more uses for.
How many years do we hear "symbian is dying" while it consistently ships most units and gains most sales, in number of handsets, year after year?
I think you want to look at the reason for those continuing sales. This is simple. Symbian ships more because if you want to get a top end Nokia, you have to get Symbian. If you want to get a solid phone with a good camera or good multi-media or etc. etc. often you really want to get a top end Nokia. Most of the time, you try another brand and really really regret it. Then you get a Nokia one more time.
If Nokia can get those people who have Symbian phones to use them as smart phones, even if they bought them whilst not caring about the "smart" then Nokia's future as a smart phone company is guaranteed. The problem is that it seems that Symbian has been inadequate for that. The people never notice the fact that it's "smart" and never start learning to use that. Those same people are beginning to notice that iPhones and Android phones do something useful. They will end up buying those to do things that their old phone was capable of, but they just didn't know about it. That is a marjor Symbian failure and if Nokia doesn't fix that, that will fix Nokia.
I wouldn't want to put my money into buying an applications from the Ovi store if I knew that the phone's OS could be dead by the time the next handset came out.
A problem Nokia could make go away with one statement; "we invested 0.1% of our savings into buying VMware to write an emulator for symbian to run on Meego". Okay, I'm a little exaggerating on the price of VMWare, but seriously, how much effort would it take to guarantee backwards compatibility with most basic Symbian apps? Even better; it can be done as an application so it can be done by a completely independent separate group so there should be no effect at all on their OS delivery schedule.
Hmm. Nasty. I wonder why I've never seen this on my N900... Not that it really changes anything. The legal arguments still apply (they ask you permission for your data; have to keep it themselves; can't share it randomly and have to let you opt out). Forcing the mobile owner to send an SMS with personal data in order to use the phone just makes Nokia's recently fired management look sick. They would never have done this in the past and hopefully the new management will allow some level of ethics back into the company. I'll have to add this to my list of warnings I give anyone who asks me if I like the N900.
Symbian isn't going anywhere - it has greater share of sales than the next two players combined; when taking number 2 player out of the equation, greater share than all what's rest combined. Might very well be the first smartphone platform to break the barrier of 100 million devices shipped annually, this year.
The thing about Symbian is it really doesn't seem to be going anywhere; in the other sense. The other smartphone OSs; Android and iOS, and even Maemo/Meego, are designed to establish platforms. New Symbian versions consistently fail to run software from old versions. Symbian phones always seem very locked in; for example it used to be difficult to just connect the phone and directly access the whole of it's file system (at best you got a few specific directories). I think that's improved now, but similar stories apply all around. etc.
What this means is, that the number of symbian devices is irrelevant. Even if Gartner's numbers are a bit exaggerated, it's clear most of those devices are not selling software; are not being used as smart phones and just don't count. Your addressable market for smart phone applications (the main meaningful thing about a "smart phone") is not the number of phones, but the number of phones that are actually being used in a smart way. This determines the amount that other people are investing in the platform and so it's long term future value.
Nokia could fix this by making sure that it delivered software updates for it's old phones and ensuring backwards application compatibility. This would mean that it would only support one software version over all it's phones and would mean that Symbian apps would become much more valuable. I'd assume, though, that there's something in Symbian or in the way Nokia uses symbian. which makes this impractical.
I think it's more than that. For example, Nokia is Europe based; it has a strong respect for the privacy of it's customers through not gathering data which doesn't really fit directly into Google's way of doing things. Note; I'm not saying that Google lacks respect, just that they do it from a completely different base. They assume they own your data and then voluntarily give you back most of your privacy (compare with e.g. Facebook which just doesn't bother to give you back your privacy.. "Deal with it Bitch"). Nokia has to start from a base of asking for permission to data which they assume you own. I think that in a Google led environment would strongly disadvantage Nokia compared to other companies which would be happy to gather all their customers data and/or hand it over to Google. Adroid was never designed to work for Nokia and there are probably plenty of other things like that which just won't be a good fit.
Also, if you think that Google is a big target for Java patent attacks that's nothing to Nokia. Nokia almost certainly already has agreements in place that it would be breaking by delivering a java execution environment which isn't compliant to Oracle's spec etc. etc.
Nokia could go with Android, but only if Google agreed to give them a serious level of long term influence over the platform. That's not something I guess Google would do and it's probably not something Google should do.
Nokia needs to do something it hasn't had the guts for for years; commit to Meego; promise that Meego will be available for at least seven years, no matter what market success it has for the first couple of years; limit Symbian to the low end; be clear about where it's going; have a vision of a bigger market and see that it's mobile expertise will only be relevant if it can apply them to devices which have the same level of flexibility as a general computer. Commit to delivering low cost Meego devices soon. Make sure that Meego will be available on all pre-existing N700/N800/N900 devices so that there is a guaranteed base market from the very beginning. Even better; if possible provide a Meego upgrade for N97 and above devices. Build up a developer "eco-system" and make sure that you look after it. This will mean that people will be able to believe in the future of Meego.
If you can just control the server to replace the hash, why would you want to separately log into the account in the first place? Just read the mail and be done with it.
I don't think he's an expert witness; he's a witness of fact. He doesn't need to be impartial. Consider for example:
I saw the bastard; he's the one who did it; I saw him put the knife in her back, I was two feet away and I'll never forget the evil grin in his face.
This is effective testimony, but has no level of impartiality. You don't impeach such a witness by saying he's biased. You have to show he's either lying or confused.
It looks like Diaspora is going to be open core. So when it gets all set up with the work of F/OSS people they'll just close some fundamental functionality and force those people out. Why should we help build the next facebook?
Android was open, but that's changing fast now. Be really careful because e.g. old Motorola phones let you install whatever you wanted. The new ones block installing your own images completely. There are similar jail breaking possibilities to an iPhone and in a similar way you can't rely on them.
The N900 is great. I'd be very careful recommending it to a Windows/Mac user without Linux experience, but if they are technically competent they should be able to get it working fine. The main problem is that, like so many recent Nokia products, it seems to lack the last two months of beta testing polish which makes the real difference. However, if you already know Linux you can really benefit from it.
Open source does not magically make computers hack proof. You have a system which has to be understood, defended by and audited by the people who are functionally computer illiterate. The way to deal with this is to make it so that the system can be understood and verified without the use of computers. That means; fundamentally; using paper.
Whilst we're on it; the mainstream US parties will never do anything about this because the Republicans own the voting machine companies and the Democrats are so stupid they believe they do too. The only way to get this changed is if every US citizen who understands the issues and has or can get access to voting machines changes them to vote 99% for write in candidates / minor parties etc. Things which make the fraud completely obvious.
Just one election, where the major parties get knocked down by voter fraud, and you will never see a voting machine again. It's a shame this is illegal and nobody should illegally manipulate the voting system.
It's great the way the Microsoft astro-turfers have clearly been preparing for this story so much that they even jump on each other's postings as being MS
Or put another way Whooooosh... the sound you hear is a MS attack squadron coming in to kill NCO baby Bambies. Or possibly a joke.
When someone asks for a citation, he's not claiming you are wrong or that you have the value wrong
Actually that depends. Mostly it's more like a "I find that fact surprising and difficult to believe; could you prove it". However in a case like this, where the statistics can be easily found on Google, it's definitely has an implication that the poster isn't right. Slashdot isn't Wikipedia and, for flow of conversation, a certain amount of stuff is normally assumed. Not even close to Wikipedia:-)
Slashdot Mirror
Try a car analogy. That might work better.
It's like there's a new car being sold and the bonnet (that's "hood" to you) is held on by an elastic band. You start selling knives and instructions for removing the "hoods". This is, of course, saving the lives of some of the people who drive those cars and many of the people behind them. Still, Ford is going to try to pin it on you and deny any responsibility for selling cars with the hood held on with elastic bands.
This is 100% solved with standard basic web security. The only reason it's not done is that Facebook & co want an extra few hundred dollars to go with the pile they already have. HTTPS should have been active from the beginning.
To give him what he's due; his article did mention that it was a Beta and he had hope for quick fixes. It's the slashdot summary which completely missed that.
But I predict that the Doc Foundation will have to offer a paid version or paid support or something to keep the lights on. Even your Mom will charge rent for the Basement after a while.
The paid version will be "Red Hat Enterprise Linux" though you will be able to get it free as "CentOS" if you don't care about brands. The paid support will be Canonical support or Red Hat support, though you will be able to get community support if you don't care about deadlines and SLAs enough to pay.
The main threat however, implicit in your posting, which is that there might be a proprietary version without full code, is impossible. They have the right to use the OpenOffice.org code under the GPL and could only do a proprietary fork if Oracle signed over it's rights in the code. Oracle will never do that.
The source code contributions to LO are not likely to be signed over to Oracle. This means that Oracle can only use them under the standard Open Office licenses and rules out using the contributions in StarOffice or any other proprietary version. That's the main reason why Sun was already ignoring all the GoOO contributions.
No Damnit; That is not the rule. The rule is really simple. Whatever I give you just type it into the bloody cash register. Then give me whatever it tells you to give me. I don't bloody expect you to think; just do what the bastards trained you to and leave it to the computer. Godddamit all these under-class types trying to get above their station.
(at this point, to avoid accusations of prejudice against people behind cash registers I invoke either my signature or username depending on how you feel. )
So I'm making minor modifications to somone else's code and trying to pass it of as my own and the damn license forces me to share it according to the author's wishes. Damn evil author not providing charity for important me. Shame I'm not good enough to start the project myself.
Because, if you wrote most of it yourself, you could easily (re)write the GPL piece too and do what you wanted. Nobody is forcing you to do anything with software you wrote your self.
That's now completely wrong; Cross-licensing is the old way. The new way goes
A develops something; hives half the patents to a holding company (C)
B develops something;
A sues B
B countersues A
A and B settle
A and B issue press releases that they have cross-licensed their technology
C sues B anyway.
B goes bankrupt,.
Cross licensing deals are no longer trustworthy with companies like Microsoft. The only way is a true deathmatch and even that isn't certain. Hive off your patents into a NPE and sue baby sue.
That's a lie, TekGoblin, if that's your real name. You are hereby summonsed to appear in a lawsuit before Judge T. John Ward. To be sued for your infringement of our patents on "a method and apparatus for limited truth delivery through use of over-extensive categories".
Ahh yes, server hosting, well-known pastime for many the average consumer.
Your comment makes sense until you think about why server hosting is not a standard pastime.
There are now lots of little router appliances that could easily be little servers for individual consumers. It makes complete sense since communication media is more or less symmetric and even if you use the cheapest possible components on the uplink you normally end up with plenty of spare capacity. File sharing software has shown that the consumers are able and willing to use this.
The thing which blocks these servers in the market is a largely implicit but partly deliberate conspiracy between consumer ISPs and the media industry to try to make them difficult so that they get to control and reduce communication from consumer to consumer whilst increasing the amount of media sales (==things like IPTV or even YouTube which are effective television).
Show me another industry which willingly reports it's customers (the consumer) to people who want to sue them (the media industry) when it has no obligation to do so. If it weren't the media industry they were reporting to, this would be in the newspapers every day and those ISPs would be out of business in weeks.
But that's again trying a bit to define what we're looking at in a way which results in a very narrow view.
Absolutely; but I'm trying to show that that view is the one which tells us most about the future. In other words; I'm defining the "smart phone" market separately from the "feature phone" market; with a separation between people who use a phone for calling and have a few other useful things and people who have a mobile communication application platform with them which they are gradually building more and more uses for.
How many years do we hear "symbian is dying" while it consistently ships most units and gains most sales, in number of handsets, year after year?
I think you want to look at the reason for those continuing sales. This is simple. Symbian ships more because if you want to get a top end Nokia, you have to get Symbian. If you want to get a solid phone with a good camera or good multi-media or etc. etc. often you really want to get a top end Nokia. Most of the time, you try another brand and really really regret it. Then you get a Nokia one more time.
If Nokia can get those people who have Symbian phones to use them as smart phones, even if they bought them whilst not caring about the "smart" then Nokia's future as a smart phone company is guaranteed. The problem is that it seems that Symbian has been inadequate for that. The people never notice the fact that it's "smart" and never start learning to use that. Those same people are beginning to notice that iPhones and Android phones do something useful. They will end up buying those to do things that their old phone was capable of, but they just didn't know about it. That is a marjor Symbian failure and if Nokia doesn't fix that, that will fix Nokia.
I wouldn't want to put my money into buying an applications from the Ovi store if I knew that the phone's OS could be dead by the time the next handset came out.
A problem Nokia could make go away with one statement; "we invested 0.1% of our savings into buying VMware to write an emulator for symbian to run on Meego". Okay, I'm a little exaggerating on the price of VMWare, but seriously, how much effort would it take to guarantee backwards compatibility with most basic Symbian apps? Even better; it can be done as an application so it can be done by a completely independent separate group so there should be no effect at all on their OS delivery schedule.
Hmm. Nasty. I wonder why I've never seen this on my N900... Not that it really changes anything. The legal arguments still apply (they ask you permission for your data; have to keep it themselves; can't share it randomly and have to let you opt out). Forcing the mobile owner to send an SMS with personal data in order to use the phone just makes Nokia's recently fired management look sick. They would never have done this in the past and hopefully the new management will allow some level of ethics back into the company. I'll have to add this to my list of warnings I give anyone who asks me if I like the N900.
Symbian isn't going anywhere - it has greater share of sales than the next two players combined; when taking number 2 player out of the equation, greater share than all what's rest combined. Might very well be the first smartphone platform to break the barrier of 100 million devices shipped annually, this year.
The thing about Symbian is it really doesn't seem to be going anywhere; in the other sense. The other smartphone OSs; Android and iOS, and even Maemo/Meego, are designed to establish platforms. New Symbian versions consistently fail to run software from old versions. Symbian phones always seem very locked in; for example it used to be difficult to just connect the phone and directly access the whole of it's file system (at best you got a few specific directories). I think that's improved now, but similar stories apply all around. etc.
What this means is, that the number of symbian devices is irrelevant. Even if Gartner's numbers are a bit exaggerated, it's clear most of those devices are not selling software; are not being used as smart phones and just don't count. Your addressable market for smart phone applications (the main meaningful thing about a "smart phone") is not the number of phones, but the number of phones that are actually being used in a smart way. This determines the amount that other people are investing in the platform and so it's long term future value.
Nokia could fix this by making sure that it delivered software updates for it's old phones and ensuring backwards application compatibility. This would mean that it would only support one software version over all it's phones and would mean that Symbian apps would become much more valuable. I'd assume, though, that there's something in Symbian or in the way Nokia uses symbian. which makes this impractical.
I think it's more than that. For example, Nokia is Europe based; it has a strong respect for the privacy of it's customers through not gathering data which doesn't really fit directly into Google's way of doing things. Note; I'm not saying that Google lacks respect, just that they do it from a completely different base. They assume they own your data and then voluntarily give you back most of your privacy (compare with e.g. Facebook which just doesn't bother to give you back your privacy.. "Deal with it Bitch"). Nokia has to start from a base of asking for permission to data which they assume you own. I think that in a Google led environment would strongly disadvantage Nokia compared to other companies which would be happy to gather all their customers data and/or hand it over to Google. Adroid was never designed to work for Nokia and there are probably plenty of other things like that which just won't be a good fit.
Also, if you think that Google is a big target for Java patent attacks that's nothing to Nokia. Nokia almost certainly already has agreements in place that it would be breaking by delivering a java execution environment which isn't compliant to Oracle's spec etc. etc.
Nokia could go with Android, but only if Google agreed to give them a serious level of long term influence over the platform. That's not something I guess Google would do and it's probably not something Google should do.
Nokia needs to do something it hasn't had the guts for for years; commit to Meego; promise that Meego will be available for at least seven years, no matter what market success it has for the first couple of years; limit Symbian to the low end; be clear about where it's going; have a vision of a bigger market and see that it's mobile expertise will only be relevant if it can apply them to devices which have the same level of flexibility as a general computer. Commit to delivering low cost Meego devices soon. Make sure that Meego will be available on all pre-existing N700/N800/N900 devices so that there is a guaranteed base market from the very beginning. Even better; if possible provide a Meego upgrade for N97 and above devices. Build up a developer "eco-system" and make sure that you look after it. This will mean that people will be able to believe in the future of Meego.
If you can just control the server to replace the hash, why would you want to separately log into the account in the first place? Just read the mail and be done with it.
I saw the bastard; he's the one who did it; I saw him put the knife in her back, I was two feet away and I'll never forget the evil grin in his face.
This is effective testimony, but has no level of impartiality. You don't impeach such a witness by saying he's biased. You have to show he's either lying or confused.
If you care, you have to encrypt a lot more than just your wifi. The guys at your ISP can see the stuff just the same as Google.
It looks like Diaspora is going to be open core. So when it gets all set up with the work of F/OSS people they'll just close some fundamental functionality and force those people out. Why should we help build the next facebook?
as an open platform
Android was open, but that's changing fast now. Be really careful because e.g. old Motorola phones let you install whatever you wanted. The new ones block installing your own images completely. There are similar jail breaking possibilities to an iPhone and in a similar way you can't rely on them.
The N900 is great. I'd be very careful recommending it to a Windows/Mac user without Linux experience, but if they are technically competent they should be able to get it working fine. The main problem is that, like so many recent Nokia products, it seems to lack the last two months of beta testing polish which makes the real difference. However, if you already know Linux you can really benefit from it.
Open source does not magically make computers hack proof. You have a system which has to be understood, defended by and audited by the people who are functionally computer illiterate. The way to deal with this is to make it so that the system can be understood and verified without the use of computers. That means; fundamentally; using paper.
Whilst we're on it; the mainstream US parties will never do anything about this because the Republicans own the voting machine companies and the Democrats are so stupid they believe they do too. The only way to get this changed is if every US citizen who understands the issues and has or can get access to voting machines changes them to vote 99% for write in candidates / minor parties etc. Things which make the fraud completely obvious.
Just one election, where the major parties get knocked down by voter fraud, and you will never see a voting machine again. It's a shame this is illegal and nobody should illegally manipulate the voting system.
When I try "Russia software piracy" an article with the statistic most people have been quoting (94%) is the second link on the page.
s/being MS/being anti-MS/ ... sorry; clearly to funny for me :-}
Mod parent up (funny).
It's great the way the Microsoft astro-turfers have clearly been preparing for this story so much that they even jump on each other's postings as being MS
Or put another way Whooooosh... the sound you hear is a MS attack squadron coming in to kill NCO baby Bambies. Or possibly a joke.
When someone asks for a citation, he's not claiming you are wrong or that you have the value wrong
Actually that depends. Mostly it's more like a "I find that fact surprising and difficult to believe; could you prove it". However in a case like this, where the statistics can be easily found on Google, it's definitely has an implication that the poster isn't right. Slashdot isn't Wikipedia and, for flow of conversation, a certain amount of stuff is normally assumed. Not even close to Wikipedia :-)