I'm not aware of anybody benefiting from this [WRT54G router] open-sourcing
I have benefited from the WRT54G router firmware. Many others have as well, with similar stories, so mine is not an isolated incident.
Specifically, I'm working on a big art project which will be installed at Burning Man this year. It has 32 stepper motors, 32 rotation sensors (to detect when people are touching and moving the pieces, rather than the motors), 32 optical sensors, and 6 sonar-based movement sensors. All this stuff uses quite a lot of power, and I need the whole thing to run from a battery, so power consumption is a big problem. The individual devices are controlled by eight 8-bit microcontrollers which use very little power, and communicate via a serial RS-485 network to a linux-based controller which makes all the decisions and controls everything.
Like so many other projects, I'm using the WRT54G router. It has a 200 MHz processor and runs linux, so it's fairly straightforward to develop quite complex code. Most importantly, it consumes only about 3-4 watts of power. That's a BIG DEAL when running from a single 12 volt battery plus a few solar cells to offset some of the consumption during the day... and the WRT54G runs directly from a single, unregulated 12 volt power source! That's a LOT better than one of those VIA ITX format motherboards plus peripherals plus an ATX power supply at 15-20 watts or more. There are a number of ARM-based linux boards, but really, the WRT54G is a very attractive platform - just because there are some other alternatives that might also work does not mean I and many others have not benefited from the WRT54G.
however, and this lack of benefits (from vendors being wrestled into releasing their "GPL-tainted" code) was my main point.
I simply do not agree.
In some alternate universe without a large base of compelling GPL (and GPL-like) code - much would be different than we now know and accept.
For one, there simply wouldn't be such a large base of code. The GPL provides a social framework that appeals to a large number of talented individuals. Without the GPL, contributions to free projects would be of a much less grand scale. The same is true for proprietary vendors, like IBM, who currently pay a great number of the heaviest contributors to the linux kernel and many other high profile projects.
I could go on, but it seems pointless.
You can call me a nobody, say me and others like me are insignificant, there there's absolutely no denying that I (and my project) have personally benefited from Linksys releasing the WRT54G firmware.
Because the market for these shares is so thin - most of the pink sheets companies will have market caps of less than one million dollars - the criminals can't fraudulently run huge amounts of money. So they perform a large number of smaller transactions.
Short of some organised crime indictment, The Feds won't get involved as the individual amounts are so damn small.
From TFA:
``Now that we have stopped the trading in these stocks, we will focus our attention on the people behind the spam and profiting from it,'' Schonfeld said.
He said the SEC is investigating the companies themselves as well as outsiders, and that the same people are likely behind multiple spam campaigns.
Also, from TFA:
SEC Chairman Christopher Cox said that not even the investor protection agency is immune to the onslaught of stock-related spam. He said the SEC's public affairs director, John Nester, received an e-mail touting the stock of one of the 35 companies.
``Not even the SEC's spam filter can stop all this spam,'' Cox said.
Someone cynical might conclude, rather than being sensitive to suckers, er, investors losing their money, perhaps Cox got fed up with penny stock spam in his inbox, picked up the phone, and next thing you know, Schonfeld halted trading and issued a press release.
It remains to be seen if they'll actually find and shut down these scammers.
The press release makes no mention of how long these bulbs will operate.
Historically, high efficiency and long operating life are a design trade-off with incandescent filaments. You get one at the expense of the other.
It paints skeptics of global warming as poor helpless victims of attempted censorship and labels those who believe global warming is a serious issue "alarmists".
Funding by the oil industry is dismissed while funding by environmental advocacy groups is deamonized. This action is painted as censorship (a bit of a stretch) while the Bush administration's suppression of science is offered only as evidence that "alarmists" should know better as they've been victims of censorship!
The article goes on and on, so incredibly biased it's almost laughable.
Really, this appears to be policy regarding Rob Enderle.
Ask anyone who's followed the SCO lawsuit saga and they'll tell you about the major Microsoft shills. Enderle (his own "group", just him really), Didio (garner), Daniel Lyons (forbes), and Maurice (sorry, didn't follow that part so well).
These folks know how to work the media. They appear quoted over and over again. They have massive bias. Enderle is the by far the WORST.
Of the many Enderle stories, he gave a keynote speech at some SCO developer conference... after things had gone pretty far south for SCO and they were well on their way to being the laughing stock they are now. Enderle reportedly was cussing and swearing about the open source world, practically paranoid that someone in the audience was an open source spy or some-such.
Sure, the register likes to bash other more, er, established publications at any chance. And yes, the "policy" doesn't seem to make sense. But if you read the register article (yeah, I know, this is slashdot, but still)... it doesn't take a lot of reading between the lines to see this is probably the NYT finally getting fed up with Rob Enderle.
Rob Enderle is quoted VERY FREQUENTLY. If you read this little comment (likely to remain only +2 cause it's not posted in the first several minutes), please remember just one thing:
Whenever you see Rob Enderle quoted, read with skepticism.
Sadly, he's very good at getting quoted all over the place. Hopefully the NYT will no longer be among the rags that takes the easy way out and prints whatever convenient sound bite he's serving up that day.
Yes, you're right. At first glance, the 18-page PDF appears to only require reporting of child porn images.
It's the modifications to definitions like section 2257, and other fine details, that worry me.
Maybe you've heard of section 2257? It's the law that directed the DOJ to draft age reporting rules for porn sites. Of course, the rules they drafted were extremely burdensome. Even after some small revisions due to public comment, they remain excessive. Among the main requirements, each produces must have a "custodian of records" whose legal name and physical address must be published. For example, go to any small USA-based porn site and follow the 2257 info link to find the legal name and usually the home address of whoever runs the website. Using a 3rd party record keeping service is not allowed, and the rules even establish business hours that the DOJ can make a surprise visit, entering and searching without a warrant to "inspect" the records without any prior notice. The excessively burdensome requirements go on and on, and much discussion can be found of them on various websites.
Ultimately, it is these sorts of practical details, established not in the letter of the law, but rather in the practice of how it is applied, that truly matter. THAT is what will determine the perceived and actual risk to service providers, who will ultimately be the ones who choke off capabilities to even the most determined bloggers and activists.
How this will all play out remains to be seen. Just remember 2257, which ended up being quite a burden for all porn sites, and over the last few years has resulted in almost all blogging and social networking sites establishing and usually enforcing policies to delete sexually explicit material their members end up writing.
For example, yahoo regularly deletes profiles and permanently bans people when they receive complains. I know of one woman who's 360 acct was locked because someone complained... about "offensive" material that was actually a bunch of Bush conspiracy theory. I've heard of several yahoo groups (on sex topics) getting deleted without warning. As another example, in response to the 2257 rules, tribe.net reversed their "mature content" policy (allowed but had to be labeled) and with 2 weeks notice all previously-allowed adult material had to be deleted.
My point is, previous, recently enacted "reporting requirements", which seemed narrowly focused on child porn have ended up being massively burdensome and has caused a lot of not-child, otherwise legal porn (lacking extensive record keeping that could not have been foreseen) and explicit but non-porn material to disappear forever.
Yes. If you go to dictionary.com, one of the 9 definitions is "The capacity to exercise choice; free will: We have the freedom to do as we please all afternoon."
Also on the list is "The condition of being free of restraints.".
But if you go to the FSF website, the definition of "free software" is:
The freedom to run the program, for any purpose (freedom 0).
The freedom to study how the program works, and adapt it to your needs (freedom 1). Access to the source code is a precondition for this.
The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbor (freedom 2).
The freedom to improve the program, and release your improvements to the public, so that the whole community benefits (freedom 3). Access to the source code is a precondition for this.
So apparently this guy has made a choice to use proprietary software. How is that not freedom?
If you ignore the FSF definition and also the "condition of being free of restraints", then "freedom of choice" it is.
But certainly he is restrained from making and distributing copies, and from making modifications and being able to distribute those changes. Most proprietary software licences prohibit reverse engineering, and even if they didn't, not having the true source code basically restrains ones freedom to study how the program really works.
However, he probably isn't restrained from actually running the program. Maybe. Some proprietary licences even apply contractual limits for the types of uses a program may be applied. So he may not even be in "the condition of being free of restraints" for simply using the program for certain purposes. It all depends on the license, which he probably didn't read.
The truth is, proprietary software sucks. Non-programmers with consumer-oriented needs tend to be less sensitive to the suckage, but to developers, and especially "open source" developers who contribute to GPL'd projects, it's pretty clear.
You can't fix bugs. You can't modify it. Usually, you can't even learn much about how it really works. When new versions come out (breaking something you care about), you usually can't get the old version anymore. Worst of all, if you depend upon it, the company who owns the code can someday decide it's no longer profitable and stop maintaining it, and sooner or later it won't work together with other things you use or a security problem will be exposed and you'll be forced to migrate to something else. That sucks. It really sucks.
Why would any "open source" developer want to contribute to that?
Other than GETTING PAID REAL MONEY, there's really no reason.
Certainly just making proprietary apps offered for sale on linux-based machines, to remain proprietary yet be available for linux users to purchase isn't a compelling reason to do all that work (for free).
For example, SDCC is a GPL'd project where I've many small contributions. Sure, it doesn't generate code as effient at Keil's $2000 compiler. But it's getting better all the time. If Keil were to call me and ask for my help to port their proprietary compiler to Linux, what would I say? Probably just "no", unless they were going to GPL it all. Truthfully, there's some amount of money I'd accept to do it, though probably more than they'd be willing to pay. They could just pay their own people (or hire more).
If proprietary software vendors want their code ported, and to remain proprietary, they're going to have to pay. They're not going to get free hand-outs from "open source" developers. There's no free lunch. Sure, they might like getting free work. To think (as your comment seems to presume) "well, you do all that work on GPL'd code for free, why not contribute to for-profit code?" Certainly to simply "promote linux adoption" isn't a compelling reason.
For those motivated by pragmatic concerns, who cares. Just reboot, or run vmware, or whatever works. For those motivated by idealogy, suggesting they contribute to proprietary software in order to contribute to popularity of other free software is completely backwards.
Sometimes a company does things so slimey, so utterly demonstrating a complete lack of ethics, that I say to myself in disgust "Well, I'm never trusting them again". Maybe not the first time, but certainly after repeated transgressions, they "never deserve my trust again".
Guess what? It's not "never" yet. Maybe in another 5 years? Maybe.
Real made bad choices. Their brand equity suffered, and they're still suffering. I personally believe they deserve it. Afterall, what negative consquence is there for any company who tries to "pull such crap"? The bar is raised VERY high for "legal" consequences. Even one or two brief ethical lapses can usually be smoothed over with PR efforts, apologies, discounts, changing names, and so on. But sustained unethical behavior ruins ones brand name. It's just as simple as that. Real ruined their reputation.
Sure, call me a karma whore. Say I'm ignoring several positive things they've done lately. Claim it's "unfair" to Real to hold a grudge so long.
Real EARNED their bag reputation. This is the punishment companies get for doing such unethical things. Much like a lengthy prison sentence for a fraudster (supposedly as a deterant to other would-be crooks), poor reputation and lack of trust in a corporate brand name lasts a LONG time. Other corporate would-be evildoers should (and often do) take note. This is what a company gets for repeated unethical behavior. Distrust lasts a long time.
I know I would feel safer with my rights protected like that.
What "rights"?
Security yes (or probably, to the extent data sharing is effective), but rights? At least for didn't say "freedom" (as many supports of expanded gov't power have done).
Certainly is could be argued that granting additional powers improves security, and safety. But rights? In an ideal situation,
The really amazing thing, at least to me, is the extent "conservatives" seem to be willing to trust the federal government and allow additional government powers.
I call those one-way adaptations that primarily either make Windows software work on Linux
On, Wine, yes.
But Cygwin? You know (or maybe you don't)... the software that allows most free/open source software to be compiled and run on Windows? When you install Cygwin using the cygwin setup utility, it gives you menus to select almost every major free software program right there at install time. Or you can run it anytime later and automatically download and install just about every major program than comes with any linux distribution. Now that's what I'd call primarily making "Linux software" run on Windows!
And Samba? Allowing linux servers to work with windows? There's also client-side support in linux, allowing microsoft servers to be used by linux. Sounds twi-way to me. All open source, mind you. Microsoft only speaks their own protocol, and has a history of introducing changes that appear to have little value other than breaking Samba. Fortunately, the Samba guys are masters of reverse engineering and have managed to keep up with Microsoft. On the flip side of the coin, the NFS protocols are fully documented, as are other newer, more experimental protocols introduced in Linux.
Oh, don't forget about MinGW, the compiler that allows direct compilation for native windows binaries. Lots and lots of open source applications provide native windows binaries via MinGW.
And while we're at it, how about wxWidgets, the cross platform library which allows applications to be compiled for native widgets on Windows, Linux, Unix, MacOS, Palm and maybe others too!
Don't forget that the two major GUI toolkits both target Windows. For example, the GIMP is available as a windows application. Can the same be said of Microsoft's MFC toolkit, or native controls? Or even of.NET ?? Yeah, lots of noise has been made of its theoretical ability to be cross platform, but does Microsoft provide a way for.NET apps to run on Linux? Oh yeah, there is such an effort underway (Mono), and look which camp is doing it?
There are also other cross platform libraries and approaches (Qt, openoffice's stuff, XPCOM from Firefox/mozilla, XUI, etc), all intended to allow applications to run on both platforms. How many of those are from Microsoft? How many are free/open source software?
I doubt MS will make good on the lip service we're reading about, but I think OSS needs to take it seriously so that when MS blows it, OSS gets to take the high ground and say "we gave it our best, and they dropped the ball."
You're probably right about the lip service.
But just take a look around at all the massive effort that goes into cross platform compatibility and interoperability in the free/open source world!
It's pretty fair to say the open source world is already doing their best to be interoperable in many, many ways. Not just making win32 binaries run on Linux (arguably one of the least successful areas, because Microsoft keep secret APIs and make undocumented changes). I talking about true interoperability, like cross platform libraries, like porting every major application (and many, many minor ones too) to windows using various libs, like following well documented open standards, like also publishing all the code with liberal permission to use, study, modify and distribute derivitive works.
Neither camp has made any significant effort in making their systems truly interoperable
Microsoft provides basic standards supports, though often with proprietary or non-standard "extensions". HTML/CSS, for example. Once could argue RTF was a good effort, though years of binary.DOC make RTF more or less obsolete. Microsoft also conforms to basic internet protocols, TCP/IP, FTP, etc. Very basic support for the most fundamental standards.
Linux (and related software) does all that. Linux also reads and in most cases writes Microsoft's filesystem formats. "mtools" provides a second, user-space support for native microsoft discs. Linux also supports Joliet (Microsoft's cdrom filename extensions). Samba supports Microsoft's file service protocols. These usually come preinstalled on major linux distributions.
Microsoft does NOT provide even read-only support for Linux ext2 filesystems. Microsoft does NOT automatically recognize unix/linux rock ridge cdroms. Microsoft does NOT provide support for mounting NFS file systems. These are all examples of well established protocols in widespread use for over 10 years!
But...
the fact that they're reaching out should be incentive enough for the OSS community to respond in kind
Remember how they "reached out" to Sun regarding Java?
Sure, if "respond in kind" means a bunch of cheap, fluffy talk, and not actually implementing anything, or writing a poor implementation with proprietary "extensions", sure.
But the truth is, almost every documented, and even many poorly or utterly undocumented Microsoft protocols are well supported by Linux and related software.
There's only one file load benchmark, supposedly comparing load times for a large speadsheet. No word processor files, no presentations, no other data types.
There isn't even a variety of spreadsheets, just one file, which gives me a suspicious feeling its contents may have been carefully chosen to bias the results.
But most suspious of all is the data is a SXC file. Not ODF at all. That's right, its in the older openoffice 1.0 format, which is also XML-based, but not at all "ODF" format.
There's a big table of startup times too, which show MS office loads faster. No mention is made of pre-loaded windows components, or if open office quick launcher is used. Why such a big table of startup times in an article supposedly about file load/save times? Well, my suspisious feeling is saying it's likely a diversionary tactic, to hide the ugly fact that this article really only presents a single test case.
I'm not calling George Ou (and Ziff Davis) Mircosoft shills. But, George (or ZD editors), if you're reading this, you could have done SO much better. Rather than a big table of load times, your effort (if it was unbaised) could have been much better spent actually testing a few word processor files and a couple presentations. You could have used actual widely published files from various sources, to avoid the impression of a contrived/biased sample file. You could have even sought data originally authored in each application and converted to the other, to see if that makes a difference.
Maybe someone else will do some real, well conducted tests, with good methodology, and without the need to pad their results (and word count) with big table of unrelated benckmarks.
Some time ago, I implemented 3DES on an 8 bit microcontroller. In assembly language, it took about 2000 instruction cycles to run all 16 rounds of DES, plus the initial and final permutation, and the xor for CBC.
So if you run it 3 times for triple des, that's approx 6000 instructions for every 8 bytes, or about 750 instruction cycles per byte. At 8000 bytes/sec for voice quality audio, my fast DES code would only need 6 MIPS on an 8 bit microcontroller. A slower version in C is readily available for free, which runs about 5X slower than my hand optimized assembly, requiring 30 MIPS.
Certainly strong encryption is feasible in real time for voice audio, even on very inexpensive 8-bit chips.
There's a good chance that, pretty much no matter where your packets are going, they hit an AT&T controlled line at some point.
Really? Let's see.
PJRC.COM (my own website): Verizon -> Alter -> NTT/Verio
YAHOO: Verizon -> 130.81.15.54 -> yahoo
GOOGLE: Verizon -> Above.net -> google
SLASHDOT: Verizon -> Alter -> Savvis -> slashdot
MYSPACE: Verizon -> llnw.net -> myspace
LIVEJOURNAL: Verizon -> Alter -> sixapart/livejournal
HOTMAIL: Verizon -> 130.81.15.90 -> msn
NEW YORK TIMES: Verizon -> Alter -> 204.255.169.98 -> NTT/Verio
Ok, there's eight traceroutes from my DSL (Verizon) to seven major websites and one not-so-major site... and not a single router identified as att.net (by DNS hostname shown by traceroute). Here's one more:
AT&T: Verizon -> Alter -> 192.205.33.121 -> 12.127.6.62 -> att.net
Ok, that's cheating, but just did it to make sure AT&T is hosting their own website someone on their network.
So perhaps you'd like to suggest some sites major sites where traceroute shows AT&T routers? Even then, that list included the big email services, hotmail, gmail & yahoo and a couple of the most widely used social networking sites. Sure, the NSA may be monitoring traffic there too, but not via their secret room 641A at AT&T in San Francisco.
Ok, I thought, "hmm, maybe this is the time to upgrade that crappy but silent card I bought some time ago?". I believe it was a nvidia 6600LE... which as I understand is the graphics equiv of the low-end 6200, but has its own dedicated 256 meg memory.
Why would I buy that? Well, cost wasn't the concern. At the time, it was the best card on the market that was passively cooled. No fan = no extra noise!
So I clicked the link to TFA, and jumped right to the end, and it turns out the quietest card is 44 dBA. No thanks! Not after the low noise power supply, an after-market super-quiet chipset heatsink/fan, and installing 120 mm low-rpm fans (20 dBA), and the quiet Seagate drive. Even worse, from TFA:
Unfortunately, none of our budget cards are intelligent enough to lower fan speeds at idle, and none offer silent, passive cooling
So does anyone know of better cards that ARE passively cooled, and will work inside a case with scant airflow due to using large but very low speed fans.
You specifically asked "Why not let parents decide what age their child should be able to do things, and stop picking absurd numbers out of the air?"
If showing a case where such a social policy results in an absurd and rediculous scenario is not reason "why not", then perhaps nothing could possibly show what a tremendously bad idea this is.
But as someone already explained, the point is when parent and child may disagree, if social policy (codified in law) "stops picking absurd numbers" and "lets parents decide", then the obvious result is parents retain complete legal control over their childrens lives, forever (or until they die).
Why not let parents decide what age their child should be able to do things, and stop picking absurd numbers out of the air.
I can just see it now...
"Hey mom, I got this great offer to do a porn shoot. It pays $1200 for 2 days work. My friend does these shoots and I trust her. Sounds like it'll be fine. It's been 4 years since I moved out, and I'm barely making ends meet at my two part time jobs. They say since that law a few years back, there isn't any set legal age anymore, so they'll only hire me if you sign this form. Will ya?"
Yeah, it's easy to take infrastructure for granted...
I believe that our governments haven't shown any ability to fix anything they want to -- the unintended consequences of every piece of regulation seem to create preferential treatment for some elite group rather than actually solve any problems, protect those meant to be protected or reduce "crime" as they define it.
roads & highways inflation kept in check for 2+ decades airports (and very high standards of safety) electrical power (large outages so rare as to be major news) emergency services water and sewage systems...just to name a few.
Sure, some uber libertarians will point to inefficiencies or flaws, but compared to most of the world, we're doing pretty damn good for critical infrastruture.
PC Magazine's Editor-in-Chief says the Mac OX X is nothing to get excited about. He writes that Boot Camp is really just a plan to get Windows users to convert to OS X. "Once you're with Windows limitations, what are you going to do? You'll start spending more and more time in OS X, until you too discover just how much better things can really be. It's sad to see so many windoze-only patriots being exposed to the superior Max OS. Perhaps they'll wake up and realize they've been taken for a ride by Microsoft all these years.
Slashdot Mirror
I have benefited from the WRT54G router firmware. Many others have as well, with similar stories, so mine is not an isolated incident.
Specifically, I'm working on a big art project which will be installed at Burning Man this year. It has 32 stepper motors, 32 rotation sensors (to detect when people are touching and moving the pieces, rather than the motors), 32 optical sensors, and 6 sonar-based movement sensors. All this stuff uses quite a lot of power, and I need the whole thing to run from a battery, so power consumption is a big problem. The individual devices are controlled by eight 8-bit microcontrollers which use very little power, and communicate via a serial RS-485 network to a linux-based controller which makes all the decisions and controls everything.
Like so many other projects, I'm using the WRT54G router. It has a 200 MHz processor and runs linux, so it's fairly straightforward to develop quite complex code. Most importantly, it consumes only about 3-4 watts of power. That's a BIG DEAL when running from a single 12 volt battery plus a few solar cells to offset some of the consumption during the day... and the WRT54G runs directly from a single, unregulated 12 volt power source! That's a LOT better than one of those VIA ITX format motherboards plus peripherals plus an ATX power supply at 15-20 watts or more. There are a number of ARM-based linux boards, but really, the WRT54G is a very attractive platform - just because there are some other alternatives that might also work does not mean I and many others have not benefited from the WRT54G.
however, and this lack of benefits (from vendors being wrestled into releasing their "GPL-tainted" code) was my main point.
I simply do not agree.
In some alternate universe without a large base of compelling GPL (and GPL-like) code - much would be different than we now know and accept.
For one, there simply wouldn't be such a large base of code. The GPL provides a social framework that appeals to a large number of talented individuals. Without the GPL, contributions to free projects would be of a much less grand scale. The same is true for proprietary vendors, like IBM, who currently pay a great number of the heaviest contributors to the linux kernel and many other high profile projects.
I could go on, but it seems pointless.
You can call me a nobody, say me and others like me are insignificant, there there's absolutely no denying that I (and my project) have personally benefited from Linksys releasing the WRT54G firmware.
Short of some organised crime indictment, The Feds won't get involved as the individual amounts are so damn small.
From TFA:
Also, from TFA:
Someone cynical might conclude, rather than being sensitive to suckers, er, investors losing their money, perhaps Cox got fed up with penny stock spam in his inbox, picked up the phone, and next thing you know, Schonfeld halted trading and issued a press release.
It remains to be seen if they'll actually find and shut down these scammers.
The press release makes no mention of how long these bulbs will operate. Historically, high efficiency and long operating life are a design trade-off with incandescent filaments. You get one at the expense of the other.
Definitely the first step in patent reform is to solicit the opinions of the hoards of thoughtful, article-reading slashdot users.
That's EXACTLY what it was meant to do.
It paints skeptics of global warming as poor helpless victims of attempted censorship and labels those who believe global warming is a serious issue "alarmists".
Funding by the oil industry is dismissed while funding by environmental advocacy groups is deamonized. This action is painted as censorship (a bit of a stretch) while the Bush administration's suppression of science is offered only as evidence that "alarmists" should know better as they've been victims of censorship!
The article goes on and on, so incredibly biased it's almost laughable.
Ask anyone who's followed the SCO lawsuit saga and they'll tell you about the major Microsoft shills. Enderle (his own "group", just him really), Didio (garner), Daniel Lyons (forbes), and Maurice (sorry, didn't follow that part so well).
These folks know how to work the media. They appear quoted over and over again. They have massive bias. Enderle is the by far the WORST.
Of the many Enderle stories, he gave a keynote speech at some SCO developer conference... after things had gone pretty far south for SCO and they were well on their way to being the laughing stock they are now. Enderle reportedly was cussing and swearing about the open source world, practically paranoid that someone in the audience was an open source spy or some-such.
Sure, the register likes to bash other more, er, established publications at any chance. And yes, the "policy" doesn't seem to make sense. But if you read the register article (yeah, I know, this is slashdot, but still)... it doesn't take a lot of reading between the lines to see this is probably the NYT finally getting fed up with Rob Enderle.
1: Here's how wrong Rob Enderle has been about Apple
2: More Enderle stuff
3: Enderle's take on SCO's lawsuit with IBM - yeah, right
4: Even Wikipedia has a Enderle entry, listing his poor prediction history, if only briefly
Rob Enderle is quoted VERY FREQUENTLY. If you read this little comment (likely to remain only +2 cause it's not posted in the first several minutes), please remember just one thing:
Whenever you see Rob Enderle quoted, read with skepticism.
Sadly, he's very good at getting quoted all over the place. Hopefully the NYT will no longer be among the rags that takes the easy way out and prints whatever convenient sound bite he's serving up that day.
It's the modifications to definitions like section 2257, and other fine details, that worry me.
Maybe you've heard of section 2257? It's the law that directed the DOJ to draft age reporting rules for porn sites. Of course, the rules they drafted were extremely burdensome. Even after some small revisions due to public comment, they remain excessive. Among the main requirements, each produces must have a "custodian of records" whose legal name and physical address must be published. For example, go to any small USA-based porn site and follow the 2257 info link to find the legal name and usually the home address of whoever runs the website. Using a 3rd party record keeping service is not allowed, and the rules even establish business hours that the DOJ can make a surprise visit, entering and searching without a warrant to "inspect" the records without any prior notice. The excessively burdensome requirements go on and on, and much discussion can be found of them on various websites.
Ultimately, it is these sorts of practical details, established not in the letter of the law, but rather in the practice of how it is applied, that truly matter. THAT is what will determine the perceived and actual risk to service providers, who will ultimately be the ones who choke off capabilities to even the most determined bloggers and activists.
How this will all play out remains to be seen. Just remember 2257, which ended up being quite a burden for all porn sites, and over the last few years has resulted in almost all blogging and social networking sites establishing and usually enforcing policies to delete sexually explicit material their members end up writing.
For example, yahoo regularly deletes profiles and permanently bans people when they receive complains. I know of one woman who's 360 acct was locked because someone complained... about "offensive" material that was actually a bunch of Bush conspiracy theory. I've heard of several yahoo groups (on sex topics) getting deleted without warning. As another example, in response to the 2257 rules, tribe.net reversed their "mature content" policy (allowed but had to be labeled) and with 2 weeks notice all previously-allowed adult material had to be deleted.
My point is, previous, recently enacted "reporting requirements", which seemed narrowly focused on child porn have ended up being massively burdensome and has caused a lot of not-child, otherwise legal porn (lacking extensive record keeping that could not have been foreseen) and explicit but non-porn material to disappear forever.
Actaully, in the context of S/M (or "BDSM" to use the more modern term), better advise might be to treat people like they'd want to be treated.
This guy is just a douche bag.
Still very true.
Yes. If you go to dictionary.com, one of the 9 definitions is "The capacity to exercise choice; free will: We have the freedom to do as we please all afternoon."
Also on the list is "The condition of being free of restraints.".
But if you go to the FSF website, the definition of "free software" is:
So apparently this guy has made a choice to use proprietary software. How is that not freedom?
If you ignore the FSF definition and also the "condition of being free of restraints", then "freedom of choice" it is.
But certainly he is restrained from making and distributing copies, and from making modifications and being able to distribute those changes. Most proprietary software licences prohibit reverse engineering, and even if they didn't, not having the true source code basically restrains ones freedom to study how the program really works.
However, he probably isn't restrained from actually running the program. Maybe. Some proprietary licences even apply contractual limits for the types of uses a program may be applied. So he may not even be in "the condition of being free of restraints" for simply using the program for certain purposes. It all depends on the license, which he probably didn't read.
Ok, now try to compile them from source!!
You can't fix bugs. You can't modify it. Usually, you can't even learn much about how it really works. When new versions come out (breaking something you care about), you usually can't get the old version anymore. Worst of all, if you depend upon it, the company who owns the code can someday decide it's no longer profitable and stop maintaining it, and sooner or later it won't work together with other things you use or a security problem will be exposed and you'll be forced to migrate to something else. That sucks. It really sucks.
Why would any "open source" developer want to contribute to that?
Other than GETTING PAID REAL MONEY, there's really no reason.
Certainly just making proprietary apps offered for sale on linux-based machines, to remain proprietary yet be available for linux users to purchase isn't a compelling reason to do all that work (for free).
For example, SDCC is a GPL'd project where I've many small contributions. Sure, it doesn't generate code as effient at Keil's $2000 compiler. But it's getting better all the time. If Keil were to call me and ask for my help to port their proprietary compiler to Linux, what would I say? Probably just "no", unless they were going to GPL it all. Truthfully, there's some amount of money I'd accept to do it, though probably more than they'd be willing to pay. They could just pay their own people (or hire more).
If proprietary software vendors want their code ported, and to remain proprietary, they're going to have to pay. They're not going to get free hand-outs from "open source" developers. There's no free lunch. Sure, they might like getting free work. To think (as your comment seems to presume) "well, you do all that work on GPL'd code for free, why not contribute to for-profit code?" Certainly to simply "promote linux adoption" isn't a compelling reason.
For those motivated by pragmatic concerns, who cares. Just reboot, or run vmware, or whatever works. For those motivated by idealogy, suggesting they contribute to proprietary software in order to contribute to popularity of other free software is completely backwards.
Sometimes a company does things so slimey, so utterly demonstrating a complete lack of ethics, that I say to myself in disgust "Well, I'm never trusting them again". Maybe not the first time, but certainly after repeated transgressions, they "never deserve my trust again".
Guess what? It's not "never" yet. Maybe in another 5 years? Maybe.
Real made bad choices. Their brand equity suffered, and they're still suffering. I personally believe they deserve it. Afterall, what negative consquence is there for any company who tries to "pull such crap"? The bar is raised VERY high for "legal" consequences. Even one or two brief ethical lapses can usually be smoothed over with PR efforts, apologies, discounts, changing names, and so on. But sustained unethical behavior ruins ones brand name. It's just as simple as that. Real ruined their reputation.
Sure, call me a karma whore. Say I'm ignoring several positive things they've done lately. Claim it's "unfair" to Real to hold a grudge so long.
Real EARNED their bag reputation. This is the punishment companies get for doing such unethical things. Much like a lengthy prison sentence for a fraudster (supposedly as a deterant to other would-be crooks), poor reputation and lack of trust in a corporate brand name lasts a LONG time. Other corporate would-be evildoers should (and often do) take note. This is what a company gets for repeated unethical behavior. Distrust lasts a long time.
What "rights"?
Security yes (or probably, to the extent data sharing is effective), but rights? At least for didn't say "freedom" (as many supports of expanded gov't power have done).
Certainly is could be argued that granting additional powers improves security, and safety. But rights? In an ideal situation,
The really amazing thing, at least to me, is the extent "conservatives" seem to be willing to trust the federal government and allow additional government powers.
On, Wine, yes.
But Cygwin? You know (or maybe you don't)... the software that allows most free/open source software to be compiled and run on Windows? When you install Cygwin using the cygwin setup utility, it gives you menus to select almost every major free software program right there at install time. Or you can run it anytime later and automatically download and install just about every major program than comes with any linux distribution. Now that's what I'd call primarily making "Linux software" run on Windows!
And Samba? Allowing linux servers to work with windows? There's also client-side support in linux, allowing microsoft servers to be used by linux. Sounds twi-way to me. All open source, mind you. Microsoft only speaks their own protocol, and has a history of introducing changes that appear to have little value other than breaking Samba. Fortunately, the Samba guys are masters of reverse engineering and have managed to keep up with Microsoft. On the flip side of the coin, the NFS protocols are fully documented, as are other newer, more experimental protocols introduced in Linux.
Oh, don't forget about MinGW, the compiler that allows direct compilation for native windows binaries. Lots and lots of open source applications provide native windows binaries via MinGW.
And while we're at it, how about wxWidgets, the cross platform library which allows applications to be compiled for native widgets on Windows, Linux, Unix, MacOS, Palm and maybe others too!
Don't forget that the two major GUI toolkits both target Windows. For example, the GIMP is available as a windows application. Can the same be said of Microsoft's MFC toolkit, or native controls? Or even of .NET ?? Yeah, lots of noise has been made of its theoretical ability to be cross platform, but does Microsoft provide a way for .NET apps to run on Linux? Oh yeah, there is such an effort underway (Mono), and look which camp is doing it?
There are also other cross platform libraries and approaches (Qt, openoffice's stuff, XPCOM from Firefox/mozilla, XUI, etc), all intended to allow applications to run on both platforms. How many of those are from Microsoft? How many are free/open source software?
I doubt MS will make good on the lip service we're reading about, but I think OSS needs to take it seriously so that when MS blows it, OSS gets to take the high ground and say "we gave it our best, and they dropped the ball."
You're probably right about the lip service.
But just take a look around at all the massive effort that goes into cross platform compatibility and interoperability in the free/open source world!
It's pretty fair to say the open source world is already doing their best to be interoperable in many, many ways. Not just making win32 binaries run on Linux (arguably one of the least successful areas, because Microsoft keep secret APIs and make undocumented changes). I talking about true interoperability, like cross platform libraries, like porting every major application (and many, many minor ones too) to windows using various libs, like following well documented open standards, like also publishing all the code with liberal permission to use, study, modify and distribute derivitive works.
Microsoft provides basic standards supports, though often with proprietary or non-standard "extensions". HTML/CSS, for example. Once could argue RTF was a good effort, though years of binary .DOC make RTF more or less obsolete. Microsoft also conforms to basic internet protocols, TCP/IP, FTP, etc. Very basic support for the most fundamental standards.
Linux (and related software) does all that. Linux also reads and in most cases writes Microsoft's filesystem formats. "mtools" provides a second, user-space support for native microsoft discs. Linux also supports Joliet (Microsoft's cdrom filename extensions). Samba supports Microsoft's file service protocols. These usually come preinstalled on major linux distributions.
Microsoft does NOT provide even read-only support for Linux ext2 filesystems. Microsoft does NOT automatically recognize unix/linux rock ridge cdroms. Microsoft does NOT provide support for mounting NFS file systems. These are all examples of well established protocols in widespread use for over 10 years!
But...
the fact that they're reaching out should be incentive enough for the OSS community to respond in kind
Remember how they "reached out" to Sun regarding Java?
Sure, if "respond in kind" means a bunch of cheap, fluffy talk, and not actually implementing anything, or writing a poor implementation with proprietary "extensions", sure.
But the truth is, almost every documented, and even many poorly or utterly undocumented Microsoft protocols are well supported by Linux and related software.
There's only one file load benchmark, supposedly comparing load times for a large speadsheet. No word processor files, no presentations, no other data types.
There isn't even a variety of spreadsheets, just one file, which gives me a suspicious feeling its contents may have been carefully chosen to bias the results.
But most suspious of all is the data is a SXC file. Not ODF at all. That's right, its in the older openoffice 1.0 format, which is also XML-based, but not at all "ODF" format.
There's a big table of startup times too, which show MS office loads faster. No mention is made of pre-loaded windows components, or if open office quick launcher is used. Why such a big table of startup times in an article supposedly about file load/save times? Well, my suspisious feeling is saying it's likely a diversionary tactic, to hide the ugly fact that this article really only presents a single test case.
I'm not calling George Ou (and Ziff Davis) Mircosoft shills. But, George (or ZD editors), if you're reading this, you could have done SO much better. Rather than a big table of load times, your effort (if it was unbaised) could have been much better spent actually testing a few word processor files and a couple presentations. You could have used actual widely published files from various sources, to avoid the impression of a contrived/biased sample file. You could have even sought data originally authored in each application and converted to the other, to see if that makes a difference.
Maybe someone else will do some real, well conducted tests, with good methodology, and without the need to pad their results (and word count) with big table of unrelated benckmarks.
Actually, months ago they tried "doesn't have accessibility" and therefore didn't meet public access requirements.
That went down in flames. Now it's too slow. Not sure if this is their 2nd attempt, but it's well known they tried the accessibility card first.
So if you run it 3 times for triple des, that's approx 6000 instructions for every 8 bytes, or about 750 instruction cycles per byte. At 8000 bytes/sec for voice quality audio, my fast DES code would only need 6 MIPS on an 8 bit microcontroller. A slower version in C is readily available for free, which runs about 5X slower than my hand optimized assembly, requiring 30 MIPS.
Certainly strong encryption is feasible in real time for voice audio, even on very inexpensive 8-bit chips.
Really? Let's see.
PJRC.COM (my own website): Verizon -> Alter -> NTT/Verio
YAHOO: Verizon -> 130.81.15.54 -> yahoo
GOOGLE: Verizon -> Above.net -> google
SLASHDOT: Verizon -> Alter -> Savvis -> slashdot
MYSPACE: Verizon -> llnw.net -> myspace
LIVEJOURNAL: Verizon -> Alter -> sixapart/livejournal
HOTMAIL: Verizon -> 130.81.15.90 -> msn
NEW YORK TIMES: Verizon -> Alter -> 204.255.169.98 -> NTT/Verio
Ok, there's eight traceroutes from my DSL (Verizon) to seven major websites and one not-so-major site... and not a single router identified as att.net (by DNS hostname shown by traceroute). Here's one more:
AT&T: Verizon -> Alter -> 192.205.33.121 -> 12.127.6.62 -> att.net
Ok, that's cheating, but just did it to make sure AT&T is hosting their own website someone on their network.
So perhaps you'd like to suggest some sites major sites where traceroute shows AT&T routers? Even then, that list included the big email services, hotmail, gmail & yahoo and a couple of the most widely used social networking sites. Sure, the NSA may be monitoring traffic there too, but not via their secret room 641A at AT&T in San Francisco.
Why would I buy that? Well, cost wasn't the concern. At the time, it was the best card on the market that was passively cooled. No fan = no extra noise!
So I clicked the link to TFA, and jumped right to the end, and it turns out the quietest card is 44 dBA. No thanks! Not after the low noise power supply, an after-market super-quiet chipset heatsink/fan, and installing 120 mm low-rpm fans (20 dBA), and the quiet Seagate drive. Even worse, from TFA:
So does anyone know of better cards that ARE passively cooled, and will work inside a case with scant airflow due to using large but very low speed fans.
If showing a case where such a social policy results in an absurd and rediculous scenario is not reason "why not", then perhaps nothing could possibly show what a tremendously bad idea this is.
But as someone already explained, the point is when parent and child may disagree, if social policy (codified in law) "stops picking absurd numbers" and "lets parents decide", then the obvious result is parents retain complete legal control over their childrens lives, forever (or until they die).
I can just see it now...
"Hey mom, I got this great offer to do a porn shoot. It pays $1200 for 2 days work. My friend does these shoots and I trust her. Sounds like it'll be fine. It's been 4 years since I moved out, and I'm barely making ends meet at my two part time jobs. They say since that law a few years back, there isn't any set legal age anymore, so they'll only hire me if you sign this form. Will ya?"
Yeah, it's easy to take infrastructure for granted...
...just to name a few.
I believe that our governments haven't shown any ability to fix anything they want to -- the unintended consequences of every piece of regulation seem to create preferential treatment for some elite group rather than actually solve any problems, protect those meant to be protected or reduce "crime" as they define it.
roads & highways
inflation kept in check for 2+ decades
airports (and very high standards of safety)
electrical power (large outages so rare as to be major news)
emergency services
water and sewage systems
Sure, some uber libertarians will point to inefficiencies or flaws, but compared to most of the world, we're doing pretty damn good for critical infrastruture.
PC Magazine's Editor-in-Chief says the Mac OX X is nothing to get excited about. He writes that Boot Camp is really just a plan to get Windows users to convert to OS X. "Once you're with Windows limitations, what are you going to do? You'll start spending more and more time in OS X, until you too discover just how much better things can really be. It's sad to see so many windoze-only patriots being exposed to the superior Max OS. Perhaps they'll wake up and realize they've been taken for a ride by Microsoft all these years.