Is there really anybody who got rich off shareware that wasn't crippled?
Yes. The guy (his name escapes me... Jim somethinggerman) who started Buttonware. Buttonware had at one time 35 employees. Jim himself retired with over 4 million dollars. Yet I do not know of any Buttonware-produced software that was crippled. The story as I know it was that he more or less started share ware, when he asked for people to send him $10 for the use of his database program so that he could provide them with a printed manual and upgrades. He went on vacation and returned to find literally sacks of mail that the housesitter had to drag to the basement. On a more personal note, a good friend of mine made his eating money for college with a shareware personal finance app on (get this) the Commedore 64.
I've been watching this debate about artists getting paid for music and etc... for a while now and I'm finally to a point that I can't stand it any more.
The fact that there is a software industry proves that electronic piracy will NOT destroy the music industry(even if we wish it would)
Let me take you back a decade or so. Software used to be small. You could fit DOS and Windows on a handful of diskettes. You could put almost any other software in the world on one diskette. You could also either download or trade for any software title in existance. I don't know of a game I ever wanted for that wasn't cracked (that's what breaking piracy protection used to be called). Professional or ameture, game or office app, everything was free for the taking if you didn't mind the legal issues involved. Downloads were at 2400 baud, true, but software was small. I remember the first game I ever saw that was actually a whole megabyte! Even it didn't take more than an hour or so to download from my favorite BBS. My point is this: Even in a niche industry (software was at the time) where almost everyone has the knowlege and ability to pirate everything, several fortunes were made. True, a lot of that was business software, but a lot of it wasn't. People know how the system works, and they will pay for good stuff. Look at the share ware model. For a long time it was NOT crippleware, people sent out full working versions and merely asked for people to send them $10. It worked. Fortunes were made off of that too. My point is that the richest people in the world made their money from something that could be perfectly copied and redistributed - in an industry where EVERYBODY, not just a fringe percentage, knew how.
It's funny that this just came up on/., I was just talking with a co-worker about software project mismanagement.
Of course OS projects are managed, that much I agree with. The thing the author doesn't delve into is the people doing the management (or better said in my opinion he doesn't give enough time to this topic). We have never and will never see anyone who is used to managing a plastics factory suddenly put in charge of an OSS project. We will also never see a kid fresh out of business school, with no software experience what so ever, put in charge of a web application (these are both examples from my workplace and the topic of the discussion I was having with my co-worker). OSS managers are there because they love the software they are working on and because they have a high level of skill and experience. I'm not managing an OSS project, I suck at coding. A friend of mine, who is a pretty fair coder but absolutely hates doing it, is also not an OSS coder. Open Source allows us to have the RIGHT people working on a project for the RIGHT reasons. Nobody works on an OSS project because they need the paycheck. In fact, I think it's more typical that the paycheck suffers so that the OSS project can be better.
As a student who is just beginning his Freshman year in CS at Cornell,
plus
Unlike work in an IT department, which we leave you drained and too tired to really do meaningful independent work,
equals
How in the hell do you presume to know what an IT job feels like? You are a freshman in college! I am 24 years old and I've been working in IT since I was 17. Not only did I skip college (actually I have some credits in English, Philosophy, and Engineering graphics, but nothing CS or CIS related) but I dropped out of high school. So far, I consider it to be the best decision I have ever made. I'm currently working as a data security consultant, but I have also worked in several IT departments, been a sysadmin, and worked as an AutoCAD tech/programmer. I have been in environments as small as 80 users and one engineer (me) up to 4-5000 users, 5 support techs (of which I was one), a networking department and so on. In all cases I have been able to easily go home and study. I have been able to teach myself Java, C, C++, perl, VB and SQL using only free time in the evenings. I have also been able to bring every one of these skills into my everyday work, and thus improve my level of service to the client. I'm sure you're wondering about that number of jobs in 7 years, I have spent most of my time working as a consultant (both independant and through an agency).
My point is simply that I have met VERY smart people (people with patents on programming algorythms who also speak 4 dissimilar languages), I have learned many interesting things (note above languages), and put a leg WAY up on my future career (more on this in a second), all without going to college and therefore without owing a single cent in student loans.
One last thing I want to bring up: College does NOT teach you how to work, only experience can do that. I will give you an example. A couple of years ago I contracted with a company to provide Novell system admin work plus some network conversion help (token ring to ethernet). I was also going to provide a limited amount of help desk support. For the first couple of weeks I was doing only help desk, as it helped me aclimate myself to the environment. On the same day I started, another guy started with me. He had just graduated with an EE from the University of Missouri at Rolla. This is one of the more respected engineering schools in the area (they require a 3+ GPA for admission) and he had graduated with a 3.8. Unfortunately, he had absolutely no idea how to complete a task. At one point, about a week after we started, he even admitted that he was used to having a defined problem sat down in front of him and that he was struggling with the work because he didn't know how to direct himself.
Wouldn't it make more sense to charge for the hardware and give away the idea? It seems that they are giving away the hardware and then trying to sell the ideas. This is like trying to move pudding uphill using a rake. Let's take this into a different arena: Has anyone ever used Avon Skin So Soft? (the non US/.'ers might not get this one). Have you ever seen the list of things that SSS is supposed to be good for? Everything from bug repellant to engine de-greaser, right? The comparison would be if Avon tried to sell those lists but then give away the product. Does this make any sense? Of course not, but tech companies don't seemed constrained by the laws of good sense any more, do they?
I think(hope) that this is one of the effects that we will see from the open source revolution. Companies are going to have to quit selling poorly implamented ideas as a product and instead go back to selling more tangible items. Luckily all the smartest people are on the side of the revolution. Can you imagine what would happen if these guys had developed some REAL encryption? Can you imagine what would have happened if CSS would have consisted of solid technology?
I'm going to patent "Stupid patents for obvious concepts" (a recursive patent-will I infringe upon myself?). Right after that I'm going to go after this guy AND amazon.com.
It seems that Judge Kaplan handed the responsibility of the case to congress rather than examine the constitutionality of what congress had done. In the USA's current political structure, there is supposed to be a system of "Check and Balences". Do you feel that Judge Kaplan failed in his responsibility to "Check" the judicial branch?
This might be slightly off topic as it isn't about programming per se, but look at the differences between different linux distrobutions. For simplicity's sake, I'll compare RH and SuSE. (or at least a couple of points... I am, after all, at work)
RedHat has it's RC scripts in/etc/init.d whereas SuSE keeps them in/sbin/init.d - is this because of a language difference? What about SuSE's/etc/rc.config, that controls all of those rc scripts (the SuSE way is to put all of the RC scripts in the dirs (/sbin/init.d/rc[S,0-6]) and then control them from/etc/rc.config. Is this again a language difference? I think it may be. I don't speak German, but I work with many people who do (international company and my department has a sister department in Munich), and I definately feel like they have a different way of thinking, especially in the way they associate nouns to verbs. When I started using SuSE, I really did feel like I was working with one of my German counterparts. IANALinguist, but this is just the feeling that I get (hey, that just reminded me of Iron Chef - did you even notice how the Japanese tasters almost always follow every comment with "that is how I feel?" Is that more of this language stuff? Sheesh!)
I know that this is off topic, but I keep seeing all of these posts along the lines of "This brings x number of new users blah blah blah and this is good for linux!" -- How is this good for Linux? What value is there in having millions of people doing the same thing you are? Here are the obvious arguments and my replies:
1) support -- There is already plenty of support. The user base is already sufficient to support any size project you care to start
2) more Linux apps -- Who cares? Most windows software is comprable to the useless consumer goods found in infomercials. Why would I want more of that?
3) hardware -- Once again, who cares? It has been my experience that the hardware that is working with linux is, with a few exceptions, best of breed anyways.
4) down with m$! -- I really doubt we'll see a dent in the desktop market, The only real advantage will be in the appliance market - and this is a good thing.
5) CmdrTaco said so! -- This is acceptable. Bow to the Taco!
The trick here is ipchains. There are many flavors, I'll paste a quick scipt in here (can be put in an RC script... best idea, if you ask me)
Once you have this up and running hit any of your favorite scanning sites and see if they can find you!
----------Start Code---------------
case "$1" in
start)
echo -n "'Engaging the Caterpillar Drive Captain.'"
## Not starting any real daemons (yet)
## configure IPCHAINS - I could use ipchains-restore, but that
## would make this _REALLY_ hard to manage.
# set up the input chain first
ipchains -P input DENY # this should always be your default
ipchains -A input -p icmp -j ACCEPT # I allow all icmp
ipchains -A input -p TCP ! -y -j ACCEPT #accept tcp replies
ipchains -A input -p UDP -j ACCEPT # need to fix this to only allow dns
# I don't do anything with forward as I'm not routing
# set up the output chain
ipchains -A output -d 199.95.207.0/24 -j REJECT #reject anything to
ipchains -A output -d 199.95.208.0/24 -j REJECT #doubleclick
#I assume that the user will see the screen output if one of these
#fails. Can't really imagine that happening, though:-)
echo -e "$return"
;;
stop)
echo -n "'Ok, now we just unzipped our fly...'"
# first, kill the ipchains rules
ipchains -F #flush ALL of the chains
ipchains -P input ACCEPT #back to normal 60's type sharing...
echo -e "$return"
;;
------------End Code------------
Like I said, that's set up to put in an rc script - I call this the "caterpillar drive" as in "The Hunt for Red October" - notice the quotes.
If you really are planning on running a web server, you will have to add a rule to allow inbound tcp on port 80.
In any case, because I believe in never typing code blindly without understanding what it does, read the ipchains howto before using any of this, and make sure you understand what it is doing.
...is NOT MP3 distribution. In the Napster case, the exact opposite is true. Napster is used almost exclusively to transfer copyrighted material.
By this you seem to be saying that mp3==copyright. I hate to break this to you, but if you ONLY use mpeg layer 3 to encode copyrighted material, then you have absolutely no vision or idea what technology can do for your life. Let's see if we can come up with some uses for a digital audio compression scheme that retains most of it's audio quality while minimizing file size... - Classroom notes - many students record lectures and play them back (with the teacher's permission). Having an easily editable, digital format for these would be invaluable. - Bird watchers - It would be nice, I think, to be able to keep the calls of several different birds on a portable mp3 player for quick identification. - Meeting notes - see "Classroom notes" above, but in context of workplace meetings
I could add to this list, but I'm @ work and in a hurry. My point is that you are trying to kill some fairly spiffy technology based on the fact that it could be misused. That said, I think that musicians should stop expecting to be paid for their 10 hours of studio time spent creating a song that they can't even play live. IMO it's a travesty of good sense to assume that musicians or record labels deserve several years of steady income from a month's work. If musicians really want full time pay, they should do live shows for it. We might even start to find bands that actually write a song, get good at playing it, and THEN record it, as a service to their fans (just in case you didn't know, most bands write songs in the studio as they are recording them). Of course we'd lose the NSync's, Backstreet Boys and other half-assed talentless manufactured groups, but I expect we could survive the loss.
Now that I've said something that everyone will agree with, let me explain why everyone else's comments are also wrong (or at least all of the ones not moderated down under 3).
I'm saying this as a data security consultant, and yes, it's my real job. I need, as soon as possible, to see the exact technical details of every new exploit. If someone has written an attack script, I need that too. Why? Any IDS that's worth the HD space it takes up allows you to write custom rules. If I know exactly what a given attack is going to look like, I can write very efficient rules to report/stop it. If I don't, I may have to guess what this attack looks like, or leave myself unprotected. Full disclosure reporting is the ONLY thing that provides this type of response for me, the guy who's really doing the work.
(Note, NT's C2 security used to involve no NIC, but I think they fixed it) Just as an aside, there is signifigant evidence to the effect that Microsoft paid for their C2. Specifically, the people originally hired to do the C2 evaluation later quit and went public with the information that Microsoft attempted to bribe them into certifying NT. Why did you not hear about this? The same reason you probably didn't know that www.microsoft.com.br was defaced over Mermorial Day weekend, (that story was only available in Portuguese) Microsoft has considerable weight with the media in this country.
Now on to more important topics... If open source is by definition an untrusted system, then why did the NSA contract a secure version of Linux? I can't think of the name of the company off hand (it's a firewall company out of California) but I know that the NSA contracted them to build an NSA certified secure system, for use by the NSA (and later everyone else) based on Linux.
And BTW: Alex, before you start whining that I'm just an anti-NT zealot, I am also an MCSE and while I agree that being an MCSE does not make you a moron, I would hope you realize that Microsoft does NOT test for the administration skills you really need.
First, the reason: Quality of the compiled app. For a quick test, I compiled the following in both Linux and NT, using the most common tools (VC++ 6.0 and gcc)
#include stdio.h int main() { printf("Hello World!\n"); return 0; }
Under gcc/linux, this compiled to roughly 11k
Under VC++6/NT, this compiled to roughly 115k I don't think I need to add much more to that.
Now for my question: What's wrong with middleware? I don't like MS either, but personally I'd rather develop in PureJava and allow people to make their own OS choice. I'm not going to start ramming an OS down anyone's throat, I'd rather see people free to make their own decision.
"Most in the online business community recognize that what Napster is doing threatens legitimate e-commerce models and is legally and morally wrong."
- Don't they realize that "Most in the online business community..." are porn dealers? Not that I'm judgeing the porn sites, but I find it ironic that they are trying to claim that porn sites are 1)concerned with napster and 2) making moral judgements about it. For that matter, since porn sites are still making money even though almost all of their stuff eventually gets posted to USENET, they probably recognize that there is still money to be made, even when people are pirateing your stuff through the same channels by which you distribute it.
I think people should consult with the pornography industry on this. They are the ebusiness pioneers and still occupy most of the ebusiness space out there, plus they too have a product that is easily distributed digitally.
An excellent point. There is only one problem, however. I have been an NT admin for 5 years. Currently I work for a consulting company, and am one of the few NT people willing to do tech reviews. In the last year I have done over 100 tech reviews for NT admins, with probably 50% of them having an MCSE. Out of that 100, only two have I recommended for hire. My point is only that while I agree that a quality NT person can get an NT box running pretty reliably and securely, there are VERY FEW quality NT people out there. Most of them, as you said, are just too comfy with the GUI to learn anything about the system. (and here is a simple question for all of you hiring types: What is the difference between regedit.exe and regedt32.exe? answer: regedit.exe enjoys a better search engine, but only regedt32.exe can edit the registry key permissions. - if someone can't answer this, they haven't a clue about NT security) The two I recommended for hire were the only two able to answer that question. I would say about 30% didn't even know what patch level their servers were at. And just in case you didn't know, the MCSE teaches NOTHING that is important (hot fixes and security are NOT part of the curriculum, although I think this is starting to change for 2000).
I hope my point was obvious, even though my grammer sucked.
I saw this list last night, and my first thought was that it couldn't possibly be right, as most of the compromises on this list are UNIX related. NT accounts for twice as many web server compromises as every other OS combined, even though it holds only 21% of the Internet web server market. (look at http://www.netcraft.com and http://www.attrition.org for verification of these figures) Therefore, the most popular attacks should almost all be NT related. I brought this up to a friend, and he proposed that only the good sysadmins (read:mostly unix) actually either detected the intrusions, or bothered to report them. I can accept that, but I'm interested to hear other opinions.
Slashdot Mirror
In a related story, it was recently discovered that it IS possible to run the Enlightenment window manager without annoying slowdowns...
Is there really anybody who got rich off shareware that wasn't crippled?
Yes. The guy (his name escapes me... Jim somethinggerman) who started Buttonware. Buttonware had at one time 35 employees. Jim himself retired with over 4 million dollars. Yet I do not know of any Buttonware-produced software that was crippled. The story as I know it was that he more or less started share ware, when he asked for people to send him $10 for the use of his database program so that he could provide them with a printed manual and upgrades. He went on vacation and returned to find literally sacks of mail that the housesitter had to drag to the basement.
On a more personal note, a good friend of mine made his eating money for college with a shareware personal finance app on (get this) the Commedore 64.
I've been watching this debate about artists getting paid for music and etc... for a while now and I'm finally to a point that I can't stand it any more.
The fact that there is a software industry proves that electronic piracy will NOT destroy the music industry (even if we wish it would)
Let me take you back a decade or so. Software used to be small. You could fit DOS and Windows on a handful of diskettes. You could put almost any other software in the world on one diskette. You could also either download or trade for any software title in existance. I don't know of a game I ever wanted for that wasn't cracked (that's what breaking piracy protection used to be called). Professional or ameture, game or office app, everything was free for the taking if you didn't mind the legal issues involved. Downloads were at 2400 baud, true, but software was small. I remember the first game I ever saw that was actually a whole megabyte! Even it didn't take more than an hour or so to download from my favorite BBS. My point is this: Even in a niche industry (software was at the time) where almost everyone has the knowlege and ability to pirate everything, several fortunes were made. True, a lot of that was business software, but a lot of it wasn't. People know how the system works, and they will pay for good stuff. Look at the share ware model. For a long time it was NOT crippleware, people sent out full working versions and merely asked for people to send them $10. It worked. Fortunes were made off of that too. My point is that the richest people in the world made their money from something that could be perfectly copied and redistributed - in an industry where EVERYBODY, not just a fringe percentage, knew how.
businessmen. They found out pretty quickly that it takes more than coding skill to run a business, your competitors will mop the floor with you
yeah, but we're talking about individual projects here, not businesses. Nobody said that coders should run the business, just the project.
It's funny that this just came up on /., I was just talking with a co-worker about software project mismanagement.
Of course OS projects are managed, that much I agree with. The thing the author doesn't delve into is the people doing the management (or better said in my opinion he doesn't give enough time to this topic). We have never and will never see anyone who is used to managing a plastics factory suddenly put in charge of an OSS project. We will also never see a kid fresh out of business school, with no software experience what so ever, put in charge of a web application (these are both examples from my workplace and the topic of the discussion I was having with my co-worker). OSS managers are there because they love the software they are working on and because they have a high level of skill and experience. I'm not managing an OSS project, I suck at coding. A friend of mine, who is a pretty fair coder but absolutely hates doing it, is also not an OSS coder. Open Source allows us to have the RIGHT people working on a project for the RIGHT reasons. Nobody works on an OSS project because they need the paycheck. In fact, I think it's more typical that the paycheck suffers so that the OSS project can be better.
As a student who is just beginning his Freshman year in CS at Cornell,
plus
Unlike work in an IT department, which we leave you drained and too tired to really do meaningful independent work,
equals
How in the hell do you presume to know what an IT job feels like? You are a freshman in college! I am 24 years old and I've been working in IT since I was 17. Not only did I skip college (actually I have some credits in English, Philosophy, and Engineering graphics, but nothing CS or CIS related) but I dropped out of high school. So far, I consider it to be the best decision I have ever made. I'm currently working as a data security consultant, but I have also worked in several IT departments, been a sysadmin, and worked as an AutoCAD tech/programmer. I have been in environments as small as 80 users and one engineer (me) up to 4-5000 users, 5 support techs (of which I was one), a networking department and so on. In all cases I have been able to easily go home and study. I have been able to teach myself Java, C, C++, perl, VB and SQL using only free time in the evenings. I have also been able to bring every one of these skills into my everyday work, and thus improve my level of service to the client. I'm sure you're wondering about that number of jobs in 7 years, I have spent most of my time working as a consultant (both independant and through an agency).
My point is simply that I have met VERY smart people (people with patents on programming algorythms who also speak 4 dissimilar languages), I have learned many interesting things (note above languages), and put a leg WAY up on my future career (more on this in a second), all without going to college and therefore without owing a single cent in student loans.
One last thing I want to bring up: College does NOT teach you how to work, only experience can do that. I will give you an example. A couple of years ago I contracted with a company to provide Novell system admin work plus some network conversion help (token ring to ethernet). I was also going to provide a limited amount of help desk support. For the first couple of weeks I was doing only help desk, as it helped me aclimate myself to the environment. On the same day I started, another guy started with me. He had just graduated with an EE from the University of Missouri at Rolla. This is one of the more respected engineering schools in the area (they require a 3+ GPA for admission) and he had graduated with a 3.8. Unfortunately, he had absolutely no idea how to complete a task. At one point, about a week after we started, he even admitted that he was used to having a defined problem sat down in front of him and that he was struggling with the work because he didn't know how to direct himself.
I hope I have made my point.
Wouldn't it make more sense to charge for the hardware and give away the idea? It seems that they are giving away the hardware and then trying to sell the ideas. This is like trying to move pudding uphill using a rake. Let's take this into a different arena: Has anyone ever used Avon Skin So Soft? (the non US /.'ers might not get this one). Have you ever seen the list of things that SSS is supposed to be good for? Everything from bug repellant to engine de-greaser, right? The comparison would be if Avon tried to sell those lists but then give away the product. Does this make any sense? Of course not, but tech companies don't seemed constrained by the laws of good sense any more, do they?
I think(hope) that this is one of the effects that we will see from the open source revolution. Companies are going to have to quit selling poorly implamented ideas as a product and instead go back to selling more tangible items. Luckily all the smartest people are on the side of the revolution. Can you imagine what would happen if these guys had developed some REAL encryption? Can you imagine what would have happened if CSS would have consisted of solid technology?
I'm going to patent "Stupid patents for obvious concepts" (a recursive patent-will I infringe upon myself?). Right after that I'm going to go after this guy AND amazon.com.
It seems that Judge Kaplan handed the responsibility of the case to congress rather than examine the constitutionality of what congress had done. In the USA's current political structure, there is supposed to be a system of "Check and Balences". Do you feel that Judge Kaplan failed in his responsibility to "Check" the judicial branch?
This might be slightly off topic as it isn't about programming per se, but look at the differences between different linux distrobutions. For simplicity's sake, I'll compare RH and SuSE. (or at least a couple of points... I am, after all, at work)
/etc/init.d whereas SuSE keeps them in /sbin/init.d - is this because of a language difference? What about SuSE's /etc/rc.config, that controls all of those rc scripts (the SuSE way is to put all of the RC scripts in the dirs (/sbin/init.d/rc[S,0-6]) and then control them from /etc/rc.config. Is this again a language difference? I think it may be. I don't speak German, but I work with many people who do (international company and my department has a sister department in Munich), and I definately feel like they have a different way of thinking, especially in the way they associate nouns to verbs. When I started using SuSE, I really did feel like I was working with one of my German counterparts. IANALinguist, but this is just the feeling that I get (hey, that just reminded me of Iron Chef - did you even notice how the Japanese tasters almost always follow every comment with "that is how I feel?" Is that more of this language stuff? Sheesh!)
RedHat has it's RC scripts in
I know that this is off topic, but I keep seeing all of these posts along the lines of "This brings x number of new users blah blah blah and this is good for linux!" -- How is this good for Linux? What value is there in having millions of people doing the same thing you are? Here are the obvious arguments and my replies:
1) support -- There is already plenty of support. The user base is already sufficient to support any size project you care to start
2) more Linux apps -- Who cares? Most windows software is comprable to the useless consumer goods found in infomercials. Why would I want more of that?
3) hardware -- Once again, who cares? It has been my experience that the hardware that is working with linux is, with a few exceptions, best of breed anyways.
4) down with m$! -- I really doubt we'll see a dent in the desktop market, The only real advantage will be in the appliance market - and this is a good thing.
5) CmdrTaco said so! -- This is acceptable. Bow to the Taco!
The trick here is ipchains. There are many flavors, I'll paste a quick scipt in here (can be put in an RC script... best idea, if you ask me)
:-)
;;
;;
Once you have this up and running hit any of your favorite scanning sites and see if they can find you!
----------Start Code---------------
case "$1" in
start)
echo -n "'Engaging the Caterpillar Drive Captain.'"
## Not starting any real daemons (yet)
## configure IPCHAINS - I could use ipchains-restore, but that
## would make this _REALLY_ hard to manage.
# set up the input chain first
ipchains -P input DENY # this should always be your default
ipchains -A input -p icmp -j ACCEPT # I allow all icmp
ipchains -A input -p TCP ! -y -j ACCEPT #accept tcp replies
ipchains -A input -p UDP -j ACCEPT # need to fix this to only allow dns
# I don't do anything with forward as I'm not routing
# set up the output chain
ipchains -A output -d 199.95.207.0/24 -j REJECT #reject anything to
ipchains -A output -d 199.95.208.0/24 -j REJECT #doubleclick
#I assume that the user will see the screen output if one of these
#fails. Can't really imagine that happening, though
echo -e "$return"
stop)
echo -n "'Ok, now we just unzipped our fly...'"
# first, kill the ipchains rules
ipchains -F #flush ALL of the chains
ipchains -P input ACCEPT #back to normal 60's type sharing...
echo -e "$return"
------------End Code------------
Like I said, that's set up to put in an rc script - I call this the "caterpillar drive" as in "The Hunt for Red October" - notice the quotes.
If you really are planning on running a web server, you will have to add a rule to allow inbound tcp on port 80.
In any case, because I believe in never typing code blindly without understanding what it does, read the ipchains howto before using any of this, and make sure you understand what it is doing.
...is NOT MP3 distribution. In the Napster case, the exact opposite is true. Napster is used almost exclusively to transfer copyrighted material.
By this you seem to be saying that mp3==copyright. I hate to break this to you, but if you ONLY use mpeg layer 3 to encode copyrighted material, then you have absolutely no vision or idea what technology can do for your life. Let's see if we can come up with some uses for a digital audio compression scheme that retains most of it's audio quality while minimizing file size...
- Classroom notes - many students record lectures and play them back (with the teacher's permission). Having an easily editable, digital format for these would be invaluable.
- Bird watchers - It would be nice, I think, to be able to keep the calls of several different birds on a portable mp3 player for quick identification.
- Meeting notes - see "Classroom notes" above, but in context of workplace meetings
I could add to this list, but I'm @ work and in a hurry. My point is that you are trying to kill some fairly spiffy technology based on the fact that it could be misused. That said, I think that musicians should stop expecting to be paid for their 10 hours of studio time spent creating a song that they can't even play live. IMO it's a travesty of good sense to assume that musicians or record labels deserve several years of steady income from a month's work. If musicians really want full time pay, they should do live shows for it. We might even start to find bands that actually write a song, get good at playing it, and THEN record it, as a service to their fans (just in case you didn't know, most bands write songs in the studio as they are recording them). Of course we'd lose the NSync's, Backstreet Boys and other half-assed talentless manufactured groups, but I expect we could survive the loss.
Marcus has the exact wrong idea.
Now that I've said something that everyone will agree with, let me explain why everyone else's comments are also wrong (or at least all of the ones not moderated down under 3).
I'm saying this as a data security consultant, and yes, it's my real job. I need, as soon as possible, to see the exact technical details of every new exploit. If someone has written an attack script, I need that too. Why? Any IDS that's worth the HD space it takes up allows you to write custom rules. If I know exactly what a given attack is going to look like, I can write very efficient rules to report/stop it. If I don't, I may have to guess what this attack looks like, or leave myself unprotected. Full disclosure reporting is the ONLY thing that provides this type of response for me, the guy who's really doing the work.
(Note, NT's C2 security used to involve no NIC, but I think they fixed it)
Just as an aside, there is signifigant evidence to the effect that Microsoft paid for their C2. Specifically, the people originally hired to do the C2 evaluation later quit and went public with the information that Microsoft attempted to bribe them into certifying NT. Why did you not hear about this? The same reason you probably didn't know that www.microsoft.com.br was defaced over Mermorial Day weekend, (that story was only available in Portuguese) Microsoft has considerable weight with the media in this country.
Now on to more important topics... If open source is by definition an untrusted system, then why did the NSA contract a secure version of Linux? I can't think of the name of the company off hand (it's a firewall company out of California) but I know that the NSA contracted them to build an NSA certified secure system, for use by the NSA (and later everyone else) based on Linux.
And BTW: Alex, before you start whining that I'm just an anti-NT zealot, I am also an MCSE and while I agree that being an MCSE does not make you a moron, I would hope you realize that Microsoft does NOT test for the administration skills you really need.
First, the reason: Quality of the compiled app. For a quick test, I compiled the following in both Linux and NT, using the most common tools (VC++ 6.0 and gcc)
#include stdio.h
int main()
{
printf("Hello World!\n");
return 0;
}
Under gcc/linux, this compiled to roughly 11k
Under VC++6/NT, this compiled to roughly 115k
I don't think I need to add much more to that.
Now for my question: What's wrong with middleware? I don't like MS either, but personally I'd rather develop in PureJava and allow people to make their own OS choice. I'm not going to start ramming an OS down anyone's throat, I'd rather see people free to make their own decision.
"Most in the online business community recognize that what Napster is doing threatens legitimate e-commerce models and is legally and morally wrong."
- Don't they realize that "Most in the online business community..." are porn dealers? Not that I'm judgeing the porn sites, but I find it ironic that they are trying to claim that porn sites are 1)concerned with napster and 2) making moral judgements about it. For that matter, since porn sites are still making money even though almost all of their stuff eventually gets posted to USENET, they probably recognize that there is still money to be made, even when people are pirateing your stuff through the same channels by which you distribute it.
I think people should consult with the pornography industry on this. They are the ebusiness pioneers and still occupy most of the ebusiness space out there, plus they too have a product that is easily distributed digitally.
An excellent point. There is only one problem, however. I have been an NT admin for 5 years. Currently I work for a consulting company, and am one of the few NT people willing to do tech reviews. In the last year I have done over 100 tech reviews for NT admins, with probably 50% of them having an MCSE. Out of that 100, only two have I recommended for hire. My point is only that while I agree that a quality NT person can get an NT box running pretty reliably and securely, there are VERY FEW quality NT people out there. Most of them, as you said, are just too comfy with the GUI to learn anything about the system. (and here is a simple question for all of you hiring types: What is the difference between regedit.exe and regedt32.exe? answer: regedit.exe enjoys a better search engine, but only regedt32.exe can edit the registry key permissions. - if someone can't answer this, they haven't a clue about NT security) The two I recommended for hire were the only two able to answer that question. I would say about 30% didn't even know what patch level their servers were at. And just in case you didn't know, the MCSE teaches NOTHING that is important (hot fixes and security are NOT part of the curriculum, although I think this is starting to change for 2000).
I hope my point was obvious, even though my grammer sucked.
I saw this list last night, and my first thought was that it couldn't possibly be right, as most of the compromises on this list are UNIX related. NT accounts for twice as many web server compromises as every other OS combined, even though it holds only 21% of the Internet web server market. (look at http://www.netcraft.com and http://www.attrition.org for verification of these figures) Therefore, the most popular attacks should almost all be NT related. I brought this up to a friend, and he proposed that only the good sysadmins (read:mostly unix) actually either detected the intrusions, or bothered to report them. I can accept that, but I'm interested to hear other opinions.