Actually, you could imprison them in the sense of "protect the general population from them for some length of time". Just suspend their business license for one or two years. In an analogous way, the death penalty could be imposed by canceling their business license entirely.
I think the problem with making a convincing "bundling == bad" argument is that the timing and manner of the bundling are more important than just the fact of bundling, and it's not the bundling itself but the combination of bundling on top of another existing monopoly which is actually illegal. For example, no one should complain about an integrated calculator or notepad at this point in time; that ship has sailed and it would obviously make your OS less competitive to ship without it. At this point in time, even shipping without a web browser (integrated or not) would be a mistake.
But let's look at the media player market, for instance. There is currently a fair amount of competition in that market still. Using the monopoly of the Windows platform to distribute Windows Media Player to consumers is effectively using an existing monopoly to try to create a new monopoly. Based on the timing of the move, the monopoly that Microsoft already has, and the monopoly that it is aiming for, that is what makes bundling of Windows Media illegal right now. In five years such bundling probably won't be illegal anymore, and you can honestly say "but Linux ships with an integrated Media Player, how can you ask Microsoft not to?"
The fact of the matter is that using an existing monopoly (however acquired) to create another monopoly is illegal. Microsoft has done this again and again, they are still doing this, and they will continue to do so until actually punished properly. The standards for what a monopoly may do in its business actions are tougher than the standards for non-monopolies. This is in the interests of consumer protection, and this is why you can't just say "but Linux does the same thing" - if Linux were a monopoly, then maybe that counterargument would make sense.
And all this is beside the issue of Microsoft bullying OEMs - another case of monopoly abuse which in itself should be enough to provide for a multi-billion dollar fine or a breakup. I can't believe the U.S. government caught Microsoft fucking making up evidence in its courtrooms and couldn't finish driving the stake. God, I'm disgusted right now.
Because smart, good people who have strongly-held beliefs and stick to them are basically unelectable in this country. In order to become President you have to be willing to compromise your most basic of values and play ball with a system that is the designed to remove the rest of your scruples on the way to the Oval Office. Any really principled, intelligent, and non-self-deceiving person could never be elected President.
Really, I pity anyone who is elected to a high office in this land - they've had to give up more of the core of their being than I ever will have to. I don't even expect them to be ethical following that experience; I just consider myself lucky if they accidentally implement policies that I find acceptable, and I try to vote for people who would be more likely to do so even after the process of getting to the top strips their humanity away.
I don't know exactly where the line is; perhaps RH customers prefer enhanced driver support at the expense of some testing? I wouldn't call them "test bed" kernels - -ac kernels are tested by many people worldwide, including RH internal testing.
Now if you were to complain about the compilers that RH puts in their distros:)
Well, drivers eventually do get from the -ac tree into the Linus tree, you know - the whole point is that AC tries them out until they are stable enough for Linus. Not to mention that Mr. Cox does have some responsibility to provide RedHat with the best kernel he can, no matter what Linus thinks of it. The only weird thing here is that as far as the VM goes, Linus has picked up the more experimental code first. So people who always recompile the Linus kernel when they install a new distro may find that their kernel operates very differently after that.
My naive thought is that the best way to do it would be to somehow modularize the two VMs so that it can be a compile-time or boot-time option, and let users try both on the same box to see which is better. However, I imagine this would be a ton of work to set up.
Re:16-bit, 32-bit, 64-bit...
on
MS DOS: A Eulogy
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· Score: 4, Informative
/usr/local is for stuff that didn't come with the standard install./share is actually useful, believe it or not, although I'm not sure where other OSen put user-shared files like that. It's better than/etc, at least./opt is an abomination and must die, I agree.
Responding to the parent post: there's a reason for those different/bin directories:/sbin is for statically linked binaries in case your system is really hosed,/bin is for when you don't have/usr mounted, and/usr/bin is for everything else.
In practice, distributions may not be setting things up quite this way, but IMHO they should. If you're putting everything on just one filesystem, then most of these don't matter, except for/sbin.
And in case I forgot to mention it,/opt must die. Especially annoying are RPMs that are non-relocatable so that you can't change the install prefix away from that damn/opt. It's a huge pain if you are striving to have the smallest possible root filesystem and then @$%! KDE dumps tons of stuff in/opt. Yes, it's really the RPM makers' fault. No, it still bugs the heck out of me.
I'd rather people just learn to spell. A spell checker is a crutch that a properly educated person doesn't need. To get back sort-of on topic, a good way to learn to spell properly as a child is to read a lot of children's books, like Harry Potter, LOTR, etc. If only I had as much time to read now that I did as a kid:)
Speak for yourself; as a computer engineer I had courses in everything from analog circuits up to and including Lisp, with a healthy exposure to CS algorigthms on the way. Just because some engineers' degrees are deficient doesn't mean they all are:)
Bingo. For example, Kevin Mitnick was charged with millions of dollars for "theft" of source code, even though in reality the victims weren't out that much money. In a capitalist society, it's always about money, even when (as in his case) it's not really about money.
Not that I prefer the alternatives to capitalism; as they say about the X window system, "it's the second worst ever, but all the others are tied for last place":) We just need strong government oversight of the capitalistic marketplace.
Hmmm, after working at a company that can't keep a few centralized Exchange servers up and running, I seriously doubt that the FBI can rearchitect the 'net and leave it in any form functional. It's decentralized now for a reason: it is technically impossible to run anything this large in a centralized manner. Or at least it would be impossible to do so and also retain the 'net as the fount of new economic growth, business productivity gains, and hot goat porn that it has become.
No, we won't have Microsoft-style improvements that are mainly aimed at selling CD-ROMS with bits on them. We'll still have improvements in applications in the areas where those things need to be improved, we just won't have needless or worthless new versions just for the sake of upgrading.
I think it will still be possible to make money in software, you just have to be at the cutting edge of technology and interface design, and make stuff that's so "insanely great" (not my words) that people will be willing to pay for it. Any sufficiently popular commercial software will generate one or several open source clones, and at that point there won't be too much money left in that product because it will become a commodity. So you move on to blazing the next trail and creating the next "killer app", or else you shift into a support role and help customers install and use your now-commoditized software.
The only reasons that this hasn't entirely come to pass are:
There is not yet universal knowledge that commodity open-source products are available to suit most peoples' computing needs, and
Microsoft is an expert at using network effects to create and then maintain a proprietary software market. For now, Microsoft has a ton of cash to keep doing so.
But Microsoft is a momentary aberration, born out of the PC boom times. Now that computing hardware is a commodity, computer software in most regards is not far behind, and Microsoft can't fight those facts forever. The jury's still out, but I don't think that they can even use their file formats, web "standards", and Passport/.Net quagmires to hold onto users forever. Eventually we'll turn the corner - basic economics tells us so. The current economic slump will in fact just hasten this outcome.
This ends my monumental paraphrase of ESR; only in rereading do I realize that I guess I agree with him about some things:)
Although, according to Microsoft in the article, the majority of revenue will come directly from the user. That's the whole point of.net: to give Microsoft a direct billing relationship with all the users of their software all the time.
I still don't see why a user would pay for that when it's free someplace else, but on the other hand the collapse of the Internet ad market is already reducing the amount of free stuff out there. It may be the case in a couple years that we will have to pay for about everything, at which point for many people it will be more convenient to just pay Microsoft rather than set up micropayments for Yahoo news, Weather.com weather reports, stock quotes, etc.
I understand the government's desire to protect the nation, and I sympathize with the large majority of government and law enforcement personnel who are working only for good in our society. But there are those in power who (for whatever reason) desire more power and more control over our society, and they will try to get these things in the name of providing safety. Saying that we'll live with it for now because it will all be better in a few years would be a reasonable approach to take, except that there are those who would use the opportunity to change things so that liberty will not have a chance to return for our children or their children. Those are the real enemy of the American people and our way of life.
I don't want to die, and I don't want anyone else to have to die because of restrictions on government actions. But more than dying I fear that some of the changes proposed in the interest of security will alter our society sufficiently so that we will never be able to return to our current level of freedom. I want to fight the good fight against terrorism; I don't want to encourage those who would use the opportunity to wage a more insidious war against the American people.
So yes, better security on airlines will help. No, a national ID card system probably won't, for exactly the same reason that requiring identification keeps so many minors from drinking. Yes, better communication between law enforcement agencies will help secure the U.S. against external and internal attack. But indefinitely detaining immigrants and allowing the CIA to act against U.S. citizens with the collusion of foreign nationals will not. We can fight terrorism with the tools and laws that we already have; heightened surveillance in the U.S. will just terrorize the population without significantly affecting the terrorists themselves.
Yes, the message is loud and clear: once it's all about the children, it's no longer even remotely about freedom. Thank you for betraying the way of life that was your children's birthright; you may now scurry back to your hole in safety.
Personally, I don't have too many problems with this particular topic, since some sort of search does seem to be a reasonable approach in this instance provided that its done equitably and professionally. (Where I work the searches are done haphazardly, so as to provide the appearance of security without the actual security benefits - now that's annoying). And, it's optional since you could choose to work somewhere else.
But I'm sick of hearing from folks who would rather trade my freedom for their security, by allowing civil liberties of all people to be infringed in the interest of the "war on terrorism". There is no security in this world, pursuit of it is illusory at best, the best that we can do is stand up as free men and women for what we believe in, and be willing to fight and die for those things if necessary. Anyone who tries to tell you otherwise is selling something, Princess.
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Actually, you could imprison them in the sense of "protect the general population from them for some length of time". Just suspend their business license for one or two years. In an analogous way, the death penalty could be imposed by canceling their business license entirely.
I think the problem with making a convincing "bundling == bad" argument is that the timing and manner of the bundling are more important than just the fact of bundling, and it's not the bundling itself but the combination of bundling on top of another existing monopoly which is actually illegal. For example, no one should complain about an integrated calculator or notepad at this point in time; that ship has sailed and it would obviously make your OS less competitive to ship without it. At this point in time, even shipping without a web browser (integrated or not) would be a mistake.
But let's look at the media player market, for instance. There is currently a fair amount of competition in that market still. Using the monopoly of the Windows platform to distribute Windows Media Player to consumers is effectively using an existing monopoly to try to create a new monopoly. Based on the timing of the move, the monopoly that Microsoft already has, and the monopoly that it is aiming for, that is what makes bundling of Windows Media illegal right now. In five years such bundling probably won't be illegal anymore, and you can honestly say "but Linux ships with an integrated Media Player, how can you ask Microsoft not to?"
The fact of the matter is that using an existing monopoly (however acquired) to create another monopoly is illegal. Microsoft has done this again and again, they are still doing this, and they will continue to do so until actually punished properly. The standards for what a monopoly may do in its business actions are tougher than the standards for non-monopolies. This is in the interests of consumer protection, and this is why you can't just say "but Linux does the same thing" - if Linux were a monopoly, then maybe that counterargument would make sense.
And all this is beside the issue of Microsoft bullying OEMs - another case of monopoly abuse which in itself should be enough to provide for a multi-billion dollar fine or a breakup. I can't believe the U.S. government caught Microsoft fucking making up evidence in its courtrooms and couldn't finish driving the stake. God, I'm disgusted right now.
I think the "Funny" moderation to your comment indicates exactly how cynical we are :)
Because smart, good people who have strongly-held beliefs and stick to them are basically unelectable in this country. In order to become President you have to be willing to compromise your most basic of values and play ball with a system that is the designed to remove the rest of your scruples on the way to the Oval Office. Any really principled, intelligent, and non-self-deceiving person could never be elected President.
Really, I pity anyone who is elected to a high office in this land - they've had to give up more of the core of their being than I ever will have to. I don't even expect them to be ethical following that experience; I just consider myself lucky if they accidentally implement policies that I find acceptable, and I try to vote for people who would be more likely to do so even after the process of getting to the top strips their humanity away.
I don't know exactly where the line is; perhaps RH customers prefer enhanced driver support at the expense of some testing? I wouldn't call them "test bed" kernels - -ac kernels are tested by many people worldwide, including RH internal testing.
Now if you were to complain about the compilers that RH puts in their distros :)
Yeah, I could do that. I also just like having a clean / directory, which /opt takes away from IMHO.
Well, drivers eventually do get from the -ac tree into the Linus tree, you know - the whole point is that AC tries them out until they are stable enough for Linus. Not to mention that Mr. Cox does have some responsibility to provide RedHat with the best kernel he can, no matter what Linus thinks of it. The only weird thing here is that as far as the VM goes, Linus has picked up the more experimental code first. So people who always recompile the Linus kernel when they install a new distro may find that their kernel operates very differently after that.
My naive thought is that the best way to do it would be to somehow modularize the two VMs so that it can be a compile-time or boot-time option, and let users try both on the same box to see which is better. However, I imagine this would be a ton of work to set up.
/usr/local is for stuff that didn't come with the standard install. /share is actually useful, believe it or not, although I'm not sure where other OSen put user-shared files like that. It's better than /etc, at least. /opt is an abomination and must die, I agree.
Responding to the parent post: there's a reason for those different /bin directories: /sbin is for statically linked binaries in case your system is really hosed, /bin is for when you don't have /usr mounted, and /usr/bin is for everything else.
In practice, distributions may not be setting things up quite this way, but IMHO they should. If you're putting everything on just one filesystem, then most of these don't matter, except for /sbin.
And in case I forgot to mention it, /opt must die. Especially annoying are RPMs that are non-relocatable so that you can't change the install prefix away from that damn /opt. It's a huge pain if you are striving to have the smallest possible root filesystem and then @$%! KDE dumps tons of stuff in /opt. Yes, it's really the RPM makers' fault. No, it still bugs the heck out of me.
I'd rather people just learn to spell. A spell checker is a crutch that a properly educated person doesn't need. To get back sort-of on topic, a good way to learn to spell properly as a child is to read a lot of children's books, like Harry Potter, LOTR, etc. If only I had as much time to read now that I did as a kid :)
Speak for yourself; as a computer engineer I had courses in everything from analog circuits up to and including Lisp, with a healthy exposure to CS algorigthms on the way. Just because some engineers' degrees are deficient doesn't mean they all are :)
Sure, I agree that those other things cloud the issue. But just with regard to the source code, the monetary damages claimed were out of whack.
<Martha>"Having a monopoly: it's a very good thing."</Martha>
Bingo. For example, Kevin Mitnick was charged with millions of dollars for "theft" of source code, even though in reality the victims weren't out that much money. In a capitalist society, it's always about money, even when (as in his case) it's not really about money.
Not that I prefer the alternatives to capitalism; as they say about the X window system, "it's the second worst ever, but all the others are tied for last place" :) We just need strong government oversight of the capitalistic marketplace.
Hmmm, after working at a company that can't keep a few centralized Exchange servers up and running, I seriously doubt that the FBI can rearchitect the 'net and leave it in any form functional. It's decentralized now for a reason: it is technically impossible to run anything this large in a centralized manner. Or at least it would be impossible to do so and also retain the 'net as the fount of new economic growth, business productivity gains, and hot goat porn that it has become.
It's not just crap NICs - on some NICs you can change the MAC to be identical to your other machine.
Remember: it's not just a copyright circumvention technology, it's also a parent circumvention technology!
Maybe we could make the TLD .tits? Somehow I like the idea of just registering big.tits, etc.
Also, many local theaters are constrained by zoning law to not show anything over R. So you can blame the prudes next door if you want :)
No, we won't have Microsoft-style improvements that are mainly aimed at selling CD-ROMS with bits on them. We'll still have improvements in applications in the areas where those things need to be improved, we just won't have needless or worthless new versions just for the sake of upgrading.
I think it will still be possible to make money in software, you just have to be at the cutting edge of technology and interface design, and make stuff that's so "insanely great" (not my words) that people will be willing to pay for it. Any sufficiently popular commercial software will generate one or several open source clones, and at that point there won't be too much money left in that product because it will become a commodity. So you move on to blazing the next trail and creating the next "killer app", or else you shift into a support role and help customers install and use your now-commoditized software.
The only reasons that this hasn't entirely come to pass are:
But Microsoft is a momentary aberration, born out of the PC boom times. Now that computing hardware is a commodity, computer software in most regards is not far behind, and Microsoft can't fight those facts forever. The jury's still out, but I don't think that they can even use their file formats, web "standards", and Passport/.Net quagmires to hold onto users forever. Eventually we'll turn the corner - basic economics tells us so. The current economic slump will in fact just hasten this outcome.
This ends my monumental paraphrase of ESR; only in rereading do I realize that I guess I agree with him about some things :)
That is the insightfulness that those Gartner folks are always grasping after. Mod up, please.
Well, you mean beyond just charging for MSDN and dev tools, right? Aside from those pre-existing taxes.
Although, according to Microsoft in the article, the majority of revenue will come directly from the user. That's the whole point of .net: to give Microsoft a direct billing relationship with all the users of their software all the time.
I still don't see why a user would pay for that when it's free someplace else, but on the other hand the collapse of the Internet ad market is already reducing the amount of free stuff out there. It may be the case in a couple years that we will have to pay for about everything, at which point for many people it will be more convenient to just pay Microsoft rather than set up micropayments for Yahoo news, Weather.com weather reports, stock quotes, etc.
I understand the government's desire to protect the nation, and I sympathize with the large majority of government and law enforcement personnel who are working only for good in our society. But there are those in power who (for whatever reason) desire more power and more control over our society, and they will try to get these things in the name of providing safety. Saying that we'll live with it for now because it will all be better in a few years would be a reasonable approach to take, except that there are those who would use the opportunity to change things so that liberty will not have a chance to return for our children or their children. Those are the real enemy of the American people and our way of life.
I don't want to die, and I don't want anyone else to have to die because of restrictions on government actions. But more than dying I fear that some of the changes proposed in the interest of security will alter our society sufficiently so that we will never be able to return to our current level of freedom. I want to fight the good fight against terrorism; I don't want to encourage those who would use the opportunity to wage a more insidious war against the American people.
So yes, better security on airlines will help. No, a national ID card system probably won't, for exactly the same reason that requiring identification keeps so many minors from drinking. Yes, better communication between law enforcement agencies will help secure the U.S. against external and internal attack. But indefinitely detaining immigrants and allowing the CIA to act against U.S. citizens with the collusion of foreign nationals will not. We can fight terrorism with the tools and laws that we already have; heightened surveillance in the U.S. will just terrorize the population without significantly affecting the terrorists themselves.
I'm pouring hot Windows XP in my pants! :)
Yes, the message is loud and clear: once it's all about the children, it's no longer even remotely about freedom. Thank you for betraying the way of life that was your children's birthright; you may now scurry back to your hole in safety.
Personally, I don't have too many problems with this particular topic, since some sort of search does seem to be a reasonable approach in this instance provided that its done equitably and professionally. (Where I work the searches are done haphazardly, so as to provide the appearance of security without the actual security benefits - now that's annoying). And, it's optional since you could choose to work somewhere else.
But I'm sick of hearing from folks who would rather trade my freedom for their security, by allowing civil liberties of all people to be infringed in the interest of the "war on terrorism". There is no security in this world, pursuit of it is illusory at best, the best that we can do is stand up as free men and women for what we believe in, and be willing to fight and die for those things if necessary. Anyone who tries to tell you otherwise is selling something, Princess.