Is it possible that MS is just trying to kill Java by ignoring it? We don't support it, so no one will use it?
Not necessarily. Sun jumped on MS for changing Java to move it away from the standard and towards a proprietary, Windows-Only version, but that particular ball has momentum. I'd lay money that there are dozens of companies that would love to take that business from Microsoft, just so long as they can be assured that MS won't step on them. Rational would be free to continue developing a non-compliant product, and MS would get to dodge the lawsuit bullet: sounds like a win-win to me.
Oh yeah - except for those of us actually concerned with platform portability. Oops.
Agreed. "Being John Malkovich" is not only one of the most original premises to come out of Hollywood in ages, but it marks a return to the surreal in American filmmaking, which I think is long overdue.
By the way: this film is not a comedy. It is, in parts, sidesplittingly funny, but not the comfortable tee-hee way that you might be expecting. It is, by any reasonable account, pretty friggin disturbing.
...will be when he's old enough to see the error of his ways, goes open source, and repudiates Bill Gates (whom he's supposed to be meeting shortly).
"Damn you, you egomaniacal bastard. I was only three and you turned me into your empire's mascot. Well, let me suggest an alternative for you: he's as little and cute as I was back then, only he's red, has a tail, and carries a trident."
However, there is also no excuse for Wired and these guys posting those flames. If I posted every "bad" e-mail I got, the 'net would have run out of bandwidth long before now. We don't need to air other people's dirty laundry or our own. There's enough blame to go around the table - I would expect people to act in a somewhat grown up and professional manner when dealing with this.
Huh? It's not as if they printed those e-mails along with the identities of the senders. Printing samples of letters like that is standard practice when writing articles about... well, about receiving letters like that. Since there was no attribution on any of the e-mails, no one's anonymity was compromised
NeuroDyanmics, Inc. (NASDAQ: NEDY) is pleased to announce its new CRICET (pronounced "cricket"), a breakthrough in law enforcement and behavioral modification technology. The Jimminy, the first device based on the CRICET system, has just completed its internal testing phase, and will soon be entering mass production for introduction into the marketplace.
CRICET, an acronym for CRanial Implanted Compliance Ensuring Technology, consists of a small, glass-lined device designed to be worn inside the skull of a the subject. The implant sends a constant signal to a bracelet worn by the subject, similar to those utilized by "lo-jack" systems.
"Essentially," said Dr. Peter Spanky, leader of the project, "the CRICET monitors the brain for violent impulses. When a person tries to injure another human being, the brain produces a distinct series of brain waves. The CRICET unit can detect those brain waves, and transmit a signal through the skin of the subject to the bracelet." The subject would then be administered a corrective jolt of electrical energy.
"It's clear that this technology is the first real breakthrough in years in controlling violent behavior," Dr. Spanky stated. "While it's true that in the past, the penal system has claimed that rehabilitation is one of its prime goals, it now has a real tool to ensure that rehabilitation is actually taking place. It's a very exciting time."
Organizations which are rumoured to be interested in the technology include the Texas Department of Corrections, and the Armed Services.
Addendum: Microsoft always makes much of the fact that many people download Linux to give it a go, but not all of them wind up using it. Microsoft definitely doesn't talk about the equal and opposite action, of people buying licenses to use NT, becoming dissatisfied with it, and discarding it for Linux, or FreeBSD, or some other Microsoft competitor.
Frankly, I don't believe that this happens with any regularity. It happened to us once: a machine who's NT-IIS installation became corrupt provoked a "reformat the hard drive and re-install NT" response from MS tech support. We responded by fdisking and installing Linux, instead.
However, we'd already been using Linux in production for some time, so it wasn't exactly a leap of faith. Besides which, that box had come with NT installed on it: the "Windows tax," so it wasn't like we set out to buy NT and then scrapped it.
I suspect that most people who have problems with NT will hire tech support/consultants, fire their IT department, or (in the case of hardware incompatibilities) go with a new OEM. But they're not likely to go with Linux.
No one else had a demo that came close to Corels. Caldera's was...ok. RedHat had little exciting or new. How much is RedHat now, anyway? The "Pro" version is like $149 or something...is this a joke?
That's right. For which, you get 30 days of phone support covering not only installation, but configuration of Red Hat's secure web server (Apache based). As well as all the extra software, yada yada yada.
Personally, I think that's on the expensive side, so I wouldn't bother: if you need a support contract, it makes more sense to buy it seperately. But, RedHat has a $29.95 version just like everybody else. If you're going to compare their products to everyone else's, at least make it apples-to-apples.
Sterno's point is still well taken, however. TRUSTe was the brainchild of Fena (of the EFF) and Jennings (of Portland Software), but now it's a seperate agency which depends in large measure on companies which it's supposed to be policing. Note that Microsoft is listed as one of their "premiere corporate sponsors" on their homepage.
What I think Sterno meant is that we need an organization which will not be beholden to the very organizations it's supposed to be watching. I don't know that the EFF would be a good fit to fill these shoes, or EPIC, or the ACLU, but TRUSTe certainly doesn't seem to be cutting the mustard.
I guess I should restate my point a little. In an ideal world in which there is widescale deployment of hardware/token based authentication (like iButton) systems, I'd say this was a no-brainer. This is not (yet) such a world. My concern rests on the following assumptions:
The "patients" requesting this service would be transitory. If the "health-care organization" described by the original poster is a hospital, you could be talking about a potentially massive turnover. Grandpa F. would only need the iButton for as long as he was having his gallbladder operation, after which it wouldn't be necessary. This problem would be mitigated somewhat if we were talking about an HMO or other insurance provider.
Deployment of a system like this would rest on the ability to provide support at both the hardware and software levels (and possibly for installation as well) for all of these patients. If Gramma's iButton breaks, who she gonna call? Does she need to use specialized client software? Is the hospital/HMO going to field tech support calls if she does?
With that said, here's the kind of thing that might change my mind:
If the developers enter into some kind of partnership with a service provider (say, WebTV, or Gateway 2000) in order to make the client side happen. Then they could restrict to service to patients with those providers, which would mitigate the "who ya gonna call" problem, as well as clear up some protocol issues (how does this information get transmitted).
If the service was only offered to long term clients - say, people on an HMO's premium service plan. That way, the doctor's end could be targeted to participating doctors willing to foot the bill, while the patients could be restricted to top-dollar clients. This would also cut down on support issues.
Mind, I'm not really suggesting that the original poster actually pursue either of these options. I'm just saying that I don't see another way of making a hardware-based authentication system work.
I don't think that an iButton would work here. Remember that this is a system for patient-doctor communication. If the patients could come in to use an iButton equipped device at the health care provider's location, they could just talk to their doctors while they were there. And if you think that they're prepared to ask grandma Finklestein to install a Blue Dot receptor on the web-TV she got for Christmas, you're nuts.
A good idea, but near impossible to implement in the real world. It's not realistic to assume that all these doctors and patients will be willing to learn to use PGP. My department contains less than 20 people, and trying to get/them/ to use PGP for sensitive information was hard enough in itself. The original poster describes a "large health care organization". You're talking, at the very least, hundreds of patients who would all have to install PGP, generate keypairs, post public keys... the technical support issues would be nightmarish.
To a certain degree, Slashdot encourages this sort of behavior. We've managed to pigeonhole ourselves ("News for Nerds") as the most recognizeable repository of geek-screed on the web. Since a lot of the opinions posted here are on the incendiary side, it figures that journalists looking for the "what geeks think of the Jackson decision" story would look to Slashdot first.
What's a little frustrating about the situation, though, is the fishbowl-like feeling you get while reading thse stories. No one has ever (to my knowledge) used a series of "ZDNet Talkback" posts as fodder for a story of its own. While I'm of the opinion that the reader posts here are of a higher quality than Talkback's (by an order of magnitude), I think this has more to do with the fact that ZDNet has lawyers. Lots of 'em. In a variety of fruit flavors. They consider those posts to be essentially their property, and fair-use clauses aside, they'd likely pursue legal action against rival publications quoting them hither and yon.
I'm not sure I really see this as too much of a problem: prohibiting people from quoting Slashdot posts seems antithetical to a group of people known for supporting, say, open source initiatives. But it still kind of bothers me that Slashdot does the work, and MacWeek and MSNBC get a cheap story.
For what it's worth, I've had a grand total of one online relationship. We met playing a MUSH. After we'd played together for a while, we started talking together out-of character. Then came a phone call, then more. Then, she came up to visit me on Spring Break.
That was in 1994. We've been married now for two years, and I don't think I've ever been happier.
I don't consider myself an expert on relationships, by any stretch of the imagination. I've been in a grand total of two, including this one. I've done my best to be "the good guy": to be as honest, understanding, and giving as I can. As far as I can tell, good relationships are predicated on nothing more complex than concern for your partner, honesty, and laughter. I've been lucky enough to find a wonderful relationship, but I was also sharp enough to remember to act in a manner that showed that I/wanted/ those things. Golden rule, and all that.
Feh. Enough rambling. I wish you all the luck in the world. Love is a complicated thing, and I make no pretense of understanding it. So my advice: don't bother trying. Just live in the moment, be nice, and remember to laugh. That's basically what worked for me.
I have a friend who is an IT contractor, and has repeatedly warned my about the evils of non-compete clauses. Her particular field is in technical writing/software documentation, which tends to be a feast-or-famine type of endeavor at best. She's seen non-competes used against contractors in the following way:
Staffing agency or IT consultancy hires a contractor on extended basis, to use on contracts as supplements to their full-time staff. Contractor must sign non-compete.
Times get rough. Work dwindles.
Consultancy scales back work to contractor in order to keep full-timers flush.
Contractor is barred from looking elsewhere for work by the terms of the non-compete.
It's really a nasty scenario, and one that happens more than you might think. The consultancy doesn't mind you working if they can get a cut, but if the market-space starts to dwindle, they'd rather starve their competitors for talent using non-compete agreements than let their contractors work. Sucks bad, but it's life.
It's not quite the same thing, but there are not-for-profit ISPs that provide internet access (usually frame relay, or point-to-point T's). I know that there's one in the Chester County, PA area called Chesconet. It provides at-cost internet access to not-for-profits like schools, libraries, etc. Barebones service (you get a connection, maybe a couple of mail accounts), but for what they sell, there's no beating the prices.
DISCLAIMER: I'm associated with Chesconet, and therefore not an entirely uninterested party.
For example, if asking about firearms, a Yes/No question could not stimulate as fair or complete an exploration as a range:
__No known possession of a firearm __Friends known to have ready access to a firearm __There are firearms in the home __There are firearms in a home frequented by the student __The student owns his own firearm __The student recently acquired a firearm
In the absence of other evidence concerning the other questions asked by the program, it would appear that Mosaic actually provides a fairly realistic analysis of the probability of student violence. However, I found the following question and non-answer from their FAQ to be very disturbing:
Can the system brand a student as dangerous?
Most often, MOSAIC-2000 will help establish that a student does not pose an elevated risk of violence.
In other words, yes.
What's worse about a tool like this is that mere possession of it can lead to accusations of liability on the part of the school in the event of a violent episode. If the software predicts that Johnny is going act out violently and no preventative action is taken, the school could very easily become a target for legal action if something happens. As a result, school administrators will be encouraged to take action in situations which don't warrant it, and to take the strongest action possible. Past experience with school administration has convinced me that the opposite threat - that of a wrongly accused child's parents threatening the district - won't scare administrators away enough to prevent this.
I just need to take a moment to observe the irony here. The original post said,
I can do VB, and I can do VC++, but I'd rather not to thankyouverymuch... I don't really know why people thing that graphical IDEs are so sexy. I have absolutely no problems with autoconf, automake, and make.
To which, you replied,
Anyone who complains about how crappy the win32 api is usually is lazy and wants a pointy clicky drawy interface to code in.
I don't really think any more comment is necessary.
Agreed. This is not a new phenomenon by any stretch of the imagination.
You mentioned IRC Botnets - another example (and to my knowledge, one of the most common) of DOS attacks is a simple "smurf" attack. It's an easy enough attack: put together a ping request with a forged FROM header, and send it to a network's broadcast address. If the admin has been lazy (and you're on a full class C), you'll wind up with up to 255 computers all pinging the same device.
I've seen this used to blow out a University's web server at the same time as it stresses two Universities' Internet connections. It's not pretty. Or new: Wired News ran an article about escalating numbers of smurf attacks way back in January of 1998.
Actually, I don't at all see how the differing nature of business processes affect the adoption of OSS. After all, it's not like MSSQL is naturally more flexable than, say, Postgres. Indeed, OSS can more easily be customized for a variety of situations precisely because it is modifiable.
But, I doubt we'll see a lot of OSS in e-commerce too. Just for different reasons.
It seems to me that because it is the nature of business to be competitive, it is against the corporate mindset to trust a large part of the business to a co-operative effort. The suits I've talked to are more likely to view these endeavors as being necessarily quid-pro-quo: the logic seems to be that if they're not paying top dollar to have someone put this stuff together for them (right down to the software level), it's suspect.
I expect it's an unfortunate side effect of the elusive nature of software systems. A lot of executives view techs like mechanics: they don't know what we do, they don't care, they just don't want their engine to jump out of the hood and land on the road, and they expect to pay for the privilege. If I told you I knew a mechanic who doesn't charge for parts... well, that'd be weird. Corp types think the two things are equivalent.
The Jane's editor was delighted that Slashdot readers - who include some of the most knowledgeable hackers, geeks and nerds on the Internet -- offered help.
C'mon, Jon. Everyone knows that the really 'l33t haX0r d00dz are too busy hacking into DOD computers using tools that look like a development build of Quake 3, while simultaneously checking their IV drip of Jolt from their darkened, pizza-stained couches, to take the time to surf. Unless one of their friends send them a killer pr0n link. Huh-huh huh. pr0n.
Yes, I'm responding to my own post. After thinking about it a bit more, I've figured out why I couldn't articulate my point better before. It's because we're talking about games, and the use of digital media in games is much different than in the rest of the world.
For example, a 3d model in a game may - and almost certainly will - turn up elsewhere with a brand new skin. I can go to one of the major skin sites, download a few that I like, and voila: I have skins to use in my new [Quake | Unreal | UT | whatever] mod. Same goes with textures, prefab objects (like chairs). Hell, using UnrealEd, I could open someone elses' level, rip out a wall, attach it to another level, and reuse it that way. Reuse of digital media components in games isn't anything like reuse in the rest of the world.
The arguments that RMS puts forth for the ethical rightness of free software also seem to apply to all digital media. If you take them seriously, the spirit of the GPL seems to want to say that all digital media should be free. That isn't a pragmatic battle to try and fight.
I'm particularly intrigued by Carmack's comments about open source game licensing, and his observation that RMS' comments on free (as in speech) software seem to apply equally to all digital media - art, music, sound effects, models, what-have-you. Personally, I don't think that's the case, because code has applications (no pun intended) that music and art don't, but I'm not sure I can articulate my point of view any better than that.
I'd like to hear what you guys think about it. (Particularly if you're RMS, for curiosity's sake.:) )
Anyone who has a more than passing interest in this story and is a fan of science fiction owes it to [him|her]self to check out Forever Peace, by Joe Haldeman. For those of you who read Forever War, the author says that it's a continuation, of sorts, of the issues he raised in the first book, though not a sequel in the strict sense.
One of the two central plot devices (you'll excuse the pun) in the book is the construction of a particle accelerator near Jupiter capable of recreating the Big Bang.
A valid point - I'm sure that Jane's found it easier to solicit opinions from/. readers than to find an individual expert they could trust and pay him/her to write something. On the other hand, I don't see that this is such a bad thing in and of itself. No one was forced to read the article and provide comment, after all.
Slashdot Mirror
Not necessarily. Sun jumped on MS for changing Java to move it away from the standard and towards a proprietary, Windows-Only version, but that particular ball has momentum. I'd lay money that there are dozens of companies that would love to take that business from Microsoft, just so long as they can be assured that MS won't step on them. Rational would be free to continue developing a non-compliant product, and MS would get to dodge the lawsuit bullet: sounds like a win-win to me.
Oh yeah - except for those of us actually concerned with platform portability. Oops.
Agreed. "Being John Malkovich" is not only one of the most original premises to come out of Hollywood in ages, but it marks a return to the surreal in American filmmaking, which I think is long overdue.
By the way: this film is not a comedy. It is, in parts, sidesplittingly funny, but not the comfortable tee-hee way that you might be expecting. It is, by any reasonable account, pretty friggin disturbing.
...will be when he's old enough to see the error of his ways, goes open source, and repudiates Bill Gates (whom he's supposed to be meeting shortly).
:)
"Damn you, you egomaniacal bastard. I was only three and you turned me into your empire's mascot. Well, let me suggest an alternative for you: he's as little and cute as I was back then, only he's red, has a tail, and carries a trident."
Or hey, a penguin would work too.
Huh? It's not as if they printed those e-mails along with the identities of the senders. Printing samples of letters like that is standard practice when writing articles about... well, about receiving letters like that. Since there was no attribution on any of the e-mails, no one's anonymity was compromised
NeuroDyanmics, Inc. (NASDAQ: NEDY) is pleased to announce its new CRICET (pronounced "cricket"), a breakthrough in law enforcement and behavioral modification technology. The Jimminy, the first device based on the CRICET system, has just completed its internal testing phase, and will soon be entering mass production for introduction into the marketplace.
CRICET, an acronym for CRanial Implanted Compliance Ensuring Technology, consists of a small, glass-lined device designed to be worn inside the skull of a the subject. The implant sends a constant signal to a bracelet worn by the subject, similar to those utilized by "lo-jack" systems.
"Essentially," said Dr. Peter Spanky, leader of the project, "the CRICET monitors the brain for violent impulses. When a person tries to injure another human being, the brain produces a distinct series of brain waves. The CRICET unit can detect those brain waves, and transmit a signal through the skin of the subject to the bracelet." The subject would then be administered a corrective jolt of electrical energy.
"It's clear that this technology is the first real breakthrough in years in controlling violent behavior," Dr. Spanky stated. "While it's true that in the past, the penal system has claimed that rehabilitation is one of its prime goals, it now has a real tool to ensure that rehabilitation is actually taking place. It's a very exciting time."
Organizations which are rumoured to be interested in the technology include the Texas Department of Corrections, and the Armed Services.
However, we'd already been using Linux in production for some time, so it wasn't exactly a leap of faith. Besides which, that box had come with NT installed on it: the "Windows tax," so it wasn't like we set out to buy NT and then scrapped it.
I suspect that most people who have problems with NT will hire tech support/consultants, fire their IT department, or (in the case of hardware incompatibilities) go with a new OEM. But they're not likely to go with Linux.
Yet.
That's right. For which, you get 30 days of phone support covering not only installation, but configuration of Red Hat's secure web server (Apache based). As well as all the extra software, yada yada yada.
Personally, I think that's on the expensive side, so I wouldn't bother: if you need a support contract, it makes more sense to buy it seperately. But, RedHat has a $29.95 version just like everybody else. If you're going to compare their products to everyone else's, at least make it apples-to-apples.
What I think Sterno meant is that we need an organization which will not be beholden to the very organizations it's supposed to be watching. I don't know that the EFF would be a good fit to fill these shoes, or EPIC, or the ACLU, but TRUSTe certainly doesn't seem to be cutting the mustard.
- The "patients" requesting this service would be transitory. If the "health-care organization" described by the original poster is a hospital, you could be talking about a potentially massive turnover. Grandpa F. would only need the iButton for as long as he was having his gallbladder operation, after which it wouldn't be necessary. This problem would be mitigated somewhat if we were talking about an HMO or other insurance provider.
- Deployment of a system like this would rest on the ability to provide support at both the hardware and software levels (and possibly for installation as well) for all of these patients. If Gramma's iButton breaks, who she gonna call? Does she need to use specialized client software? Is the hospital/HMO going to field tech support calls if she does?
With that said, here's the kind of thing that might change my mind:- If the developers enter into some kind of partnership with a service provider (say, WebTV, or Gateway 2000) in order to make the client side happen. Then they could restrict to service to patients with those providers, which would mitigate the "who ya gonna call" problem, as well as clear up some protocol issues (how does this information get transmitted).
- If the service was only offered to long term clients - say, people on an HMO's premium service plan. That way, the doctor's end could be targeted to participating doctors willing to foot the bill, while the patients could be restricted to top-dollar clients. This would also cut down on support issues.
Mind, I'm not really suggesting that the original poster actually pursue either of these options. I'm just saying that I don't see another way of making a hardware-based authentication system work.I don't think that an iButton would work here. Remember that this is a system for patient-doctor communication. If the patients could come in to use an iButton equipped device at the health care provider's location, they could just talk to their doctors while they were there. And if you think that they're prepared to ask grandma Finklestein to install a Blue Dot receptor on the web-TV she got for Christmas, you're nuts.
A good idea, but near impossible to implement in the real world. It's not realistic to assume that all these doctors and patients will be willing to learn to use PGP. My department contains less than 20 people, and trying to get /them/ to use PGP for sensitive information was hard enough in itself. The original poster describes a "large health care organization". You're talking, at the very least, hundreds of patients who would all have to install PGP, generate keypairs, post public keys... the technical support issues would be nightmarish.
To a certain degree, Slashdot encourages this sort of behavior. We've managed to pigeonhole ourselves ("News for Nerds") as the most recognizeable repository of geek-screed on the web. Since a lot of the opinions posted here are on the incendiary side, it figures that journalists looking for the "what geeks think of the Jackson decision" story would look to Slashdot first.
What's a little frustrating about the situation, though, is the fishbowl-like feeling you get while reading thse stories. No one has ever (to my knowledge) used a series of "ZDNet Talkback" posts as fodder for a story of its own. While I'm of the opinion that the reader posts here are of a higher quality than Talkback's (by an order of magnitude), I think this has more to do with the fact that ZDNet has lawyers. Lots of 'em. In a variety of fruit flavors. They consider those posts to be essentially their property, and fair-use clauses aside, they'd likely pursue legal action against rival publications quoting them hither and yon.
I'm not sure I really see this as too much of a problem: prohibiting people from quoting Slashdot posts seems antithetical to a group of people known for supporting, say, open source initiatives. But it still kind of bothers me that Slashdot does the work, and MacWeek and MSNBC get a cheap story.
For what it's worth, I've had a grand total of one online relationship. We met playing a MUSH. After we'd played together for a while, we started talking together out-of character. Then came a phone call, then more. Then, she came up to visit me on Spring Break.
/wanted/ those things. Golden rule, and all that.
That was in 1994. We've been married now for two years, and I don't think I've ever been happier.
I don't consider myself an expert on relationships, by any stretch of the imagination. I've been in a grand total of two, including this one. I've done my best to be "the good guy": to be as honest, understanding, and giving as I can. As far as I can tell, good relationships are predicated on nothing more complex than concern for your partner, honesty, and laughter. I've been lucky enough to find a wonderful relationship, but I was also sharp enough to remember to act in a manner that showed that I
Feh. Enough rambling. I wish you all the luck in the world. Love is a complicated thing, and I make no pretense of understanding it. So my advice: don't bother trying. Just live in the moment, be nice, and remember to laugh. That's basically what worked for me.
It's really a nasty scenario, and one that happens more than you might think. The consultancy doesn't mind you working if they can get a cut, but if the market-space starts to dwindle, they'd rather starve their competitors for talent using non-compete agreements than let their contractors work. Sucks bad, but it's life.
It's not quite the same thing, but there are not-for-profit ISPs that provide internet access (usually frame relay, or point-to-point T's). I know that there's one in the Chester County, PA area called Chesconet. It provides at-cost internet access to not-for-profits like schools, libraries, etc. Barebones service (you get a connection, maybe a couple of mail accounts), but for what they sell, there's no beating the prices.
DISCLAIMER: I'm associated with Chesconet, and therefore not an entirely uninterested party.
In other words, yes.
What's worse about a tool like this is that mere possession of it can lead to accusations of liability on the part of the school in the event of a violent episode. If the software predicts that Johnny is going act out violently and no preventative action is taken, the school could very easily become a target for legal action if something happens. As a result, school administrators will be encouraged to take action in situations which don't warrant it, and to take the strongest action possible. Past experience with school administration has convinced me that the opposite threat - that of a wrongly accused child's parents threatening the district - won't scare administrators away enough to prevent this.
You mentioned IRC Botnets - another example (and to my knowledge, one of the most common) of DOS attacks is a simple "smurf" attack. It's an easy enough attack: put together a ping request with a forged FROM header, and send it to a network's broadcast address. If the admin has been lazy (and you're on a full class C), you'll wind up with up to 255 computers all pinging the same device.
I've seen this used to blow out a University's web server at the same time as it stresses two Universities' Internet connections. It's not pretty. Or new: Wired News ran an article about escalating numbers of smurf attacks way back in January of 1998.
Actually, I don't at all see how the differing nature of business processes affect the adoption of OSS. After all, it's not like MSSQL is naturally more flexable than, say, Postgres. Indeed, OSS can more easily be customized for a variety of situations precisely because it is modifiable.
But, I doubt we'll see a lot of OSS in e-commerce too. Just for different reasons.
It seems to me that because it is the nature of business to be competitive, it is against the corporate mindset to trust a large part of the business to a co-operative effort. The suits I've talked to are more likely to view these endeavors as being necessarily quid-pro-quo: the logic seems to be that if they're not paying top dollar to have someone put this stuff together for them (right down to the software level), it's suspect.
I expect it's an unfortunate side effect of the elusive nature of software systems. A lot of executives view techs like mechanics: they don't know what we do, they don't care, they just don't want their engine to jump out of the hood and land on the road, and they expect to pay for the privilege. If I told you I knew a mechanic who doesn't charge for parts... well, that'd be weird. Corp types think the two things are equivalent.
C'mon, Jon. Everyone knows that the really 'l33t haX0r d00dz are too busy hacking into DOD computers using tools that look like a development build of Quake 3, while simultaneously checking their IV drip of Jolt from their darkened, pizza-stained couches, to take the time to surf. Unless one of their friends send them a killer pr0n link. Huh-huh huh. pr0n.
Yes, I'm responding to my own post. After thinking about it a bit more, I've figured out why I couldn't articulate my point better before. It's because we're talking about games, and the use of digital media in games is much different than in the rest of the world.
For example, a 3d model in a game may - and almost certainly will - turn up elsewhere with a brand new skin. I can go to one of the major skin sites, download a few that I like, and voila: I have skins to use in my new [Quake | Unreal | UT | whatever] mod. Same goes with textures, prefab objects (like chairs). Hell, using UnrealEd, I could open someone elses' level, rip out a wall, attach it to another level, and reuse it that way. Reuse of digital media components in games isn't anything like reuse in the rest of the world.
I'm particularly intrigued by Carmack's comments about open source game licensing, and his observation that RMS' comments on free (as in speech) software seem to apply equally to all digital media - art, music, sound effects, models, what-have-you. Personally, I don't think that's the case, because code has applications (no pun intended) that music and art don't, but I'm not sure I can articulate my point of view any better than that.
I'd like to hear what you guys think about it. (Particularly if you're RMS, for curiosity's sake. :) )
Hanlon's Razor says, "never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity." So, I'm goint with door number two, Monty.
Anyone who has a more than passing interest in this story and is a fan of science fiction owes it to [him|her]self to check out Forever Peace, by Joe Haldeman. For those of you who read Forever War, the author says that it's a continuation, of sorts, of the issues he raised in the first book, though not a sequel in the strict sense.
One of the two central plot devices (you'll excuse the pun) in the book is the construction of a particle accelerator near Jupiter capable of recreating the Big Bang.
A valid point - I'm sure that Jane's found it easier to solicit opinions from /. readers than to find an individual expert they could trust and pay him/her to write something. On the other hand, I don't see that this is such a bad thing in and of itself. No one was forced to read the article and provide comment, after all.