This news made me realize how much I depend on Debian. At the moment, every one of my machines (four servers, three workstations, and a laptop) runs Debian. I've been running it as my primary OS for... two years? So far I haven't paid a dime for it. It is a nice advantage of Free Software to be able to use it for free, but given the fact that I'm way out of "try-before-you-buy" mode, I'm going to send them a check today. Software in the Public Interest was founded by and is the current funding source for Debian.
One server compromise in the two years that I've been watching by a company with zero product sales revenue is pretty impressive. An OS that is (IMO) dramatically superior to any commercial offering for free? They've earned my respect, and have clearly earned my cash.
[Many examples of McDonald's not taking accountabillity for the coffee issue]
Reports also indicate that McDonald's consistently keeps its coffee at 185 degrees, still approximately 20 degrees hotter than at other restaurants. Third degree burns occur at this temperature in just two to seven seconds, requiring skin grafting, debridement and whirlpool treatments that cost tens of thousands of dollars and result in permanent disfigurement, extreme pain and disability to the victims for many months, and in some cases, years.
So what's your point? Ford sells cars knowing full well that those cars are capable of killing the driver and numerous other people in the vicinity.
But McDonald's sells really hot coffee?
So is Ferarri liable for selling really fast cars?
Is Pontiac liable for selling the new GTO, which is really fast and doesn't have a compensatory increase in handling?
In practice, I guess the answer is yes - if lots of people buy the GTO and then slide it off a freeway interchange, Pontiac will be held liable. I see that as a bad thing. I prefer to make my own choices about what I believe is safe.
Should parents be allowed to sue their ISP for making pornography available to their children? Should the RIAA be allowed to sue 2600 for making available a tool which can be used to crack DVD encryption?
Who should be liable? The company that makes a potentially dangerous product available, or the person who uses it dangerously?
Who should be liable? The person who makes DeCSS available, or the person who uses it to pirate DVDs?
Who should be liable? The company that sells really hot coffee, or the 81 year old that tries to drink it while driving?
The very reason the McDonald's case comes up so frequently is because it is currently the canonical example of where the dividing line between personal accountability and public protection is crossed.
Me? I'm with McDonald's (and 2600) on this one. I would much rather have the freedom to buy a gun and shoot myself in the foot.
Do you feel that corporate IT budgets should be focusing on cutting edge technology to best serve its customer's needs, or should they focus on shoring up what they have now in order to maximize its usefulness to the customer?
This statement I agree with, though perhaps in a different way than the way in which Mr. Carr would agree.
I feel that business has placed vastly greater importance on new features than on product quality. The result is a lot of bugs, and code that is difficult to maintain. If we (IT people) were rewarded for stability and quality as well as we are for new features, I think everyone would be happier. Since the reward structure reflects business's desire for more features sooner, it is a constant struggle to keep developers aware that things like refactoring and unit testing lead to a better product and faster development in the long run - many respond, "I'm not concerned with the long run, because my boss told me to get this done now." It is difficult to argue with this pragmatic philosophy (though, being an idealist, I do persist in leaping 'pon the back of mighty Rocinante and charging the windmill).
The licence is royalty free, but GPL 7 requires the right to sublicence patent rights to the people who obtain a GPL program from you.
so in other words Microsoft is using patents to prevent GPLed programs from accessing the XML format that MS Word will be using.
True, but only in an limited sense. The GPL places no restrictions on the libraries to which it links, and the MS license places no restrictions on software that links to software that is under this license. So it is only a matter of a very short period of time until a GPL compatible wrapper is available.
[MS Format] <- [OS Facade] <- [GPL Code]
This works particularly well with any GPL software that has a document interface. You have a Facade that functionally implements the API, and a GPL'd wrapper that uses that Facade as a servant and technically implements the API. Thus the GPL wrapper is linked to the GPL interface and the GPL compatible Facade, the Facade is the only thing linked to the MS Schema.
The whole would not be Free, but it would be a GPL compatible Open Source plugin.
"We still think free choice is best for companies, the individuals and the government," said Luiz Moncau, Microsoft's marketing director in Brazil. "There is the risk of creating a technology island in Brazil supported by law."
So, wait, in the first part of that quote, he says free choice is good. In the second part he says Microsoft's monopoly and refusal to interoperate make free choice painful. So after running that through the bullshit-o-tron we get: "Free choice is good as long as you choose Microsoft."
I'm a more passionate critic of Microsoft than even most of the people in this focused community, but this is not justified.
By controlling the first 10% of what the average consumer sees, they can manipulate consumer opinion and knoledge.
The sponsored links page (the front page, if indeed it is sponsored links) includes: 1. A Linux and Windows Dedicated Server Host 2. Another Lin & Win Host 3. Another Lin & Win Host 4. Backup Software For Lin, Win, Nix 5. Another Lin & Win Host 6. Security Software For Lin, Win, Nix 7. CNet Downloads for Lin, Win, Nix 8. Another Win & Lin Host 9. Barnes & Noble Book on DB2 for Win, Lin, Nix 10. Amazon Book on Linux for Windows Users 11. Amazon Book on X Windows (nothing about MS Win) 12. Cross Platform Virus Story 13 - 15. Three WINE Links 16. - doesn't appear? Perhaps they forgot to subtract one from the size of the array:)
I'm all for bashing Microsoft. I even think a certain amount of propaganda is appropriate, along the lines of fighting fire with fire, but this is just flat out FUD. Even a tin-foil hatted conspiracy theorist could only possibly point to item 12 as remotely anti-Linux (it could be taken to imply that Linux is as vulnerable as Windows), and even that would require a stupendous amount of blind credulity. 10, 11, and 13-15 are clearly in favor of Linux.
There is absolutly nothing wrong with a good text installer.
Sorry to get in on this one late. You are absolutely correct, and just a hair short of the mark. A good command line interface (CLI) installer is better than a good gui installer. You can run a CLI installer on a VGA card, but have you ever tried to run a gui installer without a grahics card? If (and this may be a big if) the CLI and the GUI have all the same features (sensible help, wizards, etc), the only upside of GUI is the prettiness.
A GUI means there is more code to potentially get wrong, and it's less user-friendly for advanced use. Many things have to be text entered for a full install (EG: static network settings) - requiring the user to switch from analog data entry (mouse) to binary data entry (keyclicks) is a hinderance both in terms of moving your right hand and in terms of mental context switching.
There is far too much GUI in the world. This is a matter of consciousness raising - stop blindly nodding when technots imply GUI is inherently better. The invention of the GUI should no more be the death of the CLI than television was the death of radio (which is to say, CLI may take a back seat, but still has an important role).
The litmus test of this is code editors. The two most effective code editors are Vi* and Emacs. I switched to Emacs from a GUI editor in 2000. I've since made extensive use of IntelliJ and Eclipse. Emacs is still better - it doesn't sacrifice keyboarding and screen real estate to satisfy an analog input device, which has absolutely no place in code development.
Even the technotards at Microsoft have finally figured this out and have begun rebuilding DOS.
Have you looked at what a teacher makes or any other number of degree-requiring professions? CAD$40k might sound sucky to you, but I'm betting there's a lot of unemployed IT ppl out there right now who'd take it in a snap.
First, I completely agree that teachers are shamefully underpaid. I believe there are few investments that would do more for the long-term US GDP than doubling school budgets.
But regarding IT pay, may I counter: Have you looked at how much wealth I create for the company? Seeing the guy three levels above me in the org chart driving a new SL55 AMG, seeing our stock, revenue, and profit climb an average of 60% over the past year, and knowing that the software I wrote is key to that success, I feel rather underpaid, thank you.
I create a cartload of wealth, and I expect that it be divided reasonably between the stockholders, management, and the wealth creators (employees).
The phrase "Intellectual Property" pisses Stallman off because it has no meaning, whereas "Patents, Copyright and Trademark",
You forgot "protocols, security holes (covered by anti-copyright; the copyrighting of blocks of code you didn't write but should have), and ink-jet cartridges."
I've been wondering when someone was going to try this for quite a while. "Dumping", selling a product below cost in order to force your competitors out of business, is illegal for good reasons.
I'm not sure whether it's illegal or not (as so many of our economics-related laws are irrational), but if it is, it is most definitely not illegal for good reason. Economists tend to get hot under the collar whenever their government engages in the economically self-destructive practice of protectionism under the spectre of dumping. Any first year economics student can explain precisely why dumping is good for the economy that is being dumped into in essentially every real world situation[1]. Any Linux enthusiast can as easily explain why the same is true of operating systems[2].
Consider the example of Netscape - Microsoft has spent nearly ten years attempting to dump it out of existence. Microsoft's price for IE remains at zero (not to mention their correlary anti-competitive attacks), and still Netscape lives on (and a host of other browsers, including ones with non-zero prices have poppoed up). And that's just looking at the browser producers - the rest of the world, the browser consumers, like 99.99% of the population and a similar percentage of businesses, are ECSTATIC about the browser wars. How different would the world today be if Netscape, Opera, Mozilla, Konquerer, and IE all cost $99, and had never been free?
Selling something for less than the cost of producing it. This may be used by a DOMINANT FIRM to attack rivals, a strategy known to ANTITRUST authorities as PREDATORY PRICING. Participants in international trade are often accused of dumping by domestic FIRMS charging more than rival IMPORTS. Countries can slap duties on cheap imports that they judge are being dumped in their markets. Often this amounts to thinly disguised PROTECTIONISM against more efficient foreign firms.
In practice, genuine predatory pricing is rare - certainly much rarer than anti-dumping actions - because it relies on the unlikely ability of a single producer to dominate a world market. In any case, consumers gain from lower PRICES; so do companies that can buy their supplies more cheaply abroad.
That is - unless IBM's Linux division has a maintainable monopoly on the OS market (it does not), and the ability to raise its price (it does not), and the ability to drive its competition out (OK, guilty), and there are significant barriers to reentry to the OS market (there are none), claiming dumping is specious at best.
[2] Having the ability to run a variety of operating systems without having to pay for each license makes it easier for the user to satisfy his or her wants. On the business side, a vastly greater number of businesses are OS consumers than are OS producers - thus the business world as a whole *LOVES* OS dumping (if it can be called that).
Following is my revised email sig, part of which is stolen from a +5 rated message from the last story. Keep the pressure on folks. As Microsoft has so clearly demonstrated, preventing further harm from one specific act is not enough to dissuade new and more creative despicable acts by malicious corporations. Companies must realized that it is not enough to say you're sorry (particularly when you have your fingers crossed behind your back). We don't let criminals who have malice aforethought get away with "I'm Sorry". We should not be any more lenient with malicious corporations.
Belkin (verb) - To surreptitiously alter a product in such a fashion that legitimate use is hijacked to the benefit of the manufacturer or associated beneficiaries, usually in a crass self-promoting fashion. "I installed topdesk and it belkined my browser." "VeriSign's SiteFinder belkined the.com and.net TLDs."
Belkin products are broken as designed. http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/11/07/174020 5
Belkin has recanted and claims they will issue a patch. Good. Now all they have to do for me to remove this.sig is to pay their pennance. Backing down is not enough, I require satisfaction. May I suggest a $100,000 donation to the EFF?
For items priced $0.01-$5.00, the transaction fee is 15%. For items priced $5.00 and higher, the transaction fee is 5% + $0.50.
15% is one helluva chunk to take for being the clearinghouse for micropayments, and the over $5 fee is roughly twice what you'd pay through a US commercial gateway.
This may seem like religious rhetoric (I'm a Debian user), but frankly, it is RedHat that isn't ready for the desktop, not Linux. The biggest problem with any Linux system is being able to easily install software. RPM is not easy and RedCarpet is neither complete nor does it handle dependencies elegantly. What makes RedHat great is their nice shiny corporate facade and excellent (albeit spendy) enterprise support. That's good for enterprise use, but it's not much good for end users (unless you've got money to burn).
The beautifully maintained Apt archives make life easy for the person maintaining the platform if they are comfortable with the command line, but it's no fun for the typical end user. Debian's install process is pretty intimidating (not hard mind you, but it will scare people away), and the lack of easy Windows network integration is a bit of a drawback for most people.
XandrOS solves those problems with a nice GUI interface for Apt, the installer, and wizards for connecting to your EvilOS machines. It's not safe outside the firewall (or at least the version I purchased was not), but if you've got Windows machines and non-expert users, you shouldn't have the machine outside a firewall anyway.
RedHat is the biggest, and perhaps the best for enterprise server closets, but not the best for the typical end user's desktop. So RedHat is focusing on the market to which it is best suited. It doesn't strike me as a bad thing. It's a lot better than hearing friends of mine, upon their first time using Linux, complaining that Linux is too hard because installing RPMs is a hassle, and further assuming that since RedHat is the one they've heard of, everything else must be worse.
RedHat leaving the desktop space is a good thing - it leaves more market share for the truly desktop oriented distros like Lindows, XandrOS, Mandrake, and friends. It could even lead to commercial vendors focusing a bit less attention on RPM and a bit more on platform independent tarballs.
So what do they mean by "permanent?" If someone wants to wipe and reinstall their OS, what happens?
Assuming this is the case, and with sufficient effort it can be fixed, I'd guess this is lawyerism. If they say, "it's not possible", but it is, you won't sue. If they say, "it's possible, but it's really hard and should only be attempted by experts", and it can't be done by a Luddite with a sledgehammer, that Luddite will sue, and win.
Contracts aren't supposed to make sense. They're supposed to make jobs for contract attorneys. They depend on the fact that most of their target market won't read the contract. This is the newspeak definition of perfect information.
However, you neglect the other side of that coin: a society (or genetic population) where pro-social behavior is the norm is itself an environment with genetic pressures towards anti-social behavior. A big network of bonds of trust is a network of opportunity for one willing to abuse those bonds.
I can't mod after commenting, but if I could I would. I started thinking down this exact same path after I had posted. Fascinating stuff. I need to get around to reading a book on game theory.
I'm afraid you are mistaken, they do own the infrastructure. The infrastructure of modern business is information protocols. Microsoft most certainly does own the MS Office document formats, their inter-tier APIs, and their non-standard network protocols. That was the entire point of this case, that they are using their lateral monopoly on information infrastructure to leverage expansion of their monopoly and to prevent competition. ISVs were told, "if you do not help us kill the competition, then you cannot sell Microsoft compatible products(*)," and the ISVs cannot survive without selling Microsoft compatible products.
* Note that they were told they could not sell Microsoft products, which are the only products that are Microsoft compatible, because of the aforementioned proprietary infrastructure.
I just don't understand how one company can be convicted of illegal monopolistic practices in an industry that garners them billions upon billions and are let go with; heh, please don't do it again, and oh yeah you can be on the board of persons who makes sure you operate justly and fairly.
This really cuts to the core of the problem. The anti-trust law remediation policy says (roughly) "the cure should be the minimum necessary to restore competitiveness - there should be no punishment for past acts, only corrective measures." The courts take this to mean (at the behest of defending council) that the violation should be spelled out, and the company should be instructed not to do so again.
We long ago realized that this does not work with people who break the law. People who break the law are punished, because we recognize that there must be a deterrent to bad behaviour. Not because people want to be bad, or because we want vengeance, but because if there is no downside to being bad, they won't think in terms of the consequences of their actions. And this despite the genetic imperative to be moral that exists in people (social groups are more likely to survive to breeding age than anti-social groups, thus social people are more likely to exist).
There is no such genetic imperative in business. Business schools actively promote amorality - not because it is "good", but because a business should not be in the business of deciding what is moral, it should be in the business of deciding what is profitable. It is assumed that what customers choose to purchase is a reflection of what society wants.
This is in direct contradiction to the anti-trust standards. If customers cannot make a free choice of what to buy, then they cannot enforce the will of society through the power of the pocketbook.
In summary then:
The courts will not punish abusive monopolies (it is not in their mandate - they are only supposed to take corrective steps).
Society can not punish abusive monopolies (without free choice to purchase competing products, there is no power of the pocketbook).
Business profits by being an abusive monopoly (self explanatory).
What behaviour, in light of this, are we expecting?
Having recently reviewed about 25 different O-R mapping tools, including top finishers Apache OJB, Oracle TopLink and Hibernate, I feel comfortable saying that this is the best online mapping site. What's that? Geography you say? Oh, oops, sorry, O-R on the brain. Carry on.
So wait, let me see if I get this straight. Are they acutally implying that supercomputers built starting five years ago are actually more expensive per unit of computing power than supercomputers built today? Why, if that were true, and if the same thing applied to workstations, then you'd be able to get a 2 gigahertz machine today for what a 500 megahertz machine cost five years ago. Ludicrous I tell you. Simply ludicrous.
I set up a Xandros box and (stupidly) left it exposed to the outside world without shutting down all of the default services. It being Debian based, and hence having apt, I kept the software up to date with all the patches from security.debian.org. Not good enough. About a week later someone came in through a service (which was not part of the standard Debian distro) meant for system administration that had the port open to * (as opposed to 127.0.0.1).
The lesson is that easy to use distros with lots of things to make it easy on the end user (like WebDAV) are all well and good behind a firewall, or as a sacrificial box in the DMZ, but should not themselves be the firewall. It would be possible to create a firewall in a box that would keep itself up to date, but with all the bells and whistles on this thing, it's going to be as dangerous as Windows.
Microsoft would have a fair point if they said this, "if you want a lot of open ports and friendly services for easy system interop, and you don't know how or don't want to invest the time to secure your machine, and you don't keep the software up to date, it will be compromised." The same is true of Linux.
They have also announced that the system will feature presidential vote wildcarding. If you click anywhere on the screen except exactly in the center of a candidate box, your vote will be automatically given to Verisign CEO Stratton Sclavos.
Do you think IBM might be a little bit pissed off about their trademark being used to point to someone else's computer hardware site? Do you think they might, I dunno, sue?
How about all these other blatant trademark infringements: http://ibm-asda-hardware.com http ://ibm-asdb-hardware.com http://ibm-asdc-hardware .com http://ibm-asdd-hardware.com http://ibm-asd e-hardware.com http://ibm-asdg-hardware.com http ://ibm-asdh-hardware.com http://ibm-asdi-hardware .com http://ibm-asdj-hardware.com
As I see it, Verisign is facing a not-quite-infinite number of trademark infringement lawsuits. And, of course, if Verisign switches to point to IBM, I'm sure hardware.com would be delighted to fire their own volley of lawyers.
OK, it's just a joke, but I'm interested in countering one point that some people still believe.
It's cross-platform feature has been tainted by the agenda of the forces that dominate the respective operating system
I am currently employed on a project with roughly one megaLOC of Java. It has a Swing GUI, EJB middle tier, and Oracle at the back. It currently runs on Windows, several flavors of Linux, and Solaris, without recompile. I do the production builds on a Linux machine and we distribute them to roughly 2000 Windows and a few dozen Linux workstations. Likewise I do the production middle tier on Linux and deploy to Solaris, and the development and testing versions of the middle tier go to Windows, Linux, and Solaris.
Would it fit on a wristwatch? No, it's too big. Would it run on BeOS or Mac? You betcha.
Slashdot Mirror
This news made me realize how much I depend on Debian. At the moment, every one of my machines (four servers, three workstations, and a laptop) runs Debian. I've been running it as my primary OS for... two years? So far I haven't paid a dime for it. It is a nice advantage of Free Software to be able to use it for free, but given the fact that I'm way out of "try-before-you-buy" mode, I'm going to send them a check today. Software in the Public Interest was founded by and is the current funding source for Debian.
One server compromise in the two years that I've been watching by a company with zero product sales revenue is pretty impressive. An OS that is (IMO) dramatically superior to any commercial offering for free? They've earned my respect, and have clearly earned my cash.
[Many examples of McDonald's not taking accountabillity for the coffee issue]
Reports also indicate that McDonald's consistently keeps its coffee at 185 degrees, still approximately 20 degrees hotter than at other restaurants. Third degree burns occur at this temperature in just two to seven seconds, requiring skin grafting, debridement and whirlpool treatments that cost tens of thousands of dollars and result in permanent disfigurement, extreme pain and disability to the victims for many months, and in some cases, years.
So what's your point? Ford sells cars knowing full well that those cars are capable of killing the driver and numerous other people in the vicinity.
But McDonald's sells really hot coffee?
So is Ferarri liable for selling really fast cars?
Is Pontiac liable for selling the new GTO, which is really fast and doesn't have a compensatory increase in handling?
In practice, I guess the answer is yes - if lots of people buy the GTO and then slide it off a freeway interchange, Pontiac will be held liable. I see that as a bad thing. I prefer to make my own choices about what I believe is safe.
Should parents be allowed to sue their ISP for making pornography available to their children? Should the RIAA be allowed to sue 2600 for making available a tool which can be used to crack DVD encryption?
Who should be liable? The company that makes a potentially dangerous product available, or the person who uses it dangerously?
Who should be liable? The person who makes DeCSS available, or the person who uses it to pirate DVDs?
Who should be liable? The company that sells really hot coffee, or the 81 year old that tries to drink it while driving?
The very reason the McDonald's case comes up so frequently is because it is currently the canonical example of where the dividing line between personal accountability and public protection is crossed.
Me? I'm with McDonald's (and 2600) on this one. I would much rather have the freedom to buy a gun and shoot myself in the foot.
Do you feel that corporate IT budgets should be focusing on cutting edge technology to best serve its customer's needs, or should they focus on shoring up what they have now in order to maximize its usefulness to the customer?
This statement I agree with, though perhaps in a different way than the way in which Mr. Carr would agree.
I feel that business has placed vastly greater importance on new features than on product quality. The result is a lot of bugs, and code that is difficult to maintain. If we (IT people) were rewarded for stability and quality as well as we are for new features, I think everyone would be happier. Since the reward structure reflects business's desire for more features sooner, it is a constant struggle to keep developers aware that things like refactoring and unit testing lead to a better product and faster development in the long run - many respond, "I'm not concerned with the long run, because my boss told me to get this done now." It is difficult to argue with this pragmatic philosophy (though, being an idealist, I do persist in leaping 'pon the back of mighty Rocinante and charging the windmill).
The licence is royalty free, but GPL 7 requires the right to sublicence patent rights to the people who obtain a GPL program from you.
so in other words Microsoft is using patents to prevent GPLed programs from accessing the XML format that MS Word will be using.
True, but only in an limited sense. The GPL places no restrictions on the libraries to which it links, and the MS license places no restrictions on software that links to software that is under this license. So it is only a matter of a very short period of time until a GPL compatible wrapper is available.
[MS Format] <- [OS Facade] <- [GPL Code]
This works particularly well with any GPL software that has a document interface. You have a Facade that functionally implements the API, and a GPL'd wrapper that uses that Facade as a servant and technically implements the API. Thus the GPL wrapper is linked to the GPL interface and the GPL compatible Facade, the Facade is the only thing linked to the MS Schema.
The whole would not be Free, but it would be a GPL compatible Open Source plugin.
"We still think free choice is best for companies, the individuals and the government," said Luiz Moncau, Microsoft's marketing director in Brazil. "There is the risk of creating a technology island in Brazil supported by law."
So, wait, in the first part of that quote, he says free choice is good. In the second part he says Microsoft's monopoly and refusal to interoperate make free choice painful. So after running that through the bullshit-o-tron we get: "Free choice is good as long as you choose Microsoft."
I'm a more passionate critic of Microsoft than even most of the people in this focused community, but this is not justified.
:)
By controlling the first 10% of what the average consumer sees, they can manipulate consumer opinion and knoledge.
The sponsored links page (the front page, if indeed it is sponsored links) includes:
1. A Linux and Windows Dedicated Server Host
2. Another Lin & Win Host
3. Another Lin & Win Host
4. Backup Software For Lin, Win, Nix
5. Another Lin & Win Host
6. Security Software For Lin, Win, Nix
7. CNet Downloads for Lin, Win, Nix
8. Another Win & Lin Host
9. Barnes & Noble Book on DB2 for Win, Lin, Nix
10. Amazon Book on Linux for Windows Users
11. Amazon Book on X Windows (nothing about MS Win)
12. Cross Platform Virus Story
13 - 15. Three WINE Links
16. - doesn't appear? Perhaps they forgot to subtract one from the size of the array
I'm all for bashing Microsoft. I even think a certain amount of propaganda is appropriate, along the lines of fighting fire with fire, but this is just flat out FUD. Even a tin-foil hatted conspiracy theorist could only possibly point to item 12 as remotely anti-Linux (it could be taken to imply that Linux is as vulnerable as Windows), and even that would require a stupendous amount of blind credulity. 10, 11, and 13-15 are clearly in favor of Linux.
There is absolutly nothing wrong with a good text installer.
Sorry to get in on this one late. You are absolutely correct, and just a hair short of the mark. A good command line interface (CLI) installer is better than a good gui installer. You can run a CLI installer on a VGA card, but have you ever tried to run a gui installer without a grahics card? If (and this may be a big if) the CLI and the GUI have all the same features (sensible help, wizards, etc), the only upside of GUI is the prettiness.
A GUI means there is more code to potentially get wrong, and it's less user-friendly for advanced use. Many things have to be text entered for a full install (EG: static network settings) - requiring the user to switch from analog data entry (mouse) to binary data entry (keyclicks) is a hinderance both in terms of moving your right hand and in terms of mental context switching.
There is far too much GUI in the world. This is a matter of consciousness raising - stop blindly nodding when technots imply GUI is inherently better. The invention of the GUI should no more be the death of the CLI than television was the death of radio (which is to say, CLI may take a back seat, but still has an important role).
The litmus test of this is code editors. The two most effective code editors are Vi* and Emacs. I switched to Emacs from a GUI editor in 2000. I've since made extensive use of IntelliJ and Eclipse. Emacs is still better - it doesn't sacrifice keyboarding and screen real estate to satisfy an analog input device, which has absolutely no place in code development.
Even the technotards at Microsoft have finally figured this out and have begun rebuilding DOS.
Have you looked at what a teacher makes or any other number of degree-requiring professions? CAD$40k might sound sucky to you, but I'm betting there's a lot of unemployed IT ppl out there right now who'd take it in a snap.
First, I completely agree that teachers are shamefully underpaid. I believe there are few investments that would do more for the long-term US GDP than doubling school budgets.
But regarding IT pay, may I counter: Have you looked at how much wealth I create for the company? Seeing the guy three levels above me in the org chart driving a new SL55 AMG, seeing our stock, revenue, and profit climb an average of 60% over the past year, and knowing that the software I wrote is key to that success, I feel rather underpaid, thank you.
I create a cartload of wealth, and I expect that it be divided reasonably between the stockholders, management, and the wealth creators (employees).
The phrase "Intellectual Property" pisses Stallman off because it has no meaning, whereas "Patents, Copyright and Trademark",
You forgot "protocols, security holes (covered by anti-copyright; the copyrighting of blocks of code you didn't write but should have), and ink-jet cartridges."
I've been wondering when someone was going to try this for quite a while. "Dumping", selling a product below cost in order to force your competitors out of business, is illegal for good reasons.
I'm not sure whether it's illegal or not (as so many of our economics-related laws are irrational), but if it is, it is most definitely not illegal for good reason. Economists tend to get hot under the collar whenever their government engages in the economically self-destructive practice of protectionism under the spectre of dumping. Any first year economics student can explain precisely why dumping is good for the economy that is being dumped into in essentially every real world situation[1]. Any Linux enthusiast can as easily explain why the same is true of operating systems[2].
Consider the example of Netscape - Microsoft has spent nearly ten years attempting to dump it out of existence. Microsoft's price for IE remains at zero (not to mention their correlary anti-competitive attacks), and still Netscape lives on (and a host of other browsers, including ones with non-zero prices have poppoed up). And that's just looking at the browser producers - the rest of the world, the browser consumers, like 99.99% of the population and a similar percentage of businesses, are ECSTATIC about the browser wars. How different would the world today be if Netscape, Opera, Mozilla, Konquerer, and IE all cost $99, and had never been free?
[1] DUMPING
Selling something for less than the cost of producing it. This may be used by a DOMINANT FIRM to attack rivals, a strategy known to ANTITRUST authorities as PREDATORY PRICING. Participants in international trade are often accused of dumping by domestic FIRMS charging more than rival IMPORTS. Countries can slap duties on cheap imports that they judge are being dumped in their markets. Often this amounts to thinly disguised PROTECTIONISM against more efficient foreign firms.
In practice, genuine predatory pricing is rare - certainly much rarer than anti-dumping actions - because it relies on the unlikely ability of a single producer to dominate a world market. In any case, consumers gain from lower PRICES; so do companies that can buy their supplies more cheaply abroad.
That is - unless IBM's Linux division has a maintainable monopoly on the OS market (it does not), and the ability to raise its price (it does not), and the ability to drive its competition out (OK, guilty), and there are significant barriers to reentry to the OS market (there are none), claiming dumping is specious at best.
[2] Having the ability to run a variety of operating systems without having to pay for each license makes it easier for the user to satisfy his or her wants. On the business side, a vastly greater number of businesses are OS consumers than are OS producers - thus the business world as a whole *LOVES* OS dumping (if it can be called that).
Following is my revised email sig, part of which is stolen from a +5 rated message from the last story. Keep the pressure on folks. As Microsoft has so clearly demonstrated, preventing further harm from one specific act is not enough to dissuade new and more creative despicable acts by malicious corporations. Companies must realized that it is not enough to say you're sorry (particularly when you have your fingers crossed behind your back). We don't let criminals who have malice aforethought get away with "I'm Sorry". We should not be any more lenient with malicious corporations.
.com and .net TLDs."
0 5
.sig is to pay their pennance. Backing down is not enough, I require satisfaction. May I suggest a $100,000 donation to the EFF?
Belkin (verb) - To surreptitiously alter a product in such a fashion that legitimate use is hijacked to the benefit of the manufacturer or associated beneficiaries, usually in a crass self-promoting fashion.
"I installed topdesk and it belkined my browser."
"VeriSign's SiteFinder belkined the
Belkin products are broken as designed. http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/11/07/17402
Belkin has recanted and claims they will issue a patch. Good. Now all they have to do for me to remove this
For items priced $0.01-$5.00, the transaction fee is 15%.
For items priced $5.00 and higher, the transaction fee is 5% + $0.50.
15% is one helluva chunk to take for being the clearinghouse for micropayments, and the over $5 fee is roughly twice what you'd pay through a US commercial gateway.
This may seem like religious rhetoric (I'm a Debian user), but frankly, it is RedHat that isn't ready for the desktop, not Linux. The biggest problem with any Linux system is being able to easily install software. RPM is not easy and RedCarpet is neither complete nor does it handle dependencies elegantly. What makes RedHat great is their nice shiny corporate facade and excellent (albeit spendy) enterprise support. That's good for enterprise use, but it's not much good for end users (unless you've got money to burn).
The beautifully maintained Apt archives make life easy for the person maintaining the platform if they are comfortable with the command line, but it's no fun for the typical end user. Debian's install process is pretty intimidating (not hard mind you, but it will scare people away), and the lack of easy Windows network integration is a bit of a drawback for most people.
XandrOS solves those problems with a nice GUI interface for Apt, the installer, and wizards for connecting to your EvilOS machines. It's not safe outside the firewall (or at least the version I purchased was not), but if you've got Windows machines and non-expert users, you shouldn't have the machine outside a firewall anyway.
RedHat is the biggest, and perhaps the best for enterprise server closets, but not the best for the typical end user's desktop. So RedHat is focusing on the market to which it is best suited. It doesn't strike me as a bad thing. It's a lot better than hearing friends of mine, upon their first time using Linux, complaining that Linux is too hard because installing RPMs is a hassle, and further assuming that since RedHat is the one they've heard of, everything else must be worse.
RedHat leaving the desktop space is a good thing - it leaves more market share for the truly desktop oriented distros like Lindows, XandrOS, Mandrake, and friends. It could even lead to commercial vendors focusing a bit less attention on RPM and a bit more on platform independent tarballs.
So what do they mean by "permanent?" If someone wants to wipe and reinstall their OS, what happens?
Assuming this is the case, and with sufficient effort it can be fixed, I'd guess this is lawyerism. If they say, "it's not possible", but it is, you won't sue. If they say, "it's possible, but it's really hard and should only be attempted by experts", and it can't be done by a Luddite with a sledgehammer, that Luddite will sue, and win.
Contracts aren't supposed to make sense. They're supposed to make jobs for contract attorneys. They depend on the fact that most of their target market won't read the contract. This is the newspeak definition of perfect information.
However, you neglect the other side of that coin: a society (or genetic population) where pro-social behavior is the norm is itself an environment with genetic pressures towards anti-social behavior. A big network of bonds of trust is a network of opportunity for one willing to abuse those bonds.
I can't mod after commenting, but if I could I would. I started thinking down this exact same path after I had posted. Fascinating stuff. I need to get around to reading a book on game theory.
Nor do they own the infrastructure
I'm afraid you are mistaken, they do own the infrastructure. The infrastructure of modern business is information protocols. Microsoft most certainly does own the MS Office document formats, their inter-tier APIs, and their non-standard network protocols. That was the entire point of this case, that they are using their lateral monopoly on information infrastructure to leverage expansion of their monopoly and to prevent competition. ISVs were told, "if you do not help us kill the competition, then you cannot sell Microsoft compatible products(*)," and the ISVs cannot survive without selling Microsoft compatible products.
* Note that they were told they could not sell Microsoft products, which are the only products that are Microsoft compatible, because of the aforementioned proprietary infrastructure.
My question is this: is there a place for proprietary (read 'closed') applications on said open/free platforms and frameworks?
Yes.
WebLogic
Acrobat Reader
StarTeam, Together Control Center
StarOffice
WebSphere
That's just off the top of my head.
This really cuts to the core of the problem. The anti-trust law remediation policy says (roughly) "the cure should be the minimum necessary to restore competitiveness - there should be no punishment for past acts, only corrective measures." The courts take this to mean (at the behest of defending council) that the violation should be spelled out, and the company should be instructed not to do so again.
We long ago realized that this does not work with people who break the law. People who break the law are punished, because we recognize that there must be a deterrent to bad behaviour. Not because people want to be bad, or because we want vengeance, but because if there is no downside to being bad, they won't think in terms of the consequences of their actions. And this despite the genetic imperative to be moral that exists in people (social groups are more likely to survive to breeding age than anti-social groups, thus social people are more likely to exist).
There is no such genetic imperative in business. Business schools actively promote amorality - not because it is "good", but because a business should not be in the business of deciding what is moral, it should be in the business of deciding what is profitable. It is assumed that what customers choose to purchase is a reflection of what society wants.
This is in direct contradiction to the anti-trust standards. If customers cannot make a free choice of what to buy, then they cannot enforce the will of society through the power of the pocketbook.
In summary then:
The courts will not punish abusive monopolies (it is not in their mandate - they are only supposed to take corrective steps).
Society can not punish abusive monopolies (without free choice to purchase competing products, there is no power of the pocketbook).
Business profits by being an abusive monopoly (self explanatory).
What behaviour, in light of this, are we expecting?
Having recently reviewed about 25 different O-R mapping tools, including top finishers Apache OJB, Oracle TopLink and Hibernate, I feel comfortable saying that this is the best online mapping site. What's that? Geography you say? Oh, oops, sorry, O-R on the brain. Carry on.
So wait, let me see if I get this straight. Are they acutally implying that supercomputers built starting five years ago are actually more expensive per unit of computing power than supercomputers built today? Why, if that were true, and if the same thing applied to workstations, then you'd be able to get a 2 gigahertz machine today for what a 500 megahertz machine cost five years ago. Ludicrous I tell you. Simply ludicrous.
Mod parent up (I have no points right now).
I set up a Xandros box and (stupidly) left it exposed to the outside world without shutting down all of the default services. It being Debian based, and hence having apt, I kept the software up to date with all the patches from security.debian.org. Not good enough. About a week later someone came in through a service (which was not part of the standard Debian distro) meant for system administration that had the port open to * (as opposed to 127.0.0.1).
The lesson is that easy to use distros with lots of things to make it easy on the end user (like WebDAV) are all well and good behind a firewall, or as a sacrificial box in the DMZ, but should not themselves be the firewall. It would be possible to create a firewall in a box that would keep itself up to date, but with all the bells and whistles on this thing, it's going to be as dangerous as Windows.
Microsoft would have a fair point if they said this, "if you want a lot of open ports and friendly services for easy system interop, and you don't know how or don't want to invest the time to secure your machine, and you don't keep the software up to date, it will be compromised." The same is true of Linux.
They have also announced that the system will feature presidential vote wildcarding. If you click anywhere on the screen except exactly in the center of a candidate box, your vote will be automatically given to Verisign CEO Stratton Sclavos.
Here's a fun solution:
p ://ibm-asdb-hardware.come .comd e-hardware.comp ://ibm-asdh-hardware.come .com
If your ISP hasn't fixed this yet, go to http://ibm-asdf-hardware.com
Do you think IBM might be a little bit pissed off about their trademark being used to point to someone else's computer hardware site? Do you think they might, I dunno, sue?
How about all these other blatant trademark infringements:
http://ibm-asda-hardware.com
htt
http://ibm-asdc-hardwar
http://ibm-asdd-hardware.com
http://ibm-as
http://ibm-asdg-hardware.com
htt
http://ibm-asdi-hardwar
http://ibm-asdj-hardware.com
As I see it, Verisign is facing a not-quite-infinite number of trademark infringement lawsuits. And, of course, if Verisign switches to point to IBM, I'm sure hardware.com would be delighted to fire their own volley of lawyers.
OK, it's just a joke, but I'm interested in countering one point that some people still believe.
It's cross-platform feature has been tainted by the agenda of the forces that dominate the respective operating system
I am currently employed on a project with roughly one megaLOC of Java. It has a Swing GUI, EJB middle tier, and Oracle at the back. It currently runs on Windows, several flavors of Linux, and Solaris, without recompile. I do the production builds on a Linux machine and we distribute them to roughly 2000 Windows and a few dozen Linux workstations. Likewise I do the production middle tier on Linux and deploy to Solaris, and the development and testing versions of the middle tier go to Windows, Linux, and Solaris.
Would it fit on a wristwatch? No, it's too big. Would it run on BeOS or Mac? You betcha.
Come on honey, take me back. I've changed. Really. I won't cheat on you again. I swear. I won't ever hit you again.
Sorry Bill, but these wounds run pretty deep. I'll believe it about 5 years after I see it.