Re:`Philip Greenspun's -- not accurate
on
ArsDigita Shut Down
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· Score: 3, Interesting
Judging from his more recent comments on his Ask Phillip bulletin board, he's mellowed out considerably since ArsDigita's investors bought him out. Apparently he's decided that he has better things to do with the rest of his life than complain about the sorry state of the computer industry.
If they sent you emails with ideas about how to improve the program, then they might be able to argue for a copyright on those emails, but that doesn't give them any rights to code that you wrote to implement the ideas.
If the ideas they sent you are patentable, then why on earth did they disclose them to you before either filing a patent or signing an NDA?
IANAL, but either you left out some very significant details, or they're blowing smoke.
Plus, the minute the MPAA/RIAA decides this is a problem, they write up a handy little app that shares an unending stream of random data.
For a long time, I've wondered: why didn't RIAA use this technique to deal with Napster, rather than suing it into oblivion? For the amount they spent on lawyers, they could have easily set up a few thousand computers on DSL lines running Napster, claiming to have every top-40 song that's been published in the past fifty years, and sending out MP3 files of white noise. If nine out of ten customers who try to download a song end up getting one of the noise recordings instead, what are those customers going to do -- sue? They'd just give up on Napster in a New York minute. Problem solved.
Then it hit me: if they revealed that Napster is so easy to defeat without resorting to the law, they can't tell Congress and the media about how The Entertainment Industry Will Be Doomed unless stiffer copyright legislation is passed. Bwah-hah-hah!
Having a compiler on the firewall would be convenient for you, but it would also be convenient for any 31337 h@x0rs who manage to grab a shell on the firewall.
In practice, I'm not sure how likely a problem this would be, but if I were writing a firewall distribution of Linux, I wouldn't want anything running on the firewall that wasn't necessary for the firewall's job. (Although I suppose it would be nice to package a utility with the firewall that would allow users to compile a program on another machine and then ship the binary over to the firewall. Someone who knows the ins and outs of autoconf/automake wouldn't have much trouble creating such a utility.)
If none of the canned firewall distributions suit your needs, then maybe you'd be better off installing OpenBSD on that machine and learning how to use its packet-forwarding system.
...to tell the database "The next time I return to this page, I don't want to see this comment, and I don't want to see the comments that reply to it."
I'd be interested in trying HURD out, but I don't want to (a) reboot my machine between HURD and Linux use; (b) buy a new box (my UPS is out of sockets...)
In 1957, Congress passed the Price-Anderson Act. This law caps the liability of nuclear-plant operators, and it exempts the companies that build, design, and supply parts to nuclear power plants from any liability at all. The law was passed because insurance companies refused to underwrite nuclear plants (remember, this is before product-liability suits became an industry unto itself). Price-Anderson was set to expire in ten years; people expected that by that time, reactor safety techniques would be better understood, and insurance companies would know how to assess the risks.
Of course, the law is still on the books; it's now set to expire next August. Cheney has been quoted as saying that if the law is not renewed, nobody would invest in nuclear power plants. In the meantime, if there's a catastrophic nuclear accident that causes more than $9 billion in damages, the victims will have to ask Congress for aid -- and if Congress did provide it, how much do you want to bet that people other than nuclear-plant operators would be taxed to pay for it?
Sodom and Gommorrah are not a very good fit. IIRC, while there's some debate about where those cities were, everyone agrees that they were east of the Jordan River. So any meteor strike in southern Iraq powerful enough to take out Sodom and Gomorrah would also toast all the civilizations in the region -- but judging from the text, after those cities were destroyed, their neighbors pretty much went on about their normal business.
Part V, section B: "In any enforcement proceeding in which the Court has found that Microsoft has engaged in a pattern of knowing, willful and systematic violations, the United States may apply to the Court for a one-time extension of this Final Judgment of up to two years, together with such other relief as the Court may deem appropriate."
Also, remember that if a private company (e.g., what's left of Be) decides to sue Microsoft over its tactics, Microsoft can no longer use that "aw, shucks, we're not a monopoly, no sir" defense.
And at the end of the five-year period, if Microsoft reverts to its old tactics... well, they'll be just as illegal in the future as they are now.
The "bad old days where OEMs were charged a license for every machine shipped" was, if my memory is correct, ended by another antitrust action. As far as I can tell, the consent decree prohibiting that kind of behavior is still in force.
It's not just that the licensing has to be uniform, the terms have to be disclosed to all the OEMs. They won't depend on Microsoft's winks and nods to find out how much their Windows licenses will cost.
Back when Be was a going concern, they offered to license BeOS for free to any OEM willing to make dual-boot Windows/Be systems. Only one took them up on it... and buried the instructions for how to make it boot Be in a place where few consumers were likely to find it.
Rumor (as reported in Byte a while back) has it that Microsoft leaned on the OEMs, telling them that if they accepted Be's offer, they could kiss their Windows licenses good-bye.
If I have a $20 bill in my wallet, I have effectively loaned the US Treasury $20.
This is very nice for the Treasury, since it's an interest-free loan. If more cash floats around the economy, then the Treasury doesn't have to sell so many T-bills to keep the government afloat. This reduces the interest rate on loans to the government, making interest rates in general go down, which makes it easier to get a mortgage to buy a house, and also encourages profit-hungry investors to switch to riskier investments, like stocks.
You may ask, so what?
Think of all the drug dealers, international terrorists, and other ne'er-do-wells that deal in large quantities of cash, plus the people all over the world who stuff their mattresses with greenbacks because they don't trust their local currencies or banks. Every million dollars resting in someone's suitcase is a million-dollar interest-free loan to the United States government.
According to this US Treasury report (see Table 4), there are about $550 billion worth of US cash (not counting what's sitting inside bank vaults) floating around the economy. If everyone holding those dollars decided to exchange them for euros, it might put a bit of a dent in our economy.
it would appear that most cities have lost 20% of their jobs in the past month, but Boston! They've leaked 30%!
What's the change over the past year? Given the number of colleges and universities here, I wouldn't be surprised to find a big peak in May/June, for hiring both recent graduates and summer interns, and a corresponding valley in August/September.
If we were teaching people the same as we did during the industrial revolution, we'd be doing better. After my grandfather died, my mom found some of his old 1900 timeframe 8th grade exams and report cards. Most of the questions were about as difficult as any that I took on the ACT or SAT.
What proportion of students in 1900 dropped out before 8th grade?
Upon consideration of the motion to stay the mandate, the response thereto, and the
reply, it is
ORDERED that the motion be denied. In order to obtain a stay of the mandate pending
its petition for certiorari, Microsoft must show that the "petition would present a substantial
question and that there is good cause for a stay." See Fed. R. App. P. 41(d)(2)(A); see also
D.C. Cir. Rule 41(a)(2) (movant for stay of mandate must provide "facts showing good cause
for the relief sought"). For the reasons stated in the appellees' response to the motion for stay,
it appears that Microsoft has misconstrued our opinion, particularly with respect to what would
have been required to justify vacating the district court's findings of fact and conclusions of law
as a remedy for the violation of 28 U.S.C.
455(a). We need not decide, however, whether Microsoft's objections constitute a
"substantial question" likely to lead to Supreme Court review, because Microsoft has failed to
demonstrate any substantial harm that would result from the reactivation of proceedings in the
district court during the limited pendency of the certiorari petition. See Renegotiation Board v.
Bannercraft Clothing Co., 415 U.S. 1, 24 (1974); Virginia Petroleum Jobbers Ass'n v. Federal
Power Commission, 259 F.2d 921, 925 (D.C. Cir. 1958).
The Clerk is directed to issue the mandate seven days from the date of this order. See
Fed. R. App. P. 41(b).
The Supreme Court has not yet ruled on the appeal itself. However, the appeals court said that the rest of the judicial process (remanding the case to a lower court for tying up the loose ends) should not wait for the Supremes to make up their mind.
Presumably, by the time a new trial-court judge is chosen and a new trial is scheduled, the Supremes will have a chance to either take up or turn dwon the appeal.
You're thinking "what end-user would want to spend that kind of money and put up with those restrictions?" The proper question, though, is "how many corporations would consider the benefits of Curl to be worth setting up a Curl server on their intranet?"
(Of course, the answer may be "not enough to give the VCs anything close to the return on investment they were hoping for"...)
Who said he ever could write a decent script? In an introduction to one of the recent SW books (which had the shooting script for one of the original movies -- I forget which), Lucas mentions that another writer gave him a lot of help with the dialogue.
It annoys me no end that they charge more for CDs than for tapes, despite CDs costing less
than tapes to produce.
Tapes may cost more to produce, but they also have lower sound quality and are less durable. Therefore, they are less valuable to consumers.
Therefore, anyone who would rather buy a tape than a CD is probably looking for a bargain. Therefore, it makes sense for the record companies to set CD prices above tape prices.
The best reform idea I've seen (which I think was thought up by an economist at MIT's Sloan School of Mangaement) works something like this: Once you get issued a patent, you must put it up for auction. After the auction is over, flip a coin. Heads, and the government pays you 120% of the winning bid and puts the patent in the public domain. Tails, and the high bidder buys the patent.
You're assuming that the reason software takes so long is because of the time needed to get the bugs out. Joel's point is that it takes this long to put the features in -- to find out, based on experience and customer feedback, what features you need and where you need to optimize.
--
he chastises anyone who has ever re-written anything from scratch,
saying that it is a waste of a huge investment. I don't know. I certainly think refactoring code is often
necessary. When does it stop being refactoring and start being a re-write?
When your goal is no longer "make build x+1 pass the same unit tests as build x", either because you're now trying to add new features to the code, or because your code is now in little pieces strewn all over the workshop (so to speak) and some crucial function won't work until you've figured out how to fit them back together. --
Slashdot Mirror
Judging from his more recent comments on his Ask Phillip bulletin board, he's mellowed out considerably since ArsDigita's investors bought him out. Apparently he's decided that he has better things to do with the rest of his life than complain about the sorry state of the computer industry.
If they sent you emails with ideas about how to improve the program, then they might be able to argue for a copyright on those emails, but that doesn't give them any rights to code that you wrote to implement the ideas.
If the ideas they sent you are patentable, then why on earth did they disclose them to you before either filing a patent or signing an NDA?
IANAL, but either you left out some very significant details, or they're blowing smoke.
Then it hit me: if they revealed that Napster is so easy to defeat without resorting to the law, they can't tell Congress and the media about how The Entertainment Industry Will Be Doomed unless stiffer copyright legislation is passed. Bwah-hah-hah!
In practice, I'm not sure how likely a problem this would be, but if I were writing a firewall distribution of Linux, I wouldn't want anything running on the firewall that wasn't necessary for the firewall's job. (Although I suppose it would be nice to package a utility with the firewall that would allow users to compile a program on another machine and then ship the binary over to the firewall. Someone who knows the ins and outs of autoconf/automake wouldn't have much trouble creating such a utility.)
If none of the canned firewall distributions suit your needs, then maybe you'd be better off installing OpenBSD on that machine and learning how to use its packet-forwarding system.
...to tell the database "The next time I return to this page, I don't want to see this comment, and I don't want to see the comments that reply to it."
I'd be interested in trying HURD out, but I don't want to (a) reboot my machine between HURD and Linux use; (b) buy a new box (my UPS is out of sockets...)
Of course, the law is still on the books; it's now set to expire next August. Cheney has been quoted as saying that if the law is not renewed, nobody would invest in nuclear power plants. In the meantime, if there's a catastrophic nuclear accident that causes more than $9 billion in damages, the victims will have to ask Congress for aid -- and if Congress did provide it, how much do you want to bet that people other than nuclear-plant operators would be taxed to pay for it?
Sodom and Gommorrah are not a very good fit. IIRC, while there's some debate about where those cities were, everyone agrees that they were east of the Jordan River. So any meteor strike in southern Iraq powerful enough to take out Sodom and Gomorrah would also toast all the civilizations in the region -- but judging from the text, after those cities were destroyed, their neighbors pretty much went on about their normal business.
Also, remember that if a private company (e.g., what's left of Be) decides to sue Microsoft over its tactics, Microsoft can no longer use that "aw, shucks, we're not a monopoly, no sir" defense.
And at the end of the five-year period, if Microsoft reverts to its old tactics ... well, they'll be just as illegal in the future as they are now.
The "bad old days where OEMs were charged a license for every machine shipped" was, if my memory is correct, ended by another antitrust action. As far as I can tell, the consent decree prohibiting that kind of behavior is still in force.
It's not just that the licensing has to be uniform, the terms have to be disclosed to all the OEMs. They won't depend on Microsoft's winks and nods to find out how much their Windows licenses will cost.
Rumor (as reported in Byte a while back) has it that Microsoft leaned on the OEMs, telling them that if they accepted Be's offer, they could kiss their Windows licenses good-bye.
You have a lot more faith in human nature than I do.
You may ask, so what?
Think of all the drug dealers, international terrorists, and other ne'er-do-wells that deal in large quantities of cash, plus the people all over the world who stuff their mattresses with greenbacks because they don't trust their local currencies or banks. Every million dollars resting in someone's suitcase is a million-dollar interest-free loan to the United States government.
According to this US Treasury report (see Table 4), there are about $550 billion worth of US cash (not counting what's sitting inside bank vaults) floating around the economy. If everyone holding those dollars decided to exchange them for euros, it might put a bit of a dent in our economy.
What's the change over the past year? Given the number of colleges and universities here, I wouldn't be surprised to find a big peak in May/June, for hiring both recent graduates and summer interns, and a corresponding valley in August/September.
Once that dry pair is connected to the Net, you can subscribe to an IP telephony service, and then you're only paying Ma Bell for the wire. Sweet!
What proportion of students in 1900 dropped out before 8th grade?
ORDERED that the motion be denied. In order to obtain a stay of the mandate pending its petition for certiorari, Microsoft must show that the "petition would present a substantial question and that there is good cause for a stay." See Fed. R. App. P. 41(d)(2)(A); see also D.C. Cir. Rule 41(a)(2) (movant for stay of mandate must provide "facts showing good cause for the relief sought"). For the reasons stated in the appellees' response to the motion for stay, it appears that Microsoft has misconstrued our opinion, particularly with respect to what would have been required to justify vacating the district court's findings of fact and conclusions of law as a remedy for the violation of 28 U.S.C. 455(a). We need not decide, however, whether Microsoft's objections constitute a "substantial question" likely to lead to Supreme Court review, because Microsoft has failed to demonstrate any substantial harm that would result from the reactivation of proceedings in the district court during the limited pendency of the certiorari petition. See Renegotiation Board v. Bannercraft Clothing Co., 415 U.S. 1, 24 (1974); Virginia Petroleum Jobbers Ass'n v. Federal Power Commission, 259 F.2d 921, 925 (D.C. Cir. 1958).
The Clerk is directed to issue the mandate seven days from the date of this order. See Fed. R. App. P. 41(b).
(PDF here.)
Presumably, by the time a new trial-court judge is chosen and a new trial is scheduled, the Supremes will have a chance to either take up or turn dwon the appeal.
You're thinking "what end-user would want to spend that kind of money and put up with those restrictions?" The proper question, though, is "how many corporations would consider the benefits of Curl to be worth setting up a Curl server on their intranet?"
(Of course, the answer may be "not enough to give the VCs anything close to the return on investment they were hoping for"...)
Who said he ever could write a decent script? In an introduction to one of the recent SW books (which had the shooting script for one of the original movies -- I forget which), Lucas mentions that another writer gave him a lot of help with the dialogue.
The best reform idea I've seen (which I think was thought up by an economist at MIT's Sloan School of Mangaement) works something like this: Once you get issued a patent, you must put it up for auction. After the auction is over, flip a coin. Heads, and the government pays you 120% of the winning bid and puts the patent in the public domain. Tails, and the high bidder buys the patent.
You're assuming that the reason software takes so long is because of the time needed to get the bugs out. Joel's point is that it takes this long to put the features in -- to find out, based on experience and customer feedback, what features you need and where you need to optimize.
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