I'd love to, but I'm not a SCUBA diver. Otherwise, it'd be mighty handy.
When selling GPL software, you may sell as many copies as the market will buy; but you must make the source code available, and if someone else makes the product available on an FTP server, that's cool too. Your value-add is covenience, or support, or printed manuals, or just a snazzy silk-screened CD in a printed jewel case.
Don't believe this business model works? Look at Red Hat.
The right to a trial by jury has been maintained, but note that the size of the jury has been shrinking from 12 to 8 in many courts, and that there has been a general erosion of the randomness of the jury, what with the selection process providing ever more control to the litigants. State-sponsored jury tampering, IMHO.
On the splash page for the ArtistDirect chat (which is no longer there, so I'll have to paraphrase), you said that you knew of no profession where the practitioners regularly perform their services for free.
Let me introduce you to a profession that has a long and glorious history of altruistic giving:
Software Development.
Have a look at the GNU Manifesto, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, and other important works from the Free Software Movement. You'll find them most fascinating.
There was a dark age in the software industry when companies were imposing draconian copy-protection schemes on their users, because they didn't think they could trust them. It didn't work. The ensuing renaissance has seen the rise of Open Source software (essentially free for the download), and has provided prosperity for many enlightened corporations such as Red Hat, Caldera, and others who nobody thought would ever make money with "Free Software".
You, like us, are driven by an insatiable desire to ply your craft. You, like us, would be doing this even if there was no money in it to begin with. We all do what we do because it is our one true happiness in life. Why pollute your true ambition and poison the good will you have with your fan base, just to line the pockets of your lawyers? They're the only ones who benefit from such bitterness.
Who's trying to rip off the company? They're selling the hardware for the stated price. Not renting, not leasing, but SELLING. Outright. Once you take delivery, you have the right to do absolutely whatever your little heart desires. If the company were serious about maintaining customer base for their service, they should have made it a lease agreement, not an outright sale.
They're simply learning a hard lesson -- never underestimate the Geeks.
CORBA is just dandy if you're remoting objects and have to marshal data across the country over a wire. But as an IPC mechanism for processes within a single machine, it stinks. In CORBA, EVERY BLOODY CALL TO AN OBJECT has to be routed through the ORB. This is an obscene load of processing overhead. With COM, once you have the IUnknown pointer, you make your call through a vptr, and your server routine has control. When the called routine completes its epilogue and pops a return, your code is back in control. No ORB middleman, no overhead, no nothing. Exquisite.
C'mon. Keep your life savings. What Dr. Z is suggesting is that if each person invest a VERY SMALL amount (say, buy one share at market) and proxy it to the advocacy group, the combined shares will represent a very vocal interest in the company stridently expressing our views at each and every shareholder meeting. It's really quite brilliant! As Queen once suggested, "fight from the inside!"
Anybody remember Citadel? It's still actively maintained! Check out the Uncensored! BBS. They have a Citadel room-based system, with a Web interface, a Telnet interface, and clients for a number of platforms. Way cool!
[Somewhat OT, sorry. But I had to get this off my chest.]
Two reasons: Production costs and Federal mandate.
"Production costs" because you can build a car cheaper if you use microelectronics (fuel injection) over a complicated mechanical device with all sorts of finely-machined parts (a carburetor). "Federal mandate" because you must satisfy emissions restrictions imposed by the Environmental Protection Agency, and warrant that your vehicle will continue to pass smog tests for a very long time.
The two issues are intertwined, of course. You can get a car to run cleaner cheaper if you use EFI.
The whole conspiriacy theory about complicated cars smacks of neo-Luddism to me.
The algorithms used by PGP have been extensively peer-reviewed in the cryptographic community, which is usually quite merciless on most algorithms. Unless EVERY MEMBER of that community has been co-opted (highly unlikely), any known weaknesses in the underlying algorithms would long since have been exposed.
And since there are Open Source versions of the product, a programmer can verify for himself that the code is sound and conforms to the published specs on the algorithms. The output of the non-OS versions can then be compared to the OS output to check their integrity. I have not personally done this, but it does indicate that there is a complete chain of integrity for these products that a(n almost-) lay person could follow for himself.
So yes, empirical evidence is available to vouch for the quality of some of these products. NOTE, however, there's a lot of schlock out there, too, such as practically everything available shrink-wrapped for idiots at your friendly local software retailer. Use the Source, Luke!
Cox@Home hands out addresses on a daily DHCP lease, but it's more of a convenience for the non-geeks than anything else (Windows defaults to asking a DHCP server for everything). They NEVER change the IP once issued.
Shortly after I got hooked up, I had to call into tech support because I couldn't lease my address, so they gave me my static address/mask/GW/nameservers and sent me on my merry way. (Turns out their DHCPd was getting clobbered by some rogue running a WinNT DHCP server on their net.)
If that ain't a stamp of approval, I don't know what is!
I wouldn't jump to the "greedy bastards" conclusion so readily. After all, it's an educational institution that's developing this thing in the first place. The only greed that universities exhibit is during registration.
It probably took them this long to cut through the red tape. Apparrently, the Israeli military was involved in funding the project, and they most likely wanted assurances it couldn't be used to build The Islam-a-Bomb.
I think the UF action was brought in a Canadian court. One of Iliad's emails suggested that he had one of the best "Intellectual Property and Copyright law firms in Western Canada" on his side.
Not so long ago, a woman's rape charge could be successfully attacked in court with claims like, "Look how she was dressed! She must've wanted it!" This is just the same sorry attitude resurfacing on the "new frontier". I guess it was never dead, just dormant.
So sorry to hear of your friend's experience. I hope she can learn to trust again someday.
I suppose that would be effective in some cases, but the real rogues out there would just hardcode the IPs they last leased, and you'd be none the wiser until a collision occured. And that may be never.
My cable company has DHCP on their network, but they lease out fixed IPs. I haven't tapped their DHCPd in ages!
There was a mention at the end of the article regarding their "cult-like monotone" or some such thing. This is quite telling. It sounds to me like these people are quite brainwashed into believing they can't lose, that they are "the chosen ones" as someone mentioned here.
The Cult Meme is a very powerful memotype, rooted very close to some fundamental memes that are hardwired into our brains. It's quite easy for this to manifest itself unintentionally, especially when the organization is under siege. These people are starting to sound like the high-tech equivalent of Moonies!
I think I'll skip the jokes about their soda machines dispensing Kool-Aid...;-)
In the good ol' days, when Unix only grokked one filesystem type, the OS used the directory bit to detect directories, but didn't bother to treat them any different otherwise. (Made the implementation of ls real simple, too.)
Then along came Linux with its Virtual File System model. Since multiple file systems are supported, the app-level software must be shielded from the gory details of each particular filesystem's implementation.
In this model, the only apps that should be accessing filesystem metadata directly are filesystem maintenance tools (e.g., e2fsck). I suppose, if there were a great hue and cry for access to directory metadata, a conduit could be written into the VFS model, but that's not likely.
This isn't the most lucid explanation, but I'm having too much fun enjoying my (rare) day off to really polish it down to a smooth sheen.
I seem to remember way back when, when M$ was the media darling and not the evil empire, they used to talk about how Bill could scarcely dress himself in the morning without looking like a spaz. His mom had to pin shirts and pants together so he'd at least match. Marsha probably fills that role these days.
Getting your own CDs in should be no problem. Didn't see if the supplied software included a ripper, but even if it doesn't, you can find a freeware ripper through mp3.com to create MP3's of your legacy CD's. This assumes your CD-ROM supports it (most do these days).
Slashdot Mirror
I'd love to, but I'm not a SCUBA diver. Otherwise, it'd be mighty handy.
When selling GPL software, you may sell as many copies as the market will buy; but you must make the source code available, and if someone else makes the product available on an FTP server, that's cool too. Your value-add is covenience, or support, or printed manuals, or just a snazzy silk-screened CD in a printed jewel case.
Don't believe this business model works? Look at Red Hat.
The right to a trial by jury has been maintained, but note that the size of the jury has been shrinking from 12 to 8 in many courts, and that there has been a general erosion of the randomness of the jury, what with the selection process providing ever more control to the litigants. State-sponsored jury tampering, IMHO.
On the splash page for the ArtistDirect chat (which is no longer there, so I'll have to paraphrase), you said that you knew of no profession where the practitioners regularly perform their services for free.
Let me introduce you to a profession that has a long and glorious history of altruistic giving:
Software Development.
Have a look at the GNU Manifesto, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, and other important works from the Free Software Movement. You'll find them most fascinating.
There was a dark age in the software industry when companies were imposing draconian copy-protection schemes on their users, because they didn't think they could trust them. It didn't work. The ensuing renaissance has seen the rise of Open Source software (essentially free for the download), and has provided prosperity for many enlightened corporations such as Red Hat, Caldera, and others who nobody thought would ever make money with "Free Software".
You, like us, are driven by an insatiable desire to ply your craft. You, like us, would be doing this even if there was no money in it to begin with. We all do what we do because it is our one true happiness in life. Why pollute your true ambition and poison the good will you have with your fan base, just to line the pockets of your lawyers? They're the only ones who benefit from such bitterness.
Who's trying to rip off the company? They're selling the hardware for the stated price. Not renting, not leasing, but SELLING. Outright. Once you take delivery, you have the right to do absolutely whatever your little heart desires. If the company were serious about maintaining customer base for their service, they should have made it a lease agreement, not an outright sale.
They're simply learning a hard lesson -- never underestimate the Geeks.
CORBA is just dandy if you're remoting objects and have to marshal data across the country over a wire. But as an IPC mechanism for processes within a single machine, it stinks.
In CORBA, EVERY BLOODY CALL TO AN OBJECT has to be routed through the ORB. This is an obscene load of processing overhead. With COM, once you have the IUnknown pointer, you make your call through a vptr, and your server routine has control. When the called routine completes its epilogue and pops a return, your code is back in control. No ORB middleman, no overhead, no nothing. Exquisite.
</rant>
There. I feel better.
C'mon. Keep your life savings. What Dr. Z is suggesting is that if each person invest a VERY SMALL amount (say, buy one share at market) and proxy it to the advocacy group, the combined shares will represent a very vocal interest in the company stridently expressing our views at each and every shareholder meeting. It's really quite brilliant! As Queen once suggested, "fight from the inside!"
Anybody remember Citadel? It's still actively maintained! Check out the Uncensored! BBS. They have a Citadel room-based system, with a Web interface, a Telnet interface, and clients for a number of platforms. Way cool!
[Somewhat OT, sorry. But I had to get this off my chest.]
Two reasons: Production costs and Federal mandate.
"Production costs" because you can build a car cheaper if you use microelectronics (fuel injection) over a complicated mechanical device with all sorts of finely-machined parts (a carburetor). "Federal mandate" because you must satisfy emissions restrictions imposed by the Environmental Protection Agency, and warrant that your vehicle will continue to pass smog tests for a very long time.
The two issues are intertwined, of course. You can get a car to run cleaner cheaper if you use EFI.
The whole conspiriacy theory about complicated cars smacks of neo-Luddism to me.
The algorithms used by PGP have been extensively peer-reviewed in the cryptographic community, which is usually quite merciless on most algorithms. Unless EVERY MEMBER of that community has been co-opted (highly unlikely), any known weaknesses in the underlying algorithms would long since have been exposed.
And since there are Open Source versions of the product, a programmer can verify for himself that the code is sound and conforms to the published specs on the algorithms. The output of the non-OS versions can then be compared to the OS output to check their integrity. I have not personally done this, but it does indicate that there is a complete chain of integrity for these products that a(n almost-) lay person could follow for himself.
So yes, empirical evidence is available to vouch for the quality of some of these products. NOTE, however, there's a lot of schlock out there, too, such as practically everything available shrink-wrapped for idiots at your friendly local software retailer. Use the Source, Luke!
Weeeell, M$ usually makes readers available free for download...
Do consider also the fact that said free readers typically only operate under Windows.
I'd tend to classify language more as a vector. It is a conduit (and not necessarily the only one) by which the memes are transmitted.
Brodie's book may indeed be less rigorous, but it makes the material somewhat more approachable to the masses. This has to be a Good Thing(tm).
Cox@Home hands out addresses on a daily DHCP lease, but it's more of a convenience for the non-geeks than anything else (Windows defaults to asking a DHCP server for everything). They NEVER change the IP once issued.
Shortly after I got hooked up, I had to call into tech support because I couldn't lease my address, so they gave me my static address/mask/GW/nameservers and sent me on my merry way. (Turns out their DHCPd was getting clobbered by some rogue running a WinNT DHCP server on their net.)
If that ain't a stamp of approval, I don't know what is!
I wouldn't jump to the "greedy bastards" conclusion so readily. After all, it's an educational institution that's developing this thing in the first place. The only greed that universities exhibit is during registration.
It probably took them this long to cut through the red tape. Apparrently, the Israeli military was involved in funding the project, and they most likely wanted assurances it couldn't be used to build The Islam-a-Bomb.
That effort also appears to be a bit vaporous. Links to subjects, all with a "To be filled" notation.
Not a big deal. We just need to send some content to these sites.
I think the UF action was brought in a Canadian court. One of Iliad's emails suggested that he had one of the best "Intellectual Property and Copyright law firms in Western Canada" on his side.
Not so long ago, a woman's rape charge could be successfully attacked in court with claims like, "Look how she was dressed! She must've wanted it!" This is just the same sorry attitude resurfacing on the "new frontier". I guess it was never dead, just dormant.
So sorry to hear of your friend's experience. I hope she can learn to trust again someday.
Peace.
I suppose that would be effective in some cases, but the real rogues out there would just hardcode the IPs they last leased, and you'd be none the wiser until a collision occured. And that may be never.
My cable company has DHCP on their network, but they lease out fixed IPs. I haven't tapped their DHCPd in ages!
PS to Rob: You busted Preview Mode...
There was a mention at the end of the article regarding their "cult-like monotone" or some such thing. This is quite telling. It sounds to me like these people are quite brainwashed into believing they can't lose, that they are "the chosen ones" as someone mentioned here.
;-)
The Cult Meme is a very powerful memotype, rooted very close to some fundamental memes that are hardwired into our brains. It's quite easy for this to manifest itself unintentionally, especially when the organization is under siege. These people are starting to sound like the high-tech equivalent of Moonies!
I think I'll skip the jokes about their soda machines dispensing Kool-Aid...
In the good ol' days, when Unix only grokked one filesystem type, the OS used the directory bit to detect directories, but didn't bother to treat them any different otherwise. (Made the implementation of ls real simple, too.)
Then along came Linux with its Virtual File System model. Since multiple file systems are supported, the app-level software must be shielded from the gory details of each particular filesystem's implementation.
In this model, the only apps that should be accessing filesystem metadata directly are filesystem maintenance tools (e.g., e2fsck). I suppose, if there were a great hue and cry for access to directory metadata, a conduit could be written into the VFS model, but that's not likely.
This isn't the most lucid explanation, but I'm having too much fun enjoying my (rare) day off to really polish it down to a smooth sheen.
They're on a special "wither-up-and-blow-away" diet. :-)
...in the Dollars and Sense segment, and the announcer even pronounced Linux correctly!
;-)
Ladies and Gentlemen, we have arrived.
I seem to remember way back when, when M$ was the media darling and not the evil empire, they used to talk about how Bill could scarcely dress himself in the morning without looking like a spaz. His mom had to pin shirts and pants together so he'd at least match. Marsha probably fills that role these days.
Still, Obi-Wan? Please!
How about their collective, flaccid pud...
What can their legal team be thinking at this point? "How can I get out of this with a tattered remnant of a career?"
Getting your own CDs in should be no problem. Didn't see if the supplied software included a ripper, but even if it doesn't, you can find a freeware ripper through mp3.com to create MP3's of your legacy CD's. This assumes your CD-ROM supports it (most do these days).