Why do you think the genome mapping companies have been so protective of their data? If the secrets of the universe, placed by some Lovecraftian elder race, start showing up, they want to be sure as hell that they're the ones with the patent on the Mental Translation Protocol (TM).
Jesus God, this is a bad law. One of the premises of the net that The Man has fundamentally failed to grasp is that if your computer does something, it's your fault. If you're using a client that is willing to "lock you into a web site," it's your bad for using a broken client, and you should be punished for it until you find a better one.
If a technical solution exists, legal solutions will ultimately be harmful, because they discourage people from actually solving the problem. Prosecuting people because they served you a stream of bytes you consider "harmful" to you, in response to YOUR request to THEM, is an affront to logic as well as free speech.
For God's sake, man -- web sites are going to the trouble of advertising to us that they're poorly or maliciously designed, and we're COMPLAINING about it? I'd love it if there were an HTML tag that inserted subliminal advertising on my desktop. Junkbuster would start telling me, "IBM is trying to steal your money," and I would know never to buy anything from them again.
Apologies for the flamish tone of this post; I intend no slur to you personally with anything I'm about to say.
Microsoft blew that entire market strategy away with ODBC (Open Data Base Connectivity).
You imply that this wouldn't have happened without MS -- even though Borland had a similar standard in the works, and ODBC was based largely on work the SAG had done. MS was not the sole voice of rationality in a sea of proprietariality -- it simply prefers to define its own standards rather than adhere to those designed for interoperability, and it won a big chunk of the subsequent standards war. I haven't witnessed the results in DB-land, but my experience with MS's extended standards has usually been quite unpleasant. This isn't an issue for you, since you use (as I understand) MS and MS-friendly tools exclusively -- but this effectively prevents you from using many tools that might be superior to MS's.
Microsoft didn't do this out of altruism. They did it to permit developers using Microsoft tools to connect to any database out there--but in the process they made it possible for developers using anybody else's tools (PowerBuilder, Delphi, etc.) to connect to those databases as well.
How do I connect to SQL Server from a non-microsoft machine? E.g. Unix, Macintosh etc. Ok, this isn't one with a straight answer. Microsoft don't support or supply connectivity from non-DOS/Windows/NT machines any longer, so you have to go to a 3rd party vendor.
It continues to discuss the difficulties involved in using a 3rd-party vendor, mostly because MS's TDS protocol is undocumented and keeps changing from version to version -- just like Word formats and Windows APIs. From this I draw the conclusion that MS is not a fan of interoperability.
On the first take, this is not a particularly bad thing for you. You get excellent ODBC/OLE DB support from the OS, and you don't have to care if no one can feasibly run your server on a non-MS machine.
The net result was that the proprietary database developer marketplace (Progress, some others) has dried up.
This is why I don't like it when MS gets into a market that has an impact on me. Read your comment again. Yes, I know you meant that the guys who didn't really provide anything except the ability to talk to their DB products in their proprietary format went away -- but in the process, I am quite certain that a few well-engineered and standards-compliant product lines folded completely, because they supported the SAG standard instead of the MS extensions. You praise MS for bringing you quality products at low prices -- yet you must admit that the marketplace has suffered.
Remember DR DOS? It blew MS-DOS away technologically, and MS released Windows 3.1, which didn't work with it. Bam, DR DOS blew away, and PC users got stuck with a crap OS again. Borland, Novell, Wordperfect, and Eudora all also lost seriously at the hands of MS, despite having excellent products to offer. MS out-manuevered them. I don't feel sorry for them in an "MS is a bully" sense, but I think that the PC software world is worse for their loss.
Obviously, I don't imagine I'm going to change your mind about MS -- their products clearly work well for you. I ask you to philosophize, though: What if MS had not produced these products? Would you still be using an AS/400, or would you be using a cheaper, more reliable, more interoperable product instead? Is MS's excellent marketing dept. working for or against you when it crushes its competitors? What about when MS changes around its standards, or breaks compatibility with another product, or legally attacks people who are trying to do nothing more than produce good software (Kerberos)?
This page suggests a solution to the insecurity of software that I almost agree with -- basically, that anyone with the know-how should be spending their time writing viruses and exploits for the woefully insecure OSs we are blessed to work with today, until OSs HAVE to be secure to stand up to the sea of malfeasance that comes in through their net connections. My recommendation is a loop of snide but informative walls...
You act like UNIX's man command and TCP/IP stacks came for free. Not so, not so. (Well, you claim to have used SGIs, so you should know all about UNIX's historical price structure.)
Mea culpa... "free" was entirely the wrong word for me to use. What I meant was "included in the price of the OS"; for as long as I've been using Unix, it's come with tools (such as network support and man pages) which have only recently (if at all) been included in MS products. The implication that Unix itself is free was not intended, and I apologise if you got that impression.
The important question, of course, is: Is it cheaper to buy Irix and get these tools for "free", or to buy DOS/Windows and pay for the tools as needed? In my experience, the headaches you save by going Unix have been worth any extra price, and the question has never arisen. Now, with Linux as a viable option, the question is pretty much moot: Praising MS for making it cheaper to do something you can do literally for free strikes me as silly.
Disclaimer: As I said before, I know pretty much nothing about professional DB tools; if MS has in fact made things significantly cheaper/easier for the average DB programmer, I'd appreciate hearing about it.
Indeed, slashdot is the perfect example of this Open Media - except the Open Media is so full of Closed Minds (as in a common slashdot slogan) that it's hardly open at all. Honest opinions get termed as "flamebait", and people restructure their views to the point where it no longer conflicts to the community.
I would beg to disagree; although there is a lot of crap that's modded up for some reason, I very rarely see an opposing viewpoint modded down -- in fact, it seems that opposing viewpoints are modded up as "interesting" even when I think they're transparent crap. In today's FIN story, there were one, two thoughtful pro-MS comments modded up to 5, one fairly valueless "MS rulez OK" comment modded up to 3, and a whole pantload of anti-MS comments that stayed at 1 because they weren't very interesting. Most moderators seem to select for what is interesting over what's true (for better or worse), and disagreeing with the crowd is usually pretty interesting... hell, man, anyone who sticks around long enough to get mod points has already gotten sick to death of The Slashdot Party Line (tm); each story has at least one highly-modded comment saying, "This story sucks. We knew this already."
In other words, if you're going to integrate systems, you tend to get close to a few large vendors. There are Microsoft shops, like mine; or Oracle shops; or Sun shops; or IBM shops; or CA shops. The big advantage (as I see it) to Microsoft is that they do a much better job of courting the developer than anybody else, and they offer more tools (SQL Server, Site Server, etc.) that I can put together in a single solution for a client.
Buying into a vendor's developers program does tie you to that vendor. If you're developing solutions for AS/400 users, it pays for you to ante up the bucks to join IBM's program (which includes [cough, cough] shelling out the bucks to buy an AS/400). But once you do, you're an AS/400 shop. You're not going to go writing solutions for the Unisys ClearPath server or the Unisys A mainframe.
I have no experience dealing with professional-level database software, but none of my real programming work has led me to believe any of these things. When I was working for CMU's digital mapping lab, the idea that we might be beholden to a single company was laughable. We used mainly alphas and SGIs, and all of them had gcc. When we needed to get code from out-of-house, we bought it outright, and it was ours -- we were no more tied to the guy whose stereo vision code we were using than I'm tied to Toyota because I drive one of their cars. If it broke, or we needed to add support for a new image format, we went into the code and did what needed doing; going back to the guy we bought it from was a courtesy ("image format xx mishandles odd-width images, BTW, we patched it thusly..."), never a necessity. We had problems getting programs to cooperate, of course, but different programs were self-contained enough to quickly isolate the problem to a certain program, and then either work around it ("idl_woof should only be used on Alphas until we get blip mumble fixed") or fix the code. We used Foo software, but we weren't a Foo Shop. When cvd's licensing crap started glitching on our SGIs, we had to talk to SGI to fix the problem, but they fixed it quickly and we didn't lose any work time. When we sold software to you, we could easily give you a stable version of whatever you were after for one of 3-5 different platforms, and almost always for any SGI or alpha machine.
If the state of database solutions is such that different programs are this difficult to interoperate, and solutions developed with one company's tools are extremely difficult to use with another company's tools, I would respectfully suggest you find another line of work -- you will find far fewer headaches (though probably less money), and you and your company will be far more automonous -- a smart bet as well as more personally satisfying.
All that said, there's another reason for loyalty to Microsoft. There are a lot of teenagers today on SlashDot that don't remember life when a single-seat programmer's license cost $3000 bucks (or 1.5 times the cost of a compact car). They don't remember the arcane joys of writing Epson LQ-500-compatible printer commands into print routines, or having to buy a third-party help product to display context-sensitive help. They don't remember having to pay $100 per seat for a TCP/IP stack, or $200 per seat for database driver licenses
Single-seat programmer's license? What, from the government, like a driver's license? If you want to use a tool from a Nazi company, you get a Nazi license. As I said before, I know nothing about database development tools (which is I assume what you're talking about), so this might be a legitimate beef that MS helped to fix, but all the other problems you mention were caused directly by MS. Printer routines -- thank you, Bill, for giving me an "operating system" whose idea of printer support is to give a program access to the parallel ports and say, "Good luck!" Printer-independent printing was so much the standard on Unices by then that lacking it would have been unthinkable. Third-party help products -- what, like man and info? And how many times have you gotten something useful out of Windows' help system? For me, the answer is: once. MS was working (with "help" in DOS 5) towards an extremely useful help system akin to man, but they seem to have regressed back to the "tip of the day" approach now. A TCP/IP stack? Hooray! Finally, an operating system that has networking support! Thanks, Bill. You've given me so much. Your loyalty to MS seems to be based on the fact that, long after every other operating system had included certain essential features, MS finally caught up, and saved you from having to pay for the features that no one else had been paying for since BSD 4.2. The reason I don't like MS is that they STILL want me to pay for things like a good compiler, good documentation (MSDN cd), basic word processing, and "permission" to write crap that can talk to their crap, all of which are avilable for free when you buy any good Unix. What does MS give you that isn't available better, cheaper, and sans bastard licensing agreements elsewhere?
Everyone knows about the dedication of the linux subculture, fanatics, loyalists, whatever you want to call them. Is there such a culture surrounding windows?
I'm not sure quite what to make of the serious developers in this thread who seem to like MS, but I can tell you that the vast majority of normal users like Windows a hell of a lot. They don't do wierd shit with their machines, so BSODs are rare for them. There's a lot of software for Windows that isn't available for Linux (Napster, Hotline, many games...). Windows looks better to them because MS actually has succeeded in easying up a lot of tasks (try telling a newbie about linuxconf and lothar; see if you can convince him that they're better than Control Panel). Everything has Windows drivers, and almost nothing has user-friendly Linux drivers ("Well, you just compile this stuff into the kernel, remember to define LATE_REDHAT if you're using Redhat 5.2 or later...").
I took heat for weeks when I booted Windows off my system. My mishandling of dual-boot setup wedged my partition table so badly that Linux refused to touch it; I had to dig up my recovery disks, reinstall the factory config, and THEN install Linux. Linux can't talk to my Winmodem, and I still haven't figured out how to read the PDF books that supposedly came on Mandrake disk 3 (gv brings up a single blank page, and acroread says something about the files being encrypted or protected or something). When I want to eject a CD, I have to grovel through all my windows searching for the console that's still in a CD directory so I can unmount the bitch. Any one of these issues matters more to the average web surfer than "But it comes with a free compiler!", and I was made fun of unmercifully for each of them ("What do you mean you can't eject it yet?" "Just hold on a second. Dammit. Okay, now. Dammit."), by intelligent, computer-savvy people who saw Linux as inferior because its good points did not strike them as useful.
In short: Windows really does work very well for the kinds of things the average asshole wants to do. It makes setup as easy as is feasible, and everything runs on it. I can think right now of two people I know who love Windows, MSDN, and MSDev, because they don't ever do anything that requires Makefile hacking or kernel recompiles, and Windows gives them good functionality without requiring them to learn anything. They don't think MS should be broken up, because MS has given them a great deal, and never done anything wrong they can think of. Although they don't have the religious devotion some Linux users do, there are a hell of a lot more of them.
Yep, which is entirely within the American tradition -- remember the Boston tea party, and metric road signs? [In the US, when they tried to switch to the metric system, they put up signs on all the highways that told distances in km, next to the ones that had miles. People shot all the signs down as soon as it got dark, and the govt. gave up and let us stick with miles.] Reasoned, non-violent opposition is not in our national zeitgeist.
Seriously, I almost agree with Katz on this one. This guy had a legitimate beef with Mickey D's, said his peace without hurting anybody, and now he's taking his lumps for it.
However the fact is that a binary produced by gcc must be licensed with the GPL
This got me thinking... it's high time slash supported typing in your own moderation comments. Just think about it:
(-1, hilariously misinformed)
(-1, obvious MS shill)
(-1, software bigot)
(+1, unintentionally funny)
(+1, good haiku)
or, in this case,
(-1, total nonsense)
Re:s/human genome project/nuclear energy/g
on
Frankenstein Time
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· Score: 1
An analogy, if I may. For ?illions of years, evolution guided the path that mankind would take. If something didn't work, the individual (species, ecosystem) was fucked, and life went on. We were destined, like all species, for possible success (probably not), and then extinction, but at least we had good eyesight, because those squinty guys all died. God was driving.
Then, we got smart. We tamed the world and made things comfortable for ourselves, meaning that the only real evolution we (the rich assholes who read Slashdot and can eat any time they want to, at least) get is selection for the fastest fuckers. Our genes are deteriorating with meteoric speed, because we don't need them anymore. We can keep ourselves alive, even with bad eyesight, half-assed lower backs, appendices, wisdom teeth, obselete instincts, and all the other wonderful stuff that young species get to deal with as a matter of course. It won't get better. No one is driving. More to the point, no one will be driving until we have to fight for our food again, and I don't want that to happen.
Now, we've figured out where the wheel is and are starting to reach toward it. "Are you crazy? You can't drive this thing!" No, not yet, but I tell you for damn sure it's time we learned. Our only other alternatives are extinction, the collapse of civilization, or the eternal suffering that will come when there isn't enough food to feed ANYBODY anymore. It's already happening, for example, in India and parts of Africa. We took responsibility for ourselves personally when we started figuring out what to do instead of just doing it (intelligence vs. instinct), and I for one am damned pleased with the results on the whole. I'm not sure we can manage to do as "well" when we extend our grasp into evolutionary time, but it WILL be better than what happens if we don't.
Is there the potential for abuse? Hell yes. Should we be careful? Yes, but we won't be. Should we do it anyway? Yes. It's up there with space flight as technology that is, literally, absolutely essential for the continued existence of the human race.
Well, given the amount of raw engineering talent, delicate aesthetic judgement, and humble consideration for the feedback of the users that are required to design even a passable programming language, we can only hope that Microsoft will have the bargain-basement good sense to keep the marketing guys the hell away from this project.
Hey, let's all write programs that attempt detect other people's patterns and base our moves off of that while, at the same time, making our program seem to be moving in a certain pattern, but not really patterning our moves after anything detectable, so as to seem random. Damn, we're bright!
Yeah, generalized pattern detection is pretty boring. Make sure you don't tell the people who built the first computers; they accidentally broke a few codes and helped save the world, but they might still be embarassed to admit they liked playing with that kind of stuff.
It's not a tournament where two champion RPS bots square off for The Big Game, winner take all. That would, obviously, be useless. It's something different. If you want to learn about it, go here. It's cool. IP is stunningly elegant, and the Markov chain thing is surprising in that it's an almost pure-math solution that works well (I can almost see the guy's old CS professor somewhere, beaming with pride). I know that guys with the pads made everybody a little leery of following the links off this site, but this one is worth clicking past the first page for.
Do you think MS is the only multi-million dollar business to lie and cheat? I've got news for you. THEY ALL DO. However, MS does it to enforce a monopoly, while other companies do it to try to get a monopoly. That's why it's wrong. The problem is once you get to being a monopoly you have to stop doing all the things that got you there. But don't talk about MS like they are so much worse than other companies. They aren't. They are just the biggest, and most documented.
Right you are, sir! In today's "free" market, there are a slew of businesses which wield monopoly power, but which they don't want you to know about it. Consider:
Cisco Systems has a market value comparable to Microsoft's, and has even exceeded it at times, by maintaining a total stranglehold on the network hardware market. Although they would have us believe that Cisco's strategy is "providing a reliable, top-quality product and good support," a number of internal memos have recently been leaked indicating that Cisco plans to start including support for the "upgraded" IPv6 "extension," putting them in a position to use the "embrace and extend" strategy to leverage their large market share into an almost total monopoly on the Internet's physical infrastructure.
The Lego corporation has a long history of introducing new block designs which render the old blocks almost totally useless from an aesthetic perspective. "I spent all my lawn-mowing money on the medievel set," said a sniffling little boy who asked not to be identified, "but then the Technics came out, and all my spears and stuff wouldn't fit anywhere on the walking robot I built unless I mixed those brown spear-holder blocks in, and then my robot looks yucky." He also pointed out, as is well known, that Lego has broken Technics color-compatibility with their new Mindstorm upgrade, by switching red dye #5 for #8, and yellow #2 for #7. Alas, the legal hassles that await anyone foolish enough to reverse-engineer Lego's proprietary block-connection protocols have ensured that Lego has reigned unchallenged as the only source for toys you can build cool shit with, despite their inferior product. The "accidental" death of Abe Fromage and the subsequent collapse of Tinkertoys spelt the end of competition, even before Lego started blatantly cloning "CPU" and "robotics" technology from the computer industry for use in their "innovative" Mindstorm toys.
Furthermore, Red Lobster, Denny's, and other chain/corporation/restaruant/franchise establishments regularly use unconscionable terms in the dining agreements they make with their patrons. As a large corporation, they play from a position of strength: With their high-priced lawyers and large bankrolls, they can freely impose their will on the consumer (commonly by the use of so-called "walk-through" agreements: the restaurant posts it dining agreement on its wall, you and are considered to have "agreed" simply by choosing to dine there, regardless if you have read or even noticed the sign). Examples of this include:
"Shirt and shoes required" -- usually extended at the whim of the management to cover any situation that might cut into their bottom line. You must keep your shirt buttoned, shoes and feet off the table, wear pants (although it says nothing of this in the dining agreement), and wear all clothing "correctly" (again, at the whim of the management) -- even if you're wearing shoes, placing your socks on your ears will earn you a quick ticket to the street.
Even though you have paid in full for the meal, none of it is "yours" to do with as you see fit -- only licensed to you. You cannot throw your potato. You cannot hold a puppet show with your broccoli. You cannot gargle anything. And don't even think about trying to take "your" plate, ashtray, silverware, or table out the door with you -- if you read the fine print, you'll find that these items were only "licensed" to you for the duration of the meal!
It is sad, but the powermongering megacorporations who really run our country also have merciless teams of wedgie-men and noogie-goons at their command, and they have bamboozled the media and the government into abusing Microsoft to benefit their own bottom line. What with communistic government interference, backlash from the misinformed public, and the software piracy that is rampant in today's industry, Microsoft can barely stay afloat, let alone research more of the innovative, professionally engineered products the software community has come to expect from them, like Microsoft Bob, the dancing Office paper clip, and email clients that do it all at the click of a mouse! Yay Microsoft! Go Bill! One world, one web, one program!
This was an opportunity for Lars to talk directly to people who think he's the enemy, and prove he's not. Instead, we got:
With other programs such as Gnutella, Freenet, etc. that are anonymous and are not controlled by a centralized company which you could sue, like Naptser, don't you think that you should be spending your time and money developing your own Internet solutions from which you can profit, rather than trying to push back the flow of technology which will only become more and more difficult to combat?
"Well, we didn't think about that, and we don't plan to start."
How much money do you get from the sale of each CD, and how much goes to the record company? Would you be interested in a system that allows you to circumvent the record company, sell your music for half the price you do now, and get quadruple the cut that Metallica gets on each sale? The internet has the potential to offer such a system.
"I don't feel like answering your question, especially the first sentence. But I'd be happy to blather about how record companies aren't all bad and cite a dubious statistic that has NOTHING to do with the question."
This evasive claptrap makes me doubt the rest of the interview ("This was entirely our own decision, when you include our managers in 'we.'"); the whole thing smacks of a poorly-rehearsed press conference. This is Lars letting everybody know that he doesn't give a damn about the issues involved.
Their lawyer-whores said: "Hey! Let's set up a *real* trojan horse for those/.-hippies and nail their asses! We can design this whole disclosure so it'll work as a righteous open-source-geek-trap and when they fall for it -- which they *will* -- we've got/. and andover.net all in one swoop!"
At the risk of karma-whoring, I'd say it's more like this: Microsoft, looking for a fight, draws a line in the sand and says, "I dare you to cross this line." Slashdot crosses it and says, "What are you gonna do about it?" I think both Slashdot and Microsoft knew (or at least hoped) that something like this would happen when the spec was posted -- I certainly did; as tests for the DMCA go, this one is as rigged in our favor as they get.
On the other hand, MS is a corporation; they're used to hitting things with a hammer, and they're quite good at it. As someone else pointed out, they get somewhat confused when they encounter Jello -- which Andover is not. I expect this to go to court, and I wish the best of luck to Andover.
IMHO, the DOJ should have figured out by now that any solution that involves the phrase, "Microsoft promises to..." is not worth considering. This solution is, as far as I can see, a subset of the solution that's gained favor with most of the states by now -- i.e. split MS into two companies, OS and applications, and keep them from colluding (which implies that standards available to the applications division must also be available to some guy in Omaha who wants to write a pornographic video game) (and allows the openness of standards to be enforceable in some real sense) (I can see MS's lawyers now... "That's not an undocumented API, it's a patented algorithm. Anyone who jumps to 0xD00D1E without license is guilty of infringement and we'll see them in court.").
The solution I always liked was simply to fork() MS a couple of times (not allowing any of them to keep the original name). That way, any of them that obfuscates standards will break compatibility with the others and lose. Also, each will face stiff competition to produce a quality product -- in short, they abused their monopoly, so we're taking it away.
It get much wierder; I'm optimistic (in a kind of "good luck, better you than me" way) about IBM doing this kind of research, because AFAIK we know almost nothing about the rules for what an "observer" is in quantum-mechanical terms, and this might shed some light if the research was done right.
Example: According to something I've read somewhere and believe (I think it was in a Dilbert book, but hey, I trust Scott Adams), you still get the interference pattern if you turn the detector on but instruct it to throw away its data instead of sending it anywhere -- this is what discredits the hypothesis that the detector beam interacts somehow with the electrons.
What's always bothered me about this (and Schroedinger's Cat, which was made up to illustrate exactly this point, I guess) is the messiness that goes with it. What if the scientists just don't look at the detector? What if the detector, instead of throwing the data away, XORs it with an unknown bit and outputs the encrypted data? Does the pattern change depending on who in the room knows what the unknown bit is? What if the detector has audio output, but the scientist is deaf?
If you build a QM burglar alarm that rings when it's observed, and the burglar who glances at it is unobserved by you, does he count as an observer from your viewpoint, or does he become part of the wave-equation, like Schroedinger's cat? Does the alarm ever ring when you're not around?
Yah, I can confirm this. I saw it on TV, but according to Fox it happened fairly recently (life imitates art?).
Somebody whose name I don't remember welded a single rocket (jet engine? solid fuel booster? memory fails me) to a big, old-school, lead-gas-guzzling American car and tried to jump it over the US/Canadian border (about 1 mile of water) using an enormous ramp. I swear I'm not making this up; I saw it in slow motion.
Naturally, the car flew apart in pieces, killing the driver, the instant it got off the ground. There was also fire, but it was secondary.
I have no idea where the nonsense on the Darwin Awards page came from, but there is a true story similar to this.
Chuck supports the freedom napster offers!...it offers me freedom as the consumer. It offers me access to vast libaries of free copyrighted music. It does not offer the artist any freedom that i can see. The artist can not control how or who gets hold of their works (the music).
In Harlan Ellison's priceless essay "I Don't Think We're in Kansas Anymore, Toto," he talks about a particularly sour deal he had with a TV studio, wherein he was trying to do good writing for a decent wage and the producers were treating him as the hired help. When the project starts to fail in official ways, Harlan calls up one of The Management and starts chortling with glee.
"What are you so happy about? You just lost a $90,000 contract," asks The Man.
Harlan's reply: "It's worth ninety grand to see you fuckers go down the toilet."
Chuck D is saying the same thing, and I applaud him for it.
The problem: Anyone with half a brain can take down a host, untraceably, if they put their mind to it. Nothing can be done about this.
The solution: Reduce their incentive to. Widely distribute a daemon, pstormd, and a program, pstorm. When pstorm is run, it will connect to every copy of pstormd in existence, each of which will begin ping-flooding every host it knows of.
Result: Anyone anywhere will be able to effortlessly bring down the Internet without getting caught. After several months during which the net is totally useless, a general appreciation for the fact that the network is not a toy will develop. Every month or two, someone will run the program out of maliciousness, terrorism, or curiosity, but the appeal will gradually dwindle. ISPs who deny access to the program to their users will be publicly flogged for "presenting a challenge to the little bastards." AOL, after steadfastly refusing to include pstorm's trademark "don't push" button in their software, will be disconnected from the network entirely, to general approval. pstorm will eventually be ruled illegal, but no one will care.
The FBI will be sued by the FSF, and lose, because its attempts to block pstormd from functioning involve reverse-engineering its messages (3-byte UDP packets which read, "GO!"). Microsoft will write its own pstorm, which says "BO!", and imply that the non-MS version is unreliable and may be unsupported in the future.
Eventually, use of pstorm will be restricted by tradition to certain celebratory occasions, such as Kwanza. It will also be used to protest particularly clueless decisions by judges and elected officials about The Way The Network Should Work, to remind them and everyone else how much say they have in the matter.
All the interesting points have been well-ranted already, so I'll keep it short: Stephen King was reported to have made a bigger pile on his on-line novella than the few ten thousand he could have expected if he'd published it through normal channels (although for the cracking of "Ride the Bullet," click here.) I have never heard of anyone burning a copy of a Debian CD, for any reason, although I'm sure it's happened. The competitor to Altair BASIC (price: $150 author: Bill Gates) (you can't make this shit up) was originally free; when it was switched over to $5 shareware, people who already had the free copy sent the author $5.
Have you heard a single musician or writer complaining about how the Internet is going to put him/her out of a job?
Ok, so the new Linux kernel has a lot of enhancements coming. That still doesn't change the fact that it's still playing catch-up.
"An engineer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away." IMHO, there is nothing at all more important than keeping new and unique features out of the kernel unless they are absolutely necessary -- even this seems like too much (well, really just khttpd; I agree with you that it seems like an exceptionally silly way to whore Linux to the small web-server market.)
An app revision can be partially judged on the basis of a bullet-list of what it does now; a kernel revision, not at all. Experience tells me to place blind faith in there being good new stuff in there that I'll never know about, because it is good. This may be what prevents M$ from ever producing a good OS -- they're embarrassed to ship a product if all they can say about it is, "It's faster and it crashes less. It's better."
Coming soon: ksendmail! kbash! Anything that's on the console would be better in the kernel, right? Maybe we should put the web browser in there, or at least let it handle a few API calls...;-)
I've never even looked at the Mozilla source, but from my limited experience writing browser-like SW, the #1 problem is that you've got eighteen different producer-consumer problems going at the same time, all fighting for very limited resources... should you be rendering off-screen HTML so you can get spacing information, or should you be decompressing a JPEG that's on-screen when you already know its position & dimensions? When should you allow input? These kinds of decisions make process scheduling look trivial. Building a functionally correct browser is no joke (because of all the different standards), but writing one that's smart about task scheduling (i.e. one that looks & feels fast & crisp) is a straight-up bitch, because it's a UI problem.
Example: at one point in the aforementioned semi-browser, I had to disable a piece of background-fetching code, because (click) (1/2 second pause) (response) looks slower than (click) (1/2 second pause with wait-cursor up, input disabled) (response), and at the time no one had thought of having a throbber.
Was it because of this stupid integration idea? Could be. But nothing's stopping those IE users from installing Netscape. Hell, my college library has computers running Windows 98 and Netscape. Same goes for the labs. Microsoft didn't stop them, did they?
You guys are gonna think I'm crazy, but I'm not so sure they didn't.
Did anyone else get a vague impression that (in the days of, say, IE4 or a little earlier) there was code in Windows specifically to put roadblocks up to people who wanted to install Netscape? I remember spending a good 30-40 minutes trying to download the NS installation to a friend's Windows box so I could show him a Java 1.1 applet I thought was cool. I got a meaningless, somewhat threatening-sounding "security warning" when I first went to netscape.com. The IE download I tried ran until the progress bar was full, then hung. Twice. I tried to manually ftp it from NS's site and got a non-FTP-protocol error I've never seen before (wish I could remember what it was); I couldn't download anything from Netscape. I tried grabbing random files off of wustl and a couple other places out of a spirit of, "What the fuck?" and had no problems. I finally had to telnet to a unix box, download it there, and ftp it to his machine. Nothing went wrong after that.
I swear I'm not making any of this up or exaggerating in the slightest. Nobody I talked to had similar stories, and in hindsight my problems seemed kind of trivial, so I dismissed the incident. M$ did pull this approach off against DR DOS with stunning results, though.
Slashdot Mirror
Why do you think the genome mapping companies have been so protective of their data? If the secrets of the universe, placed by some Lovecraftian elder race, start showing up, they want to be sure as hell that they're the ones with the patent on the Mental Translation Protocol (TM).
If a technical solution exists, legal solutions will ultimately be harmful, because they discourage people from actually solving the problem. Prosecuting people because they served you a stream of bytes you consider "harmful" to you, in response to YOUR request to THEM, is an affront to logic as well as free speech.
For God's sake, man -- web sites are going to the trouble of advertising to us that they're poorly or maliciously designed, and we're COMPLAINING about it? I'd love it if there were an HTML tag that inserted subliminal advertising on my desktop. Junkbuster would start telling me, "IBM is trying to steal your money," and I would know never to buy anything from them again.
On the first take, this is not a particularly bad thing for you. You get excellent ODBC/OLE DB support from the OS, and you don't have to care if no one can feasibly run your server on a non-MS machine.
This is why I don't like it when MS gets into a market that has an impact on me. Read your comment again. Yes, I know you meant that the guys who didn't really provide anything except the ability to talk to their DB products in their proprietary format went away -- but in the process, I am quite certain that a few well-engineered and standards-compliant product lines folded completely, because they supported the SAG standard instead of the MS extensions. You praise MS for bringing you quality products at low prices -- yet you must admit that the marketplace has suffered.Remember DR DOS? It blew MS-DOS away technologically, and MS released Windows 3.1, which didn't work with it. Bam, DR DOS blew away, and PC users got stuck with a crap OS again. Borland, Novell, Wordperfect, and Eudora all also lost seriously at the hands of MS, despite having excellent products to offer. MS out-manuevered them. I don't feel sorry for them in an "MS is a bully" sense, but I think that the PC software world is worse for their loss.
Obviously, I don't imagine I'm going to change your mind about MS -- their products clearly work well for you. I ask you to philosophize, though: What if MS had not produced these products? Would you still be using an AS/400, or would you be using a cheaper, more reliable, more interoperable product instead? Is MS's excellent marketing dept. working for or against you when it crushes its competitors? What about when MS changes around its standards, or breaks compatibility with another product, or legally attacks people who are trying to do nothing more than produce good software (Kerberos)?
This page suggests a solution to the insecurity of software that I almost agree with -- basically, that anyone with the know-how should be spending their time writing viruses and exploits for the woefully insecure OSs we are blessed to work with today, until OSs HAVE to be secure to stand up to the sea of malfeasance that comes in through their net connections. My recommendation is a loop of snide but informative walls...
The important question, of course, is: Is it cheaper to buy Irix and get these tools for "free", or to buy DOS/Windows and pay for the tools as needed? In my experience, the headaches you save by going Unix have been worth any extra price, and the question has never arisen. Now, with Linux as a viable option, the question is pretty much moot: Praising MS for making it cheaper to do something you can do literally for free strikes me as silly.
Disclaimer: As I said before, I know pretty much nothing about professional DB tools; if MS has in fact made things significantly cheaper/easier for the average DB programmer, I'd appreciate hearing about it.
If the state of database solutions is such that different programs are this difficult to interoperate, and solutions developed with one company's tools are extremely difficult to use with another company's tools, I would respectfully suggest you find another line of work -- you will find far fewer headaches (though probably less money), and you and your company will be far more automonous -- a smart bet as well as more personally satisfying.
Single-seat programmer's license? What, from the government, like a driver's license? If you want to use a tool from a Nazi company, you get a Nazi license. As I said before, I know nothing about database development tools (which is I assume what you're talking about), so this might be a legitimate beef that MS helped to fix, but all the other problems you mention were caused directly by MS. Printer routines -- thank you, Bill, for giving me an "operating system" whose idea of printer support is to give a program access to the parallel ports and say, "Good luck!" Printer-independent printing was so much the standard on Unices by then that lacking it would have been unthinkable. Third-party help products -- what, like man and info? And how many times have you gotten something useful out of Windows' help system? For me, the answer is: once. MS was working (with "help" in DOS 5) towards an extremely useful help system akin to man, but they seem to have regressed back to the "tip of the day" approach now. A TCP/IP stack? Hooray! Finally, an operating system that has networking support! Thanks, Bill. You've given me so much. Your loyalty to MS seems to be based on the fact that, long after every other operating system had included certain essential features, MS finally caught up, and saved you from having to pay for the features that no one else had been paying for since BSD 4.2. The reason I don't like MS is that they STILL want me to pay for things like a good compiler, good documentation (MSDN cd), basic word processing, and "permission" to write crap that can talk to their crap, all of which are avilable for free when you buy any good Unix. What does MS give you that isn't available better, cheaper, and sans bastard licensing agreements elsewhere?I took heat for weeks when I booted Windows off my system. My mishandling of dual-boot setup wedged my partition table so badly that Linux refused to touch it; I had to dig up my recovery disks, reinstall the factory config, and THEN install Linux. Linux can't talk to my Winmodem, and I still haven't figured out how to read the PDF books that supposedly came on Mandrake disk 3 (gv brings up a single blank page, and acroread says something about the files being encrypted or protected or something). When I want to eject a CD, I have to grovel through all my windows searching for the console that's still in a CD directory so I can unmount the bitch. Any one of these issues matters more to the average web surfer than "But it comes with a free compiler!", and I was made fun of unmercifully for each of them ("What do you mean you can't eject it yet?" "Just hold on a second. Dammit. Okay, now. Dammit."), by intelligent, computer-savvy people who saw Linux as inferior because its good points did not strike them as useful.
In short: Windows really does work very well for the kinds of things the average asshole wants to do. It makes setup as easy as is feasible, and everything runs on it. I can think right now of two people I know who love Windows, MSDN, and MSDev, because they don't ever do anything that requires Makefile hacking or kernel recompiles, and Windows gives them good functionality without requiring them to learn anything. They don't think MS should be broken up, because MS has given them a great deal, and never done anything wrong they can think of. Although they don't have the religious devotion some Linux users do, there are a hell of a lot more of them.
Seriously, I almost agree with Katz on this one. This guy had a legitimate beef with Mickey D's, said his peace without hurting anybody, and now he's taking his lumps for it.
(-1, hilariously misinformed)
(-1, obvious MS shill)
(-1, software bigot)
(+1, unintentionally funny)
(+1, good haiku)
or, in this case,
(-1, total nonsense)
Then, we got smart. We tamed the world and made things comfortable for ourselves, meaning that the only real evolution we (the rich assholes who read Slashdot and can eat any time they want to, at least) get is selection for the fastest fuckers. Our genes are deteriorating with meteoric speed, because we don't need them anymore. We can keep ourselves alive, even with bad eyesight, half-assed lower backs, appendices, wisdom teeth, obselete instincts, and all the other wonderful stuff that young species get to deal with as a matter of course. It won't get better. No one is driving. More to the point, no one will be driving until we have to fight for our food again, and I don't want that to happen.
Now, we've figured out where the wheel is and are starting to reach toward it. "Are you crazy? You can't drive this thing!" No, not yet, but I tell you for damn sure it's time we learned. Our only other alternatives are extinction, the collapse of civilization, or the eternal suffering that will come when there isn't enough food to feed ANYBODY anymore. It's already happening, for example, in India and parts of Africa. We took responsibility for ourselves personally when we started figuring out what to do instead of just doing it (intelligence vs. instinct), and I for one am damned pleased with the results on the whole. I'm not sure we can manage to do as "well" when we extend our grasp into evolutionary time, but it WILL be better than what happens if we don't.
Is there the potential for abuse? Hell yes. Should we be careful? Yes, but we won't be. Should we do it anyway? Yes. It's up there with space flight as technology that is, literally, absolutely essential for the continued existence of the human race.
Oh, good, it's going to support Cobol.
It's not a tournament where two champion RPS bots square off for The Big Game, winner take all. That would, obviously, be useless. It's something different. If you want to learn about it, go here. It's cool. IP is stunningly elegant, and the Markov chain thing is surprising in that it's an almost pure-math solution that works well (I can almost see the guy's old CS professor somewhere, beaming with pride). I know that guys with the pads made everybody a little leery of following the links off this site, but this one is worth clicking past the first page for.
Right you are, sir! In today's "free" market, there are a slew of businesses which wield monopoly power, but which they don't want you to know about it. Consider:
Cisco Systems has a market value comparable to Microsoft's, and has even exceeded it at times, by maintaining a total stranglehold on the network hardware market. Although they would have us believe that Cisco's strategy is "providing a reliable, top-quality product and good support," a number of internal memos have recently been leaked indicating that Cisco plans to start including support for the "upgraded" IPv6 "extension," putting them in a position to use the "embrace and extend" strategy to leverage their large market share into an almost total monopoly on the Internet's physical infrastructure.
The Lego corporation has a long history of introducing new block designs which render the old blocks almost totally useless from an aesthetic perspective. "I spent all my lawn-mowing money on the medievel set," said a sniffling little boy who asked not to be identified, "but then the Technics came out, and all my spears and stuff wouldn't fit anywhere on the walking robot I built unless I mixed those brown spear-holder blocks in, and then my robot looks yucky." He also pointed out, as is well known, that Lego has broken Technics color-compatibility with their new Mindstorm upgrade, by switching red dye #5 for #8, and yellow #2 for #7. Alas, the legal hassles that await anyone foolish enough to reverse-engineer Lego's proprietary block-connection protocols have ensured that Lego has reigned unchallenged as the only source for toys you can build cool shit with, despite their inferior product. The "accidental" death of Abe Fromage and the subsequent collapse of Tinkertoys spelt the end of competition, even before Lego started blatantly cloning "CPU" and "robotics" technology from the computer industry for use in their "innovative" Mindstorm toys.
Furthermore, Red Lobster, Denny's, and other chain/corporation/restaruant/franchise establishments regularly use unconscionable terms in the dining agreements they make with their patrons. As a large corporation, they play from a position of strength: With their high-priced lawyers and large bankrolls, they can freely impose their will on the consumer (commonly by the use of so-called "walk-through" agreements: the restaurant posts it dining agreement on its wall, you and are considered to have "agreed" simply by choosing to dine there, regardless if you have read or even noticed the sign). Examples of this include:
It is sad, but the powermongering megacorporations who really run our country also have merciless teams of wedgie-men and noogie-goons at their command, and they have bamboozled the media and the government into abusing Microsoft to benefit their own bottom line. What with communistic government interference, backlash from the misinformed public, and the software piracy that is rampant in today's industry, Microsoft can barely stay afloat, let alone research more of the innovative, professionally engineered products the software community has come to expect from them, like Microsoft Bob, the dancing Office paper clip, and email clients that do it all at the click of a mouse! Yay Microsoft! Go Bill! One world, one web, one program!
"Well, we didn't think about that, and we don't plan to start."
"I don't feel like answering your question, especially the first sentence. But I'd be happy to blather about how record companies aren't all bad and cite a dubious statistic that has NOTHING to do with the question."
This evasive claptrap makes me doubt the rest of the interview ("This was entirely our own decision, when you include our managers in 'we.'"); the whole thing smacks of a poorly-rehearsed press conference. This is Lars letting everybody know that he doesn't give a damn about the issues involved.
At the risk of karma-whoring, I'd say it's more like this: Microsoft, looking for a fight, draws a line in the sand and says, "I dare you to cross this line." Slashdot crosses it and says, "What are you gonna do about it?" I think both Slashdot and Microsoft knew (or at least hoped) that something like this would happen when the spec was posted -- I certainly did; as tests for the DMCA go, this one is as rigged in our favor as they get.
On the other hand, MS is a corporation; they're used to hitting things with a hammer, and they're quite good at it. As someone else pointed out, they get somewhat confused when they encounter Jello -- which Andover is not. I expect this to go to court, and I wish the best of luck to Andover.
The solution I always liked was simply to fork() MS a couple of times (not allowing any of them to keep the original name). That way, any of them that obfuscates standards will break compatibility with the others and lose. Also, each will face stiff competition to produce a quality product -- in short, they abused their monopoly, so we're taking it away.
Example: According to something I've read somewhere and believe (I think it was in a Dilbert book, but hey, I trust Scott Adams), you still get the interference pattern if you turn the detector on but instruct it to throw away its data instead of sending it anywhere -- this is what discredits the hypothesis that the detector beam interacts somehow with the electrons.
What's always bothered me about this (and Schroedinger's Cat, which was made up to illustrate exactly this point, I guess) is the messiness that goes with it. What if the scientists just don't look at the detector? What if the detector, instead of throwing the data away, XORs it with an unknown bit and outputs the encrypted data? Does the pattern change depending on who in the room knows what the unknown bit is? What if the detector has audio output, but the scientist is deaf?
If you build a QM burglar alarm that rings when it's observed, and the burglar who glances at it is unobserved by you, does he count as an observer from your viewpoint, or does he become part of the wave-equation, like Schroedinger's cat? Does the alarm ever ring when you're not around?
Somebody whose name I don't remember welded a single rocket (jet engine? solid fuel booster? memory fails me) to a big, old-school, lead-gas-guzzling American car and tried to jump it over the US/Canadian border (about 1 mile of water) using an enormous ramp. I swear I'm not making this up; I saw it in slow motion.
Naturally, the car flew apart in pieces, killing the driver, the instant it got off the ground. There was also fire, but it was secondary.
I have no idea where the nonsense on the Darwin Awards page came from, but there is a true story similar to this.
In Harlan Ellison's priceless essay "I Don't Think We're in Kansas Anymore, Toto," he talks about a particularly sour deal he had with a TV studio, wherein he was trying to do good writing for a decent wage and the producers were treating him as the hired help. When the project starts to fail in official ways, Harlan calls up one of The Management and starts chortling with glee.
"What are you so happy about? You just lost a $90,000 contract," asks The Man.
Harlan's reply: "It's worth ninety grand to see you fuckers go down the toilet."
Chuck D is saying the same thing, and I applaud him for it.
The solution: Reduce their incentive to. Widely distribute a daemon, pstormd, and a program, pstorm. When pstorm is run, it will connect to every copy of pstormd in existence, each of which will begin ping-flooding every host it knows of.
Result: Anyone anywhere will be able to effortlessly bring down the Internet without getting caught. After several months during which the net is totally useless, a general appreciation for the fact that the network is not a toy will develop. Every month or two, someone will run the program out of maliciousness, terrorism, or curiosity, but the appeal will gradually dwindle. ISPs who deny access to the program to their users will be publicly flogged for "presenting a challenge to the little bastards." AOL, after steadfastly refusing to include pstorm's trademark "don't push" button in their software, will be disconnected from the network entirely, to general approval. pstorm will eventually be ruled illegal, but no one will care.
The FBI will be sued by the FSF, and lose, because its attempts to block pstormd from functioning involve reverse-engineering its messages (3-byte UDP packets which read, "GO!"). Microsoft will write its own pstorm, which says "BO!", and imply that the non-MS version is unreliable and may be unsupported in the future.
Eventually, use of pstorm will be restricted by tradition to certain celebratory occasions, such as Kwanza. It will also be used to protest particularly clueless decisions by judges and elected officials about The Way The Network Should Work, to remind them and everyone else how much say they have in the matter.
Have you heard a single musician or writer complaining about how the Internet is going to put him/her out of a job?
"An engineer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away." IMHO, there is nothing at all more important than keeping new and unique features out of the kernel unless they are absolutely necessary -- even this seems like too much (well, really just khttpd; I agree with you that it seems like an exceptionally silly way to whore Linux to the small web-server market.)
An app revision can be partially judged on the basis of a bullet-list of what it does now; a kernel revision, not at all. Experience tells me to place blind faith in there being good new stuff in there that I'll never know about, because it is good. This may be what prevents M$ from ever producing a good OS -- they're embarrassed to ship a product if all they can say about it is, "It's faster and it crashes less. It's better."
Coming soon: ksendmail! kbash! Anything that's on the console would be better in the kernel, right? Maybe we should put the web browser in there, or at least let it handle a few API calls... ;-)
Example: at one point in the aforementioned semi-browser, I had to disable a piece of background-fetching code, because (click) (1/2 second pause) (response) looks slower than (click) (1/2 second pause with wait-cursor up, input disabled) (response), and at the time no one had thought of having a throbber.
You guys are gonna think I'm crazy, but I'm not so sure they didn't.
Did anyone else get a vague impression that (in the days of, say, IE4 or a little earlier) there was code in Windows specifically to put roadblocks up to people who wanted to install Netscape? I remember spending a good 30-40 minutes trying to download the NS installation to a friend's Windows box so I could show him a Java 1.1 applet I thought was cool. I got a meaningless, somewhat threatening-sounding "security warning" when I first went to netscape.com. The IE download I tried ran until the progress bar was full, then hung. Twice. I tried to manually ftp it from NS's site and got a non-FTP-protocol error I've never seen before (wish I could remember what it was); I couldn't download anything from Netscape. I tried grabbing random files off of wustl and a couple other places out of a spirit of, "What the fuck?" and had no problems. I finally had to telnet to a unix box, download it there, and ftp it to his machine. Nothing went wrong after that.
I swear I'm not making any of this up or exaggerating in the slightest. Nobody I talked to had similar stories, and in hindsight my problems seemed kind of trivial, so I dismissed the incident. M$ did pull this approach off against DR DOS with stunning results, though.