Even in their 'meatspace' incarnations, virii are facinating, and raise a lot of probing questions about the definition of life, and how we gauge 'success' in a competitive system. They only reproduce through the subversion of larger, much more complex organisms...they can survive extreme conditions (even a near-perfect vacuum, in many cases)...their design is simpler than even the most basic cellular structure.
I had hoped to see some interesting discussion of the usefulness of the viral analogy for information flow here, but instead, I'm disappointed. Most of the comments I see are knee-jerk emotional responses to the "icky-ness" or virii, and how that makes the comparison offensive or inappropriate.
Remember, folks, winning is the primary goal of many human (and biological) activities. In an environment as competitive as the food chain, anything that keeps you from getting wiped out is a good idea. Virii are an elegant, effective solution, and really bend a lot of our preconceptions about the basic requirements for life.
You are forgetting one of the most important areas of the information economy (and of pure information science): network effects. Setting aside the qualitative evaluations of Microsoft's products, that is the one factor that has made them the dominant monopoly they are today. For those who might not recall, the classic example of a network effect is the fax machine. The first fax was basically useless, as there was no one to send documents to. The second was more useful, and increased the value of the first; this pattern continues ad infinitum, making each new fax (or copy of Windows) more valuable than the last simply because it is interoperable with all of them.
The Internet is changing that, however. It's less important now that I be able to swap word processing documents and floppies with someone than it is to be able to speak the same protocols online. I don't think that Linux, or Mac OS, or even Windows will have anything like a 90% market share in five years. You'll have servers running BSD or some modern Windows variant, workstations with OS X or Linux, and embedded devices running anything that'll fit. The key battleground now is the network, and Microsoft knows it as well as their competitors do. That's why they do things like "improving" the Kerebos specification; if they can control the protocols, it doesn't matter what OS or office package people want to run, because they'll still be beholden to MS for the most important work they do with computers.
First of all, it's not charity. Every *loan* that gets made to developing countries gets paid back, and they get charged interest rates that you or I would think were usary. Why? Because otherwise, the local economies would overheat, and self-destruct in a matter of months. The only true "charity" that most developing nations get is the occasional batch of disaster relief, which means patrols from UN soldiers, shipping containers full of unusuable perishable goods and expired pharmaceuticals, and news crews taking pictures.
Second of all, trade agreements with other developing nations don't get you antibiotics, or construction machinery, or electronics. As for "giving" them access to "your" market, I had been under the impression that capitalism held a truly open market as a good thing. Maybe you're just intimidated, because there are millions of perfectly intelligent people out there who would kill to work hundred hour weeks for half what you make, and they're all scrambling for their piece of "your" market.
You could apply that statement to the BSD license, perhaps, but not the GPL. The initial creator may make the decision to open their code, but every following contributor is required to do the same. That sounds a lot more like some form of pseudo-communism than a no-strings-attached gift. When I give someone a gift, I don't tell them that it's very important to me that they keep it forever, or wear it every day, or display it in a public place in their home. That would be rude. Software is not a gift from programmer to user; it is simply something that might as well be shared once it is created, since additional copies of it cost effectively nothing, and don't prevent those who already have it from continuing to use it.
Now, I personally have far fewer problems with Communism than most people around here seem to, but that's simply a result of having been taught as a child that money is a terrible idicator of your worth as a person, and really wishing that other people saw it the same way. Call me a softie if you must, but I like to think that there are any number of things better than money that we could be offering those we respect.
Big record labels are some of the most consistently unpleasant entities of the artistic world. Their entire role is to take the music with the widest appeal, sterilize it, and make cookie-cutter bands that "perform" it until the public gets tired of it. Every once in a while, someone gifted with some semblance of songwriting or musical ability may "make it", but it then becomes a constant struggle for them to continue to grow and improve as an artist, because the label just wants consisten, predictable, top-40 hits. To top it all off, since most record labels own or control basically every stage of the music production and distribution process, you can't get into popular markets without bending over for them.
However, there's hope on the horizon. I don't know how many of you actually pay attention to PHB-speak, but there's a lot of talk around business circles these days about the sudden loss of all the advantages that historically have come from "vertical integration" -- basically, controlling every step in the lifecycle of your product. Today's record companies are dinosaurs from an age when owning the distribution, promotion, production, and development of popular music (or any other consumer good) was once the only competitive way to get the products to market. However, we now have this wonderful thing called the Internet, which makes them unneccesary. I can record an album, mix it, publish CD's, market my group, contact fans, broadcast live or studio performances, make business contacts, etc., all from the comfort of my own home.
Unless the big labels start loosening up the tight lines between their major operational areas, there's no way they'll be able to keep up with the pace of innovation. Hence, pointless price fixing, which is going to get them nailed to the floor and walked all over.
M17 was just announced, and if you'd read the damn page, you'd see that they recommend waiting a little while to see if your platform comes up. M16, by the time all the *binary* builds were up, was available for Windows, Mac, Linux, FreeBSD, Solaris, Tru64, HPUX, and OpenVMS. Earlier builds included *binary* releases for those, AIX, and IRIX. Sounds pretty damn cross-platform to me.
Have you tried compiling the thing yourself? There is a reason they distribute the *source* for *open source* software. If it has problems compiling on your platform, tell the maintainers, so the bugs can get fixed; or better yet, send them a patch. Don't just get on/. and bitch about how you can't find a *binary* release for your particular flavor of *NIX, so everything except Linux has been abandoned by the development community.
Most of us can't afford SGI hardware, so we have to deal with running Linux on shitty x86 boxes. The least you could do is not complain about how you have to suffer through finding software for machines that I, at least, would give a pinky to swap for the Celeron I've got at home.
Listen: Apple did *not* sue the rumor sites. They sent them cease-and-desist letters, then started going after the employees and/or contractors who leaked the information.
And how, exactly, is this "the heart of F.U.D.?" The 'fear', I can understand, but it doesn't seem to me that Apple left much room for 'uncertainty' or 'distrust' -- by ordering the sites to pull the pictures, they basically certified them as the real deal, and no one has been brazen enough to claim that the information wasn't leaked illegally from Apple.
Your second-to-last paragraph makes no sense. The aggrieved parties would win, because the courts would back Apple? Finally, the last thing you recommend *is* an example of FUD -- by manipulating the evidence as you suggest, Apple would have been, in my mind, guilty of far worse an offense than asking some stolen pictures to get yanked from the Web.
Pretty much any country that wants to be a part of the WTO has to play by IP rules similar to those in the US. That means that any developing nation that wants loans or trade agreements from the big boys will get strong-armed into adopting "the party line" on intellectual property, drugs, taxes, etc.
Welcome to the modern networked world, everyone...where big business has just as much power as government in every country, and can intimidate, sue, and surveil you anywhere, anytime, for any reason.
Compare, for example, FTP and Napster. Both are conceptually similar, but one offered a coherent use and user interface, while the other was an incredibly general tool. Which one got popular notice really quickly, and generated all this attention?
Similarly, Freenet and Publius have similar basic goals and technologies at their core. However, Freenet is an incredibly general system, which could be used for everything from snippets of text to warez and pirated movies. I think Publius may do quite well, if for no other reason than its purpose is easily understandable by the average user, it will probably have a much simpler interface, (especially with strong corporate backing) and there will be less opportunity to shut the whole thing down on the pretense of preventing piracy.
What I really want to know is why AT&T would back a project like this. Where is the gain to them from making anonymous free speech easier? How exactly are they going to answer, say, their Board of Directors, or a shareholders' suit, if someone decides that is could be economically detrimental to them?
Try turning on Active Desktop. Or opening an email with HTML in it is Outlook -- or any other MS app, for that matter. Then the DLL's will load. When you exit, they will close. Even Microsoft would not be so stupid as to have big, fat HTML rendering DLL's loaded into memory when there's no HTML being rendered, and likewise with JScript.
The issue is their 'tying' of those DLL files to the IE browser. It's not anything that, say, the GNOME and KDE projects aren't working on copying, and really, it's a good design choice for any OS that's going to be rendering a lot of HTML. However, the issue has always been Microsoft's exclusive ability to develop such integrated tools on the Windows platform, since outside developers are not given access to the full internals.
And yes, that means that if you could duplicate the performance of the IE DLL's on the Windows platform, you could make a lot of money -- because you would be an employee of Microsoft. They are the only ones who can develop tools that work with Windows on that low a level. (Or, you could develop it on your own, and get sued/jailed for reverse-engineering proprietary MS technology.)
I realize that/. is a hostile place for MS-sympathizers, but don't assume that everyone who speaks poorly of them knows nothing about their software. Many of us only gained an interest in open source after being driven away from the Windows platform.
And much of the reason that people feel they need to "develop" for browsers is that the companies making them (and that most certainly includes Netscape) aren't content to leave the logic on the server. They want to have each and every user stay in their browser all day, and run every possible application they might need through a JavaScript/HTML/XML/Java/Shockwave/Flash nightmare.
Just look at the number of freaking Linux system administration tools that have browser-based interfaces. Granted, they do most of the processing on the server side, but neither HTML or HTTP were designed to jump through the kind of hoops that they are these days.
I agree with you that the web should be about getting your information out to the widest audience possible. However, $100 billion worth or marketing is quickly convincing most companies and consumers otherwise, and I fear for our ability to fight back.
Well, if the government didn't patent the technologies developed by its employees, someone else would. Patent applications only require that you be able to describe an invention decently well, and prove that it has yet to be patented. If you can find out about someone else's idea, and patent it first, then the rights belong to you. Personally, I'd rather see a few more basic technology patents in the hands of somewhat other than profit-seeking corporations, and if that has to be the government, rather than the original inventors, so be it.
*Hardware expansion bus: Springboard -- Supports software & hardware on single low-profile card, expansion of system memory, external I/O, etc.
*Programmability: Okay, Palm OS really isn't the best development platform in the world...something better than C for rapid development would be really nice. There are C, Lisp, and minimal Java compilers, all available free or cheaply now, though.
*CPU power: You know, the Dragonball chips really aren't that bad...the original Mac, every PC up to the 386's, and even a lot of early workstations (like the old Moto-powered Suns) has slower chips, and were perfectly seviceable for all kinds of scientific apps.
*Display: Probably the weakest link. 4-bit grayscale at 160x160 ain't gonna cut it for complex graphs, or anything 3-D.
*Interface: USB. Fast as 10/Base-T Ethernet, cheap, and low-power.
If all those are a little anemic for what you want, why not take a step back in time to the later Newtons? You lose a good bit in portability, but gain a 100+ MHz StrongARM processor, much better display, handwriting recognition, and an actual PCMCIA slot. I'm not familiar with how easy the Newton OS is to develop for, but it seems like it should be no worse than for the Mac.
You know, text entry on a watch, while painfully slow and inaccurate, *can* be done. Anyone remember the old Casio Data Bank watches? Sure, they we *really expensive* -- like $50-75. Yes, they only held a few hundred reminders or phone numbers. They were also designed in the late eighties, which leads me to believe that we might be able to improve on the design just a bit.
It seems to me that there are a number of potential uses for something that small, secure, and cheap, even without extensive user I/O. How about a few MB of storage space, so you can use it like a handful of floppies? (I've often wished that my 8MB Palm was willing to cough up even 1-2MB so I could take some new downloads, umm, I mean, Word documents, home from work.) Or, add a low-power RF tranciever, and use the thing as a local pager -- get up and walk around while your code compiles, or get pinged when email arrives, etc. (Hell, then the damn things *could* exchange business cards, etc.)
If it's running Linux, on a standard (if stripped down) kernel, all these and more are possible from the software side; as with many such barely-marketable ideas, however, getting the hardware build seems like it would be a significantly larger challenge. I wonder if those IBM boys are gonna need that prototype after the press have snapped a few pictures...
While we may sound brave and ready for blood here, posting to a forum for those we are fairly sure will agree and back us up, I wonder how many of us would walk up to our boss, tell them we thought the body of business and IP law in the US were bunk, and that we refused to support it. Not many, I would guess...and those of you who are lucky enough to be able to work for companies who are socially and envronmentally conscious, or work for yourself, etc., are the exception, rather than the rule. Most of us are stuck working for organizations whose policies and goals we don't necessarily agree with 100%.
So, if even the massed voice of Slashdot falters when confronted with real-world situations, we can't really expect the general population to revolt over Napster, DeCSS, and the like. Assuming this, we can't expect the whole system to simply be tossed out and rewritten from scratch. However, there are some basic milestones that could conceivably be reached in the next couple of years to help begin the process of returning sanity to copyright and patent law.
First, "fair use" must be defined clearly, unambigously, and publicly. The boundaries between acceptable duplication and sharing of protected materials and outright piracy cannot continue to be a grey area to be manipulated by industry at will. This includes clarification of licensing agreements and provision for the development of new distribution technologies.
Second, the RIAA, MPAA, et. al., must step up and provide a usable system of digital distribution for the full range of their products. That means infrastructure, connectivity, micropayment systems, secure transactions, etc. If they expect to be at the wheel for media distribution in the next twenty years, they're going to have to take it as seriously as any other major distribution channel (if not more so).
If either or both fail to happen soon, I don't see how the major interest groups could expect any outcome but the one currently developing: developer and user communities will continue to outpace "big media" by six months to a year, and jump ship to the new, improved work-around as soon as one is shut down.
It's actually in all our best interests to try to see #1 and #2 above happen, because otherwise, the continued proliferation of pirated materials will move in alongside drug trafficking and terrorism as common justifications for government surveillence and unconstitutional status of executive decision as unquestionable national policy. The first strong big-business supporter in the White House will be able to walk all over personal freedoms and liberties so long as enough college kids are swapping illegal MPEG's and warez.
I understand the fundamental core of your arguments, and agree with portions of it. (The fact that government imposes arbitrary restrictions, seems to me like a simple truism, but I'll give you points for sincerity.) However, please do not group Napster in with Socrates and Reich. The Internet as a whole, and Napster as one of its child technologies, is an amazing mode of communication, but Napster is not in and of itself a body of "subversive material" any more than a typewriter is subversive.
Do you want to have clean installation and deinstallation, or do you want to have your choice of a dozen distributions, an equal number of stable kernels, and an effectively limitless number of end-user configurations? Yes, if the Linux directory, config file, and system library versions were perfectly consistent, it would make it easy to add and remove entire packages of software at a fell swoop without concern for the consequences. However, it would also make the system as static and constrained as Windows or the MacOS.
For some users, this might be a good thing. Those people, IMHO, gravitate towards Red Hat. Others, though, may want the freedom to occasionally try out a development kernel, or use a non-standard partitioning and configuration to squeeze a few more Apache page hits out of that old PII box. This is where source or binary tarballs are nice and easy, and give a quite adequate amount of control.
The language is pretty immaterial here, folks. It's primarily being developed to let your average Joe "VB" User move up to a slightly more powerful toolkit, without having to get in to the nitty-gritty of C++. Plus, if the full spec is really submitted to the EMCA, it can be copied and implemented by anyone, including the GNU Project, or any other open source development group or team. (Maybe the Blackdown guys need another challenge?)
Anyway, the card to watch for here is the core.NET libraries themselves. If they're licensed as prohibitively as most MS software, then the language will be crippled outside the Windows sandbox; think of Java without any of the more complex packages, like AWT, JDBC, etc. However, if the libraries are even distributed like Java's (binary format only), then they can be used as a stopgap until open source replacements can be built.
Just out of curiosity, are there compilers for most major computer languages in other human languages than English? I know that the big OS's and applications support localization, but is there, for example, a Japanese or Finnish version of C? If not, it would seem that part of the American advantage in software stems from the ease with which we can read and write source code.
Netscape didn't have many options when they released the Communicator 5 source to the Mozilla community. IE was already starting to run circles around them, and the product would have been dead in the water in another six months. Their most important contribution has turned out to not even be the code, which basically had to be scrapped, but the development support and maintenance that the project needed to continue moving forward.
While development may not have proceeded on a breakneck pace, it probably wouldn't have happened at all otherwise. Netscape simply could not develop Communicator fast enough to keep up with MS, or even with the introduction of XML and other new web standards.
I would also hesitate to say that no one has been interested in Mozilla; just look at the fuss people make about it on both sides. Those who use and work on it are often almost religiously dedicated to it, and those who feel that it's failing in its purpose say so loudly and publicly. How many pre-alpha applications have you seen which get national media attention on a regular basis?
There's a spectrum of computing problems that are commonly attacked with large-scale systems, including traditional supercomputers and clusters. On one end, you have the high-end supers, with that beautiful I/O and memory bandwidth. They serve a valuable purpose for calculations that require a lot of interaction between routines -- think a big system of equations, where every variable appears in several of them.
On the other extreme are widely distributed systems, like SETI@home. There, you get decent performance by splitting your data set into completely independent, smaller batches, and farming them out a chunk at a time to smaller systems, which then report back to a central aggregator. Efficiency-wise, this method loses a lot, because every client usually has to completely duplicate the functionality and overhead of the entire processing application; however, the low cost and high availability of processing cycles can make that almost immaterial.
These big clusters fit somewhere in the middle. Especially in this case, where each node is a highly capable system in its own right, you can give more complex and varied instruction sets to each unit, and offer decent I/O bandwidth to the others. The clustering tools give the system a maintainability and level of transparency better that simply running the same application on many machines, and since each node can be given a completely seperate set of instructions, the redundancy of code is less.
The other key advantage to one big cluster, instead of a processtree-like distributed solution, is the real-time control and reliability of the processing. If you have massive job that needs to be completed some time in the next month, an online distributed net might work fine; if you have a data set crunched by five p.m., you want to know exactly how much power you'll be getting, and run the job in one fell swoop.
This is a perfectly good example of why it is a Good Thing that there are more protocols on the Net than just HTTP. If you want to find porn, check Usenet. If you want protected free speech, use encrypted email lists, or run a Freenet node.
Also, is there any reason that Gopher, IRC, MUDs, authenticated FTP, or any number of other common, easy-to-use tools couldn't carry a lot of the traffic that's on the Web right now? Especially since that would immediately remove a sizeable fraction of the clueless people who bump around in IE until they get themselves into trouble...
From what I gather, Microsoft *is* working on new licensing arrangements...annual rental fees. Then, you not only won't have the right to choose which version or configuration you install, you'll be forced to upgrade to every new version, or lose your right to use any edition. That would make the total cost of ownership fairly reasonable, (and very consistent) but turn you into a permanent MicroSerf.
If the government doesn't have the right to put packet sniffers on the net, and look for traffic to and from "interesting parties", then do system administrators have a right to watch traffic on their internal networks to watch for possible attacks from within, or poor security practices by users? Both of them are "just doing their job," and both invade the privacy of those they monitor.
Voluntary profiling can lead to better customer service. Just like in the standard world of retail, where a salesperson who knows you, or knows the right questions to ask, can pick out products that you might like more effectively than someone who knows nothing about you.
However, most sites give you no opt-out, other than disabling JavaScript or cookies, which often renders them unusable. That's like a retail store that refuses to let anyone shop there who doesn't want their height, weight, favorite color, and home town recorded at the point of sale.
Slashdot Mirror
Even in their 'meatspace' incarnations, virii are facinating, and raise a lot of probing questions about the definition of life, and how we gauge 'success' in a competitive system. They only reproduce through the subversion of larger, much more complex organisms...they can survive extreme conditions (even a near-perfect vacuum, in many cases)...their design is simpler than even the most basic cellular structure.
I had hoped to see some interesting discussion of the usefulness of the viral analogy for information flow here, but instead, I'm disappointed. Most of the comments I see are knee-jerk emotional responses to the "icky-ness" or virii, and how that makes the comparison offensive or inappropriate.
Remember, folks, winning is the primary goal of many human (and biological) activities. In an environment as competitive as the food chain, anything that keeps you from getting wiped out is a good idea. Virii are an elegant, effective solution, and really bend a lot of our preconceptions about the basic requirements for life.
You are forgetting one of the most important areas of the information economy (and of pure information science): network effects. Setting aside the qualitative evaluations of Microsoft's products, that is the one factor that has made them the dominant monopoly they are today. For those who might not recall, the classic example of a network effect is the fax machine. The first fax was basically useless, as there was no one to send documents to. The second was more useful, and increased the value of the first; this pattern continues ad infinitum, making each new fax (or copy of Windows) more valuable than the last simply because it is interoperable with all of them.
The Internet is changing that, however. It's less important now that I be able to swap word processing documents and floppies with someone than it is to be able to speak the same protocols online. I don't think that Linux, or Mac OS, or even Windows will have anything like a 90% market share in five years. You'll have servers running BSD or some modern Windows variant, workstations with OS X or Linux, and embedded devices running anything that'll fit. The key battleground now is the network, and Microsoft knows it as well as their competitors do. That's why they do things like "improving" the Kerebos specification; if they can control the protocols, it doesn't matter what OS or office package people want to run, because they'll still be beholden to MS for the most important work they do with computers.
First of all, it's not charity. Every *loan* that gets made to developing countries gets paid back, and they get charged interest rates that you or I would think were usary. Why? Because otherwise, the local economies would overheat, and self-destruct in a matter of months. The only true "charity" that most developing nations get is the occasional batch of disaster relief, which means patrols from UN soldiers, shipping containers full of unusuable perishable goods and expired pharmaceuticals, and news crews taking pictures.
Second of all, trade agreements with other developing nations don't get you antibiotics, or construction machinery, or electronics. As for "giving" them access to "your" market, I had been under the impression that capitalism held a truly open market as a good thing. Maybe you're just intimidated, because there are millions of perfectly intelligent people out there who would kill to work hundred hour weeks for half what you make, and they're all scrambling for their piece of "your" market.
You could apply that statement to the BSD license, perhaps, but not the GPL. The initial creator may make the decision to open their code, but every following contributor is required to do the same. That sounds a lot more like some form of pseudo-communism than a no-strings-attached gift. When I give someone a gift, I don't tell them that it's very important to me that they keep it forever, or wear it every day, or display it in a public place in their home. That would be rude. Software is not a gift from programmer to user; it is simply something that might as well be shared once it is created, since additional copies of it cost effectively nothing, and don't prevent those who already have it from continuing to use it.
Now, I personally have far fewer problems with Communism than most people around here seem to, but that's simply a result of having been taught as a child that money is a terrible idicator of your worth as a person, and really wishing that other people saw it the same way. Call me a softie if you must, but I like to think that there are any number of things better than money that we could be offering those we respect.
Big record labels are some of the most consistently unpleasant entities of the artistic world. Their entire role is to take the music with the widest appeal, sterilize it, and make cookie-cutter bands that "perform" it until the public gets tired of it. Every once in a while, someone gifted with some semblance of songwriting or musical ability may "make it", but it then becomes a constant struggle for them to continue to grow and improve as an artist, because the label just wants consisten, predictable, top-40 hits. To top it all off, since most record labels own or control basically every stage of the music production and distribution process, you can't get into popular markets without bending over for them.
However, there's hope on the horizon. I don't know how many of you actually pay attention to PHB-speak, but there's a lot of talk around business circles these days about the sudden loss of all the advantages that historically have come from "vertical integration" -- basically, controlling every step in the lifecycle of your product. Today's record companies are dinosaurs from an age when owning the distribution, promotion, production, and development of popular music (or any other consumer good) was once the only competitive way to get the products to market. However, we now have this wonderful thing called the Internet, which makes them unneccesary. I can record an album, mix it, publish CD's, market my group, contact fans, broadcast live or studio performances, make business contacts, etc., all from the comfort of my own home.
Unless the big labels start loosening up the tight lines between their major operational areas, there's no way they'll be able to keep up with the pace of innovation. Hence, pointless price fixing, which is going to get them nailed to the floor and walked all over.
M17 was just announced, and if you'd read the damn page, you'd see that they recommend waiting a little while to see if your platform comes up. M16, by the time all the *binary* builds were up, was available for Windows, Mac, Linux, FreeBSD, Solaris, Tru64, HPUX, and OpenVMS. Earlier builds included *binary* releases for those, AIX, and IRIX. Sounds pretty damn cross-platform to me.
/. and bitch about how you can't find a *binary* release for your particular flavor of *NIX, so everything except Linux has been abandoned by the development community.
Have you tried compiling the thing yourself? There is a reason they distribute the *source* for *open source* software. If it has problems compiling on your platform, tell the maintainers, so the bugs can get fixed; or better yet, send them a patch. Don't just get on
Most of us can't afford SGI hardware, so we have to deal with running Linux on shitty x86 boxes. The least you could do is not complain about how you have to suffer through finding software for machines that I, at least, would give a pinky to swap for the Celeron I've got at home.
Listen: Apple did *not* sue the rumor sites. They sent them cease-and-desist letters, then started going after the employees and/or contractors who leaked the information.
And how, exactly, is this "the heart of F.U.D.?" The 'fear', I can understand, but it doesn't seem to me that Apple left much room for 'uncertainty' or 'distrust' -- by ordering the sites to pull the pictures, they basically certified them as the real deal, and no one has been brazen enough to claim that the information wasn't leaked illegally from Apple.
Your second-to-last paragraph makes no sense. The aggrieved parties would win, because the courts would back Apple? Finally, the last thing you recommend *is* an example of FUD -- by manipulating the evidence as you suggest, Apple would have been, in my mind, guilty of far worse an offense than asking some stolen pictures to get yanked from the Web.
Pretty much any country that wants to be a part of the WTO has to play by IP rules similar to those in the US. That means that any developing nation that wants loans or trade agreements from the big boys will get strong-armed into adopting "the party line" on intellectual property, drugs, taxes, etc.
Welcome to the modern networked world, everyone...where big business has just as much power as government in every country, and can intimidate, sue, and surveil you anywhere, anytime, for any reason.
Compare, for example, FTP and Napster. Both are conceptually similar, but one offered a coherent use and user interface, while the other was an incredibly general tool. Which one got popular notice really quickly, and generated all this attention?
Similarly, Freenet and Publius have similar basic goals and technologies at their core. However, Freenet is an incredibly general system, which could be used for everything from snippets of text to warez and pirated movies. I think Publius may do quite well, if for no other reason than its purpose is easily understandable by the average user, it will probably have a much simpler interface, (especially with strong corporate backing) and there will be less opportunity to shut the whole thing down on the pretense of preventing piracy.
What I really want to know is why AT&T would back a project like this. Where is the gain to them from making anonymous free speech easier? How exactly are they going to answer, say, their Board of Directors, or a shareholders' suit, if someone decides that is could be economically detrimental to them?
Try turning on Active Desktop. Or opening an email with HTML in it is Outlook -- or any other MS app, for that matter. Then the DLL's will load. When you exit, they will close. Even Microsoft would not be so stupid as to have big, fat HTML rendering DLL's loaded into memory when there's no HTML being rendered, and likewise with JScript.
/. is a hostile place for MS-sympathizers, but don't assume that everyone who speaks poorly of them knows nothing about their software. Many of us only gained an interest in open source after being driven away from the Windows platform.
The issue is their 'tying' of those DLL files to the IE browser. It's not anything that, say, the GNOME and KDE projects aren't working on copying, and really, it's a good design choice for any OS that's going to be rendering a lot of HTML. However, the issue has always been Microsoft's exclusive ability to develop such integrated tools on the Windows platform, since outside developers are not given access to the full internals.
And yes, that means that if you could duplicate the performance of the IE DLL's on the Windows platform, you could make a lot of money -- because you would be an employee of Microsoft. They are the only ones who can develop tools that work with Windows on that low a level. (Or, you could develop it on your own, and get sued/jailed for reverse-engineering proprietary MS technology.)
I realize that
And much of the reason that people feel they need to "develop" for browsers is that the companies making them (and that most certainly includes Netscape) aren't content to leave the logic on the server. They want to have each and every user stay in their browser all day, and run every possible application they might need through a JavaScript/HTML/XML/Java/Shockwave/Flash nightmare.
Just look at the number of freaking Linux system administration tools that have browser-based interfaces. Granted, they do most of the processing on the server side, but neither HTML or HTTP were designed to jump through the kind of hoops that they are these days.
I agree with you that the web should be about getting your information out to the widest audience possible. However, $100 billion worth or marketing is quickly convincing most companies and consumers otherwise, and I fear for our ability to fight back.
Well, if the government didn't patent the technologies developed by its employees, someone else would. Patent applications only require that you be able to describe an invention decently well, and prove that it has yet to be patented. If you can find out about someone else's idea, and patent it first, then the rights belong to you. Personally, I'd rather see a few more basic technology patents in the hands of somewhat other than profit-seeking corporations, and if that has to be the government, rather than the original inventors, so be it.
How about a Handspring Visor?
*Hardware expansion bus: Springboard -- Supports software & hardware on single low-profile card, expansion of system memory, external I/O, etc.
*Programmability: Okay, Palm OS really isn't the best development platform in the world...something better than C for rapid development would be really nice. There are C, Lisp, and minimal Java compilers, all available free or cheaply now, though.
*CPU power: You know, the Dragonball chips really aren't that bad...the original Mac, every PC up to the 386's, and even a lot of early workstations (like the old Moto-powered Suns) has slower chips, and were perfectly seviceable for all kinds of scientific apps.
*Display: Probably the weakest link. 4-bit grayscale at 160x160 ain't gonna cut it for complex graphs, or anything 3-D.
*Interface: USB. Fast as 10/Base-T Ethernet, cheap, and low-power.
If all those are a little anemic for what you want, why not take a step back in time to the later Newtons? You lose a good bit in portability, but gain a 100+ MHz StrongARM processor, much better display, handwriting recognition, and an actual PCMCIA slot. I'm not familiar with how easy the Newton OS is to develop for, but it seems like it should be no worse than for the Mac.
You know, text entry on a watch, while painfully slow and inaccurate, *can* be done. Anyone remember the old Casio Data Bank watches? Sure, they we *really expensive* -- like $50-75. Yes, they only held a few hundred reminders or phone numbers. They were also designed in the late eighties, which leads me to believe that we might be able to improve on the design just a bit.
It seems to me that there are a number of potential uses for something that small, secure, and cheap, even without extensive user I/O. How about a few MB of storage space, so you can use it like a handful of floppies? (I've often wished that my 8MB Palm was willing to cough up even 1-2MB so I could take some new downloads, umm, I mean, Word documents, home from work.) Or, add a low-power RF tranciever, and use the thing as a local pager -- get up and walk around while your code compiles, or get pinged when email arrives, etc. (Hell, then the damn things *could* exchange business cards, etc.)
If it's running Linux, on a standard (if stripped down) kernel, all these and more are possible from the software side; as with many such barely-marketable ideas, however, getting the hardware build seems like it would be a significantly larger challenge. I wonder if those IBM boys are gonna need that prototype after the press have snapped a few pictures...
While we may sound brave and ready for blood here, posting to a forum for those we are fairly sure will agree and back us up, I wonder how many of us would walk up to our boss, tell them we thought the body of business and IP law in the US were bunk, and that we refused to support it. Not many, I would guess...and those of you who are lucky enough to be able to work for companies who are socially and envronmentally conscious, or work for yourself, etc., are the exception, rather than the rule. Most of us are stuck working for organizations whose policies and goals we don't necessarily agree with 100%.
So, if even the massed voice of Slashdot falters when confronted with real-world situations, we can't really expect the general population to revolt over Napster, DeCSS, and the like. Assuming this, we can't expect the whole system to simply be tossed out and rewritten from scratch. However, there are some basic milestones that could conceivably be reached in the next couple of years to help begin the process of returning sanity to copyright and patent law.
First, "fair use" must be defined clearly, unambigously, and publicly. The boundaries between acceptable duplication and sharing of protected materials and outright piracy cannot continue to be a grey area to be manipulated by industry at will. This includes clarification of licensing agreements and provision for the development of new distribution technologies.
Second, the RIAA, MPAA, et. al., must step up and provide a usable system of digital distribution for the full range of their products. That means infrastructure, connectivity, micropayment systems, secure transactions, etc. If they expect to be at the wheel for media distribution in the next twenty years, they're going to have to take it as seriously as any other major distribution channel (if not more so).
If either or both fail to happen soon, I don't see how the major interest groups could expect any outcome but the one currently developing: developer and user communities will continue to outpace "big media" by six months to a year, and jump ship to the new, improved work-around as soon as one is shut down.
It's actually in all our best interests to try to see #1 and #2 above happen, because otherwise, the continued proliferation of pirated materials will move in alongside drug trafficking and terrorism as common justifications for government surveillence and unconstitutional status of executive decision as unquestionable national policy. The first strong big-business supporter in the White House will be able to walk all over personal freedoms and liberties so long as enough college kids are swapping illegal MPEG's and warez.
I understand the fundamental core of your arguments, and agree with portions of it. (The fact that government imposes arbitrary restrictions, seems to me like a simple truism, but I'll give you points for sincerity.) However, please do not group Napster in with Socrates and Reich. The Internet as a whole, and Napster as one of its child technologies, is an amazing mode of communication, but Napster is not in and of itself a body of "subversive material" any more than a typewriter is subversive.
Do you want to have clean installation and deinstallation, or do you want to have your choice of a dozen distributions, an equal number of stable kernels, and an effectively limitless number of end-user configurations? Yes, if the Linux directory, config file, and system library versions were perfectly consistent, it would make it easy to add and remove entire packages of software at a fell swoop without concern for the consequences. However, it would also make the system as static and constrained as Windows or the MacOS.
For some users, this might be a good thing. Those people, IMHO, gravitate towards Red Hat. Others, though, may want the freedom to occasionally try out a development kernel, or use a non-standard partitioning and configuration to squeeze a few more Apache page hits out of that old PII box. This is where source or binary tarballs are nice and easy, and give a quite adequate amount of control.
The language is pretty immaterial here, folks. It's primarily being developed to let your average Joe "VB" User move up to a slightly more powerful toolkit, without having to get in to the nitty-gritty of C++. Plus, if the full spec is really submitted to the EMCA, it can be copied and implemented by anyone, including the GNU Project, or any other open source development group or team. (Maybe the Blackdown guys need another challenge?)
.NET libraries themselves. If they're licensed as prohibitively as most MS software, then the language will be crippled outside the Windows sandbox; think of Java without any of the more complex packages, like AWT, JDBC, etc. However, if the libraries are even distributed like Java's (binary format only), then they can be used as a stopgap until open source replacements can be built.
Anyway, the card to watch for here is the core
Just out of curiosity, are there compilers for most major computer languages in other human languages than English? I know that the big OS's and applications support localization, but is there, for example, a Japanese or Finnish version of C? If not, it would seem that part of the American advantage in software stems from the ease with which we can read and write source code.
Netscape didn't have many options when they released the Communicator 5 source to the Mozilla community. IE was already starting to run circles around them, and the product would have been dead in the water in another six months. Their most important contribution has turned out to not even be the code, which basically had to be scrapped, but the development support and maintenance that the project needed to continue moving forward.
While development may not have proceeded on a breakneck pace, it probably wouldn't have happened at all otherwise. Netscape simply could not develop Communicator fast enough to keep up with MS, or even with the introduction of XML and other new web standards.
I would also hesitate to say that no one has been interested in Mozilla; just look at the fuss people make about it on both sides. Those who use and work on it are often almost religiously dedicated to it, and those who feel that it's failing in its purpose say so loudly and publicly. How many pre-alpha applications have you seen which get national media attention on a regular basis?
There's a spectrum of computing problems that are commonly attacked with large-scale systems, including traditional supercomputers and clusters. On one end, you have the high-end supers, with that beautiful I/O and memory bandwidth. They serve a valuable purpose for calculations that require a lot of interaction between routines -- think a big system of equations, where every variable appears in several of them.
On the other extreme are widely distributed systems, like SETI@home. There, you get decent performance by splitting your data set into completely independent, smaller batches, and farming them out a chunk at a time to smaller systems, which then report back to a central aggregator. Efficiency-wise, this method loses a lot, because every client usually has to completely duplicate the functionality and overhead of the entire processing application; however, the low cost and high availability of processing cycles can make that almost immaterial.
These big clusters fit somewhere in the middle. Especially in this case, where each node is a highly capable system in its own right, you can give more complex and varied instruction sets to each unit, and offer decent I/O bandwidth to the others. The clustering tools give the system a maintainability and level of transparency better that simply running the same application on many machines, and since each node can be given a completely seperate set of instructions, the redundancy of code is less.
The other key advantage to one big cluster, instead of a processtree-like distributed solution, is the real-time control and reliability of the processing. If you have massive job that needs to be completed some time in the next month, an online distributed net might work fine; if you have a data set crunched by five p.m., you want to know exactly how much power you'll be getting, and run the job in one fell swoop.
This is a perfectly good example of why it is a Good Thing that there are more protocols on the Net than just HTTP. If you want to find porn, check Usenet. If you want protected free speech, use encrypted email lists, or run a Freenet node.
Also, is there any reason that Gopher, IRC, MUDs, authenticated FTP, or any number of other common, easy-to-use tools couldn't carry a lot of the traffic that's on the Web right now? Especially since that would immediately remove a sizeable fraction of the clueless people who bump around in IE until they get themselves into trouble...
From what I gather, Microsoft *is* working on new licensing arrangements...annual rental fees. Then, you not only won't have the right to choose which version or configuration you install, you'll be forced to upgrade to every new version, or lose your right to use any edition. That would make the total cost of ownership fairly reasonable, (and very consistent) but turn you into a permanent MicroSerf.
If the government doesn't have the right to put packet sniffers on the net, and look for traffic to and from "interesting parties", then do system administrators have a right to watch traffic on their internal networks to watch for possible attacks from within, or poor security practices by users? Both of them are "just doing their job," and both invade the privacy of those they monitor.
Voluntary profiling can lead to better customer service. Just like in the standard world of retail, where a salesperson who knows you, or knows the right questions to ask, can pick out products that you might like more effectively than someone who knows nothing about you.
However, most sites give you no opt-out, other than disabling JavaScript or cookies, which often renders them unusable. That's like a retail store that refuses to let anyone shop there who doesn't want their height, weight, favorite color, and home town recorded at the point of sale.