You're right...it's all in how the tool is used, and the ones Peacefire goes after are used aggressively and beligerantly. Censorware companies block porn, true...they also block any site that speaks poorly of them, or offers support information for those affected by hate crimes or AIDS, or any number of other things they just don't like.
That's not protecting children, it's protecting corporate interests.
I'm impressed that MS would try to pull this while their case is waiting for an appeal. They must either be:
a) So full of themselves, they can't fit their swollen heads through a door, or...
b) Desperate enough to sell some copies of Win2k that they'll sink as low as they have to.
But seriously, why do customers have to put up with this kind of crap at all? Doesn't it seem like Microsoft should have such a bad rep by now that folks would go in armed to the teeth with support from other small fish and some good business lawyers?
Umm...what do you call being one of the earliest adopters of RISC architecture in consumer-level systems? Or the use of USB, Firewire, and fanless/low-power hardware? Or making a shift to a totally new OS architecture, because the old one had simply outlived its useful lifespan? (MS could really stand to learn a thing or two about this...)
Apple innovates, and they do it without the massive support that the x86 market provides. fact that anything Apple makes today is compatible with ten year-old software and peripherials that ran on a different processor architecture is a pretty strong statement.
However, so far as I understand trademark law, it only applies to the "owners" of a conflicting product who profit directly from its sale or distribution. Since open source software is not (usually) sold, including in the case of Samba, there should be no one to sue here.
The users of the software are not selling it as their own product, even if they use it in a business setting, and the "owner" of the software is not profiting monetarily from its sale. This should be thrown out, regardless of whether the trademarks conflict.
Worst case, the Samba maintainers should be allowed to change the name of the package, not penalized for something from which they did not derive a profit.
Corporations are only able to manipulate popular government because of their position in our society. Capitalism, as a system of social policies, hold up the profitable business as the ultimate social good, and frowns on anything (no matter how humane, beautiful, or noble) that gets in the way of that ideal.
If we are going to use money as a universal system of measurement, then governments formed of the people by the people need to have control of amounts of it at least equal to the largest corporations, or the (profit-seeking) interests of those corporations will always outweigh the interests of the people.
And don't try to say that individuals can and should look out for themselves, and don't need a government for protection. A single laid-off employee, or ripped-off consumer, or any other victim or predatory corporate policy means nothing to a large business, and has no chance of standing up to and resisting them alone.
So, if you trust Microsoft, Citibank, Mitsubishi, and the Shell Corporation to be your benevolent protectors, then by all means, strip the power of representational governments to resist them. I, for one, do not trust them, and while I may not agree with everything that my government does and is, I need its support to protect myself against entities far more powerful than myself.
The responsiblity for access control to "adult" content should lie with the businesses providing it. Adult video and book stores have to card people, just like bars, and held liable in minors are illegally allowed inside. Why, then, are web sites exempt from any kind of reasonable authentication requirements?
There's a simple reason, really: all those horny geeks out there want their porn quickly, anonymously, and effortlessly, and adult verification systems would just get in the way. Therefore, control is limited to credit card verification, which proves nothing except knowing how to steal some plastic.
So, to all you adults who think that censorware is intrusive or wrong, and that individuals (or their parents) should be able to choose what they can or cannot see online: support secure but authenticated transaction systems. Help develop them, promote the good ones, whatever; just don't let your desire to see digitally enhanced pseudo-porn override your sense of social responsibility.
Competitors bring charges of antitrust violation against MS, AOL, etc., because they have the money and influence to get the case heard. If you or I, or most any other citizen, were to attempt to bring a lawsuit against Microsoft for anticompetitive practices, we would be laughed out of the courtroom. You have to be able to pay for hot-shit corporate lawyers, find expert witnesses to testify, etc., which is beyond the capabilities of real people -- hence, enter Sun, Netscape, et. al.
As for the basic necessity of some sort of antitrust protection, I'm going to have to flat out disagree with you. Just like private citizens have a right to defend themselves against government actions in court, individuals and nations needs to have some sort of recourse against multinational corporations that have human and financial resources greater than many small countries. I agree with you that business law is often to vague and arbitrary -- but I think that it needs to be more tightly controlling, to prevent the self-serving, privacy-invading, aggressive tactics that every corporation uses whenever they can get away with it.
I fail to see how filing suit against MS has harmed the computer industry at all. They have had their chance to make a defense, and are appealing the decision; a public discourse has been opened on technology business ethics, and someone has done something to help counterbalance the billions Microsoft spends on marketing and PR every year.
Look, I said on a 'per-MHz basis', not on an absolute, total basis. Since a 500MHz G4 *can* keep up with, say, most 600-700MHz x86 chips, it has a higher amount of usable power per cycle. As for the 'per dollar basis', I should apologize -- in my excitement, I was thinking primarily of the high-end PIII's, not Athlons. AMD must have some kind of amazing deal going somewhere on their fabs, 'cause what they're charging for those chips is just rediculously low.
The Athlon is an impressive chip. However, considering the size, complexity, waste power and heat, and fundamental limits in die size it's running up against, I still think the G4 is a more elegant design. Yes, if the Athlon were not crippled by the x86 instruction set, it would have higher performance; however, I doubt we're going to be seeing it in any laptops, large-scale SMP systems, etc., where the efficiency and durability of the hardware is as important as the raw performance.
The Athlon reminds me of a huge, gas-guzzling V12 with a supercharger nitrous system...not exactly the kind of machine you drive around much, just because of the noise, fuel consumption, and simple *waste* of using it for things like driving to the store. The G4, on the other hand, is like a perfectly tuned BMW V6 (think high-end European endurance racing). Yes, it may have a bit more power than your average commuter needs, but it will run cooler, cleaner, longer, and much, much more quietly.
My reference to the 'oversimplified, insulting crap' was in regards to your cracks about 'disobeying the founder'. It's shit like that that doesn't do anything for a reasonable debate, and just pisses people off. I don't even like MS-bashing when it gets personal and offensive like that, and I especially don't like you making a sweeping generalization about the staff or customers of an entire corporation being mindless cult followers.
So I'll make you a deal, to match the one you offered me: if you can cut out the obnoxious personal bigotry directed towards thousands of people, I won't feel the need to keep polluting your beautiful "PC/x86-lovers only" clubhouse with my heretical rants.
Look, it's true that Apple overstates the performance of the G4, and I've heard very few people who knew much about the chip say otherwise. That is marketing, and most every major corporation does it. Apple is not unique in that regard.
However, the G4 massively outperforms Athlons and PIII's on a per-MHz, per-watt, and per-dollar basis. (Not to mention, the Apple systems do it running a freaking archaic OS and outdated motherboard, RAM, and I/O hardware.) Also, most of the Intel and AMD machines that outpaced the G4 were running top-of-the-line processors...how many GHz PIII's have you actually seen outside of benchmark labs?
I'd like to see some benchmarks of Yellow Dog Linux (with the AltiVec optimizations) on a decent G4 machine vs. an Athlon or PIII workstation. Or, how about a dual 500-MHz G4 box running Linux, a BSD, or OS X? Or running benchmarks on software that wasn't developed primarily for Windows, then ported to MacOS.
As for the personality cult of Steve Jobs, there's a good reason for it: when people at Apple do what he says, the company is profitable, their stock price goes up, and new, interesting products turn up left and right. When they canned him, or when there was another CEO, Apple almost bit the big one.
So cut the over-simplified, insulting crap. Apple is not the perfect company, but they earn their customer loyalty by engineering good products and sticking to their guns.
And you shold be more up to date on the hardware you're badmouthing...you now get a dual-processor machine for the same price as the old 450 or 500-Mhz G4's.
I'd like to see a dual-Athlon box that didn't need liquid cooling to keep from melting components inside the case.
That shot of the crashed video board has inspired me. Those damn things are like animated GIF's on the highways, and I've been looking for some way to mess with them without being totally destructive and getting my ass thrown in jail.
It's all so simple...I just need to get a copy of BackOrifice installed on it, and put up my own subversive messages. Subtly, of course...I was thinking of something along the lines of:
"News Flash: Animated billboards reported as #3 cause of fatal car crashes, following drunk driving and cell phones!"
I agree with the countless posts stating that a full port of X, GNOME, KDE, and the like would be unqieldly and unnecessary for your average palmtop. However, there is a real need for some of the features these standards provide in the portable/appliance/embedded range of systems. Take CORBA, for instance, or a consistent set of Internet protocol libraries, or fast, light XML parsers. Right now, the only folks providing these things are MS and Sun, and neither are sharing the code with anyone. Licensing may be cheap, (or even free) but they're still in the driver's seat.
Linux as a kernel scales down to the handheld pretty well, but WinCE and Java, Micro Edition (with the possible addition of PalmOS) are going to keep running the show so long as they have the only consistent and usable API's for user application development.
The comments about rolling the new, lightweight versions back into the original tree are also quite valid, IMHO. When you're forced to squeeze every bit of performance and memory efficiency out of your code, some pretty amazing things can happen, and there's no reason that those hacks wouldn't be helpful and appreciated in development for other environments. High-volume servers need every free byte and cycle they can get, justs like palmtops.
This could set a very interesting precedent of making government technology public. While I support the idea of accountability and public review of government tools and processes used in intelligence and surveillence, I worry about a potential backlash from this and similar cases.
Basically, from what I can gather, the Carnivore system looks like a glorified packet sniffer. It's not something I'm happy about, but I haven't exactly been losing any sleep over it. However, the response I've already seen, including this suit, make me wonder how hard the government is going to try to keep the rest of its intelligence technologies secret. If the public panics over a sniffer, what would the think of more sophisticated tools used for tracing, wiretapping, en/decryption, etc.?
I know that a lot of the excitement has been generated by sensationalist media hype, (the extrapolation of Carnivore into some sort of global on/off switch for the Internet is solid gold BS, if you ask me) but I really think that choosing our battles might be wise here. We don't want to send the government into a paranoid spin, and make it that much harder to find out what they're up to later on.
Listen -- those who wish to be active, healthy participants in society will do so, regardless of their occupation, interests, or hobbies. I'm beyond tired of hearing about geeks' inability to socialize, their unwillingness to pitch in for the common good, etc.; this is simply a sad but true observation for the better part of modern society. Where are the statistics to back up such sweeping, condemning statements? I have yet to see a single study that actually showed that those who worked in tech were more likely to be assholes that those who worked in, say, high-end sales, or law, or any other potentially lucrative field.
So take your random whining elsewhere, and come back when there's something other than your righteous indignation to justify these offensive generalizations.
I absolutely cannot believe the amount of bitching I have heard in relation to Mozilla for the last year or so. Without leaving/., I can find my weekly ten examples of people bashing the moz team for their slow development, or their inclusion of chrome, or any number of other gripes du jour. Well gues what, folks! It's open source! Grab that Gecko engine, roll yourself a nice GTK interface, and release that browser you all want so badly. The Mozilla project has literally tens of megabytes of good code from some great programmers, sitting in CVS ready for you to use. There are already GTK bindings for Gecko.
Open-source parasites really tick me off. If you want it fixed, do it. If you don't know how, learn. And if you can't or won't do either of the above, then how exactly are you qualified to say what is good development practice?
Isn't SGI supposed to be waiting around for a buyout? What exactly would make IBM a worse fit as a new 'parent' for them than Sun? Let's see...IBM buys SGI, integrates their contributions to Linux into the IBM tree, and in about six months, we suddenly see:
"IBM Linux! Certified, guaranteed 99.9% uptime, data integrity, and 24/7 local or remote support. Now with 'Big Iron'(tm)!"
As to the comments above about IBM only wanting Linux to fill the workstation-to-small-server niche, I fial to see what they would have to lose by moving away from AIX.
They can't be making any truly significant amount of their revenue from OS licensing, since they only sell it for their hardware, (which costs an order of magnitude more) but having the most respected Linux servers in the biz could be a real money maker for them. Especially considering how 'hot' Linux is with all the PHB's these days...
It would seem that MS finally figured out how to 'beat' open source. Their solution: become the world's largest ASP, offering the industry-standard MS Office and other business products online to any customer with a decent-speed Internet connection, modern web browser, and deep pockets. They can adopt all the 'open standards,' even make the damn stuff cross-platform compatible, and still hold the reigns, because they don't have to show their server code to anyone so long as it's not distributed.
Assuming they lose their Supreme Court appeal, watch for the Windows group to become sacrifical goats. Since Windows is far from the best server solution in most cases, and IE can be ported wherever they want to put it, the applications group will literally have no use for it once everything is piped through a browser.
Plus, they can sidestep piracy, users reluctant to upgrade, and most of the other things that customers do to sap their revenue machine. I've got to hand it to whoever dreamed up their long-term strategy; it's sharp. But then, I guess MS has always survived more on its aggressive management style than its technology.
Personally, I'm not sure how I feel about this overall. Maybe if their record were better on privacy and security issues, the thought of being able to keep their code off my hard drive would actually outweigh the perpetual upgrade serfdom that businesses are going to face.
Now I understand why MS put so much time and money into making IE5 for the Mac a decent browser -- it's a proof-of-concept for their ability to outlive Windows. Hats off to the world's most effective monopoly; they've once again found a way to effectively distort the fabric of reality with their black-hole like mass.
It's especially funny that you should tell everyone to "wake up and smell the java," since Sun just put some quite inspiring promotional material up on the Java web site about the new "Java Web Platform." Apparently, this system is a full framework for developing apps that only run in Java, while the user is connected to the Internet, so that the latest versions of your favorite tools are always waiting for you. Oh, and did we forget to mention that, as an added bonus, every software provider would be able to log each and every use of the software?
All I can say is: network connectivity is great, automated software updates may be nice, and distributed computing has some truly amazing potential applications, but I'll keep my core OS, apps, and personal documents sitting on my damn hard drive, where I can pull the phone plug/ethernet cable/wireless network card/whatever out of the back and do my work in peace when I need to.
You know, I've heard countless comments on how Linux and other open-source projects are simply playing catch-up to existing systems, but what really entertains me is people seemingly thinking MS products offer anything new. Take, for example, this patent: MS has basically established their exclusive right to use Windows Update, which is basically just a net-connected version of the package managers that have been in use in countless commercial and open *NIX distributions for the last couple of decades. Just look at the "new features" in Win2k -- most of them *almost* bring it up to the level of a basic UNIX system (I'm thinking of file and directory-level permissions and the like). It would make me want to laugh, if it wasn't so disturbing to see how effectively advertising can render people's memories and critical thinking skills inoperable.
I applaud the ingenuity and effeort required to come up with one of these consumer-device hacks. Converting an I-Opener/WebSurfer/other 'embedded' system into a nearly fully-functional PC is a great project, and can be great fun for personal use (MP3 players, smart-home controllers, etc).
However, I see at least one potential problem down the road if companies attempting to bundle services with hardware find any new device built on commodity hardware standards immediately ripped open and repurposed. Have we all forgotten that we live in the age of the DMCA? Proprietary, closed standards, systems, and software are not dead, and the major corporations whose bread and butter come from providing products and services no one else can replicate simply due to the obfuscation of their workings can be counted on to protect their interests in court.
What ever happened to the true DIY attitude of computer hobbyists and hackers? It may feel great to see that cute little plastic appliance booting Linux, but that doesn't mean you've actually built something, just stood on the shoulders of countless other engineers and programmers to give yourself a feeling of technological prowess.
Basically, if you know what you think a perfect system would be, pull together some people and build the damn thing! There's no reason that open hardware construction couldn't be just as sucessful as open software, and Sony won't be sending out the lawyer ninja to kick anyone's ass for building their own homebrew hardware.
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You're right...it's all in how the tool is used, and the ones Peacefire goes after are used aggressively and beligerantly. Censorware companies block porn, true...they also block any site that speaks poorly of them, or offers support information for those affected by hate crimes or AIDS, or any number of other things they just don't like.
That's not protecting children, it's protecting corporate interests.
Or, people who consider an open and honest forum more important than "karma points"...
I'm impressed that MS would try to pull this while their case is waiting for an appeal. They must either be:
a) So full of themselves, they can't fit their swollen heads through a door, or...
b) Desperate enough to sell some copies of Win2k that they'll sink as low as they have to.
But seriously, why do customers have to put up with this kind of crap at all? Doesn't it seem like Microsoft should have such a bad rep by now that folks would go in armed to the teeth with support from other small fish and some good business lawyers?
Umm...what do you call being one of the earliest adopters of RISC architecture in consumer-level systems? Or the use of USB, Firewire, and fanless/low-power hardware? Or making a shift to a totally new OS architecture, because the old one had simply outlived its useful lifespan? (MS could really stand to learn a thing or two about this...)
Apple innovates, and they do it without the massive support that the x86 market provides. fact that anything Apple makes today is compatible with ten year-old software and peripherials that ran on a different processor architecture is a pretty strong statement.
However, so far as I understand trademark law, it only applies to the "owners" of a conflicting product who profit directly from its sale or distribution. Since open source software is not (usually) sold, including in the case of Samba, there should be no one to sue here.
The users of the software are not selling it as their own product, even if they use it in a business setting, and the "owner" of the software is not profiting monetarily from its sale. This should be thrown out, regardless of whether the trademarks conflict.
Worst case, the Samba maintainers should be allowed to change the name of the package, not penalized for something from which they did not derive a profit.
Corporations are only able to manipulate popular government because of their position in our society. Capitalism, as a system of social policies, hold up the profitable business as the ultimate social good, and frowns on anything (no matter how humane, beautiful, or noble) that gets in the way of that ideal.
If we are going to use money as a universal system of measurement, then governments formed of the people by the people need to have control of amounts of it at least equal to the largest corporations, or the (profit-seeking) interests of those corporations will always outweigh the interests of the people.
And don't try to say that individuals can and should look out for themselves, and don't need a government for protection. A single laid-off employee, or ripped-off consumer, or any other victim or predatory corporate policy means nothing to a large business, and has no chance of standing up to and resisting them alone.
So, if you trust Microsoft, Citibank, Mitsubishi, and the Shell Corporation to be your benevolent protectors, then by all means, strip the power of representational governments to resist them. I, for one, do not trust them, and while I may not agree with everything that my government does and is, I need its support to protect myself against entities far more powerful than myself.
The responsiblity for access control to "adult" content should lie with the businesses providing it. Adult video and book stores have to card people, just like bars, and held liable in minors are illegally allowed inside. Why, then, are web sites exempt from any kind of reasonable authentication requirements?
There's a simple reason, really: all those horny geeks out there want their porn quickly, anonymously, and effortlessly, and adult verification systems would just get in the way. Therefore, control is limited to credit card verification, which proves nothing except knowing how to steal some plastic.
So, to all you adults who think that censorware is intrusive or wrong, and that individuals (or their parents) should be able to choose what they can or cannot see online: support secure but authenticated transaction systems. Help develop them, promote the good ones, whatever; just don't let your desire to see digitally enhanced pseudo-porn override your sense of social responsibility.
Competitors bring charges of antitrust violation against MS, AOL, etc., because they have the money and influence to get the case heard. If you or I, or most any other citizen, were to attempt to bring a lawsuit against Microsoft for anticompetitive practices, we would be laughed out of the courtroom. You have to be able to pay for hot-shit corporate lawyers, find expert witnesses to testify, etc., which is beyond the capabilities of real people -- hence, enter Sun, Netscape, et. al.
As for the basic necessity of some sort of antitrust protection, I'm going to have to flat out disagree with you. Just like private citizens have a right to defend themselves against government actions in court, individuals and nations needs to have some sort of recourse against multinational corporations that have human and financial resources greater than many small countries. I agree with you that business law is often to vague and arbitrary -- but I think that it needs to be more tightly controlling, to prevent the self-serving, privacy-invading, aggressive tactics that every corporation uses whenever they can get away with it.
I fail to see how filing suit against MS has harmed the computer industry at all. They have had their chance to make a defense, and are appealing the decision; a public discourse has been opened on technology business ethics, and someone has done something to help counterbalance the billions Microsoft spends on marketing and PR every year.
Look, I said on a 'per-MHz basis', not on an absolute, total basis. Since a 500MHz G4 *can* keep up with, say, most 600-700MHz x86 chips, it has a higher amount of usable power per cycle. As for the 'per dollar basis', I should apologize -- in my excitement, I was thinking primarily of the high-end PIII's, not Athlons. AMD must have some kind of amazing deal going somewhere on their fabs, 'cause what they're charging for those chips is just rediculously low.
The Athlon is an impressive chip. However, considering the size, complexity, waste power and heat, and fundamental limits in die size it's running up against, I still think the G4 is a more elegant design. Yes, if the Athlon were not crippled by the x86 instruction set, it would have higher performance; however, I doubt we're going to be seeing it in any laptops, large-scale SMP systems, etc., where the efficiency and durability of the hardware is as important as the raw performance.
The Athlon reminds me of a huge, gas-guzzling V12 with a supercharger nitrous system...not exactly the kind of machine you drive around much, just because of the noise, fuel consumption, and simple *waste* of using it for things like driving to the store. The G4, on the other hand, is like a perfectly tuned BMW V6 (think high-end European endurance racing). Yes, it may have a bit more power than your average commuter needs, but it will run cooler, cleaner, longer, and much, much more quietly.
My reference to the 'oversimplified, insulting crap' was in regards to your cracks about 'disobeying the founder'. It's shit like that that doesn't do anything for a reasonable debate, and just pisses people off. I don't even like MS-bashing when it gets personal and offensive like that, and I especially don't like you making a sweeping generalization about the staff or customers of an entire corporation being mindless cult followers.
So I'll make you a deal, to match the one you offered me: if you can cut out the obnoxious personal bigotry directed towards thousands of people, I won't feel the need to keep polluting your beautiful "PC/x86-lovers only" clubhouse with my heretical rants.
Look, it's true that Apple overstates the performance of the G4, and I've heard very few people who knew much about the chip say otherwise. That is marketing, and most every major corporation does it. Apple is not unique in that regard.
However, the G4 massively outperforms Athlons and PIII's on a per-MHz, per-watt, and per-dollar basis. (Not to mention, the Apple systems do it running a freaking archaic OS and outdated motherboard, RAM, and I/O hardware.) Also, most of the Intel and AMD machines that outpaced the G4 were running top-of-the-line processors...how many GHz PIII's have you actually seen outside of benchmark labs?
I'd like to see some benchmarks of Yellow Dog Linux (with the AltiVec optimizations) on a decent G4 machine vs. an Athlon or PIII workstation. Or, how about a dual 500-MHz G4 box running Linux, a BSD, or OS X? Or running benchmarks on software that wasn't developed primarily for Windows, then ported to MacOS.
As for the personality cult of Steve Jobs, there's a good reason for it: when people at Apple do what he says, the company is profitable, their stock price goes up, and new, interesting products turn up left and right. When they canned him, or when there was another CEO, Apple almost bit the big one.
So cut the over-simplified, insulting crap. Apple is not the perfect company, but they earn their customer loyalty by engineering good products and sticking to their guns.
And you shold be more up to date on the hardware you're badmouthing...you now get a dual-processor machine for the same price as the old 450 or 500-Mhz G4's.
I'd like to see a dual-Athlon box that didn't need liquid cooling to keep from melting components inside the case.
That shot of the crashed video board has inspired me. Those damn things are like animated GIF's on the highways, and I've been looking for some way to mess with them without being totally destructive and getting my ass thrown in jail.
It's all so simple...I just need to get a copy of BackOrifice installed on it, and put up my own subversive messages. Subtly, of course...I was thinking of something along the lines of:
"News Flash: Animated billboards reported as #3 cause of fatal car crashes, following drunk driving and cell phones!"
Okay, maybe not, but I still hate them.
I agree with the countless posts stating that a full port of X, GNOME, KDE, and the like would be unqieldly and unnecessary for your average palmtop. However, there is a real need for some of the features these standards provide in the portable/appliance/embedded range of systems. Take CORBA, for instance, or a consistent set of Internet protocol libraries, or fast, light XML parsers. Right now, the only folks providing these things are MS and Sun, and neither are sharing the code with anyone. Licensing may be cheap, (or even free) but they're still in the driver's seat.
Linux as a kernel scales down to the handheld pretty well, but WinCE and Java, Micro Edition (with the possible addition of PalmOS) are going to keep running the show so long as they have the only consistent and usable API's for user application development.
The comments about rolling the new, lightweight versions back into the original tree are also quite valid, IMHO. When you're forced to squeeze every bit of performance and memory efficiency out of your code, some pretty amazing things can happen, and there's no reason that those hacks wouldn't be helpful and appreciated in development for other environments. High-volume servers need every free byte and cycle they can get, justs like palmtops.
This could set a very interesting precedent of making government technology public. While I support the idea of accountability and public review of government tools and processes used in intelligence and surveillence, I worry about a potential backlash from this and similar cases.
Basically, from what I can gather, the Carnivore system looks like a glorified packet sniffer. It's not something I'm happy about, but I haven't exactly been losing any sleep over it. However, the response I've already seen, including this suit, make me wonder how hard the government is going to try to keep the rest of its intelligence technologies secret. If the public panics over a sniffer, what would the think of more sophisticated tools used for tracing, wiretapping, en/decryption, etc.?
I know that a lot of the excitement has been generated by sensationalist media hype, (the extrapolation of Carnivore into some sort of global on/off switch for the Internet is solid gold BS, if you ask me) but I really think that choosing our battles might be wise here. We don't want to send the government into a paranoid spin, and make it that much harder to find out what they're up to later on.
Listen -- those who wish to be active, healthy participants in society will do so, regardless of their occupation, interests, or hobbies. I'm beyond tired of hearing about geeks' inability to socialize, their unwillingness to pitch in for the common good, etc.; this is simply a sad but true observation for the better part of modern society. Where are the statistics to back up such sweeping, condemning statements? I have yet to see a single study that actually showed that those who worked in tech were more likely to be assholes that those who worked in, say, high-end sales, or law, or any other potentially lucrative field.
So take your random whining elsewhere, and come back when there's something other than your righteous indignation to justify these offensive generalizations.
Open-source parasites really tick me off. If you want it fixed, do it. If you don't know how, learn. And if you can't or won't do either of the above, then how exactly are you qualified to say what is good development practice?
Isn't SGI supposed to be waiting around for a buyout? What exactly would make IBM a worse fit as a new 'parent' for them than Sun? Let's see...IBM buys SGI, integrates their contributions to Linux into the IBM tree, and in about six months, we suddenly see:
"IBM Linux! Certified, guaranteed 99.9% uptime, data integrity, and 24/7 local or remote support. Now with 'Big Iron'(tm)!"
As to the comments above about IBM only wanting Linux to fill the workstation-to-small-server niche, I fial to see what they would have to lose by moving away from AIX.
They can't be making any truly significant amount of their revenue from OS licensing, since they only sell it for their hardware, (which costs an order of magnitude more) but having the most respected Linux servers in the biz could be a real money maker for them. Especially considering how 'hot' Linux is with all the PHB's these days...
It would seem that MS finally figured out how to 'beat' open source. Their solution: become the world's largest ASP, offering the industry-standard MS Office and other business products online to any customer with a decent-speed Internet connection, modern web browser, and deep pockets. They can adopt all the 'open standards,' even make the damn stuff cross-platform compatible, and still hold the reigns, because they don't have to show their server code to anyone so long as it's not distributed.
Assuming they lose their Supreme Court appeal, watch for the Windows group to become sacrifical goats. Since Windows is far from the best server solution in most cases, and IE can be ported wherever they want to put it, the applications group will literally have no use for it once everything is piped through a browser.
Plus, they can sidestep piracy, users reluctant to upgrade, and most of the other things that customers do to sap their revenue machine. I've got to hand it to whoever dreamed up their long-term strategy; it's sharp. But then, I guess MS has always survived more on its aggressive management style than its technology.
Personally, I'm not sure how I feel about this overall. Maybe if their record were better on privacy and security issues, the thought of being able to keep their code off my hard drive would actually outweigh the perpetual upgrade serfdom that businesses are going to face.
Now I understand why MS put so much time and money into making IE5 for the Mac a decent browser -- it's a proof-of-concept for their ability to outlive Windows. Hats off to the world's most effective monopoly; they've once again found a way to effectively distort the fabric of reality with their black-hole like mass.
It's especially funny that you should tell everyone to "wake up and smell the java," since Sun just put some quite inspiring promotional material up on the Java web site about the new "Java Web Platform." Apparently, this system is a full framework for developing apps that only run in Java, while the user is connected to the Internet, so that the latest versions of your favorite tools are always waiting for you. Oh, and did we forget to mention that, as an added bonus, every software provider would be able to log each and every use of the software?
All I can say is: network connectivity is great, automated software updates may be nice, and distributed computing has some truly amazing potential applications, but I'll keep my core OS, apps, and personal documents sitting on my damn hard drive, where I can pull the phone plug/ethernet cable/wireless network card/whatever out of the back and do my work in peace when I need to.
You know, I've heard countless comments on how Linux and other open-source projects are simply playing catch-up to existing systems, but what really entertains me is people seemingly thinking MS products offer anything new. Take, for example, this patent: MS has basically established their exclusive right to use Windows Update, which is basically just a net-connected version of the package managers that have been in use in countless commercial and open *NIX distributions for the last couple of decades. Just look at the "new features" in Win2k -- most of them *almost* bring it up to the level of a basic UNIX system (I'm thinking of file and directory-level permissions and the like). It would make me want to laugh, if it wasn't so disturbing to see how effectively advertising can render people's memories and critical thinking skills inoperable.
I applaud the ingenuity and effeort required to come up with one of these consumer-device hacks. Converting an I-Opener/WebSurfer/other 'embedded' system into a nearly fully-functional PC is a great project, and can be great fun for personal use (MP3 players, smart-home controllers, etc).
However, I see at least one potential problem down the road if companies attempting to bundle services with hardware find any new device built on commodity hardware standards immediately ripped open and repurposed. Have we all forgotten that we live in the age of the DMCA? Proprietary, closed standards, systems, and software are not dead, and the major corporations whose bread and butter come from providing products and services no one else can replicate simply due to the obfuscation of their workings can be counted on to protect their interests in court.
What ever happened to the true DIY attitude of computer hobbyists and hackers? It may feel great to see that cute little plastic appliance booting Linux, but that doesn't mean you've actually built something, just stood on the shoulders of countless other engineers and programmers to give yourself a feeling of technological prowess.
Basically, if you know what you think a perfect system would be, pull together some people and build the damn thing! There's no reason that open hardware construction couldn't be just as sucessful as open software, and Sony won't be sending out the lawyer ninja to kick anyone's ass for building their own homebrew hardware.