You don't know, and can't find out very reliably (at this point, anyway) what any of the three-letter gov't agencies may or may not have built into Internet2. Remember, 'Internet1' was originally ARPANet, and was build largely with federal funds and support. There's no reason to think that the second generation will have any more "backdoors" build into it than the first -- though I suppose there's no real reason that there couldn't be a good number in the current incarnation...
There is no longer any such thing as an "engineering-driven company" -- at least, if there were, it wouldn't stay one for long. As a corporation, Intel, like all their competitors, have one primary responsibility: maximize shareholder wealth. Customer satisfaction, quality control, and engineering ability are all simply a means to that end.
Were Intel to make a better product, but fail to report the earnings and stock value growth that their investors and market analysts expect, they could be sued by their stockholders for mismanagement. Advertising can, and often is, a far more effective means of increasing sales than simple quality and customer satisfaction, especially in a complex field such as chip design and fabrication, where few of your customers have any indepth understanding of the product they're buying.
Actually, there are rules in place (and in the process of being implemented) that would cause problems with many of your examples:
Most recent EULAs on software do not allow you to give away or sell the right to use it. That's what the words "non-tranferrable" refer to.(Software companies are also seriously considering moving to subscription-based licensing, where you would be required to upgrade or lose all rights to the tools. Sound familiar?)
If you collect food or beer money from people to help pay for your party, it might be argued to be a public event, in which case your use of the CD would indeed be illegal (unless you were already making payments to ASCAP or BMI).
Yes, it is utterly rediculous. That is why so many people are getting so fed up with the current state of IP law.
Do you think that moving all education to the private sector would, likewise, insure a more efficient distribution of knowledge? Perhaps we should simply do away with all government services and legal protections, and trust the benevolent forces of capitalism to guide and nurture us and our children. After all, that "invisible hand" sounds an awful lot like God, and we're supposed to trust and have faith, right? Okay, lord Buck, into your interest-bearing account I place all my hopes, ideas, freedom, and humanity. Here's hoping it's a good year on the NASDAQ...
Capitalism is an economic system, not a philosophical, political, or religious one. We cannot make the mistake of jumping from a body of solid mathematical inference about the behaviors of financial markets to a core set of laws and morality to govern a society. If there were a social policy that would kill the poorest 5% of the population every year, but reintroduce ten thousand times as much money as they had held into the economy at the same time, modern economics would call it a Good Thing. (Come to think of it, that doesn't sound that different from the way that many national and international policies are formed.)
Personally, the day that I am required to constantly license everything that I read, listen to, watch, or learn from some orginial copyright holder is the day I invest in a typewriter and a shack in the woods. From that shack, I will begin writing down every thought I can, and using that body of work to flood the market with free ideas, which will of course bring about a devaluation on an agreggate basis, and get me shot by the Economic Police in short order.
Depending on what you actually do with your Mac, OS-X may not be much of a big deal at all -- at least, not right away. The migration of application developers away from the "classic" APIs will take time, and OS-9 compatible versions of most of the big packages should be available for a while. However, I'm very excited at the possiblity of running a system that has even a good fraction of the reliability of the BSDs, the UI consistency and quality of the MacOS, and the system APIs and libraries of NeXT. No dual booting for me -- I'll just run my XTerm/emacs session in a nicely-decorated window right next to the Photoshop document I'm working on, then let Apache purr away happily in the background while I mix down some live audio I recorded the day before in Pro Tools.
However, there will be little reason for software comapnies to not start moving towards the new platform. First of all, it is a much-needed overhaul and updating of tired architecture. Reliable memory and process management, tightly integrated Java, a system graphics level that handles rendering to a near-universal format for print or diplay, etc., will all make programming for OS-X a dream compared to current Macs. The Darwin/OS-X system model is also, as a Mach/BSD creature itself, much closer to traditional *NIX, which gives developers the option of much more easily porting their apps to the Linux/BSD platforms.
The patent is being filed as a business method, rather than a software algorithm or specific technology. The patent would cover businesses who wish to use any software-based system that handles currency conversions, shipping rate checks, etc., to automate international commerce.
This class of patent is different, but every bit as insidious as the more general technological ones. I have to agree with the poster above, though, in feeling that this patent would best serve the common good by being granted, so that the major international business players can start leaning against the patent office and Congress a bit harder.
What we need now is an open source degree -- make a high-quality accredited curriculum, its textbooks, etc., freely available for redistribution and public comment and revision. Make them available online, or in print, on tape, etc., and ask for the participation of experts in each field to help keep the standards high. Hardcore research-oriented academics are largely concerned with getting a publication record, rather than publishing royalties, so chances are good that many contributions would be freely available.
Anyone certified to teach a college-level course, from community college associate professors to Nobel-winning careers academics, could offer part or all of that material, and be sure of having an up-to-date, well edited and maintained body of 'source' material. Plus, as online education gains legitimacy and accredidation, the content could be offered with Internet-based lectures, discussions, etc., to allow for a free (or low-cost) college degree with content way above the level that most trade and 2-year schools can afford to provide.
...what this company is doing is creating an artifical shortage of a product, knowledge...
...which is what higher education has been doing for many, many years. Look at the economic value of a college degree (especially from an expensive private school): your wages go up, your foot is already in the door with many firms, and you are simply considered a more intelligent, well-rounded person.
Don't get me wrong -- I think college can be a wonderful and productive place for many minds, and that high valuation of education is a good thing. However, the suppliers of degree programs are every bit as capitalistic as any other market, and they utilize similar amounts of PR, FUD, and legislative influence.
I think your warning is entirely valid -- however, it's also just a little too late. The new War against the American people was declared when the DMCA was passed, and the first shot was fired when DeCSS became forbidden fruit.
All that remains is to see what kind of war this becomes. One the one hand, we could have a Gulf-style "bloodless conflict," wherein the only ones who get hurt are those who stand in the way of the massively overpowering "liberation" forces...or, we could have a Vietnam, where the native guerilla fighters give the better-equipped side a run for their money.
Software, however, has massive profit margins, largely due to its different economies of scale. In hardware, like most other manufatured goods, your first few units a very expensive. Then, as quantities go up, your costs go down -- that's the benefit of mass production. However, once you reach a certain critical point, finding the resources and capital to make more actually starts cutting back into your profits -- i.e., when Intel is already running a peak capacity in their PIII fabs, having demand shoot up 25% in a month really wouldn't be a good thing, becuase they'd either have to miss ship dates or throw a bunch of money at farming out or ramping up their capacity.
Software, on the other hand, almost never hits that saturation point. 95% or more of the cost of making a program is incurred before the first copy even ships: development, marketing, testing, etc. Once copies are being boxeed and shipped in large numbers, each one only costs the company an additional few cents for duplication, printing, and distribution.
Now, enter the Free Software movement (or at least its popular media recognition): you can get your OS, server applications, and business tools absolutely free, with the source code, on your choice of hardware. Connected by the Internet, thousands upon thousands of developers toil away on labors of love, making their OSS projects into the best tools on the market.
One might think that this spelled disaster for the old-school software houses, who relied on a steady stream of income from every shrink-wrapped box. However, that same Internet that made the spread of quality, free tools possible also makes possible a new kind of company...the ASP. ASPs have many of the advantages of the software industry: low cost per unit, easy distribution, etc. However, it also allows for new levels of user authentication (preventing piracy), planned obsolescence (you can only buy a subscription to a service, and the ASP changes the software at will), and lock-in (once all your corporate data is on another company's servers, you're going to think twice about telling them to go screw themselves).
Microsoft, as the world's largest developer of new software, is uniquely positioned to take over the ASP market. They can do this either by moving Windows, Office, and the rest of their end user applications to an ASP model, or by working to become the "standard" developers of ASP platform development tools and applications. With personal hardware thrown into their stable, they can insure that every WebTV box, PocketPC PDA, and X-Box console speaks the Microsoft dialect of networking, and reads and writes exclusively Microsoft documents.
.NET is Microsoft's ASP power-play. If C#, DCOM, et. al. can become standards for server-side distributed business logic, then anything that doesn't play nice with them runs the risk of becoming very unpopular. This is why the success of Linux and *BSD on the desktop is a noble, but less important goal -- the battle now is for control of the network, and the network will be the "killer application" for many years to come.
A used eMachine will not magically transform into an unbreakable server overnight just because you install Linux on it. I think a lot of non-profits could probably benefit more from a system that would have been pricy as hell a few years ago, but is now outdated enough to be rediculously cheap. You can pick up a used Sun Sparcstation off eBay for a few hundred bucks, and with a decently-sized hard drive and the occasional preventative maintenance and log checking, the thing will continue to purr away for another four or five years without complaint.
Linux, BSD, etc. (really, any UNIX-like OS) should only be used in a non-tech-savvy office for one of a short list of purposes. Web hosting, file sharing, or firewall configurations should be more or less rock-solid for months on end if they're done right. Maintenance shouldn't be much more than a remote checkup every few days (logs, drive space, etc.) and a weekly tape backup.
I'm going to have to disagree with you on this one. ASPs are a natural extension of a pretty old (and sucessful) idea in computers -- time-sharing, dialup shell connections, remote X sessions, etc. The only real difference is that now, they're all on one big network, rather than on a few thousand seperate LANs or WANs. This is a Good Thing, if you think competition and availability help the development of better technology.
The core reasoning hasn't changed though; it is still entirely possible to serve many users' needs from a single, more powerful, computer, and to do it more economically and efficiently. A well-run ASP can offer better securtiy, data integrity, and support than most small non-profits would ever be able to maintain internally. Open sourcing the tools being used further increases the support and development base, and the non-profit using the service shouldn't have to worry about anything much more complex than getting a hard backup of their data put into storage somewhere every few weeks or months.
Software in general I have much less concern about -- I could really care less what word processor and spreadsheet people use, and most of the crap people have installed on their computers is of little concern to me. The Internet, however, was developed and implemented as an open communications system. If Microsoft gains a more complete dominance, however, they have the opportunity to close off the option of participation to those who aren't exclusively using their software -- witness FrontPage extensions, custom HTML tags, their incompatible Kerebos, etc. Right now, thay pulish their additions to the standard in order to encourage widespread adoption. However, I think it's painfully obvious that Microsoft is not the kind of company to leave open what they can make proprietary -- and the Web is an area where I think that's unacceptable.
Imagine, if you will, that suddenly, the postal service decided that you could only read and write your mail with a custom, USPS-approved, compact letter-machine. The output it produced would be scrambled to the point of being impossible to decipher, and any attempt to decode it would be a federal crime. However, business and legal documents had to be transferred by that means to be considered "official." That is dramatically similar to the situation we are beginning to face with EULAs, the DMCA prohibitions on reverse-engineering, and the growing segment of Internet users who think it's nothing more than the Web and email. I, for one, would very much like to have at least a few options, and do not wish to support Microsoft in their attempt to "own" the Internet in any way I can avoid.
I'm saying that pages render correctly only in IE precisely because no one will write pages that work in anything else. IE's version of HTML is just that -- a variant, developed by Microsoft, and intended to make theirs the only usable browser. They are not interested in aiding communication on the web, they are interested in making sure that people only use their products. Mozilla, Opera, et. al. are not broken. They support the W3C specs very nicely, thank you. IE is broken. However, because no one cares about anything but "where they want to go today," the idea of web "standards" is being rapidly eroded into ".NET".
I'm glad that you have no problem with doing your part to solidify and permanently establish Microsoft's supreme decision-making authority for every user of the Internet. Personally, I am trying to do something about it -- by arguing with you, by running the latest Mozilla builds, by trying to push friends and coworkers into avoiding IE, and at least into avoiding sites that only work with IE.
"Rogue" programmers are still employed by the company and use company-owned equipment to write their software and post it online. Any email, source code, etc., made on company time with company equipment and transferred through company communications systems is legally considered an official message from that company. That means that not only do they own it -- they can be held liable for its contents, and AOL could conceivably be found at fault for the copyright violations facilitated by Gnutella.
Whether any judge in the country is going to accept that is anybody's guess. I, for one, think it highly unlikely. We can hope, though, right? Basically, if this thing doesn't get thrown directly out of court, it becomes a win/win situation for supporters of peer-to-peer networking tech: either AOL/Time Warner loses, thereby biting themselves in the ass with the legal teeth of their anti-Napster arguments, or AOL/T.W. wins, in which case the future of peer-to-peer tools looks a little brighter.
Plus, either way, they're going to be involved in a nice, hyped, confusing legal action which will obscure their anti-swapping message for months. I can see the first-time Net users reading the AUP for their service now:
AUP: "...any use of these services for the purpose of knowingly violating copyright or patent protection of intellectual property is strictly prohibited; these uses may include, but are not limited to, the sharing of copyrighted media files, software, or proprietary information (see MP3s, FTP & Me on p. 3)."
User: "...uhh, but didn't AOL do a bunch of that stuff? I saw it on the news, I think, so they must mean something different than what I think they mean...so where's that stupid Noo-tella site? I want me some tunes...
Unfortunately, by refusing to "suffer" through a few improperly-rendered sites a day, you are contributing to the client stats on every web server that suggest to developers that IE is the only browser they reallyneed to support. That impression is what keeps every site out there looking perfect in IE 4/5/5.5, and god-awful in most every other browser.
Warning: Please take all comments below with an approriate grain of salt, and try to read the whole thing before you start flaming.
Anyone remember their basic Western Civ classes? Think hard, now...there was this amazing informational technology, commericalized by that guy Gutenberg, that allowed for a dramatic increase in the efficiency of ditributing information. In its day, the printing press was cutting edge, and those in power were just as scared shitless as they are now.
Suddenly, written works were flying from one end of Europe to the other, and the potential for the easy accessiblity of heretical, immoral, and rebellious works frightened the powers that be to no end. So, the benevolent leaders of Europe's governments (the Church) stepped in, and as best they could, restored order to the chaos. Wholesome texts were printed and distributed far and wide, and the mental and spiritual health and hygeine of the entire reading world was improved. In addition, the increased availability of approraite texts helped aid the spread of literacy, and through it, "appropraite" ideas and morals (Christianity).
The new moral code is good consumerism, and so advertising and promotion drive communications technologies. Just as Christianity was aided by the printing of countless Bibles and supporting texts, modern developed nations are deluged with instructions to buy, replace, upgrade, and be "the first on the block" to have the latest and greatst. Therefore, when "insurgent" technologies like DeCSS threaten this hold, they must be branded as heretical and illegal, in order to protect the population from dangerous and rebellious ideas. There's little deliberate malice coming from the government, and what filters down from corporate boardrooms is unavoidable -- they have to maximize shareholder wealth, and their only products being given away for free is frightening to an extreme.
However, I think few people would argue that change is not an accellerating vehicle, and therein lies our greatest source of hope. Just as the spread of literacy was instrumental in bringing about the rise of populist politics and scientific study in the public view, computers and pervasive networks will allow for a greater sharing of ideas than possible before. It's sometimes easy for those of us who have spent the majority of our lives working with these relatively new technologies to forget that they are, from a sociological or historical point of view, barely blips on the radar so far.
Remember, most of the circuit judges, legislators, and senior executives of this world probably didn't touch a computer until they were at least in their 30s. They had finished college, started careers, etc., and were no longer blessed with young minds ready to reshape themselves for a new mode of thought or communication tool. Compared to children, adults have a great deal of trouble learning new languages and computers are the cognitive equivalent of several new foreign tongues, some hard math, and a lot of new metaphors and suumptions, all rolled into one.
So, let's try to be a little patient. I, for one, am not as big a fan of violent upheaval as of natural progression, and I fail to see how the current trend towards restriction of digital tools with the objective of "informational purity" can continue under with the next generation of leaders. They will be comfortable with the technology, its implications, and its use, and will know how rediculous the current body of laws are.
If you want to help accellerate this process, you can do so in any number of ways that won't require getting thrown in jail and effectively silenced. Be a teacher, or support the EFF, or put on a clean shirt and go talk to your local legislator or library administrator about your views on censorship and IP. If we want sanity in our leaders, then we should try to show ourselves worthy of taking that role, rather than simply foaming at the mouth about the injustices of "the man."
Microsoft, who has more programmers working for them in-house than freaking God, has hired some small, crack team of Israeli hackers to work on a Linux port of Office? Then, one of those developers has stepped forward to announce the project, blatantly ignoring the NDA-from-Hell the MS lawyers made him sign before he could come within a hundred yards of the Windows source code? Sorry, folks, I don't think so.
Porting DCOM to UNIX is one thing, but Office is another beast entirely. Microsoft nearly destroyed their market for Mac applications when they tried to offer a weak port of the Windows version of Office -- people simply started refusing to upgrade. These days, the two have pretty much completely different code -- you can't really port the Windows version of Office to any other OS, because they're joined at the hip with DLL-Hell, private system calls, etc.
My Celeron/466 Linux box boots in less than three minutes, and that's with Apache, Samba, Sendmail, and MySQL all starting up. Move the OS into ROM or flash, and you've got yourself a winner -- even without custom-tweaked drivers and hardware.
Check out XFree86 4.0.1 -- the DRI and modularization redesigns for this version are really freaking impressive. AFAIK, the 3D is all done w/OpenGL, and quite a few cards already have accellerated support.
Remember, we're talking Linux here. Assuming they're looking at using off-the-shelf hardware, coding for these consoles shouldn't be any more difficult than writing for a desktop machine. Game consoles are often incredibly difficult to code for because they don't follow any sort of industry standards for either hardware or software, and require a lot of low-level hacking to get good results.
Linux consoles could easily put the smack down on the X-Box and proprietary boxes, because they could have the same availability of development tools and a much more reasonable learning curve for new developers. However, they could also easily die a quick, painful death if the X-Box beats them to the punch with game support. That is the biggest problem I see dealing with, since the X-Box will already be largely Windows-compatible, and ports of old Win32 games will be trivial, if necessary at all.
Interestingly enough, Japanese is also an excellent language to form compound statements, especially when dealing with foreign or onamotopoetic words. They have taken the English practice of concatenating terms to a new level of proficiency -- witness the original Japanese version of the Nintendo console, called the "Famicon", short for "Family Computer."
Even their large primary alphabet, kanji, is formed of complex arrangements of a core of smaller pictographic 'primitives'. It takes a special kind of weirdness to be willing to take something more or less equivalent to our concept of words, and distill it down to the individual character level.
The use of foreign words in the Japanese language dates back to their first contact with Europeans -- the Japanese word for "bread" is still "pan," which they took directly from the Portugese. There is acutally a completely seperate alphabet in the Japanese language for words that are not Japanese in origin, which uses the same set of phonetics as their native language, but a different written character set. Their system for word-borrowing is simple: if the concept doesn't exist in Japanese, they adopt it as a new bit of vocabulary, rather than trying to explain or synthesize a new term. Everything from technical terms, to proper nouns, to American slang is absorbed in the same way. However, those new words are still used within the same grammatical structures as the oldest Japanese.
Personally, I find Japanese a much more algorithmic and unambiguous language than English. Not only is the language's basic syntax more structured than that of modern Anglophiles, there are pre-defined levels of respect and formality that control word choice and forms in every sentence. You can tell the respective social positions of two Japanese people by their choice of verb conjugations. I think that influences their style of management and "quality control" far more than the business courses of a conquering invader.
What they did learn from America was the allure of capitalism. It allowed their feudal heritage of the shogunate, samurai, and personal honor and sacrifice to resurface in a socially-acceptable forum. The Japanese sarariman (salary-man) of the mid- to late-twentieth century was the new samurai, who spent a lifetime owing allegience to a single corporate "house." From the time they started work -- immediately after high school or college -- to their deathbed, the same corporation gave them employment, structure and discipline, and often even their housing. Just like their language, the core structure of their lives remained unchanged from two thousand years prior.
Well, of course -- it stands to reason that a more complex, "intelligent" compression codec would have noticeably higher CPU utilization. I suppose that this could be much more of an issue on portable hardware, as the increased resources required to to play vorbis files could make the players a good bit more expensive, larger, or slower to some to market.
Acutally, you can get away with it in certain cases. For example, you can move back and forth between the DV and MPEG video codecs relatively cleanly, because both are based on similar algorithms, and introduce almost indentical types of noise -- much like saving the same image in JPEG format multiple times.
In this case, though, I would guess that your warning would be appropriate. The two codecs are just too different, and each would probably introduce noise that the other would interpret as an important part of the source file.
Delphi is also tied to a single platform, and if you were to compare the amount of software written in it to the amount written in, say, C++, you would find that it barely registers. I agree that corporations do not necessarily screw everything up, but having an open, clean standard is important to widespread adoption of any new technology.
You are choosing a dangerous argument here, for one simple reason: Freenet is not being designed, implemented, or supported by any corporation. It is a volunteer project, being built on the labors of those who believe in it, not those who wish to profit monetarily through it. I forgive you for sounding hyperbolic, because I, too hate the rising tide of corporatism and technolust that is eroding so much of our ability to remain truly individuals. However, I do not fear the loss of financial value of my creations nearly so much as I fear the control of those works being usurped by corporations who would profit from them. Intellectual property law, in its current incarnation, gives almost no power to the individual; anything that opposes a major corporation's interests can be demolished with lawsuits, intimidation, and FUD.
If this old order has to be thrown into a temporary state of upheaval to return the power of free speech and choice to individuals. We cannot put the genie of technology back into the bottle, so we have to attempt to shape it in such a way as to insure the world remains as free as possible for us and our children. You, sir or madam, are a preservationist, which is noble, but unrealistic. Accept the fact that progress will continue, and start doing what you can to support its more benevolent forms.
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You don't know, and can't find out very reliably (at this point, anyway) what any of the three-letter gov't agencies may or may not have built into Internet2. Remember, 'Internet1' was originally ARPANet, and was build largely with federal funds and support. There's no reason to think that the second generation will have any more "backdoors" build into it than the first -- though I suppose there's no real reason that there couldn't be a good number in the current incarnation...
Were Intel to make a better product, but fail to report the earnings and stock value growth that their investors and market analysts expect, they could be sued by their stockholders for mismanagement. Advertising can, and often is, a far more effective means of increasing sales than simple quality and customer satisfaction, especially in a complex field such as chip design and fabrication, where few of your customers have any indepth understanding of the product they're buying.
- Most recent EULAs on software do not allow you to give away or sell the right to use it. That's what the words "non-tranferrable" refer to.(Software companies are also seriously considering moving to subscription-based licensing, where you would be required to upgrade or lose all rights to the tools. Sound familiar?)
- If you collect food or beer money from people to help pay for your party, it might be argued to be a public event, in which case your use of the CD would indeed be illegal (unless you were already making payments to ASCAP or BMI).
Yes, it is utterly rediculous. That is why so many people are getting so fed up with the current state of IP law.Capitalism is an economic system, not a philosophical, political, or religious one. We cannot make the mistake of jumping from a body of solid mathematical inference about the behaviors of financial markets to a core set of laws and morality to govern a society. If there were a social policy that would kill the poorest 5% of the population every year, but reintroduce ten thousand times as much money as they had held into the economy at the same time, modern economics would call it a Good Thing. (Come to think of it, that doesn't sound that different from the way that many national and international policies are formed.)
Personally, the day that I am required to constantly license everything that I read, listen to, watch, or learn from some orginial copyright holder is the day I invest in a typewriter and a shack in the woods. From that shack, I will begin writing down every thought I can, and using that body of work to flood the market with free ideas, which will of course bring about a devaluation on an agreggate basis, and get me shot by the Economic Police in short order.
However, there will be little reason for software comapnies to not start moving towards the new platform. First of all, it is a much-needed overhaul and updating of tired architecture. Reliable memory and process management, tightly integrated Java, a system graphics level that handles rendering to a near-universal format for print or diplay, etc., will all make programming for OS-X a dream compared to current Macs. The Darwin/OS-X system model is also, as a Mach/BSD creature itself, much closer to traditional *NIX, which gives developers the option of much more easily porting their apps to the Linux/BSD platforms.
This class of patent is different, but every bit as insidious as the more general technological ones. I have to agree with the poster above, though, in feeling that this patent would best serve the common good by being granted, so that the major international business players can start leaning against the patent office and Congress a bit harder.
Anyone certified to teach a college-level course, from community college associate professors to Nobel-winning careers academics, could offer part or all of that material, and be sure of having an up-to-date, well edited and maintained body of 'source' material. Plus, as online education gains legitimacy and accredidation, the content could be offered with Internet-based lectures, discussions, etc., to allow for a free (or low-cost) college degree with content way above the level that most trade and 2-year schools can afford to provide.
...which is what higher education has been doing for many, many years. Look at the economic value of a college degree (especially from an expensive private school): your wages go up, your foot is already in the door with many firms, and you are simply considered a more intelligent, well-rounded person.
Don't get me wrong -- I think college can be a wonderful and productive place for many minds, and that high valuation of education is a good thing. However, the suppliers of degree programs are every bit as capitalistic as any other market, and they utilize similar amounts of PR, FUD, and legislative influence.
All that remains is to see what kind of war this becomes. One the one hand, we could have a Gulf-style "bloodless conflict," wherein the only ones who get hurt are those who stand in the way of the massively overpowering "liberation" forces...or, we could have a Vietnam, where the native guerilla fighters give the better-equipped side a run for their money.
Software, on the other hand, almost never hits that saturation point. 95% or more of the cost of making a program is incurred before the first copy even ships: development, marketing, testing, etc. Once copies are being boxeed and shipped in large numbers, each one only costs the company an additional few cents for duplication, printing, and distribution.
Now, enter the Free Software movement (or at least its popular media recognition): you can get your OS, server applications, and business tools absolutely free, with the source code, on your choice of hardware. Connected by the Internet, thousands upon thousands of developers toil away on labors of love, making their OSS projects into the best tools on the market.
One might think that this spelled disaster for the old-school software houses, who relied on a steady stream of income from every shrink-wrapped box. However, that same Internet that made the spread of quality, free tools possible also makes possible a new kind of company...the ASP. ASPs have many of the advantages of the software industry: low cost per unit, easy distribution, etc. However, it also allows for new levels of user authentication (preventing piracy), planned obsolescence (you can only buy a subscription to a service, and the ASP changes the software at will), and lock-in (once all your corporate data is on another company's servers, you're going to think twice about telling them to go screw themselves).
Microsoft, as the world's largest developer of new software, is uniquely positioned to take over the ASP market. They can do this either by moving Windows, Office, and the rest of their end user applications to an ASP model, or by working to become the "standard" developers of ASP platform development tools and applications. With personal hardware thrown into their stable, they can insure that every WebTV box, PocketPC PDA, and X-Box console speaks the Microsoft dialect of networking, and reads and writes exclusively Microsoft documents.
.NET is Microsoft's ASP power-play. If C#, DCOM, et. al. can become standards for server-side distributed business logic, then anything that doesn't play nice with them runs the risk of becoming very unpopular. This is why the success of Linux and *BSD on the desktop is a noble, but less important goal -- the battle now is for control of the network, and the network will be the "killer application" for many years to come.
Linux, BSD, etc. (really, any UNIX-like OS) should only be used in a non-tech-savvy office for one of a short list of purposes. Web hosting, file sharing, or firewall configurations should be more or less rock-solid for months on end if they're done right. Maintenance shouldn't be much more than a remote checkup every few days (logs, drive space, etc.) and a weekly tape backup.
The core reasoning hasn't changed though; it is still entirely possible to serve many users' needs from a single, more powerful, computer, and to do it more economically and efficiently. A well-run ASP can offer better securtiy, data integrity, and support than most small non-profits would ever be able to maintain internally. Open sourcing the tools being used further increases the support and development base, and the non-profit using the service shouldn't have to worry about anything much more complex than getting a hard backup of their data put into storage somewhere every few weeks or months.
Imagine, if you will, that suddenly, the postal service decided that you could only read and write your mail with a custom, USPS-approved, compact letter-machine. The output it produced would be scrambled to the point of being impossible to decipher, and any attempt to decode it would be a federal crime. However, business and legal documents had to be transferred by that means to be considered "official." That is dramatically similar to the situation we are beginning to face with EULAs, the DMCA prohibitions on reverse-engineering, and the growing segment of Internet users who think it's nothing more than the Web and email. I, for one, would very much like to have at least a few options, and do not wish to support Microsoft in their attempt to "own" the Internet in any way I can avoid.
I'm glad that you have no problem with doing your part to solidify and permanently establish Microsoft's supreme decision-making authority for every user of the Internet. Personally, I am trying to do something about it -- by arguing with you, by running the latest Mozilla builds, by trying to push friends and coworkers into avoiding IE, and at least into avoiding sites that only work with IE.
Whether any judge in the country is going to accept that is anybody's guess. I, for one, think it highly unlikely. We can hope, though, right? Basically, if this thing doesn't get thrown directly out of court, it becomes a win/win situation for supporters of peer-to-peer networking tech: either AOL/Time Warner loses, thereby biting themselves in the ass with the legal teeth of their anti-Napster arguments, or AOL/T.W. wins, in which case the future of peer-to-peer tools looks a little brighter.
Plus, either way, they're going to be involved in a nice, hyped, confusing legal action which will obscure their anti-swapping message for months. I can see the first-time Net users reading the AUP for their service now:
AUP: "...any use of these services for the purpose of knowingly violating copyright or patent protection of intellectual property is strictly prohibited; these uses may include, but are not limited to, the sharing of copyrighted media files, software, or proprietary information (see MP3s, FTP & Me on p. 3)."
User: "...uhh, but didn't AOL do a bunch of that stuff? I saw it on the news, I think, so they must mean something different than what I think they mean...so where's that stupid Noo-tella site? I want me some tunes...
Unfortunately, by refusing to "suffer" through a few improperly-rendered sites a day, you are contributing to the client stats on every web server that suggest to developers that IE is the only browser they reallyneed to support. That impression is what keeps every site out there looking perfect in IE 4/5/5.5, and god-awful in most every other browser.
Anyone remember their basic Western Civ classes? Think hard, now...there was this amazing informational technology, commericalized by that guy Gutenberg, that allowed for a dramatic increase in the efficiency of ditributing information. In its day, the printing press was cutting edge, and those in power were just as scared shitless as they are now.
Suddenly, written works were flying from one end of Europe to the other, and the potential for the easy accessiblity of heretical, immoral, and rebellious works frightened the powers that be to no end. So, the benevolent leaders of Europe's governments (the Church) stepped in, and as best they could, restored order to the chaos. Wholesome texts were printed and distributed far and wide, and the mental and spiritual health and hygeine of the entire reading world was improved. In addition, the increased availability of approraite texts helped aid the spread of literacy, and through it, "appropraite" ideas and morals (Christianity).
The new moral code is good consumerism, and so advertising and promotion drive communications technologies. Just as Christianity was aided by the printing of countless Bibles and supporting texts, modern developed nations are deluged with instructions to buy, replace, upgrade, and be "the first on the block" to have the latest and greatst. Therefore, when "insurgent" technologies like DeCSS threaten this hold, they must be branded as heretical and illegal, in order to protect the population from dangerous and rebellious ideas. There's little deliberate malice coming from the government, and what filters down from corporate boardrooms is unavoidable -- they have to maximize shareholder wealth, and their only products being given away for free is frightening to an extreme.
However, I think few people would argue that change is not an accellerating vehicle, and therein lies our greatest source of hope. Just as the spread of literacy was instrumental in bringing about the rise of populist politics and scientific study in the public view, computers and pervasive networks will allow for a greater sharing of ideas than possible before. It's sometimes easy for those of us who have spent the majority of our lives working with these relatively new technologies to forget that they are, from a sociological or historical point of view, barely blips on the radar so far.
Remember, most of the circuit judges, legislators, and senior executives of this world probably didn't touch a computer until they were at least in their 30s. They had finished college, started careers, etc., and were no longer blessed with young minds ready to reshape themselves for a new mode of thought or communication tool. Compared to children, adults have a great deal of trouble learning new languages and computers are the cognitive equivalent of several new foreign tongues, some hard math, and a lot of new metaphors and suumptions, all rolled into one.
So, let's try to be a little patient. I, for one, am not as big a fan of violent upheaval as of natural progression, and I fail to see how the current trend towards restriction of digital tools with the objective of "informational purity" can continue under with the next generation of leaders. They will be comfortable with the technology, its implications, and its use, and will know how rediculous the current body of laws are.
If you want to help accellerate this process, you can do so in any number of ways that won't require getting thrown in jail and effectively silenced. Be a teacher, or support the EFF, or put on a clean shirt and go talk to your local legislator or library administrator about your views on censorship and IP. If we want sanity in our leaders, then we should try to show ourselves worthy of taking that role, rather than simply foaming at the mouth about the injustices of "the man."
Porting DCOM to UNIX is one thing, but Office is another beast entirely. Microsoft nearly destroyed their market for Mac applications when they tried to offer a weak port of the Windows version of Office -- people simply started refusing to upgrade. These days, the two have pretty much completely different code -- you can't really port the Windows version of Office to any other OS, because they're joined at the hip with DLL-Hell, private system calls, etc.
- My Celeron/466 Linux box boots in less than three minutes, and that's with Apache, Samba, Sendmail, and MySQL all starting up. Move the OS into ROM or flash, and you've got yourself a winner -- even without custom-tweaked drivers and hardware.
- Check out XFree86 4.0.1 -- the DRI and modularization redesigns for this version are really freaking impressive. AFAIK, the 3D is all done w/OpenGL, and quite a few cards already have accellerated support.
- Remember, we're talking Linux here. Assuming they're looking at using off-the-shelf hardware, coding for these consoles shouldn't be any more difficult than writing for a desktop machine. Game consoles are often incredibly difficult to code for because they don't follow any sort of industry standards for either hardware or software, and require a lot of low-level hacking to get good results.
Linux consoles could easily put the smack down on the X-Box and proprietary boxes, because they could have the same availability of development tools and a much more reasonable learning curve for new developers. However, they could also easily die a quick, painful death if the X-Box beats them to the punch with game support. That is the biggest problem I see dealing with, since the X-Box will already be largely Windows-compatible, and ports of old Win32 games will be trivial, if necessary at all.Even their large primary alphabet, kanji, is formed of complex arrangements of a core of smaller pictographic 'primitives'. It takes a special kind of weirdness to be willing to take something more or less equivalent to our concept of words, and distill it down to the individual character level.
Personally, I find Japanese a much more algorithmic and unambiguous language than English. Not only is the language's basic syntax more structured than that of modern Anglophiles, there are pre-defined levels of respect and formality that control word choice and forms in every sentence. You can tell the respective social positions of two Japanese people by their choice of verb conjugations. I think that influences their style of management and "quality control" far more than the business courses of a conquering invader.
What they did learn from America was the allure of capitalism. It allowed their feudal heritage of the shogunate, samurai, and personal honor and sacrifice to resurface in a socially-acceptable forum. The Japanese sarariman (salary-man) of the mid- to late-twentieth century was the new samurai, who spent a lifetime owing allegience to a single corporate "house." From the time they started work -- immediately after high school or college -- to their deathbed, the same corporation gave them employment, structure and discipline, and often even their housing. Just like their language, the core structure of their lives remained unchanged from two thousand years prior.
Well, of course -- it stands to reason that a more complex, "intelligent" compression codec would have noticeably higher CPU utilization. I suppose that this could be much more of an issue on portable hardware, as the increased resources required to to play vorbis files could make the players a good bit more expensive, larger, or slower to some to market.
In this case, though, I would guess that your warning would be appropriate. The two codecs are just too different, and each would probably introduce noise that the other would interpret as an important part of the source file.
Delphi is also tied to a single platform, and if you were to compare the amount of software written in it to the amount written in, say, C++, you would find that it barely registers. I agree that corporations do not necessarily screw everything up, but having an open, clean standard is important to widespread adoption of any new technology.
If this old order has to be thrown into a temporary state of upheaval to return the power of free speech and choice to individuals. We cannot put the genie of technology back into the bottle, so we have to attempt to shape it in such a way as to insure the world remains as free as possible for us and our children. You, sir or madam, are a preservationist, which is noble, but unrealistic. Accept the fact that progress will continue, and start doing what you can to support its more benevolent forms.