There is a legitimate point behind this troll. When does being an open source project administrator have more to do with media relations than project management? People like RMS, etc. probably spend very little of their time writing code and much more of their time promoting their projects and building community.
Open Source software has evolved to the point where the "leading minds" have become project administrators deciding which contributions to merge into the main build rather than thought leaders defining the future of their products. Not to troll, but a project manager at Microsoft probably has more influence on the technological evolution of their products than open source project leaders. It is just the nature of distributed development--distributed innovation.
The video game censorship law is just a symptom of a larger problem; the resurgence of social conservatism in the U.S. Whether in the form of media censorship, gay marraige bans, partial-birth abortion bans, flag-burning ban, etc., it appears that social conservativism has taken hold at the state level as well as the federal. I can only hope that dissatisfaction with the current administration impacts the midterm elections.
Mirosoft started treating device driver that were not 'certified' for Windows XP differently in the installation process. the certification process is expensive and I have had numerous drivers that generated warning prompts because the manufacturers did not pay the Microsoft tax. I had a feeling that it would only be a matter of time before Microsoft created its own 'digital signature' like process for certifying system or application software.
I am very surprised to see Google mentioned as a company with a strong brand. While they are the market leader in search, their brand value is minimal with respect to the myriad of other services that they have launched. Yahoo seems to have a much stronger brand as indicated by its ability to establish top 5 contenders in markets as disperate as online dating, business/finance, e-mail, etc. under the Yahoo brand. While Google has a strong reputation in search, its ability to attract people to other services under the Google brand has been lackluster at best.
It is inevitable that Amazon would chase businesses that offer better ROCE than their core. They took on tremendous debt to build a distribution infrastructure and see single digit profit margins as a result. Meanwhile, "virtual" companies like eBay, Google, Yahoo, etc. are able to get better returns on their assets. In the past, Amazon tried to be an e-commerce platform and license their services to Toys R Us and other firms but ran into problems because they were essentially hosting sites for their direct competitors. Now, they are trying to branch into unrelated "virtual" companies like search, media, etc.
There is a lot of nasty stuff that you can do if you are routing the traffic through a squid proxy like the author of the original article did. Imagine replacing all images with Goatse.cx or redirecting all web traffic to a page announcing "You are a bandwidth thief!".
The more serious and disturbing outcome of this story is in that it presents a case for how wardrivers can have their passwords and personal information stolen through a clever phishing attack using a proxy. You can argue they deserve it for piggybacking on others' bandwidth but the potential for exploitation here is huge (imagine if somebody put an open access point near Central Park).
I think Microsoft is very worried about Windows open source applications like OpenOffice that threaten their dominance in the application software market. While their customers are forcing them to take a less hostile position to open source, in general, they still need to fan the flames of criticism of the security, reliability, etc. Even on Windows, open source is a major threat to Microsoft that they cannot fully accept.
Like the Dvorak keyboard, ergonomic innovations that force people to relearn basic skills are bound for failure irrespective of the upside. Companies should instead develop ergonomic enhancements that integrate into the existing workspace.
One of the things that was discussed regarding the GPL v3 was adding a provision that made web services considered distribution that would require eleasing the source as per the GPL (as opposed to applications which are used internally but not distributed, where there is no source code distribution requirement). If they do choose to include such a provision, it could stifle the development of new and innovative web applications as the financial incentive for development would be removed.
Microsoft is already waging a scare campaign comparing the source distribution clause of the GPL to a virus. Why should the open source community give tbem more ammunition to attack the GPL while limiting the use of GPL code in web applications?
Like its other non-search offerings, Google is behind the curve on this one. Sourceforge seems to be more feature packed than what Google is proposing, we have already launched a social code sharing site (see our sig) and Koders already searches millions of lines of open source code. Google strategy seems to be releaing me-too sites that are not positioned to be mafrket leaders (Google Finance, Orkut, Google Talk, etc.).
The cable and satellite companies will almost certainly throw a fit about products like the Slingbox. Now, they are able to ensure not only that each house can its own paid-for cable connection, but also levy per-TV fees for cable/satellite box rentals. The slingbox and its ilk attach to the cable box outputs so you could use a single cable box to broadcast video to all computers in your house. Furthermore, if you disable your router's firewall and use port forwarding, you (and your friends) could get cable stations outside your home. Unlike the PVRs, which only pissed off networks that were losing ad revenue, the space-shifting devices will anger all providers of video delivery services, from Comcast to Verizon to DishTV. The service will simply have too many enemies to exist without regulation in the long term.
My Mom was a public school teacher for 13 years and very quickly discovered that the problem with our educational system was not the lack of technology. As a math teacher, she saw that many students relied on their (graphing) calculators to do even simple arithmetic as a result. The main problems she saw in low income parts of the county were lack of parental involvement, peer pressure not to do well in school (particularly when she taught poorer students), and a lack of ambition or motivation. When she taught in a higher income part of the county, she felt that many parents would push too hard for their kids to be honors classes, where they performed poorly and diminished the quality of education for other students.
In short, the problems afflicting the education system, in the U.S. at least, are social not technological. Presumably, elsewhere in the world, this is the case, as well.
This is the dumbest idea in the history of mankind: verifyably identifying children as such on the Internet. Unless, of course, they are trying to help pedophiles find targets that they *know* are too young to be FBI agents.
"Lindows" was just a PR move and the trademark equivalent of cybersquatting. Let's not forget that the founder of the company got his start by registering mp3.com as well as slight variations of the URLs of other major sites and convincing a VC to fund him as a company. Yet again, though, his strategy worked pretty well.
I think that there will be little meaningful technological change in either Microsoft's or Sun's products as a result of the settlement. Microsoft did not want to be barred from distributing the JVM while Sun did not want Microsoft to fork Java (like J++ originally tried to). The settlement ensures that both concerns are met. The major surprise to me was the magnitude and nature of the license payments to Sun. I would have thought Microsoft could structure the payments as an equity investment similar to their $100million investment in Apple so as to at least they receive something of more tangible value in return.
One of the things few Linux desktop advocates consider is the cost of retraining users to use the new software and any loss of productivity that would result from incompatibilities between OSS Office packages (OpenOffice,StarOffice,etc.) and Microsoft's offering. If 90% of business users create their documents in word then even subtle incompatibilities or limitations of the import functionality could make it very difficult to share information across and between organizations.
It is the chicken and the egg problem. The value in MS Software is certainly not any features of the packages, themselves; it is the network effect of being able to easily share data with all other users of the software.
A company that actually cared about customer satisfaction would immediately offer to allow customers to return their PDAs, and a repackaging of unsold units to reflect the actual capabilities of the product. Though a recall would be expensive and likely require a product redesign, such an offer would likely be cost-effective and give consumers a reason to feel positively about the company.
Since most people probably saw the PDAs before they bought them, they must have been satisfied enough with the appearance of the display at the time of purchase. It would therefore be unlikely that a specification change would convince them to return the PDA and lose any data that they stored on it.
Why is it so difficult for companies to do the right thing, even if it will cultivate a more positive image for them in the long run, at a limited expense?
$60/month seems relatively expensive for a 206Kbps SDSL connection when compared to other cable/satellite/DSL offerings. While this may provide users with greater upstream speeds, most users would benefit more from the faster downstream connections from the aforementioned providers than a better upstream rate.
What advantages does the co-op model offer to subscribers over a traditional ISP that would justify the added expense? How is the subscriber experience different from what would be expected from a large national provider?
If the subjects of this monitoring know that the location of the cell phone/pager is being tracked, then they will merely leave their cell-phone where they are supposed to be. Unless the parent/employer calls every so often to ensure that the subject is actually carrying the device with him, then it is all but useless, as the subject can go anywhere he pleases while the device reports that he is where he is supposed to be.
This license would seem more suited to id's business model than the GPL and should be considered as a replacement. Not only would iD open up a new revenue stream for older game engines, but also the community would continue to learn and benefit from the open sourced system (while being able to produce non-commercial titles without restriction).
If anything, opening the source while employing this licensing scheme would be more make the code more useful to the community by allowing for commercial titles to be released using the code (the GPL's requirement that all derivative works be licensed under the GPL makes commercial development unfeasible).
The only worry, from iD's perspective is that licensing older engines would cannibalize the lucrative sales of the most recent engine.
The article states that he was selling pirated games alongside the mod chips. Maybe the charge of copyright infringement related to the illegal video games being sold (as Sony did not design the mod chips, it is unclear of whose copyright he would be violating).
Now, instead of having to deal with obscene graffiti on the walls of public bathroom stalls, the graffiti will automatically page people when they use the commode, to make obscene remarks. What makes it even worse is that shop owners won't be able to get rid of such messages as easily; it would be very strange if an entire bathroom would need to be declared because people with pagers would get demeaning comments about their adequacy when they used the urinals.
From a more serious perspective, webmasters strongly disapproved of Third Voice, who provided software that allowed users to associate comments with web pages. I imagine shopkeepers who are slandered (or have their bathrooms rendered "interactive") will strongly oppose this technology.
An entire new activist movement could be spawned with the slogan: "don't waste mental effort that can never again be reclaimed; send only RECYCLED SPAM!"
Slashdot Mirror
There is a legitimate point behind this troll. When does being an open source project administrator have more to do with media relations than project management? People like RMS, etc. probably spend very little of their time writing code and much more of their time promoting their projects and building community.
Open Source software has evolved to the point where the "leading minds" have become project administrators deciding which contributions to merge into the main build rather than thought leaders defining the future of their products. Not to troll, but a project manager at Microsoft probably has more influence on the technological evolution of their products than open source project leaders. It is just the nature of distributed development--distributed innovation.
The video game censorship law is just a symptom of a larger problem; the resurgence of social conservatism in the U.S. Whether in the form of media censorship, gay marraige bans, partial-birth abortion bans, flag-burning ban, etc., it appears that social conservativism has taken hold at the state level as well as the federal. I can only hope that dissatisfaction with the current administration impacts the midterm elections.
Mirosoft started treating device driver that were not 'certified' for Windows XP differently in the installation process. the certification process is expensive and I have had numerous drivers that generated warning prompts because the manufacturers did not pay the Microsoft tax. I had a feeling that it would only be a matter of time before Microsoft created its own 'digital signature' like process for certifying system or application software.
I am very surprised to see Google mentioned as a company with a strong brand. While they are the market leader in search, their brand value is minimal with respect to the myriad of other services that they have launched. Yahoo seems to have a much stronger brand as indicated by its ability to establish top 5 contenders in markets as disperate as online dating, business/finance, e-mail, etc. under the Yahoo brand. While Google has a strong reputation in search, its ability to attract people to other services under the Google brand has been lackluster at best.
It is inevitable that Amazon would chase businesses that offer better ROCE than their core. They took on tremendous debt to build a distribution infrastructure and see single digit profit margins as a result. Meanwhile, "virtual" companies like eBay, Google, Yahoo, etc. are able to get better returns on their assets. In the past, Amazon tried to be an e-commerce platform and license their services to Toys R Us and other firms but ran into problems because they were essentially hosting sites for their direct competitors. Now, they are trying to branch into unrelated "virtual" companies like search, media, etc.
There is a lot of nasty stuff that you can do if you are routing the traffic through a squid proxy like the author of the original article did. Imagine replacing all images with Goatse.cx or redirecting all web traffic to a page announcing "You are a bandwidth thief!".
The more serious and disturbing outcome of this story is in that it presents a case for how wardrivers can have their passwords and personal information stolen through a clever phishing attack using a proxy. You can argue they deserve it for piggybacking on others' bandwidth but the potential for exploitation here is huge (imagine if somebody put an open access point near Central Park).
I think Microsoft is very worried about Windows open source applications like OpenOffice that threaten their dominance in the application software market. While their customers are forcing them to take a less hostile position to open source, in general, they still need to fan the flames of criticism of the security, reliability, etc. Even on Windows, open source is a major threat to Microsoft that they cannot fully accept.
Like the Dvorak keyboard, ergonomic innovations that force people to relearn basic skills are bound for failure irrespective of the upside. Companies should instead develop ergonomic enhancements that integrate into the existing workspace.
One of the things that was discussed regarding the GPL v3 was adding a provision that made web services considered distribution that would require eleasing the source as per the GPL (as opposed to applications which are used internally but not distributed, where there is no source code distribution requirement). If they do choose to include such a provision, it could stifle the development of new and innovative web applications as the financial incentive for development would be removed.
Microsoft is already waging a scare campaign comparing the source distribution clause of the GPL to a virus. Why should the open source community give tbem more ammunition to attack the GPL while limiting the use of GPL code in web applications?
Like its other non-search offerings, Google is behind the curve on this one. Sourceforge seems to be more feature packed than what Google is proposing, we have already launched a social code sharing site (see our sig) and Koders already searches millions of lines of open source code. Google strategy seems to be releaing me-too sites that are not positioned to be mafrket leaders (Google Finance, Orkut, Google Talk, etc.).
The cable and satellite companies will almost certainly throw a fit about products like the Slingbox. Now, they are able to ensure not only that each house can its own paid-for cable connection, but also levy per-TV fees for cable/satellite box rentals. The slingbox and its ilk attach to the cable box outputs so you could use a single cable box to broadcast video to all computers in your house. Furthermore, if you disable your router's firewall and use port forwarding, you (and your friends) could get cable stations outside your home. Unlike the PVRs, which only pissed off networks that were losing ad revenue, the space-shifting devices will anger all providers of video delivery services, from Comcast to Verizon to DishTV. The service will simply have too many enemies to exist without regulation in the long term.
My Mom was a public school teacher for 13 years and very quickly discovered that the problem with our educational system was not the lack of technology. As a math teacher, she saw that many students relied on their (graphing) calculators to do even simple arithmetic as a result. The main problems she saw in low income parts of the county were lack of parental involvement, peer pressure not to do well in school (particularly when she taught poorer students), and a lack of ambition or motivation. When she taught in a higher income part of the county, she felt that many parents would push too hard for their kids to be honors classes, where they performed poorly and diminished the quality of education for other students.
In short, the problems afflicting the education system, in the U.S. at least, are social not technological. Presumably, elsewhere in the world, this is the case, as well.
This is the dumbest idea in the history of mankind: verifyably identifying children as such on the Internet. Unless, of course, they are trying to help pedophiles find targets that they *know* are too young to be FBI agents.
For more info, see these links:
2 00 0/d2000-0009.html (Talk-City.com)
4 .h tml
http://arbiter.wipo.int/domains/decisions/html/
http://seclists.org/lists/politech/2000/Mar/001
http://www.fool.com/specials/2000/sp000523b.htm (Tu-cows.com)
Another poster may be right that mp3.com was purchased from a third party. But, Robertson has a history of typosquatting, etc.
"Lindows" was just a PR move and the trademark equivalent of cybersquatting. Let's not forget that the founder of the company got his start by registering mp3.com as well as slight variations of the URLs of other major sites and convincing a VC to fund him as a company. Yet again, though, his strategy worked pretty well.
I think that there will be little meaningful technological change in either Microsoft's or Sun's products as a result of the settlement. Microsoft did not want to be barred from distributing the JVM while Sun did not want Microsoft to fork Java (like J++ originally tried to). The settlement ensures that both concerns are met. The major surprise to me was the magnitude and nature of the license payments to Sun. I would have thought Microsoft could structure the payments as an equity investment similar to their $100million investment in Apple so as to at least they receive something of more tangible value in return.
One of the things few Linux desktop advocates consider is the cost of retraining users to use the new software and any loss of productivity that would result from incompatibilities between OSS Office packages (OpenOffice,StarOffice,etc.) and Microsoft's offering. If 90% of business users create their documents in word then even subtle incompatibilities or limitations of the import functionality could make it very difficult to share information across and between organizations.
It is the chicken and the egg problem. The value in MS Software is certainly not any features of the packages, themselves; it is the network effect of being able to easily share data with all other users of the software.
A company that actually cared about customer satisfaction would immediately offer to allow customers to return their PDAs, and a repackaging of unsold units to reflect the actual capabilities of the product. Though a recall would be expensive and likely require a product redesign, such an offer would likely be cost-effective and give consumers a reason to feel positively about the company.
Since most people probably saw the PDAs before they bought them, they must have been satisfied enough with the appearance of the display at the time of purchase. It would therefore be unlikely that a specification change would convince them to return the PDA and lose any data that they stored on it.
Why is it so difficult for companies to do the right thing, even if it will cultivate a more positive image for them in the long run, at a limited expense?
$60/month seems relatively expensive for a 206Kbps SDSL connection when compared to other cable/satellite/DSL offerings. While this may provide users with greater upstream speeds, most users would benefit more from the faster downstream connections from the aforementioned providers than a better upstream rate.
What advantages does the co-op model offer to subscribers over a traditional ISP that would justify the added expense? How is the subscriber experience different from what would be expected from a large national provider?
If the subjects of this monitoring know that the location of the cell phone/pager is being tracked, then they will merely leave their cell-phone where they are supposed to be. Unless the parent/employer calls every so often to ensure that the subject is actually carrying the device with him, then it is all but useless, as the subject can go anywhere he pleases while the device reports that he is where he is supposed to be.
This license would seem more suited to id's business model than the GPL and should be considered as a replacement. Not only would iD open up a new revenue stream for older game engines, but also the community would continue to learn and benefit from the open sourced system (while being able to produce non-commercial titles without restriction).
If anything, opening the source while employing this licensing scheme would be more make the code more useful to the community by allowing for commercial titles to be released using the code (the GPL's requirement that all derivative works be licensed under the GPL makes commercial development unfeasible).
The only worry, from iD's perspective is that licensing older engines would cannibalize the lucrative sales of the most recent engine.
The article states that he was selling pirated games alongside the mod chips. Maybe the charge of copyright infringement related to the illegal video games being sold (as Sony did not design the mod chips, it is unclear of whose copyright he would be violating).
Now, instead of having to deal with obscene graffiti on the walls of public bathroom stalls, the graffiti will automatically page people when they use the commode, to make obscene remarks. What makes it even worse is that shop owners won't be able to get rid of such messages as easily; it would be very strange if an entire bathroom would need to be declared because people with pagers would get demeaning comments about their adequacy when they used the urinals.
From a more serious perspective, webmasters strongly disapproved of Third Voice, who provided software that allowed users to associate comments with web pages. I imagine shopkeepers who are slandered (or have their bathrooms rendered "interactive") will strongly oppose this technology.
An entire new activist movement could be spawned with the slogan: "don't waste mental effort that can never again be reclaimed; send only RECYCLED SPAM!"
This is the biggest fragfest outside of Afghanistan!