However, part of the reason that source code was held to be speech was that the crypto researchers involved were using it as part of their routine discussions of algorithms. So unless these kids are looking at the object code and actually understand it (which would almost certainly involve a DMCA violation, anyway), this wouldn't qualify.
A couple of years ago, I did some research for webstats packages for our websites, and came up with a package that I haven't seen mentioned yet:
Sawmill is the best tool for the kinds of questions you mentioned -- it can run as a CGI program (or as its own daemon) and does on-the-fly limiting, different reports, etc. So if they want to know what kind of browsers people were using in the Support section at 3am, they can get that.
I put together a Perl CGI to handle combining logs from all of our different servers, and then feed the combined log to Sawmill (or FunnelWeb, the other package we wound up using).
Imagine walking into a computer store with no idea of what you want or what the different technologies are. You walk up the salesman and say, "I want a good computer." You'll walk out paying twice as much as you need to, and probably not getting what you need, right?
Same goes for dealing with people. If you don't know what they want, what they value, and what you can get away with, you're likely to get screwed. I've seen perfectly intelligent techies blatantly insult their bosses (and bosses' boss) because they didn't understand who stood where on the issues. And other stupid mistakes just as bad.
And politics, irritating as it might be, is the way to not make stupid mistakes when dealing with people. To negotiate from a position of knowledge rather than a position of ignorance.
sure, you've got 30 gigs free. Why would any business pay you for storage when, for under $200, they can pop a 100-gig disk into a disk tray, slide it into a box, back up everything over their lan at 100mb or 1gb speed, then pop the hd out of the box and bring it elsewhere for safekeeping?
it's true that ide disks are cheap enough these days that it makes a lot of sense to use them for data recovery. at work, we're building a couple of 800GB file servers (following the SDSC model posted here a couple of months back), that make nightly backups of all our servers. problem is that this doesn't do versioning, you can't pull a file that was deleted two weeks ago, etc. the traditional way to get that is tape, which has a lot of disadvantages. using removable disks is also an option, but they've got to be swapped. like i said, once you get in the terabyte range (i.e., swapping 10 of those 100GB disks), something network-based starts to look really attractive.
you admit that your lack of backups is due to your own personal behavior. Loose a few partitions, you'll learn:)
actually, i've lost a couple of partitions, and i still haven't learned. it's not that i don't know any better, it's just that for my home systems, it's just not important enough for me to put in the work. i'm not a sysadmin any more, so i don't have to worry about our servers at work.
there's no way any competent sysadmin will ever let in-house data out into the wild... that's a firing offence. This is not a flame, it's just the way it is in the real world.
obviously, it would need to be encrypted, and not deposited in large chunks on any individual computer. with a well-documented and open architecture (and 3K encryption keys), this should give you roughly the same confidence that your data can't be eavesdropped on as putting tapes in a remote storage site.
The greatest possibility that I see for using this sort of system is storage. I don't know about the rest of you, but I would glady sell my spare processor cycles to get a robust, secure, frequently-updated backup of my files. I have a backup system (CD-R for my home machines), but I don't keep it updated very well, and certainly not as updated as the system they're talking about could keep it.
Add to that the fact that when you start dealing with serious amounts of data (~1TB), making backups to tape or any other media starts to get really difficult. If the free disk space on people's computers (I've got around 30 or 40GB free on my home machines) could be put to use to store backups, I'm sure businesses would be willing to pay a significant amount of money for it.
I agree with the main point of your post -- lots of people seem to be irrationally negative about Stallman. I don't agree with him all the time, and can see how his confrontational style can be abrasive, but all told, I think he deserves a lot of respect. That said, I totally disagree with a couple of your statements.
Whether you honor it or not is your choice. But insulting him while you continue to use the fruits of his labor is worse than hypocrisy - its theft.
No, it isn't. (Neither is depriving someone of profits from intellectual property, btw). I think that people like to try to apply the concept of theft to the digital world (since it's such a strong concept), but it just doesn't apply. It's very hard to deprive someone of their property in the digital world. I think the word you're looking for is 'ingrattitude'.
To say that Richard Stallman's radical ideas are a hindrance to the acceptance of non-proprietary alternatives is absurd.
I don't think it's absurd. Ironic, yes, but not absurd. Stallman was absolutely necessary to getting free software where it is today, but his unyielding principles and abrasive style are a hindrance. They make many of the people who make the decisions about what software large enterprises use uncomfortable.
When you break the numbers down by Linux distribution, Win2K had fewer vulnerabilities than RedHat Linux 7.0 or MandrakeSoft Mandrake Linux 7.2
And this is exactly the kind of flawed logic that always creeps into these kinds of discussions: there is no "Linux" to compare with "Windows", there are only a bunch of distros. Totalling up all the holes in all the distros makes no sense at all.
And when you compare Windows to a given Linux distro (much closer to a good comparison), Linux wins every time.
The decision doesn't say that carpel tunnel syndrome isn't a disability. They just said that you can't just look at a person's fitness to work to decide whether they are disabled. You have to look at what the person can do, what they can't, etc. In this case, the woman couldn't do a couple of things (like hold her arms out), but could do some other things.
This decision just means that if you can't do one thing, but could do something else, it's not your employer's responsibility to accommodate you -- it's your responsibility to find a job that you can do. I don't think this really changes things for people who have disabilities (e.g., blindness) which would require accommodation in almost all circumstances. And it certainly doesn't single out carpel tunnel as not being a disability. If you had a case of carpel tunnel that made it difficult for you to do most jobs, ADA would still apply.
The only conceivably good thing about effective DRM (assuming it ever happened), would be to reduce the amount of gouging that's justified by piracy.
The basic idea is that if it takes a software company a million dollars to produce and support a piece of commercial software, and they have a million customers, they could charge $1 per customer and break even. But if 100,000 buy it, and the other 900,000 get a pirated version, they have to charge $10 per copy to break even. So if effective DRM forced all 1,000,000 to buy it, they could sell it for a buck.
Same goes for movies. If they do pay-per-view, and everybody has to pay each time they view it, the price per view could be lower than it is now with the studios still making money. Personally, I like movies, but not obsessively like some people. And I think it might be nice to have some of the people who watch movies a billion times offset some of my casual viewing.
Of course, this won't happen. If DRM is implemented, it will not be effective. Perhaps it will be largely effective, but I seriously doubt any DRM will be effective enough to prevent software and movies from being pirated and sold on the streets of Moscow. And even if it does, the studios would just make more profit, not sell for less.
In case you haven't noticed, the aqua look-and-feel that they're defending with their lawyers rests on one of the biggest things that differentiates them from the wintel world: displayPDF. adopting an already widely-used standard for cross platform display consistency as their internal display format allows not only nifty graphics with transparency and the like, but also a much better match between print and screen (probably the biggest pain in the ass for apple's primary clientele -- graphics world).
speaking of graphics, they give away perfectly usable software for making movies and streaming them over the net (did i mention that darwinstreamingserver runs on linux, too). you can buy a perfectly decent video-editing system from them for around $1,100.
oh, and they also released a mass-market consumer operating system (with microsoft apps, no less) that runs a free (as in speech) unix kernel.
yeah, i guess the pretty candy colors are all that differentiates apple from wintel after all.
my solution is a briefcase. a nice, small, soft-sided leather briefcase, measuring about 10 x 7 x 3.
in it, i have my visor, folding keyboard, cell-phone, and text pager. there's also room for my sunglasses, and whatever paper i get stuck with at meetings.
(as it turns out, i submitted this very question to ask slashdot last year, but it got rejected -- so i just had to figure it out on my own)
Don't confuse the UI with the OS. If you mean why would you want X or a command-line on a phone, then I agree -- you wouldn't.
But if we're just talking about the kernel, then the answer is pretty simple -- because it's already done, stable, configurable and Free. They don't have to reinvent all the core OS stuff, they can just use the Linux kernel, which has already been adapted to run in low disk/ram/etc. environments that aren't that different from phones.
Once you're using Linux, then you can get benefits of advances in the voice shell or other stuff like that (which other people are working on for its own sake). And since it's Free, they can make whatever changes they want to add the features they need or make the adaptations that are good for phones.
IMHO (and I'm sure there's a really good technical reason for this), they missed the boat using a RGB color filter over a b/w pixel. Wouldn't it be much better to have three different-colored pixels -- cyan, magenta and yellow, perhaps?
They would still have the 1/3 of the resolution problem, though that seems pretty unavoidable with this kind of approach. But at least they'd have a truly CMYK reflective electronic display.
I suppose the really good techincal reason not to use CMY pixels has to do with the problem of assembly. Would keeping track of which pixels were which color be much harder than producing the filter they use in the current setup?
Maybe it's time we revert to the practice of people producing art because they are compelled to, not because they are paid to. When
artists are paid only on commission, or for a live performance. That is, they earn their living like the rest of us, based solely on the
merit of their work - as judged by others.
Actually, we're already there. The artists who are managed by the RIAA member companies only get paid for live performances right now. The rest (and then some) gets taken by the record companies to fund the RIAA, label marketing, etc.
Overall, the Left moves in the direction of a lot of personal Liberty in the areas of Morality, but a lot of centralized power/money in the government. The Right, of course, moves in the direction of a lot of centralized control of the nation's Morality in the government, and a lot of personal freedom/liberty/power, thus reducing that of the government.
No argument from this Democrat (I didn't just vote for them, I donated time and money).
That's where my agreements with you end, tho. As much as I like my fiscal/firearms liberties that the Republicans want to protect, I find their bent toward xtian theocracy repulsive and dangerous.
I'd much rather have the right to control my own body, sexuality, and conscience than the right to control my paycheck.
Not to mention the fact that the Republicans probably won't even follow through on their calls for smaller government. They want to spend so much on the military that all the social programs they complain about are chump change in comparison.
While I have no doubt that MS is capable of something as underhanded as stealing the code from themselves to create bogus grounds for lawsuits against the samba and wine folks, my guess is that they probably did this for a much more mundane reason: PR.
Remember how MS (including Ballmer) was making rumblings about open-sourcing Windows, or at least loosening their existing source-licensing program? And then nothing happened and the press occasionally runs pithy pieces about MS just saying that to gain some open-source cachet, or because they are idiots.
But now they can say that they don't want to open up the windoze source because they don't want to give the hax0r5 cover to profit from the ill-gotten source by claiming they actually got it under the hypothetical legit open-source licensing. Not only does this give them a good reason to now not be open-sourcing windoze when they were considering it before, it also lets them switch the focus to how they are victimized by by the h4xors (who probably use open-source software, right). And while admitting that they've been 0wn3d isn't good PR, being the victim of open-source hax0rs makes it a lot easier for them to claim that they're just this innocent, hard-working, innovative company who couldn't possibly have a monopoly because there are all these threats that could take them down at any moment.
I'm sick and tired of hearing this kind of crap again and again (from the MacWeek article):
Some of the more extreme Unix geeks disagree. Many of them are academic purists who were raised to believe that only the kernel is the operating system, and that everything else is not. But they are ignoring the history of computers and how computers have evolved. Ihey [sic] have not kept up.
The problem isn't that we're "purists" who don't get it. The problem isn't that we refuse to acknowledge that the market has moved on.
It's a simple difference of opinion rooted in the differences between the cultures of Unix and Windows/MacOS. Unix has a long tradition of having things be seperate for the sake of modularity and recombinability. I can use any shell I want on top of my kernel. I can use Sun's tar, or GNU's tar. I can use XFree86 or a commercial X server (or none at all). Within X, I can use any of a dozen window managers, and withing those I can use several desktop environments.
Windows and MacOS, on the other hand, have all those choices made for you, and bolted together in one particular way. No choice about which shell (DOS, or nothing in the case of MacOS 9 and before). No choice about which windowing system or window manager or desktop, etc.
There are benefits to the MacOS/Windows way: less user confusion, more consistency, etc. There are advantages to the Unix way: more flexibility and choice.
But don't tell me that I'm wrong about my conception of what an OS is just because I happen to be from a different culture that thinks of things being seperated that you are used to being one bolted-together mass.
I've already scanned in my books and CDs, so I can tell you before you start that it's not as easy as it sounds.
For one thing, if your book collection is anything like mine, you'll have a good number of books that don't have ISBN's (crummy British paperbacks from the 60's), let alone bar codes. Then there are a bunch where there's some stupid sticker, or a bend in the book cover, etc. to make it unreadable. Then, once you've got the barcode, at least a third of them don't successfully get a title and author from Amazon. I even hacked up a CGI-Z39 gateway to look up the ISBNs in Melvyl (Univ. of Cal's catalog), and got about the same hit rate there (though better data when it did hit).
CD's are roughly the same: a third of mine (mostly old stuff and punk) didn't have UPCs on them, so didn't match. I pointed them at barpoint.com, and got a hit rate of roughly 75% on the ones that did have barcodes.
I also did a lot of mucking around with the various different drivers, and wound up recoding some of it in Perl (the UPC->ISBN stuff was in Python), so I spent a lot of time before I even got started messing around with the drivers and stuff.
My copy of DeCSS (actually just css_descrable.c), is a fully-protected speech act.
Why? Because it is formatted, in HTML, to be a giant ASCII-art version of the OpenDVD logo, expressing my belief that DVDs should be open and viewable by anyone, anywhere, free from restrictions, on any OS.
--
-Esme
Re:LEGO: Not Open Source...
on
The LEGO Desk
·
· Score: 1
Proper Use of the LEGO Trademark on a Web Site
If the LEGO trademark is used at all, it should always be used as an adjective, not as a noun. For example, say "MODELS BUILT OF LEGO BRICKS". Never say "MODELS BUILT OF LEGOs"
I really hate this kind of garbage. I'm assuming they're doing it for the same reason that Band-Aids are now "Band-Aid brand bandages" and Jello is now "Jello brand gelatin dessert" and the like: trademark dilution.
I call them Legos (I'm sure they'll be irritated that I don't all-cap them, either), as does everyone I've ever spoken too about them. Whether it's convenient for their lawyers or not, when only one famous product comes from a company (Netscape, anyone?), that product tends to be referred to by the company's name.
And then there are free speech advocates. "Information wants to be free," they chant, over and over, conveniently ignoring the fact that freeing information can be stealing.
Let me tell you why you're wrong:
Freeing information is not stealing. Kevin Mitnick copying source code from big companies is not stealing. Copying music and software from an official copy and giving it away is not stealing.
Why not, you ask? Because by doing any of the above, you have not deprived anyone of anything.
Stealing means taking something from someone else -- depriving them of their property. The reason it is wrong is that the original owner has a right to their property (notice that the law generally doesn't care whether you keep the property, destroy it, or sell it for drug money -- it only cares how much you have deprived the original owner). One after-effect of theft in meat-space is that someone gets something for nothing. But the reverse is not true: getting something for nothing does not mean that someone else has to be deprived of their property. In the digital realm, copies can be made almost infinitely without ever depriving anyone of anything (limited only by media, bandwidth, machine time, etc.).
But wait, you say, what about copyright, patents, and intellectual property? Not relevant. Read the Constitution some time. All intellectual property (just speaking for the U.S. here, don't know about other govts) is a hack to encourage innovation. You have no right, per se, to keep your information from others, but the government has granted you that privilege to encourage you to do research, create art, etc.
So please people, let's stop talking about theft, piracy, and all the rest. Setting information free harms no one, it just (in some cases) slightly decreases the value of an artifical monopoly granted by the Constitution. It doesn't violate anyone's natural rights. It doesn't deprive them of property. It is not theft.
I was at the "New Developmens Human Interfaces" session of JavaOne this afternoon, and they do in fact have the swing components using the Aqua look and feel. They also (finally) have the toolbar at the top of the screen like the rest of Mac applications. It looks very nice, and uses all the Aqua widgets and transparency.
Not only did Jobs get up on stage during the keynote, he said that OS X will be the best desktop platform for Java. In a conference otherwise dominated by serverside (J2EE) and portables (KVM, etc.), it was nice to see someone acknowledge the importance of vanilla desktop Java.
If I'm not mistaken, it's from the famous photograph of Einstein taken by W. Eugene Smith. Smith and Einstein were discussing the ramifications of relativity and the nuclear bomb, and Einstein fell into something of a stupor as he pondered the horrible things that his science had made possible. It was then that Smith took this photo.
I think it would be hard to find a better icon of science: at once brilliant discovery and sobering consequences.
The reason why the government has such a high bar to restrict what newspapers can or cannot publish is that it is prior restraint of speech, which the court holds to be particularly difficult to justify.
This case, however, involves no such prior restraint./. has the copyrighted material up on their servers now, and MS just wants it taken down.
That said, I think/. is in the right on this one. Putting a doc on the web with a flimsy, easily circumvented click-wrap license is not a trade secret. Particularly when they've done nothing to ensure that minors, and others who cannot consent to a license at all, download this -- they didn't even requre registration in some online developer's area. Allowing MS to treat this spec as anything but public knowledge sets a dangerous precedent, and the burden should definitely be on MS to prove that this is an appropriate extension of the current protections of trade secrets.
IMHO, Microsoft should have to contact each poster individually, and settle the matter with that person by persuasion or litigation as neccessary. If they want Slashdot to give out non-publicly available information (IP addresses from their httpd_access logs, for example) to help Microsoft track down the ACs, then they should have to get a court to issue a search warrant (which will involve Microsoft having the burden of proof to prove infringement of copyright for each instance).
If the poster requests that Slashdot remove his/her comments, then (and only then) should they be removed. Anything else would make "Comments are owned by the Poster." a mockery. And I'm sure that Microsoft wouldn't want to challenge the validity of implied electronic license agreements.
Slashdot Mirror
-Esme
A couple of years ago, I did some research for webstats packages for our websites, and came up with a package that I haven't seen mentioned yet: Sawmill is the best tool for the kinds of questions you mentioned -- it can run as a CGI program (or as its own daemon) and does on-the-fly limiting, different reports, etc. So if they want to know what kind of browsers people were using in the Support section at 3am, they can get that.
I put together a Perl CGI to handle combining logs from all of our different servers, and then feed the combined log to Sawmill (or FunnelWeb, the other package we wound up using).
-Esme
Politics is just good common sense.
Imagine walking into a computer store with no idea of what you want or what the different technologies are. You walk up the salesman and say, "I want a good computer." You'll walk out paying twice as much as you need to, and probably not getting what you need, right?
Same goes for dealing with people. If you don't know what they want, what they value, and what you can get away with, you're likely to get screwed. I've seen perfectly intelligent techies blatantly insult their bosses (and bosses' boss) because they didn't understand who stood where on the issues. And other stupid mistakes just as bad.
And politics, irritating as it might be, is the way to not make stupid mistakes when dealing with people. To negotiate from a position of knowledge rather than a position of ignorance.
-Esme
it's true that ide disks are cheap enough these days that it makes a lot of sense to use them for data recovery. at work, we're building a couple of 800GB file servers (following the SDSC model posted here a couple of months back), that make nightly backups of all our servers. problem is that this doesn't do versioning, you can't pull a file that was deleted two weeks ago, etc. the traditional way to get that is tape, which has a lot of disadvantages. using removable disks is also an option, but they've got to be swapped. like i said, once you get in the terabyte range (i.e., swapping 10 of those 100GB disks), something network-based starts to look really attractive.
actually, i've lost a couple of partitions, and i still haven't learned. it's not that i don't know any better, it's just that for my home systems, it's just not important enough for me to put in the work. i'm not a sysadmin any more, so i don't have to worry about our servers at work.
obviously, it would need to be encrypted, and not deposited in large chunks on any individual computer. with a well-documented and open architecture (and 3K encryption keys), this should give you roughly the same confidence that your data can't be eavesdropped on as putting tapes in a remote storage site.
-Esme
Add to that the fact that when you start dealing with serious amounts of data (~1TB), making backups to tape or any other media starts to get really difficult. If the free disk space on people's computers (I've got around 30 or 40GB free on my home machines) could be put to use to store backups, I'm sure businesses would be willing to pay a significant amount of money for it.
-Esme
No, it isn't. (Neither is depriving someone of profits from intellectual property, btw). I think that people like to try to apply the concept of theft to the digital world (since it's such a strong concept), but it just doesn't apply. It's very hard to deprive someone of their property in the digital world. I think the word you're looking for is 'ingrattitude'.
I don't think it's absurd. Ironic, yes, but not absurd. Stallman was absolutely necessary to getting free software where it is today, but his unyielding principles and abrasive style are a hindrance. They make many of the people who make the decisions about what software large enterprises use uncomfortable.
--Esme
And this is exactly the kind of flawed logic that always creeps into these kinds of discussions: there is no "Linux" to compare with "Windows", there are only a bunch of distros. Totalling up all the holes in all the distros makes no sense at all.
And when you compare Windows to a given Linux distro (much closer to a good comparison), Linux wins every time.
-Esme
This decision just means that if you can't do one thing, but could do something else, it's not your employer's responsibility to accommodate you -- it's your responsibility to find a job that you can do. I don't think this really changes things for people who have disabilities (e.g., blindness) which would require accommodation in almost all circumstances. And it certainly doesn't single out carpel tunnel as not being a disability. If you had a case of carpel tunnel that made it difficult for you to do most jobs, ADA would still apply.
-Esme
The only conceivably good thing about effective DRM (assuming it ever happened), would be to reduce the amount of gouging that's justified by piracy.
The basic idea is that if it takes a software company a million dollars to produce and support a piece of commercial software, and they have a million customers, they could charge $1 per customer and break even. But if 100,000 buy it, and the other 900,000 get a pirated version, they have to charge $10 per copy to break even. So if effective DRM forced all 1,000,000 to buy it, they could sell it for a buck.
Same goes for movies. If they do pay-per-view, and everybody has to pay each time they view it, the price per view could be lower than it is now with the studios still making money. Personally, I like movies, but not obsessively like some people. And I think it might be nice to have some of the people who watch movies a billion times offset some of my casual viewing.
Of course, this won't happen. If DRM is implemented, it will not be effective. Perhaps it will be largely effective, but I seriously doubt any DRM will be effective enough to prevent software and movies from being pirated and sold on the streets of Moscow. And even if it does, the studios would just make more profit, not sell for less.
-Esme
In case you haven't noticed, the aqua look-and-feel that they're defending with their lawyers rests on one of the biggest things that differentiates them from the wintel world: displayPDF. adopting an already widely-used standard for cross platform display consistency as their internal display format allows not only nifty graphics with transparency and the like, but also a much better match between print and screen (probably the biggest pain in the ass for apple's primary clientele -- graphics world).
speaking of graphics, they give away perfectly usable software for making movies and streaming them over the net (did i mention that darwinstreamingserver runs on linux, too). you can buy a perfectly decent video-editing system from them for around $1,100.
oh, and they also released a mass-market consumer operating system (with microsoft apps, no less) that runs a free (as in speech) unix kernel.
yeah, i guess the pretty candy colors are all that differentiates apple from wintel after all.
--esme
in it, i have my visor, folding keyboard, cell-phone, and text pager. there's also room for my sunglasses, and whatever paper i get stuck with at meetings.
(as it turns out, i submitted this very question to ask slashdot last year, but it got rejected -- so i just had to figure it out on my own)
-esme
But if we're just talking about the kernel, then the answer is pretty simple -- because it's already done, stable, configurable and Free. They don't have to reinvent all the core OS stuff, they can just use the Linux kernel, which has already been adapted to run in low disk/ram/etc. environments that aren't that different from phones.
Once you're using Linux, then you can get benefits of advances in the voice shell or other stuff like that (which other people are working on for its own sake). And since it's Free, they can make whatever changes they want to add the features they need or make the adaptations that are good for phones.
--Esme
IMHO (and I'm sure there's a really good technical reason for this), they missed the boat using a RGB color filter over a b/w pixel. Wouldn't it be much better to have three different-colored pixels -- cyan, magenta and yellow, perhaps?
They would still have the 1/3 of the resolution problem, though that seems pretty unavoidable with this kind of approach. But at least they'd have a truly CMYK reflective electronic display.
I suppose the really good techincal reason not to use CMY pixels has to do with the problem of assembly. Would keeping track of which pixels were which color be much harder than producing the filter they use in the current setup?
-Esme
Actually, we're already there. The artists who are managed by the RIAA member companies only get paid for live performances right now. The rest (and then some) gets taken by the record companies to fund the RIAA, label marketing, etc.
-Esme
No argument from this Democrat (I didn't just vote for them, I donated time and money).
That's where my agreements with you end, tho. As much as I like my fiscal/firearms liberties that the Republicans want to protect, I find their bent toward xtian theocracy repulsive and dangerous.
I'd much rather have the right to control my own body, sexuality, and conscience than the right to control my paycheck.
Not to mention the fact that the Republicans probably won't even follow through on their calls for smaller government. They want to spend so much on the military that all the social programs they complain about are chump change in comparison.
-Esme
While I have no doubt that MS is capable of something as underhanded as stealing the code from themselves to create bogus grounds for lawsuits against the samba and wine folks, my guess is that they probably did this for a much more mundane reason: PR.
Remember how MS (including Ballmer) was making rumblings about open-sourcing Windows, or at least loosening their existing source-licensing program? And then nothing happened and the press occasionally runs pithy pieces about MS just saying that to gain some open-source cachet, or because they are idiots.
But now they can say that they don't want to open up the windoze source because they don't want to give the hax0r5 cover to profit from the ill-gotten source by claiming they actually got it under the hypothetical legit open-source licensing. Not only does this give them a good reason to now not be open-sourcing windoze when they were considering it before, it also lets them switch the focus to how they are victimized by by the h4xors (who probably use open-source software, right). And while admitting that they've been 0wn3d isn't good PR, being the victim of open-source hax0rs makes it a lot easier for them to claim that they're just this innocent, hard-working, innovative company who couldn't possibly have a monopoly because there are all these threats that could take them down at any moment.
-Esme
I'm sick and tired of hearing this kind of crap again and again (from the MacWeek article):
The problem isn't that we're "purists" who don't get it. The problem isn't that we refuse to acknowledge that the market has moved on.
It's a simple difference of opinion rooted in the differences between the cultures of Unix and Windows/MacOS. Unix has a long tradition of having things be seperate for the sake of modularity and recombinability. I can use any shell I want on top of my kernel. I can use Sun's tar, or GNU's tar. I can use XFree86 or a commercial X server (or none at all). Within X, I can use any of a dozen window managers, and withing those I can use several desktop environments.
Windows and MacOS, on the other hand, have all those choices made for you, and bolted together in one particular way. No choice about which shell (DOS, or nothing in the case of MacOS 9 and before). No choice about which windowing system or window manager or desktop, etc.
There are benefits to the MacOS/Windows way: less user confusion, more consistency, etc. There are advantages to the Unix way: more flexibility and choice.
But don't tell me that I'm wrong about my conception of what an OS is just because I happen to be from a different culture that thinks of things being seperated that you are used to being one bolted-together mass.
-Esme
I've already scanned in my books and CDs, so I can tell you before you start that it's not as easy as it sounds.
For one thing, if your book collection is anything like mine, you'll have a good number of books that don't have ISBN's (crummy British paperbacks from the 60's), let alone bar codes. Then there are a bunch where there's some stupid sticker, or a bend in the book cover, etc. to make it unreadable. Then, once you've got the barcode, at least a third of them don't successfully get a title and author from Amazon. I even hacked up a CGI-Z39 gateway to look up the ISBNs in Melvyl (Univ. of Cal's catalog), and got about the same hit rate there (though better data when it did hit).
CD's are roughly the same: a third of mine (mostly old stuff and punk) didn't have UPCs on them, so didn't match. I pointed them at barpoint.com, and got a hit rate of roughly 75% on the ones that did have barcodes.
I also did a lot of mucking around with the various different drivers, and wound up recoding some of it in Perl (the UPC->ISBN stuff was in Python), so I spent a lot of time before I even got started messing around with the drivers and stuff.
My $0.02, anyway.
--
-Esme
Why? Because it is formatted, in HTML, to be a giant ASCII-art version of the OpenDVD logo, expressing my belief that DVDs should be open and viewable by anyone, anywhere, free from restrictions, on any OS.
--
-Esme
I really hate this kind of garbage. I'm assuming they're doing it for the same reason that Band-Aids are now "Band-Aid brand bandages" and Jello is now "Jello brand gelatin dessert" and the like: trademark dilution.
I call them Legos (I'm sure they'll be irritated that I don't all-cap them, either), as does everyone I've ever spoken too about them. Whether it's convenient for their lawyers or not, when only one famous product comes from a company (Netscape, anyone?), that product tends to be referred to by the company's name.
Deal with it.
--
-Esme
Let me tell you why you're wrong:
Freeing information is not stealing. Kevin Mitnick copying source code from big companies is not stealing. Copying music and software from an official copy and giving it away is not stealing.
Why not, you ask? Because by doing any of the above, you have not deprived anyone of anything.
Stealing means taking something from someone else -- depriving them of their property. The reason it is wrong is that the original owner has a right to their property (notice that the law generally doesn't care whether you keep the property, destroy it, or sell it for drug money -- it only cares how much you have deprived the original owner). One after-effect of theft in meat-space is that someone gets something for nothing. But the reverse is not true: getting something for nothing does not mean that someone else has to be deprived of their property. In the digital realm, copies can be made almost infinitely without ever depriving anyone of anything (limited only by media, bandwidth, machine time, etc.).
But wait, you say, what about copyright, patents, and intellectual property? Not relevant. Read the Constitution some time. All intellectual property (just speaking for the U.S. here, don't know about other govts) is a hack to encourage innovation. You have no right, per se, to keep your information from others, but the government has granted you that privilege to encourage you to do research, create art, etc.
So please people, let's stop talking about theft, piracy, and all the rest. Setting information free harms no one, it just (in some cases) slightly decreases the value of an artifical monopoly granted by the Constitution. It doesn't violate anyone's natural rights. It doesn't deprive them of property. It is not theft.
-Esme
Not only did Jobs get up on stage during the keynote, he said that OS X will be the best desktop platform for Java. In a conference otherwise dominated by serverside (J2EE) and portables (KVM, etc.), it was nice to see someone acknowledge the importance of vanilla desktop Java.
-Esme
If I'm not mistaken, it's from the famous photograph of Einstein taken by W. Eugene Smith. Smith and Einstein were discussing the ramifications of relativity and the nuclear bomb, and Einstein fell into something of a stupor as he pondered the horrible things that his science had made possible. It was then that Smith took this photo.
I think it would be hard to find a better icon of science: at once brilliant discovery and sobering consequences.
-Esme
I've got two words for you: prior restraint.
The reason why the government has such a high bar to restrict what newspapers can or cannot publish is that it is prior restraint of speech, which the court holds to be particularly difficult to justify.
This case, however, involves no such prior restraint. /. has the copyrighted material up on their servers now, and MS just wants it taken down.
That said, I think /. is in the right on this one. Putting a doc on the web with a flimsy, easily circumvented click-wrap license is not a trade secret. Particularly when they've done nothing to ensure that minors, and others who cannot consent to a license at all, download this -- they didn't even requre registration in some online developer's area. Allowing MS to treat this spec as anything but public knowledge sets a dangerous precedent, and the burden should definitely be on MS to prove that this is an appropriate extension of the current protections of trade secrets.
-Esme
IMHO, Microsoft should have to contact each poster individually, and settle the matter with that person by persuasion or litigation as neccessary. If they want Slashdot to give out non-publicly available information (IP addresses from their httpd_access logs, for example) to help Microsoft track down the ACs, then they should have to get a court to issue a search warrant (which will involve Microsoft having the burden of proof to prove infringement of copyright for each instance).
If the poster requests that Slashdot remove his/her comments, then (and only then) should they be removed. Anything else would make "Comments are owned by the Poster." a mockery. And I'm sure that Microsoft wouldn't want to challenge the validity of implied electronic license agreements.
-Esme