I see profit as comparable to breath. You have to breathe to stay alive, but that doesn't mean you were put on Earth for the sole purpose of breathing.
And those figures are correct. Woz would find out when another Apple employee was reading a book on the history of Atari on an airplane. He rightfully felt betrayed.
The Apple story is a rather facinating one. I'd recommend Michael Malone's book, Infinite Loop.
In this book he also reveals the true story of the origin of the Mac, and Jobs' trip to Xerox PARC. And it's not even close to the common myth about Apple discovering the GUI there. (The Lisa and Mac projects were already underway by the time Jobs went to PARC. This, and the writings of Apple employee Jef Raskin. who envisioned the concept of a GUI while in college, are why Apple won the lawsuit against them from Xerox.)
You could just buy hot swappable hardware, and test software patches on an identical copy of the machine first, like anyone who's ever worked in IT maintaining mission-critical systems already knows.
Two big servers and a ton of thin clients is still cheaper to buy (except perhaps for small companies) and cheaper to support than hundreds of Windows desktops.
Those big machines aren't going away anytime soon. There's a reason why Intel hardware is so cheap. It's just plain not as reliable as Sun's.
Not to mention that with what Oracle charges for it's very confusing clustering software, it was actually cheaper for my company to buy one more expensive Sun server to run Oracle on than lots of cheap ones + the clustering software. Since Oracle licences are a recurring expensce, and we just had to buy the Sun server up front, the disparity gets even worse.
That reminds me, I have to take the opportunity to rant about Oracle pricing now. They actually charged us for a second license because our Oracle software is located on a NFS-shared network filer. This way, if the hardware of the DB server takes a shit, we can quickly mount the filesystem Oracle lives on, and start it on another box.
They even said they would not have charged us a second license if we had a second machine powered off, which we brought up in the event of a hardware failure. They claimed that Oracle was providing us the benfit to be able to failover quickly. Umm, no, the network filer is. BEA doesn't charge us for this setup. iPlanet doesn't charge us for this setup. Why should you get to?
if these are not a standard (because 100% of computer users do not use them), then there is no such thing as a standard.
TCP/IP is a standard. 100% of internet users use it.
SMTP is a standard. 100% of internet email users use it.
HTTP is a standard 100% of those who browse the web use it.
Office docs are a standard for *Windows* users maybe, but they are the ones who need to realize there are computers that don't run MS software. In just them same way I don't send HTML enabled email to someone unless I am sure they are using a client that supports it, I expect not to be sent Office docs unless someone knows that I have software that supports it. Simple netiquette.
He's been so taken over by laissez faire conservatives and libertarians who've never actually read him, that most people don't even know what he stood for anymore. If any of them actually picked up a copy of Wealth of Nations once in their lives, they'd see quotes like this:
The subjects of every state ought to contribute toward the support of the government, as nearly as possible, in proportion to their respective abilities; that is, in proportion to the revenue which they respectively enjoy under the protection of the state....[As Henry Home (Lord Kames) has written, a goal of taxation should be to] 'remedy inequality of riches as much as possible, by relieving the poor and burdening the rich.'
...what is your problem with iPlanet. I've been using for awhile, and haven't seen any serious problems with it. Having the integrated JSP engine is quite useful (though I've not tried Apache+Tomcat yet) and it has the advantage of being multithreaded which allows it avoid some of Apache's problems.
I like Apache, especially for mass webhosting, but it's lack of multithreadedness can be a pretty serious performance issue in certain applications. iPlanet solves this for my company.
Note that I've only used iPlanet's webserver and LDAP server, so I can't speak about anything else in the suite.
OK, let's say you steal $50,000 from the bank, and the police come to your house and say "Give us the $50,000 or we'll throw you in jail." Is that extortion? Hardly.
Actually, if the police bust down my door without a warrent, or with an illegally obtained one, it *is* illegal.
Let's say $50,000 has been stolen by someone in the city of, say, Orlando. The police most certainly cannot knock down doors of every house in Orlando without a warrant. If they do, the evidence is illegally obtained, and inadmissable in a court of law.
If they BSA were to show up at my door, I can first tell them to piss off, as they are a private organization with no law enforcement powers. Next they come back with a warrant, and get in, and find an illegally copy of FooBar 1.0. If our legal system actually worked, I could challenge the legality of the warrant on Probable Cause grounds, arguing that they had no reason to believe that I had illegal copies, thus making the search illegal, and the evidence inadmissable. (Refusing entry to your private space to someone without a warrant is not grounds for Probabale Cause either).
Unfortunately, I believe in some civil cases (which copyright infingment is) illegally obtained evidence can be admitted. So, they'd be able to sue me based on evidence concidered illegal in a criminal court.
Extortion? Maybe not. Flying in the face of at least the spirit of due process and the Constitution? Most definitly.
To make a long story short. This machine has a false positive rate of 10%, and a false negative rate of 25%. Assume 1% of airport travelers are liars. If an airport scans 100,000 travellers, there will be 1000 liars, 750 of which will be caught. There will be 999,000 truth-tellers, 99,900 of which will be false postives.
So, the machine will beep on 100,650 people, only 750 of, or 1.342% of which will actually be lieing. Talk about the boy who cried wolf!
That's really amusing, since Lessig used to clerk for Scalia, and conciders him a mentor.
Scalia is an aid to our cause anyway. As a strict constructionist, I would expect him to take one look at "for limited times" in the Consitution, and throw current copyright law out on it's ear.
It's not my assumption that stealing is wrong. It's a law, one held by pretty much every set of moral beliefs out there. If stealing is ok for you, then you're more than welcome to try and legalize it in whatever country you live in, but I kinda like that law.
Ahh, but we aren't talking about stealing here are we? We're talking about something completely different, called copyright infringement.
We have laws against stealing for a simple reason. To protect your property. When someone steals your property, you lose your property. This does not occur in copyright infringemnt. Even the US legal system agrees with this simple point. If I make violate copyright, I will not be charged with theft, no matter how many times the word is carelessly thrown about.
Even this nonsense about stealing revenue is faulty. No company has a right to profits. You may as well say that GM can sue me because I bought a Ford. In both this case, and in software piracy, GM/the software company has the same amount of their product as before, and one less potential customer.
Even better. Imagine a world where the Star Trek replicator suddenly becomes real. Now I don't need to buy cars/food/TVs, etc. Being able to create anything this easily would have obvious benfits to mankind, yet if it happened today it wouldn't be long before such a device was branded as "circumvention" and banned by the DMCA.
I'm just throwing out examples here. I'm not even really trying to say that IP rights are always wrong. There are some real tricky problems and questions here about where society is headed, and knocking down the straw man of "theft" and "piracy", does nothing to advance the debate in either direction.
You mean I have to install additional software for FTP? I have to find wherever the Windows telnet server is and turn it on? Wow, that sounds like entirely too much work. Windows sure has a long way to go before it becomes as easy to use as Linux.
I'll avoid getting into the moral arguemnt about evil, but it certainly is illegal to sell products that don't work as advertised. (false advertiseing, fraud) It is illegal to to use a monopoly in one market to leverage control over others. (The MS case. And yes, like it or not, under the US legal system MS was ruled a monopoly, and was ruled guilty of abusing it)
When a car company rushes a product to market, and is suffers from poor design and defects, they are required to fix them for free and can be sued. However, the magic of EULA protects software companies from the same procedures.
No matter much you think these laws are "evil statist interference in the free market", this is the reality of capitalism in the US. And any consistent libertarian would oppose EULAs as not being fair contracts, (since the purchaser is not given the contract and allowed to negotiate beforehand as to the terms before purchase.) and intellectual property as government interference in the marketplace anyway.
...trust me, there's was piracy taking place every day when I went there, and I'm sure there still is now. (seeing as I have friends who are still there.)
Do you think that Purdue students who buy those copies don't turn around and burn them for others? Serve them off of ResNet or off-campus DSL connections? How about non-MS software?
They support great projects like Mozilla, open sourced an excellent webserver, but play hardball over AIM.
If AOL wants to prove their commitment to open standards, then publish the AIM protocol under a royalty-free license. Be willing to put their money where their mouth is.
Now, if GM/AOL wanted to somehow integrate liberty-alliance-passport into their AOL or GMC Yukon... Then they'd have an edge.
Say, a gas station that gets a signal from a chip in your car, presto, you've just paid for gas. Heck, get this required by law, and you've solved the "gas and go" problem.
the three tax related government bodies would require a special identity certificate... that can only be provided (and verified) by your bank.
In Code and other laws of cyberspace, Lessig talks about something just like this. Using digital certificates to indentify yourself online. The problem comes in when said certificate contains things like a "geographic location" field. Then, a gambling site hosted in Las Vegas can be forced to decline you access if you are living in Iowa, and other such abuses.
This is even without getting into the problems if something like this became prevalent to the point that you got this certificate from your ISP, and were required to have it to go online. Then you could be tracked *everywhere*.
Yeah, I can think of ways to preserve anonymity, like a "certificate proxy server" hosted someplace out of the reach of US law, but I'd rather not have to deal with it at all.
Slashdot Mirror
...but I *love* this analogy:
I see profit as comparable to breath. You have to breathe to stay alive, but that doesn't mean you were put on Earth for the sole purpose of breathing.
Excellent...
And those figures are correct. Woz would find out when another Apple employee was reading a book on the history of Atari on an airplane. He rightfully felt betrayed.
The Apple story is a rather facinating one. I'd recommend Michael Malone's book, Infinite Loop.
In this book he also reveals the true story of the origin of the Mac, and Jobs' trip to Xerox PARC. And it's not even close to the common myth about Apple discovering the GUI there. (The Lisa and Mac projects were already underway by the time Jobs went to PARC. This, and the writings of Apple employee Jef Raskin. who envisioned the concept of a GUI while in college, are why Apple won the lawsuit against them from Xerox.)
You could just buy hot swappable hardware, and test software patches on an identical copy of the machine first, like anyone who's ever worked in IT maintaining mission-critical systems already knows.
Two big servers and a ton of thin clients is still cheaper to buy (except perhaps for small companies) and cheaper to support than hundreds of Windows desktops.
Those big machines aren't going away anytime soon. There's a reason why Intel hardware is so cheap. It's just plain not as reliable as Sun's.
Not to mention that with what Oracle charges for it's very confusing clustering software, it was actually cheaper for my company to buy one more expensive Sun server to run Oracle on than lots of cheap ones + the clustering software. Since Oracle licences are a recurring expensce, and we just had to buy the Sun server up front, the disparity gets even worse.
That reminds me, I have to take the opportunity to rant about Oracle pricing now. They actually charged us for a second license because our Oracle software is located on a NFS-shared network filer. This way, if the hardware of the DB server takes a shit, we can quickly mount the filesystem Oracle lives on, and start it on another box.
They even said they would not have charged us a second license if we had a second machine powered off, which we brought up in the event of a hardware failure. They claimed that Oracle was providing us the benfit to be able to failover quickly. Umm, no, the network filer is. BEA doesn't charge us for this setup. iPlanet doesn't charge us for this setup. Why should you get to?
if these are not a standard (because 100% of computer users do not use them), then there is no such thing as a standard.
TCP/IP is a standard. 100% of internet users use it.
SMTP is a standard. 100% of internet email users use it.
HTTP is a standard 100% of those who browse the web use it.
Office docs are a standard for *Windows* users maybe, but they are the ones who need to realize there are computers that don't run MS software. In just them same way I don't send HTML enabled email to someone unless I am sure they are using a client that supports it, I expect not to be sent Office docs unless someone knows that I have software that supports it. Simple netiquette.
He's been so taken over by laissez faire conservatives and libertarians who've never actually read him, that most people don't even know what he stood for anymore. If any of them actually picked up a copy of Wealth of Nations once in their lives, they'd see quotes like this:
....[As Henry Home (Lord Kames) has written, a goal of taxation should be to] 'remedy inequality of riches as much as possible, by relieving the poor and burdening the rich.'
The subjects of every state ought to contribute toward the support of the government, as nearly as possible, in proportion to their respective abilities; that is, in proportion to the revenue which they respectively enjoy under the protection of the state
I had the same thought, and was also reminded of James Randi's challenge to an alleged aura-seer:
http://skepdic.com/auras.html
Don't expect AOL to write free programs
Really?
...what is your problem with iPlanet. I've been using for awhile, and haven't seen any serious problems with it. Having the integrated JSP engine is quite useful (though I've not tried Apache+Tomcat yet) and it has the advantage of being multithreaded which allows it avoid some of Apache's problems.
I like Apache, especially for mass webhosting, but it's lack of multithreadedness can be a pretty serious performance issue in certain applications. iPlanet solves this for my company.
Note that I've only used iPlanet's webserver and LDAP server, so I can't speak about anything else in the suite.
I'm not interested in joining the Fashionably Left.
Insinuating Lessig is a leftist shows your ignorance. You do realize he was a clerk for Scalia, right? Or is Scalia a leftist too?
OK, let's say you steal $50,000 from the bank, and the police come to your house and say "Give us the $50,000 or we'll throw you in jail." Is that extortion? Hardly.
Actually, if the police bust down my door without a warrent, or with an illegally obtained one, it *is* illegal.
Let's say $50,000 has been stolen by someone in the city of, say, Orlando. The police most certainly cannot knock down doors of every house in Orlando without a warrant. If they do, the evidence is illegally obtained, and inadmissable in a court of law.
If they BSA were to show up at my door, I can first tell them to piss off, as they are a private organization with no law enforcement powers. Next they come back with a warrant, and get in, and find an illegally copy of FooBar 1.0. If our legal system actually worked, I could challenge the legality of the warrant on Probable Cause grounds, arguing that they had no reason to believe that I had illegal copies, thus making the search illegal, and the evidence inadmissable. (Refusing entry to your private space to someone without a warrant is not grounds for Probabale Cause either).
Unfortunately, I believe in some civil cases (which copyright infingment is) illegally obtained evidence can be admitted. So, they'd be able to sue me based on evidence concidered illegal in a criminal court.
Extortion? Maybe not. Flying in the face of at least the spirit of due process and the Constitution? Most definitly.
Yes.
NT
Bayes' Theorem
To make a long story short. This machine has a false positive rate of 10%, and a false negative rate of 25%. Assume 1% of airport travelers are liars. If an airport scans 100,000 travellers, there will be 1000 liars, 750 of which will be caught. There will be 999,000 truth-tellers, 99,900 of which will be false postives.
So, the machine will beep on 100,650 people, only 750 of, or 1.342% of which will actually be lieing. Talk about the boy who cried wolf!
That's really amusing, since Lessig used to clerk for Scalia, and conciders him a mentor.
Scalia is an aid to our cause anyway. As a strict constructionist, I would expect him to take one look at "for limited times" in the Consitution, and throw current copyright law out on it's ear.
It's not my assumption that stealing is wrong. It's a law, one held by pretty much every set of moral beliefs out there. If stealing is ok for you, then you're more than welcome to try and legalize it in whatever country you live in, but I kinda like that law.
Ahh, but we aren't talking about stealing here are we? We're talking about something completely different, called copyright infringement.
We have laws against stealing for a simple reason. To protect your property. When someone steals your property, you lose your property. This does not occur in copyright infringemnt. Even the US legal system agrees with this simple point. If I make violate copyright, I will not be charged with theft, no matter how many times the word is carelessly thrown about.
Even this nonsense about stealing revenue is faulty. No company has a right to profits. You may as well say that GM can sue me because I bought a Ford. In both this case, and in software piracy, GM/the software company has the same amount of their product as before, and one less potential customer.
Even better. Imagine a world where the Star Trek replicator suddenly becomes real. Now I don't need to buy cars/food/TVs, etc. Being able to create anything this easily would have obvious benfits to mankind, yet if it happened today it wouldn't be long before such a device was branded as "circumvention" and banned by the DMCA.
I'm just throwing out examples here. I'm not even really trying to say that IP rights are always wrong. There are some real tricky problems and questions here about where society is headed, and knocking down the straw man of "theft" and "piracy", does nothing to advance the debate in either direction.
Warning: It's also PPPoE, which is lame. 'Course, may not bother some people like it does me, and if it was my only option, I'd be forced to deal.
<prays Covad keeps on the upswing>
Umm no... If MS really spent 10 years getting it right, then Windows would work just like a Mac. *That's* proper UI design.
You mean I have to install additional software for FTP? I have to find wherever the Windows telnet server is and turn it on? Wow, that sounds like entirely too much work. Windows sure has a long way to go before it becomes as easy to use as Linux.
I'll avoid getting into the moral arguemnt about evil, but it certainly is illegal to sell products that don't work as advertised. (false advertiseing, fraud) It is illegal to to use a monopoly in one market to leverage control over others. (The MS case. And yes, like it or not, under the US legal system MS was ruled a monopoly, and was ruled guilty of abusing it)
When a car company rushes a product to market, and is suffers from poor design and defects, they are required to fix them for free and can be sued. However, the magic of EULA protects software companies from the same procedures.
No matter much you think these laws are "evil statist interference in the free market", this is the reality of capitalism in the US. And any consistent libertarian would oppose EULAs as not being fair contracts, (since the purchaser is not given the contract and allowed to negotiate beforehand as to the terms before purchase.) and intellectual property as government interference in the marketplace anyway.
Anyone who uses Legato for backups knows exactly what I mean.
One day the Legato interface will be the death of me, I just know it. God forbid they actually perform some usability testing.
...trust me, there's was piracy taking place every day when I went there, and I'm sure there still is now. (seeing as I have friends who are still there.)
Do you think that Purdue students who buy those copies don't turn around and burn them for others? Serve them off of ResNet or off-campus DSL connections? How about non-MS software?
They support great projects like Mozilla, open sourced an excellent webserver, but play hardball over AIM.
If AOL wants to prove their commitment to open standards, then publish the AIM protocol under a royalty-free license. Be willing to put their money where their mouth is.
Now, if GM/AOL wanted to somehow integrate liberty-alliance-passport into their AOL or GMC Yukon... Then they'd have an edge.
Say, a gas station that gets a signal from a chip in your car, presto, you've just paid for gas. Heck, get this required by law, and you've solved the "gas and go" problem.
the three tax related government bodies would require a special identity certificate... that can only be provided (and verified) by your bank.
In Code and other laws of cyberspace, Lessig talks about something just like this. Using digital certificates to indentify yourself online. The problem comes in when said certificate contains things like a "geographic location" field. Then, a gambling site hosted in Las Vegas can be forced to decline you access if you are living in Iowa, and other such abuses.
This is even without getting into the problems if something like this became prevalent to the point that you got this certificate from your ISP, and were required to have it to go online. Then you could be tracked *everywhere*.
Yeah, I can think of ways to preserve anonymity, like a "certificate proxy server" hosted someplace out of the reach of US law, but I'd rather not have to deal with it at all.