While it may be too late for loki I feel that at least a few of us have learned that it's worthwhile to purchase games under linux and will try to do so at every opportunity forthcomming.
Will you? Won't you feel even worse when you pay for a game and the company still goes under?
Huh? If I bring my CDs into work, I can play them on a boombox loud enough for the whole office to hear. That's called "fair use". But now if I take those same CDs into work, convert them into MP3s, and let the same people listen to them, now its "pirating"? All these people did was use the corporate network to timeshift the playing of a few CDs; this sort of falls in the grey area between fair use and exploitation, but by no means justifies a million dollar fine.
Actually, that's not fair use, as others have pointed out. (And fair use is not an absolute right, as we heard on Slashdot last week.)
Playing your boombox at work loud enough for everyone to hear is an illegal broadcast, but it's a grey area. The music companies probably aren't going to come after you because:
a) it's not a serious offense b) it's probably not costing them any money c) it's hard to enforce d) if you did this in a large office, you would be shot
I know that there's a certain culture on Slashdot that doesn't seem to understand the concept of a grey area. I don't know why; maybe writing code in binary makes people think in terms of Boolean logic. Running an MP3 "sharing" server at work is illegal because it is an obvious attempt to defraud the copyright owners. Playing a cd in your car in the presence of two friends is not an illegal broadcast because your intent is not to defraud the copyright owner. Sometimes, in the real world, you have to use your judgement.
It's one thing to violate the letter of the law without violating the intent; it is quite another to manipulate the law by exploiting a loophole. As soon as you start trying to exploit a loophole in the system, they're going to come after you. Now you can do some real damage to their business. You can play your cds at a private party, but you can't play your cds over the PA in a supermarket, even if you try to spin it as a "food party".
Plus there is a difference between listening to a song because it happens to be on the radio, and choosing which song to listen to because you have millions of MP3s on a server. You may think that's splitting hairs, but it's not. It's not a distinction between black and white, it's a grey area. You may define ownership however you like, but the record companies are pragmatic. They know that what makes music worth buying is the ability to choose when to listen to it.
I use RedHat, and religiously buy a new box with every release so they get money and it stays on retail shelves. I know I don't _have_ to, but in my own cost/benefit analysis, the money I spend on their boxes is well worth it. I'm not making a 'donation', I'm consciously investing in my own future. I'm investing in the security updates I know I'll recieve. I'm investing in the next version that I know they are working on. RedHat has earned my trust in this regard, and I know that to continue to produce the things I need and/or treasure, they need my support.
I think you misunderstand the cost/benefit analysis. Paying for free software is a 'tragedy of the commons', which means that society overall benefits from the contributions of individuals, but no individual benefits more than they put in. The tragedy of the commons is the same rule of game theory that predicted that socialism wouldn't work, hence the frequent comparisons of free software to socialism. It also tells you not to bother voting in the next election. The fact that you use the word "meme" suggests that you have read Hofstadter, but please realize that Hofstadter was an idealist, not a pragmatist, and he was frequently proven wrong by his friends.
Your support of RedHat is certainly a 'donation'. The effect of your single donation is so insignificant in the grand scheme of things that you could not possibly benefit from it. From a cost/benefit analysis, the best thing you could do is not pay them any money, but post a message saying that you are paying them money and encouraging everyone else to do the same. I'm not implying that that's what you are doing, but you are definitely misusing the term 'cost-benefit analysis'.
On the other hand, think of what a 'gift' is. I give Christmas gifts to my family because I feel obliged to do so, because they will be giving me gifts in turn, and because I am participating in a community tradition. I don't do so because of a cost-benefit analysis. I think it's the same with free software. You donate money because you feel obliged to do so and because it gives you a warm, fuzzy feeling.
Blowing venture capital on stupid things is about the same as maxing out a personal credit card on luxury items in my book. It's just plain stupid.
I feel so passionately about this issue because I've seen so many companies go under, where the workers suffer because of poor management. Enron is a really big example, but there are hundreds if not thousands of "dot-coms" that did the same thing to their workers.
But you're ignoring the fact that all companies have poor management. Or at least it seems that way to the employees. Some companies succeed in spite of their poor management and when others fail, it's easy to blame it on their poor management.
I worked for a small company with poor management. Bucking the odds, it turned into a moderate success. Both the founders and the employees made out pretty well. Of course, that was before the tech meltdown.
Now I work for a large company with poor management. Actually it feels more like no management. When your department makes up less than 1% of the bottom line, the decisions from above tend to appear capricious and arbitrary.
Calculus was developed around the same time by two seperate individuals, one being Sir Issac Newton who was a very bitter man and sought to discredit the other researcher, and it worked well. Can you name him? The victors always write the history books.
That's interesting, because when I studied calculus, the textbooks spun it a different way. To be sure, they mentioned Liebnitz quite a bit, but the story they spin is that Newton invented Calculus first, but he didn't publish because he was too modest. Later, after Liebnitz published his results, Newton's friends convinced him to come forward.
The problem, as I see it, is not so much that businesses are focused on maximumizing shareholder value. The problem is that the dotcom bubble re-popularized pyramid schemes. Many companies ceased to focus on selling products as they concentrated more on selling stock.
If the ice melts. While I am aware that the North Pole melts each year (my dad once spent a number of months near the North Pole on a scientific trip for the University of Washington and had pictures of the ice breaking up when they abandoned their camp), that is not the case with the South Pole.
Actually, parts of the South Pole have begun melting recently... ice that has been there for thousands of years. That's part of what has been concerning scientists recently.
Agreed, completely. But that goes both ways and everything the environmentalists say needs to be taken with a grain of salt as well. Unfortunately, the media sensationalizes it and governments come up with drastic Protocols based on incomplete research. They've forgotten their grain of salt...
You know, I am not a hardcore environmentalist. I just happen to know some science, and I can't deny that this stuff is real. Environmentalists may sensationalize the facts, but they are still facts. I cannot prove that the effects of global warming will be devestating, but I know there will be effects.
There are those among us who will deny tooth and nail that a fact is important until it is conclusively proven. How many people died of lung cancer while the cigarette companies claimed that there was no conclusive link to tobacco? You cannot conclusively prove that this gun is loaded, so stick it against your head and pull the trigger. Now you know. Either it wasn't loaded or your are dead. That's the problem with global warming. The effects may be inconclusive now, but they won't be conclusive until it's too late.
As I said, I am not a hardcore environmentalist. The reason is that I also understand game theory, and I know that environmentalism is a tragedy of the commons (i.e. it pays off for society as a whole, but not for each individual). Therefore, I am wasteful when it suits me; I drive an SUV. But I don't go around posting on newsgroups, trying to justify my selfish behaviour.
Really? thats interesting. I have always wanted to know how many people there have ever been. but I could never fgure out a reliable way of determining this info - aside from talking with God.
Where did you get that info - how do they know how many people have been born in ALL of time?
Actually, I have heard this statistic before as well, in the context of the anthropic principle. One of the corollaries of the anthropic principle is that the population of Earth is probably going to decline drastically very soon. The reasoning is kind of counter-intuitive, but it goes like this:
There will be N human beings during the course of the Earth's lifespan. Statistically speaking, your birth number, X, is most likely to be close to number N/2. Given that something like half the people who have ever lived are alive today (i.e. N/4), if all of these people have an average of 2 children, we will reach N in only 2 more generations. So the end of the world is coming. Kind of scary, isn't it?
I'm sure this kind of logic isn't going to appeal to people the first time they hear it. After all, the assumption that X is close to N/2 is not really valid. However, if you integrate the function across all possible values of X, you will find that there is still a very good chance that the world will end soon (i.e. the population will drop drastically).
Therefore, the equilibrium would be unstable, but chaotic enough to always return to the balance point. There is no guarantee than man-made climate change will have the same effect.
There's always the Nuclear Winter theory.
That's right, mankind can disturb the equilibrium in both directions. Maybe in a few decades, when the effects of global warming get really bad, some genius politician will come up with that solution. If we explode a bunch of nuclear bombs and block out the sunlight, we can cool the Earth back down. Personally, I'd rather not wager my future on a terraforming experiment for which we cannot possibly be adequately prepared.
If you're talking about some Col Waresque plot that involves a Russian KGB agent who has trained 20 years just impersonating your friends voice, and he is perfect, and also has the tech to intercept and then retransmit, well then I suppose you're screwed.
FYI, we already have multiple cryptographic techniques for key exchange. For example, there's the Diffie-Hellman protocol that I alluded to earlier. With DH, you can still do all the same paranoid stuff you can do with quantum key exchange, such as publishing your vectors in a newspaper or on a newsgroup or phoning the guy and analyzing his voiceprint. But in practice, no one does that, because people use RSA for authentication, and you only have to exchange the RSA keys once. Of course, the weak link in the chain is now the authenticity of the RSA key, which you now have to publish on a newsgroup or webpage, or distribute through PGP web of trust.
So what is the advantage of quantum key exchange over DH? Well, if someone listens in on the DH exchange, they can store the keys and then crack them 10 years from now with their $100 billion brute force cracking machine or their quantum computer. Before they do this, they have to intercept your keys, which means that they are probably either the government or AT&T. In either case, what's so improbable about them intercepting your phone call?
Also, note that you currently have to have a dedicated fibre line connecting you to the person you want to talk to, but for some reason, you didn't want to just meet with them ahead of time to decide on an authentication key. Now who's talking KGB plot?
I saw this exhibit when I visited the Smithsonian Institute last October. Unfortunately, I can't find a link on their website.
I remember they had a video presentation in which they showed how the warming trend had slowed for 2 years due to a recent volcanic eruption, and they talked about a computer model which had successfully predicted the effect.
In any case, whether or not, they can model the Earth as a whole, I don't see how anyone can deny that they have the ability to model the effects of each factor individually, and those models should lead you to the same conclusions.
Climate change happens. Ten thousand years ago a good part of North America (and Europe) was under a mile of ice. I suppose humans take the blame for melting that?
Oh, you people are so ridiculous, snatching at whatever random fact that appeals to your self-serving opinion. I remember a Christian Science lecturer once told me that the ice age is what allowed the animals from Noah's ark to walk across the ocean and settle on the various continents. I don't think your argument is that bad, but you're still being willfully ignorant.
Scientists believe that a number of factors contribute to large scale climate change:
1. The gradual warming of the sun. 2. The gradual cooling of the earth's core. 3. Large volcanic eruptions and meteor impacts, which pollute the atmosphere with dust. 4. The reflective nature of the polar ice. 5. The population cycles of plants and animals, which change the composition of the atmosphere. 6. The thinning of the ozone layer. 7. The bulldozing of the rainforest. 8. Commercial farming. 9. Atmospheric pollution. 10. Human power consumption.
So the fact that the first 5 elements have caused periodic climate change over the course of Earth's existance does not prove that the industrial revolution is not causing global warming. Furthermore, we have evidence that the effects of mankind are causing climate change to occur much faster than they were previously. On top of this, we have scientific models (based on chemistry and physics) which can accurately predict the warming trend. (We have the examples of the planets Mars and Venus, which provide further test vectors.)
This doesn't mean that there won't be little blips in the data. In fact, a volcanic eruption in the mid 90s caused a 2-3 year disruption in the warming trend (source: the Smithsonian Institute). In the past, large scale climate changes have caused the extinction of large numbers of species. So far, the temperature has always returned back to comfortable levels.
However, the danger of global warming is that several of these factors exist in an unstable equilibrium. As the Earth gets warmer, the polar ice melts. This causes the Earth to reflect less of the sun's energy and more of the ice melts. This results in a 'snowball' effect (to use an inappropriate term). Perhaps in the past, this runaway warming has been quenched by a catastrophic effect like a giant volcanic eruption. Therefore, the equilibrium would be unstable, but chaotic enough to always return to the balance point. There is no guarantee than man-made climate change will have the same effect. Some of the natural factors (e.g. the plant-animal arms race) have a buffering effect, which tends to restore the equilibrium. Man-made factors will get worse as the population increases; they may bias the controlling equations and cause the equilibrium to never be restored.
This doesn't work either. The man in the middle might try this, but he will be revealed when the two participants check their observations against each other. Remember, this isn't encryption itself, so much as a way to securely distribute keys.
Non-sequitor. How do the two participants check their results against each other? That's the problem. I write encryption software for a living, so I'm not just babbling here. The quantum key distribution is analagous to a Diffie-Hellman exchange. The principle advantage is that the DH is subject to cryptanalysis and brute-force cracking, whereas the quantum key exchange is not. However quantum KE, like DH, is not secure without proper authentication.
To do authentication, you need some kind of key. The "key" does not have to be a literal string of bits. If you phone the other guy and you recognize his voice and you believe that the man in the middle could not possibly intercept the call and fake your friend's voice, then you could consider your friend's voiceprint to be a form of key.
(Gee. Remember when the big question was "How do we make money at this?")
As it turns out, the only open-source business case that has consistently worked is that of bilking investors out of their money. ESR does nothing but breathe hot air and he gets $36 million for the privilege. (Who knows how much how much of that he actually mangaged to cash in.) Who will pay for the cost of open source development? As it turns out, Wall Street.
Interestingly enough, in the e-mail, ESR says that the biggest advantage of being rich is that he will have more free time to work on his pet projects. Elsewhere in this thread ESR-heads say that they will gladly work 8 hours a day at a menial job and code in their free time. Meanwhile, I get paid good money to write closed source software in a field that I am interested in. (note: I found out what the company did before I applied for a job there.)
With all of these endless/. posts about how Linux will rule the world, I have yet to see a single post explaining how programmers will ever get paid. Don't any of you want to write code for a living? Open Source companies can make money, sure, charging for services. But services cannot pay for programmers. Let me repeat that so that everyone is sure to see it: services cannot pay for programmers.
Ignore all these people who are merely repeating some silly argument they read in the Cathedral and the Bazaar. If you read the recent interview as well as CatB, you will see that ESR always stops short of saying that Open Source will be profitable. He says that it will be "successful", but he seems to define success in terms of wide-spread adoption and technical merit.
The fact is, ESR greatly exaggerates the number of "programmers" who work on proprietary systems. 90%? Give me a break. Maybe he is including web page designers and sysadmins. The thing that scares me is that I think he is right: Open Source will win, even without a business case. It provides a platform which you can't afford not to use, because the cost of entry is so high. But you can't afford to use it either. I fear that the business world will not recover without new legislation.
I'm disgusted by this overwhelming sense of entitlement displayed by many in the Slashdot readership in the comments sections. Some of you believe that just because you pay a (very reasonable, flat-rate) fee for network access, email and news, you have a license to use all your bandwidth, all the time in any manner that you please. It's just plain bad manners, and I'm sure that it wouldn't have been tolerated in the internet days of yore when bandwidth and system resources were hard to come by.
To be fair, the vast majority of Slashdotters seem to have come out on the side of reason this time (at least when you look at the posts that have been moderated up). For an overwhelming sense of entitlement, go read the latest file 'sharing' thread.
Wrong. The beauty of it, is that the settings don't have to be known. You call up over the phone, and check against each other... and the info you exchange in the phone call isn't the settings, just what you observed. If both observations match, then it wasn't intercepted.
Unless the man in the middle intercepts your phone call. Sound implausible? He intercepted your data traffic somehow, didn't he? Or you can put an ad in the paper. But what if the man in the middle calls up the paper as well to correct a 'mistake' in the ad you posted. Or you can post to a newsgroup, but so can he. You can't beat the man in the middle without a shared key of some kind.
I have a Sony Dream Machine (ARV: $20) that someone gave me as a gift several years ago. It has two buttons to set the alarm: forward and backward. If you hold them down, they zoom through the time extremely fast. So if the alarm is set to 8:30, and you want to wake up at 8:15, you just hit the back button for a couple of seconds. This is all without the clutter of a numeric keypad. I've seen it on alarm clocks that dated back to the late 70's.
Another good interface is the one I have on my alarm clock. My alarm clock has 3 buttons: fast forward, fast reverse, and slow forward. This lets me zip over to the correct ballpark and then fine tune without getting carpal tunnel syndrome. (note to alarm clock manufacturers: my purchasing decisions are based almost entirely on the interface you use to set the time.)
Well first, the story was about patents in general, and you seem to have narrowed it down to patents in general. 1-click shopping is the poster child for bad software patents, and I'm not going to defend it.
Your argument about GIF doesn't necessarily prove anything. The fact that 3 companies developed and attempted to patent the same idea doesn't prove that the idea would have inevitably been discovered. All 3 companies invested time and money developing the technology with the intention of patenting it.
On the other hand, I do think that innovation would continue today without patents. The reason is that a lot of research takes place at universities. Private companies would cease to invest in pure research, but universities would continue to do so. Universities get their money largely from tuition and government grants. Let's assume that companies won't fund university research if they don't benefit from it in the form of patents. So in actual fact, if patent protection was removed, a large percentage of the ongoing innovation would be funded by poor, starving students.
All nations have prospered without patent law. Go back to the last century. Inventions were still happening.
Okay, firstly I don't know which century you're talking about. The last century was only 3 years ago, so I'll assume you mean the 1800s. I don't know how many countries had patents in the 19th century, but the Americans certainly did. So did the French; read the article. Now, if you want to go way, way back to the last millenium, I don't think anyone had patents. But the world was very different then. People had a baser standard of living. Go back just a decade in computing, to before you could patent computer programs. How much invention happened then? Most of the important new concepts in computing were developed without patents.
The world has changed. Back then, the oft-espoused business case of "give away the software as a loss leader to sell your hardware" would have actually worked. Hardware was very lucrative, and this was driving innovation. Now, the situation is different. (Remember also that lots of bad concepts in computing were developed back then, like storing the date as a 2 digit decimal.) What if IBM had been able to patent the BIOS of the PC? The evolution of the PC industry would have been slowed down immensely
They would have to license it under "fair use". The prisoners dilemma doesnt match up against IP problemspace. If everyone defects, they still will not be worse off, in fact it might map the other way around.
That's an unsubstantiated opinion. Your statement that "If everyone defects, they still will not be worse off" is baseless. Maybe you are assuming a zero-sum game? (an invalid assumption) This isnt really news tho, look up the criticism of patents on the eurolinux alliance website; a lot of research that has come to the conclusion that patents hamper innovation is available.
Yes, I know. A lot of self-interested Linux advocates have argued against patents for years. However, the fact that it's a heavily debated issue is what continues to make it news.
-a
Re:What a bunch of Bull
on
Patent Nonsense
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
I was just about to post and say the same thing. Somebody mod the parent up. Let me extend this point by saying two things:
1. Take a look at game theory, such as the iterated prisoner's dilemma. In many games, if everyone cooperates then everyone will do well. If a few people defect, they will do even better. However, if the majority of people defect then everyone will suffer. Thus, the fact that two nations prospered without patent law does not imply that the system could be extended to the whole world.
2. The fact that the author could name a few inventions that were developed during the patent-free period (even if they were more like trade secrets) doesn't prove anything. Anecdotal evidence only proves that something is possible or true in principle. You need to have quantitative evidence to prove that things are true in general. E.g. the fact that Red Hat has had at least one profitable quarter shows that you *can* make money selling free software, but it doesn't prove that they have a solid business case.
-a
Re:Sorry, I don't believe in paying for software.
on
How to Save PGP
·
· Score: 1
Now, I know nothing about accounting, but my understanding of the English language leads me to believe that they had a quarterly loss of 17M in 2000 (and a somewhat higher loss in the same quarter of 2001). Which leads me to question your interpretation of any facts.
Okay, so I only quickly skimmed the balance sheet and read the wrong number. No need to get snotty (especially since both mistakes I made caused me to *underestimate* their annual loss).
OTOH, your $120 billion figure, if I'm not mistaken, is their peak market cap. Which is bullshit. Market cap is literally meaningless. It has nothing to do with actual money. Not money that they have, have spent, people have spent on them. Nothing.
It was a humourous aside, nothing more.
How does selling something along with something you get for free drive down your margins?
Did you ever read the book "Voltaire's Bastards: the Dictatorship of Reason in the West" in which John Raulston Saul explains how ideas which seem logical, but counter-intuitive have led to such global problems as nuclear prolifiration and the 3rd world debt crisis? (That may seem like a bit of a non-sequitor, but I was reminded of this book by the recent slahsdot story on US nuclear research.)
You'd have to read the book to really understand the concept, but the crux of the argument is that it is wrong to allow logic to overrule common sense, especially when there are human factors involved. There are too many factors involved and simplistic comparisons tend to overlook some of them. For example, you ignore the fact that Red Hat's entry into the market changes the market. You can't simply extrapolate based on market share because the curve is not linear and its shape will be further altered by feedback.
As an illustration of how the feedback effect works in economics, take the example of a company that rakes in a huge profit in 2002. Chances are, the employees will go on strike in 2003 to demand a larger cut. The next year, the profit margins will be much smaller. In the software industry, we don't see a lot of strikes because the employees are not unionized. However, large profits attract increased competition, which tends to lower prices.
There is a reason why adding a $1 part to a computer may add $10 to the price. Along the way, each party operates on margins. The manufacturer will increase the price of the raw goods by a fixed margin. So will the distributor and the reseller. They make the margin a percentage of the price because that's the way people buy things. Whether you're buying a house or a car or a computer game, the amount you are willing to pay is probably a base price X plus some additional amount Y to get the specific one you want. Y can typically be modelled as a percentage of X. So if you *need* a car, but you *want* a Honda, you may be willing to pay a margin of 10% above the price of a similar Ford. Since you have to pay X regardless of what you buy, you might as well pay X+Y to get what you want.
Let's say that the price of vacuums drops from $200 to $10. Would you still buy an extended warranty for $100? I don't know about you, but I don't buy warrantees today. Warranties are too much like insurance. I figure if the product breaks, I'll just replace it (probably with a different brand). If Red Hat gives away its OS for free and sells a support package then suddenly support, rather than software, will be the biggest cost to consumers. People are going to start looking for ways to save money. Why pay Red Hat $100 for support when you can get discount support for $20. Maybe the discount support isn't as good, but maybe it is. Red Hat will probably have to resort to IBM-style FUD to convince people that nobody ever got fired for buying Red Hat support.
Note that this applies in other instances as well. Right now, the software industry is having its margins eroded by the falling price of hardware. People don't mind spending a few hundred buck on software if it improves the functionality of their $2000 computer. If hardware prices continue to fall, then the software industry is going to get hurt even more.
Finally, who said anything about "open source?" I'm talking about Free Software.
I take the Nancy Reagan approach: "Just say no to jargon."
-a
Re:Sorry, I don't believe in paying for software.
on
How to Save PGP
·
· Score: 1
I don't know about Cheap Bytes and KRUD. A few companies are making money distributing open source, but clearly not many and not very much. Bundling sounds great in principle, but in practice it drives down your margins, and that has a snowballing effect through the whole economy.
As for Redhat, I dispute your claim that they are making a profit. Here's a link to their balance sheet for 2001. According to this page, they lost $17 million below the line last year. That's not a huge loss, but it's not a great result for a former $120 billion company.
-a
Re:Sorry, I don't believe in paying for software.
on
How to Save PGP
·
· Score: 1
Many people believe that the spirit of the GNU project is that you should not charge money for distributing copies of software, or that you should charge as little as possible -- just enough to cover the cost.
Actually we encourage people who redistribute free software to charge as much as they wish or can. If this seems surprising to you, please read on.
RMS can encourage people to charge as much as they want for redistributing software, but under his system all software has the same value, which is directly proportional to the cost of a CD-R and a stamp.
Slashdot Mirror
While it may be too late for loki I feel that at least a few of us have learned that it's worthwhile to purchase games under linux and will try to do so at every opportunity forthcomming.
Will you? Won't you feel even worse when you pay for a game and the company still goes under?
-a
Huh? If I bring my CDs into work, I can play them on a boombox loud enough for the whole office to hear. That's called "fair use". But now if I take those same CDs into work, convert them into MP3s, and let the same people listen to them, now its "pirating"? All these people did was use the corporate network to timeshift the playing of a few CDs; this sort of falls in the grey area between fair use and exploitation, but by no means justifies a million dollar fine.
Actually, that's not fair use, as others have pointed out. (And fair use is not an absolute right, as we heard on Slashdot last week.)
Playing your boombox at work loud enough for everyone to hear is an illegal broadcast, but it's a grey area. The music companies probably aren't going to come after you because:
a) it's not a serious offense
b) it's probably not costing them any money
c) it's hard to enforce
d) if you did this in a large office, you would be shot
I know that there's a certain culture on Slashdot that doesn't seem to understand the concept of a grey area. I don't know why; maybe writing code in binary makes people think in terms of Boolean logic. Running an MP3 "sharing" server at work is illegal because it is an obvious attempt to defraud the copyright owners. Playing a cd in your car in the presence of two friends is not an illegal broadcast because your intent is not to defraud the copyright owner. Sometimes, in the real world, you have to use your judgement.
It's one thing to violate the letter of the law without violating the intent; it is quite another to manipulate the law by exploiting a loophole. As soon as you start trying to exploit a loophole in the system, they're going to come after you. Now you can do some real damage to their business. You can play your cds at a private party, but you can't play your cds over the PA in a supermarket, even if you try to spin it as a "food party".
Plus there is a difference between listening to a song because it happens to be on the radio, and choosing which song to listen to because you have millions of MP3s on a server. You may think that's splitting hairs, but it's not. It's not a distinction between black and white, it's a grey area. You may define ownership however you like, but the record companies are pragmatic. They know that what makes music worth buying is the ability to choose when to listen to it.
-a
I use RedHat, and religiously buy a new box with every release so they get money and it stays on retail shelves. I know I don't _have_ to, but in my own cost/benefit analysis, the money I spend on their boxes is well worth it. I'm not making a 'donation', I'm consciously investing in my own future. I'm investing in the security updates I know I'll recieve. I'm investing in the next version that I know they are working on. RedHat has earned my trust in this regard, and I know that to continue to produce the things I need and/or treasure, they need my support.
I think you misunderstand the cost/benefit analysis. Paying for free software is a 'tragedy of the commons', which means that society overall benefits from the contributions of individuals, but no individual benefits more than they put in. The tragedy of the commons is the same rule of game theory that predicted that socialism wouldn't work, hence the frequent comparisons of free software to socialism. It also tells you not to bother voting in the next election. The fact that you use the word "meme" suggests that you have read Hofstadter, but please realize that Hofstadter was an idealist, not a pragmatist, and he was frequently proven wrong by his friends.
Your support of RedHat is certainly a 'donation'. The effect of your single donation is so insignificant in the grand scheme of things that you could not possibly benefit from it. From a cost/benefit analysis, the best thing you could do is not pay them any money, but post a message saying that you are paying them money and encouraging everyone else to do the same. I'm not implying that that's what you are doing, but you are definitely misusing the term 'cost-benefit analysis'.
On the other hand, think of what a 'gift' is. I give Christmas gifts to my family because I feel obliged to do so, because they will be giving me gifts in turn, and because I am participating in a community tradition. I don't do so because of a cost-benefit analysis. I think it's the same with free software. You donate money because you feel obliged to do so and because it gives you a warm, fuzzy feeling.
-a
Blowing venture capital on stupid things is about the same as maxing out a personal credit card on luxury items in my book. It's just plain stupid.
I feel so passionately about this issue because I've seen so many companies go under, where the workers suffer because of poor management. Enron is a really big example, but there are hundreds if not thousands of "dot-coms" that did the same thing to their workers.
But you're ignoring the fact that all companies have poor management. Or at least it seems that way to the employees. Some companies succeed in spite of their poor management and when others fail, it's easy to blame it on their poor management.
I worked for a small company with poor management. Bucking the odds, it turned into a moderate success. Both the founders and the employees made out pretty well. Of course, that was before the tech meltdown.
Now I work for a large company with poor management. Actually it feels more like no management. When your department makes up less than 1% of the bottom line, the decisions from above tend to appear capricious and arbitrary.
-a
Calculus was developed around the same time by two seperate individuals, one being Sir Issac Newton who was a very bitter man and sought to discredit the other researcher, and it worked well. Can you name him? The victors always write the history books.
That's interesting, because when I studied calculus, the textbooks spun it a different way. To be sure, they mentioned Liebnitz quite a bit, but the story they spin is that Newton invented Calculus first, but he didn't publish because he was too modest. Later, after Liebnitz published his results, Newton's friends convinced him to come forward.
-a
The problem, as I see it, is not so much that businesses are focused on maximumizing shareholder value. The problem is that the dotcom bubble re-popularized pyramid schemes. Many companies ceased to focus on selling products as they concentrated more on selling stock.
-a
If the ice melts. While I am aware that the North Pole melts each year (my dad once spent a number of months near the North Pole on a scientific trip for the University of Washington and had pictures of the ice breaking up when they abandoned their camp), that is not the case with the South Pole.
Actually, parts of the South Pole have begun melting recently... ice that has been there for thousands of years. That's part of what has been concerning scientists recently.
Agreed, completely. But that goes both ways and everything the environmentalists say needs to be taken with a grain of salt as well. Unfortunately, the media sensationalizes it and governments come up with drastic Protocols based on incomplete research. They've forgotten their grain of salt...
You know, I am not a hardcore environmentalist. I just happen to know some science, and I can't deny that this stuff is real. Environmentalists may sensationalize the facts, but they are still facts. I cannot prove that the effects of global warming will be devestating, but I know there will be effects.
There are those among us who will deny tooth and nail that a fact is important until it is conclusively proven. How many people died of lung cancer while the cigarette companies claimed that there was no conclusive link to tobacco? You cannot conclusively prove that this gun is loaded, so stick it against your head and pull the trigger. Now you know. Either it wasn't loaded or your are dead. That's the problem with global warming. The effects may be inconclusive now, but they won't be conclusive until it's too late.
As I said, I am not a hardcore environmentalist. The reason is that I also understand game theory, and I know that environmentalism is a tragedy of the commons (i.e. it pays off for society as a whole, but not for each individual). Therefore, I am wasteful when it suits me; I drive an SUV. But I don't go around posting on newsgroups, trying to justify my selfish behaviour.
-a
Really? thats interesting. I have always wanted to know how many people there have ever been. but I could never fgure out a reliable way of determining this info - aside from talking with God.
Where did you get that info - how do they know how many people have been born in ALL of time?
Fossil records, historical data, statistical models.
Actually, I have heard this statistic before as well, in the context of the anthropic principle. One of the corollaries of the anthropic principle is that the population of Earth is probably going to decline drastically very soon. The reasoning is kind of counter-intuitive, but it goes like this:
There will be N human beings during the course of the Earth's lifespan. Statistically speaking, your birth number, X, is most likely to be close to number N/2. Given that something like half the people who have ever lived are alive today (i.e. N/4), if all of these people have an average of 2 children, we will reach N in only 2 more generations. So the end of the world is coming. Kind of scary, isn't it?
I'm sure this kind of logic isn't going to appeal to people the first time they hear it. After all, the assumption that X is close to N/2 is not really valid. However, if you integrate the function across all possible values of X, you will find that there is still a very good chance that the world will end soon (i.e. the population will drop drastically).
-a
That's right, mankind can disturb the equilibrium in both directions. Maybe in a few decades, when the effects of global warming get really bad, some genius politician will come up with that solution. If we explode a bunch of nuclear bombs and block out the sunlight, we can cool the Earth back down. Personally, I'd rather not wager my future on a terraforming experiment for which we cannot possibly be adequately prepared.
-a
If you're talking about some Col Waresque plot that involves a Russian KGB agent who has trained 20 years just impersonating your friends voice, and he is perfect, and also has the tech to intercept and then retransmit, well then I suppose you're screwed.
FYI, we already have multiple cryptographic techniques for key exchange. For example, there's the Diffie-Hellman protocol that I alluded to earlier. With DH, you can still do all the same paranoid stuff you can do with quantum key exchange, such as publishing your vectors in a newspaper or on a newsgroup or phoning the guy and analyzing his voiceprint. But in practice, no one does that, because people use RSA for authentication, and you only have to exchange the RSA keys once. Of course, the weak link in the chain is now the authenticity of the RSA key, which you now have to publish on a newsgroup or webpage, or distribute through PGP web of trust.
So what is the advantage of quantum key exchange over DH? Well, if someone listens in on the DH exchange, they can store the keys and then crack them 10 years from now with their $100 billion brute force cracking machine or their quantum computer. Before they do this, they have to intercept your keys, which means that they are probably either the government or AT&T. In either case, what's so improbable about them intercepting your phone call?
Also, note that you currently have to have a dedicated fibre line connecting you to the person you want to talk to, but for some reason, you didn't want to just meet with them ahead of time to decide on an authentication key. Now who's talking KGB plot?
-a
I saw this exhibit when I visited the Smithsonian Institute last October. Unfortunately, I can't find a link on their website.
I remember they had a video presentation in which they showed how the warming trend had slowed for 2 years due to a recent volcanic eruption, and they talked about a computer model which had successfully predicted the effect.
In any case, whether or not, they can model the Earth as a whole, I don't see how anyone can deny that they have the ability to model the effects of each factor individually, and those models should lead you to the same conclusions.
-a
Climate change happens. Ten thousand years ago a good part of North America (and Europe) was under a mile of ice. I suppose humans take the blame for melting that?
Oh, you people are so ridiculous, snatching at whatever random fact that appeals to your self-serving opinion. I remember a Christian Science lecturer once told me that the ice age is what allowed the animals from Noah's ark to walk across the ocean and settle on the various continents. I don't think your argument is that bad, but you're still being willfully ignorant.
Scientists believe that a number of factors contribute to large scale climate change:
1. The gradual warming of the sun.
2. The gradual cooling of the earth's core.
3. Large volcanic eruptions and meteor impacts, which pollute the atmosphere with dust.
4. The reflective nature of the polar ice.
5. The population cycles of plants and animals, which change the composition of the atmosphere.
6. The thinning of the ozone layer.
7. The bulldozing of the rainforest.
8. Commercial farming.
9. Atmospheric pollution.
10. Human power consumption.
So the fact that the first 5 elements have caused periodic climate change over the course of Earth's existance does not prove that the industrial revolution is not causing global warming. Furthermore, we have evidence that the effects of mankind are causing climate change to occur much faster than they were previously. On top of this, we have scientific models (based on chemistry and physics) which can accurately predict the warming trend. (We have the examples of the planets Mars and Venus, which provide further test vectors.)
This doesn't mean that there won't be little blips in the data. In fact, a volcanic eruption in the mid 90s caused a 2-3 year disruption in the warming trend (source: the Smithsonian Institute). In the past, large scale climate changes have caused the extinction of large numbers of species. So far, the temperature has always returned back to comfortable levels.
However, the danger of global warming is that several of these factors exist in an unstable equilibrium. As the Earth gets warmer, the polar ice melts. This causes the Earth to reflect less of the sun's energy and more of the ice melts. This results in a 'snowball' effect (to use an inappropriate term). Perhaps in the past, this runaway warming has been quenched by a catastrophic effect like a giant volcanic eruption. Therefore, the equilibrium would be unstable, but chaotic enough to always return to the balance point. There is no guarantee than man-made climate change will have the same effect. Some of the natural factors (e.g. the plant-animal arms race) have a buffering effect, which tends to restore the equilibrium. Man-made factors will get worse as the population increases; they may bias the controlling equations and cause the equilibrium to never be restored.
-a
This doesn't work either. The man in the middle might try this, but he will be revealed when the two participants check their observations against each other. Remember, this isn't encryption itself, so much as a way to securely distribute keys.
Non-sequitor. How do the two participants check their results against each other? That's the problem. I write encryption software for a living, so I'm not just babbling here. The quantum key distribution is analagous to a Diffie-Hellman exchange. The principle advantage is that the DH is subject to cryptanalysis and brute-force cracking, whereas the quantum key exchange is not. However quantum KE, like DH, is not secure without proper authentication.
To do authentication, you need some kind of key. The "key" does not have to be a literal string of bits. If you phone the other guy and you recognize his voice and you believe that the man in the middle could not possibly intercept the call and fake your friend's voice, then you could consider your friend's voiceprint to be a form of key.
-a
Heh, yes, well remembered [lwn.net]
A very interesting read. From the article:
As it turns out, the only open-source business case that has consistently worked is that of bilking investors out of their money. ESR does nothing but breathe hot air and he gets $36 million for the privilege. (Who knows how much how much of that he actually mangaged to cash in.) Who will pay for the cost of open source development? As it turns out, Wall Street.
Interestingly enough, in the e-mail, ESR says that the biggest advantage of being rich is that he will have more free time to work on his pet projects. Elsewhere in this thread ESR-heads say that they will gladly work 8 hours a day at a menial job and code in their free time. Meanwhile, I get paid good money to write closed source software in a field that I am interested in. (note: I found out what the company did before I applied for a job there.)
-a
With all of these endless
Ignore all these people who are merely repeating some silly argument they read in the Cathedral and the Bazaar. If you read the recent interview as well as CatB, you will see that ESR always stops short of saying that Open Source will be profitable. He says that it will be "successful", but he seems to define success in terms of wide-spread adoption and technical merit.
The fact is, ESR greatly exaggerates the number of "programmers" who work on proprietary systems. 90%? Give me a break. Maybe he is including web page designers and sysadmins. The thing that scares me is that I think he is right: Open Source will win, even without a business case. It provides a platform which you can't afford not to use, because the cost of entry is so high. But you can't afford to use it either. I fear that the business world will not recover without new legislation.
-a
I'm disgusted by this overwhelming sense of entitlement displayed by many in the Slashdot readership in the comments sections. Some of you believe that just because you pay a (very reasonable, flat-rate) fee for network access, email and news, you have a license to use all your bandwidth, all the time in any manner that you please. It's just plain bad manners, and I'm sure that it wouldn't have been tolerated in the internet days of yore when bandwidth and system resources were hard to come by.
To be fair, the vast majority of Slashdotters seem to have come out on the side of reason this time (at least when you look at the posts that have been moderated up). For an overwhelming sense of entitlement, go read the latest file 'sharing' thread.
-a
Unless the man in the middle intercepts your phone call. Sound implausible? He intercepted your data traffic somehow, didn't he? Or you can put an ad in the paper. But what if the man in the middle calls up the paper as well to correct a 'mistake' in the ad you posted. Or you can post to a newsgroup, but so can he. You can't beat the man in the middle without a shared key of some kind.
-a
Another good interface is the one I have on my alarm clock. My alarm clock has 3 buttons: fast forward, fast reverse, and slow forward. This lets me zip over to the correct ballpark and then fine tune without getting carpal tunnel syndrome. (note to alarm clock manufacturers: my purchasing decisions are based almost entirely on the interface you use to set the time.)
-a
Speaking of crypto, the British secret service had prior art on both DH and RSA. But the private sector inventors were allowed to keep their patents.
-a
Well first, the story was about patents in general, and you seem to have narrowed it down to patents in general. 1-click shopping is the poster child for bad software patents, and I'm not going to defend it.
Your argument about GIF doesn't necessarily prove anything. The fact that 3 companies developed and attempted to patent the same idea doesn't prove that the idea would have inevitably been discovered. All 3 companies invested time and money developing the technology with the intention of patenting it.
On the other hand, I do think that innovation would continue today without patents. The reason is that a lot of research takes place at universities. Private companies would cease to invest in pure research, but universities would continue to do so. Universities get their money largely from tuition and government grants. Let's assume that companies won't fund university research if they don't benefit from it in the form of patents. So in actual fact, if patent protection was removed, a large percentage of the ongoing innovation would be funded by poor, starving students.
-a
All nations have prospered without patent law. Go back to the last century. Inventions were still happening.
Okay, firstly I don't know which century you're talking about. The last century was only 3 years ago, so I'll assume you mean the 1800s. I don't know how many countries had patents in the 19th century, but the Americans certainly did. So did the French; read the article. Now, if you want to go way, way back to the last millenium, I don't think anyone had patents. But the world was very different then. People had a baser standard of living.
Go back just a decade in computing, to before you could patent computer programs. How much invention happened then? Most of the important new concepts in computing were developed without patents.
The world has changed. Back then, the oft-espoused business case of "give away the software as a loss leader to sell your hardware" would have actually worked. Hardware was very lucrative, and this was driving innovation. Now, the situation is different. (Remember also that lots of bad concepts in computing were developed back then, like storing the date as a 2 digit decimal.)
What if IBM had been able to patent the BIOS of the PC? The evolution of the PC industry would have been slowed down immensely
They would have to license it under "fair use".
The prisoners dilemma doesnt match up against IP problemspace. If everyone defects, they still will not be worse off, in fact it might map the other way around.
That's an unsubstantiated opinion. Your statement that "If everyone defects, they still will not be worse off" is baseless. Maybe you are assuming a zero-sum game? (an invalid assumption)
This isnt really news tho, look up the criticism of patents on the eurolinux alliance website; a lot of research that has come to the conclusion that patents hamper innovation is available.
Yes, I know. A lot of self-interested Linux advocates have argued against patents for years. However, the fact that it's a heavily debated issue is what continues to make it news.
-a
I was just about to post and say the same thing. Somebody mod the parent up. Let me extend this point by saying two things:
1. Take a look at game theory, such as the iterated prisoner's dilemma. In many games, if everyone cooperates then everyone will do well. If a few people defect, they will do even better. However, if the majority of people defect then everyone will suffer. Thus, the fact that two nations prospered without patent law does not imply that the system could be extended to the whole world.
2. The fact that the author could name a few inventions that were developed during the patent-free period (even if they were more like trade secrets) doesn't prove anything. Anecdotal evidence only proves that something is possible or true in principle. You need to have quantitative evidence to prove that things are true in general. E.g. the fact that Red Hat has had at least one profitable quarter shows that you *can* make money selling free software, but it doesn't prove that they have a solid business case.
-a
Okay, so I only quickly skimmed the balance sheet and read the wrong number. No need to get snotty (especially since both mistakes I made caused me to *underestimate* their annual loss).
It was a humourous aside, nothing more.
Did you ever read the book "Voltaire's Bastards: the Dictatorship of Reason in the West" in which John Raulston Saul explains how ideas which seem logical, but counter-intuitive have led to such global problems as nuclear prolifiration and the 3rd world debt crisis? (That may seem like a bit of a non-sequitor, but I was reminded of this book by the recent slahsdot story on US nuclear research.)
You'd have to read the book to really understand the concept, but the crux of the argument is that it is wrong to allow logic to overrule common sense, especially when there are human factors involved. There are too many factors involved and simplistic comparisons tend to overlook some of them. For example, you ignore the fact that Red Hat's entry into the market changes the market. You can't simply extrapolate based on market share because the curve is not linear and its shape will be further altered by feedback.
As an illustration of how the feedback effect works in economics, take the example of a company that rakes in a huge profit in 2002. Chances are, the employees will go on strike in 2003 to demand a larger cut. The next year, the profit margins will be much smaller. In the software industry, we don't see a lot of strikes because the employees are not unionized. However, large profits attract increased competition, which tends to lower prices.
There is a reason why adding a $1 part to a computer may add $10 to the price. Along the way, each party operates on margins. The manufacturer will increase the price of the raw goods by a fixed margin. So will the distributor and the reseller. They make the margin a percentage of the price because that's the way people buy things. Whether you're buying a house or a car or a computer game, the amount you are willing to pay is probably a base price X plus some additional amount Y to get the specific one you want. Y can typically be modelled as a percentage of X. So if you *need* a car, but you *want* a Honda, you may be willing to pay a margin of 10% above the price of a similar Ford. Since you have to pay X regardless of what you buy, you might as well pay X+Y to get what you want.
Let's say that the price of vacuums drops from $200 to $10. Would you still buy an extended warranty for $100? I don't know about you, but I don't buy warrantees today. Warranties are too much like insurance. I figure if the product breaks, I'll just replace it (probably with a different brand). If Red Hat gives away its OS for free and sells a support package then suddenly support, rather than software, will be the biggest cost to consumers. People are going to start looking for ways to save money. Why pay Red Hat $100 for support when you can get discount support for $20. Maybe the discount support isn't as good, but maybe it is. Red Hat will probably have to resort to IBM-style FUD to convince people that nobody ever got fired for buying Red Hat support.
Note that this applies in other instances as well. Right now, the software industry is having its margins eroded by the falling price of hardware. People don't mind spending a few hundred buck on software if it improves the functionality of their $2000 computer. If hardware prices continue to fall, then the software industry is going to get hurt even more.
I take the Nancy Reagan approach: "Just say no to jargon."
-a
I don't know about Cheap Bytes and KRUD. A few companies are making money distributing open source, but clearly not many and not very much. Bundling sounds great in principle, but in practice it drives down your margins, and that has a snowballing effect through the whole economy.
As for Redhat, I dispute your claim that they are making a profit. Here's a link to their balance sheet for 2001. According to this page, they lost $17 million below the line last year. That's not a huge loss, but it's not a great result for a former $120 billion company.
-a
RMS can encourage people to charge as much as they want for redistributing software, but under his system all software has the same value, which is directly proportional to the cost of a CD-R and a stamp.
-a