I'm all for the hippie ethic of giving it away and asking nothing in return.
Good, but I, for one, is asking to get something in return. Kind of. Users get to understand the software, they are educated, and eventually, they start contributing to the software, giving me, and everyone else, better software.
I'm always concerned about free speech issues, and I follow RMS quite a long way in his insistence on non-propritary software.
I think, however, this software can't do much harm, simply because it will with time be inferior of OSS.
Remember, free-beer software isn't Peer Reviewed! ESR argues impressingly for that what makes OSS software so good, is the very extensive (informal) Peer Review every piece of code goes through.
Therefore, free-beer software will with time get OSS competitor(s), that, when matured, are technically superior, but costs no more. Then, it has no advantage, so it will be "open the source or perish". I hope...
Who can't run the executable unzipper anyways? If I download files that end in EXE, my first reaction is "file $file" followed by "unzip $file" or whatever. I would never have known about the license agreement in the first place, and as I could not read it anyways (well, not true, I could pull the strings out, but whatever) how could I 'circumvent' it. Or are MS Windoze users only allowed to download it?
Well, actually, that isn't too far from the case...:-)
Go to the download page. It says that "Document is in Adobe Acrobat format," which is a lie, it is a pdf file after extraction (hey, we should get Adobe to sue M$:-)), so the next part goes "and can be extracted onto any Windows platform." So, if you're not using Windows, you're out of luck. Guess that's a part of their tactics.
Anyway, downloading is not a problem, you can do that. Then, you have to unzip it. Is long as you use the programs you normally use to unzip, I can't imagine they can call it "circumventing". I haven't successfully unzipped it on my Digital UNIX box, but I hear others have done it with unrar.
Then, you should have a file you can read. I can't see that you can possibly have done anything wrong by doing this, and it is certainly a freedom of speech issue if you can't critize what you read. Nevertheless, I think the document shouldn't be on/., M$ can claim copyright for it. I agree entirely with the summary made by Art Tatum. That being said, I think we need new laws that requires things like these "extentions" to be open.
BTW, on linking: Isn't it so that M$ won a case about deeplinking? M$ had deep linked a company, that sued M$, and M$ won...? And, while we're on the topic, have you seen what Tim Berners-Lee has to say on links and laws?/. should get TimBL to witness if they won't let the links stay.
Well, yeah, I think it is good, but I have another concern: Quite a few smaller businesses might think that "we can't put anything on the internet that isn't supposed to be completely open, 'cause someone will abuse it". And that's not a good message.
BTW, I tried to unzip the file on my Digital UNIX box, but I didn't find any software that could do it. Any suggestions?
OK, I should have written "detected" somewhere in there. Real World != Ideal World, you know... I haven't done a lot of lab-work on radioactive materials, but in the work I did do, how things turn out never ceased to amaze me. Once, the emission from a source jumped to about 10000 times what we expected for no apparent reason. The comment of the lab technician was just that "yeah, well, things like that happen, strange things happen all the time."
OK, so if I've got this right, M$ argument for making insecure software is that their users are stupid. Yep, the mail client must be able to e-mail stuff for the user because the users themselves are not bright enough to do it. I guess we can believe that...:-)
So, let us go for a little thought experiment here: Suppose somebody finds out that some files should be deleted reguralily. Personally, I would find that useful. Some large files, such as Postscript files (most of my large PS files are generated from raw (La)TeX files anyway), core-dumps, etc. should be deleted when they are n days old. Useful stuff. OK, so, let us postulate that there exists somebody who could write this in VBScript and make it work. Great. Well, this guy forwards it to somebody else who thinks it is useful, and who has a small disk and thinks that n=1, in other words certain files should be deleted every day.
Now, at the other end of the world sits a geek who has not yet realized it, but given some fortunate circumstances (e.g. education) could become a hacker. This guy has written a script to send his friends pieces of VBScript code that he writes and install it on his friend's computers. I mean, that would be nice and unselfish.
Now, the next thing that happens, is that these two programs meet, and merge.... Given that not everybody involved are particularily clued, it might well become a worm...
So what's the point of all this? Well, in an unfortunate case, some well-meaning, but not very competent programmers may create a worm like the ones we have just seen by accident, and the moral is, the more stupid your users are, the more you need to make sure they don't hurt themselves and the others.
M$ is more like "so, you would like to shoot yourself in the foot? Really bad? Sure, for only $29.95, we will give you a gun, and point it at your foot for you, the only thing you would have to do yourself, is pull the trigger. Don't worry, we'll show you where it is."
Well, it is a nice thing, but certainly not a new idea. The problem is that the rate of radioactive decay depends of an awful lot of things, environmental parameters. Now, I don't know how sensitive the RNG will be in this case, but it is easy to imagine the rate of decay being dependent on e.g. temperature. So, if you power up your computer in the morning and start counting decays, the CPU heats up, and you always get veeery interesting results in the evening, well, your "this-is-too-good-to-be-true"-alarm should be ringing...:-) Besides, radioactive decay is a Poisson process, and Poisson processes are not always nice... Kjetil
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Good, but I, for one, is asking to get something in return. Kind of. Users get to understand the software, they are educated, and eventually, they start contributing to the software, giving me, and everyone else, better software.
That's what I get in return.
I think, however, this software can't do much harm, simply because it will with time be inferior of OSS.
Remember, free-beer software isn't Peer Reviewed! ESR argues impressingly for that what makes OSS software so good, is the very extensive (informal) Peer Review every piece of code goes through.
Therefore, free-beer software will with time get OSS competitor(s), that, when matured, are technically superior, but costs no more. Then, it has no advantage, so it will be "open the source or perish". I hope...
Go to the download page. It says that "Document is in Adobe Acrobat format," which is a lie, it is a pdf file after extraction (hey, we should get Adobe to sue M$ :-)), so the next part goes "and can be extracted onto any Windows platform." So, if you're not using Windows, you're out of luck. Guess that's a part of their tactics.
Anyway, downloading is not a problem, you can do that. Then, you have to unzip it. Is long as you use the programs you normally use to unzip, I can't imagine they can call it "circumventing". I haven't successfully unzipped it on my Digital UNIX box, but I hear others have done it with unrar.
Then, you should have a file you can read. I can't see that you can possibly have done anything wrong by doing this, and it is certainly a freedom of speech issue if you can't critize what you read. Nevertheless, I think the document shouldn't be on /., M$ can claim copyright for it. I agree entirely with the summary made by Art Tatum. That being said, I think we need new laws that requires things like these "extentions" to be open.
BTW, on linking: Isn't it so that M$ won a case about deeplinking? M$ had deep linked a company, that sued M$, and M$ won...? And, while we're on the topic, have you seen what Tim Berners-Lee has to say on links and laws? /. should get TimBL to witness if they won't let the links stay.
BTW, I tried to unzip the file on my Digital UNIX box, but I didn't find any software that could do it. Any suggestions?
OK, I should have written "detected" somewhere in there. Real World != Ideal World, you know... I haven't done a lot of lab-work on radioactive materials, but in the work I did do, how things turn out never ceased to amaze me. Once, the emission from a source jumped to about 10000 times what we expected for no apparent reason. The comment of the lab technician was just that "yeah, well, things like that happen, strange things happen all the time."
So, let us go for a little thought experiment here: Suppose somebody finds out that some files should be deleted reguralily. Personally, I would find that useful. Some large files, such as Postscript files (most of my large PS files are generated from raw (La)TeX files anyway), core-dumps, etc. should be deleted when they are n days old. Useful stuff. OK, so, let us postulate that there exists somebody who could write this in VBScript and make it work. Great. Well, this guy forwards it to somebody else who thinks it is useful, and who has a small disk and thinks that n=1, in other words certain files should be deleted every day.
Now, at the other end of the world sits a geek who has not yet realized it, but given some fortunate circumstances (e.g. education) could become a hacker. This guy has written a script to send his friends pieces of VBScript code that he writes and install it on his friend's computers. I mean, that would be nice and unselfish.
Now, the next thing that happens, is that these two programs meet, and merge.... Given that not everybody involved are particularily clued, it might well become a worm...
So what's the point of all this? Well, in an unfortunate case, some well-meaning, but not very competent programmers may create a worm like the ones we have just seen by accident, and the moral is, the more stupid your users are, the more you need to make sure they don't hurt themselves and the others.
M$ is more like "so, you would like to shoot yourself in the foot? Really bad? Sure, for only $29.95, we will give you a gun, and point it at your foot for you, the only thing you would have to do yourself, is pull the trigger. Don't worry, we'll show you where it is."
Well, it is a nice thing, but certainly not a new idea. The problem is that the rate of radioactive decay depends of an awful lot of things, environmental parameters. Now, I don't know how sensitive the RNG will be in this case, but it is easy to imagine the rate of decay being dependent on e.g. temperature. So, if you power up your computer in the morning and start counting decays, the CPU heats up, and you always get veeery interesting results in the evening, well, your "this-is-too-good-to-be-true"-alarm should be ringing... :-) Besides, radioactive decay is a Poisson process, and Poisson processes are not always nice... Kjetil