Exactly. Besides, most PHBs are actually fairly well educated, some even have [gasp] legal backgrounds. A quick comparison of the GPL and your typical MS EULA shows that GPLed software doesn't require anything unless you actually distribute software, while the MS EULA actually tries to control how you use the software. You can do whatever you want with GPLed software as long as you keep it to yourself.
Syntax is a cinch to learn, it's the new APIs that are a pain in the keister. In fact, that is one of the reasons that the Mono hackers are interested in.NET. They think that it would be cool to write modules in C# and use them in Perl, or write modules in Lisp and import them into Python.
Personally I don't know if it will work better than the writing libraries in C and creating language interfaces, but it is possible that the Mono hackers are onto something.
Now that is good news. In the long run Free Software is good for developing nations as it allows them to play on the software field as equals and not as subject nations. The fact of the matter is that Peruvians are just as smart as anyone, and twice as motivated as any American I have ever met. There is no doubt in my mind that they will make huge contributions to the software economy once they start working for themselves and not for the primarily North American software consortiums.
Most of this is true, but there IS a BSA representatives along with "INDECOPI" (an intellectual property defense office) that raids over private and public institutions as well.
The Peruvian government has lots of reasons to keep normal citizens and businesses in line. After all most of the politicos have business interests. INDECOPI probably comes in handy by making sure that businesses that the politicos don't like have to pay for their software. There is little chance that Peru is going to turn INDECOPI loose on other branches of the government, and there is less chance that the Peruvian government is going to pay any attention to the BSA.
Peru probably will pay attention to the WTO, however. First world nations (and especially the U.S.) have been pushing anti-piracy heavily lately. Trade sanctions would certainly have an effect on Peru.
Most of the desktop software that I use on Linux is available on Windows. OpenOffice, Mozilla, the Gimp, Emacs, LaTeX are all readily available. The software that isn't available generally has Windows equivalents.
The moral of the story is that Free Software allows you to avoid vendor lock in, which is good.
If what Microsoft is doing is illegal, then what about what RedHat is doing? They not only give the software away, they even throw in source code, and make it easy to install this software over the Internet.
Besides, what do you bet Microsoft ends up making a profit on the Peruvian government. They throw in $550,000 in perks, and get a nice deal. If Microsoft makes money, then its not dumping, its merely being a good businessman.
Don't get me wrong, this particular deal is nothing short of a bribe. However, Peru is not your typical company. The BSA might seem scary to an American company, but Peru has their own military and their own laws. Peru has, in the past, expropriated entire industries stealing billions from foreign investors.
Peru is not scared of Microsoft, Peruvian officials are simply susceptible to bribes.
The problem with this is that Linux not only has a lower price, but it costs far less to fund Linux development than Windows development. That's why Ballmer is going around giving interviews in which he admits that Microsoft is no longer the discount solution. Even with $40 billion in the bank Microsoft can't buy off enough customers to force Free Software vendors out of business (especially when you start talking about IBM and their Linux push). Well, they probably could do it, but not without spooking investors on Wall Street. Since Microsoft management is heavily invested in Microsoft, you can bet that they won't do anything to upset the short term stock price, even if it would be good for Microsoft in the long run.
Microsoft's edge is that they aren't selling a commodity like lemonade. Ripping out Microsoft requires that you learn how to use some other system, which can be very expensive. However, this sort of momentum only carries you so far.
During Christmas time it is a fairly common practice (or it used to be when I lived in Peru) for the police to simply pull over motorists and demand money. Bribes are very commonplace in Peru any time of the year, but during Christmas the police stop even pretending to be upholding the law. They have got guns and you don't, and their children need Christmas presents and Paneton.
Lima is a city of something like 7 million people and this "donation" is supposed to help something like 20,000 students (a pittance). My guess is that it ends up helping far fewer students than that, and all of the help will likely go to the rich private schools that the politicos send their children too.
Unfortunately it is impossible to do business in Peru without bribery. I am just surprised that Bill Gates himself is delivering the money. When I first heard that Peru was looking at Free Software legislation I was very skeptical. There are lots of good people in Peru, and I don't doubt that Dr. Villanueva is an honest man and a patriot, but honest Peruvian officials are few and far between.
It's actually considerably worse than that. You see with Linux you can actually move to a workable thin client solution like the folks in Largo Florida. With Linux you can easily support hundreds of users with one commodity Intel-based server. For about the same price as an upgrade to your current Windows OS and office suite you could move your entire office to thin clients and never have to worry about client side problems ever again. Imagine how much easier your life would be with one machine to configure and a whole pile of thin clients that you could simply throw away if something broke.
No, the bad guys will be the ones that aren't robots. If it breathes, shoot it.
As an American the idea of being able to fight entire wars without American casualties sounds pretty cool. Of course, if I lived in some other country I probably would be worried.
This is a guy planning to strap a rocket to his butt and shoot himself thirty miles into the air. You expected him to joke about it. I think that it is unfortunate that/. sent so many questions over that made fun of what he is doing. Personally I am surprised that he answered at all. I know that I wouldn't have.
/. asked stupid questions that made fun of what this guy is trying to attempt, and he answered with pat answers, what do you expect?
Uh, people jump out of airplanes all of the time. Rocket guy simply thinks that he can get skydivers to 15,000 feet cheaper and safer than the folks with airplanes. Skydivers would probably appreciate that.
They should have simply charged for support, DUH! If ten times as many people wanted support as there were that bought the game then chances are good that they were sitting on a gold mine.
That's the beauty of Snort. If you use Snort as your IDS you have saved $20,000 that you can then spend on the services of someone that knows how to set Snort up. 20K buys a fair amount of consulting, and from the article it sounds like you are going to need expensive help no matter what IDS you use. It also appears that Snort is at least as robust and useful as the competition, so you might as well go for the least expensive option.
Re:This surprises you how?
on
Digital Dark Ages?
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
On the other hand, I have digital information that I have been carrying around since I owned an Apple ][c. With the rapidly decreasing cost of storage it is very inexpensive to hang onto old data. Mix in an offsite backup or two and your house can even burn down without losing your information. You certainly can't say that about your paper documents.
You clearly haven't lived outside the first world if you think that America is forcing goods on our poorer neighbors. Most people in the third world would give anything to live in the United States. They know what they want for themselves and their children, and it isn't a thatched hut out in the middle of the jungle. They want Big Macs, Nike shoes, and Captain Crunch just like the rest of us.
One hundred years from now the poorest folks in the world will probably live better than the richest of us now, and people will laugh at the 21st century environmentalists (like we laugh at Malthus) and cower over the predictions of their modern fear mongerers. Nothing changes.
You need to separate Hitler the genocidal maniac and Hitler the diplomat. Had Hitler concentrated on conquering England before dragging Russia into the war, and if Japan would have forestalled their attack on Pearl Harbor most of Europe would probably be speaking German right now. Hitler conquered nearly all of Western Europe with relatively few casualties. As a conqueror (and a diplomat) Hitler has few equals.
Besides which if the leaders of the rest of the world had been paying attention Hitler could have been stopped the Germans long before they became the serious threat that they were after the fall of France. Poor diplomacy was certainly part of the problem that lead to World War II. I would much rather have the future diplomats of the world learn this lesson in a harmless game in their history class than learn it in real life.
The irony of this example is that this particular kid deserves an A because he actually studied history and used the knowledge he gained to his advantage. Notice, for example, how he had historical precedents for each of his actions. Had the rest of the students been paying attention to their history lessons then they could have countered his moves. But they didn't, preferring instead to experience history first hand.
The problem is that this is how diplomacy really works. The actions of this particular player are very reminiscent of Germany's behavior under Hitler. In fact, there are several world rulers today that are probably worse than this particular player. Take a look at the people playing diplomacy for keeps in the Middle East, for instance.
That's the only explanation I have heard that explains why SuSE would pick up the tab for helping Caldera develop a Linux distribution. SuSE wants access to the remnants of Caldera's ex-SCO distribution network, TurboLinux's Japanese market, and Connectiva's Latin markets, and they are willing to pay the developers to go after these markets.
I wish them luck, but RedHat has the momentum, and it has much better licensing terms. In my opinion the reason that SuSE and Caldera aren't in RedHat's spot is that they haven't been as free with their source code as RedHat and Mandrake have been. It might seem like a small thing, but part of the reason that many of us are switching to Linux is to get out from under the thumb of our software vendors. Caldera and SuSE want us to trade our old proprietary software vendors with a new one (that bases most of their work on Linux), and most people aren't falling for that. Both Caldera and SuSE have created distributions that were as good (or better in most cases) as RedHat's, but the Freedom issue has tripped them up.
When the LSB was first being kicked around Bruce Perens happened to be on board and he suggested using Debian's set of core packages as a test distribution. However, Caldera (and to a lesser extent SuSE) didn't want a binary standard base that you could actually install, because the leaders at these companies knew that many people might simply deploy the test distribution and not pay for the proprietary extras that Caldera and SuSE had to offer. After all, if all you need is a Linux distribution that you can run Oracle on, it really doesn't matter which distribution it is as long as it is supported by Oracle.
That is why we have a written LSB standard and a set of tests instead of a much easier to create and use binary standard.
Well, Caldera and SuSE (and TurboLinux) have finally realized that their developers want a binary standard, and if they can't have one from the LSB they will simply use RedHat which is a very popular and extremely open.. Once again that leaves the proprietary distributions (Caldera, SuSE, TurboLinux) out in the cold, and so they have banded together to form a proprietary alternative. You see, they have created a binary distribution, but they want to charge people to use it. Since most of the software is GPLed, they can't deny sources to most of the distribution, but you can bet that they will be up to the same old tricks that they have always been up to. Caldera has said unequivocally that the UnitedLinux core would be licensed "per seat."
The truly unfortunate bit is that it would appear that Caldera is going to use UnitedLinux as a chance to drag SuSE into bankruptcy. SuSE gets to pay for the development and maintenance of UnitedLinux, and Caldera stands to receive a disproportionate amount of the benefit. Meanwhile Caldera still has revenues from the old SCO Unixes to keep itself afloat.
Personally, I use Debian, and think that it would make an excellent binary test platform. It is well-maintained, non-commercial, and it is a relatively slow moving target. There is lots of room for adding value to the Debian core packages. That being the case, I would much rather see RedHat or even Mandrake (both of which have firm policies of releasing source code under the GPL) become the binary standard than UnitedLinux.
Clearly you didn't read the article. The biggest difference between Sourcefire and most of the other crash and burn software companies (whether selling Free softwware or commercial software) was that Marty and friends have not spent money they didn't have. They ran the company out of Marty's house for a while, and when they finally did get offices they bought pre-furnished offices from a burnout at pennies on the dollar.
In fact, the cycle you describe is common in the commercial software world as well. I pay maintenance fees on several large commercial software packages that I have no intention of ever updating to the newest version. The version I have works fine, and the new version had "issues" in my environment. I pay the maintenance fees as insurance.
Microsoft has a large enough market, and enough clout that they can force their customers to upgrade, but most software companies don't have that kind of leverage.
Imagine that, the Hardware folks want the bandwidth folks to lower restrictions on bandwidth usage so that new computer hardware (and software) becomes more desirable. It strikes me as pretty funny that Microsoft (king of the PC monopoly) wants to force the cable companies to open up their networks, and yet they have fought tooth and nail against measures that would make the PC software business more open to competition.
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Exactly. Besides, most PHBs are actually fairly well educated, some even have [gasp] legal backgrounds. A quick comparison of the GPL and your typical MS EULA shows that GPLed software doesn't require anything unless you actually distribute software, while the MS EULA actually tries to control how you use the software. You can do whatever you want with GPLed software as long as you keep it to yourself.
Syntax is a cinch to learn, it's the new APIs that are a pain in the keister. In fact, that is one of the reasons that the Mono hackers are interested in .NET. They think that it would be cool to write modules in C# and use them in Perl, or write modules in Lisp and import them into Python.
Personally I don't know if it will work better than the writing libraries in C and creating language interfaces, but it is possible that the Mono hackers are onto something.
Now that is good news. In the long run Free Software is good for developing nations as it allows them to play on the software field as equals and not as subject nations. The fact of the matter is that Peruvians are just as smart as anyone, and twice as motivated as any American I have ever met. There is no doubt in my mind that they will make huge contributions to the software economy once they start working for themselves and not for the primarily North American software consortiums.
The Peruvian government has lots of reasons to keep normal citizens and businesses in line. After all most of the politicos have business interests. INDECOPI probably comes in handy by making sure that businesses that the politicos don't like have to pay for their software. There is little chance that Peru is going to turn INDECOPI loose on other branches of the government, and there is less chance that the Peruvian government is going to pay any attention to the BSA.
Peru probably will pay attention to the WTO, however. First world nations (and especially the U.S.) have been pushing anti-piracy heavily lately. Trade sanctions would certainly have an effect on Peru.
Most of the desktop software that I use on Linux is available on Windows. OpenOffice, Mozilla, the Gimp, Emacs, LaTeX are all readily available. The software that isn't available generally has Windows equivalents.
The moral of the story is that Free Software allows you to avoid vendor lock in, which is good.
If what Microsoft is doing is illegal, then what about what RedHat is doing? They not only give the software away, they even throw in source code, and make it easy to install this software over the Internet.
Besides, what do you bet Microsoft ends up making a profit on the Peruvian government. They throw in $550,000 in perks, and get a nice deal. If Microsoft makes money, then its not dumping, its merely being a good businessman.
Don't get me wrong, this particular deal is nothing short of a bribe. However, Peru is not your typical company. The BSA might seem scary to an American company, but Peru has their own military and their own laws. Peru has, in the past, expropriated entire industries stealing billions from foreign investors.
Peru is not scared of Microsoft, Peruvian officials are simply susceptible to bribes.
The problem with this is that Linux not only has a lower price, but it costs far less to fund Linux development than Windows development. That's why Ballmer is going around giving interviews in which he admits that Microsoft is no longer the discount solution. Even with $40 billion in the bank Microsoft can't buy off enough customers to force Free Software vendors out of business (especially when you start talking about IBM and their Linux push). Well, they probably could do it, but not without spooking investors on Wall Street. Since Microsoft management is heavily invested in Microsoft, you can bet that they won't do anything to upset the short term stock price, even if it would be good for Microsoft in the long run.
Microsoft's edge is that they aren't selling a commodity like lemonade. Ripping out Microsoft requires that you learn how to use some other system, which can be very expensive. However, this sort of momentum only carries you so far.
Not for a lousy $550,000 they won't.
During Christmas time it is a fairly common practice (or it used to be when I lived in Peru) for the police to simply pull over motorists and demand money. Bribes are very commonplace in Peru any time of the year, but during Christmas the police stop even pretending to be upholding the law. They have got guns and you don't, and their children need Christmas presents and Paneton.
Lima is a city of something like 7 million people and this "donation" is supposed to help something like 20,000 students (a pittance). My guess is that it ends up helping far fewer students than that, and all of the help will likely go to the rich private schools that the politicos send their children too.
Unfortunately it is impossible to do business in Peru without bribery. I am just surprised that Bill Gates himself is delivering the money. When I first heard that Peru was looking at Free Software legislation I was very skeptical. There are lots of good people in Peru, and I don't doubt that Dr. Villanueva is an honest man and a patriot, but honest Peruvian officials are few and far between.
It's actually considerably worse than that. You see with Linux you can actually move to a workable thin client solution like the folks in Largo Florida. With Linux you can easily support hundreds of users with one commodity Intel-based server. For about the same price as an upgrade to your current Windows OS and office suite you could move your entire office to thin clients and never have to worry about client side problems ever again. Imagine how much easier your life would be with one machine to configure and a whole pile of thin clients that you could simply throw away if something broke.
Talk about low TCO.
No, the bad guys will be the ones that aren't robots. If it breathes, shoot it.
As an American the idea of being able to fight entire wars without American casualties sounds pretty cool. Of course, if I lived in some other country I probably would be worried.
This is a guy planning to strap a rocket to his butt and shoot himself thirty miles into the air. You expected him to joke about it. I think that it is unfortunate that /. sent so many questions over that made fun of what he is doing. Personally I am surprised that he answered at all. I know that I wouldn't have.
Uh, people jump out of airplanes all of the time. Rocket guy simply thinks that he can get skydivers to 15,000 feet cheaper and safer than the folks with airplanes. Skydivers would probably appreciate that.
They should have simply charged for support, DUH! If ten times as many people wanted support as there were that bought the game then chances are good that they were sitting on a gold mine.
That's the beauty of Snort. If you use Snort as your IDS you have saved $20,000 that you can then spend on the services of someone that knows how to set Snort up. 20K buys a fair amount of consulting, and from the article it sounds like you are going to need expensive help no matter what IDS you use. It also appears that Snort is at least as robust and useful as the competition, so you might as well go for the least expensive option.
On the other hand, I have digital information that I have been carrying around since I owned an Apple ][c. With the rapidly decreasing cost of storage it is very inexpensive to hang onto old data. Mix in an offsite backup or two and your house can even burn down without losing your information. You certainly can't say that about your paper documents.
You clearly haven't lived outside the first world if you think that America is forcing goods on our poorer neighbors. Most people in the third world would give anything to live in the United States. They know what they want for themselves and their children, and it isn't a thatched hut out in the middle of the jungle. They want Big Macs, Nike shoes, and Captain Crunch just like the rest of us.
One hundred years from now the poorest folks in the world will probably live better than the richest of us now, and people will laugh at the 21st century environmentalists (like we laugh at Malthus) and cower over the predictions of their modern fear mongerers. Nothing changes.
You need to separate Hitler the genocidal maniac and Hitler the diplomat. Had Hitler concentrated on conquering England before dragging Russia into the war, and if Japan would have forestalled their attack on Pearl Harbor most of Europe would probably be speaking German right now. Hitler conquered nearly all of Western Europe with relatively few casualties. As a conqueror (and a diplomat) Hitler has few equals.
Besides which if the leaders of the rest of the world had been paying attention Hitler could have been stopped the Germans long before they became the serious threat that they were after the fall of France. Poor diplomacy was certainly part of the problem that lead to World War II. I would much rather have the future diplomats of the world learn this lesson in a harmless game in their history class than learn it in real life.
The irony of this example is that this particular kid deserves an A because he actually studied history and used the knowledge he gained to his advantage. Notice, for example, how he had historical precedents for each of his actions. Had the rest of the students been paying attention to their history lessons then they could have countered his moves. But they didn't, preferring instead to experience history first hand.
The problem is that this is how diplomacy really works. The actions of this particular player are very reminiscent of Germany's behavior under Hitler. In fact, there are several world rulers today that are probably worse than this particular player. Take a look at the people playing diplomacy for keeps in the Middle East, for instance.
That's the only explanation I have heard that explains why SuSE would pick up the tab for helping Caldera develop a Linux distribution. SuSE wants access to the remnants of Caldera's ex-SCO distribution network, TurboLinux's Japanese market, and Connectiva's Latin markets, and they are willing to pay the developers to go after these markets.
I wish them luck, but RedHat has the momentum, and it has much better licensing terms. In my opinion the reason that SuSE and Caldera aren't in RedHat's spot is that they haven't been as free with their source code as RedHat and Mandrake have been. It might seem like a small thing, but part of the reason that many of us are switching to Linux is to get out from under the thumb of our software vendors. Caldera and SuSE want us to trade our old proprietary software vendors with a new one (that bases most of their work on Linux), and most people aren't falling for that. Both Caldera and SuSE have created distributions that were as good (or better in most cases) as RedHat's, but the Freedom issue has tripped them up.
When the LSB was first being kicked around Bruce Perens happened to be on board and he suggested using Debian's set of core packages as a test distribution. However, Caldera (and to a lesser extent SuSE) didn't want a binary standard base that you could actually install, because the leaders at these companies knew that many people might simply deploy the test distribution and not pay for the proprietary extras that Caldera and SuSE had to offer. After all, if all you need is a Linux distribution that you can run Oracle on, it really doesn't matter which distribution it is as long as it is supported by Oracle.
That is why we have a written LSB standard and a set of tests instead of a much easier to create and use binary standard.
Well, Caldera and SuSE (and TurboLinux) have finally realized that their developers want a binary standard, and if they can't have one from the LSB they will simply use RedHat which is a very popular and extremely open.. Once again that leaves the proprietary distributions (Caldera, SuSE, TurboLinux) out in the cold, and so they have banded together to form a proprietary alternative. You see, they have created a binary distribution, but they want to charge people to use it. Since most of the software is GPLed, they can't deny sources to most of the distribution, but you can bet that they will be up to the same old tricks that they have always been up to. Caldera has said unequivocally that the UnitedLinux core would be licensed "per seat."
The truly unfortunate bit is that it would appear that Caldera is going to use UnitedLinux as a chance to drag SuSE into bankruptcy. SuSE gets to pay for the development and maintenance of UnitedLinux, and Caldera stands to receive a disproportionate amount of the benefit. Meanwhile Caldera still has revenues from the old SCO Unixes to keep itself afloat.
Personally, I use Debian, and think that it would make an excellent binary test platform. It is well-maintained, non-commercial, and it is a relatively slow moving target. There is lots of room for adding value to the Debian core packages. That being the case, I would much rather see RedHat or even Mandrake (both of which have firm policies of releasing source code under the GPL) become the binary standard than UnitedLinux.
Clearly you didn't read the article. The biggest difference between Sourcefire and most of the other crash and burn software companies (whether selling Free softwware or commercial software) was that Marty and friends have not spent money they didn't have. They ran the company out of Marty's house for a while, and when they finally did get offices they bought pre-furnished offices from a burnout at pennies on the dollar.
In fact, the cycle you describe is common in the commercial software world as well. I pay maintenance fees on several large commercial software packages that I have no intention of ever updating to the newest version. The version I have works fine, and the new version had "issues" in my environment. I pay the maintenance fees as insurance.
Microsoft has a large enough market, and enough clout that they can force their customers to upgrade, but most software companies don't have that kind of leverage.
Imagine that, the Hardware folks want the bandwidth folks to lower restrictions on bandwidth usage so that new computer hardware (and software) becomes more desirable. It strikes me as pretty funny that Microsoft (king of the PC monopoly) wants to force the cable companies to open up their networks, and yet they have fought tooth and nail against measures that would make the PC software business more open to competition.
The problem with this is that it is a stop gap measure at best. Microsoft can't afford to pay everyone to use their software.