I think MS is brilliant for doing this. They've embraced, extended and tried to extinguish third party browsers and firewall software, might as well do the same with spyware.
It's like buying laxatives and tossing them straight into the loo...eliminates the middleman and probably more efficient.
You imply "pragmatism" means "sacrificing your ideals", yet this is not what the Linux devs have done.
Well, "pragmatism" is literally an antonym of "idealism", so yes...speaking in terms of literal definitions, when you are acting pragmatically you are sacrificing ideals in the face of reality. Keep in mind that I did not mean to say Linux devs were sacrificing THER OWN ideals, it's just that their set of values is more practical than those of RMS. It's kinda like Castro believing in Communism after a fashion, and acting pretty consistently in fact, however Castro's ideals are tempered by a considerable amount of pragmatism, to the point that Castro's communism is quite a pale shade of "Karl Marx Red" (and no, I'm not implying Free software is communist any more than software is an automobile--it's just an analogy)
If we are looking at things through RMS' ideals though, then yes, the Linux devs have absolutely, certainly sacrificed some of those ideals on a few occasions. RMS would've never used BitKeeper in the first place--he'd spend weeks or months or years making a "truly Free" solution that worked perfectly. Linus' hand was forced when he made Git and dropped BitKeeper, and it did in fact cause a period of slowdown. RMS would strongly disagree with your assertion that Linus and the Linux kernel developers have not sacrificed the ideals of Free software (as RMS sees them) in the interests of practicality. RMS famously decreed that "if you value Freedom don't follow Linus".
For example, see the fucking driver ABI.
Many "Free software purists" of RMS' stripe say the Linux driver ABI does indeed sacrifice Free software ideals by more easily enabling the "binary blob" driver practice that we've dealt with on the graphics front for years. Nonetheless, even though the Linux devs would love to see binary drivers go away they are putting effort into a stable ABI. It is in fact a very good example IN SUPPORT of my argument that just because you don't like something doesn't mean you must not accommodate it. Can you explain to me how the "f***ing driver ABI" is somehow "less evil" than the GNOME folks working on an OOXML parser/filter? What makes OOXML more evil than an NVidia driver?
On the other side of your false dichotomy, ultimately controlled by the big, bad, FSF, is GTK. Which has a much more permissive license than, uhm, Qt.
Indeed it does--another example of pragmatism over idealism. GTK can be used on multiple platforms with Free and restricted/closed applications alike, but it preserves ehough ideals to insist that EVERYONE who uses the library preserves the freedom of that library. I just find it puzzling that the KDE team would suddenly take a "principled stand" on OOXML when KDE is built upon a library that is actually "less principled" in terms of licensing than GTK. GTK might have a more permissive license, put at least its consistent. The choice of a more strict license for qt was not done out of principle at all; it was done in order to preserve a revenue stream for Trolltech. GTK defines its ideals up front. With qt, those ideals are for sale to the highest bidder.
That is partly why I still maintain a preference for GNOME and GTK even after qt was GPLed. They might not live up to each and every Free software ideal, but at least they are consistent.
Miguel may have been a founder of the GNOME project, but he is not even on the GNOME foundation board anymore. His opinion matters no more than that of anyone else who contributes code to GNOME. Though he has written some excellent software his baffling statements probably with respect to OOXML will not likely be taken seriously.
RMS is worried about compromising on principles of Free software by putting efforts into making software that reads or writes this technically and philosophically nasty format. Since when has AVOIDING interoperability furthered the spread of Free software? Linus has yielded to pragmatism many times in the past (using BitKeeper for example, and being cautious about GPL3) whereas RMS remains steadfastly rigid in his ideals at all levels. RMS' stance is admirable, but look at where the Linux kernel is...then look at how far the HURD has come in comparison. Perhaps some pragmatism isn't always a bad thing?
Now, as far as compromising "principle" with the pragmatic decision to work on making GNOME read the OOXML format, where exactly is this a more serious concern than with countless other interoperability projects? What about the work that went into making NTFS mountable in Linux? What about the Samba project? What about the ability of OpenOffice, KOffice, AbiWord, GNUMeric, etc. to at least partially support Microsoft's legacy binary file formats already? Where do we draw the "principled" line here? Microsoft's "core dump" binary formats, NTFS file system, CIFS and the Active Directory are not proper open standards yet great effort has been made thus far to reverse-engineer and deal with them so as to break down the Microsoft lock-in. How come, all of the sudden, RMS has to chime in about OOXML and now suddenly we should all ignore it on principle?
Perhaps the KDE people should become even more principled and drop all the hooks it has with Samba to browse and be browsed on Microsoft's "network neighbourhood". Perhaps Linux-based OSes should not only all drop GNOME as the default desktop, they should also drop the ability to mount NTFS volumes too. After all, if we're gonna snub OOXML because it's crap and it's closed, then we should be consistent and do the same across the board.
KDE is "True Free Software"? OMFG, how times have changed! One of the biggest single reasons I'm a GNOME user today is because back in the "dark ages" KDE depended upon the then-proprietary qt library and GNOME and the associated GTK library were "truly Free". By the time this was rectified GNOME had improved a lot, GNOME designers were more focused on usability and I was already used to the environment.
One thing that has NOT changed is the licensing for GNOME--it's still good ol' GPL and LGPL and nothing else.
GNOME is free software lite. It is almost free software, just without the Four Freedoms. With KDE, you can be sure that all KDE software you use is truly Free. GNOME, on the other hand, is more than willing to bow to Microsoft.
With GNOME, you can see the source code, make copies of the code or resulting binaries to meet any needs you have, use it for any purpose you want (fit or unfit, without any warranty, but still use it nonetheless) and of course you can share it with your friends without the BSA beating down your door. Those are pretty good freedoms, and there are four of them. Can you explain to me SPECIFICALLY where the freedoms are lacking?
Furthermore, with KDE, what exactly give you any more assurance over GNOME that the software you are using is truly free? Trolltech will happily offer an alternative, proprietary license for its code to the highest bidder. GNOME has taken a more consistent approach by putting libraries under LGPL--so commercial apps can be made that take advantage of GTK yet the libraries are sure to remain Free. Such is not the case with commercial KDE apps. You can use KDE-based software that is totally non-Free because the publishers have paid off Trolltech.
At least with GNOME everyone has to play by the same rules and the GNOME platform itself remains uncompromised. Historically KDE with qt has been quite a moving target due to different platforms having different licensing rules and with the dual licensing scheme in place.
GNOME died the day it accepted Evolution with the proprietary Exchange connector.
What have you been smoking? I suggest you stop because it's frying your brain. From the "horses mouth" (Novell's own press release):
The Evolution Connector for Microsoft Exchange Server source code can be found at http://ftp.ximian.com/ and developer information about Evolution can be found at http://www.gnome.org/projects/evolution. The Connector code is now available to the public along with the rest of Evolution under the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL).
When Novell included the connector with Evolution 2.0 it also relicensed it to GPL (FULL GPL at that; not LGPL) and it immediately made all the source code for it available the very second it licensed it under GPL. Do you know something I don't? How EXACTLY is this different from when Trolltech GPLed its libraries to allow them to be TRULY Free? Being you're such a devout fan of KDE surely you know how this is different?
The fact that KDE is objectively a better desktop environment is just gravy.
I've never once seen any OBJECTIVE evidence that one desktop is superior over the other from end users OR developers. It's ALWAYS been a matter of personal tastes, which are very SUBJECTIVE...visual layout, how things are configured, use of C++ or whatever. Again, I gladly welcome any concrete, specific areas where KDE is without a doubt superior to GNOME. I prefer GNOME over KDE myself, and I'll freely admit that I think KDE does SOME stuff better and that my overall impressions are largely my personal taste. To be more specific, I find the GNOME design has become more consistent than KDE (something that wasn't always the case, but has become true over time as GNOME has really pushed specific and consistent usability/UI standards for the desktop and ass
I think the reason we haven't gone crazy and created the mother-of-all criminal registries is because smart politicians, judges and law enforcement people all know they are stupid and don't work. The reason we have any sort of registries like this is because they can be effective political strategy. That is what "Megan's Law" was--there was a sad, probably preventable and high profile tragedy and a public outcry ensued: "the Government must do something! What about the CHILDREN!!!". And so, politicians put together this nice big database project to make voters feel better, even though it probably creates more problems than it solves, because now not only are there sick criminals out on the street, evry nutjob out there can find them which creates yet another crime issue. However, the government "did something" so the voters are happy, and as a nice side benefit there are these contracts to create and maintain this skookum database system, which make for perfect "job creation" (palm-greasing) opportunities.
It's just the same game we've played for awhile now. A group of crazed zealots pull a kamakaze into important US buildingsa and kill thousands, so now we have a "no-fly" database and a whole set of highly visible new security screening procedures and rules...just the same as Megan's law but on a grand scale--new database, new "systems", new lucrative contracts and voters who feel safer because the government is "doing something", even though those particular somethings are probably as ineffective as they are visible (the governent has done as much wrong as it has done right, and what it has done right is the least visible on the political radar).
Canada has it's own "registry disease" too. A gunman killed a bunch of innocent female students in Montreal--it was a tragedy that remains among the most brutal crimes in Canada's history, and it was the vehicle that propelled the government into bringing about the universal gun registry. Costs ran uncontrolled up to $2 billion before an election changed governments and the brakes were put on spending. In the meantime, RCMP and municipal police forces were underfunded and understaffed and the trends in violent crime have been completely unaffected by the registry (contrary to media hype on both sides--violent crime hasn't dramatically escalated, however the registry has done exactly zero to slow or stop the steady rate of violent crime, despite what supporters of the universal gun registry have said. Most "on the inside" know this to be true). Never mind that Mark Lepine had already seriously broken the law before he fired the first shot (mere possession of the weapon he had was already very illegal in Canada, and the registry wouldn't change that because the restricted weapon isn't even legally register-able today). The registry is easier to get going and gives more rapid positive political feedback than pumping $2 billion into our police forces and doing a massive recruitment and training programme...and there's that "palm greasing" factor again.
Canada has a sex offender registry as well, though it isn't accessible to the public, and we take the DNA samples of sex offenders (probably the only thing that is useful about the registry). Same thing applies though--it is a politically-friendly thing to do. Never mind that police forces have understaffed or underfunded sex-crimes units, or inadequate training, or that crackpot judges sentence rapists to mere months in jail sometimes, or that rapists go free or innocent are jailed because investigators botch cases sometimes. Nope, instead we create lists, because voters like lists and lists cover up problems that are hard to deal with. That's too bad, because billions in funding get wasted on lists. We should be tackling root causes like poverty, homelessness and addiction. At the same time we should be dealing with those now beyond redemption--repeat or violent rapists and molesters should be jailed for the rest of their lives with no parole ever for example, right alongside murderers. I'd
Actually, its a bad example of government incompetence, but a great example of how an organized disinformation campaign can influence public policy.
It is nothing of the sort. ABSOLUTELY ALL of this information is correct. Whether or not you believe a national database of firearms will actually reduce firearms deaths does not factor in here.
Government incompetence was not the only factor for sure--there were political considerations, but it was NOT the federal Conservative party that derailed the project in the slightest (technically that party did not exist--the Conservative party is the result of a merger of the PROGRESSIVE-conservatives and the Alliance parties, and speaking as one familiar with the inner workings of both parties the present organisational structure most closely resembles the Alliance party, but the policies overall are more PC-like). Nor is is some "Republican-lite" right-wing conspiracy.
The original "net cost" estimate of $2million was the result of extremely foolish assumption-making on the part of the Cretien-Liberal government. The modest figure assumed that the system would be "mostly self-funding" from two components: fees paid by gun owners with each registration, and contribution from provincial governments who would be tasked with enforcing the registry (the feds were merely going to collect and keep the data, where the cities--using provincial money--would have to dedicate the bulk of the maintenance resources). The "disinformation campaign" was therefore mostly a product of the LIBERALS, not the "right wing gun lobby, because that $2million was the estimated cost to the federal gov't ONLY, NOT the overall cost to taxpayers.
It was that burden placed upon the provinces that was the reason for much of the resistance and lack of cooperation (the feds eventually had to take full responsibility for the gun registry). The ideological opposition was for sure the main factor, but the unloading of responsibility gave them good excuses. Note that the "right wing" were not the only ones opposed to the gun registry. The province of Saskatchewan was led by the socialist New Democratic Party when they refused to cooperate, and some federal NDP MPs were also not on board.
There were specific instructions posted at firing ranges and gun club meetings to fuck with the system in order to drive up the cost of administering it.
I understand that gun owners and provinces who refused to cooperate, or even made efforts to obstruct the registry, contributed to the inflation of costs, however this in no way AT ALL justifies 50000 to 100000 percent cost overrun. Such a monumental misjudgement can only be attributed to gross incompetence, inefficiency and corruption. First of all, a law and system that allows hundreds or thousands of people to register their glue guns in protest, without the means of preventing such fraud, is severly flawed. Secondly, it you take the total amount spent on the registry (an immense number that is still hard to quantify exactly because of a lack of financial oversight) and divide that by the total applications received (INCLUDING the "fake protest" applications) it averages out to between $1500 and $3000 PER APPLICATION.
That ridiculous cost per application obviously shows that those protest methods you describe were mere statistical noise compared to the gross incompetence and waste of the federal government. I've seen the registry forms--there is NO WAY AT ALL someone could sabotage them so much that the cost of handling these applications would be that high. At the rates estimated that would mean it would take 80 to 100 man hours to receive, process and maintain one single application. Proper screening would reject applications for glue guns, water pistols and such within minutes. These idiots let them right through!
Given the colossal stupidness of the whole registry project that dwarfs the ridiculous protestations of many gun owners, I'm not surprised in the lightest that the feds would spend m
Online distribution is only feasible if you have an Internet-enabled device connected to your HDTV.
Well, *network* enabled anyways. Online distribution does NOT require a "media centre PC", or any device that includes an ethernet port and speaks TCP/IP in fact. Where I live the cable company has something called "Shaw OnDemand" where you buy/rent/lease a digital terminal that plugs right into your usual coax cable. This isn't a "tuner+TiVO" thing--content is delivered real-time as you request it. Even so, standard digital TV with a TiVO is essentially "Online distribution" as well.
Sure, media center PCs are getting more common (and more affordable), and the numbers on HD-ready game consoles are steadily rising, but the vast majority of HDTV owners do not possess either
Not sure about your market, but I'd say that the alternatives I describe above, while combined might not be in the hands of more than 50% of HDTV owners yet, constitute a SUBSTANTIAL minority. It is definitely NOT true that the "VAST majority" of HTDV owners do not possess the gear to take advantage of online distribution, at least in the local market for me. In fact, I'd say OnDemand or digital-TV-with-TiVO already significantly outnumber both BD and HD-DVD. Since you only seem to examine HD-game-consoles vs. HTDVs your numbers really fail to look at the whole on-line picture.
Maybe in 10 years the tide will have turned and most people will be using online distribution. However, there's serious money to be made in the meantime, and that requires physical media.
I believe you are greatly over-estimating how long it'll take for on-line to catch on. It is quite a way from mainstraem yet, but I think it is actually ahead of BD and HD-DVD as far as momentum goes, and that we could see online distribution being mainstream in as soon as 5 years. Remembering how long it took DVD to gain critical mass it doesn't look very hopeful for physical HD media unless they resolve the problem. I think that BOTH physical formats will have a short life and be big failures compared to the original DVD format if the market stays the way it does. People remember Beta vs. VHS and how that limited market growth (and former Bets owners really remember getting burned) and history won't repeat quite the same way.
I foresee one of two scenarios that MUST happen or physical media will go extinct (in the mainstream at least):
1. HD-DVD will eventually kill BD. BD might be more advanced and have more capacity, but it is more complex to implement (the discs themselves, but especially the players) and so it started with a very bad cost disadvantage that it has to recify. No matter how many studios it has on its side, this cost problem, plus the fact that Microsoft and its allies (ie technology vendors that build the players vs the Hollywood studios) are in the HD-DVD camp mean a Betamax-like existence for BD (gradual slide into obscurity)
OR
2. Both competing formats are the same physical size and work under the same general principles (short-wavelength laser shot at a little plastic disc to read bits compressed using the same basic algorithms). VHS and Beta machines were so different that to make a device tha played both formats you'd basically have to house tow separate players in one giant enclosure. A dual-format BD/HD-DVD player would share almost ALL the physical components and it is basically no harder to make a laser pick up the bits from both formats than it is to make a DVD pick up data off a CD (which has been done for many years now). Thus, as the HD media technology matures, dual-format players will be only modestly more expensive to make and purchase than a BD-only player. The format war will then be as relevant to typical end users as the DVD-R/DVD+R argument is today.
I think that #2 will happen in the next few years because interested parties have invested so much into their pet technologies..and it'll happen within 5 years, or else both formats will be relegated to offline optical backup storage.
You're wrong. The basic problem of browser developers vs. armchair standardization experts is that unless browsers render most pages as intended, users will use something else.
No, the problem is that we've let browsers slide for so long that the standards are meaningless. I'm not advocating that we simply dump old standards and make everything break all at once. The old standards are still in place and can still be followed. New standards should be more aggressive in deprecating old crufty stuff--HTML5 allows for far too much old crufty stuff than it should. That is what is good about the W3C standards vs the philosophy of the HTML5 guys--you have a DTD that days exactly what format AND what version AND what compatibility level (ie. strict). If you don't include that, it is tag soup. If you do, you'd better be valid markup or it'll break. There should really be some pressure on browser makers to optimise for "strict" behaviour and consider "tag soup" to be deprecated "legacy" behavior. It is much easier to make "strict" code render consistently between browsers, and parsing code under strict conditions should also be much more efficient and faster because you don't have to deal with countless possible inconsistencies.
The HTML 5 spec is being written and pushed by browser vendors. Html 5 is being supported as it is being written. It's being designed with sound engineering principles in mind
That it is a product of browser vendors is probably some of the problem--they've invested in all this browser code and want a much more incremental approach. A proper standard must involve not only the develpers of user agents, but also content providers and end users. We let the user-agent developer lunatics run the asylum for too long in the early days of the WWW and we now have a very sick web, with 95% of pages having markup flaws, really bad security issues and so on.
And as I am an engineer, I can tell you that much of what the HTML5 folks have talked about don't follow any particular engineering principle. In our products we provide means of interoperability with each new platform, however at some point we assess user's requirements and the state of technology and start clean. Even the PC platform has done a reset like that from time to time: If the HTML5 approach was applied to the PC platform we wouldn't have had ATX motherborads--we'd just add kludges to the AT standard and we'd still have ISA slots, but now with 3 or 4 rows of connector pins and extra notches and sections added on, just in case someone wanted to plug that old classic Soundblaster into their Core Duo screamin' desktop in the same slot that modern PCIE cards would use. The hardware engineers weren't that foolish; they introduced completely new, incompatible bus standards to take advantage of new technology and address new needs. In the process, they accommodated legacy hardware by including both types of slots, with the new slots having compelling new capabilities.
Browser makers should take the same approach: From now on, new markup tags and features should be IGNORED if there isn't a proper DTD or the code doesn't validate. Tag soup, and documents with older DTDs could still be rendered just fine (even broken documents should be rendered as much as possible, however there should be a very noticeable error message when broken code is encountered). If the MSIE and Mozilla teams had started doing this way back when introducing HTML4 the web would've been a much better place. However, encouraging poor web programmers to use new bells and whistles as much as possilbe with as little hassle as possible is what gets browser market share, not responsible "engineering principles".
Most of the proposed changes in HTML 5 are very pragmatic and easy to support by browser vendors. They drop DTD support because it has proven to be completely useless and unreliable in the current web.
That is a problem--it is the browser makers being self serving. Much of what makes things easy for t
On the one hand, people tout the web as a great platform for communicating ideas, from anyone to anyone. On the other hand, people keep saying that html needs to be standards compliant, the browsers need to fit the standard and that it should be exact and break catastrophically at a mistake.
Software development made great strides when standards for C programming language became established. Java stepped that up even more. Programming languages "break catastrophically at a mistake" you know. Miss a semicolon or closing bracket and it won't compile. The WWW is not just a big distributed repository of documents anymore; we now have this "Web 2.0" with online applications being built. HTML is no longer just markup--it denotes meaningful structure that scripting and stylesheets depend upon to function properly. It isn't simply markup anymore--it is a declarative language used to specify the "V" part of an online application implemented with an MVC-architecture.
As HTML evolved to take on the role of programming language, it ABSOLUTELY MUST be treated with the same discipline, or web applications will always suffer from poor performance and poor quality.
Furthermore, confirming to standards does NOT impede "communicating ideas from anyone to anyone". It ENHANCES it. In modern society there are a lot of dead languages no loner spoken or written, especially small "tribal" dialects. Furthermore, as time passes the surviving languages become more standard. In English we have dictionaries that tell us how we are supposed to spell and rules about grammar, even if they aren't perfect they are a common ground. If we just let everyone decide for themselves how to spell for example we might all spell phonetically and use our own rules--instead of "laugh" we'd write "laf" or "laff" or "lahf" or "lahff" or "lauff"...get the picture? Add liberties taken with grammar and we'd devolve into tribal dialects of english so different that someone from London wouldn't even be able to read what someone from Atlanta wrote, much less get past the different accent.
With technology it is even MORE vital to have precise standards for communication--it's bad enough to deal with "big endian vs. little endian" of different architectures. Imagine if everyone encoded character sets differently for the same language (ie. ASCII did not exist ore wasn't followed strictly)? THAT would sure break down communications! As we become more sophisticated in exchanging information the standards have to become more sophisticated and more disciplined too.
If a page has a major breakdown because a closing tag is missing, then someone like my mother would just give up trying.
I presume you use your mother as an example of a casual web browser user and she is not a developer of websites. In that case, what would it matter? When was the last time she examined the source HTML? Does she actually save it and correct it to view the page? NO! If a closing tag is missing it IS NOT HER PROBLEM! Web application developers have gotten lazy and spoiled and expect a VERY forgiving environment--more so tha ANY OTHER kind of developer (C, Java or even VB). If you forget a closing bracket in C or Perl there is a MAJOR BREAKDOWN--it won't even run or it'll do REALLY funky things. It's a pain in the butt but you know what? Millions of REAL programmers have learned to deal with it, and web veleopers can learn to deal with it too. If you've tasked "designers" to author web page CODE you've done the wrong thing--you get CODERS to code. Designers are good at DESIGNING and coders should do their job and give them tools to generate PROPER CODE from the DESIGN the designers made with the WYSIWYG tools.
Internet Explorer, for all its problems, was very good at error forgiveness, and it opened up the platform for a lot of people.
This forgiveness and looseness with standards is EXACTLY WHAT MAKES IE ENEMY NUMBER ONE! Microsoft, almost single-handedly, made the WWW into GARBAGE. IT didn't have to
Honestly are HTML authors really that damn stupid and lazy that they can't manage to write compliant XHTML 1.0? Really, people, it ISN'T THAT BAD. Yes, there is a lot of complex stuff and does namespaces and its all modular and things, but you don't need to use all of that! Putting a forward slash in an empty tag and quotes on your attributes and case sensitivity really aren't HUGE burdens on developers. Perhaps we've all gotten too used to IDEs that auto-complete and auto-adjust case and everything else that we've all turned off our brains. It doesn't help that Microsoft (and even Netscape played along in the bad old days) have encouraged the development of crock-o-crap HTML by adding their own bling to standards and resorting to loosey-goosey tag-soup parsing fro so many years.
HTML5 seems to be doing a lot to make sure mediocre developers can stay in their comfort zone and to perpetuate many of the more serious problems we still face today. The HTML5 FAQ makes me cringe in many places!
* "no DOCTYPE. You may include one if you wish, though this is not recommended as they are only relevant when using a validating parser which web browsers do not have." - This is the wrong recommendation and a really stupid rationale. One cannot assume that web browsers will be the only clients to read your document, nor that all clients will lack validating parsers. This saves a small bit of work for lazy HTML authors at the expense of making
* "HTML 5 is being developed with IE compatibility in mind." - This is a backwards way to move forward with proper standards. You design applications towards standards, not standards towards applications. IE is already mostly compatible with existing standards--the solution is to make sure IE8 tows the line, not to bend over for IE developers. In the automation industry, there is a massive, complicated 8-headed beast of a standard called IEC 61158 that is a good example of what happens when applications drive standards. The IEC was somewhat stuck here however because they got into the game late, when all these battling vendor-developed systems were already established. With the Internet, though the situation is not perfect, existing standards hold a fair and increasing amount of influence. I believe the philosophies behind HTML5 don't do enough to prevent the perpetuation of tag soup and loose vendor-driven application of standards.
* "The details are still being worked out, but the plan is to indicate the maturity level on a per-section basis." - This puzzles me: They seem to be abandoning the "modules" approach being sought by XHTML in the interests of simplicity, however it is intended that user-agent developers will be implementing the standard "on a per-section basis" as they figure everything out along the way? And they expect this process to take TWICE AS LONG as XHTML did to establish itself as a ratified standard? I sense a lack of vision here--something along the lines of "lets look at what we've got, put Bondo on the dents and holes then spray it with Tremclad to make it look pretty". Not only that, they've decided that they'll work on the right fender and the left door this year, then the rear bumper next year and so on. There's nothing wrong with incrementally ratifying standards, but how about some VISION and PLANNING? Define some modules and their scopes then set teams upon them to tackle them individually and have them ratified as they reach maturity, and do so in a logical fashion (some sort of "core", then forms, then scripting, etc)
* "Void elements in HTML (the new name for empty elements) do not require a trailing slash...However, due to the widespread attempts to use XHTML 1.0, there are a significant number of pages using the trailing slash"--yet ANOTHER wrong recommendation and faulty reasoning. Lazy HTML authors are annoyed by the slash, but it's been part of XHTML for years so there are a lot of web documents that use it, so HTML5 parsers will have to continue to parse tag soup and do the "guess if there's a closing t
The Citadel project is not the product of a for-profit venture. In 1981 as electronic bulletin board systems were starting to take off a BBS guy going by "CrT" wrote software to run a BBS on CP/M computers called Citadel. A year or so later there was some big soap-opera personality conflict and the original author walked away from the program and left the source code to float in the public domain. This code was picked up by dozens of different people who made an equal number of forks (forking was more apt to happen in the days before widespread internet and in the culture of strong personalities of those early days of the PC).
A few years after the original Citadel was released into the wild as public domain, a guy named Art Cancro (I. T. Foobar--he still maintains it today and posts on slashdot, understandably plugging it whenever he can) re-wrote the original CP/M Citadel to run on Unix for his hobby BBS called "Uncensored" (it ultimately ended up sharing no source code at all with the CP/M version; it was however a faithful work-alike). Cancro's version was referred to as "Citadel/UX" to distinguish it from the unrelated CP/M codebase. The UX part was later dropped since all the other Citadel variants with similar names (Citadel, Citadel/86, Citadel+, etc) have dropped out of active development and use.
There was a forked version called DOC (Dave's Own Citadel) that was somewhat popular but as the BBS scene died out so did DOC (there hasn't been a release for over 5 years). Cancro's Citadel persisted because it adapted to new technologies while other Citadel-variant BBSes remained steadfastly text-oriented BBS-style systems. Citadel(/UX) now appears to be the only Citadel variant BBS platform under active development (though others remain in use in a few places).
It's BBS heritage is quite evident in its architecture despite the fact that it has evolved significantly into a real "groupware" system. The original text-based Citadel client is still present, alongside the "webcit" AJAX client. The data store is still centered around the classic "Citadel Host/Floor/Room/Message" system and the instant-messaging and chat through webcit is a front-end to the tried-and-true chatroom system. Mr. Cancro and the other developers have done a remarkable job of bringing in new features and connectivity around this BBS "engine" without compromising the elegant and simple architecture.
Citadel started as, and continues to be, driven by enthusiasts as a hobby, and as such there are no "employees" with anything to gain financially from plugging Citadel. When a Citadel developer does pump Citadel, it is largely out of pride for a job well done. Citadel is older than Linux itself and remarkably remains almost completely free of commercial sponsorship.
I expect that MS-Exchange connectivity will be licensed under GPLv3, just as the rest of the citadel and webcit projects are presently licensed.
Sadly it looks like the connector is being developed by a closed source developer rather than within the Citadel project itself so my prediction isn't quite true. Still it would make a great alternative to Exchange, and fortunately for me Exchange compatibility is not an issue.
I quite enthusiastically plug Citadel wherever I can, not only because it performs extremely well and is easy to administer, but because the project is very open (the citadel.org site has a LOT of info on protocols and other technical developer stuff) and the more people that are aware of it the more likely people will get involved in developing it and moving it forward (eventually, perhaps, leading to a Free exchange connector;-). I'm still amazed that software of this quality, with a 20 year history of development, continues to fly under the radar with much of the Free software community.
Based upon the direction that Citadel has been following w.r.t licensing and that where it is mentioned they're proud of being a "100% truly Free" application (and not some watered down "community edition" with closed extensions) I expect that MS-Exchange connectivity will be licensed under GPLv3, just as the rest of the citadel and webcit projects are presently licensed.
I've been running a citadel server for some time now--it replaced Postfix as an email server--and it has proven to be extremely capable, considering the simple little thing it is. I am running the second-to-latest release and the more I hear about what is in development the more I'm looking forward to upgrading. Citadel shows excellent promise and would really take off with a greater profile...it makes IBM's "Boated Goats" look embarrassingly clunky already. With Exchange compatability on this level perhaps it could put ugly old Bloated Goats to sleep for good and get on with the task of giving Exchange itself a run for its money.
I love it how everytime something like this come up, people screm "Yeah, at last the goverment *forces* these companies to to this and that, so we can finally have a free market!"
There are semantics and confusion of terminology in economics, just like in the realm of software development (open source vs Free software vs freeware).
What Canada has in the wireless market is a fairly "closed" market. There are 3 big players and each do their best to minimise interoperability and retain customers (they call the latter "reducing churn"). They fought strongly against number portability because it would be expensive and "damage business" (as a result we waited a long time after the US to get number portability). They minimised that impact by making contract lock-in terms stronger. In the absence of government action the market was doing nothing but getting more closed.
"Hands off" by the government would be like BSD-licensed software--the market would be very "free" but given the oligopoly that exists such freedoms could be abused (just as BSD licensed code routinely makes its way into closed software like MS Windows). Total freedom would be like "public domain" source code--even attributions could be stripped away (this would be like closing down the CRTC and letting the spectrum be used in a free-for-all--strongest transmitters win).
Regulations put in place by the government in this case are analgous to terms of GPL-licensed software. GPL contains a number of restrictions that "force these developers and publishers to do this and that" with respect to disclosing source code, the idea being to foster the OPEN "bazaar" development community. Given the current situation in the Canadian market I think radio spectrum reservations and mandating roaming access requirements is a very good GPL-like decision (it was in fact done in the US and many European countries and produced favourable results). The status quo (or even relaxing reculation on existing monopolistic players) certainly is not acceptable, and the socialist alternative (outright price controls/caps/etc on what existing providers can bill to end customers) would discourage competition and kill innovation and choice (imagine what your cellphone would do to you in Soviet Russia, basically).
I'd agree with your sentiment that government "forcing" companies or people to do this and that should be kept to a minimum, all things being equal. However all things are very far from equal. There is no serious competition between the dominant providers, and two of the three (Bell and Telus) historically were government-mandated/protected regional monopolies in years past (Telus was the result of privatising AGT--the Alberta Government Telephone company). Basically, past governments had a large hand in building up this mess, so yeah, it actually does make some sense for current governments to dismantle this mess to foster a more free market (well, more OPEN market actually, to start with).
The fact Telus and Verizon offer similar plans is not surprising, becuase there is cross-ownership between the two and they are partners, so they'd align at some levels...however there are a lot of differences.
local/long distance calling is 50 dollars a month for 400 minutes within Canada. I pay the same thing for my phone plan in America.
That is but one component of the services these companies offer. You completely ignore everything else:
* When Telus advertises "$x for y minutes" that "y minutes" is ALL you get. You get NO data transfer, NO voicemail , NO caller ID, NO call waiting...NOTHING. Even Mandatory "system access fees" and taxes are extra.
* Telus offers inflexible "SPARK" packages--if you want a specific feature you must get a more expensive package that is also bundled with features you don't want. "A la carte" is difficult to get, and when you do get features that way is quite overpriced.
* Telus data plan, at least for consumers, is VERY antiquated. They still charge by the KB or each HTTP request (and it can add up very very quickly). If you get a package the limits are so low they're a joke. They still ascribe to the "walled garden" strategy when it comes to web browsing too--if you go to one of a hundred or so "partner" websites it is part of the flat rate, and if you go to other sites, even if you have one of their packages, they STILL charge you by the HTTP request!
* They literally have ZERO "unlimited" plans, and the closest to unlimited you can get is EXTREMELY expensive.
I'm not familiar with Verison's rates, but from what I've seen of the US industry as a whole they are fairly more competitive than Canada now. What is sad is that US cell service is a joke compared to most of Europe and Asia, making cell service in Canada even more embarrassing. Considering that Canada got such a huge jump on the US in the area of broadband to the home it is tragic that wireless service didn't achieve the same thing (it's also sad that Canada's lead over the US in broadband has shrunk considerably too).
I do not think that this copyright initiative will happen in the form suggested, though I think it is a good chance that some level of DMCA-like provisions will come into being in the years to come. Not only is the Hollywood lobby very strong, but the Liberals under PM Cretien signed the WIPO copyright treaty almost enthusiastically a decade ago...and just like with Kyoto Canada has been castigated for not living up to their promises by signing a treaty and not following through with required legislation.
Anyways, the Liberals (currently the main opposition party in the lower house of the minority gov't) have been in support for a more Hollywood-friendly copyright regime (media corporate types like the Asper family, etc are very loyal long-time Liberals). If the Conservatives were to introduce a DMCA-like bill it would most likely receive support from the Liberals and it would easily pass over the objections of the NDP and Bloq parties. That said, and although politics in Canada are much more rigid along party lines than in the US, the current political situation makes it less likely to be a confidence motion and individual MPs may vote against the party line on this issue. Quite frankly (and unlike Kyoto), copyright law is very very low on the political priority list and showing some independence on this issue wouldn't be damaging to an MPs political aspirations.
So although the "blue Tories" (former "Mulroney-style" PCs) may back this bill, there is a chance some "green Tories" (former Reform and Alliance members) may object on both populist and libertarian grounds. The Industry Minister and Heritage Minister would be the ones steering this bill, with the former having a higher profile in cabinet than the latter. Until recently, Maxime Bernier was Industry minister and is known to be a "green Tory" (backer of the former Alliance party and fairly libertarian-oriented) and Heritage minister Bev Oda was a fairly weak influence. As a result copyright reform was stalled as the governent not only gave it a low priority, they also resisted the more draconian requirements of the WIPO agreement. Now a "blue Tory" (Jim Prentice) is industry minister and could be more receptive to a Canadian DMCA. OTOH, the new Heritage minister is Josee Vernier, and she is more visible than Bev Oda was. Josee is also a "green Tory" (leaned more towards the old Alliance party than the old PCs, and is still a strong supporter of the ADQ party in Quebec which is very Reform/Alliance-like). Like Bernier, she is more apt to consider individuals consumer rights and freedoms than many other MPs. Furthermore, there is some antagonism between media conglomerates and the current governing party and as such the Harper Tories are less likely to bend over for them.
The Liberals historically support the DMCA, though "Martin Liberals" (more right-leaning like former PM Martin) have less influence now. High-profile Liberal MPs with NDP histories like Bob Rae and Ujjal Dosanjh are pretty left-leaning and would object to a DMCA for very different reasons than a "green Tory" would (more because it is too friendly to industry rather than its impact on individual freedoms). Plus, left-leaning Liberals are apt to vote against anything that looks too American-like such as the DMCA (whether or not it is a good thing). The Liberals are also less principled/less ideological and their platform shifts greatly with the polls, so they are not likely to follow through on an idea that would lose them votes (again, whether it is good for the country or not).
Anyways, in this Minority government, with the two biggest parties having no strong/passionate opinion on the subject, it is a simply a matter of who speaks loudest. In the absence of public resistance a DMCA could sleepwalk through Parliament on the basis that it meets our treaty obligations and protects the media industry. However if enough people were to protest a government sensitive to getting popular vote would drop it more easily. Also, if lawyers and judges suggest ther
Based on the recent news of a major Korean company being under investigation for corruption/et cetera
I fail to see the relevance. Asia is not one big homogenous society--it isn't even a "bloc" as was the "communist bloc" of Soviet republics and eastern-European satellite nations. Japan's economy and business community differ greatly from Korea's. Furthermore, given the history between those particular nations, Koreans of a certain age would take great offense to being compared with the Japanese. They understand each other about as much as Americans and Russians do.
Aside from being offensive to Japanese, Koreans, Chinese, etc to be lumped together as all the same because they're Asian there isn't any indication that they are any more apt to be duped my MS (or to be co-conspirators) than anyone else in the world. MS' first and highest-profile "intellectual property assurance" deal was with an American company involving a German-developed Linux product after all.
This isn't an "Asian world" or even "business world" thing...this is just MS finding a firm with a weak-enough constitution to participate in MS' mafia-inspired protection racket.
As has been noted the fact is Microsoft dominates the market and to not admit that and include interoperability is foolish.
Equally as foolish is to sacrifice standards to the dominant player. The risk with Novell's "deal with the devil" is that is could subjugate them to MS. If they roll over and accept MS' assertion that their patents are valid, or toil on projects to implement proprietary components of the.NET framework, or any other manner of invented-by-MS initiative, the result is that MS remains in control of the computing environment. If effort is made to entrench technology already embraced by MS, all the easier for MS to extend it. It is MS' goal to be able to say "sure we have no problem with Linux..in fact here is this SuSE one that we endorse so try it out", then once they've got something in place they can come in again and say "looks like Linux doesn't meet all your needs--try our Windows server with these new MS-only extensions!"
In short, cooperation has to be balanced with competition.
Without collaboration Linux would remain a niche market, but with Novell getting out there it's getting in the press and people are reading about this thing called Linux.
Novell has to go further than offer collaboration--they have to beat MS at its own game and offer something compelling to the PHB's of the corporate world that MS doesn't have (i.e. they must "out extend" Microsoft) or else their agreement with MS will do more harm than good. They have to be able to use whatever advantage they can within their agreement to compete agressively with Microsoft. I'd like to see them aggressively develop and market a "Reporting Services fro PostgreSQL" that would appeal to MS SQL Server users looking to upgrade, plus add useful "extended reporting features" to lock them out of MSRS. I'd like to see "the next Groupwise on Linux" and offer a migration path from Exchange that is as easy or easier than upgrading to newer Exchange and work better. Ideally I'd like it to all be Free software but I'd love to see this happen even if it wasn't.
Of course, all of this would depend on if they can find that useful hammer in the Toolbox MS has offered--if the agreement precludes them from doing this (or requires Novell to pay royalties so MS can benefit too much) then there is no hammer to nail MS with. Hope there is though, 'cause right now Novell doesn't offer anything markedly compelling to end users that Red Hat can't offer, except for anger and concern in the Linux world over these dealings with MS, which will contribute to further dwindling market share.
Some would beg to differ--i.e. those with low spec machines. Anyways for most people I'd say isn't that it is more bloated and executes slower, it is that the interface design changes make them less productive ("it looks like you are about to sneeze...accept or allow?", rearranging control panel, config dialogues and whatnot..all the crappy annoying stuff MS is legendary for doing between major releases).
Do I really care whether things are theoretically a few percent slower if I can't tell the difference without actually benchmarking?
Only if you've bought a new computer and had it foisted upon you. If I went to the bother of going to the store, putting down good money to buy the upgrade, then sat for hours installing and tweaking it to my tastes, it damn well BETTER be faster, or smarter, or SOMETHING. For most people who would consider upgrading, translucent spinny 3D windows and pester-ware security just isn't worth it.
I wouldn't want to use it day-to-day, but that's the same as any version of Windows.
That is something most computer users don't have the luxury of saying because Windows is all they know. Vista isn't horrid (it certainly cannot match WinMe in crappiness) but it's just a step sideways from XP, especially some power-user's tweaked out XP with thrid party add-ons (I've even seen magazine articles on "Vistafying XP for free"). Why go through all the pain of having half your peripherals not work right due to no Vista-approved drivers, buying extra ram or hard drive, spending money and time, learning a changed-up interface...if you get nothing tangible out of that effort? For a lot less trouble you can quite literally switch to Ubuntu (probably less than half the cost and effort to do that than to adopt Vista).
This annoys consumers and it completely drives away corporate customers. We are entering a time now where MS can't just offer something new--it actually has to be BETTER in the real sense.
Drivers not available anymore except for Vista, important programs that are Vista-only. Security updates not being made available for XP anymore.
You know, those are some of the exact reasons Vista hasn't gained the traction in enterprise environments that MS would like:
* There is hardware out there with drivers not available anymore except for WinXP or earlier, because it is just a bit too old for MS or the vendors to care (in the latter case, it is often the issue of being economically unjustifiable to support products recently discontinued on very new OSes).
* Important programs are XP-only, and will not be Vista-ready for a long time, if ever. My employer's current products won't be ALL Vista-ready for another year. Furthermore we have some applications in "extended support" (not the term our marketing dept. uses, but basically software that is not being sold to new customers ore being upgraded but is still in support mode--we are legally obligated in some cases to support our pruducts for upwards of 20 years). That software will NEVER be Vista-ready but could be used well past 2010.
* Vista and its updates occasionally break application software and in some cases the lack of MS' "critical updates" is something to look forward to. The more mature the software, the more stable it is. It is more difficult to hit a moving target when it comes to making your applications reliable. In the last few years I've personally had to deal with a couple of major bugs in our customers' systems that were a direct cause of a bug fix. We had to go to great lengths to convince MS that Windows was no longer behaving as documentation said it was (ie. we were not relying on previously buggy behaviour). Subsequently a hotfix was released to fix the bug introduced by a previous hotfix that fixed another bug.
This is bad enough in a business enterprise system. With the longer product cycles and more demanding (reliability-wise) industrial environment the issues with Vista are still intolerable. Literally there will not be very serious uptake of Vista in that area until MS releases the next version of Windows (or until the time they THINK they're going to release it).
(Look at how the support for Win2k went downhill once WinXP was released. For NT 4.0, they stopped giving patches before the official end-of-line)...Try running NT 4.0 these days... Won't get you very far. That's the future of Windows XP. They are going to drop it like a hot potato.
And yet, I am currently dealing with a facility that just finished upgrading their offices to Windows XP at about the time Vista was released, and has exactly zero 2003 servers out there--in fact they still run a good portion of them on NT4. They are stuck with them until they are forced to upgrade a lot of equipment on a production line because the application is no longer sold and the vendor is probably no longer in business. Upgrading for many people isn't just a matter of 5 or 10 thousand to upgrade a server...sometimes it involves costs upwards of a quarter million or more....for one server (or one redundant pair).
I've noticed something with every new release of Windows since 2000 was released: the uptake has steadily slowed. When NT4 came out it offered marked improvements over 3.x. Furthermore the market was less established--there were more non-Windows legacy systems being picked off. Then 2000 came out and it was well received, but I'd argue not QUITE as rapidly adopted as NT4--it sold briskly and there were a lot of upgrades but NT4 stuck around WAY more than NT3.x did. Then XP and later Server 2003 came out and there was a very muted response to them--they were readily accepted in new installations but enterprises were extremely slow in upgrading--so much so that 2000 is still very common in the server room.
Now we have Vista and the impending release of a new server OS, and not only is there no enthusiasm to upgrade, there is even resistance to accepting NEW systems with the software. No, things are different now--even though that's what weve always bee saying.
the point is we're supposed to ignore that $1 million dollars will make a much larger differences to our lives than whether or not we vote,
Only if a handful of people took up the offer would this statement be true. If a thousand or more voters did this, in a close election as Bush fought in 2000, it has a more profound effect than $1M would ever have. It might affect our own life less, but it would re-shape the nation as a whole. Could you imagine if Gore went to Florida in 2000 and gave away a couple thousand Prius cars to Republicans in exchange for forfeiting their right to vote? I'd have to say the whole world would've noticed the difference.
If every voting citizen was given $1M in exchange for eternally being denied the vote, then I'd have to disagree. The loss of voting rights would probably have a far more important and dramatic affect on our lives than having a million dollars. Loss of any sorts of freedom or rights would not be worth $1M. Wealth certainly hasn't helped legal professionals and media execs in Pakistan for example.
Besides, since when is $1M a lot of money these days (especially in US$;-)? Households with a worth of $1M are merely upper-middle class. $1M would only DRAMATICALLY change the lives of half the population.
If you fat finger something, back up and fix it. Its not the phones fault, its the end user's fault.
SteveJ's reality distortion field is still going strong. I don't think I've come across any product defect or design flaw in an Apple product that hasn't had at least one Apple apologist step up and blame the customer. I remember early colour Powerbooks (the 1st-gen PowerPC ones) that had a lot of problems with power cord connectors and battery charging and though most users complained and Apple even admitted fault and issued a recall, there were a number of Apple fans who derided users for misusing or abusing their precious Powerbooks. Later there were white MacBooks that started to discolour after a few weeks of regular use. It couldn't be that snow-white was an impractical choice for a laptop enclosure, or that the plastic or protective coatings were not of high quality--it was the fault of users with their sweaty grubby hands (never mind that the cheap and not-so-cheerful Dells went far longer before showing wear or discolouring).
Right from the days of the ZX81 and Atari 400 until today, it has been proven time and again that flat, non-tactile keyboard surfaces are inferior to keyboards/keypads with raised keys and tactile feedback when it comes to any sort of serious typing. This study regarding the iPhone's on-screen touch-keyboard is not the least bit surprising. Certainly it is no more surprising than an iEnthusiast complaining that users must evolve to accommodate their beloved Apple products.
If you use your mobile for a lot of text messaging the iPhone is an inferior product and you should get a Blackberry instead. That doesn't mean the iPhone isn't pretty or cool or useful for other things, but it is what it is. It isn't stupid user's fault for iPhone typos, it is the design of the iPhone itself. It isn't meant to be a "text message machine"--it merely offers something "good enough" to do the occasional text message when you need to.
as an automatic trademark, just like copyright is automatic. You merely have to declare the trademark, such as "xxx is a trademark of yyy corporation" or simply by putting the "tm" abbreviation next to it (not really required on the domain itself, but if the "tm" marque appears within the web page it points to it would suffice). That is the case for copyright as well--declaring it simply with "Copyright yyyy such and such" is enough to invoke copyright protection under the law. Do such declarations exist? If there are no marques such as tm or (c) or the corresponding phrases on the published work then they have little groung to stand on.
That said, just as is the case with copyrights it is always prudent to go through some more formal means of declaring the trademark (ie. registering it, so the "circle-R" marque can be used in the case of a trademark). The tone of the question suggests there ISN'T any indication on the website where the domain is parked that there are registered copyright or trademarks involved however. Why is registration important for valued trademarks? Because it is formal proof of when the trademark is established first of all. Second the burden of enforcing the trademark is lower (there is added protection, but there are still SOME responsibilities to protect your trademark).
That said, your cybersquatter pest has some responsibilities to protect/enforce his unregistered trademark beyond slapping (tm) beside it. It is a "marque", or identifying name or phrase, used in the conduct of business (trade--thus "trademark"). Registering a domain and parking it does not constitute "trade". Look into it further. Is there an active business operating under the name, or a product branded with the name? Is there an MX record suggesting there may be email addresses by which they conduct business that include the name? If not, the cybersquatter has no right to take your domain (in fact, even if they registered the trademark there recourse is limited if they've abandoned the trademark).
It can go even further than that--if the marque IS being used in trade actively the burden of proof is on them to prove that your use of a similar phrase is misleading or confusing. Are you both using the marque in the same industry to sell similar products, or are they terms generally known in the same geographical area? If not, the case is limited and the cybersquatter probably doesn't have the means to fight it out on such a weak case. Think of how long it took the WWF to get the WWE not to use the same three-letter acronym for its unrelated business? It took years and considerable money because the two parties were not easily confused, and the WWE only prevailed because of how pervasively the WWF marque was being used by what is now WWE (ie. more people assocated the acronym with wrestlers than with tree-huggers). This is not a problem with a little personal blog vs. a cybersquatter.
I would just ignore the request, or (maybe better) get a lawyer or someone with a background in IP to pen a letter politely refusing to comply with a good legal explanation why you feel justified to do so. This is just a form of phishing IMO.
In the scenario where they're getting $2/album they don't have to foot any of those bills.
Reality is much more complicated than that, and in fact unless you're already a mega superstar you're not going to get a very nice deal.
First off, $2 royalty per album is quite generous for an emerging artist signed on with a traditional record corporation. Second, the record execs hardly foot any of the bills at all--at least not directly. Promising artists are awarded "advances". Basically an advance is a loan of sorts--it provides money to spend putting together and promoting your first albums, when you aren't generating any revenue. When your album is released you commonly get severely reduced royalties...or none at all...until the record company has recovered its investment in you (the advance).
Some other points to consider in terms of "new media" on the internet:
* marketing requires a much lower monetary investment these days--time and creativity are more important
* in order to get a deal with a record company you have to have a demo tape--generally you've already spent a lot of your own money on recording songs.
* distribution over the internet is very low cost
So, the costs to distribute an album online are much lower than the $10, $15 or more that is the difference between what the artist gets and what consumers pay for one copy of the album. It seems to me that Radiohead has done quite well here, getting revenue into the millions from one album sold on a name-your-price basis. This is just another sign that the business model of selling little plastic discs with songs made by artists held captive in a studio-system environment is obsolete and trying to make the same model work on the internet is futile. The commercial music industry is like the motion picture industry, except even more backwards, modeled after the way studios did business in the days of Gone With the Wind and Wizard of Oz. Because of that, it'll be quite a sea change that will make for very noisy lobbying.
Ever TRIED Gnash? It's a promising project but very very far from a complete and reliable implementation.
Flash is a pox on the internet. Flash steals bandwith from helpless babies and your innocent grandmother. Flash stands in the way of world peace. Every time a web developer uses Flash God kills a kitten. Flash must die!
Perhaps I'm being a bit to hard on Flash, after all it is popular because it works well enough. However Flash is a pseudo-standard, the de-facto choice because it cornered the market before a proper standard could gain traction. No industry body or standards organisation has codified it as a standard and Adobe (and Macromedia before them) has never made a serious effort to push for its adoption as a standard and in fact licensing has been purposely put in place to PREVENT Flash form becoming a real standard (even Microsoft has a better track record, and that's saying something!). So, unless Adobe does a 180 and opens the specification so that projects like gnash don't have to rely on reverse-engineering and trial-and-error, I maintain that as much effort as possible should be made to kill the putrid virus that is Flash.
Slashdot Mirror
"the Bonzi Buddy license"
I think MS is brilliant for doing this. They've embraced, extended and tried to extinguish third party browsers and firewall software, might as well do the same with spyware.
It's like buying laxatives and tossing them straight into the loo...eliminates the middleman and probably more efficient.
You imply "pragmatism" means "sacrificing your ideals", yet this is not what the Linux devs have done.
Well, "pragmatism" is literally an antonym of "idealism", so yes...speaking in terms of literal definitions, when you are acting pragmatically you are sacrificing ideals in the face of reality. Keep in mind that I did not mean to say Linux devs were sacrificing THER OWN ideals, it's just that their set of values is more practical than those of RMS. It's kinda like Castro believing in Communism after a fashion, and acting pretty consistently in fact, however Castro's ideals are tempered by a considerable amount of pragmatism, to the point that Castro's communism is quite a pale shade of "Karl Marx Red" (and no, I'm not implying Free software is communist any more than software is an automobile--it's just an analogy)
If we are looking at things through RMS' ideals though, then yes, the Linux devs have absolutely, certainly sacrificed some of those ideals on a few occasions. RMS would've never used BitKeeper in the first place--he'd spend weeks or months or years making a "truly Free" solution that worked perfectly. Linus' hand was forced when he made Git and dropped BitKeeper, and it did in fact cause a period of slowdown. RMS would strongly disagree with your assertion that Linus and the Linux kernel developers have not sacrificed the ideals of Free software (as RMS sees them) in the interests of practicality. RMS famously decreed that "if you value Freedom don't follow Linus".
For example, see the fucking driver ABI.
Many "Free software purists" of RMS' stripe say the Linux driver ABI does indeed sacrifice Free software ideals by more easily enabling the "binary blob" driver practice that we've dealt with on the graphics front for years. Nonetheless, even though the Linux devs would love to see binary drivers go away they are putting effort into a stable ABI. It is in fact a very good example IN SUPPORT of my argument that just because you don't like something doesn't mean you must not accommodate it. Can you explain to me how the "f***ing driver ABI" is somehow "less evil" than the GNOME folks working on an OOXML parser/filter? What makes OOXML more evil than an NVidia driver?
On the other side of your false dichotomy, ultimately controlled by the big, bad, FSF, is GTK. Which has a much more permissive license than, uhm, Qt.
Indeed it does--another example of pragmatism over idealism. GTK can be used on multiple platforms with Free and restricted/closed applications alike, but it preserves ehough ideals to insist that EVERYONE who uses the library preserves the freedom of that library. I just find it puzzling that the KDE team would suddenly take a "principled stand" on OOXML when KDE is built upon a library that is actually "less principled" in terms of licensing than GTK. GTK might have a more permissive license, put at least its consistent. The choice of a more strict license for qt was not done out of principle at all; it was done in order to preserve a revenue stream for Trolltech. GTK defines its ideals up front. With qt, those ideals are for sale to the highest bidder.
That is partly why I still maintain a preference for GNOME and GTK even after qt was GPLed. They might not live up to each and every Free software ideal, but at least they are consistent.
Miguel may have been a founder of the GNOME project, but he is not even on the GNOME foundation board anymore. His opinion matters no more than that of anyone else who contributes code to GNOME. Though he has written some excellent software his baffling statements probably with respect to OOXML will not likely be taken seriously.
RMS is worried about compromising on principles of Free software by putting efforts into making software that reads or writes this technically and philosophically nasty format. Since when has AVOIDING interoperability furthered the spread of Free software? Linus has yielded to pragmatism many times in the past (using BitKeeper for example, and being cautious about GPL3) whereas RMS remains steadfastly rigid in his ideals at all levels. RMS' stance is admirable, but look at where the Linux kernel is...then look at how far the HURD has come in comparison. Perhaps some pragmatism isn't always a bad thing?
Now, as far as compromising "principle" with the pragmatic decision to work on making GNOME read the OOXML format, where exactly is this a more serious concern than with countless other interoperability projects? What about the work that went into making NTFS mountable in Linux? What about the Samba project? What about the ability of OpenOffice, KOffice, AbiWord, GNUMeric, etc. to at least partially support Microsoft's legacy binary file formats already? Where do we draw the "principled" line here? Microsoft's "core dump" binary formats, NTFS file system, CIFS and the Active Directory are not proper open standards yet great effort has been made thus far to reverse-engineer and deal with them so as to break down the Microsoft lock-in. How come, all of the sudden, RMS has to chime in about OOXML and now suddenly we should all ignore it on principle?
Perhaps the KDE people should become even more principled and drop all the hooks it has with Samba to browse and be browsed on Microsoft's "network neighbourhood". Perhaps Linux-based OSes should not only all drop GNOME as the default desktop, they should also drop the ability to mount NTFS volumes too. After all, if we're gonna snub OOXML because it's crap and it's closed, then we should be consistent and do the same across the board.
KDE is Free Software. True Free Software.
KDE is "True Free Software"? OMFG, how times have changed! One of the biggest single reasons I'm a GNOME user today is because back in the "dark ages" KDE depended upon the then-proprietary qt library and GNOME and the associated GTK library were "truly Free". By the time this was rectified GNOME had improved a lot, GNOME designers were more focused on usability and I was already used to the environment.
One thing that has NOT changed is the licensing for GNOME--it's still good ol' GPL and LGPL and nothing else.
GNOME is free software lite. It is almost free software, just without the Four Freedoms. With KDE, you can be sure that all KDE software you use is truly Free. GNOME, on the other hand, is more than willing to bow to Microsoft.
With GNOME, you can see the source code, make copies of the code or resulting binaries to meet any needs you have, use it for any purpose you want (fit or unfit, without any warranty, but still use it nonetheless) and of course you can share it with your friends without the BSA beating down your door. Those are pretty good freedoms, and there are four of them. Can you explain to me SPECIFICALLY where the freedoms are lacking?
Furthermore, with KDE, what exactly give you any more assurance over GNOME that the software you are using is truly free? Trolltech will happily offer an alternative, proprietary license for its code to the highest bidder. GNOME has taken a more consistent approach by putting libraries under LGPL--so commercial apps can be made that take advantage of GTK yet the libraries are sure to remain Free. Such is not the case with commercial KDE apps. You can use KDE-based software that is totally non-Free because the publishers have paid off Trolltech.
At least with GNOME everyone has to play by the same rules and the GNOME platform itself remains uncompromised. Historically KDE with qt has been quite a moving target due to different platforms having different licensing rules and with the dual licensing scheme in place.
GNOME died the day it accepted Evolution with the proprietary Exchange connector.
What have you been smoking? I suggest you stop because it's frying your brain. From the "horses mouth" (Novell's own press release):
The Evolution Connector for Microsoft Exchange Server source code can be found at http://ftp.ximian.com/ and developer information about Evolution can be found at http://www.gnome.org/projects/evolution. The Connector code is now available to the public along with the rest of Evolution under the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL).
When Novell included the connector with Evolution 2.0 it also relicensed it to GPL (FULL GPL at that; not LGPL) and it immediately made all the source code for it available the very second it licensed it under GPL. Do you know something I don't? How EXACTLY is this different from when Trolltech GPLed its libraries to allow them to be TRULY Free? Being you're such a devout fan of KDE surely you know how this is different?
The fact that KDE is objectively a better desktop environment is just gravy.
I've never once seen any OBJECTIVE evidence that one desktop is superior over the other from end users OR developers. It's ALWAYS been a matter of personal tastes, which are very SUBJECTIVE...visual layout, how things are configured, use of C++ or whatever. Again, I gladly welcome any concrete, specific areas where KDE is without a doubt superior to GNOME. I prefer GNOME over KDE myself, and I'll freely admit that I think KDE does SOME stuff better and that my overall impressions are largely my personal taste. To be more specific, I find the GNOME design has become more consistent than KDE (something that wasn't always the case, but has become true over time as GNOME has really pushed specific and consistent usability/UI standards for the desktop and ass
I think the reason we haven't gone crazy and created the mother-of-all criminal registries is because smart politicians, judges and law enforcement people all know they are stupid and don't work. The reason we have any sort of registries like this is because they can be effective political strategy. That is what "Megan's Law" was--there was a sad, probably preventable and high profile tragedy and a public outcry ensued: "the Government must do something! What about the CHILDREN!!!". And so, politicians put together this nice big database project to make voters feel better, even though it probably creates more problems than it solves, because now not only are there sick criminals out on the street, evry nutjob out there can find them which creates yet another crime issue. However, the government "did something" so the voters are happy, and as a nice side benefit there are these contracts to create and maintain this skookum database system, which make for perfect "job creation" (palm-greasing) opportunities.
It's just the same game we've played for awhile now. A group of crazed zealots pull a kamakaze into important US buildingsa and kill thousands, so now we have a "no-fly" database and a whole set of highly visible new security screening procedures and rules...just the same as Megan's law but on a grand scale--new database, new "systems", new lucrative contracts and voters who feel safer because the government is "doing something", even though those particular somethings are probably as ineffective as they are visible (the governent has done as much wrong as it has done right, and what it has done right is the least visible on the political radar).
Canada has it's own "registry disease" too. A gunman killed a bunch of innocent female students in Montreal--it was a tragedy that remains among the most brutal crimes in Canada's history, and it was the vehicle that propelled the government into bringing about the universal gun registry. Costs ran uncontrolled up to $2 billion before an election changed governments and the brakes were put on spending. In the meantime, RCMP and municipal police forces were underfunded and understaffed and the trends in violent crime have been completely unaffected by the registry (contrary to media hype on both sides--violent crime hasn't dramatically escalated, however the registry has done exactly zero to slow or stop the steady rate of violent crime, despite what supporters of the universal gun registry have said. Most "on the inside" know this to be true). Never mind that Mark Lepine had already seriously broken the law before he fired the first shot (mere possession of the weapon he had was already very illegal in Canada, and the registry wouldn't change that because the restricted weapon isn't even legally register-able today). The registry is easier to get going and gives more rapid positive political feedback than pumping $2 billion into our police forces and doing a massive recruitment and training programme...and there's that "palm greasing" factor again.
Canada has a sex offender registry as well, though it isn't accessible to the public, and we take the DNA samples of sex offenders (probably the only thing that is useful about the registry). Same thing applies though--it is a politically-friendly thing to do. Never mind that police forces have understaffed or underfunded sex-crimes units, or inadequate training, or that crackpot judges sentence rapists to mere months in jail sometimes, or that rapists go free or innocent are jailed because investigators botch cases sometimes. Nope, instead we create lists, because voters like lists and lists cover up problems that are hard to deal with. That's too bad, because billions in funding get wasted on lists. We should be tackling root causes like poverty, homelessness and addiction. At the same time we should be dealing with those now beyond redemption--repeat or violent rapists and molesters should be jailed for the rest of their lives with no parole ever for example, right alongside murderers. I'd
Actually, its a bad example of government incompetence, but a great example of how an organized disinformation campaign can influence public policy.
It is nothing of the sort. ABSOLUTELY ALL of this information is correct. Whether or not you believe a national database of firearms will actually reduce firearms deaths does not factor in here.
Government incompetence was not the only factor for sure--there were political considerations, but it was NOT the federal Conservative party that derailed the project in the slightest (technically that party did not exist--the Conservative party is the result of a merger of the PROGRESSIVE-conservatives and the Alliance parties, and speaking as one familiar with the inner workings of both parties the present organisational structure most closely resembles the Alliance party, but the policies overall are more PC-like). Nor is is some "Republican-lite" right-wing conspiracy.
The original "net cost" estimate of $2million was the result of extremely foolish assumption-making on the part of the Cretien-Liberal government. The modest figure assumed that the system would be "mostly self-funding" from two components: fees paid by gun owners with each registration, and contribution from provincial governments who would be tasked with enforcing the registry (the feds were merely going to collect and keep the data, where the cities--using provincial money--would have to dedicate the bulk of the maintenance resources). The "disinformation campaign" was therefore mostly a product of the LIBERALS, not the "right wing gun lobby, because that $2million was the estimated cost to the federal gov't ONLY, NOT the overall cost to taxpayers.
It was that burden placed upon the provinces that was the reason for much of the resistance and lack of cooperation (the feds eventually had to take full responsibility for the gun registry). The ideological opposition was for sure the main factor, but the unloading of responsibility gave them good excuses. Note that the "right wing" were not the only ones opposed to the gun registry. The province of Saskatchewan was led by the socialist New Democratic Party when they refused to cooperate, and some federal NDP MPs were also not on board.
There were specific instructions posted at firing ranges and gun club meetings to fuck with the system in order to drive up the cost of administering it.
I understand that gun owners and provinces who refused to cooperate, or even made efforts to obstruct the registry, contributed to the inflation of costs, however this in no way AT ALL justifies 50000 to 100000 percent cost overrun. Such a monumental misjudgement can only be attributed to gross incompetence, inefficiency and corruption. First of all, a law and system that allows hundreds or thousands of people to register their glue guns in protest, without the means of preventing such fraud, is severly flawed. Secondly, it you take the total amount spent on the registry (an immense number that is still hard to quantify exactly because of a lack of financial oversight) and divide that by the total applications received (INCLUDING the "fake protest" applications) it averages out to between $1500 and $3000 PER APPLICATION.
That ridiculous cost per application obviously shows that those protest methods you describe were mere statistical noise compared to the gross incompetence and waste of the federal government. I've seen the registry forms--there is NO WAY AT ALL someone could sabotage them so much that the cost of handling these applications would be that high. At the rates estimated that would mean it would take 80 to 100 man hours to receive, process and maintain one single application. Proper screening would reject applications for glue guns, water pistols and such within minutes. These idiots let them right through!
Given the colossal stupidness of the whole registry project that dwarfs the ridiculous protestations of many gun owners, I'm not surprised in the lightest that the feds would spend m
Online distribution is only feasible if you have an Internet-enabled device connected to your HDTV.
Well, *network* enabled anyways. Online distribution does NOT require a "media centre PC", or any device that includes an ethernet port and speaks TCP/IP in fact. Where I live the cable company has something called "Shaw OnDemand" where you buy/rent/lease a digital terminal that plugs right into your usual coax cable. This isn't a "tuner+TiVO" thing--content is delivered real-time as you request it. Even so, standard digital TV with a TiVO is essentially "Online distribution" as well.
Sure, media center PCs are getting more common (and more affordable), and the numbers on HD-ready game consoles are steadily rising, but the vast majority of HDTV owners do not possess either
Not sure about your market, but I'd say that the alternatives I describe above, while combined might not be in the hands of more than 50% of HDTV owners yet, constitute a SUBSTANTIAL minority. It is definitely NOT true that the "VAST majority" of HTDV owners do not possess the gear to take advantage of online distribution, at least in the local market for me. In fact, I'd say OnDemand or digital-TV-with-TiVO already significantly outnumber both BD and HD-DVD. Since you only seem to examine HD-game-consoles vs. HTDVs your numbers really fail to look at the whole on-line picture.
Maybe in 10 years the tide will have turned and most people will be using online distribution. However, there's serious money to be made in the meantime, and that requires physical media.
I believe you are greatly over-estimating how long it'll take for on-line to catch on. It is quite a way from mainstraem yet, but I think it is actually ahead of BD and HD-DVD as far as momentum goes, and that we could see online distribution being mainstream in as soon as 5 years. Remembering how long it took DVD to gain critical mass it doesn't look very hopeful for physical HD media unless they resolve the problem. I think that BOTH physical formats will have a short life and be big failures compared to the original DVD format if the market stays the way it does. People remember Beta vs. VHS and how that limited market growth (and former Bets owners really remember getting burned) and history won't repeat quite the same way.
I foresee one of two scenarios that MUST happen or physical media will go extinct (in the mainstream at least):
1. HD-DVD will eventually kill BD. BD might be more advanced and have more capacity, but it is more complex to implement (the discs themselves, but especially the players) and so it started with a very bad cost disadvantage that it has to recify. No matter how many studios it has on its side, this cost problem, plus the fact that Microsoft and its allies (ie technology vendors that build the players vs the Hollywood studios) are in the HD-DVD camp mean a Betamax-like existence for BD (gradual slide into obscurity)
OR
2. Both competing formats are the same physical size and work under the same general principles (short-wavelength laser shot at a little plastic disc to read bits compressed using the same basic algorithms). VHS and Beta machines were so different that to make a device tha played both formats you'd basically have to house tow separate players in one giant enclosure. A dual-format BD/HD-DVD player would share almost ALL the physical components and it is basically no harder to make a laser pick up the bits from both formats than it is to make a DVD pick up data off a CD (which has been done for many years now). Thus, as the HD media technology matures, dual-format players will be only modestly more expensive to make and purchase than a BD-only player. The format war will then be as relevant to typical end users as the DVD-R/DVD+R argument is today.
I think that #2 will happen in the next few years because interested parties have invested so much into their pet technologies..and it'll happen within 5 years, or else both formats will be relegated to offline optical backup storage.
You're wrong. The basic problem of browser developers vs. armchair standardization experts is that unless browsers render most pages as intended, users will use something else.
No, the problem is that we've let browsers slide for so long that the standards are meaningless. I'm not advocating that we simply dump old standards and make everything break all at once. The old standards are still in place and can still be followed. New standards should be more aggressive in deprecating old crufty stuff--HTML5 allows for far too much old crufty stuff than it should. That is what is good about the W3C standards vs the philosophy of the HTML5 guys--you have a DTD that days exactly what format AND what version AND what compatibility level (ie. strict). If you don't include that, it is tag soup. If you do, you'd better be valid markup or it'll break. There should really be some pressure on browser makers to optimise for "strict" behaviour and consider "tag soup" to be deprecated "legacy" behavior. It is much easier to make "strict" code render consistently between browsers, and parsing code under strict conditions should also be much more efficient and faster because you don't have to deal with countless possible inconsistencies.
The HTML 5 spec is being written and pushed by browser vendors. Html 5 is being supported as it is being written. It's being designed with sound engineering principles in mind
That it is a product of browser vendors is probably some of the problem--they've invested in all this browser code and want a much more incremental approach. A proper standard must involve not only the develpers of user agents, but also content providers and end users. We let the user-agent developer lunatics run the asylum for too long in the early days of the WWW and we now have a very sick web, with 95% of pages having markup flaws, really bad security issues and so on.
And as I am an engineer, I can tell you that much of what the HTML5 folks have talked about don't follow any particular engineering principle. In our products we provide means of interoperability with each new platform, however at some point we assess user's requirements and the state of technology and start clean. Even the PC platform has done a reset like that from time to time: If the HTML5 approach was applied to the PC platform we wouldn't have had ATX motherborads--we'd just add kludges to the AT standard and we'd still have ISA slots, but now with 3 or 4 rows of connector pins and extra notches and sections added on, just in case someone wanted to plug that old classic Soundblaster into their Core Duo screamin' desktop in the same slot that modern PCIE cards would use. The hardware engineers weren't that foolish; they introduced completely new, incompatible bus standards to take advantage of new technology and address new needs. In the process, they accommodated legacy hardware by including both types of slots, with the new slots having compelling new capabilities.
Browser makers should take the same approach: From now on, new markup tags and features should be IGNORED if there isn't a proper DTD or the code doesn't validate. Tag soup, and documents with older DTDs could still be rendered just fine (even broken documents should be rendered as much as possible, however there should be a very noticeable error message when broken code is encountered). If the MSIE and Mozilla teams had started doing this way back when introducing HTML4 the web would've been a much better place. However, encouraging poor web programmers to use new bells and whistles as much as possilbe with as little hassle as possible is what gets browser market share, not responsible "engineering principles".
Most of the proposed changes in HTML 5 are very pragmatic and easy to support by browser vendors. They drop DTD support because it has proven to be completely useless and unreliable in the current web.
That is a problem--it is the browser makers being self serving. Much of what makes things easy for t
On the one hand, people tout the web as a great platform for communicating ideas, from anyone to anyone. On the other hand, people keep saying that html needs to be standards compliant, the browsers need to fit the standard and that it should be exact and break catastrophically at a mistake.
Software development made great strides when standards for C programming language became established. Java stepped that up even more. Programming languages "break catastrophically at a mistake" you know. Miss a semicolon or closing bracket and it won't compile. The WWW is not just a big distributed repository of documents anymore; we now have this "Web 2.0" with online applications being built. HTML is no longer just markup--it denotes meaningful structure that scripting and stylesheets depend upon to function properly. It isn't simply markup anymore--it is a declarative language used to specify the "V" part of an online application implemented with an MVC-architecture.
As HTML evolved to take on the role of programming language, it ABSOLUTELY MUST be treated with the same discipline, or web applications will always suffer from poor performance and poor quality.
Furthermore, confirming to standards does NOT impede "communicating ideas from anyone to anyone". It ENHANCES it. In modern society there are a lot of dead languages no loner spoken or written, especially small "tribal" dialects. Furthermore, as time passes the surviving languages become more standard. In English we have dictionaries that tell us how we are supposed to spell and rules about grammar, even if they aren't perfect they are a common ground. If we just let everyone decide for themselves how to spell for example we might all spell phonetically and use our own rules--instead of "laugh" we'd write "laf" or "laff" or "lahf" or "lahff" or "lauff"...get the picture? Add liberties taken with grammar and we'd devolve into tribal dialects of english so different that someone from London wouldn't even be able to read what someone from Atlanta wrote, much less get past the different accent.
With technology it is even MORE vital to have precise standards for communication--it's bad enough to deal with "big endian vs. little endian" of different architectures. Imagine if everyone encoded character sets differently for the same language (ie. ASCII did not exist ore wasn't followed strictly)? THAT would sure break down communications! As we become more sophisticated in exchanging information the standards have to become more sophisticated and more disciplined too.
If a page has a major breakdown because a closing tag is missing, then someone like my mother would just give up trying.
I presume you use your mother as an example of a casual web browser user and she is not a developer of websites. In that case, what would it matter? When was the last time she examined the source HTML? Does she actually save it and correct it to view the page? NO! If a closing tag is missing it IS NOT HER PROBLEM! Web application developers have gotten lazy and spoiled and expect a VERY forgiving environment--more so tha ANY OTHER kind of developer (C, Java or even VB). If you forget a closing bracket in C or Perl there is a MAJOR BREAKDOWN--it won't even run or it'll do REALLY funky things. It's a pain in the butt but you know what? Millions of REAL programmers have learned to deal with it, and web veleopers can learn to deal with it too. If you've tasked "designers" to author web page CODE you've done the wrong thing--you get CODERS to code. Designers are good at DESIGNING and coders should do their job and give them tools to generate PROPER CODE from the DESIGN the designers made with the WYSIWYG tools.
Internet Explorer, for all its problems, was very good at error forgiveness, and it opened up the platform for a lot of people.
This forgiveness and looseness with standards is EXACTLY WHAT MAKES IE ENEMY NUMBER ONE! Microsoft, almost single-handedly, made the WWW into GARBAGE. IT didn't have to
Honestly are HTML authors really that damn stupid and lazy that they can't manage to write compliant XHTML 1.0? Really, people, it ISN'T THAT BAD. Yes, there is a lot of complex stuff and does namespaces and its all modular and things, but you don't need to use all of that! Putting a forward slash in an empty tag and quotes on your attributes and case sensitivity really aren't HUGE burdens on developers. Perhaps we've all gotten too used to IDEs that auto-complete and auto-adjust case and everything else that we've all turned off our brains. It doesn't help that Microsoft (and even Netscape played along in the bad old days) have encouraged the development of crock-o-crap HTML by adding their own bling to standards and resorting to loosey-goosey tag-soup parsing fro so many years.
HTML5 seems to be doing a lot to make sure mediocre developers can stay in their comfort zone and to perpetuate many of the more serious problems we still face today. The HTML5 FAQ makes me cringe in many places!
* "no DOCTYPE. You may include one if you wish, though this is not recommended as they are only relevant when using a validating parser which web browsers do not have." - This is the wrong recommendation and a really stupid rationale. One cannot assume that web browsers will be the only clients to read your document, nor that all clients will lack validating parsers. This saves a small bit of work for lazy HTML authors at the expense of making
* "HTML 5 is being developed with IE compatibility in mind." - This is a backwards way to move forward with proper standards. You design applications towards standards, not standards towards applications. IE is already mostly compatible with existing standards--the solution is to make sure IE8 tows the line, not to bend over for IE developers. In the automation industry, there is a massive, complicated 8-headed beast of a standard called IEC 61158 that is a good example of what happens when applications drive standards. The IEC was somewhat stuck here however because they got into the game late, when all these battling vendor-developed systems were already established. With the Internet, though the situation is not perfect, existing standards hold a fair and increasing amount of influence. I believe the philosophies behind HTML5 don't do enough to prevent the perpetuation of tag soup and loose vendor-driven application of standards.
* "The details are still being worked out, but the plan is to indicate the maturity level on a per-section basis." - This puzzles me: They seem to be abandoning the "modules" approach being sought by XHTML in the interests of simplicity, however it is intended that user-agent developers will be implementing the standard "on a per-section basis" as they figure everything out along the way? And they expect this process to take TWICE AS LONG as XHTML did to establish itself as a ratified standard? I sense a lack of vision here--something along the lines of "lets look at what we've got, put Bondo on the dents and holes then spray it with Tremclad to make it look pretty". Not only that, they've decided that they'll work on the right fender and the left door this year, then the rear bumper next year and so on. There's nothing wrong with incrementally ratifying standards, but how about some VISION and PLANNING? Define some modules and their scopes then set teams upon them to tackle them individually and have them ratified as they reach maturity, and do so in a logical fashion (some sort of "core", then forms, then scripting, etc)
* "Void elements in HTML (the new name for empty elements) do not require a trailing slash...However, due to the widespread attempts to use XHTML 1.0, there are a significant number of pages using the trailing slash"--yet ANOTHER wrong recommendation and faulty reasoning. Lazy HTML authors are annoyed by the slash, but it's been part of XHTML for years so there are a lot of web documents that use it, so HTML5 parsers will have to continue to parse tag soup and do the "guess if there's a closing t
The Citadel project is not the product of a for-profit venture. In 1981 as electronic bulletin board systems were starting to take off a BBS guy going by "CrT" wrote software to run a BBS on CP/M computers called Citadel. A year or so later there was some big soap-opera personality conflict and the original author walked away from the program and left the source code to float in the public domain. This code was picked up by dozens of different people who made an equal number of forks (forking was more apt to happen in the days before widespread internet and in the culture of strong personalities of those early days of the PC).
A few years after the original Citadel was released into the wild as public domain, a guy named Art Cancro (I. T. Foobar--he still maintains it today and posts on slashdot, understandably plugging it whenever he can) re-wrote the original CP/M Citadel to run on Unix for his hobby BBS called "Uncensored" (it ultimately ended up sharing no source code at all with the CP/M version; it was however a faithful work-alike). Cancro's version was referred to as "Citadel/UX" to distinguish it from the unrelated CP/M codebase. The UX part was later dropped since all the other Citadel variants with similar names (Citadel, Citadel/86, Citadel+, etc) have dropped out of active development and use.
There was a forked version called DOC (Dave's Own Citadel) that was somewhat popular but as the BBS scene died out so did DOC (there hasn't been a release for over 5 years). Cancro's Citadel persisted because it adapted to new technologies while other Citadel-variant BBSes remained steadfastly text-oriented BBS-style systems. Citadel(/UX) now appears to be the only Citadel variant BBS platform under active development (though others remain in use in a few places).
It's BBS heritage is quite evident in its architecture despite the fact that it has evolved significantly into a real "groupware" system. The original text-based Citadel client is still present, alongside the "webcit" AJAX client. The data store is still centered around the classic "Citadel Host/Floor/Room/Message" system and the instant-messaging and chat through webcit is a front-end to the tried-and-true chatroom system. Mr. Cancro and the other developers have done a remarkable job of bringing in new features and connectivity around this BBS "engine" without compromising the elegant and simple architecture.
Citadel started as, and continues to be, driven by enthusiasts as a hobby, and as such there are no "employees" with anything to gain financially from plugging Citadel. When a Citadel developer does pump Citadel, it is largely out of pride for a job well done. Citadel is older than Linux itself and remarkably remains almost completely free of commercial sponsorship.
I expect that MS-Exchange connectivity will be licensed under GPLv3, just as the rest of the citadel and webcit projects are presently licensed.
;-). I'm still amazed that software of this quality, with a 20 year history of development, continues to fly under the radar with much of the Free software community.
Sadly it looks like the connector is being developed by a closed source developer rather than within the Citadel project itself so my prediction isn't quite true. Still it would make a great alternative to Exchange, and fortunately for me Exchange compatibility is not an issue.
I quite enthusiastically plug Citadel wherever I can, not only because it performs extremely well and is easy to administer, but because the project is very open (the citadel.org site has a LOT of info on protocols and other technical developer stuff) and the more people that are aware of it the more likely people will get involved in developing it and moving it forward (eventually, perhaps, leading to a Free exchange connector
Is it going to be free (beer/speech)?
Based upon the direction that Citadel has been following w.r.t licensing and that where it is mentioned they're proud of being a "100% truly Free" application (and not some watered down "community edition" with closed extensions) I expect that MS-Exchange connectivity will be licensed under GPLv3, just as the rest of the citadel and webcit projects are presently licensed.
I've been running a citadel server for some time now--it replaced Postfix as an email server--and it has proven to be extremely capable, considering the simple little thing it is. I am running the second-to-latest release and the more I hear about what is in development the more I'm looking forward to upgrading. Citadel shows excellent promise and would really take off with a greater profile...it makes IBM's "Boated Goats" look embarrassingly clunky already. With Exchange compatability on this level perhaps it could put ugly old Bloated Goats to sleep for good and get on with the task of giving Exchange itself a run for its money.
I love it how everytime something like this come up, people screm "Yeah, at last the goverment *forces* these companies to to this and that, so we can finally have a free market!"
There are semantics and confusion of terminology in economics, just like in the realm of software development (open source vs Free software vs freeware).
What Canada has in the wireless market is a fairly "closed" market. There are 3 big players and each do their best to minimise interoperability and retain customers (they call the latter "reducing churn"). They fought strongly against number portability because it would be expensive and "damage business" (as a result we waited a long time after the US to get number portability). They minimised that impact by making contract lock-in terms stronger. In the absence of government action the market was doing nothing but getting more closed.
"Hands off" by the government would be like BSD-licensed software--the market would be very "free" but given the oligopoly that exists such freedoms could be abused (just as BSD licensed code routinely makes its way into closed software like MS Windows). Total freedom would be like "public domain" source code--even attributions could be stripped away (this would be like closing down the CRTC and letting the spectrum be used in a free-for-all--strongest transmitters win).
Regulations put in place by the government in this case are analgous to terms of GPL-licensed software. GPL contains a number of restrictions that "force these developers and publishers to do this and that" with respect to disclosing source code, the idea being to foster the OPEN "bazaar" development community. Given the current situation in the Canadian market I think radio spectrum reservations and mandating roaming access requirements is a very good GPL-like decision (it was in fact done in the US and many European countries and produced favourable results). The status quo (or even relaxing reculation on existing monopolistic players) certainly is not acceptable, and the socialist alternative (outright price controls/caps/etc on what existing providers can bill to end customers) would discourage competition and kill innovation and choice (imagine what your cellphone would do to you in Soviet Russia, basically).
I'd agree with your sentiment that government "forcing" companies or people to do this and that should be kept to a minimum, all things being equal. However all things are very far from equal. There is no serious competition between the dominant providers, and two of the three (Bell and Telus) historically were government-mandated/protected regional monopolies in years past (Telus was the result of privatising AGT--the Alberta Government Telephone company). Basically, past governments had a large hand in building up this mess, so yeah, it actually does make some sense for current governments to dismantle this mess to foster a more free market (well, more OPEN market actually, to start with).
The fact Telus and Verizon offer similar plans is not surprising, becuase there is cross-ownership between the two and they are partners, so they'd align at some levels...however there are a lot of differences.
local/long distance calling is 50 dollars a month for 400 minutes within Canada. I pay the same thing for my phone plan in America.
That is but one component of the services these companies offer. You completely ignore everything else:
* When Telus advertises "$x for y minutes" that "y minutes" is ALL you get. You get NO data transfer, NO voicemail , NO caller ID, NO call waiting...NOTHING. Even Mandatory "system access fees" and taxes are extra.
* Telus offers inflexible "SPARK" packages--if you want a specific feature you must get a more expensive package that is also bundled with features you don't want. "A la carte" is difficult to get, and when you do get features that way is quite overpriced.
* Telus data plan, at least for consumers, is VERY antiquated. They still charge by the KB or each HTTP request (and it can add up very very quickly). If you get a package the limits are so low they're a joke. They still ascribe to the "walled garden" strategy when it comes to web browsing too--if you go to one of a hundred or so "partner" websites it is part of the flat rate, and if you go to other sites, even if you have one of their packages, they STILL charge you by the HTTP request!
* They literally have ZERO "unlimited" plans, and the closest to unlimited you can get is EXTREMELY expensive.
I'm not familiar with Verison's rates, but from what I've seen of the US industry as a whole they are fairly more competitive than Canada now. What is sad is that US cell service is a joke compared to most of Europe and Asia, making cell service in Canada even more embarrassing. Considering that Canada got such a huge jump on the US in the area of broadband to the home it is tragic that wireless service didn't achieve the same thing (it's also sad that Canada's lead over the US in broadband has shrunk considerably too).
I do not think that this copyright initiative will happen in the form suggested, though I think it is a good chance that some level of DMCA-like provisions will come into being in the years to come. Not only is the Hollywood lobby very strong, but the Liberals under PM Cretien signed the WIPO copyright treaty almost enthusiastically a decade ago...and just like with Kyoto Canada has been castigated for not living up to their promises by signing a treaty and not following through with required legislation.
Anyways, the Liberals (currently the main opposition party in the lower house of the minority gov't) have been in support for a more Hollywood-friendly copyright regime (media corporate types like the Asper family, etc are very loyal long-time Liberals). If the Conservatives were to introduce a DMCA-like bill it would most likely receive support from the Liberals and it would easily pass over the objections of the NDP and Bloq parties. That said, and although politics in Canada are much more rigid along party lines than in the US, the current political situation makes it less likely to be a confidence motion and individual MPs may vote against the party line on this issue. Quite frankly (and unlike Kyoto), copyright law is very very low on the political priority list and showing some independence on this issue wouldn't be damaging to an MPs political aspirations.
So although the "blue Tories" (former "Mulroney-style" PCs) may back this bill, there is a chance some "green Tories" (former Reform and Alliance members) may object on both populist and libertarian grounds. The Industry Minister and Heritage Minister would be the ones steering this bill, with the former having a higher profile in cabinet than the latter. Until recently, Maxime Bernier was Industry minister and is known to be a "green Tory" (backer of the former Alliance party and fairly libertarian-oriented) and Heritage minister Bev Oda was a fairly weak influence. As a result copyright reform was stalled as the governent not only gave it a low priority, they also resisted the more draconian requirements of the WIPO agreement. Now a "blue Tory" (Jim Prentice) is industry minister and could be more receptive to a Canadian DMCA. OTOH, the new Heritage minister is Josee Vernier, and she is more visible than Bev Oda was. Josee is also a "green Tory" (leaned more towards the old Alliance party than the old PCs, and is still a strong supporter of the ADQ party in Quebec which is very Reform/Alliance-like). Like Bernier, she is more apt to consider individuals consumer rights and freedoms than many other MPs. Furthermore, there is some antagonism between media conglomerates and the current governing party and as such the Harper Tories are less likely to bend over for them.
The Liberals historically support the DMCA, though "Martin Liberals" (more right-leaning like former PM Martin) have less influence now. High-profile Liberal MPs with NDP histories like Bob Rae and Ujjal Dosanjh are pretty left-leaning and would object to a DMCA for very different reasons than a "green Tory" would (more because it is too friendly to industry rather than its impact on individual freedoms). Plus, left-leaning Liberals are apt to vote against anything that looks too American-like such as the DMCA (whether or not it is a good thing). The Liberals are also less principled/less ideological and their platform shifts greatly with the polls, so they are not likely to follow through on an idea that would lose them votes (again, whether it is good for the country or not).
Anyways, in this Minority government, with the two biggest parties having no strong/passionate opinion on the subject, it is a simply a matter of who speaks loudest. In the absence of public resistance a DMCA could sleepwalk through Parliament on the basis that it meets our treaty obligations and protects the media industry. However if enough people were to protest a government sensitive to getting popular vote would drop it more easily. Also, if lawyers and judges suggest ther
... as in Kyoto, JAPAN.
Based on the recent news of a major Korean company being under investigation for corruption/et cetera
I fail to see the relevance. Asia is not one big homogenous society--it isn't even a "bloc" as was the "communist bloc" of Soviet republics and eastern-European satellite nations. Japan's economy and business community differ greatly from Korea's. Furthermore, given the history between those particular nations, Koreans of a certain age would take great offense to being compared with the Japanese. They understand each other about as much as Americans and Russians do.
Aside from being offensive to Japanese, Koreans, Chinese, etc to be lumped together as all the same because they're Asian there isn't any indication that they are any more apt to be duped my MS (or to be co-conspirators) than anyone else in the world. MS' first and highest-profile "intellectual property assurance" deal was with an American company involving a German-developed Linux product after all.
This isn't an "Asian world" or even "business world" thing...this is just MS finding a firm with a weak-enough constitution to participate in MS' mafia-inspired protection racket.
...Linux has to play the MS game.
.NET framework, or any other manner of invented-by-MS initiative, the result is that MS remains in control of the computing environment. If effort is made to entrench technology already embraced by MS, all the easier for MS to extend it. It is MS' goal to be able to say "sure we have no problem with Linux..in fact here is this SuSE one that we endorse so try it out", then once they've got something in place they can come in again and say "looks like Linux doesn't meet all your needs--try our Windows server with these new MS-only extensions!"
As has been noted the fact is Microsoft dominates the market and to not admit that and include interoperability is foolish.
Equally as foolish is to sacrifice standards to the dominant player. The risk with Novell's "deal with the devil" is that is could subjugate them to MS. If they roll over and accept MS' assertion that their patents are valid, or toil on projects to implement proprietary components of the
In short, cooperation has to be balanced with competition.
Without collaboration Linux would remain a niche market, but with Novell getting out there it's getting in the press and people are reading about this thing called Linux.
Novell has to go further than offer collaboration--they have to beat MS at its own game and offer something compelling to the PHB's of the corporate world that MS doesn't have (i.e. they must "out extend" Microsoft) or else their agreement with MS will do more harm than good. They have to be able to use whatever advantage they can within their agreement to compete agressively with Microsoft. I'd like to see them aggressively develop and market a "Reporting Services fro PostgreSQL" that would appeal to MS SQL Server users looking to upgrade, plus add useful "extended reporting features" to lock them out of MSRS. I'd like to see "the next Groupwise on Linux" and offer a migration path from Exchange that is as easy or easier than upgrading to newer Exchange and work better. Ideally I'd like it to all be Free software but I'd love to see this happen even if it wasn't.
Of course, all of this would depend on if they can find that useful hammer in the Toolbox MS has offered--if the agreement precludes them from doing this (or requires Novell to pay royalties so MS can benefit too much) then there is no hammer to nail MS with. Hope there is though, 'cause right now Novell doesn't offer anything markedly compelling to end users that Red Hat can't offer, except for anger and concern in the Linux world over these dealings with MS, which will contribute to further dwindling market share.
...just not really any love for it.
Vista is merely slightly slower than XP.
Some would beg to differ--i.e. those with low spec machines. Anyways for most people I'd say isn't that it is more bloated and executes slower, it is that the interface design changes make them less productive ("it looks like you are about to sneeze...accept or allow?", rearranging control panel, config dialogues and whatnot..all the crappy annoying stuff MS is legendary for doing between major releases).
Do I really care whether things are theoretically a few percent slower if I can't tell the difference without actually benchmarking?
Only if you've bought a new computer and had it foisted upon you. If I went to the bother of going to the store, putting down good money to buy the upgrade, then sat for hours installing and tweaking it to my tastes, it damn well BETTER be faster, or smarter, or SOMETHING. For most people who would consider upgrading, translucent spinny 3D windows and pester-ware security just isn't worth it.
I wouldn't want to use it day-to-day, but that's the same as any version of Windows.
That is something most computer users don't have the luxury of saying because Windows is all they know. Vista isn't horrid (it certainly cannot match WinMe in crappiness) but it's just a step sideways from XP, especially some power-user's tweaked out XP with thrid party add-ons (I've even seen magazine articles on "Vistafying XP for free"). Why go through all the pain of having half your peripherals not work right due to no Vista-approved drivers, buying extra ram or hard drive, spending money and time, learning a changed-up interface...if you get nothing tangible out of that effort? For a lot less trouble you can quite literally switch to Ubuntu (probably less than half the cost and effort to do that than to adopt Vista).
This annoys consumers and it completely drives away corporate customers. We are entering a time now where MS can't just offer something new--it actually has to be BETTER in the real sense.
Drivers not available anymore except for Vista, important programs that are Vista-only. Security updates not being made available for XP anymore.
You know, those are some of the exact reasons Vista hasn't gained the traction in enterprise environments that MS would like:
* There is hardware out there with drivers not available anymore except for WinXP or earlier, because it is just a bit too old for MS or the vendors to care (in the latter case, it is often the issue of being economically unjustifiable to support products recently discontinued on very new OSes).
* Important programs are XP-only, and will not be Vista-ready for a long time, if ever. My employer's current products won't be ALL Vista-ready for another year. Furthermore we have some applications in "extended support" (not the term our marketing dept. uses, but basically software that is not being sold to new customers ore being upgraded but is still in support mode--we are legally obligated in some cases to support our pruducts for upwards of 20 years). That software will NEVER be Vista-ready but could be used well past 2010.
* Vista and its updates occasionally break application software and in some cases the lack of MS' "critical updates" is something to look forward to. The more mature the software, the more stable it is. It is more difficult to hit a moving target when it comes to making your applications reliable. In the last few years I've personally had to deal with a couple of major bugs in our customers' systems that were a direct cause of a bug fix. We had to go to great lengths to convince MS that Windows was no longer behaving as documentation said it was (ie. we were not relying on previously buggy behaviour). Subsequently a hotfix was released to fix the bug introduced by a previous hotfix that fixed another bug.
This is bad enough in a business enterprise system. With the longer product cycles and more demanding (reliability-wise) industrial environment the issues with Vista are still intolerable. Literally there will not be very serious uptake of Vista in that area until MS releases the next version of Windows (or until the time they THINK they're going to release it).
(Look at how the support for Win2k went downhill once WinXP was released. For NT 4.0, they stopped giving patches before the official end-of-line)...Try running NT 4.0 these days... Won't get you very far. That's the future of Windows XP. They are going to drop it like a hot potato.
And yet, I am currently dealing with a facility that just finished upgrading their offices to Windows XP at about the time Vista was released, and has exactly zero 2003 servers out there--in fact they still run a good portion of them on NT4. They are stuck with them until they are forced to upgrade a lot of equipment on a production line because the application is no longer sold and the vendor is probably no longer in business. Upgrading for many people isn't just a matter of 5 or 10 thousand to upgrade a server...sometimes it involves costs upwards of a quarter million or more....for one server (or one redundant pair).
I've noticed something with every new release of Windows since 2000 was released: the uptake has steadily slowed. When NT4 came out it offered marked improvements over 3.x. Furthermore the market was less established--there were more non-Windows legacy systems being picked off. Then 2000 came out and it was well received, but I'd argue not QUITE as rapidly adopted as NT4--it sold briskly and there were a lot of upgrades but NT4 stuck around WAY more than NT3.x did. Then XP and later Server 2003 came out and there was a very muted response to them--they were readily accepted in new installations but enterprises were extremely slow in upgrading--so much so that 2000 is still very common in the server room.
Now we have Vista and the impending release of a new server OS, and not only is there no enthusiasm to upgrade, there is even resistance to accepting NEW systems with the software. No, things are different now--even though that's what weve always bee saying.
the point is we're supposed to ignore that $1 million dollars will make a much larger differences to our lives than whether or not we vote,
;-)? Households with a worth of $1M are merely upper-middle class. $1M would only DRAMATICALLY change the lives of half the population.
Only if a handful of people took up the offer would this statement be true. If a thousand or more voters did this, in a close election as Bush fought in 2000, it has a more profound effect than $1M would ever have. It might affect our own life less, but it would re-shape the nation as a whole. Could you imagine if Gore went to Florida in 2000 and gave away a couple thousand Prius cars to Republicans in exchange for forfeiting their right to vote? I'd have to say the whole world would've noticed the difference.
If every voting citizen was given $1M in exchange for eternally being denied the vote, then I'd have to disagree. The loss of voting rights would probably have a far more important and dramatic affect on our lives than having a million dollars. Loss of any sorts of freedom or rights would not be worth $1M. Wealth certainly hasn't helped legal professionals and media execs in Pakistan for example.
Besides, since when is $1M a lot of money these days (especially in US$
If you fat finger something, back up and fix it. Its not the phones fault, its the end user's fault.
SteveJ's reality distortion field is still going strong. I don't think I've come across any product defect or design flaw in an Apple product that hasn't had at least one Apple apologist step up and blame the customer. I remember early colour Powerbooks (the 1st-gen PowerPC ones) that had a lot of problems with power cord connectors and battery charging and though most users complained and Apple even admitted fault and issued a recall, there were a number of Apple fans who derided users for misusing or abusing their precious Powerbooks. Later there were white MacBooks that started to discolour after a few weeks of regular use. It couldn't be that snow-white was an impractical choice for a laptop enclosure, or that the plastic or protective coatings were not of high quality--it was the fault of users with their sweaty grubby hands (never mind that the cheap and not-so-cheerful Dells went far longer before showing wear or discolouring).
Right from the days of the ZX81 and Atari 400 until today, it has been proven time and again that flat, non-tactile keyboard surfaces are inferior to keyboards/keypads with raised keys and tactile feedback when it comes to any sort of serious typing. This study regarding the iPhone's on-screen touch-keyboard is not the least bit surprising. Certainly it is no more surprising than an iEnthusiast complaining that users must evolve to accommodate their beloved Apple products.
If you use your mobile for a lot of text messaging the iPhone is an inferior product and you should get a Blackberry instead. That doesn't mean the iPhone isn't pretty or cool or useful for other things, but it is what it is. It isn't stupid user's fault for iPhone typos, it is the design of the iPhone itself. It isn't meant to be a "text message machine"--it merely offers something "good enough" to do the occasional text message when you need to.
as an automatic trademark, just like copyright is automatic. You merely have to declare the trademark, such as "xxx is a trademark of yyy corporation" or simply by putting the "tm" abbreviation next to it (not really required on the domain itself, but if the "tm" marque appears within the web page it points to it would suffice). That is the case for copyright as well--declaring it simply with "Copyright yyyy such and such" is enough to invoke copyright protection under the law. Do such declarations exist? If there are no marques such as tm or (c) or the corresponding phrases on the published work then they have little groung to stand on.
That said, just as is the case with copyrights it is always prudent to go through some more formal means of declaring the trademark (ie. registering it, so the "circle-R" marque can be used in the case of a trademark). The tone of the question suggests there ISN'T any indication on the website where the domain is parked that there are registered copyright or trademarks involved however. Why is registration important for valued trademarks? Because it is formal proof of when the trademark is established first of all. Second the burden of enforcing the trademark is lower (there is added protection, but there are still SOME responsibilities to protect your trademark).
That said, your cybersquatter pest has some responsibilities to protect/enforce his unregistered trademark beyond slapping (tm) beside it. It is a "marque", or identifying name or phrase, used in the conduct of business (trade--thus "trademark"). Registering a domain and parking it does not constitute "trade". Look into it further. Is there an active business operating under the name, or a product branded with the name? Is there an MX record suggesting there may be email addresses by which they conduct business that include the name? If not, the cybersquatter has no right to take your domain (in fact, even if they registered the trademark there recourse is limited if they've abandoned the trademark).
It can go even further than that--if the marque IS being used in trade actively the burden of proof is on them to prove that your use of a similar phrase is misleading or confusing. Are you both using the marque in the same industry to sell similar products, or are they terms generally known in the same geographical area? If not, the case is limited and the cybersquatter probably doesn't have the means to fight it out on such a weak case. Think of how long it took the WWF to get the WWE not to use the same three-letter acronym for its unrelated business? It took years and considerable money because the two parties were not easily confused, and the WWE only prevailed because of how pervasively the WWF marque was being used by what is now WWE (ie. more people assocated the acronym with wrestlers than with tree-huggers). This is not a problem with a little personal blog vs. a cybersquatter.
I would just ignore the request, or (maybe better) get a lawyer or someone with a background in IP to pen a letter politely refusing to comply with a good legal explanation why you feel justified to do so. This is just a form of phishing IMO.
In the scenario where they're getting $2/album they don't have to foot any of those bills.
Reality is much more complicated than that, and in fact unless you're already a mega superstar you're not going to get a very nice deal.
First off, $2 royalty per album is quite generous for an emerging artist signed on with a traditional record corporation. Second, the record execs hardly foot any of the bills at all--at least not directly. Promising artists are awarded "advances". Basically an advance is a loan of sorts--it provides money to spend putting together and promoting your first albums, when you aren't generating any revenue. When your album is released you commonly get severely reduced royalties...or none at all...until the record company has recovered its investment in you (the advance).
Some other points to consider in terms of "new media" on the internet:
* marketing requires a much lower monetary investment these days--time and creativity are more important
* in order to get a deal with a record company you have to have a demo tape--generally you've already spent a lot of your own money on recording songs.
* distribution over the internet is very low cost
So, the costs to distribute an album online are much lower than the $10, $15 or more that is the difference between what the artist gets and what consumers pay for one copy of the album. It seems to me that Radiohead has done quite well here, getting revenue into the millions from one album sold on a name-your-price basis. This is just another sign that the business model of selling little plastic discs with songs made by artists held captive in a studio-system environment is obsolete and trying to make the same model work on the internet is futile. The commercial music industry is like the motion picture industry, except even more backwards, modeled after the way studios did business in the days of Gone With the Wind and Wizard of Oz. Because of that, it'll be quite a sea change that will make for very noisy lobbying.
Ever TRIED Gnash? It's a promising project but very very far from a complete and reliable implementation.
Flash is a pox on the internet. Flash steals bandwith from helpless babies and your innocent grandmother. Flash stands in the way of world peace. Every time a web developer uses Flash God kills a kitten. Flash must die!
Perhaps I'm being a bit to hard on Flash, after all it is popular because it works well enough. However Flash is a pseudo-standard, the de-facto choice because it cornered the market before a proper standard could gain traction. No industry body or standards organisation has codified it as a standard and Adobe (and Macromedia before them) has never made a serious effort to push for its adoption as a standard and in fact licensing has been purposely put in place to PREVENT Flash form becoming a real standard (even Microsoft has a better track record, and that's saying something!). So, unless Adobe does a 180 and opens the specification so that projects like gnash don't have to rely on reverse-engineering and trial-and-error, I maintain that as much effort as possible should be made to kill the putrid virus that is Flash.