Becoming another IBM is not the worst case
on
Microsoft's Future
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
I was amused by the notion that for Microsoft to follow in the footsteps of IBM, as a company that no longer sets standards, would somehow be the bad scenario. Well, things could have been worse for IBM. They had a near-death experience in about 1993. Sure, they had inertia, it could have taken them decades to finally fade away (a la Control Data, Unisaurus, DEC, and many others), but that they revitalized themselves rather than fade away is thanks to having reinvented the company (including their first-ever layoffs, just to pick one example). The best reference I could quickly find was an article from Business Week, which seems to capture the essential points.
The significance for Microsoft? Well it is pretty early to start pondering a post-Microsoft era and I'm not sure I see any signs of collapse in the various cracks which appear around the sides of the empire. But if a collapse does come, it could be more catastrophic than you'd think.
My personal experience is from a while ago with extremely cheap switches, but I do remember I got things like ghosted video (not always, it seemed to depend on which computer was hooked to the switch and so on). As the article says: In our testing, we found that it was more important to use good quality cables and follow the instructions in the manual to the letter.
. My solution? I got rid of all the computers except one. But I doubt that would be of interest to the average slashdot reader;-).
There is also an article in the Washington Post which mostly gives the same information we have already but also cites the case more specifically as "Macromedia v. Adobe, C01-3940". So the next step is Findlaw which can get us to the web site of, say, the district court for Northern California (disclaimer: I'm not sure that is the right district but it is a decent guess). That web site seems to say there is lots of fascinating information on PACER but that's a pay service. So I think I'm more or less at a dead end (although I didn't try, say, searching the patent databases looking for macromedia owned patents which look plausible).
As for why PACER costs $$$, they answer that on the PACER site as follows:
Why are there user fees for PACER?
In 1988, the Judiciary sought funding through the appropriation process to establish the capability to provide electronic public access services. Rather than appropriating additional funds for this purpose, Congress specifically directed the Judiciary to fund that initiative through the collection of user fees. As a result, the program relies exclusively on fee revenue.
Well, if you browse sourceforge you'll find plenty of examples of where it hasn't worked to start without code. There must be an example or two
where starting without code worked. Perhaps GNOME is an example? At least, I remember Miguel proposing GNOME to Red Hat before there was any code (although if we count various bits of code from midnight commander maybe that's not even an example).
While Kernel Traffic is very good for what it is (a summary of more or less everything on the kernel mailing list in a given week), for my purposes the LWN kernel page is even better. They summarize a few issues in enough detail to actually understand what is going on, and then give some links to other stuff that happened. Anyway, with respect to the LWN kernel page, or Kernel Traffic, or other such efforts: Would greater public recognition make it easier to keep resources like this going? Would it help if there were a better way of dividing it up into multiple volunteers (not that I can think of how to do it as easily as for code or the Open Directory Project)? Activities like these are indeed a pretty useful part of open source development/use.
GOVNET would not solve all govt security problems
on
GOVNET In the Works
·
· Score: 1
My thinking is that they plan to use GOVNET as an excuse to be lazy. Everything will have minimal authentication because there's no way big bad hackers can get on the network, right?
Yup, that's the way I read it too. It is deluded to think that individual government computers don't need to be secured. For example, if there is a vulnerability in the http server of a public web server (www.whitehouse.gov or whatever), GOVNET probably won't even slow down an attacker. And once a few boxes inside GOVNET are 0wn3d, then you pretty much have to use ssh and secure the rest of your services and so on. Now, if GOVNET isn't treated as a panacea, the idea is probably a good one (most denials of service wouldn't affect government->government traffic, some attacks would be harder, etc). The biggest downsides I can see are practical. Do they really have one agency that can run this thing and keep it up and keep it robust and not fall prey to turf battles?
My vote for the most obscure goes to FreeVMS. Warning: very little code got written and there hasn't been activity in years. But the way in which it failed was interesting: no one wanted to do anything unless it had the blessing of Digital ^W Compaq ^W Hewlett Paqard. The biggest leverage of the proprietary OS was over the minds of the users/enthusiasts/etc. One could argue about whether the legal issues were real, but the free unices managed to get around legal issues with Unix including the setuid patent.
Slashdot readers are very familiar with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and probably also the Center for Democracy and Technology which is an offshoot which aims to play more of a Washington insider game. Are these organizations well-known in Washington? If not, who is seen as representing the technology interests?
I've put up a mirror (article there now, images should be up by the time you read this).
As for the article itself, this kind of published analysis is what makes the internet great - compare with the telephone system where each company keeps (more of) their analysis to themselves and engages in more finger-pointing.
I don't know, I guess it just makes me nervous when the ratio of number of companies involved to lines of code written is so high. The effort might be a good thing, if it actually becomes real, though. I'm guessing that Brian Behlendorf had something to do with this - he was talking about the need for open standards for single sign on at LinuxWorld.
Not only did he go off and build something instead of just whining, but I also was amused by the part from the mini-FAQ in which he responds to people who whine and complain and tell him he has it all wrong: "Enough already! I don't care whether or not you think what I am going is a waste of time. If you think this site is pointless or retarded, dear God save me the bandwidth and take your ass elsewhere."
The page says that the satellite is the size of a birthday cake, and also that it is "42 centimeters (17 inches) across . . . weighs about 21.5 kilograms (47 pounds)". I don't know about you, but on my last birthday I didn't get a cake that big;-).
More seriously, this is cool stuff. My favorite item from the list of new technologies is the "electrically tunable coating that can change its properties from absorbing heat when the spacecraft is cool to reflecting or emitting heat when the spacecraft is in the sun by applying electrical power". When you look at conventional ways of managing heat on a spacecraft (such as large and heavy radiators on the Space Station), this is pretty exciting.
Especially when I lived in Washington, DC, I would run into stores which didn't take cash. Apparently they just got held up too much. So currency is far from risk-free.
Still, I use cash a fair bit because it still seems resistent to many of the *other* risks (stolen credit card numbers and all that stuff).
They don't need a US launch license, which you get from the space people at the FAA. They are going to be on a multiple payload launch of a Russian Dnepr rocket. This means that if they aren't ready in time, they have to duke it out with the other missions which are going on that rocket.
The coolest part was the ASUS board which speaks for power on self-test errors, rather than the age-old cryptic beep system. And the fact that you could download new messages. Anyone done the Klingon translation yet?
The Grail browser has python applets and has had them for many years (almost as long as Java applets have been out there). It even has a sandbox (or so the web site says, haven't looked too deeply myself). Rather than downloading a bytecode, it just downloads source code (a fairly clean approach). Now Jython or maybe even Parrot someday might be better ways of running Python applets but the Grail one is interesting at least as a historical footnote.
Last time I tried Grail it wasn't really fast or reliable enough to be my main browser, but that was many versions ago.
It cracks me up the way that whenever NASA is running out of funding for a mission, they come up with some daring plunge which is supposed to lead to the death of the spacecraft. Remember Galileo, which took a pass at Io and was supposed to be killed by the radiation? Well, it has been damaged by the radiation, but it keeps on ticking (and keeps on spending money:-)). Not that NASA is wrong to do this - you need to move on to the next mission some time, and trying a riskier mission to get some last data is a way to go out with a bang, but the part which is amusing is when they talk all about their gutsy move without saying that the probe would have been turned off anyway due to lack of money.
Ah yes, I remember when Dragon's Lair came out. Using the laserdisk was a big step ahead over the resolution/image complexity/etc you could get in other video games at the time. And there was a lot of hype about how soon your video game would feature your favorite actors instead of crude cartoons and the like. I guess it hasn't really happened like that very much, but it is true that video games have gotten a lot more visually sophisticated - back in the old days the only *really* nice graphics were on the package (or the side/top of the console in the arcade).
Limewire.com seems to be slashdotted or otherwise
unavailable (even tried the google cache), but there is a good article from digitalmusicweekly.com about Limewire LLC and how the Limewire client fits in. Basically, they want to make money from servers (or something like that), and never wanted to charge money for the client in the first place. So GPL'ing it makes lots of sense - they don't lose anything and they might gain development help, more users, and stuff like that.
Well, I don't know about anyone else but for me
my PDA is very much a utilitarian tool - I do
my playing on a regular computer. So I looked
at Linuxda.com (noticed it wasn't open source, but neither is PalmOS), and then found the screen shots. First reaction is that the screens are a bit on the ugly side (although not terminally so), and that it passes some kind of sanity test of functionality. Hard to really know, but I can always hope that this will fulfill my dream of an appliance which Just Works (like I say, I futz around enough with my regular computer, and I don't regret that time, but I don't necessarily want that times 2).
As people have pointed out, there are a zillion
varieties of potato, some of which are purple.
Even at the time of the Incas there were thousands of varieties, many/most of which survive to today.
Here's the South America page from the World Potato Atlas.
And no, until 10 minutes ago I didn't know there was such a thing as a World Potato Atlas, but it has more information than I ever imagined would be on the web about where potatoes are grown, what kind are grown, and so on.
The interesting thing is that their business
model is practically identical to the standard
distribution company (Mandrake, Red Hat especially before
the acquisitions, maybe Ximian, probably SuSE): sell physical boxes,
sell professional services, and sell access to an apt-get server (or whatever we want to call it).
There is also the issue of the proprietary value-adds - I don't personally think this is bad, but it can be tricky to make sure that they actually end up being (and staying) better than the open source stuff (e.g. Metrolink vs. XFree86, Samba versus forgotton packages the names of which I don't even remember, &c).
Professional services is the hardest for a distribution company - to a certain extent, doing it requires a whole different mindset. And there is also the question of identifying customers who find it worth the money - many companies who have done Linux have, or end up acquiring, in-house Linux expertise.
Anyway, maybe with the shakeout of Caldera and Linuxcare and so on, there is some room for these guys. I certainly hope so - there are plenty of corporate markets which Linux companies haven't really made much progress in, so there is no shortage of things to accomplish.
Given that the environmental problems of many
weapons affect everyone except the enemy - most
especially the poor civilians who have to live
on the battlefield afterwards - this isn't as
strange as it sounds. Look at all the environmental
cleanups here in the US - Rocky Flats and a
bunch of other military and former military
lands which have all kinds of pollution, often
much worse than is found in civilian contexts.
I thought the most interesting part was: "Responding to a request for documents during a merger review by the Federal Trade Commission took one company nearly a year because the electronic documents were kept in offices all over the world and in all manner of different formats". But the twist there is: would
you like to have everything easy to find (and if
so, how do you do that, what with all the fragmentation between office 97, office 2000, not to mention different file servers and such)? Or are you better off making it inconvenient for other litigants to get at the data?
Slashdot Mirror
I was amused by the notion that for Microsoft to follow in the footsteps of IBM, as a company that no longer sets standards, would somehow be the bad scenario. Well, things could have been worse for IBM. They had a near-death experience in about 1993. Sure, they had inertia, it could have taken them decades to finally fade away (a la Control Data, Unisaurus, DEC, and many others), but that they revitalized themselves rather than fade away is thanks to having reinvented the company (including their first-ever layoffs, just to pick one example). The best reference I could quickly find was an article from Business Week, which seems to capture the essential points.
The significance for Microsoft? Well it is pretty early to start pondering a post-Microsoft era and I'm not sure I see any signs of collapse in the various cracks which appear around the sides of the empire. But if a collapse does come, it could be more catastrophic than you'd think.
My personal experience is from a while ago with extremely cheap switches, but I do remember I got things like ghosted video (not always, it seemed to depend on which computer was hooked to the switch and so on). As the article says: In our testing, we found that it was more important to use good quality cables and follow the instructions in the manual to the letter. . My solution? I got rid of all the computers except one. But I doubt that would be of interest to the average slashdot reader ;-).
There is also an article in the Washington Post which mostly gives the same information we have already but also cites the case more specifically as "Macromedia v. Adobe, C01-3940". So the next step is Findlaw which can get us to the web site of, say, the district court for Northern California (disclaimer: I'm not sure that is the right district but it is a decent guess). That web site seems to say there is lots of fascinating information on PACER but that's a pay service. So I think I'm more or less at a dead end (although I didn't try, say, searching the patent databases looking for macromedia owned patents which look plausible).
As for why PACER costs $$$, they answer that on the PACER site as follows:
Well, if you browse sourceforge you'll find plenty of examples of where it hasn't worked to start without code. There must be an example or two where starting without code worked. Perhaps GNOME is an example? At least, I remember Miguel proposing GNOME to Red Hat before there was any code (although if we count various bits of code from midnight commander maybe that's not even an example).
While Kernel Traffic is very good for what it is (a summary of more or less everything on the kernel mailing list in a given week), for my purposes the LWN kernel page is even better. They summarize a few issues in enough detail to actually understand what is going on, and then give some links to other stuff that happened. Anyway, with respect to the LWN kernel page, or Kernel Traffic, or other such efforts: Would greater public recognition make it easier to keep resources like this going? Would it help if there were a better way of dividing it up into multiple volunteers (not that I can think of how to do it as easily as for code or the Open Directory Project)? Activities like these are indeed a pretty useful part of open source development/use.
My thinking is that they plan to use GOVNET as an excuse to be lazy. Everything will have minimal authentication because there's no way big bad hackers can get on the network, right?
Yup, that's the way I read it too. It is deluded to think that individual government computers don't need to be secured. For example, if there is a vulnerability in the http server of a public web server (www.whitehouse.gov or whatever), GOVNET probably won't even slow down an attacker. And once a few boxes inside GOVNET are 0wn3d, then you pretty much have to use ssh and secure the rest of your services and so on. Now, if GOVNET isn't treated as a panacea, the idea is probably a good one (most denials of service wouldn't affect government->government traffic, some attacks would be harder, etc). The biggest downsides I can see are practical. Do they really have one agency that can run this thing and keep it up and keep it robust and not fall prey to turf battles?
My vote for the most obscure goes to FreeVMS. Warning: very little code got written and there hasn't been activity in years. But the way in which it failed was interesting: no one wanted to do anything unless it had the blessing of Digital ^W Compaq ^W Hewlett Paqard. The biggest leverage of the proprietary OS was over the minds of the users/enthusiasts/etc. One could argue about whether the legal issues were real, but the free unices managed to get around legal issues with Unix including the setuid patent.
Slashdot readers are very familiar with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and probably also the Center for Democracy and Technology which is an offshoot which aims to play more of a Washington insider game. Are these organizations well-known in Washington? If not, who is seen as representing the technology interests?
I've put up a mirror (article there now, images should be up by the time you read this).
As for the article itself, this kind of published analysis is what makes the internet great - compare with the telephone system where each company keeps (more of) their analysis to themselves and engages in more finger-pointing.
I don't know, I guess it just makes me nervous when the ratio of number of companies involved to lines of code written is so high. The effort might be a good thing, if it actually becomes real, though. I'm guessing that Brian Behlendorf had something to do with this - he was talking about the need for open standards for single sign on at LinuxWorld.
Not only did he go off and build something instead of just whining, but I also was amused by the part from the mini-FAQ in which he responds to people who whine and complain and tell him he has it all wrong: "Enough already! I don't care whether or not you think what I am going is a waste of time. If you think this site is pointless or retarded, dear God save me the bandwidth and take your ass elsewhere."
The page says that the satellite is the size of a birthday cake, and also that it is "42 centimeters (17 inches) across . . . weighs about 21.5 kilograms (47 pounds)". I don't know about you, but on my last birthday I didn't get a cake that big ;-).
More seriously, this is cool stuff. My favorite item from the list of new technologies is the "electrically tunable coating that can change its properties from absorbing heat when the spacecraft is cool to reflecting or emitting heat when the spacecraft is in the sun by applying electrical power". When you look at conventional ways of managing heat on a spacecraft (such as large and heavy radiators on the Space Station), this is pretty exciting.
Especially when I lived in Washington, DC, I would run into stores which didn't take cash. Apparently they just got held up too much. So currency is far from risk-free.
Still, I use cash a fair bit because it still seems resistent to many of the *other* risks (stolen credit card numbers and all that stuff).
They don't need a US launch license, which you get from the space people at the FAA. They are going to be on a multiple payload launch of a Russian Dnepr rocket. This means that if they aren't ready in time, they have to duke it out with the other missions which are going on that rocket.
The coolest part was the ASUS board which speaks for power on self-test errors, rather than the age-old cryptic beep system. And the fact that you could download new messages. Anyone done the Klingon translation yet?
The Grail browser has python applets and has had them for many years (almost as long as Java applets have been out there). It even has a sandbox (or so the web site says, haven't looked too deeply myself). Rather than downloading a bytecode, it just downloads source code (a fairly clean approach). Now Jython or maybe even Parrot someday might be better ways of running Python applets but the Grail one is interesting at least as a historical footnote.
Last time I tried Grail it wasn't really fast or reliable enough to be my main browser, but that was many versions ago.
It cracks me up the way that whenever NASA is running out of funding for a mission, they come up with some daring plunge which is supposed to lead to the death of the spacecraft. Remember Galileo, which took a pass at Io and was supposed to be killed by the radiation? Well, it has been damaged by the radiation, but it keeps on ticking (and keeps on spending money :-)). Not that NASA is wrong to do this - you need to move on to the next mission some time, and trying a riskier mission to get some last data is a way to go out with a bang, but the part which is amusing is when they talk all about their gutsy move without saying that the probe would have been turned off anyway due to lack of money.
Ah yes, I remember when Dragon's Lair came out. Using the laserdisk was a big step ahead over the resolution/image complexity/etc you could get in other video games at the time. And there was a lot of hype about how soon your video game would feature your favorite actors instead of crude cartoons and the like. I guess it hasn't really happened like that very much, but it is true that video games have gotten a lot more visually sophisticated - back in the old days the only *really* nice graphics were on the package (or the side/top of the console in the arcade).
Limewire.com seems to be slashdotted or otherwise unavailable (even tried the google cache), but there is a good article from digitalmusicweekly.com about Limewire LLC and how the Limewire client fits in. Basically, they want to make money from servers (or something like that), and never wanted to charge money for the client in the first place. So GPL'ing it makes lots of sense - they don't lose anything and they might gain development help, more users, and stuff like that.
Well, I don't know about anyone else but for me my PDA is very much a utilitarian tool - I do my playing on a regular computer. So I looked at Linuxda.com (noticed it wasn't open source, but neither is PalmOS), and then found the screen shots. First reaction is that the screens are a bit on the ugly side (although not terminally so), and that it passes some kind of sanity test of functionality. Hard to really know, but I can always hope that this will fulfill my dream of an appliance which Just Works (like I say, I futz around enough with my regular computer, and I don't regret that time, but I don't necessarily want that times 2).
Oh, I see, "feer.com" is the Far Eastern Economic Review. That makes more sense than it being some 31337 haxor rag, which was my first reaction.
As people have pointed out, there are a zillion varieties of potato, some of which are purple. Even at the time of the Incas there were thousands of varieties, many/most of which survive to today. Here's the South America page from the World Potato Atlas. And no, until 10 minutes ago I didn't know there was such a thing as a World Potato Atlas, but it has more information than I ever imagined would be on the web about where potatoes are grown, what kind are grown, and so on.
The interesting thing is that their business model is practically identical to the standard distribution company (Mandrake, Red Hat especially before the acquisitions, maybe Ximian, probably SuSE): sell physical boxes, sell professional services, and sell access to an apt-get server (or whatever we want to call it).
There is also the issue of the proprietary value-adds - I don't personally think this is bad, but it can be tricky to make sure that they actually end up being (and staying) better than the open source stuff (e.g. Metrolink vs. XFree86, Samba versus forgotton packages the names of which I don't even remember, &c).
Professional services is the hardest for a distribution company - to a certain extent, doing it requires a whole different mindset. And there is also the question of identifying customers who find it worth the money - many companies who have done Linux have, or end up acquiring, in-house Linux expertise.
Anyway, maybe with the shakeout of Caldera and Linuxcare and so on, there is some room for these guys. I certainly hope so - there are plenty of corporate markets which Linux companies haven't really made much progress in, so there is no shortage of things to accomplish.
Given that the environmental problems of many weapons affect everyone except the enemy - most especially the poor civilians who have to live on the battlefield afterwards - this isn't as strange as it sounds. Look at all the environmental cleanups here in the US - Rocky Flats and a bunch of other military and former military lands which have all kinds of pollution, often much worse than is found in civilian contexts.
I thought the most interesting part was: "Responding to a request for documents during a merger review by the Federal Trade Commission took one company nearly a year because the electronic documents were kept in offices all over the world and in all manner of different formats". But the twist there is: would you like to have everything easy to find (and if so, how do you do that, what with all the fragmentation between office 97, office 2000, not to mention different file servers and such)? Or are you better off making it inconvenient for other litigants to get at the data?