I, too, really respect Bruce Perens, but I don't see how he can complain that his lawsuit remarks were meant to be private, when he made the same remarks in a comment on a slashdot article - and you don't get much more open than that.
That said, I would like to express my hope that this uproar does not cause Bruce to retreat into the kind of measured mediaspeak that we get from every corporate flack in the world. Bruce is not an officer of Red Hat and owes nothing to their stockholders. Neither does he owe anything to the stockholders of the Open Source corporation, because there is no such thing, and hopefully never will be.
One of the greatest benefits of the Open Source community is the degree to which we can trust that statements made from its illuminaries come from the heart. Any deviation from this is a lessening of the community, and I for one hope that Bruce Perens recovers quickly from this fiasco and continues to fight the good fight.
The desktop metaphor is familiar and "good enough" for a 2D workspace, and so I suspect that it will be the primary metaphor until such time as 3D is as cheap (in both dollars and system resources) as 2D is today. Alternate 2D metaphors may be better, but it will be hard to overcome the weight of usage enjoyed by the desktop.
Now when 3D gains primacy in a year or two, all bets are off. All it will take is a radical new input device (the mouse is inherently 2D), and a stunning new metaphor (you are in a maze of twisting passages, all alike? maybe not) and we'll be off on an entirely new paradigm.
We'll still have to do all the 2D things we do now, such as writing and drawing and calculating, but even something as two dimensional as a written document could have very interesting enhancements when presented in a 3D space.
Anyone who has administered email servers has to feel a real shiver going up the spine on reading this, because it is impossible to keep email flowing without engaging occasionally in just this sort of thing. When email starts behaving erratically you have to check oout the headers. With Sendmail type MTAs that means capturing and reading the email messages, because that's where they are found. And no matter how hard you try, you are going to read at least some of the content in some of those messages.
If this comes to be seen as illegal, it could mean very bad things for Internet email admins, and a lot of us who don't even admin anymore could find ourselves in deep doodoo.
I have used many different analyst companies while working for different organizations, and in every case I have seen, their advice was either obvious to any competent geek, or else just plain wrong (e.g. see above references to Linux). They all made predictions, but I have never seen any independent analysis of analysts predictions. This article promised some objective reporting, but failed to deliver. Too bad, it's something we really need.
I'm PROVING it every day on my machine for three weeks now! Win 2k pro is going to smoke NT4 and 98
A single person sitting at a single system cannot, of course, "prove" the power or stability of any operating system. This scenario does not even rule out the possibility that some other person sitting at the same system might crash every ten minutes.
I say "of course' because this is absolutely obvious to me. The fact that it's not obvious to our AC might indicate that he has only ever been exposed to a single operating system, and does not need much in the way of proof.
The easiest thing you can do to help reduce the frequency of those crashes is to get the data off of Access. That poor little DBMS was just never designed to put up with the abuse that is constantly heaped upon it. You should be able to move the data to any ODBC compliant DBMS with little effort. I would suggest picking one that was cross platform so that you only had to move the database once. I suggest you take a look at Progress, as well as Oracle, Sybase, Ingress and, of course, MySQL. It's been a few years since I used Progress, but from what I have heard, it's just gotten better. MySQL is free (as in beer) on Unices, but not on Windows, and that's just one of many reasons it would make sense to put the database on Linux. Moving to a more robust DBMS will buy you time to port the application correctly.
Make full use of that time to do the job right. I strongly suggest that you do not attempt to do the port yourself in a language you are in the process of learning. Everybody writes really horrible code during the learning process of any language, and you do not want that code enshrined forever in an application that's critical to your business. Hire someone who knows how to do this type of app, and perform a real analysis and design before doing the coding. You will be doing the second system, so you have a pretty good idea what the requirements are. You will, of course, follow my advice and bring in someone who knows how to write this kind of application; and when you understand the problem, the technology, and the data there is no better model to follow than the top down model: analyse, then design, then code. Of course even when you understand all the elements of your application the creation of the application itself changes the environment it lives in, and so some adjustments to the design, and perhaps even the analysis will be made. But these adjustments will always be more expensive if done after the coding has started then if done before.
You have a working system. Fix it then replace it with a well-engineered second system; and your management will be pleased. Replace it with another hack, and nobody will be happy.
I have learned to be very suspicious of folks who go on at great length about those people and their problems, contrasted, of course with the elect who know and tread the righteous path.
It's not that they might not be right, it's just that every time I have encountered any of this ilk, they have ultimately had nothing of substance to contribute.
Science has made great strides in discovering methods to help humans determine the truth value of a proposition. Things like predictability, repeatability, the limiting of propositions to those that are falsifiable, and thus capable of being proven wrong; these are essential factors in our ability to judge a notion.
The thing that is missing from Carter's writings is anything that can be used to judge the ideas objectively. Without that, all we have is his ability to weave words in patterns that seem appealing and that elicit a favorable response. History has shown that this ability is not often linked to movements that bring any realy benefit to society.
Aside from stemming electronic eavesdropping, these prototypes could open the way to new types of security attacks on computers, Anderson and Kuhn suggest. A virus could be designed to find and then broadcast information stored on a machine without a user's knowledge. The game of spy versus spy goes on.
This is the final paragraph from the Scientific American article referenced above.
Seems like Microsoft's lack of care about their customers' security goes very deep. They're even funding novel ways for crackers to break into computers.
> it should not be two hard to check on whether a party is acting as a > government entity (i.e., when it is looking out for the public interest) > and when it is acting as a private organization (e.g., when it is looking > out for its own interests).
By this criteria, we should also be seeing House.org and Senate.org and WhiteHouse.org etc. etc. The entire.gov domain can just be retired.
A major problem faced by big established businesses is that it's not easy to determine what innovations will be successful. Most new ideas do not result in a successful product, most new businesses go bust. Even in this business climate, most startups will never reach the IPO stage, and most stock options will eventually be worthless.
When innovation is an integral part of the corporate culture, as it is at 3M, the expertise to turn an idea into a product is there. But I don't know of any company other than 3M that has learned how to do this.
Occasionally something comes along, like the Internet or Linux, that is clearly a winner; and then it's easy to decide to jump on the bandwagon. Today, any company that is not at least seriously checking Linux out is asleep at the switch. But just because two such phenomena happened so closely together does not mean that we have entered a period of highly predictable innovation. Yet another obvious winner may arise this year or next, but the most likely future is one in which the technology winners emerge from a confusing market battle. Microsoft is a good example of this. Until they had achieved dominance, it was not clear that they actually would.
Small companies bet the farm on their ideas. The individuals are willing to put in long hours for little pay in exchange for a chance to get very rich. Big companies, and the people who run them, are already very rich, and don't have the same motivation to push themselves. More than that, no single company can afford to back every possible new idea; and picking the winners is a very difficult job.
Even with something like Open Source development, it's tough to figure out a winning stragegy. While it's clear that Open Source development is a winner, it is not clear for any given product whether it would be best to create it using the cathedral or the bazaar. ESR has presented some guidelines in this area, but only time will tell whether they will stand up to real use.
All in all, I don't see any way for a big company to avoid the innovation trap.
She said: "Why does Windows crash so much?" I said: "Why don't you use an operating system that doesn't crash? Besides, it's free!" She said: "It's just too hard to learn." I said: "I guess you just answered your own question."
The rambling lack of organization, the very parochial assumption that the reader shares his narrow cultural and linguistic framework, the pronouns that have no obvious referent - the generally horrible writing style, in other words - could be fixed by a few working sessions with a talented editor. But not fixable at all is the failure to provide any reason to believe that the packer/mapper thing is in some way related to whether an individual is a superprogrammer.
In spite of all its flaws, however, this piece really is a terrific starting point for a worthy discussion. Just another instance of our failures being more valuable than our successes.
This is one instance where the disadvantaged can actually have an advantage over the priviledged. If these machines are, indeed, delivered with Linux, the kids who learn on them will end up far better educated in the computer arts than the rich kids who are "able" to run Windows.
Re:How can this hold up in court?
on
UCITA is passed
·
· Score: 1
Yeah, I've always given software to my kids to open and install. That way I can claim to to be exempt from the license I've never seen.
(Well, actually I haven't ALWAYS done that. But I do always think about doing it.)
If Microsoft were to shut down NT servers...
on
UCITA is passed
·
· Score: 2
How would we even tell the difference between that, and what we've got now?
Microsoft already shuts down our NT servers regularly, and they aren't even trying.
Now I won't have any reason at all to write C code. I'll hate to see that skill that saw me through so many years of trial and tribulation finally fade away. But in truth, handling balanced tags (quotes as well as HTML tags) was all I've used it for in the recent past.
The payback figures here are wildly optimistic. It's been many years since I was involved in installing communications cabling, but the cost of the materials was so low compared to the cost of labor and of getting permission to run the cables that we would typically run two to four times as much capacity as needed. The figure I recall is that material costs are less than ten percent of the total cost of laying cables.
Every one of the things that Conrad says Microsoft will do has already been done in NT4, for all the good it has done them. They cannot do very much more in this regard unless they integrate IIS with Windows 99 or 99++ or whatever they call their next Desktop OS. And we can only hope they do that, since it will push them even closer to the point at which the bubble gum and baling wire give way and their whole messy OS collapses in chaos.
The OS integration strategy was a brilliant response to the threat posed by Netscape. We should not expect them to try the same strategy against Linux. They are more likely to try things that exploit the weaknesses of the Linux community and the strengths of Microsoft, such as setting up bogus benchmarks that compare specially modified versions of an OS running a single task. That is a contest they can be expected to win every time, since they can throw as many full time, well paid engineers at it as needed, while the Linux folks must rely on volunteers - and who wants to put in hours working on a project that only makes sense to a marketdroid or a CIO? The recent PC Week tests showed nothing at all about how NT stacks up against Linux in the real world (try running IIS and Exchange on the same NT box), and have no practical value at all. They were, from an engineering perspective, a complete waste of time.
Rather than meeting this challenge on the battleground chosen by Microsoft, the Linux community would do far better to expose these "benchmarks" for the travesty they are. Then continue on the path that is leading to true greatness, making Linux better in ways that really matter.
I don't understand how there is any coercion in the use of the GPL. Nobody is forced to write code that is derived from GPL licensed code. Anyone can write their own code, hire someone to write it, buy a library, or write code that is derived from BSD or some other non-copyleft license.
BSD is there for those who want to be sure that their efforts remain free, and/or are offended by the thought that their code will be used in a proprietary product. Those who don't mind are free to release their work under another license.
If the GPL were the only license available then there would, indeed, be coercion. As long as there is choice, there is none.
for sticking this piece deep in the middle of 200+ responses to a REALLY stupid troll. This belongs at the top level of slashdot, and I hope you get it there.
I wouldn't worry about this one too much. I've heard that 9th circuit court rulings are overturned so often that they have almost no value as precedence.
Meaning no criticism of FreeBSD itself, it does no good to an OS to include as absurd a statement as "I don't believe it would've been possible had we chosen to go with any other Operating System solution", even in an advocacy piece. This is so patently false that the kindest thing one could say about the speaker (assuming that he was quoted accurately) is that he had been carried away by his enthusiasm for his favorite OS.
Misinformation is not good advocacy. All it accomplishes is the destruction of credibility. I suggest it would be best for the entire Open Source community if we were to leave such tactics to the commercial world.
Slashdot Mirror
I, too, really respect Bruce Perens, but I don't see how he can complain that his lawsuit remarks were meant to be private, when he made the same remarks in a comment on a slashdot article - and you don't get much more open than that.
That said, I would like to express my hope that this uproar does not cause Bruce to retreat into the kind of measured mediaspeak that we get from every corporate flack in the world. Bruce is not an officer of Red Hat and owes nothing to their stockholders. Neither does he owe anything to the stockholders of the Open Source corporation, because there is no such thing, and hopefully never will be.
One of the greatest benefits of the Open Source community is the degree to which we can trust that statements made from its illuminaries come from the heart. Any deviation from this is a lessening of the community, and I for one hope that Bruce Perens recovers quickly from this fiasco and continues to fight the good fight.
The desktop metaphor is familiar and "good enough" for a 2D workspace, and so I suspect that it will be the primary metaphor until such time as 3D is as cheap (in both dollars and system resources) as 2D is today. Alternate 2D metaphors may be better, but it will be hard to overcome the weight of usage enjoyed by the desktop.
Now when 3D gains primacy in a year or two, all bets are off. All it will take is a radical new input device (the mouse is inherently 2D), and a stunning new metaphor (you are in a maze of twisting passages, all alike? maybe not) and we'll be off on an entirely new paradigm.
We'll still have to do all the 2D things we do now, such as writing and drawing and calculating, but even something as two dimensional as a written document could have very interesting enhancements when presented in a 3D space.
Anyone who has administered email servers has to feel a real shiver going up the spine on reading this, because it is impossible to keep email flowing without engaging occasionally in just this sort of thing. When email starts behaving erratically you have to check oout the headers. With Sendmail type MTAs that means capturing and reading the email messages, because that's where they are found. And no matter how hard you try, you are going to read at least some of the content in some of those messages.
If this comes to be seen as illegal, it could mean very bad things for Internet email admins, and a lot of us who don't even admin anymore could find ourselves in deep doodoo.
I have used many different analyst companies while working for different organizations, and in every case I have seen, their advice was either obvious to any competent geek, or else just plain wrong (e.g. see above references to Linux). They all made predictions, but I have never seen any independent analysis of analysts predictions. This article promised some objective reporting, but failed to deliver. Too bad, it's something we really need.
I'm PROVING it every day on my machine for three weeks now! Win 2k pro is going to smoke NT4 and 98
A single person sitting at a single system cannot, of course, "prove" the power or stability of any operating system. This scenario does not even rule out the possibility that some other person sitting at the same system might crash every ten minutes.
I say "of course' because this is absolutely obvious to me. The fact that it's not obvious to our AC might indicate that he has only ever been exposed to a single operating system, and does not need much in the way of proof.
The easiest thing you can do to help reduce the frequency of those crashes is to get the data off of Access. That poor little DBMS was just never designed to put up with the abuse that is constantly heaped upon it. You should be able to move the data to any ODBC compliant DBMS with little effort. I would suggest picking one that was cross platform so that you only had to move the database once. I suggest you take a look at Progress, as well as Oracle, Sybase, Ingress and, of course, MySQL. It's been a few years since I used Progress, but from what I have heard, it's just gotten better. MySQL is free (as in beer) on Unices, but not on Windows, and that's just one of many reasons it would make sense to put the database on Linux. Moving to a more robust DBMS will buy you time to port the application correctly.
Make full use of that time to do the job right. I strongly suggest that you do not attempt to do the port yourself in a language you are in the process of learning. Everybody writes really horrible code during the learning process of any language, and you do not want that code enshrined forever in an application that's critical to your business. Hire someone who knows how to do this type of app, and perform a real analysis and design before doing the coding. You will be doing the second system, so you have a pretty good idea what the requirements are. You will, of course, follow my advice and bring in someone who knows how to write this kind of application; and when you understand the problem, the technology, and the data there is no better model to follow than the top down model: analyse, then design, then code. Of course even when you understand all the elements of your application the creation of the application itself changes the environment it lives in, and so some adjustments to the design, and perhaps even the analysis will be made. But these adjustments will always be more expensive if done after the coding has started then if done before.
You have a working system. Fix it then replace it with a well-engineered second system; and your management will be pleased. Replace it with another hack, and nobody will be happy.
I have learned to be very suspicious of folks who go on at great length about those people and their problems, contrasted, of course with the elect who know and tread the righteous path.
It's not that they might not be right, it's just that every time I have encountered any of this ilk, they have ultimately had nothing of substance to contribute.
Science has made great strides in discovering methods to help humans determine the truth value of a proposition. Things like predictability, repeatability, the limiting of propositions to those that are falsifiable, and thus capable of being proven wrong; these are essential factors in our ability to judge a notion.
The thing that is missing from Carter's writings is anything that can be used to judge the ideas objectively. Without that, all we have is his ability to weave words in patterns that seem appealing and that elicit a favorable response. History has shown that this ability is not often linked to movements that bring any realy benefit to society.
Aside from stemming electronic eavesdropping, these prototypes could open the way to new types of security attacks on computers, Anderson and Kuhn suggest. A virus could be designed to find and then broadcast information stored on a machine without a user's knowledge. The game of spy versus spy goes on.
This is the final paragraph from the Scientific American article referenced above.
Seems like Microsoft's lack of care about their customers' security goes very deep. They're even funding novel ways for crackers to break into computers.
> it should not be two hard to check on whether a party is acting as a
.gov domain can just be retired.
> government entity (i.e., when it is looking out for the public interest)
> and when it is acting as a private organization (e.g., when it is looking
> out for its own interests).
By this criteria, we should also be seeing House.org and Senate.org and WhiteHouse.org etc. etc. The entire
A major problem faced by big established businesses is that it's not easy to determine what innovations will be successful. Most new ideas do not result in a successful product, most new businesses go bust. Even in this business climate, most startups will never reach the IPO stage, and most stock options will eventually be worthless.
When innovation is an integral part of the corporate culture, as it is at 3M, the expertise to turn an idea into a product is there. But I don't know of any company other than 3M that has learned how to do this.
Occasionally something comes along, like the Internet or Linux, that is clearly a winner; and then it's easy to decide to jump on the bandwagon. Today, any company that is not at least seriously checking Linux out is asleep at the switch. But just because two such phenomena happened so closely together does not mean that we have entered a period of highly predictable innovation. Yet another obvious winner may arise this year or next, but the most likely future is one in which the technology winners emerge from a confusing market battle. Microsoft is a good example of this. Until they had achieved dominance, it was not clear that they actually would.
Small companies bet the farm on their ideas. The individuals are willing to put in long hours for little pay in exchange for a chance to get very rich. Big companies, and the people who run them, are already very rich, and don't have the same motivation to push themselves. More than that, no single company can afford to back every possible new idea; and picking the winners is a very difficult job.
Even with something like Open Source development, it's tough to figure out a winning stragegy. While it's clear that Open Source development is a winner, it is not clear for any given product whether it would be best to create it using the cathedral or the bazaar. ESR has presented some guidelines in this area, but only time will tell whether they will stand up to real use.
All in all, I don't see any way for a big company to avoid the innovation trap.
She said:
"Why does Windows crash so much?"
I said:
"Why don't you use an operating system that doesn't crash? Besides, it's free!"
She said:
"It's just too hard to learn."
I said:
"I guess you just answered your own question."
NOT!
The rambling lack of organization, the very parochial assumption that the reader shares his narrow cultural and linguistic framework, the pronouns that have no obvious referent - the generally horrible writing style, in other words - could be fixed by a few working sessions with a talented editor. But not fixable at all is the failure to provide any reason to believe that the packer/mapper thing is in some way related to whether an individual is a superprogrammer.
In spite of all its flaws, however, this piece really is a terrific starting point for a worthy discussion. Just another instance of our failures being more valuable than our successes.
This is one instance where the disadvantaged can actually have an advantage over the priviledged. If these machines are, indeed, delivered with Linux, the kids who learn on them will end up far better educated in the computer arts than the rich kids who are "able" to run Windows.
Yeah, I've always given software to my kids to open and install. That way I can claim to to be exempt from the license I've never seen.
(Well, actually I haven't ALWAYS done that. But I do always think about doing it.)
How would we even tell the difference between that, and what we've got now?
Microsoft already shuts down our NT servers regularly, and they aren't even trying.
Now I won't have any reason at all to write C code. I'll hate to see that skill that saw me through so many years of trial and tribulation finally fade away. But in truth, handling balanced tags (quotes as well as HTML tags) was all I've used it for in the recent past.
The payback figures here are wildly optimistic. It's been many years since I was involved in installing communications cabling, but the cost of the materials was so low compared to the cost of labor and of getting permission to run the cables that we would typically run two to four times as much capacity as needed. The figure I recall is that material costs are less than ten percent of the total cost of laying cables.
Yes, but do any of them play Quicktime 4? The thrust of the comment was that the new Quicktime 4 format was not supported or open.
Every one of the things that Conrad says Microsoft will do has already been done in NT4, for all the good it has done them. They cannot do very much more in this regard unless they integrate IIS with Windows 99 or 99++ or whatever they call their next Desktop OS. And we can only hope they do that, since it will push them even closer to the point at which the bubble gum and baling wire give way and their whole messy OS collapses in chaos.
The OS integration strategy was a brilliant response to the threat posed by Netscape. We should not expect them to try the same strategy against Linux. They are more likely to try things that exploit the weaknesses of the Linux community and the strengths of Microsoft, such as setting up bogus benchmarks that compare specially modified versions of an OS running a single task. That is a contest they can be expected to win every time, since they can throw as many full time, well paid engineers at it as needed, while the Linux folks must rely on volunteers - and who wants to put in hours working on a project that only makes sense to a marketdroid or a CIO? The recent PC Week tests showed nothing at all about how NT stacks up against Linux in the real world (try running IIS and Exchange on the same NT box), and have no practical value at all. They were, from an engineering perspective, a complete waste of time.
Rather than meeting this challenge on the battleground chosen by Microsoft, the Linux community would do far better to expose these "benchmarks" for the travesty they are. Then continue on the path that is leading to true greatness, making Linux better in ways that really matter.
I don't understand how there is any coercion in the use of the GPL. Nobody is forced to write code that is derived from GPL licensed code. Anyone can write their own code, hire someone to write it, buy a library, or write code that is derived from BSD or some other non-copyleft license.
BSD is there for those who want to be sure that their efforts remain free, and/or are offended by the thought that their code will be used in a proprietary product. Those who don't mind are free to release their work under another license.
If the GPL were the only license available then there would, indeed, be coercion. As long as there is choice, there is none.
for sticking this piece deep in the middle of 200+ responses to a REALLY stupid troll. This belongs at the top level of slashdot, and I hope you get it there.
c:\format c:
d:\setup
I wouldn't worry about this one too much. I've heard that 9th circuit court rulings are overturned so often that they have almost no value as precedence.
Meaning no criticism of FreeBSD itself, it does no good to an OS to include as absurd a statement as "I don't believe it would've been possible had we chosen to go with any other Operating System solution", even in an advocacy piece. This is so patently false that the kindest thing one could say about the speaker (assuming that he was quoted accurately) is that he had been carried away by his enthusiasm for his favorite OS.
Misinformation is not good advocacy. All it accomplishes is the destruction of credibility. I suggest it would be best for the entire Open Source community if we were to leave such tactics to the commercial world.