"You, the customer, by clicking on the 'I accept' button, agree that you
have no more rights than an insect, and we, the software company, can keep you
in a jar if we want."
Or maybe:
"We, or any of our employees, can come to your house and eat your fig
newtons and drink your milk. If any of your children are cute, we can take
them to live with us."
In contrast, the open source licenses will continue to say: "We are
giving you this software entirely as an act of technical love. It is possible
that, if you need help, we will help you with your installation also."
The license says, basically, "Even though the U.S. was founded with
carefully designed judicial principles, you must agree that those principles
don't apply to you."
Software companies seem to be quite self-destructive. First Microsoft, with
Bill Gates seeming to lie to the courts, and Microsoft license confusion, and
numerous other ways of communicating that the company doesn't care.
Then Adobe attacking Skylarov and the author of Killustrator.
Now Borland wants to finish the job of destroying itself.
I've seen major problems with security in Macromedia Flash. Apparently someone
was using a security bug in Macromedia software to run arbitrary programs.
Macromedia software wants to check the Macromedia web site for later versions.
The communication software appeared to be the gateway for the attack. I reported this problem to Macromedia, but the company showed no interest.
A second problem with using Flash is that you give the URL of each of your
customers to Macromedia. A third is that you have to post an advertisement for
Macromedia that says "Download Flash if you don't have it". A fourth is that,
if the user does not want to run Macromedia software, web sites using it are
broken.
The question is not whether the Columbia administration is paying the professors a lot of money. The question is whether, if they have money, they will share it with the teaching staff? I don't know the answer to this, but the previous poster indicated the answer was no.
It is relevant that the costs near the university are low only if the tuition is also low. Since this is not the case, it indicates the university administration does not share money with the teaching staff.
This relates to the original story because it shows more fully the overall personality of the university administration.
Being known by every prospective student as an organization that sues:
Priceless. (Do you want to come from a university that prospective employers
know might sue? This is a cost to the university whether or not they win.)
I thought the whole point of a university was to collect people who know more
than the average person, for the benefit of the society as a whole. But now,
if the university discovers that they may have benefited us, they sue?
The patent claims seem overly broad to me. If you have experience doing
assembly language programming, you are certainly aware of the possibilities of
out-of-order execution. I was doing what the patent claims long before 1989 --
manually. That is certainly prior art.
When you hand-optimize assembly code, you develop lots of appreciation for
cases where re-ordered execution might not function correctly. The claims
basically say, "Execute instructions out of their normal order, except where
that wouldn't work." So, Columbia has a patent on hard-wiring a processor to
run an obvious kind of program.
From the story: Dullea acknowledged that the university is involved in
patent litigation with Carl Zeiss Optical, Inc., maker of eyeglass frames, but
said the case is "not of this size." Translation: "We are not really an
organization that likes to litigate, except..."
From a previous post: The average Cornell prof salary is below
corresponding salaries at "peer" institutions and definitely below private
industry equivalents. The faculty has been complaining about that for at least
twenty years without effect. - son of Cornell professor. The university is
NOT planning on sharing any money with students or faculty if they win.
The suit seems to me to be an example of a habitually adversarial kind of
thinking that is becoming quite common in the U.S. culture. Remember Adobe and
Skylarov, and Adobe's attack on the writer of the Killustrator program? People
and societies sometimes arrive at a habitual frame of mind in which they are
unable to find creative ways to live in the world without conflict.
The recent terrorism is also an example of this. According to major news
sources; the U.S. government caused many of the problems to which the
terrorists were reacting: What
should be the response to violence?
Because all the settings necessary to run a program are in the registry, it is not possible to just copy the program's files onto another computer, and run the program.
Most users are not able to edit the registry, even if they new what the registry keys meant and how to change them to work on a new computer.
Microsoft has a history of doing what it thinks will make more money in the
short term, even if what the company does is strongly against the interests of
its customers. For example, the registry in MS operating systems is
implemented in such a way that it provides copy protection, and also in such a
way as to be a massive single point of failure.
Basically, when you pay money to Microsoft, you are paying money to someone
who may decide to be your enemy. It is not surprising that a large
organization would try to avoid that.
Also, there is the concern that the amazing number of security bugs in
Microsoft software may be due to a deliberate intention of the U.S. government
to provide points of entry for government spy software like the FBI's
Carnivore.
I've gathered more than 600 pages of links from major news sources showing
the U.S. government's interest in control: What should be the Response to
Violence? It it any wonder that a foreign government would want to avoid
being involved in this? The only downside is that the office tools are less
capable. But the Chinese government's decision is support for closing the gap.
One big lesson from this for big companies like Intel and Adobe is that having your problems discussed on Slashdot is VERY costly.
I've read a lot of the posts, and they have the effect of making Intel seem less like an interesting place to work. The good people may just not apply in the future, and that may mean that nothing will stop Intel's decline.
"The truth is that violence is violence, no matter who commits and no
matter who suffers as a result."
Agreed. Also, very few Americans understand how violent is their government.
The U.S. government has bombed 14 countries in a little over 30 years, killing
more than 2,000,000 people directly, and destroying the lives of millions
more.
It is interesting to note that Brazil is a country about the same size as the
United States. Brazil is also a nation of immigrants, from the same mostly
European countries. How many countries has Brazil bombed in the last 30 years?
None, nada, zero. So, it is possible for Europeans to live in the world
without killing. The method of relating to other people used by the U.S.
government is not the only way.
A lot of people don't realize how bad the situation is with Microsoft. They
read a story on Slashdot, and think that Slashdot is exaggerating the
problems. The opposite is true. There are many, many problems you never hear
about on Slashdot. For example, this just arrived:
Title: SQL Server Text Formatting Functions Contain unchecked Buffers.
Date: 20 December 2001
Software: Microsoft SQL Server 7.0 and Microsoft SQL Server 2000
Impact: Run code of attacker's choice on server, denial of service
Max Risk: Moderate
Bulletin: MS01-060
I read all the posts carefully, because accounting software is an important
subject for me.
No one seems to have discussed a MAJOR reason to go to Open Source software:
Commercial companies often become self-destructive. Maybe because they want to
preserve reasons for future upgrades, they become unwilling to fix problems in
their products.
When commercial companies are successful, they will often begin to try to
squeeze the user. Look at the quote below about "unrelenting
advertisement".
When commercial companies are successful, they often seem to spin out
of control. Novell was one. Corel was another.
When commercial companies are successful, they often become arrogant and
self-serving. Microsoft is an on-going story of being adversarial toward its
customers.
Commercial software is often VERY influenced by the markeplace. From a quote
below: Microsoft is "giving away Microsoft Money... I think
Intuit/Quicken/QuickBooks will go the way of Netscape within 18 months." When
a company experiences a downturn, the good people leave, and companies often
are unable to continue successfully. Remember PowerBuilder? Where is it now,
after Microsoft took over the market with Visual Basic? Those who spent years
learning PowerBuilder lost their investment.
I've been hearing about file corruption in Quicken and QuickBooks for years.
The quotes below from this Slashdot story show that the problems have not been
cured. Have the good people left Intuit, the manufacturer of QuickBooks? My
experience of Open Source software it that major problems are fixed quickly.
QuickBooks is counter-intuitive, lacks backward file compatibility, and
fixing some types of transactions is virtually impossible: 2718237
QuickBooks has a poor interface, there is often data corruption, and it
is "slooooooooow": 2720211
QuickBooks has "frequently lost entire days worth of data": 2718998
"I hate the QuickBooks UI and its inconsistencies", GNU Cash is better:
2717131
QuickBook's "Web Based" accounting package only works on Windows:2717244
"QuickBooks 2001 Pro is cranky - it misnumbers printed checks,
sometimes. It will let you delete a reconciled check without warning on some
systems, but not others. The invoicing sometimes deletes descriptions but
keeps amounts.
"Plus, [QuickBooks 2001 Pro is] an unrelenting advertisement for online
plus-charged checking, charge cards, investment accounts, you name it. QB
is just a loss leader for the online services.
"... [Microsoft] is giving away Microsoft Money. The.NET services will
require you to use Money, just you watch. I think Intuit/Quicken/QuickBooks
will go the way of Netscape within 18 months."
The above three paragraphs are quoted from: 2717209
"I use Vmware [under Linux] to run QuickBooks for my business and
Quicken for my personal stuff. They are in two different VMs and it runs
great. When Quicken/QuickBooks decides to crash the OS, I just restart the
Virtual Machine": 2716999"
"Microsoft doesn't audit their software because *IT ISN'T COST EFFECTIVE
YET*. Not until people demand security will MS start doing this. It hasn't
happened yet."
I agree that Microsoft does not audit their software. That seems obvious.
Yes, Microsoft has more to audit, but they have more full-time programmers, too.
What you are basically saying is that Microsoft doesn't care about being
trustworthy, they care only about money.
I never would have guessed that Open Source software would replace the
software from a giant company, but that is will continue happening if
Microsoft does not care for its customers.
I agree it is a bug in the OS. It is Matrox video cards. The problem is that, in some cases, Opera takes memory and doesn't give it back. There is a huge memory leak somewhere, it seems, that has been there for more than a year.
If the volunteers for OpenBSD can go through the software and eliminate
security problems in advance, Microsoft, with 30 billion dollars in the bank,
could also. Since Microsoft doesn't do this, maybe there is some reason.
Maybe the U.S. government has dictated that they leave bugs in.
Software is only an operating system if it can be trusted. If it can't be
trusted, there should be some other name, like fnord. Microsoft Fnord XP.
I am very pro-Microsoft. I am more pro-Microsoft than Bill Gates. In my
opinion, correcting the problems below would be very healthy for Microsoft.
The registry is a single point of failure. If I install a program, and
something goes wrong, the registry may become corrupted. There are many kinds
of registry corruption that cannot be fixed for a practical price.
Microsoft operating systems cannot be trusted. Microsoft often builds
attempts at making money and crushing competitors into its operating systems.
For example, if I make a mistake in typing an address into the Internet
Explorer address bar, I am connected instead to MSN.com, a commercial activity
of Microsoft.
A recent service pack upgrade to Microsoft operating system software disabled a
competitor's software (Apple's QuickTime). There was no notice. The fact
that there was no notice means that users may spend time troubleshooting why
QuickTime would not start.
Microsoft cannot be trusted to try to make a good operating system. The
registry problems are, apparently, caused by trying to mix all programs
together so that the mixture will act as copy protection. This is putting
interest in making money before interest in trying to make a good operating
system.
Microsoft Windows 95, 98, and ME contain deliberate limitations. They crash
even when there is plenty of memory, because of deliberate limitations in
operating sytem resources. This was done apparently because of the desire to
sell everyone a better operating system later.
I estimate that this message could go on for 1,000 more pages. Just the very
limited U.S.
Justice Department complaints against Microsoft, in which Microsoft was
found guilty of breaking the law, were more than 200 pages.
Part of the complete definition of an operating system is that it is software
you can trust completely. By that definition, in my opinion it cannot be said
that Microsoft has ever made an operating system.
Encouragement and expression of happiness is meaningful content. The fast growth of Linux is a wonderful, wonderful thing. Shouts of joy are meaningful.
It is a stretch to say this has any connection with terrorism.
Slashdot Mirror
Licenses of the future:
"You, the customer, by clicking on the 'I accept' button, agree that you have no more rights than an insect, and we, the software company, can keep you in a jar if we want."
Or maybe:
"We, or any of our employees, can come to your house and eat your fig newtons and drink your milk. If any of your children are cute, we can take them to live with us."
In contrast, the open source licenses will continue to say: "We are giving you this software entirely as an act of technical love. It is possible that, if you need help, we will help you with your installation also."
The license says, basically, "Even though the U.S. was founded with carefully designed judicial principles, you must agree that those principles don't apply to you."
Software companies seem to be quite self-destructive. First Microsoft, with Bill Gates seeming to lie to the courts, and Microsoft license confusion, and numerous other ways of communicating that the company doesn't care.
Then Adobe attacking Skylarov and the author of Killustrator.
Now Borland wants to finish the job of destroying itself.
--
What should be the response to violence?
He's right, you need more sleep. It is self-destructive not to get enough sleep. You probably don't realize how crabby you have become.
I've seen major problems with security in Macromedia Flash. Apparently someone was using a security bug in Macromedia software to run arbitrary programs.
Macromedia software wants to check the Macromedia web site for later versions. The communication software appeared to be the gateway for the attack. I reported this problem to Macromedia, but the company showed no interest.
A second problem with using Flash is that you give the URL of each of your customers to Macromedia. A third is that you have to post an advertisement for Macromedia that says "Download Flash if you don't have it". A fourth is that, if the user does not want to run Macromedia software, web sites using it are broken.
The question is not whether the Columbia administration is paying the professors a lot of money. The question is whether, if they have money, they will share it with the teaching staff? I don't know the answer to this, but the previous poster indicated the answer was no.
It is relevant that the costs near the university are low only if the tuition is also low. Since this is not the case, it indicates the university administration does not share money with the teaching staff.
This relates to the original story because it shows more fully the overall personality of the university administration.
Suing HP: $8,000,000 if they win.
Suing other people: Another $4,000,000.
Being known by every prospective student as an organization that sues: Priceless. (Do you want to come from a university that prospective employers know might sue? This is a cost to the university whether or not they win.)
I thought the whole point of a university was to collect people who know more than the average person, for the benefit of the society as a whole. But now, if the university discovers that they may have benefited us, they sue?
The patent claims seem overly broad to me. If you have experience doing assembly language programming, you are certainly aware of the possibilities of out-of-order execution. I was doing what the patent claims long before 1989 -- manually. That is certainly prior art.
When you hand-optimize assembly code, you develop lots of appreciation for cases where re-ordered execution might not function correctly. The claims basically say, "Execute instructions out of their normal order, except where that wouldn't work." So, Columbia has a patent on hard-wiring a processor to run an obvious kind of program.
From the story: Dullea acknowledged that the university is involved in patent litigation with Carl Zeiss Optical, Inc., maker of eyeglass frames, but said the case is "not of this size." Translation: "We are not really an organization that likes to litigate, except..."
From a previous post: The average Cornell prof salary is below corresponding salaries at "peer" institutions and definitely below private industry equivalents. The faculty has been complaining about that for at least twenty years without effect. - son of Cornell professor. The university is NOT planning on sharing any money with students or faculty if they win.
The suit seems to me to be an example of a habitually adversarial kind of thinking that is becoming quite common in the U.S. culture. Remember Adobe and Skylarov, and Adobe's attack on the writer of the Killustrator program? People and societies sometimes arrive at a habitual frame of mind in which they are unable to find creative ways to live in the world without conflict.
The recent terrorism is also an example of this. According to major news sources; the U.S. government caused many of the problems to which the terrorists were reacting: What should be the response to violence?
Because all the settings necessary to run a program are in the registry, it is not possible to just copy the program's files onto another computer, and run the program.
Most users are not able to edit the registry, even if they new what the registry keys meant and how to change them to work on a new computer.
Microsoft has a history of doing what it thinks will make more money in the short term, even if what the company does is strongly against the interests of its customers. For example, the registry in MS operating systems is implemented in such a way that it provides copy protection, and also in such a way as to be a massive single point of failure.
Basically, when you pay money to Microsoft, you are paying money to someone who may decide to be your enemy. It is not surprising that a large organization would try to avoid that.
Also, there is the concern that the amazing number of security bugs in Microsoft software may be due to a deliberate intention of the U.S. government to provide points of entry for government spy software like the FBI's Carnivore.
I've gathered more than 600 pages of links from major news sources showing the U.S. government's interest in control: What should be the Response to Violence? It it any wonder that a foreign government would want to avoid being involved in this? The only downside is that the office tools are less capable. But the Chinese government's decision is support for closing the gap.
One big lesson from this for big companies like Intel and Adobe is that having your problems discussed on Slashdot is VERY costly.
I've read a lot of the posts, and they have the effect of making Intel seem less like an interesting place to work. The good people may just not apply in the future, and that may mean that nothing will stop Intel's decline.
"The truth is that violence is violence, no matter who commits and no matter who suffers as a result."
Agreed. Also, very few Americans understand how violent is their government. The U.S. government has bombed 14 countries in a little over 30 years, killing more than 2,000,000 people directly, and destroying the lives of millions more.
It is interesting to note that Brazil is a country about the same size as the United States. Brazil is also a nation of immigrants, from the same mostly European countries. How many countries has Brazil bombed in the last 30 years? None, nada, zero. So, it is possible for Europeans to live in the world without killing. The method of relating to other people used by the U.S. government is not the only way.
I've gathered links from news agencies and other online sources about this: What should be the Response to Violence?
Microsoft is making sure this company gets a lot of publicity.
--
The U.S. government causes problems, then pretends to solve them by creating more: What should be the Response to Violence?
A lot of people don't realize how bad the situation is with Microsoft. They read a story on Slashdot, and think that Slashdot is exaggerating the problems. The opposite is true. There are many, many problems you never hear about on Slashdot. For example, this just arrived:
Title: SQL Server Text Formatting Functions Contain unchecked Buffers.
Date: 20 December 2001
Software: Microsoft SQL Server 7.0 and Microsoft SQL Server 2000
Impact: Run code of attacker's choice on server, denial of service
Max Risk: Moderate
Bulletin: MS01-060
Microsoft encourages customers to review the Security Bulletin at: http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/bulleti
If you read all the advisories, it is possible to come to the conclusion that there seems to be a lot of sloppy code in Microsoft products.
--
The U.S. government causes problems, then pretends to solve them by creating more: What should be the Response to Violence?
I read all the posts carefully, because accounting software is an important subject for me.
No one seems to have discussed a MAJOR reason to go to Open Source software: Commercial companies often become self-destructive. Maybe because they want to preserve reasons for future upgrades, they become unwilling to fix problems in their products.
When commercial companies are successful, they will often begin to try to squeeze the user. Look at the quote below about "unrelenting advertisement".
When commercial companies are successful, they often seem to spin out of control. Novell was one. Corel was another.
When commercial companies are successful, they often become arrogant and self-serving. Microsoft is an on-going story of being adversarial toward its customers.
Commercial software is often VERY influenced by the markeplace. From a quote below: Microsoft is "giving away Microsoft Money
I've been hearing about file corruption in Quicken and QuickBooks for years. The quotes below from this Slashdot story show that the problems have not been cured. Have the good people left Intuit, the manufacturer of QuickBooks? My experience of Open Source software it that major problems are fixed quickly.
QuickBooks is counter-intuitive, lacks backward file compatibility, and fixing some types of transactions is virtually impossible: 2718237
QuickBooks has a poor interface, there is often data corruption, and it is "slooooooooow": 2720211
QuickBooks has "frequently lost entire days worth of data": 2718998
"I hate the QuickBooks UI and its inconsistencies", GNU Cash is better: 2717131
QuickBook's "Web Based" accounting package only works on Windows: 2717244
"QuickBooks 2001 Pro is cranky - it misnumbers printed checks, sometimes. It will let you delete a reconciled check without warning on some systems, but not others. The invoicing sometimes deletes descriptions but keeps amounts.
"Plus, [QuickBooks 2001 Pro is] an unrelenting advertisement for online plus-charged checking, charge cards, investment accounts, you name it. QB is just a loss leader for the online services.
"... [Microsoft] is giving away Microsoft Money. The
The above three paragraphs are quoted from: 2717209
"I use Vmware [under Linux] to run QuickBooks for my business and Quicken for my personal stuff. They are in two different VMs and it runs great. When Quicken/QuickBooks decides to crash the OS, I just restart the Virtual Machine": 2716999"
Someone from Intuit posted a comment: KaiserSoze, a "member of the QuickBooks team" -- 2717731
This is counter-intuitive, but commercial software is often or unwilling to serve the needs of its users. Open Source software has no other purpose.
--
The U.S. government causes problems, then pretends to solve them by creating more: What should be the Response to Violence?
Maybe so, but I get worried when their web site does not work.
It says, "Useful POS Links", but there is no link:
http://www.compiere.org/pos.html
Know nothing about it, but looked it up on Google. Might as well share my research:
SQL Ledger
Christopher Browne's List of Free Software for Business Accounting
Mini review of SQL Ledger
Short discussion of SQL Ledger from GNU.ORG
AllCommerce, an ecommerce and fulfillment system
GNU Enterprise
Linux-Kontor is a free ERP (enterprise resource planning) software suite.
From the story:
"Using Windows NT, which is known to have some failure modes, on a warship is similar to hoping that luck will be in our favor," DiGiorgio said.
You were very quick to be hostile. Sometimes I don't have control over the operating system used by my customers.
Interesting point.
"Microsoft doesn't audit their software because *IT ISN'T COST EFFECTIVE YET*. Not until people demand security will MS start doing this. It hasn't happened yet."
I agree that Microsoft does not audit their software. That seems obvious.
Yes, Microsoft has more to audit, but they have more full-time programmers, too.
What you are basically saying is that Microsoft doesn't care about being trustworthy, they care only about money.
I never would have guessed that Open Source software would replace the software from a giant company, but that is will continue happening if Microsoft does not care for its customers.
I agree it is a bug in the OS. It is Matrox video cards. The problem is that, in some cases, Opera takes memory and doesn't give it back. There is a huge memory leak somewhere, it seems, that has been there for more than a year.
If the volunteers for OpenBSD can go through the software and eliminate security problems in advance, Microsoft, with 30 billion dollars in the bank, could also. Since Microsoft doesn't do this, maybe there is some reason. Maybe the U.S. government has dictated that they leave bugs in.
Software is only an operating system if it can be trusted. If it can't be trusted, there should be some other name, like fnord. Microsoft Fnord XP.
--
U.S. planned to attack Afghanistan before the second WTC bombing.
I've had serious problems with Opera crashing the operating system when there are too many windows. I've reported this bug several times. No answer.
I am very pro-Microsoft. I am more pro-Microsoft than Bill Gates. In my opinion, correcting the problems below would be very healthy for Microsoft.
The registry is a single point of failure. If I install a program, and something goes wrong, the registry may become corrupted. There are many kinds of registry corruption that cannot be fixed for a practical price.
Microsoft operating systems cannot be trusted. Microsoft often builds attempts at making money and crushing competitors into its operating systems. For example, if I make a mistake in typing an address into the Internet Explorer address bar, I am connected instead to MSN.com, a commercial activity of Microsoft.
A recent service pack upgrade to Microsoft operating system software disabled a competitor's software (Apple's QuickTime). There was no notice. The fact that there was no notice means that users may spend time troubleshooting why QuickTime would not start.
Microsoft cannot be trusted to try to make a good operating system. The registry problems are, apparently, caused by trying to mix all programs together so that the mixture will act as copy protection. This is putting interest in making money before interest in trying to make a good operating system.
Microsoft Windows 95, 98, and ME contain deliberate limitations. They crash even when there is plenty of memory, because of deliberate limitations in operating sytem resources. This was done apparently because of the desire to sell everyone a better operating system later.
I estimate that this message could go on for 1,000 more pages. Just the very limited U.S. Justice Department complaints against Microsoft, in which Microsoft was found guilty of breaking the law, were more than 200 pages.
Part of the complete definition of an operating system is that it is software you can trust completely. By that definition, in my opinion it cannot be said that Microsoft has ever made an operating system.
Encouragement and expression of happiness is meaningful content. The fast growth of Linux is a wonderful, wonderful thing. Shouts of joy are meaningful.
It is a stretch to say this has any connection with terrorism.