Yah, 99% of windows comunications protocols relate directly to security, DRM or software licensing... Right... buth that won't prevent some MS lawyer worm from arguing it. After all, they get paid either way.
In my reading of these documents, it seems that while there significant positive elements to the decision, there are many loopholes for microsoft to slither though. I'm just waiting for every license agreement to be re-characterized as a joint venture.
I'm not sure how this is any different than the feature of mod_bandwidth that limits the number of requests per user per second. I'm definately going to test it out it's unclear how this is any different, except that it doesn't have all the other overhead functionality of mod_bandwidth.
There is nothing new in this article, although there is one phrase I liked vary much:
This kind of cultish devotion is every marketer's dream -- a product perceived as so cool that owners will subjugate their normal lives to embrace it.
Not because it presents a new idea or take on the issue but simply because it is well constructed and is phrased in such a way as to appeal to corporate marketoids so maybe they'll pay attention.
It is good to see this sort of thing in the main stream media although I would have liked to see more focus on how ill-concieved legislation like the DNCA, hastilly written with little or no understanding of the ramifications is coming back to bite these corporations in their collective ass. Oh well. It's a good start.
The Amiga A1000 was perhaps the most advanced piece of personal computing hardware of it's time. It ushered in the age of computer generated effects for television in the '80s as well as provided extraordinary graphical capabilities unmatched by any personal computer until the early 1990s. It was a horrible failure of the marketplace that this hardware platform did not find a sufficiently large customer base and it's wonderful to see that some groups seek to prolong the usefulness of this platform, regardless of the financial benefit. Consider it a service to the memory of evolutionary hallmarks of the computer industry.
OK, so 4 million dereamcast consoles were sold in the US alone. Ang I have to say, it's cool that you can now use CD linux and FreeBSD to get online with this hardware, but where does the contributor of this article get the notion that this will significantly increase the userbase Linux of FreeBSD. Somehow I seriously doubt that any new adopters of Linux or FreeBSD will be so balzy as to choose to do their first installation on a DC console just because they have one. Certainly, logic dicates that the vast extreme majority of DC *nix users were already *nix hobbyists.
Yah, after a few replies correcting me, I guess it was a PowerPC box. I only ever saw the thing once. It was tucked neatly next to a rack of other hardware (!!?!!) in a dorm room (!). The guy who's machine it was was insane. He had one machine on which he was trying to set the record for the most OSs on a single box. There was a/. article on this subject a while back but I couldn't find it jsut now for a link. oh well.
Although I agree with the latter positions of the infoWorld article, I did not find it particularly persuasive. I find an earlier MSBNC (admitedly a most unlikely source) arcicle to be far more enguaging and persuasive as it evaluates more even handedly the historical purposes of copyright and whether or not it has served it's purpose. The article was Copyrights and copywrongs, a historical examination of Copyright which is definately worth a read. Along the same lines you might want to read the letters between Jefferson and Maddison on the issue which are archived in various places around the net.
A buddy of mine from school had a BeBox. They were Dual Motorola 68K class (maybe 68040s) boxes. Not only were they pretty damn fast, but they were cool loooking. I recall much hype about these boxes but as far as I know, only a few hundred were ever built. To this day I'm suprised they abandoned the hardware business so quickly.
Has anyone got Linux or some other OS going on a BeBox? I would expect most of the stuff ported for YellowDog would run without much work, although you might not get load balancing on 68k processors without a bit of kernel hacking
It's scary the number of programmers who were tought to speak english by C. Well, C and IRC. I had a guy working for me at one point who's name escapes me at the moment, Everyone just called him Grumpy. He used to wear a floppy Fadora looking hat and whenever you spoke to him all he'd ever say is 'Bite Me'. Now I understand where he learned to speak.
To be fair, he was an excellant programmer, and although he never smiled, you would occasionally hear him utter the words "Colon, Close Parenthesis".
I was never vary impressed whan viewing a movie which was taped from within a theater. Neither tha audio nor video quality was even close to satisfactory.
This will force a new era in piracy. We've already seen the beginning with the availability of the second LoTR movie on the net before it hits theaters. All this means is that pirates will have to accept a small reduction in their proffit margins since they'll now have to bribe productuin and editing staff for advance copies of films, which will inevitably be of higher quality than those tapes by audience members in theaters.
I'm not entirely clear on why NIST is handing out grants oor research in this field though. Seems to me the products resulting from this research will have applications in limited areas of the security industry (in addition to the initial target of the motion picture industry) but have no larger societal benefit so they shouldn't be handing out grants in thie area.
Hear me out before you scream. What do they care what women think of the game? Since when was it designed to appeal to women? If they're looking for people to do bug testing, then gender shouldn't matter. IF they're testing the appeak of the game content, then the marketing depertment needs to talk to the folks running the beta-test.
I seriously doubt gender matters in bug testing unless women tend to play games in significantly different ways than men (thus excercising different parts of the codebase). Since Women are obviously going to be such a small segment of the target market for the game, what difference does it make?
At one level, this is true, there is no way that live-action can duplicate anime, but the re-creation of this classic is not about duplicating a piece of anime, but presenting a great story to an audience which would otherwise never experience it.
Also, providing conciencious marketing, attention can be drawn to the fact that the live-action version is based on an anime film, so it may draw new viewers for the original and perhaps anime as a whole.
I'm not sure about Canadian law, but in the states, there are two classes of employment law. Some states allow for employment at will and others construe all employment as being contract based. In the former case, the employer can let you the employee go at any time without rason with no further obligation. In the latter case employee termination must be with cause (as I understand it - and IANAL). In either case, the employee may sue the employer on various grounds usually relating to wrongful termination. Only in the latter case would such suits have even a remote chance of having a successful outcome. Severence packages are typically offered in exchange for an agreement not to sue the employer or the company officers. This is simple contract law. Consideration is being provided in exchange for agreed behaviors/actions/inactions. In some cases, however, these agreements are not enforcable because, for example in the case of Enron or Worldcom the companies enguaged in (potentially) criminal fraud directly affecting the matters (your salary and continued employment) the severence contract would impact.
Whatever else you want to say about Bill Gates; he certainly is a visionary. He saw through the hype and while the rest of the world watched a pedjulum swing to favor OSS then commercial software, then OSS once again, he saw how OSS would mature to threaten Microsoft software dominence.
It's great to see that vision coming true as major corporate players are actually finding ways to leverage OSS as a competitive advantage, rather than simply sponsoring projects for PR value.
Bill may see threats around every corner, but he isn't often wrong about this stuff. It's great to see these threats actually manifesting themselves. Life is good!
The arguments are presented in an articulare, well reasoned way. They are reasonably persuasive from a business perspective, both for Redhat and for promoters of Linux Desktop adoption, however I'd expect to see a rebutal from each of the KDE and Gnome projects vary soon; each of which will probably say the same thing, that they agree that their two projects should colaborate more to bring the look and feel into alignment, however it is not Redhat's place to undertake this.
If Redhat is to take this on, then other distributions of Linux will suffer due to their newfound 'inconsistency', and while this may be a reasonable approach for Redhat, it is something to be avoided from the perspective of the Redhat and Gnome projects since their software is provided with virtually all Linux distributions so in order to gain the greatest market penetration they should be acting in support of all distributions. I'm certain these rebutals will be ariving soon and I look forward to reading them.
Consider, for a moment, the social changes that would imediately take place if privacy were nonexistant, in the sense that all cryptography could be broken with a trivial effort by anyone and their brother, using off-the-shelf hardware. International politics would be forever changed. The basis for personal freedom (now based on privacy) would have to shift to something as alien as mutual trust and maybe even respect.
The focus of international intelligence gathering would shift radically back to human intelligence (which is already happening for other reasons) and the new basis for security would become that of access cintrol through discontinuity - if you network is not connected to your neighbor's, then he can't get access to it regardless of his technical sophistocation.
The days of the NSA Sneaker-Net would return (picture NSA computer geeks running from one terminal to another with DLTs in order to keep the systems in communication, such that data could only flow in one direction.
It has always seemed to me that there is more money to be made in services than RedHat has ever been able to squeeze out of them. Every hardware manufacturer of any significant size derives large percentages of their revenues from their Global Services (enterprise consulting) divisions so why couldn't Redhat manage it? IBM seems to think they can do it bu supporting and integrating the same products redhat was.
Perhaps the key is that the hardware manufacturers are offering the services as a value added feature of their core products. This raises the question, why did VA Systems abandon Linux based PC hardware in favor of becoming a software shop, and at that, not even one that provides Linux software integration consulting? Well, in the case of VA it was probably due to their content holdings, but again, if the combination of hardware sales and software integration services can work for IBM, why wouldn't it work for Redhat or (in the past) VA? It just seems to me that, while having IBM enter what is esentially a reseller agreement, is not the most lucrative means for generating a revenue stream from Redhat's distribution; although it does have vary low overhead, which is parhaps a key for redhat at this point.
I wish you were correct on this point. It would be great if modern HTML were 100% backward compatible, but the fact remains that it isn't.
It is asumed that sites utilizing older HTML standards were developed in a time when less stringent standards compliance was considered acceptable, so it is assumed that these sires are not compliant with the old standards either.
We've all seen reports over the past 5 years, that the increase in digital music trading has allowed for increased exposure of bands and styles of musin to which the music buying public would not otherwise be exposed, thus increasing overall CD sales. We've also seen the competing reports sponsored by the likes of the RIAA, that online music trading has caused grave harm to the recording industry, regardless of the fact they have had record setting in those years. This report is just a reflection of the economy, as the analysis says flat out, but you can be sure the recording industry will use the data of the sales decline and develop their own interpretation along the lines of their usual ramblings.
Particularly interesting was the 7% rise in CD prices in a time of economic decline. I'm not usually a conspiracy theorist, but it seems to me that a choice to raise prices on a discressionary product such as CDs might be made simply to spur the decline we've seen here. The raw data certainly provides amunition for the RIAA and company, without resulting in a significant reduction in revenues.
I have a problem with the basic proposition of hashcash. It it really reasonable to - in order to improve the efficiency of a system - introduce ineficiency into that system and and expect a positive outcome?
The entire premise seems ridiculous. Granted the system might work in small controlled enviroments where the overall inefficiency it introduces into the network would be limited, but if you read the proposal, you'll see that of course the system wouldn't work at all unless it was adopted on a large scale, so, while it's certainly a novel idea, I don't see how it could possibly succeed.
Because neither Netscape or IE meet the stringent requirements of standards compliance needed to force site owners to bring their sites into compliance.
The key to such standards compliance is NOT permitting display on non-compliant sites, but you're right that it would be tough to get users to adopt a browser which intentionally prevented access to non-standards compliant sites.
At one point durring the heyday of the.com gold rush, people threw money at companies which claimed the ability to draw increadible proffits at some undetermined point in the future. Some onsider this long term thinking, while others consider it foolishness.
Website designers have learned this lesson well. They strive to serve their business clients by allowing them interact with the largest customer base possible by using clunky non-standard, bandwidth-consuming techniques to get outdated browsers to render their stores in the desied fashion.
You really can't blame website designers for this, nor can you blame site owners. The designers are working to meet their client's requirements, which is to make money, by being accessible to the largest percentage of the available customer base.
The fault, dear brutus, is in ourselves. Website visitors are at fault, for using browsers which promote this non-standard architecture. Certainly no one will use a browser which is strictly standards complient such that any non-standard website would not be visible, because that would diminish the user's internet experience; but this is what's required. We need to force site owners to become standards compliant, which will in turn improve efficiency throughout the net.
If only, bandwidth were more expensive, this problem would already have been fixed, as the bandwidth costs of ineficient non-standard site design would be far mor visible.
It really is a foustian bargain. Reduce revenue by modernizing your website thereby making it inaccessible to older browsers and thus reducing your potential customer base and save money on bandwidth usage, then wait for web users to upgrade their browsers so as to be able to view your site, and build up your custoemr base once again; or, cater to every antiquated browser in existance, so as to maximize your potential customer base, and accept the increased bandwidth costs.
In the long term, with a little short term pain, this problem will be resolved, but in the short term, there really is no good answer.
Slashdot Mirror
Yah, 99% of windows comunications protocols relate directly to security, DRM or software licensing... Right... buth that won't prevent some MS lawyer worm from arguing it. After all, they get paid either way.
--CTH
For those who can't get at the main site, here's a mirror of all the documents
In my reading of these documents, it seems that while there significant positive elements to the decision, there are many loopholes for microsoft to slither though. I'm just waiting for every license agreement to be re-characterized as a joint venture.
--CTH
I'm not sure how this is any different than the feature of mod_bandwidth that limits the number of requests per user per second. I'm definately going to test it out it's unclear how this is any different, except that it doesn't have all the other overhead functionality of mod_bandwidth.
--CTH
It is good to see this sort of thing in the main stream media although I would have liked to see more focus on how ill-concieved legislation like the DNCA, hastilly written with little or no understanding of the ramifications is coming back to bite these corporations in their collective ass. Oh well. It's a good start.
--CTH
The Amiga A1000 was perhaps the most advanced piece of personal computing hardware of it's time. It ushered in the age of computer generated effects for television in the '80s as well as provided extraordinary graphical capabilities unmatched by any personal computer until the early 1990s. It was a horrible failure of the marketplace that this hardware platform did not find a sufficiently large customer base and it's wonderful to see that some groups seek to prolong the usefulness of this platform, regardless of the financial benefit. Consider it a service to the memory of evolutionary hallmarks of the computer industry.
--CTH
OK, so 4 million dereamcast consoles were sold in the US alone. Ang I have to say, it's cool that you can now use CD linux and FreeBSD to get online with this hardware, but where does the contributor of this article get the notion that this will significantly increase the userbase Linux of FreeBSD. Somehow I seriously doubt that any new adopters of Linux or FreeBSD will be so balzy as to choose to do their first installation on a DC console just because they have one. Certainly, logic dicates that the vast extreme majority of DC *nix users were already *nix hobbyists.
--CTH
Yah, after a few replies correcting me, I guess it was a PowerPC box. I only ever saw the thing once. It was tucked neatly next to a rack of other hardware (!!?!!) in a dorm room (!). The guy who's machine it was was insane. He had one machine on which he was trying to set the record for the most OSs on a single box. There was a /. article on this subject a while back but I couldn't find it jsut now for a link. oh well.
--CTH
Although I agree with the latter positions of the infoWorld article, I did not find it particularly persuasive. I find an earlier MSBNC (admitedly a most unlikely source) arcicle to be far more enguaging and persuasive as it evaluates more even handedly the historical purposes of copyright and whether or not it has served it's purpose. The article was Copyrights and copywrongs , a historical examination of Copyright which is definately worth a read. Along the same lines you might want to read the letters between Jefferson and Maddison on the issue which are archived in various places around the net.
--CTH
A buddy of mine from school had a BeBox. They were Dual Motorola 68K class (maybe 68040s) boxes. Not only were they pretty damn fast, but they were cool loooking. I recall much hype about these boxes but as far as I know, only a few hundred were ever built. To this day I'm suprised they abandoned the hardware business so quickly.
Has anyone got Linux or some other OS going on a BeBox? I would expect most of the stuff ported for YellowDog would run without much work, although you might not get load balancing on 68k processors without a bit of kernel hacking
--CTH
No, I swear to god it's true.
It's scary the number of programmers who were tought to speak english by C. Well, C and IRC. I had a guy working for me at one point who's name escapes me at the moment, Everyone just called him Grumpy. He used to wear a floppy Fadora looking hat and whenever you spoke to him all he'd ever say is 'Bite Me'. Now I understand where he learned to speak.
To be fair, he was an excellant programmer, and although he never smiled, you would occasionally hear him utter the words "Colon, Close Parenthesis".
--CTH
I was never vary impressed whan viewing a movie which was taped from within a theater. Neither tha audio nor video quality was even close to satisfactory.
This will force a new era in piracy. We've already seen the beginning with the availability of the second LoTR movie on the net before it hits theaters. All this means is that pirates will have to accept a small reduction in their proffit margins since they'll now have to bribe productuin and editing staff for advance copies of films, which will inevitably be of higher quality than those tapes by audience members in theaters.
I'm not entirely clear on why NIST is handing out grants oor research in this field though. Seems to me the products resulting from this research will have applications in limited areas of the security industry (in addition to the initial target of the motion picture industry) but have no larger societal benefit so they shouldn't be handing out grants in thie area.
--CTH
Hear me out before you scream. What do they care what women think of the game? Since when was it designed to appeal to women? If they're looking for people to do bug testing, then gender shouldn't matter. IF they're testing the appeak of the game content, then the marketing depertment needs to talk to the folks running the beta-test.
I seriously doubt gender matters in bug testing unless women tend to play games in significantly different ways than men (thus excercising different parts of the codebase). Since Women are obviously going to be such a small segment of the target market for the game, what difference does it make?
--CTH
At one level, this is true, there is no way that live-action can duplicate anime, but the re-creation of this classic is not about duplicating a piece of anime, but presenting a great story to an audience which would otherwise never experience it.
Also, providing conciencious marketing, attention can be drawn to the fact that the live-action version is based on an anime film, so it may draw new viewers for the original and perhaps anime as a whole.
--CTH
Bill's approach to reverse engineering is a little edgy:I'd have to say that this approach is illegal under the DMCA, if not previous copyright law.
--CTH
I'm not sure about Canadian law, but in the states, there are two classes of employment law. Some states allow for employment at will and others construe all employment as being contract based. In the former case, the employer can let you the employee go at any time without rason with no further obligation. In the latter case employee termination must be with cause (as I understand it - and IANAL). In either case, the employee may sue the employer on various grounds usually relating to wrongful termination. Only in the latter case would such suits have even a remote chance of having a successful outcome. Severence packages are typically offered in exchange for an agreement not to sue the employer or the company officers. This is simple contract law. Consideration is being provided in exchange for agreed behaviors/actions/inactions. In some cases, however, these agreements are not enforcable because, for example in the case of Enron or Worldcom the companies enguaged in (potentially) criminal fraud directly affecting the matters (your salary and continued employment) the severence contract would impact.
Again, IANAL.
--CTH
Whatever else you want to say about Bill Gates; he certainly is a visionary. He saw through the hype and while the rest of the world watched a pedjulum swing to favor OSS then commercial software, then OSS once again, he saw how OSS would mature to threaten Microsoft software dominence.
It's great to see that vision coming true as major corporate players are actually finding ways to leverage OSS as a competitive advantage, rather than simply sponsoring projects for PR value.
Bill may see threats around every corner, but he isn't often wrong about this stuff. It's great to see these threats actually manifesting themselves. Life is good!
--CTH
The arguments are presented in an articulare, well reasoned way. They are reasonably persuasive from a business perspective, both for Redhat and for promoters of Linux Desktop adoption, however I'd expect to see a rebutal from each of the KDE and Gnome projects vary soon; each of which will probably say the same thing, that they agree that their two projects should colaborate more to bring the look and feel into alignment, however it is not Redhat's place to undertake this.
If Redhat is to take this on, then other distributions of Linux will suffer due to their newfound 'inconsistency', and while this may be a reasonable approach for Redhat, it is something to be avoided from the perspective of the Redhat and Gnome projects since their software is provided with virtually all Linux distributions so in order to gain the greatest market penetration they should be acting in support of all distributions. I'm certain these rebutals will be ariving soon and I look forward to reading them.
--CTH
Consider, for a moment, the social changes that would imediately take place if privacy were nonexistant, in the sense that all cryptography could be broken with a trivial effort by anyone and their brother, using off-the-shelf hardware. International politics would be forever changed. The basis for personal freedom (now based on privacy) would have to shift to something as alien as mutual trust and maybe even respect.
The focus of international intelligence gathering would shift radically back to human intelligence (which is already happening for other reasons) and the new basis for security would become that of access cintrol through discontinuity - if you network is not connected to your neighbor's, then he can't get access to it regardless of his technical sophistocation.
The days of the NSA Sneaker-Net would return (picture NSA computer geeks running from one terminal to another with DLTs in order to keep the systems in communication, such that data could only flow in one direction.
Disclaimer: IANAF - I Am Not A Futurist
--CTH
It has always seemed to me that there is more money to be made in services than RedHat has ever been able to squeeze out of them. Every hardware manufacturer of any significant size derives large percentages of their revenues from their Global Services (enterprise consulting) divisions so why couldn't Redhat manage it? IBM seems to think they can do it bu supporting and integrating the same products redhat was.
Perhaps the key is that the hardware manufacturers are offering the services as a value added feature of their core products. This raises the question, why did VA Systems abandon Linux based PC hardware in favor of becoming a software shop, and at that, not even one that provides Linux software integration consulting? Well, in the case of VA it was probably due to their content holdings, but again, if the combination of hardware sales and software integration services can work for IBM, why wouldn't it work for Redhat or (in the past) VA? It just seems to me that, while having IBM enter what is esentially a reseller agreement, is not the most lucrative means for generating a revenue stream from Redhat's distribution; although it does have vary low overhead, which is parhaps a key for redhat at this point.
--CTH
I wish you were correct on this point. It would be great if modern HTML were 100% backward compatible, but the fact remains that it isn't.
It is asumed that sites utilizing older HTML standards were developed in a time when less stringent standards compliance was considered acceptable, so it is assumed that these sires are not compliant with the old standards either.
--CTH
We've all seen reports over the past 5 years, that the increase in digital music trading has allowed for increased exposure of bands and styles of musin to which the music buying public would not otherwise be exposed, thus increasing overall CD sales. We've also seen the competing reports sponsored by the likes of the RIAA, that online music trading has caused grave harm to the recording industry, regardless of the fact they have had record setting in those years. This report is just a reflection of the economy, as the analysis says flat out, but you can be sure the recording industry will use the data of the sales decline and develop their own interpretation along the lines of their usual ramblings.
Particularly interesting was the 7% rise in CD prices in a time of economic decline. I'm not usually a conspiracy theorist, but it seems to me that a choice to raise prices on a discressionary product such as CDs might be made simply to spur the decline we've seen here. The raw data certainly provides amunition for the RIAA and company, without resulting in a significant reduction in revenues.
--CTH
I have a problem with the basic proposition of hashcash. It it really reasonable to - in order to improve the efficiency of a system - introduce ineficiency into that system and and expect a positive outcome?
The entire premise seems ridiculous. Granted the system might work in small controlled enviroments where the overall inefficiency it introduces into the network would be limited, but if you read the proposal, you'll see that of course the system wouldn't work at all unless it was adopted on a large scale, so, while it's certainly a novel idea, I don't see how it could possibly succeed.
--CTH
Because neither Netscape or IE meet the stringent requirements of standards compliance needed to force site owners to bring their sites into compliance.
The key to such standards compliance is NOT permitting display on non-compliant sites, but you're right that it would be tough to get users to adopt a browser which intentionally prevented access to non-standards compliant sites.
--CTH
At one point durring the heyday of the .com gold rush, people threw money at companies which claimed the ability to draw increadible proffits at some undetermined point in the future. Some onsider this long term thinking, while others consider it foolishness.
Website designers have learned this lesson well. They strive to serve their business clients by allowing them interact with the largest customer base possible by using clunky non-standard, bandwidth-consuming techniques to get outdated browsers to render their stores in the desied fashion.
You really can't blame website designers for this, nor can you blame site owners. The designers are working to meet their client's requirements, which is to make money, by being accessible to the largest percentage of the available customer base.
The fault, dear brutus, is in ourselves. Website visitors are at fault, for using browsers which promote this non-standard architecture. Certainly no one will use a browser which is strictly standards complient such that any non-standard website would not be visible, because that would diminish the user's internet experience; but this is what's required. We need to force site owners to become standards compliant, which will in turn improve efficiency throughout the net.
If only, bandwidth were more expensive, this problem would already have been fixed, as the bandwidth costs of ineficient non-standard site design would be far mor visible.
It really is a foustian bargain. Reduce revenue by modernizing your website thereby making it inaccessible to older browsers and thus reducing your potential customer base and save money on bandwidth usage, then wait for web users to upgrade their browsers so as to be able to view your site, and build up your custoemr base once again; or, cater to every antiquated browser in existance, so as to maximize your potential customer base, and accept the increased bandwidth costs.
In the long term, with a little short term pain, this problem will be resolved, but in the short term, there really is no good answer.
--CTH