We've been very fortunate that ISPs haven't been bending easily to help track and control copyright enfringement. But there's a good chance the ISPs won't stay out of it forever. I'm hoping wireless mesh networks take off. Eventually it could mean no more ISPs at all. Buy your hardware and you're in. The next time we can worry a little less is when there's no service provider needed to wire us into the internet.
My undergrad studies for computer science included fundamental understanding of gates and boolean logic. We also studied some of the microcode that goes into processors. So we went from the level of the gates to simple chips to the basics of processors to assembly to operating systems to applications. It wasn't taught in that order from the ground up. Algorithms were studied at the same time as chips, but it worked out well. Anyone getting a comp sci degree from Pace U. in NY has at least a fundamental understanding of computers from the ground up. However I have a coworker (developer) with an electrical engineering degree. He has much better knowledge of the electronics from beginning to end and he's a great programmer.
I find knowing how things work from the bottom up makes me better at building on top. I find the most ignorant and least innovative developers to be those with only a high level understanding of how the underlying software and hardware works.
A chapter in Lawrence Lessig's latest book, The Future of Ideas, covers the topic of spectrum as a controlled commons. Many feel with modern technology it should be de-regulated and simply sold to any of the highest bidders. Interference with military transmissions has been one key arguing point. His book discusses it well and raises the argument for easing government control of the spectrum commons. I highly recommend the book for anyone interesting in the ideas of the internet as a commons and how it should or should not be controlled.
Read the Microsoft web page more carefully. Services for Unix comes with some basic GPL'd apps like gcc and grep. The sidebar on the right of the page references the open source utilities. But the apps which MS actually wrote are not open source. They're reselling the GPL'd apps with their own, but those open source apps are not the "Services for Unix" package. So what I don't understand is how the closed source apps can get an open source award.
"The Open Source Product Excellence Awards are the industry standard for innovation in Open Source technology," said Rob Scheschareg, vice president of sales, marketing and product development, IDG World Expo.
I'm confused. http://www.microsoft.com/windows/sfu/howtobuy/defa ult.asp. How can a non-open source product win an open source excellence award? Some of the basic utilities are GPL. The product requires per-seat and/or per-server licensing and licenses for each person who connects. That's a proprietary license.
ABSOLUTELY RIGHT. (I'd mod instead of post, but I just used up my points last week!) The core of.NET plus the C# language being accepted as ECMA standards will be rendered useless if MS later uses patents force licensing fees or restrictions on developers. ASAIK nothing in the core or the standards themselves is patented, but things within other basic libraries are. Since none of the "higher" libraries are standardized, they can change at any moment. The forms for example can be implemented by Mono, but since it's not a standard MS can change their APIs at any moment and still claim "open standards compliance". Once everyone's dependant on the common non-standardized APIs implemented by MS and others, if they pull tricks like changing the APIs or enforcing patent licenses we'll again have segmentation and implementation reliance. MS will play that card if they see too much of a threat.
While the technology seems promising, we must be weary due to patents and corporate strategies. It's better to stick to non-corporate-backed open technologies in general. I personally like wxWindows for a native look-and-feel cross-platform object library. I'm fascinated, though, by the Mozilla platform as a way to serve GUIs from servers and to have apps centered around a rendering engine.
There are 8 million people living in NYC. Add a few more million who work there 5 days a week. Add another 1+ million pieces of equipment. Add a few more million from the suburbs who use the same system. You think it's horrible to stick to 11 digits instead of getting all of them to change to 10? How about inconveniencing as few people as possible? We'd rather inconvenience a few torrists. After all NYC is the center of the known universe;)
All NYC area codes (except for new mobile numbers of which I'm not familiar) are local calls. The area codes are only used within the city. Any other area code is "regional" or long distance. It's quite simple and I've understood it since I was a child.
In addition to the other posts, there's one more basic reason: dialing out of your area code in NYC has always required the 1. The 1 was originally required so the system explicitly knew the next 3 digits were the US area code. Since I was a kid growing up in NYC it always had multiple area codes, first just 212 for Manhattan and 718 for the other 4 boroughs. So everyone is used to dialing either 7 or 11 digits. I've never in my life dialed 10 and neither has anyone else here, or their PBXs or faxes or anything else that can dial. With everyone here used to 11 digits and all of our electronics trained appropriately, it makes sense to stick with 11 instead of moving everyone to 10.
Of course I still don't get why the system can't work the way it does now. If I don't dial a 1 then why can't it assume I'm dialing to another number within my own area code? The phone companies are desparately hanging on to their legacy systems and only a few startups have tried going all digital.
I see the original patent was issued in 1988, and "re-issued" in 1996. What's a re-issued patent? That sounds like a circumvention of the original patent's time limit. If it's re-issued just before it expires, doesn't that mean it's time limit begins again since it has a new patent number? I'm very curious if anyone is familiar with the process.
For people staying on Mars, wouldn't it be much easier and cheaper to bring some frozen embryos and grow them there? If they get a few males and females born from the test tubes then they could breed them. It would also prevent the negative response from much of the public.
"...message passing as the fundamental operation of the OS is just an exercise in computer science masturbation. It may feel good, but you don't actually get anything done."
- Linus Torvalds (from Tigran Aivazian's Linux Kernel 2.4 Internals)
It's my understanding that the tiny windows kernel core's only job is message passing between OS objects. And I think you're over-generalizing when you speak of UNIX's purpose as the paradigm for the Linux (kernel) design.
And to think my taxes are helping pay for this. Sure my money's being spent in far worse ways, but I can think of so many better places to put it. It still amazes me we pay people to do this stuff.
Open source systems offer this power to the end user (you), that is their real strength. You can tell the difference between a developer who gets it and one who doesn't because the developer who doesn't get it is content to build a custom system using closed source components that they cannot understand, let alone keep secure.
That's precisely why the IT deparment of my company is setting themselves up to fall apart. My group's lead tech (lead not because of higher knowledge, but because he's hung around a while and sold himself) is convinced closed source is better. His arguments come from quoting Microsoft's advertising and web sites (which are basically just more advertising). Without even trying anything open source my company has whole-heartedly adopted.NET. I am so out of here as soon as possible.
Ignorance may be bliss, but only for the person who's ignorant. They're happy... I'm not.
The same person as Linux sysadmin will provide the same quality level of the computing environment for 8-12 times more machines compared with Windows environments.
I completely agree. However, I don't see many articles or reports anywhere proving it's a "practice-confirmed truth." My company does not believe it, no matter what I present to them. They don't see it and can't imagine how it's possible (since they refuse to actually log onto a linux machine and look at it), so they don't believe it. What's obvious to us and easy to explain isn't satisfactory to all managers without real hard numbers from others' experiences as proof.
Except for theft of course. Or how about the sin of gluttony? They could strip their code of the bloat. Or what about sloth? That would require resignations of most of the executives. How about wrath? Bill and Craig would need some tranquilizers. Craig isn't aware of just how many circles of hell he'll be burning in.
Yeah, yeah, flamebait... but I need to vent somewhere!?!
I've been failing at convincing my company to even look at any non-Microsoft software, let alone Linux. I've shown the TCO analyses that I've found online, all of them already posted by others. I even did my own analysis specific to my company in a long paper. I also re-wrote one of our applications on a linux app server just to prove my points. All with no success. There are too few very specific reports online of corporate experience in migration to Linux and the actual cost savings achieved. So whatever the results, good or bad or mediocre, please do the community a favor and post as many details as possible online. You'll be helping people like me who are trying to convert the ignorant. It will be much appreciated.
The Republicans and Democrats should merge and rename themselves the Green Party. They have far more green than the current Green Party. Then the current Green Party could change to maybe the People's Party... oh, that sounds communist. Well, Nader would come up with something.
Yeah, it's flamebait, but I'm so fed up with the system...
I can't seem to find the link, but recently Wired published an article in their dead-tree magazine about replacements for many of the hazardous chemicals used in chip production. There are new ideas which will make most of the run-off biodegradable, and some companies are looking into building new factories to support these new techs in the long term. But there won't be any environmentally safe process anytime in the near future.
(e) LIMITATION ON AUTHORITY- Nothing in this Act shall be interpreted to authorize any action by the United States to interfere with foreign national censorship for the purpose of protecting minors from harm, preserving public morality, or assisting with legitimate law enforcement aims.
"Preserving public morality." The United States Congress's definition of morality. Because if they mean the foreign countries' definitions of morality, that would counter the entire bill. "Legitimate law enforcement." The United States definition of legitimate law enforcement, which these days is being contested by the public. To China, restricting internet access is a legitimate act of law enforcement. As to morals, I don't know what the Chinese government is thinking, but I would think part of their objection to free internet access is their thought that democracy is immoral. Of course the Chinese government is also afraid of what democratic ideas would do to their careers. But I'm afraid this will be interpreted as yet another abuse by the US of its power in the world.
Lessig is presenting the Eldred v. Ashcroft case in front of the Supreme Court right now. His intent is to overturn the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act, which has added 20 years. Lessig is the only publicly visible person I've seen who's actively fighting against copyright abuse.
MS' Developer community drawves the size of the Open Source community by at least a few hundred if not a thousand fold. They generally have a richer centralized repository of information and technical knowledge (MSDN) to draw from and their development tools are widely considered to be superior. They also sell a platform which offers the best chance for close to 100% market saturation.
The size of the MS developer community isn't so easy to calculate. Do you include corporate in-house developers who may recommend things to friends and co-workers, but MS doesn't know about? The size of the Open Source community is at least as hard to calculate. People can give whatever estimates they want, but chances are they're wrong. So your community size argument is moot.
The "richer centralized repository of information" (MSDN) until recently was written 100% by Microsoft employees and a few outside (payed) contributors. Only recently have newsgroups been added, but articles are almost exclusively from MS employees. The Open Source resources may not be nearly as centralized, but personally I've found far more needed information in the OS community than the "MS community" (I'm a pro VB developer, so I've used MSDN extensively and it's nearly impossible to find answers to hard questions.)
"Platform which offers the best chance for close to 100% market saturation"? A little narrow-minded? Apps that make MS money (other than Office) and the place where Linux is making the most in-roads is in the server market. Ballmer knows he has the desktops, so why say they need to stomp on Linux? Because they're heavily pushing into the server market with little success (compared to the effort they're putting in). MS has less than 40% market saturation in server OSs and apps. The MS professional server-side developer community is not nearly as large as the Unix/Linux professional server developer community (see Netcraft surveys and Oracle on Unix statistics).
Fostering a stronger, united, MS developer community would of course help them compete. But it's not going to be nearly as easy as you describe. IBM alone has tens of thousands of sales people all keeping and making Unix and Linux customers. MS has the most visibility due to consumer marketing and press, but what you perceive is not nearly the reality.
While you're correct about VB and the object interfaces to Word docs (I'm a professional VB developer), the fact that doc files are in a proprietary format is very relevant. A standard, open doc format would allow anyone to write an independant application which could read it. The main purpose of open standards is interoperability. By using the proprietary format, VB and Word object libraries are required. So just because the interfaces from certain libraries are documented doesn't make the file format irrelevant. It's quite relevant because it requires purchasing and using software from the creator of the format.
Those are all good points I hadn't put much thought into. I would think any open standard could go the route of the W3C. Sites comply if they wish, and those sites can claim "HTML 4 Verified". Browser vendors can also claim compliance. While it's not a forced certification which would guarantee compliance (and as we see on the web there's a lot of non-compliance), it's the next best thing in an open environment.
Slashdot Mirror
We've been very fortunate that ISPs haven't been bending easily to help track and control copyright enfringement. But there's a good chance the ISPs won't stay out of it forever. I'm hoping wireless mesh networks take off. Eventually it could mean no more ISPs at all. Buy your hardware and you're in. The next time we can worry a little less is when there's no service provider needed to wire us into the internet.
My undergrad studies for computer science included fundamental understanding of gates and boolean logic. We also studied some of the microcode that goes into processors. So we went from the level of the gates to simple chips to the basics of processors to assembly to operating systems to applications. It wasn't taught in that order from the ground up. Algorithms were studied at the same time as chips, but it worked out well. Anyone getting a comp sci degree from Pace U. in NY has at least a fundamental understanding of computers from the ground up. However I have a coworker (developer) with an electrical engineering degree. He has much better knowledge of the electronics from beginning to end and he's a great programmer.
I find knowing how things work from the bottom up makes me better at building on top. I find the most ignorant and least innovative developers to be those with only a high level understanding of how the underlying software and hardware works.
A chapter in Lawrence Lessig's latest book, The Future of Ideas, covers the topic of spectrum as a controlled commons. Many feel with modern technology it should be de-regulated and simply sold to any of the highest bidders. Interference with military transmissions has been one key arguing point. His book discusses it well and raises the argument for easing government control of the spectrum commons. I highly recommend the book for anyone interesting in the ideas of the internet as a commons and how it should or should not be controlled.
Read the Microsoft web page more carefully. Services for Unix comes with some basic GPL'd apps like gcc and grep. The sidebar on the right of the page references the open source utilities. But the apps which MS actually wrote are not open source. They're reselling the GPL'd apps with their own, but those open source apps are not the "Services for Unix" package. So what I don't understand is how the closed source apps can get an open source award.
From the LinuxWorld announcement about the Open Source Product Excellence Awards:
"The Open Source Product Excellence Awards are the industry standard for innovation in Open Source technology," said Rob Scheschareg, vice president of sales, marketing and product development, IDG World Expo.
I'm confused. http://www.microsoft.com/windows/sfu/howtobuy/defa ult.asp. How can a non-open source product win an open source excellence award? Some of the basic utilities are GPL. The product requires per-seat and/or per-server licensing and licenses for each person who connects. That's a proprietary license.
ABSOLUTELY RIGHT. (I'd mod instead of post, but I just used up my points last week!) The core of .NET plus the C# language being accepted as ECMA standards will be rendered useless if MS later uses patents force licensing fees or restrictions on developers. ASAIK nothing in the core or the standards themselves is patented, but things within other basic libraries are. Since none of the "higher" libraries are standardized, they can change at any moment. The forms for example can be implemented by Mono, but since it's not a standard MS can change their APIs at any moment and still claim "open standards compliance". Once everyone's dependant on the common non-standardized APIs implemented by MS and others, if they pull tricks like changing the APIs or enforcing patent licenses we'll again have segmentation and implementation reliance. MS will play that card if they see too much of a threat.
While the technology seems promising, we must be weary due to patents and corporate strategies. It's better to stick to non-corporate-backed open technologies in general. I personally like wxWindows for a native look-and-feel cross-platform object library. I'm fascinated, though, by the Mozilla platform as a way to serve GUIs from servers and to have apps centered around a rendering engine.
There are 8 million people living in NYC. Add a few more million who work there 5 days a week. Add another 1+ million pieces of equipment. Add a few more million from the suburbs who use the same system. You think it's horrible to stick to 11 digits instead of getting all of them to change to 10? How about inconveniencing as few people as possible? We'd rather inconvenience a few torrists. After all NYC is the center of the known universe ;)
All NYC area codes (except for new mobile numbers of which I'm not familiar) are local calls. The area codes are only used within the city. Any other area code is "regional" or long distance. It's quite simple and I've understood it since I was a child.
In addition to the other posts, there's one more basic reason: dialing out of your area code in NYC has always required the 1. The 1 was originally required so the system explicitly knew the next 3 digits were the US area code. Since I was a kid growing up in NYC it always had multiple area codes, first just 212 for Manhattan and 718 for the other 4 boroughs. So everyone is used to dialing either 7 or 11 digits. I've never in my life dialed 10 and neither has anyone else here, or their PBXs or faxes or anything else that can dial. With everyone here used to 11 digits and all of our electronics trained appropriately, it makes sense to stick with 11 instead of moving everyone to 10.
Of course I still don't get why the system can't work the way it does now. If I don't dial a 1 then why can't it assume I'm dialing to another number within my own area code? The phone companies are desparately hanging on to their legacy systems and only a few startups have tried going all digital.
I see the original patent was issued in 1988, and "re-issued" in 1996. What's a re-issued patent? That sounds like a circumvention of the original patent's time limit. If it's re-issued just before it expires, doesn't that mean it's time limit begins again since it has a new patent number? I'm very curious if anyone is familiar with the process.
For people staying on Mars, wouldn't it be much easier and cheaper to bring some frozen embryos and grow them there? If they get a few males and females born from the test tubes then they could breed them. It would also prevent the negative response from much of the public.
"...message passing as the fundamental operation of the OS is just an exercise in computer science masturbation. It may feel good, but you don't actually get anything done."
- Linus Torvalds (from Tigran Aivazian's Linux Kernel 2.4 Internals)
It's my understanding that the tiny windows kernel core's only job is message passing between OS objects. And I think you're over-generalizing when you speak of UNIX's purpose as the paradigm for the Linux (kernel) design.
And to think my taxes are helping pay for this. Sure my money's being spent in far worse ways, but I can think of so many better places to put it. It still amazes me we pay people to do this stuff.
Read the whole article. The judge instructions to the jury are interesting and will contradict what you're thinking.
Open source systems offer this power to the end user (you), that is their real strength. You can tell the difference between a developer who gets it and one who doesn't because the developer who doesn't get it is content to build a custom system using closed source components that they cannot understand, let alone keep secure.
.NET. I am so out of here as soon as possible.
That's precisely why the IT deparment of my company is setting themselves up to fall apart. My group's lead tech (lead not because of higher knowledge, but because he's hung around a while and sold himself) is convinced closed source is better. His arguments come from quoting Microsoft's advertising and web sites (which are basically just more advertising). Without even trying anything open source my company has whole-heartedly adopted
Ignorance may be bliss, but only for the person who's ignorant. They're happy... I'm not.
The same person as Linux sysadmin will provide the same quality level of the computing environment for 8-12 times more machines compared with Windows environments.
I completely agree. However, I don't see many articles or reports anywhere proving it's a "practice-confirmed truth." My company does not believe it, no matter what I present to them. They don't see it and can't imagine how it's possible (since they refuse to actually log onto a linux machine and look at it), so they don't believe it. What's obvious to us and easy to explain isn't satisfactory to all managers without real hard numbers from others' experiences as proof.
"...we're trying to fix sins of the past."
Except for theft of course. Or how about the sin of gluttony? They could strip their code of the bloat. Or what about sloth? That would require resignations of most of the executives. How about wrath? Bill and Craig would need some tranquilizers. Craig isn't aware of just how many circles of hell he'll be burning in.
Yeah, yeah, flamebait... but I need to vent somewhere!?!
I've been failing at convincing my company to even look at any non-Microsoft software, let alone Linux. I've shown the TCO analyses that I've found online, all of them already posted by others. I even did my own analysis specific to my company in a long paper. I also re-wrote one of our applications on a linux app server just to prove my points. All with no success. There are too few very specific reports online of corporate experience in migration to Linux and the actual cost savings achieved. So whatever the results, good or bad or mediocre, please do the community a favor and post as many details as possible online. You'll be helping people like me who are trying to convert the ignorant. It will be much appreciated.
The Republicans and Democrats should merge and rename themselves the Green Party. They have far more green than the current Green Party. Then the current Green Party could change to maybe the People's Party... oh, that sounds communist. Well, Nader would come up with something.
Yeah, it's flamebait, but I'm so fed up with the system...
I can't seem to find the link, but recently Wired published an article in their dead-tree magazine about replacements for many of the hazardous chemicals used in chip production. There are new ideas which will make most of the run-off biodegradable, and some companies are looking into building new factories to support these new techs in the long term. But there won't be any environmentally safe process anytime in the near future.
(e) LIMITATION ON AUTHORITY- Nothing in this Act shall be interpreted to authorize any action by the United States to interfere with foreign national censorship for the purpose of protecting minors from harm, preserving public morality, or assisting with legitimate law enforcement aims.
"Preserving public morality." The United States Congress's definition of morality. Because if they mean the foreign countries' definitions of morality, that would counter the entire bill. "Legitimate law enforcement." The United States definition of legitimate law enforcement, which these days is being contested by the public. To China, restricting internet access is a legitimate act of law enforcement. As to morals, I don't know what the Chinese government is thinking, but I would think part of their objection to free internet access is their thought that democracy is immoral. Of course the Chinese government is also afraid of what democratic ideas would do to their careers. But I'm afraid this will be interpreted as yet another abuse by the US of its power in the world.
Lessig is presenting the Eldred v. Ashcroft case in front of the Supreme Court right now. His intent is to overturn the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act, which has added 20 years. Lessig is the only publicly visible person I've seen who's actively fighting against copyright abuse.
The "richer centralized repository of information" (MSDN) until recently was written 100% by Microsoft employees and a few outside (payed) contributors. Only recently have newsgroups been added, but articles are almost exclusively from MS employees. The Open Source resources may not be nearly as centralized, but personally I've found far more needed information in the OS community than the "MS community" (I'm a pro VB developer, so I've used MSDN extensively and it's nearly impossible to find answers to hard questions.)
"Platform which offers the best chance for close to 100% market saturation"? A little narrow-minded? Apps that make MS money (other than Office) and the place where Linux is making the most in-roads is in the server market. Ballmer knows he has the desktops, so why say they need to stomp on Linux? Because they're heavily pushing into the server market with little success (compared to the effort they're putting in). MS has less than 40% market saturation in server OSs and apps. The MS professional server-side developer community is not nearly as large as the Unix/Linux professional server developer community (see Netcraft surveys and Oracle on Unix statistics).
Fostering a stronger, united, MS developer community would of course help them compete. But it's not going to be nearly as easy as you describe. IBM alone has tens of thousands of sales people all keeping and making Unix and Linux customers. MS has the most visibility due to consumer marketing and press, but what you perceive is not nearly the reality.
While you're correct about VB and the object interfaces to Word docs (I'm a professional VB developer), the fact that doc files are in a proprietary format is very relevant. A standard, open doc format would allow anyone to write an independant application which could read it. The main purpose of open standards is interoperability. By using the proprietary format, VB and Word object libraries are required. So just because the interfaces from certain libraries are documented doesn't make the file format irrelevant. It's quite relevant because it requires purchasing and using software from the creator of the format.
Those are all good points I hadn't put much thought into. I would think any open standard could go the route of the W3C. Sites comply if they wish, and those sites can claim "HTML 4 Verified". Browser vendors can also claim compliance. While it's not a forced certification which would guarantee compliance (and as we see on the web there's a lot of non-compliance), it's the next best thing in an open environment.