I don't think the power is going to go out, I don't think there will be mass hysteria, we won't be returned to the Stone Age. But if all the computers break, we'll be plunged back into the bleakness of the 1970's.
Trouble is, there's no place to buy leisure suits anymore.
This always happens. I mean, I'm a fan of Stallman, he's brilliant, he's the original Guy Who Got It Done, I agree that software patents are generally not good. But a boycott such as this is sooooo petty, so naive, and he's always sounding off about soemthing.
The thing that can make salary a pain is when management starts to view your marginal cost as zero. In other words, they can heap as much work on you as they like, and it costs nothing extra. This is an obstacle to efficient management. Too often, they'll have you work on some old hardware that could be cheaply replaced, but to their eyes, you can fix it for free. You end up maintaining things that aren't worth maintaining. In the short run, they save some cash, but it inevitably means that something else gets dropped or delayed, and it's lousy for marale. But many PHB's think they're smart because it looks like they're getting something for nothing.
Hourly with a guaranteed minimum has always provided the proper incentives and delivered the best results, both for me and for the employers.
Processors are remarked and overclocked; but the culprit usually isn't the local mom-and-pop computer store, but their supplier. There are many cpu-selling wholesalers and middlemen in the world. Some buy trays of Intel OEM CPUs and re-sell them. Or they buy them from somebody else and then re-sell them. Usually, these folks are working on tight margins, well below ten percent. Many local computer stores use these people as a source of supply, and many get burned. Usually, the CPU gets passed on to the consumer, it works as advertised, and that's the end of it.
On the other hand, I've seen some incredibly egregious examples. When Pentium-166's were current, it was almost impossible to buy a legit one for a while. People were buying 133's, and adding $100 to the price by calling them 166's. An educated eye could tell the difference, but you really had to know what you were looking for.
It hasn't been as bad during the PII-PIII-Celeron era; the clock-locking has helped, especially in the US. But there are ways to defeat it, and since you can make upwards of $100 doing so, it's worth some effort.
For example, I once bought two Intel Retail Boxed PII-400 CPUs from my local mom-and-pop shop. Usually I would go through authorized channels, but I didn't have time, and buying the retail boxed versions is fairly safe. But not completely. When I went to build the systems using these CPUs, I noticed that the two boxes had slightly different shades of purple. Upon further examination, I found that one was marked "100 MHz Sustem Bus", complete with misspelling. There were also slight differences in some typefaces. Clearly, one was a fake. Since I was a regular customer, I simply returned it to the dealer, and they exchanged it for me without hesitation. But it helped that I caught it before opening the box; if I had only bought one CPU, I might not have noticed.
So, yeah, I buy all my CPU's either from a trusted dealer where they know me, or from name-brand channels. No, you won't get re-marked CPUs from Dell or Gateway, nor from authorized wholesalers like Tech Data. If you buy retail boxed, you're probably safe with the larger mail-order houses like CDW or warehouse.com who have relationships with the manufacturers. But as you slide into the gray market, the odds begin to turn against you.
from the article: "I don't think a corporation, particularly a public one, whose allegiances are only to its shareholders and its customers, can be trusted to keep software free"
Folks, believe in it. Have all the doubts you want about corporations and the people who operate them. They are, indeed, only out to make a buck. And for some, free software is how they do it.
A company that deals in free software would not be better off selling proprietary software, otherwise, they'd have started out doing that in the first place.
Stop worrying. Red Hat is Red Hat, Microsoft is Microsoft. They're both out to make a buck, and they're both doing well. Neither is going to adopt the other's way of doing things.
It's just weird that so many supporters and developers of free software are fretting about it's future, while at the same time, investors are expressing their confidence by pouring money into it.
It may not yet be available online, but it is in bookstores. I hadn't even known it was coming, but as soon as I saw the review this morning, I headed out to the bookstore, and there it was.
Very nice indeed. All of the Samba books that I've seen are pretty good, but this one has it all.
Think about it folks. Counterfeit software may be a ripoff of Microsoft, but it's an even worse ripoff of the consumer. Go through any computer show, and you'll see piles of "Microsoft OEM" software for sale, or retail copies of Office at suspiciously low prices. If you develop an eye for it, you'll realize that as much as 90% of the stuff is counterfeit.
If you want to rip off a copy of Windows from Microsoft, that's your decision; but if you're going to pay for it, then you might as well get the real thing. People who sell a counterfeit copy of Office to an unsuspecting user for $200 or more are pretty slimy.
Offering to replace counterfeit stuff with the real thing is pretty generous on MS's part, and as I said, I have no problems with them chasing down the people who make the stuff. These are not innocent home users making an extra copy of Windows for their buddies, they're professional criminals, they know what they're doing, and they're ripping off consumers.
>> give the customer indemnification and product warranties
So, is he implying that under SCSL, there is warranty protection on my free downloaded copy of StarOffice? Indemnification against the possibility that some subroutine was copied from somebody else? Can I hold Sun liable if something goes wrong?
I doubt it, and thus I just don't get it. If they want to distribute Star Office just to existing Sun customers, I guess it makes sense. If they want to expand their market, and take a bite out of MSOffice, it's dumb.
I think I'd prefer to see NSI hold the names and refuse to register them, than to see the government seize them.
What happens next? Will fuck.com be offered to the first bozo who tried to register it? Or is the government bound to sell it to the highest bidder? My guess is the latter. Either way, somebody stands to make a windfall that they don;t deserve.
As I pointed out in another post this week, there is censorship in the US, there always has been censorship, and there will always be censorship. There's not very much of it, and as a nation we're pretty vigilant about letting it extend itself (e.g. this discussion). So, you know, I'd rather not see those domains registered than to see them auctioned off and promoted commercially. Seven words. Period. And you know, the list will not grow; any other words that may become "obscene" in the future are probably already registered. Nigger.com belongs to the NAACP. That's a perfect private solution to the problem. I'd rather let the other seven words go than to see the government get involved in seizng domain names.
And you never know, maybe NSI will need the 35 bucks someday, and the whole censorship thing will become moot.
When I first got involved with the web, it was with a news-like organization. We produced some material, it was legitimately copyrighted. And we felt the impulse to ensure that nobody stole it and used it on their web site.
Of course, this was impossible, right or wrong. And no matter how many lawyers we had, and even if they worked for free (one did), there was simply no way to efficiently eliminate all traces of copyright violation. There are too many millions of people with the ability to copy something, and it took too much effort to even warn them about copyright violation.
Yes, copyright and trademark still exist on the web; nobody can effectively copy your site wholesale, nobody can get away with selling phony products under your name for very long, nobody can use your trademarks to direct people to their own site. Those sorts of major violations are easy enough to counter, just as they have always been. But when you talk about a zillion little violations... like fans using your name in their metatags... let it go. You can't win. All you'll accomplish is to piss off your loyal customers.
That said, I understand the need for these disclaimers; if they were actually chasing down minor violators, that would be quite annoying. A better idea is to protect a trademark by specifically allowing it to be used in certain ways, and having the lawyers chase down only the worst abusers.
The web works under a sort of de facto copyright law: if it can be done below the radar of the lawyers, then you might as well condone it, because you can't stop it.
Yeah, I think the problem is that relatively few payees in the US accept online transfers. I have it down to two checks a month, though; car and rent. The hardest part is finding the correct checkbook after it has sifted down into the pile for 29 days.
I'd have to guess that Finland, like many other European countries, enjoys some benefits of being relatively small and homogeneous. Once something like online payment reaches critical mass, it's easier for it to permeate the entire society. There are some cool technologies that are far more widely deployed in Europe, but that doesn't exactly make the US a technology backwater.
On the other hand, I'm not offended by Linus' wisecrack, either.
However bright we may be, it is not for us to decide. Consider: every civilization that has successfully evolved has done so with strong restrictions against infanticide. That alone should prove the dangers. If a society could gain a competititve advantage by killing defective children, why has this practice never taken hold? The answer is simply that it does not confer any net advantage to a society.
Even if some babies would be "better off dead," any society that allowed such things would suffer other maladies. The bright white line between life and death is one of those absolute values that people must have in order to work together and prosper. Allowing infanticide blurs that line, coarsens people, and reduces their trust of each other.
Drive letter exhaustion is getting to be a real worry, if your NT network isn't set up with those limits in mind. And if there's NetWare around, it gets even tighter.
One experiment we did on our network was to set up a Samba machine, and under each user's home directory, we'd smbmount each of the NT Server shares that he or she had access to. Their home dir on the Samba box would then be shared and mapped to a single drive letter on their client PC. So they'd see all their network resources under a single drive letter, and file paths were consistent company-wide. They loved it, at least in the demo we set up.
Of course, there would be a lot of issues to consider before setting up a real network like that, but it sure demonstrated the flexibility in a way that average users could relate to.
Really, folks, they DO make some good points. Stories of better security and reliability are pretty much anectdotal. It's one of those things that's taken as truth among the faithful, but if there's a good way to measure these things, I've yet to see it.
To be sure, for MS to claim better reliability on NT would be equally disingenuous and unproven. But more to the point: repeating the claims that "Linux is more secure" or "Linux is more reliable" without proof will eventually cease to be effective. MS has already managed to portray NT as being as fast or faster than Linux; claims that Linux is faster don't impress people anymore.
Rather than beating the "more reliable; more secure" drum, advocates should emphasize Linux's proven and unambiguous advantages. For example, you can install Linux without a GUI if you want to. There's no way to FUD that. Another example: the Unix file system tree is far more flexible than drive letter mappings. (No matter how much money Microsoft has, they can't add letters to the alphabet.) Text-based log files score another big win for Linux in my book, and troubleshooting is generally easier in Linux.
Concentrate on quantifiable differences; speed, reliability, and security are the kinds of things that a good PR machine can easily turn to their advantage.
This wasn't even a remotely valid security test, so who the heck cares about the details?
There's no way am I going to make a decision based on what happened in a test like this. I'm not even going to take it into consideration. It was entertaining, and I enjoyed it, I enjoyed reading about it, I hope the ZDNet people had fun doing it, and I hope the people who hacked it had some jollies.
But the results are as meaningless as Bill Clinton's sworn testimony.
Of course, every society that has ever existed has practiced cencorship. To be sure, there is very little of it in the US these days, but it exists. Child porn is censored, and only a few will argue that it shouldn't be. Cigarette logos are censored. Politcal campaigns are censored, depending on who is paying for them. Some college campuses censor students' opinions of one another.
Censorship isn't going to go away, and a certain amount of it is apparently compatible with the First Ammendment and has been so for 200+ years. Yeah, there's more of it than there should be. But when colleges are tossing out students for calling each another names, when people are seriously proposing to "reform" our political system by jailing people who campaign in certain ways, when anything that can be chracterized as "commercial speech" is exempted from guarantees of freedom, well, I'm just not going to lose much sleep over Australians' right to surf for porn.
Gosh, they make this out to be so complicated. The keyboard analogy has often been used as an example of "market failure," much like the supposed VHS-Beta example.
It's wrong, and you don't need to be a microeconomist to figure it out. It doesn't even matter which keyboard is "superior". People chose qwerty, end of story. True, there weren't many choices initially (one, I guess), but once that choice was made, nobody wanted much to change to another keyboard. The lesson? Standardization is more valuable than an "optimum" layout. People chose standardization, and the public settled for the first standard that came along. That's a valid market result.
I gotta think that Sun's real goal is to reduce Microsoft's profits. MS is said to make 40% of their revenue from MSOffice, and if Sun can make any dent in that, it will play to their advantage.
>> . There will ALWAYS be a need for constant upgrades while the proprietary software model reigns king
Ah, but by the same token, the proprietary oftware business if pretty reliant on the need to upgrade. That's why I think Linus is right on the mark.
As Microsoft continues to add features to Office, each new feature will appeal to a smaller percentage of users. And as PC prices drop, it's going to be harder and harder to justify a $600 word processor, much less a $300 upgrade every 24 months.
I've watched PC software evolve since the beginning, and there has always been a sort of promised land on the horizon. We were always just a hair short of where we wanted to be. GUIs were unreliable at first, they were too slow. Upgrades seemed necessary, just to make it from Z80-CP/M to a stable 32-bit GUI platform with decent multitasking. It took time, and we bought upgrades along the way.
Now, GUIs and multitasking just work, and we don't think much of it. Windows works pretty well most of the time, Gnome/KDE just need a year or two of polish. And then we're done. The PC has finally evolved to where you turn on a new computer, and no matter how cheap it is, you'll get a pretty snappy GUI interface. And making it twice as "snappy" is no longer a big deal. Most "new" features in current software upgrades are either bells, whistles, or advertisements.
This situation will probably make it pretty difficult to charge a lot of money for the latest version of software in upcoming years. John Dvorak's article yesterday showed rare (for him) insight, when he observed that Linux's desktop challenge will eventually come in the form of a $199 PC that comes with a complete office suite.
I've been extremely impressed by MediaOne's attitude about Linux, running servers, and LANs. All are officially unsupported, but explicitly allowed. In fact, MediaOne even hosts private newsgroups for Linux users, people who want to connect their home LANs, etc. I was very impressed by that.
@Home, on the other hand, specifically disallows these, and most of the DSL ISP's disallow them unless you pay extra for "business service."
In addition, this notion that cable modems get overloaded on the local loop is mostly urban legend. Yes, it's possible, but only if the ISP/cable company lets it happen. M1 advertizes specifies a maximum number of customers on a single loop, and they periodically renumber to maintain it. In the Boston area, all of the slowdowns are upstream of MediaOne; I've never seen any delay that could be attributed to the theoretical local loop overload.
Speed isn't always as good as I want, and the service interruptions, while brief, are too frequent. But I have to say that MediaOne is a much hipper ISP than I expected them to be.
This could easily be added to the Salon article about Columbine, as another example of how media helps spread and immmortalize myths. These people apparently did nothing but copy some popular pages, submitted them to Altavista for indexing, then swapped in their normal pages after they had secured their place in the index. Tacky, probably a copyright infringement, but pretty low-tech.
But "pagejacking" makes it sound all that much more dramatic. Throw in a weepy story about how teenagers could accidentally exposed to naughty advertising, and it's national news. And if the offending sites "incapacitated their computers so they couldn't escape," (known to the rest of us as those annoying page-exit popups) it sounds all that much more frightening.
Sounds to me like just another case of the FCC looking for ways to expand their jusridiction.
The rationale used to justify copyright protection is that it's needed to provide incentive for authors, writers, etc.
But if we didn't have copyrighted databases, would we have a shortage of databases? If we wouldn't, then extending copyright protection is not economically justified.
What remains is simply our sense of fairness; we can all relate the the unpleasantness of somebody else selling our work. It may not bother a musician if somebody makes a copy of their CD for a friend, but it would definitely bother them if somebody else were pressing their own copies and selling them in music stores.
Slashdot Mirror
Ah, he probably just wrote a good review of Linux because somebody gave him a free copy.
/. writes a good review of Playboy, maybe they'll give you a free....
Hey, if
Oh, never mind.
Can't wait for somebody to hack the satellite, and make all the cars go 500 kph.
I don't think the power is going to go out, I don't think there will be mass hysteria, we won't be returned to the Stone Age. But if all the computers break, we'll be plunged back into the bleakness of the 1970's.
Trouble is, there's no place to buy leisure suits anymore.
This always happens. I mean, I'm a fan of Stallman, he's brilliant, he's the original Guy Who Got It Done, I agree that software patents are generally not good. But a boycott such as this is sooooo petty, so naive, and he's always sounding off about soemthing.
Ya just gotta love somebody who's that sincere.
The thing that can make salary a pain is when management starts to view your marginal cost as zero. In other words, they can heap as much work on you as they like, and it costs nothing extra. This is an obstacle to efficient management. Too often, they'll have you work on some old hardware that could be cheaply replaced, but to their eyes, you can fix it for free. You end up maintaining things that aren't worth maintaining. In the short run, they save some cash, but it inevitably means that something else gets dropped or delayed, and it's lousy for marale. But many PHB's think they're smart because it looks like they're getting something for nothing.
Hourly with a guaranteed minimum has always provided the proper incentives and delivered the best results, both for me and for the employers.
Processors are remarked and overclocked; but the culprit usually isn't the local mom-and-pop computer store, but their supplier. There are many cpu-selling wholesalers and middlemen in the world. Some buy trays of Intel OEM CPUs and re-sell them. Or they buy them from somebody else and then re-sell them. Usually, these folks are working on tight margins, well below ten percent. Many local computer stores use these people as a source of supply, and many get burned. Usually, the CPU gets passed on to the consumer, it works as advertised, and that's the end of it.
On the other hand, I've seen some incredibly egregious examples. When Pentium-166's were current, it was almost impossible to buy a legit one for a while. People were buying 133's, and adding $100 to the price by calling them 166's. An educated eye could tell the difference, but you really had to know what you were looking for.
It hasn't been as bad during the PII-PIII-Celeron era; the clock-locking has helped, especially in the US. But there are ways to defeat it, and since you can make upwards of $100 doing so, it's worth some effort.
For example, I once bought two Intel Retail Boxed PII-400 CPUs from my local mom-and-pop shop. Usually I would go through authorized channels, but I didn't have time, and buying the retail boxed versions is fairly safe. But not completely. When I went to build the systems using these CPUs, I noticed that the two boxes had slightly different shades of purple. Upon further examination, I found that one was marked "100 MHz Sustem Bus", complete with misspelling. There were also slight differences in some typefaces. Clearly, one was a fake. Since I was a regular customer, I simply returned it to the dealer, and they exchanged it for me without hesitation. But it helped that I caught it before opening the box; if I had only bought one CPU, I might not have noticed.
So, yeah, I buy all my CPU's either from a trusted dealer where they know me, or from name-brand channels. No, you won't get re-marked CPUs from Dell or Gateway, nor from authorized wholesalers like Tech Data. If you buy retail boxed, you're probably safe with the larger mail-order houses like CDW or warehouse.com who have relationships with the manufacturers. But as you slide into the gray market, the odds begin to turn against you.
Here's a page that details some re-marking schemes. Slightly out of date, but interesting nonetheless.from the article: "I don't think a corporation, particularly a public one, whose allegiances are only to its shareholders and its customers, can be trusted to keep software free"
Folks, believe in it. Have all the doubts you want about corporations and the people who operate them. They are, indeed, only out to make a buck. And for some, free software is how they do it.
A company that deals in free software would not be better off selling proprietary software, otherwise, they'd have started out doing that in the first place.
Stop worrying. Red Hat is Red Hat, Microsoft is Microsoft. They're both out to make a buck, and they're both doing well. Neither is going to adopt the other's way of doing things.
It's just weird that so many supporters and developers of free software are fretting about it's future, while at the same time, investors are expressing their confidence by pouring money into it.
It may not yet be available online, but it is in bookstores. I hadn't even known it was coming, but as soon as I saw the review this morning, I headed out to the bookstore, and there it was.
Very nice indeed. All of the Samba books that I've seen are pretty good, but this one has it all.
Think about it folks. Counterfeit software may be a ripoff of Microsoft, but it's an even worse ripoff of the consumer. Go through any computer show, and you'll see piles of "Microsoft OEM" software for sale, or retail copies of Office at suspiciously low prices. If you develop an eye for it, you'll realize that as much as 90% of the stuff is counterfeit.
If you want to rip off a copy of Windows from Microsoft, that's your decision; but if you're going to pay for it, then you might as well get the real thing. People who sell a counterfeit copy of Office to an unsuspecting user for $200 or more are pretty slimy.
Offering to replace counterfeit stuff with the real thing is pretty generous on MS's part, and as I said, I have no problems with them chasing down the people who make the stuff. These are not innocent home users making an extra copy of Windows for their buddies, they're professional criminals, they know what they're doing, and they're ripping off consumers.
>> give the customer indemnification and product warranties
So, is he implying that under SCSL, there is warranty protection on my free downloaded copy of StarOffice? Indemnification against the possibility that some subroutine was copied from somebody else? Can I hold Sun liable if something goes wrong?
I doubt it, and thus I just don't get it. If they want to distribute Star Office just to existing Sun customers, I guess it makes sense. If they want to expand their market, and take a bite out of MSOffice, it's dumb.
I think I'd prefer to see NSI hold the names and refuse to register them, than to see the government seize them.
What happens next? Will fuck.com be offered to the first bozo who tried to register it? Or is the government bound to sell it to the highest bidder? My guess is the latter. Either way, somebody stands to make a windfall that they don;t deserve.
As I pointed out in another post this week, there is censorship in the US, there always has been censorship, and there will always be censorship. There's not very much of it, and as a nation we're pretty vigilant about letting it extend itself (e.g. this discussion). So, you know, I'd rather not see those domains registered than to see them auctioned off and promoted commercially. Seven words. Period. And you know, the list will not grow; any other words that may become "obscene" in the future are probably already registered. Nigger.com belongs to the NAACP. That's a perfect private solution to the problem. I'd rather let the other seven words go than to see the government get involved in seizng domain names.
And you never know, maybe NSI will need the 35 bucks someday, and the whole censorship thing will become moot.
When I first got involved with the web, it was with a news-like organization. We produced some material, it was legitimately copyrighted. And we felt the impulse to ensure that nobody stole it and used it on their web site.
Of course, this was impossible, right or wrong. And no matter how many lawyers we had, and even if they worked for free (one did), there was simply no way to efficiently eliminate all traces of copyright violation. There are too many millions of people with the ability to copy something, and it took too much effort to even warn them about copyright violation.
Yes, copyright and trademark still exist on the web; nobody can effectively copy your site wholesale, nobody can get away with selling phony products under your name for very long, nobody can use your trademarks to direct people to their own site. Those sorts of major violations are easy enough to counter, just as they have always been. But when you talk about a zillion little violations... like fans using your name in their metatags... let it go. You can't win. All you'll accomplish is to piss off your loyal customers.
That said, I understand the need for these disclaimers; if they were actually chasing down minor violators, that would be quite annoying. A better idea is to protect a trademark by specifically allowing it to be used in certain ways, and having the lawyers chase down only the worst abusers.
The web works under a sort of de facto copyright law: if it can be done below the radar of the lawyers, then you might as well condone it, because you can't stop it.
Yeah, I think the problem is that relatively few payees in the US accept online transfers. I have it down to two checks a month, though; car and rent. The hardest part is finding the correct checkbook after it has sifted down into the pile for 29 days.
I'd have to guess that Finland, like many other European countries, enjoys some benefits of being relatively small and homogeneous. Once something like online payment reaches critical mass, it's easier for it to permeate the entire society. There are some cool technologies that are far more widely deployed in Europe, but that doesn't exactly make the US a technology backwater.
On the other hand, I'm not offended by Linus' wisecrack, either.
However bright we may be, it is not for us to decide. Consider: every civilization that has successfully evolved has done so with strong restrictions against infanticide. That alone should prove the dangers. If a society could gain a competititve advantage by killing defective children, why has this practice never taken hold? The answer is simply that it does not confer any net advantage to a society.
Even if some babies would be "better off dead," any society that allowed such things would suffer other maladies. The bright white line between life and death is one of those absolute values that people must have in order to work together and prosper. Allowing infanticide blurs that line, coarsens people, and reduces their trust of each other.
Drive letter exhaustion is getting to be a real worry, if your NT network isn't set up with those limits in mind. And if there's NetWare around, it gets even tighter.
One experiment we did on our network was to set up a Samba machine, and under each user's home directory, we'd smbmount each of the NT Server shares that he or she had access to. Their home dir on the Samba box would then be shared and mapped to a single drive letter on their client PC. So they'd see all their network resources under a single drive letter, and file paths were consistent company-wide. They loved it, at least in the demo we set up.
Of course, there would be a lot of issues to consider before setting up a real network like that, but it sure demonstrated the flexibility in a way that average users could relate to.
Really, folks, they DO make some good points. Stories of better security and reliability are pretty much anectdotal. It's one of those things that's taken as truth among the faithful, but if there's a good way to measure these things, I've yet to see it.
To be sure, for MS to claim better reliability on NT would be equally disingenuous and unproven. But more to the point: repeating the claims that "Linux is more secure" or "Linux is more reliable" without proof will eventually cease to be effective. MS has already managed to portray NT as being as fast or faster than Linux; claims that Linux is faster don't impress people anymore.
Rather than beating the "more reliable; more secure" drum, advocates should emphasize Linux's proven and unambiguous advantages. For example, you can install Linux without a GUI if you want to. There's no way to FUD that. Another example: the Unix file system tree is far more flexible than drive letter mappings. (No matter how much money Microsoft has, they can't add letters to the alphabet.) Text-based log files score another big win for Linux in my book, and troubleshooting is generally easier in Linux.
Concentrate on quantifiable differences; speed, reliability, and security are the kinds of things that a good PR machine can easily turn to their advantage.
This wasn't even a remotely valid security test, so who the heck cares about the details?
There's no way am I going to make a decision based on what happened in a test like this. I'm not even going to take it into consideration. It was entertaining, and I enjoyed it, I enjoyed reading about it, I hope the ZDNet people had fun doing it, and I hope the people who hacked it had some jollies.
But the results are as meaningless as Bill Clinton's sworn testimony.
Of course, every society that has ever existed has practiced cencorship. To be sure, there is very little of it in the US these days, but it exists. Child porn is censored, and only a few will argue that it shouldn't be. Cigarette logos are censored. Politcal campaigns are censored, depending on who is paying for them. Some college campuses censor students' opinions of one another.
Censorship isn't going to go away, and a certain amount of it is apparently compatible with the First Ammendment and has been so for 200+ years. Yeah, there's more of it than there should be. But when colleges are tossing out students for calling each another names, when people are seriously proposing to "reform" our political system by jailing people who campaign in certain ways, when anything that can be chracterized as "commercial speech" is exempted from guarantees of freedom, well, I'm just not going to lose much sleep over Australians' right to surf for porn.
Gosh, they make this out to be so complicated. The keyboard analogy has often been used as an example of "market failure," much like the supposed VHS-Beta example.
It's wrong, and you don't need to be a microeconomist to figure it out. It doesn't even matter which keyboard is "superior". People chose qwerty, end of story. True, there weren't many choices initially (one, I guess), but once that choice was made, nobody wanted much to change to another keyboard. The lesson? Standardization is more valuable than an "optimum" layout. People chose standardization, and the public settled for the first standard that came along. That's a valid market result.
>> What is the real goal here?
I gotta think that Sun's real goal is to reduce Microsoft's profits. MS is said to make 40% of their revenue from MSOffice, and if Sun can make any dent in that, it will play to their advantage.
"Pokemon Lawyers Sue Themselves"
If I didn't know better, I'd think I was reading The Onion.
>> . There will ALWAYS be a need for constant upgrades while the proprietary software model reigns king
Ah, but by the same token, the proprietary oftware business if pretty reliant on the need to upgrade. That's why I think Linus is right on the mark.
As Microsoft continues to add features to Office, each new feature will appeal to a smaller percentage of users. And as PC prices drop, it's going to be harder and harder to justify a $600 word processor, much less a $300 upgrade every 24 months.
I've watched PC software evolve since the beginning, and there has always been a sort of promised land on the horizon. We were always just a hair short of where we wanted to be. GUIs were unreliable at first, they were too slow. Upgrades seemed necessary, just to make it from Z80-CP/M to a stable 32-bit GUI platform with decent multitasking. It took time, and we bought upgrades along the way.
Now, GUIs and multitasking just work, and we don't think much of it. Windows works pretty well most of the time, Gnome/KDE just need a year or two of polish. And then we're done. The PC has finally evolved to where you turn on a new computer, and no matter how cheap it is, you'll get a pretty snappy GUI interface. And making it twice as "snappy" is no longer a big deal. Most "new" features in current software upgrades are either bells, whistles, or advertisements.
This situation will probably make it pretty difficult to charge a lot of money for the latest version of software in upcoming years. John Dvorak's article yesterday showed rare (for him) insight, when he observed that Linux's desktop challenge will eventually come in the form of a $199 PC that comes with a complete office suite.
I've been extremely impressed by MediaOne's attitude about Linux, running servers, and LANs. All are officially unsupported, but explicitly allowed. In fact, MediaOne even hosts private newsgroups for Linux users, people who want to connect their home LANs, etc. I was very impressed by that.
@Home, on the other hand, specifically disallows these, and most of the DSL ISP's disallow them unless you pay extra for "business service."
In addition, this notion that cable modems get overloaded on the local loop is mostly urban legend. Yes, it's possible, but only if the ISP/cable company lets it happen. M1 advertizes specifies a maximum number of customers on a single loop, and they periodically renumber to maintain it. In the Boston area, all of the slowdowns are upstream of MediaOne; I've never seen any delay that could be attributed to the theoretical local loop overload.
Speed isn't always as good as I want, and the service interruptions, while brief, are too frequent. But I have to say that MediaOne is a much hipper ISP than I expected them to be.
This could easily be added to the Salon article about Columbine, as another example of how media helps spread and immmortalize myths. These people apparently did nothing but copy some popular pages, submitted them to Altavista for indexing, then swapped in their normal pages after they had secured their place in the index. Tacky, probably a copyright infringement, but pretty low-tech.
But "pagejacking" makes it sound all that much more dramatic. Throw in a weepy story about how teenagers could accidentally exposed to naughty advertising, and it's national news. And if the offending sites "incapacitated their computers so they couldn't escape," (known to the rest of us as those annoying page-exit popups) it sounds all that much more frightening.
Sounds to me like just another case of the FCC looking for ways to expand their jusridiction.
The rationale used to justify copyright protection is that it's needed to provide incentive for authors, writers, etc.
But if we didn't have copyrighted databases, would we have a shortage of databases? If we wouldn't, then extending copyright protection is not economically justified.
What remains is simply our sense of fairness; we can all relate the the unpleasantness of somebody else selling our work. It may not bother a musician if somebody makes a copy of their CD for a friend, but it would definitely bother them if somebody else were pressing their own copies and selling them in music stores.