despite comments from the zealots here at/. MS is actually moving towards using standards and open APIs.
Who writes your paychecks, boy?
One, MSFT has been tooting the standards horn for a LONG time. It's been at least two years since I heard them use the carefully-constructed, meaningless term "open, standards-based". Open means that you don't unnecessarily constrain data semantics, and standards-based could imply any number of closed standards.
Two, the term "open API's" does not imply that MSFT will not, as is "standard" operating procedure, attempt to gain control of the platform by using secret, undocumented API's in its own code and by "tumbling" wire protocols as frequently as they can get away with (see Samba and Windows NT service packs).
The core of.NET is truly Visual Studio.NET, the.NET framework, the.NET enterprise servers (such as Exchange 2000, SQL Server 2000 and BizTalk Server), and Whistler (probably Windows.NET 1.0).
Chirped like a professional marketer who apparently can't look at a system and recognize a "core", unless they're talking about "core products". I'll save the design discussions for another day.
These core applications and services will have a high degree of interoperability (with themselves AND with 3rd party applications).
"High degree of interoperability" is another meaningless statement, at least without context. To a manager type, this might mean that people can use JavaStations to read their email. To a coder type, this might mean that I could write once and run anywhere. To a user type, this could mean that I can send email to virtually anyone. Without defining "high degree" and "interoperability", this says nothing.
Once again, what's more interesting is what's left unsaid. It's almost a certainty that the barriers against duplication or reimplementation of the.NET infrastructure are high (some or all of: patents, trade secrets, cryptography, binding EULA's, obfuscated code). One should not expect to run Office.NET on a free reimplementation of the.NET foundation, even if the intellectual property censors didn't find it first.
The basic idea is to have a standardized way of communicating between these applications and services, in order to create a better experience for the developer, business, end user, et al.
"Better experience" is crodocile tears, a standard trick of besieged organizations. Being a besieged organization, MSFT's motives are nowhere near so pristine. The basic idea really is to control ("standardize") distributed IPC and ensure that the largest possible part of that infrastructure is MSFT intellectual property, in order to create a better experience for MSFT shareholders.
XML and its predecessors has been around for double-digit years
So, buried in this handwaving is much feeble misdirection that Microsoft is interested in providing anything at all to the computing community besides another epoxy-potted, magnesium-encased "solution" to a problem already solved.
-jhp
Re:Faith in computers... E-commerce != voting.
on
eLection '04
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· Score: 1
It seems that the main problem with voting is securing the ballot box after it's filled, and ensuring that all ballot boxes are counted. Write-once, factory-serialized, tamperproof memory devices are available today and have relatively high capacities for relatively low cost. With a 200-hole ballot and a 127-bit signature, two hundred ballots could be stored on a single "ballot box", with room enough for a 256-bit signature over the entire contents to "seal" the ballot box. With a 200-hole ballot, a 128-bit signature, and a 64-bit unique ballot ID (assigned from a pool of approved ballot ID's exactly as large as the voter base when the poll worker crosses your name off the list, and never linked with the voter's identity), plus 464 bits for signature/checksum, that's 166 ballots to a ballot box.
Such ballot boxes could be locked inside the voting terminals and removed by the precinct captain. Each ballot box serial number is published before the election. Each serial number is accounted for after the election and the entire contents of each ballot box is posted on a public site. Ballot ID's are verified after but not published before.
Scenario:
Voter goes to desk, registration is confirmed, is given a bar code containing the ballot ID.
Voter goes to voting terminal, swipes:CueCat over bar code:-) . Voter then votes using whatever user interface is deemed reasonable.
Votes are recorded to the ballot box. Votes are then hashed with ballot ID and whatever other information is considered important (ballot box serial number?). Hash and ballot ID are written to the ballot box.
When the ballot box is full or the polls close, the precinct captain signs the ballot box with her own key and seals the ballot box in a static-free container.
When ballots are counted, each ballot box is read out (an operation that takes on the order of 20 seconds) and stored under surveillance. Missing/unauthorized ballot boxes and voter ID's are recognized at this stage.
This scheme does NOT prevent against fraud on the part of the makers of the voting terminals. Since the ballot boxes are more-or-less a mass-market item, and the meanings of the bits are determined by local precinct rather than national standard, it would be difficult for the manufacturer to tamper with them in a way that might throw the election in a particular direction.
Of course, these aren't the votes that really matter, if you think about it. It makes more sense to work on Congress first, providing non-anonymous, non-repudiatable voting and prohibiting the voice vote. When it can be proven who voted for what, the wolves will drop like flies, OR the dittoheads will stop bitching about accountability and responsibility.
First off, the only real way to give any weight to creation by a lone deity is for said deity to assert themselves -- and it would be an assertion, nothing more or less. Ever had a deity jerk your chain on a rough day? Second, Creator theories have historically had little more support than blind faith and political coercion. Third, science encourages research by demanding faith only as long as and to the extent that such theory agrees with observed phenomena, whereas most Creator myths demand not just faith but push-marketing of theories counter to observation, enforced by deprivation of life, liberty, and property. (From the Old Testament through the Crusades through the War On (Some) Drugs, this holds true.)
Finally, why do you think that this research is aimed at seeking alternatives to Creator myths? Each set of theories answers its own question. We have a saying in the software industry, see...
Not necessarily. From the sound of it, they're just moving the region check from the player to the disc. The menuing system on DVD's is sufficiently rich that you can write games with it (Dragon's Lair, for example); a region check would be trivial to implement. RCE just means the DVD player now needs to lie to the disc to play it out-of-region, which means the firmware hacks may require a user interface component and are no longer "invisible" or "easy".
The ramifications in light of the DMCA is interesting to consider: access control is now part of the copyrighted work. Just as one can read past the statement of copyright in a book, is "reading past" the access control on the DVD still within DMCA purview? Is it an offense to lie to the disc about the player type? (Is it a crime to disable Javascript?) Or, since the authority of the copyright holder is now clearly stated as part of the disc "content", is circumvention now a more intentional act, more akin to "breaking and entering" than entering through an unlocked door?
RCE inspires other interesting "features", such as discs that "edit" the content based on what region your player reports (no bush or drugs in region 1, no chewing gum in region 3, etc.). This could streamline studio dealings with censor boards, whose lists of "improper" frame ranges and substitute scenes could be incorporated easily into the disc. This only makes sense if players can be secured, and history has shown that they can't.
I'm sure there are others that used less-powerful system to run mathematical behemoths.
The Sun Ultra Enterprise 10000's microcode and glue logic is loaded from an Ultra 5 with a JTAG card (collectively known as the System Support Processor). Not that the UE10k is particularly a mathematical behemoth, but lots of chip foundries like to use them for layout.
For the most part, they own the debate and the channels through which the debate is presented to Joe Sixpack. Evidence simply does not matter. They'll make it up if they need to, or even if they don't.
As an aside to all you whose arguments are appeals to higher authority (But it's illegal!): Dumping tea into Boston Harbor was very clearly illegal, but that's part of why it was so important and so necessary.
You'll notice the press release mentions "national security" as a distinct mission of Sandia. (For those outside the US, this is a euphemism for "preserving the existing ruling class". The term is frequently found in announcements and discussions of populace control.)
Nanoweapons may first be deployed against progressive activists, since they currently represent the biggest threat to the ruling class and they congregate readily. This populace also provides ready-made excuses for the right-wing media to spin ("a particularly virulent pneumonia", "must have been their lifestyle choices", etc.) Watch out for those water cannons, and remember where you heard it first!
Further advances in storage capacity and reproductive accuracy will enable nanite hit squads, with the ability to target a specific person and affect their life processes in degrees ranging from annoying to torturous to fatal, while remaining mostly quiescent and undetectable in other human carriers.
There ought to be a ban on any sort of use of nanotechnology of any kind in or on a non-consenting human. Anything less is wide open to abuse by disrespectful governments, of which there are plenty.
Santa Clara County, California, is the county in which such tech hotspots as Sunnyvale, Mountain View, and Palo Alto reside. Morgan Hill, on the other hand, is a right dump. (It even smells like a garbage dump near the Tennant Ave. exit).
It's definitely close enough for Valley residents to picket, if you can get a half-day off work, and if it should come to that.
You know, that's a thread all its own right there: ever notice how often web developers lack security skills and are all-around poor architects? Also, have you noticed how undegreed sysadmins are actually good at this stuff more often than you'd think?
I'm spending my money offline this year. This isn't just because of the ridiculous 1-Click(R) shopping patent, not just because amazon.com is yet another bloodsucking corporation with the delusion of birthright to all things Amazon, but because of the sexual intimidation visited by Amazon legal department against an independent feminist bookstore in Minnesota. If you can get hold of the ABC owners' deposition, read it -- there's content in there that makes me nauseous.
If you live in Silly Valley, you have no excuse to not shop at an independent local bookstore -- Stacey's has treated me right since I've been here. Their San Francisco store delivers downtown, too.
(Aside: Funny how startups look more and more like Ponzi schemes as time goes on, innit?)
The guy who wrote RFC 821, "Simple Mail Transfer Protocol", is the late Jonathan B. Postel. Eric Allman, the author of Sendmail and partner in Sendmail, Inc., is very much alive and well.
Do you terribly mind sticking to facts rather than folklore?
There's not much competition per se between Linux and *BSD.. they're both great OSes. BSD is incredibly powerful and stable but it's got a learning curve that's steep enough to require a safety line and supplmental oxygen. Linux, believe it or not, is a more "friendly" UNIX-like OS.
Which is why I warn newbies who got Linux to try to learn Unix that, well, you'll probably get the fundamentals down more or less well, but be prepared to learn the details all over again when you move to any other platform.
Examples: Why does ifconfig not display anything with no parameters? Because Linux decided to be cute and assume a -a by default. Now that one isn't particularly damaging, but what about ldconfig? ldconfig's behavior with no parameters under Linux is to refresh all currently cached paths. Under every other Unix ldconfig with no parameters resets the cached paths to the default set and refreshes that.
Another issue is file system layout. Why aren't the rc?.d directories in/etc, like every other Unix? Why is/bin and/sbin mostly dynamically linked, unlike every other Unix? Why is Linux the only Unix to avoid BSD disk slicing, preferring inflexible BIOS partitioning instead?
Oh, and how about that compatibility nightmare called libc5? (thankfully, R.I.P.)
CIO's, parasites though they are, don't like to hedge their bets. Linux fails sometimes -- it proves too unstable in whatever particular configuration, applications outgrow available IA-32 hardware (and if any ignorant twit pipes up with "What about Beowulf", they'll be smacked), too much time eaten up by tuning -- and we all need to deal with this inconvenient fact. The greater the chance that effort poured into a Linux deployment can migrate easily and cheaply to (say) Solaris, the greater the likelihood that Mr. Pointy-Hair might put some serious thought into trying Linux out -- and the more likely Linux gets a reputation for playing nice. No CIO with half a clue about bean-counting (which is what got them there in the first place, n'est-pas?) will pass up a money-back guarantee without someone lying to him first.
-jhp marxmarv@antigates.com (Vote against G.W. "Toot" Bush and the "right to innovate")
Re:Apple's market cap is actually...
on
Apple Sale Rumors
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· Score: 1
If you are going to sell your car, yeah you clean it, get it running decent, etc., but you don't go overhauling the motor, redoing the interior, put new tires and wheels on it, repaint it. You only do that if you are going to keep it.
I'm down with you up to solution #3. When has the state "sending a message" by taking away someone's freedom EVER worked? Almost everyone still alive in the US has grown up in a culture with a prohibition in place on some sort of intoxicant. Has intoxicant use gone down? Hell no -- it's gone WAY up! Under Clinton, the War On (some) Drugs got even more money and busted more marijuana offenders -- and now even more teenagers are toking up. (I wonder what will happen to drug use in California if the State Senate passes Pete Knight's (R-Palmdale) bill to jack up possession fines tenfold. For that matter, I wonder what will happen to the technology industry.)
The tougher the laws get, the more criminals we see and the more violently and perniciously they behave. Everyone has some fault. Applying legal sanctions to every conceivable fault or misdemeanor is guaranteed to create a whole bunch of angry people disrespectful of authority (and, by association, the "supreme good" which such authority is held to represent). Food for thought: Why is it the "tough on crime" people are the ones who can get caught red-handed and buy or lawyer their way out of it?
Do you 20 something people do drugs to Help your skills and abilities? Does it work? (sarcasm).
Feel free to lose the sarcasm. I code better after a moderate amount (like a bowl) of pot. I write more elegant code without obsessing over details, I write more code, and I actually have a larger vocabulary when I code (and perl is all about vocabulary). One morning after a smoky coding session, I looked back on my code and saw clever things I'd have never thought to do sober.
Of course, the couch lock that comes from overripe stuff is not terribly conducive to coding. Weed is far from standardized, and genetics and growing/harvesting practices can make a major difference in the effects of the buzz.
OTOH, this could have been an example of "state-dependent memory". I dunno.
"Those who would trade a little liberty for a little security deserve neither liberty nor security." -popularly attributed to Ben Franklin, who most assuredly wasn't a seventh grader
As for fascism, totalitarianism, and war, the US economy is good precisely because of these things.
Capitalism survives because no one actually THINKS about it.
Just for the sake of argument, let's take a couple of traditional capitalist tenets -- it is a religion, after all -- and think about them, taking them to their logical extremes. (There's little danger of them not reaching their logical extremes, since society has agreed that money is a one-dimensional metric of power and those with power/money believe in capitalism.) "It takes money to make money" (which on its face is quite true) predicts a compounding exponential shift upwards of a finite pool of wealth. "Charge what the market will bear" predicts a large body of people working for subsistence wages with no marginal income to MAKE money with.
(Feel free to find some other tenets and try it for yourself. Post the results.)
There's a reason the United States has reacted violently toward any flavor of socialism, to the extreme of replacing socialist officials in other countries with hand-picked leaders friendly to U.S. business interests. (These leaders, coincidentally or not, tend to attack civil liberties and social policy in favor of wild enterprise. Free is simply not the right word). The United States' national interest is fundamentally incompatible with democracy.
-jhp
Wherever you see the US, oil wars and drugs are never far behind.
because, instead of restricting itself to another go-round of "Open source rules/Open source sucks/Rob is lame", it actually looks outside of the computer screen and examines open source as a social institution, and how it can reverse the steady decay of democracy in the United States. To do this, the movement needs outreach.
Without a PR arm, we don't have a chance of changing the social constructs that make the proprietary "hate-thy-neighbor" software industry _possible_. Without a legal arm, we're not capable of protecting our own or anyone else's intellectual property from misappropriation, from software patents or outright theft. Without a research arm, we lack the ability to track, critique, and eventually shape computing trends to as great an extent. Without a marketing arm, the ONLY thing we have to go on is quality, and though we might like to believe that rational people will choose systems and components based on quality, all you need to do is look at history (or, for that matter, the present) for a good slap in the face and wakeup call.
There's no point in settling for free beer when you can have a Renaissance. (The author mentions this at the end of the paper, by the way.)
The nature of such organizations is to hold onto these assets tightly and release them slowly, so that the most efficient return on investment can be achieved.
Duh no. They deploy them as quickly as possible to realize the fastest return on investment.
Not always true. The auto industry had efficient combustion engines long before 1973. Only when the gasoline crunch finally hit us did the auto industry finally produce them, and only to save their own industry.
This article in question only made it to Slashdot because it had the words "open source" somewhere in it. It was poorly written (worse than Jon Katz, even), poorly researched, and didn't know whether it was a persuasive essay or not. I recommend against.
As an aside, it's also interesting that whenever a paradigm is on the verge of collapse, or a technology on the edge of obsolescence, the people who benefit most from that technology will violently defend their turf, to the point of killing. "Communism" (read: social democracy) threatened the top.1% for years, and several democratically elected governments (particularly in South America) have been overthrown and/or their candidates and officials killed to keep wealth where it is. Hemp threatened the Hearst paper and Du Pont chemical monopolies, so they lied in Congress and whipped up a media frenzy to have it banned. (Hemp more directly threatened the existing social order in the early '70s; the Controlled Substances Act of 1972 was passed shortly thereafter, and civil liberties have been in decline ever since.) Chevron keeps labor cheap in Nigeria by renting the Nigerian police forces (and, after this information was presented in an award-winning program "Drilling and Killing" by Pacifica Radio's Amy Goodman and Juan Gonzales, Chevron barred a credentialed Pacifica reporter from a press conference because "Pacifica does not report news"). And do I need to mention Steve Kangas turning up dead in a restroom near the office of a CIA operative he fingered, with bullet holes in the wrong places and facts that don't match up?
Not only does this explain Microsoft, it explains society. C'mon, kiddies, they're playing for keeps. They need us more than we need them.
Slashdot Mirror
One, MSFT has been tooting the standards horn for a LONG time. It's been at least two years since I heard them use the carefully-constructed, meaningless term "open, standards-based". Open means that you don't unnecessarily constrain data semantics, and standards-based could imply any number of closed standards.
Two, the term "open API's" does not imply that MSFT will not, as is "standard" operating procedure, attempt to gain control of the platform by using secret, undocumented API's in its own code and by "tumbling" wire protocols as frequently as they can get away with (see Samba and Windows NT service packs).
Chirped like a professional marketer who apparently can't look at a system and recognize a "core", unless they're talking about "core products". I'll save the design discussions for another day."High degree of interoperability" is another meaningless statement, at least without context. To a manager type, this might mean that people can use JavaStations to read their email. To a coder type, this might mean that I could write once and run anywhere. To a user type, this could mean that I can send email to virtually anyone. Without defining "high degree" and "interoperability", this says nothing.
Once again, what's more interesting is what's left unsaid. It's almost a certainty that the barriers against duplication or reimplementation of the .NET infrastructure are high (some or all of: patents, trade secrets, cryptography, binding EULA's, obfuscated code). One should not expect to run Office.NET on a free reimplementation of the .NET foundation, even if the intellectual property censors didn't find it first.
"Better experience" is crodocile tears, a standard trick of besieged organizations. Being a besieged organization, MSFT's motives are nowhere near so pristine. The basic idea really is to control ("standardize") distributed IPC and ensure that the largest possible part of that infrastructure is MSFT intellectual property, in order to create a better experience for MSFT shareholders.XML and its predecessors has been around for double-digit years
So, buried in this handwaving is much feeble misdirection that Microsoft is interested in providing anything at all to the computing community besides another epoxy-potted, magnesium-encased "solution" to a problem already solved.
-jhp
Such ballot boxes could be locked inside the voting terminals and removed by the precinct captain. Each ballot box serial number is published before the election. Each serial number is accounted for after the election and the entire contents of each ballot box is posted on a public site. Ballot ID's are verified after but not published before.
Scenario:
- Voter goes to desk, registration is confirmed, is given a bar code containing the ballot ID.
- Voter goes to voting terminal, swipes
:CueCat over bar code :-) . Voter then votes using whatever user interface is deemed reasonable.
- Votes are recorded to the ballot box. Votes are then hashed with ballot ID and whatever other information is considered important (ballot box serial number?). Hash and ballot ID are written to the ballot box.
- When the ballot box is full or the polls close, the precinct captain signs the ballot box with her own key and seals the ballot box in a static-free container.
- When ballots are counted, each ballot box is read out (an operation that takes on the order of 20 seconds) and stored under surveillance. Missing/unauthorized ballot boxes and voter ID's are recognized at this stage.
This scheme does NOT prevent against fraud on the part of the makers of the voting terminals. Since the ballot boxes are more-or-less a mass-market item, and the meanings of the bits are determined by local precinct rather than national standard, it would be difficult for the manufacturer to tamper with them in a way that might throw the election in a particular direction.Of course, these aren't the votes that really matter, if you think about it. It makes more sense to work on Congress first, providing non-anonymous, non-repudiatable voting and prohibiting the voice vote. When it can be proven who voted for what, the wolves will drop like flies, OR the dittoheads will stop bitching about accountability and responsibility.
-jhp
Finally, why do you think that this research is aimed at seeking alternatives to Creator myths? Each set of theories answers its own question. We have a saying in the software industry, see...
-jhp
The ramifications in light of the DMCA is interesting to consider: access control is now part of the copyrighted work. Just as one can read past the statement of copyright in a book, is "reading past" the access control on the DVD still within DMCA purview? Is it an offense to lie to the disc about the player type? (Is it a crime to disable Javascript?) Or, since the authority of the copyright holder is now clearly stated as part of the disc "content", is circumvention now a more intentional act, more akin to "breaking and entering" than entering through an unlocked door?
RCE inspires other interesting "features", such as discs that "edit" the content based on what region your player reports (no bush or drugs in region 1, no chewing gum in region 3, etc.). This could streamline studio dealings with censor boards, whose lists of "improper" frame ranges and substitute scenes could be incorporated easily into the disc. This only makes sense if players can be secured, and history has shown that they can't.
-jhp
-jhp
For the most part, they own the debate and the channels through which the debate is presented to Joe Sixpack. Evidence simply does not matter. They'll make it up if they need to, or even if they don't.
As an aside to all you whose arguments are appeals to higher authority (But it's illegal!): Dumping tea into Boston Harbor was very clearly illegal, but that's part of why it was so important and so necessary.
-jhp
-jhp
Nanoweapons may first be deployed against progressive activists, since they currently represent the biggest threat to the ruling class and they congregate readily. This populace also provides ready-made excuses for the right-wing media to spin ("a particularly virulent pneumonia", "must have been their lifestyle choices", etc.) Watch out for those water cannons, and remember where you heard it first!
Further advances in storage capacity and reproductive accuracy will enable nanite hit squads, with the ability to target a specific person and affect their life processes in degrees ranging from annoying to torturous to fatal, while remaining mostly quiescent and undetectable in other human carriers.
There ought to be a ban on any sort of use of nanotechnology of any kind in or on a non-consenting human. Anything less is wide open to abuse by disrespectful governments, of which there are plenty.
-jhp
("locusts with heads of men"? Hmm...)
perl -MPOSIX -e 'print "Tomorrow it will be ", strftime("%Y/%m/%d", localtime), "\n"'
Tomorrow it will be 2000/01/05
If you don't know what you're talking about, don't.
-jhp
It's definitely close enough for Valley residents to picket, if you can get a half-day off work, and if it should come to that.
mole
-jhp
(who probably will be there)
-jhp
If you live in Silly Valley, you have no excuse to not shop at an independent local bookstore -- Stacey's has treated me right since I've been here. Their San Francisco store delivers downtown, too.
(Aside: Funny how startups look more and more like Ponzi schemes as time goes on, innit?)
-jhp
Do you terribly mind sticking to facts rather than folklore?
-jhp
Examples: Why does ifconfig not display anything with no parameters? Because Linux decided to be cute and assume a -a by default. Now that one isn't particularly damaging, but what about ldconfig? ldconfig's behavior with no parameters under Linux is to refresh all currently cached paths. Under every other Unix ldconfig with no parameters resets the cached paths to the default set and refreshes that.
Another issue is file system layout. Why aren't the rc?.d directories in /etc, like every other Unix? Why is /bin and /sbin mostly dynamically linked, unlike every other Unix? Why is Linux the only Unix to avoid BSD disk slicing, preferring inflexible BIOS partitioning instead?
Oh, and how about that compatibility nightmare called libc5? (thankfully, R.I.P.)
CIO's, parasites though they are, don't like to hedge their bets. Linux fails sometimes -- it proves too unstable in whatever particular configuration, applications outgrow available IA-32 hardware (and if any ignorant twit pipes up with "What about Beowulf", they'll be smacked), too much time eaten up by tuning -- and we all need to deal with this inconvenient fact. The greater the chance that effort poured into a Linux deployment can migrate easily and cheaply to (say) Solaris, the greater the likelihood that Mr. Pointy-Hair might put some serious thought into trying Linux out -- and the more likely Linux gets a reputation for playing nice. No CIO with half a clue about bean-counting (which is what got them there in the first place, n'est-pas?) will pass up a money-back guarantee without someone lying to him first.
-jhp
marxmarv@antigates.com
(Vote against G.W. "Toot" Bush and the "right to innovate")
-jhp
-jhp
If the car is a classic, then you might.
-jhp
The tougher the laws get, the more criminals we see and the more violently and perniciously they behave. Everyone has some fault. Applying legal sanctions to every conceivable fault or misdemeanor is guaranteed to create a whole bunch of angry people disrespectful of authority (and, by association, the "supreme good" which such authority is held to represent). Food for thought: Why is it the "tough on crime" people are the ones who can get caught red-handed and buy or lawyer their way out of it?
Of course, the couch lock that comes from overripe stuff is not terribly conducive to coding. Weed is far from standardized, and genetics and growing/harvesting practices can make a major difference in the effects of the buzz.
OTOH, this could have been an example of "state-dependent memory". I dunno.
As for fascism, totalitarianism, and war, the US economy is good precisely because of these things.
-jhp
Just for the sake of argument, let's take a couple of traditional capitalist tenets -- it is a religion, after all -- and think about them, taking them to their logical extremes. (There's little danger of them not reaching their logical extremes, since society has agreed that money is a one-dimensional metric of power and those with power/money believe in capitalism.) "It takes money to make money" (which on its face is quite true) predicts a compounding exponential shift upwards of a finite pool of wealth. "Charge what the market will bear" predicts a large body of people working for subsistence wages with no marginal income to MAKE money with.
(Feel free to find some other tenets and try it for yourself. Post the results.)
There's a reason the United States has reacted violently toward any flavor of socialism, to the extreme of replacing socialist officials in other countries with hand-picked leaders friendly to U.S. business interests. (These leaders, coincidentally or not, tend to attack civil liberties and social policy in favor of wild enterprise. Free is simply not the right word). The United States' national interest is fundamentally incompatible with democracy.
-jhp
Wherever you see the US, oil wars and drugs are never far behind.
Without a PR arm, we don't have a chance of changing the social constructs that make the proprietary "hate-thy-neighbor" software industry _possible_. Without a legal arm, we're not capable of protecting our own or anyone else's intellectual property from misappropriation, from software patents or outright theft. Without a research arm, we lack the ability to track, critique, and eventually shape computing trends to as great an extent. Without a marketing arm, the ONLY thing we have to go on is quality, and though we might like to believe that rational people will choose systems and components based on quality, all you need to do is look at history (or, for that matter, the present) for a good slap in the face and wakeup call.
There's no point in settling for free beer when you can have a Renaissance. (The author mentions this at the end of the paper, by the way.)
-jhp
(cypherhippy)
This article in question only made it to Slashdot because it had the words "open source" somewhere in it. It was poorly written (worse than Jon Katz, even), poorly researched, and didn't know whether it was a persuasive essay or not. I recommend against.
As an aside, it's also interesting that whenever a paradigm is on the verge of collapse, or a technology on the edge of obsolescence, the people who benefit most from that technology will violently defend their turf, to the point of killing. "Communism" (read: social democracy) threatened the top .1% for years, and several democratically elected governments (particularly in South America) have been overthrown and/or their candidates and officials killed to keep wealth where it is. Hemp threatened the Hearst paper and Du Pont chemical monopolies, so they lied in Congress and whipped up a media frenzy to have it banned. (Hemp more directly threatened the existing social order in the early '70s; the Controlled Substances Act of 1972 was passed shortly thereafter, and civil liberties have been in decline ever since.) Chevron keeps labor cheap in Nigeria by renting the Nigerian police forces (and, after this information was presented in an award-winning program "Drilling and Killing" by Pacifica Radio's Amy Goodman and Juan Gonzales, Chevron barred a credentialed Pacifica reporter from a press conference because "Pacifica does not report news"). And do I need to mention Steve Kangas turning up dead in a restroom near the office of a CIA operative he fingered, with bullet holes in the wrong places and facts that don't match up?
Not only does this explain Microsoft, it explains society. C'mon, kiddies, they're playing for keeps. They need us more than we need them.
-jhp