Was in Unreal. That was, what, five years ago? It was a revalation to me as a commercial games developer. You could script object behaviour in C-like code, and load it dynamically at run time without having to restart the engine or try and do clever tricks with dll's. The development time that saved was simply breathtaking, and it pretty much defined the future of games engines and games development, which epitomise the RAD concept. Heck, the first thing that we did was crank out our own C-like VM, and we never looked back.
everse-engineer MS's encrypted DRM-able filesystem will be branded as "interoperability" or "a federal crime" under the DMCA?
You know, the one thing that Europe got right recently was giving specific protection to reverse engineering for purposes of interoperability. The USA needs a law like that, and it needs it now.
I live not far from Bonnybridge. I wouldn't call it the arsehole of the universe, because arseholes have a use. Bonnybridge is a classic oversized-small-town, i.e. crammed full of disillusioned young people with nothing to do. UFO spotting is pretty much the only thing to do there of an evening that doesn't involve pointy implements or GTA (the Live Action version).
Note the military airlanes, note the undulating foggy roads, note that UFO sighting go up after firework displays. It's pretty much a local game now, with people playing along and making up more and more outrageous claims. And note also the ulterior commercial motive: a (dear god) theme park.
I'm picturing the pitch now: "Come to Bonnybridge, home of surly teenagers and desparate hollow eyed single mothers. Taste the delights of warm Irn Bru and soggy chippies. A free stabbing with every ticket!"
Shudder. Nothing to see here. Move along. For your own good, move along.
OK, I decided to use the interweb for something useful. I've just sucked down a selection of the tracks from 18, and you know what? I don't really like them. So I'm not going to buy the album, and in fact I've already shredded the tracks. Seems to me like that's no different from hearing them on the radio or requesting them on an MTV-a-like TV channel.
I enjoyed Play, and I even enjoyed the savvy way that Moby leveraged the crap out of it, licensing every track for use in commercials (thereby buying himself a shitload of exposure). But I don't like 18, and I don't like Moby's attitude that because CD sales are lower, there must be a cause other than that the album sucks or that he chose not to license the tracks. Shit, it can't be anything, he's done, right, because god knows that artists never just fade away after one amazing album. I mean, that's never happened before.
Damn, I wish artists wouldn't keep doing this. Someone needs to slap them round the head and say "Look, you can't all have massive hits every time. Some of you have to win and some have to lose. Deal with it.". Because every time that they even mention reduced sales and file sharing in the same breath, they just give Microsoft more ammunition for shoving Palladium down our collective throats.
You know, perhaps the most productive thing that we could do would be to start collecting metrics on gnutella search terms. I'd bet my bottom dollar that the number 1 albums and singles would correspond to the top mp3 searches, week on week, which would pretty much blow any "lost sales" argument clean out of the water.
Wow, talk about living in denial. P2P does hurt sales directly
Prove it. Show us the figures, don't just assert it as though it's incontrovertible. I know that it's common sense that it does, but it's non-sensical for people to donate to charity, and yet, strangely, they still do. Show us the figures.
This is Moby, the artist that licensed every one of the tracks on Play for use in commercials. What does he care about selling albums? That's largely irrelevant to his income, and he clearly understands that. If you don't know why, I suggest you go and find out
Note that while he's declined to license any of the tracks on 18, his stance is actually that he hasn't licensed them yet, but he will when an "interesting opportunity comes along" i.e. an advertiser cracks and offers insane money to be the first licensee. I think his point is that CD sales just provide leverage for him to make a living wage selling other rights, and that it would be to the benefit of artists to have all of the swapping and downloading counted as well.
Microsoft is also publishing [present tense] the system's source code. "We are trying to be transparent in all this," says Allchin
Strangely, a google search fails to turn this up, or indeed much else on Microsoft's wonderfully transparent new idea. The idea that they've already agreed (transparently?) with Intel and AMD, so don't tell me this is a brand new project.
As with all verbal promises, this one's not even worth the paper it's not written on. How high is the Cynic-O-Meter reading here? I'm betting by "publishing" they mean "making viewing of representative samples of the source available under strictly limited and NDA'd conditions to selected high level purchasers in government, industry, and, hell, even some of those long haired hippy academics. But not the pinko ones, obviously."
The rest of this is article is just blurb, but this, if true, would shake Microsoft to its very foundations. Want to bet it later gets dismissed as a misquote? I'll even venture that "transparency" replaces "trustworthy" as Microsoft's meaningless-blurb-word-of-the-moment. Hell, they might even go as far as trying to assimilate "freedom" for their cause.
Microsoft have finally realised that there are free (beer and speech) alternatives that do 95% of the things that Windows does, and mostly at least as good as Windows does them.
We thought they'd struggle. We thought they'd adapt. I think they've actually decided to follow through on one of their antitrust assertions, that the best price point for Windows is $800. Yes, $800. Sure, they said, they'd lose a lot of customers, but they'd retain a lot of customers - those who didn't have a choice, they noted - and they make more money out of them.
This is along those lines. In even three years time, anybody still using Windows will be doing it because they don't know that they can switch, because they're not allowed to switch, or because they absolutely cannot switch. It's a captive market, pretty much by definition, because it's free to switch. So they can turn the screw. They can squeeze and squeeze and squeeze. They can lock people in harder than they we can imagine, all the time cranking up the dollar cost in obfuscated software-as-a-service licensing, and raising the cost to leave them (because all of your data becomes unreadable).
Does it sound insane? The tighter they close their fist, the more star systems - er, customers - will slip through their fingers? So what? Whenever one leaves, pass the cost onto the rest. And keep doing it. The beauty of this system is that if you have one customer left who can't afford to switch, the arithmetic works! This isn't hyperbole: what if that last customer is the US government in some form? Say, the military. How much is it worth to the DoD to keep renewing the licenses for Windows For Warfare? How much is it worth for them to hush up how insane it was to allow themselves to get tied in to proprietary software, when the dangers were clear?
But it won't even come to that, because enough businesses are already locked into the mindset that they can't give up Microsoft. My own employer's IS department won't even trial Star/OpenOffice. It fills them with primal fear to consider moving away from MS Office, ever. To suggest to them that we could trial non-Microsoft OS's would be anathema. Hell, it's not their money they're spending, and nobody ever got fired for buying Microsoft (nee IBM).
So, sure, pile it on, Microsoft. The nightmare scenario is, of course, hardware that will only respond to Microsoft's patented security systems, but there are enough generic non-PC devices out there using the same hardware (I develop them) that even the most corrupt and insular legislator would have to listen to the storm of protest that would erupt if Microsoft OS was made mandatory in desktops, servers, embedded systems, set top boxes, PDA's, MP3 players, cellphones, desktop 'phones for that matter (and no, I am not joking about this last one - I develop VOIP 'phones that have an OS, versioned software loads, even a web browser).
This looks horrid, but I don't believe that even Microsoft can railroad it through on the hardware side, and without that, it only effects those people who can't or won't switch from Microsoft. I pity those people, but there'll be fewer of them every year, so eventually we won't even be tortured by their piteous wails as Microsoft gouge deeper and deeper. My only worry is that most of the final holdouts will be spending my tax dollars, so Microsoft will get my money anyway.
Microsoft will claim that modding an Xbox is a DMCA violation.
They'll spend a fortune on lawyers and publicity and on an "education" campaign to convince purchasers that they are stealing from the mouths of hungry developers.
The net effect will be that a lot of lawyers and PR people will be able to make a deposit on a BMW, and that clued up gamers who want to mod their Xbox and play with it will go ahead and do it anyway.
Someone (let's say me) will point out that Microsoft could license some of the abandonware titles that MAME supports and sell (yes, sell) a MAME collection, thereby keeping money out of the hands of lawyers and keeping gamers happy.
Microsoft (if they deign to acknowlege this suggestion) will snort derisively and ask why anyone would want to run MAME on the Xbox. When they have it pointed out that they are spending millions on pursuing DMCA suits to have it stopped, they will shift uncomfortably in their seats and ask for the name and home address of the questioner, their family and their little dog too.
You know, one day we'll wake up in a world where suppliers have remembered that you make money by supplying the demand that's out there, not by trying to control it. It didn't work for the Soviet Union, and it sure isn't going to work in the USA.
While Vint and his chums write insightful pieces on why there might be a possible problem with conflicts of interest, the commercial interests just carry on buying up the laws and precedents to do whatever they damn well want with the root servers and TLD's.
The problem with reasonable, balanced, polite objections is that the other side is utterly convinced that might makes right. They see Vint and his kind as irrelevant dinosaurs, and they see us not as contributing netizens, but as consumers.
Vint, Vint, stop being so nice. Start asserting the bald fact: the net is for individuals, not for companies. Don't make the mistake of justifying that or explaining why it should be so, because the commercial interests damn well don't. Just assert it, and keep on asserting it more confidently every day. There's a war on for control of the internet, and wars aren't won through appeasment and debate, they're won through a single minded belief that there can be only one possible outcome, and that's that we will win this.
Go and actually read the article. This is partly PR stunt, and partly law enforcement just covering their collective asses. They have no idea what they'll actually use jamming for, they're just saber rattling.
In case you weren't aware, most countries don't actually give law enforcement blanket dispensation from prosecution. Police break the law every day: they speed, they break and enter, they inflict violence, they kill people. No country that I know of recognises in law the concept of a "license to kill". The point is that they aren't prosecuted for doing this, because it's not in the public interest.
However, when their activities effect enough people, it's in everyone's best interest to document what's considered reasonable behaviour, partly so that law enforcement know how far they can go before being prosecuted. Stop and search powers are the most obvious, as they (almost by definition) target people who are mostly innocent. In this case, this is just the initial step in the process. They're trying to ensure that they won't be prosecuted for jamming RF the first time they do it. That's why this is limited to two specific occasions. However, if they do cause public inconvenience (or, hopefully, if they receive too many claims for compensation and get bogged down in individual lawsuits), they'll back off and forget the whole thing.
So, sure, this is vile in principle, but in practice it'll likely be a one off that will vanish into the footnotes of history.
Time when a white hat hacker reports a security flaw in open source code != time when a black hat hacker notices and exploits a flaw in closed source code
Time of public disclosure != either of the above
Time when a closed source flaw is reported fixed != time when an open source flaw is demonstrably fixed
what exactly would you do if you did see one of these things approaching anyways?
NASA could throw one of it's $1,000 toilet seats at it. Or perhaps they've already taken those toilet seats up to orbit and bolted them together into some sort of orbittal missile platform. Just a thought.
every time I have submitted bug reports to Microsoft (which I've done on multiple occasions) the report seems to disappear into a black hole
Amen to that. I recall trying to report a bug in MSVC 5.2, and drawing a complete blank. It wasn't a new version with a beta program, there was (at that time) no links on their site that we could find to report bugs, and whoever we got through to on the 'phone eventually ended up putting us through to tech support, who wanted to charge us $75 to ask two question.
Think about that. You are talking to someone in Microsoft. You say to them "I have a bug to report. A bug. Not a technical support issue. I know how to use it, and it doesn't work. It hangs the machine if you try and compile an MFC collection class inside a double nested namespace. The product doesn't work, and I'm trying to provide feedback to help you fix it. Don't put me through to tech support. Do not put me through to tech support."
"Transferring you now... Hi, welcome to tech support. My name is Mindy, and I'll talk to you for ten whole minutes for only $75 dollars. Mmm, you sound like a real stud. What's your credit card number, you hot stallion?"
OK, I'm perhaps paraphrasing slightly at the end, but they really seemed to go out of their way to make it hard to help them.
Can somebody please just come up with a convenient, inexpensive storage medium that allows me to back up these giant (~100GB) hard drive
So you want a re-recordable medium that's power-off stable, has large information density, and which can handle high data throughput?
Mmm, sounds like you need to buy more hard drives.
Really, no joke. I take your point, but the only thing that meets the criteria that I think you're applying is a RAID array with occasional disaster-recovery backups to good old tape. There's a very good reason that this is a popular choice for commercial companies.
The VMs just keep getting better and better, and I'm sure millions of copies of Windows and Linux have a modern JVM installed.
Let me explain why you're agreeing with me. The VM's plural keep getting better. There are millions of copies of Windows (and Linux and BeOS and MacOS) with a java-like VM installed.
Did you not understand my point? Java is not the source code. That's irrelevant (says Sun). What's important is that there's one correct VM object code syntax and one definitive VM, otherwise it's not "write once, run anywhere", and you might as well hammer the underlying OS or hardware. Did you not read where I said that I have in front of me a production quality java-like applet (claiming to be Java) that run only on one version of one vendor's VM? That's not Java, that's "java like object code for version 1.1.4 (or whatever) of the Microsoft VM". Java - as a write once, run anywhere language - is dead.
You want to debate further? OK, can you lay your hands on one of those java-like cell phone applications, because I'd like to try running it on my PC under a variety of browsers and appletviewer. Want to bet that it'll work? Bet your career?
Microsoft does not provide a "JVM". They provide the Microsoft Virtual Machine or Microsoft VM. This may or may not be compatible with any given version of valid Java object code: Microsoft doesn't make that claim any more.
Further, Microsoft VM object code compiled with Microsoft J++ is definitely not guaranteed to work with any version of the Sun JVM. Further further, Microsoft VM object code compiled for any given version of the Microsoft VM is not guaranteed to - and sometimes does not - work with newer versions of the Microsoft VM.
Let me give you an example of what this means in practice. My employer uses the web based Rational ClearQuest for bug tracking. It used java-like applets, and works with all versions of Microsoft IE on 9x/NT/2K/XP platforms using the Microsoft VM that we've tried it with, but with no versions of the Sun JVM in IE, or indeed with any browser other than IE.
It gets worse. Our actual product uses java-like applets, built using Microsoft J++. They work with IE 5.5 under Windows 9x/NT/2K using the supplied VM. And nothing else, which exactly fulfills the specification given to the developers. Our tools don't work with any other browser, nor with the Sun JVM, nor (and this is where it gets silly) nor with XP and IE 6 using the latest downloaded Microsoft VM. Yes, our code is "write once, run once" in the worst sense. By tying ourselves to the Microsoft platform, Microsoft browsers and Microsoft VM, we've even managed to build in obsolescence and ensure non-forwards compatibility on our chosen platform.
The scary part for me isn't that the java-like "experts" in my company don't care, but that so many of them don't even understand what I'm talking about. As far as they're concerned, IE running java-like applets using the Microsoft VM on Windows is Java. They don't even seem to know about other platforms or VM's or appletviewers or applications, or that they're creating java-like object code rather than correct Java.
As a hobbyist Java programmer (using the Sun JVM on multiple platforms) this both pisses me off, and makes me very sad indeed. I greatly fear that Microsoft has succeeded in assimilating and killing Java. I worry that Java has already been dealt the fatal blow, but it's still staggering on under its own momentum, shedding limbs and slowly dissolving. When it finally expires, the beast that will erupt from its tattered corpse won't even be J++, but C#
This is hardly news. I can't remember the last time that I shared a music file from gnutella that was correctly named, labelled, untruncated and not a radio edit (mea non culpla, the first thing that I do is to fix the damn things, before making them available for re-sharing).
For exe's, it's even worse. There seems to be a deliberate misnamimg of some files, e.g. GTA2 labelled as GTA3, or in some bizarre cases files named as "game Foo (actually game Bar)". What on earth is the point of that? If you're warning that there are misnamed versions out there with this filesize, then say that, otherwise just name it correctly and be done with it.
Porn is the worst of all. I've lost count of the number of god damn bangbus promos (or worse, trailers that spawn popups) that I've shared and ditched, and I'm now so sick of it that I won't download anything under 5MB (most of the trailers are smaller than that).
What I can't understand in all this is that I'm sharing these from other gnutella users. Sure, they are injected through malice (or avarice), but what is wrong in the heads of users that they don't understand that this is our network, and our responsibility to clean up the file naming? Nobody is going to step in and do it for us. It's only going to get worse over time, and I'd rather download three different but accurately named versions of the same file than one misnamed version that turns out to be another badly encoded asian lipstick lesbian popup spawning commercial.
Repeat the mantra: our network, our responsibility.
It's not practical for us to stop using Microsoftware, because it's simply too pervasive and dominant, and the costs and penalties for switching are too high.
What? What do you mean "That's the definition of an abusive monopoly!"? But it's so hard to switch away from Microsoft. We know that's the point, but, uuh, we don't wanna. We'd have to learn stuff! We're civil servants, that's not in our job description. And don't get us started on the long term career risks of being in the same room where an actual decision gets made to switch from the biggest, safest option... [etc, ad nauseum]
As an aside, it would perhaps be more accurate to call the Guardian an English and Welsh (rather than a UK) publication. I mention this because there have been a few cases recently of English papers being gagged and prevented from disclosing details on certain released criminals. The idiocy of this is highlighted in the last line of this Guardian article; publishing in England would be illegal, but take one step over the open Scottish border, and it becomes legal.
In that respect, the English courts appear to have little idea how to deal with the complexities of international jurisdiction. It's going to be very interesting when a Scottish newpaper finally does nail its colours to the mast and defy one of these English bans.
Nice summary. I think we're beginning to understand just how badly patents and the GPL mix. I'm sure there's a bunch of guys out there tearing out their hair and screaming "I told you so! Why did nobody listen?". Sorry, guys, we should have listened.
As an addenda to your point about defensive patents and anyone cracking if they're offered enough money, let's not forget that if (e.g.) Red Hat go Chapter 11, then administrators will step in and just flat out sell their assets, including their patents, to the highest bidder. And we've always said that Microsoft couldn't kill the GPL code base by assimilation...
Slashdot Mirror
Was in Unreal. That was, what, five years ago? It was a revalation to me as a commercial games developer. You could script object behaviour in C-like code, and load it dynamically at run time without having to restart the engine or try and do clever tricks with dll's. The development time that saved was simply breathtaking, and it pretty much defined the future of games engines and games development, which epitomise the RAD concept. Heck, the first thing that we did was crank out our own C-like VM, and we never looked back.
You know, the one thing that Europe got right recently was giving specific protection to reverse engineering for purposes of interoperability. The USA needs a law like that, and it needs it now.
I'm sure glad that the USA doesn't ban books with depressing regularity.
I live not far from Bonnybridge. I wouldn't call it the arsehole of the universe, because arseholes have a use. Bonnybridge is a classic oversized-small-town, i.e. crammed full of disillusioned young people with nothing to do. UFO spotting is pretty much the only thing to do there of an evening that doesn't involve pointy implements or GTA (the Live Action version).
Note the military airlanes, note the undulating foggy roads, note that UFO sighting go up after firework displays. It's pretty much a local game now, with people playing along and making up more and more outrageous claims. And note also the ulterior commercial motive: a (dear god) theme park.
I'm picturing the pitch now: "Come to Bonnybridge, home of surly teenagers and desparate hollow eyed single mothers. Taste the delights of warm Irn Bru and soggy chippies. A free stabbing with every ticket!"
Shudder. Nothing to see here. Move along. For your own good, move along.
The problem with pedantary is that you really have to be sure that you're correct.
3. (Geol.) A violent and widely extended change in the surface of the earth, as, an elevation or subsidence of some part of it, effected by internal causes also 3: a sudden violent change in the earth's surface [syn: cataclysm]
Before someone tries to up the pedantry, there's nothing in the greek root of either words that's specific to the third planet of our solar system. ;-P
OK, I decided to use the interweb for something useful. I've just sucked down a selection of the tracks from 18, and you know what? I don't really like them. So I'm not going to buy the album, and in fact I've already shredded the tracks. Seems to me like that's no different from hearing them on the radio or requesting them on an MTV-a-like TV channel.
I enjoyed Play, and I even enjoyed the savvy way that Moby leveraged the crap out of it, licensing every track for use in commercials (thereby buying himself a shitload of exposure). But I don't like 18, and I don't like Moby's attitude that because CD sales are lower, there must be a cause other than that the album sucks or that he chose not to license the tracks. Shit, it can't be anything, he's done, right, because god knows that artists never just fade away after one amazing album. I mean, that's never happened before.
Damn, I wish artists wouldn't keep doing this. Someone needs to slap them round the head and say "Look, you can't all have massive hits every time. Some of you have to win and some have to lose. Deal with it.". Because every time that they even mention reduced sales and file sharing in the same breath, they just give Microsoft more ammunition for shoving Palladium down our collective throats.
You know, perhaps the most productive thing that we could do would be to start collecting metrics on gnutella search terms. I'd bet my bottom dollar that the number 1 albums and singles would correspond to the top mp3 searches, week on week, which would pretty much blow any "lost sales" argument clean out of the water.
Prove it. Show us the figures, don't just assert it as though it's incontrovertible. I know that it's common sense that it does, but it's non-sensical for people to donate to charity, and yet, strangely, they still do. Show us the figures.
This is Moby, the artist that licensed every one of the tracks on Play for use in commercials. What does he care about selling albums? That's largely irrelevant to his income, and he clearly understands that. If you don't know why, I suggest you go and find out
Note that while he's declined to license any of the tracks on 18, his stance is actually that he hasn't licensed them yet, but he will when an "interesting opportunity comes along" i.e. an advertiser cracks and offers insane money to be the first licensee. I think his point is that CD sales just provide leverage for him to make a living wage selling other rights, and that it would be to the benefit of artists to have all of the swapping and downloading counted as well.
Strangely, a google search fails to turn this up, or indeed much else on Microsoft's wonderfully transparent new idea. The idea that they've already agreed (transparently?) with Intel and AMD, so don't tell me this is a brand new project.
As with all verbal promises, this one's not even worth the paper it's not written on. How high is the Cynic-O-Meter reading here? I'm betting by "publishing" they mean "making viewing of representative samples of the source available under strictly limited and NDA'd conditions to selected high level purchasers in government, industry, and, hell, even some of those long haired hippy academics. But not the pinko ones, obviously."
The rest of this is article is just blurb, but this, if true, would shake Microsoft to its very foundations. Want to bet it later gets dismissed as a misquote? I'll even venture that "transparency" replaces "trustworthy" as Microsoft's meaningless-blurb-word-of-the-moment. Hell, they might even go as far as trying to assimilate "freedom" for their cause.
Microsoft have finally realised that there are free (beer and speech) alternatives that do 95% of the things that Windows does, and mostly at least as good as Windows does them.
We thought they'd struggle. We thought they'd adapt. I think they've actually decided to follow through on one of their antitrust assertions, that the best price point for Windows is $800. Yes, $800. Sure, they said, they'd lose a lot of customers, but they'd retain a lot of customers - those who didn't have a choice, they noted - and they make more money out of them.
This is along those lines. In even three years time, anybody still using Windows will be doing it because they don't know that they can switch, because they're not allowed to switch, or because they absolutely cannot switch. It's a captive market, pretty much by definition, because it's free to switch. So they can turn the screw. They can squeeze and squeeze and squeeze. They can lock people in harder than they we can imagine, all the time cranking up the dollar cost in obfuscated software-as-a-service licensing, and raising the cost to leave them (because all of your data becomes unreadable).
Does it sound insane? The tighter they close their fist, the more star systems - er, customers - will slip through their fingers? So what? Whenever one leaves, pass the cost onto the rest. And keep doing it. The beauty of this system is that if you have one customer left who can't afford to switch, the arithmetic works! This isn't hyperbole: what if that last customer is the US government in some form? Say, the military. How much is it worth to the DoD to keep renewing the licenses for Windows For Warfare? How much is it worth for them to hush up how insane it was to allow themselves to get tied in to proprietary software, when the dangers were clear?
But it won't even come to that, because enough businesses are already locked into the mindset that they can't give up Microsoft. My own employer's IS department won't even trial Star/OpenOffice. It fills them with primal fear to consider moving away from MS Office, ever. To suggest to them that we could trial non-Microsoft OS's would be anathema. Hell, it's not their money they're spending, and nobody ever got fired for buying Microsoft (nee IBM).
So, sure, pile it on, Microsoft. The nightmare scenario is, of course, hardware that will only respond to Microsoft's patented security systems, but there are enough generic non-PC devices out there using the same hardware (I develop them) that even the most corrupt and insular legislator would have to listen to the storm of protest that would erupt if Microsoft OS was made mandatory in desktops, servers, embedded systems, set top boxes, PDA's, MP3 players, cellphones, desktop 'phones for that matter (and no, I am not joking about this last one - I develop VOIP 'phones that have an OS, versioned software loads, even a web browser).
This looks horrid, but I don't believe that even Microsoft can railroad it through on the hardware side, and without that, it only effects those people who can't or won't switch from Microsoft. I pity those people, but there'll be fewer of them every year, so eventually we won't even be tortured by their piteous wails as Microsoft gouge deeper and deeper. My only worry is that most of the final holdouts will be spending my tax dollars, so Microsoft will get my money anyway.
You know, one day we'll wake up in a world where suppliers have remembered that you make money by supplying the demand that's out there, not by trying to control it. It didn't work for the Soviet Union, and it sure isn't going to work in the USA.
While Vint and his chums write insightful pieces on why there might be a possible problem with conflicts of interest, the commercial interests just carry on buying up the laws and precedents to do whatever they damn well want with the root servers and TLD's.
The problem with reasonable, balanced, polite objections is that the other side is utterly convinced that might makes right. They see Vint and his kind as irrelevant dinosaurs, and they see us not as contributing netizens, but as consumers.
Vint, Vint, stop being so nice. Start asserting the bald fact: the net is for individuals, not for companies. Don't make the mistake of justifying that or explaining why it should be so, because the commercial interests damn well don't. Just assert it, and keep on asserting it more confidently every day. There's a war on for control of the internet, and wars aren't won through appeasment and debate, they're won through a single minded belief that there can be only one possible outcome, and that's that we will win this.
Go and actually read the article. This is partly PR stunt, and partly law enforcement just covering their collective asses. They have no idea what they'll actually use jamming for, they're just saber rattling.
In case you weren't aware, most countries don't actually give law enforcement blanket dispensation from prosecution. Police break the law every day: they speed, they break and enter, they inflict violence, they kill people. No country that I know of recognises in law the concept of a "license to kill". The point is that they aren't prosecuted for doing this, because it's not in the public interest.
However, when their activities effect enough people, it's in everyone's best interest to document what's considered reasonable behaviour, partly so that law enforcement know how far they can go before being prosecuted. Stop and search powers are the most obvious, as they (almost by definition) target people who are mostly innocent. In this case, this is just the initial step in the process. They're trying to ensure that they won't be prosecuted for jamming RF the first time they do it. That's why this is limited to two specific occasions. However, if they do cause public inconvenience (or, hopefully, if they receive too many claims for compensation and get bogged down in individual lawsuits), they'll back off and forget the whole thing.
So, sure, this is vile in principle, but in practice it'll likely be a one off that will vanish into the footnotes of history.
A couple of things to bear in mind:
Well said. Likewise
NASA could throw one of it's $1,000 toilet seats at it. Or perhaps they've already taken those toilet seats up to orbit and bolted them together into some sort of orbittal missile platform. Just a thought.
Amen to that. I recall trying to report a bug in MSVC 5.2, and drawing a complete blank. It wasn't a new version with a beta program, there was (at that time) no links on their site that we could find to report bugs, and whoever we got through to on the 'phone eventually ended up putting us through to tech support, who wanted to charge us $75 to ask two question.
Think about that. You are talking to someone in Microsoft. You say to them "I have a bug to report. A bug. Not a technical support issue. I know how to use it, and it doesn't work. It hangs the machine if you try and compile an MFC collection class inside a double nested namespace. The product doesn't work, and I'm trying to provide feedback to help you fix it. Don't put me through to tech support. Do not put me through to tech support."
"Transferring you now... Hi, welcome to tech support. My name is Mindy, and I'll talk to you for ten whole minutes for only $75 dollars. Mmm, you sound like a real stud. What's your credit card number, you hot stallion?"
OK, I'm perhaps paraphrasing slightly at the end, but they really seemed to go out of their way to make it hard to help them.
So you want a re-recordable medium that's power-off stable, has large information density, and which can handle high data throughput?
Mmm, sounds like you need to buy more hard drives.
Really, no joke. I take your point, but the only thing that meets the criteria that I think you're applying is a RAID array with occasional disaster-recovery backups to good old tape. There's a very good reason that this is a popular choice for commercial companies.
Let me explain why you're agreeing with me. The VM's plural keep getting better. There are millions of copies of Windows (and Linux and BeOS and MacOS) with a java-like VM installed.
Did you not understand my point? Java is not the source code. That's irrelevant (says Sun). What's important is that there's one correct VM object code syntax and one definitive VM, otherwise it's not "write once, run anywhere", and you might as well hammer the underlying OS or hardware. Did you not read where I said that I have in front of me a production quality java-like applet (claiming to be Java) that run only on one version of one vendor's VM? That's not Java, that's "java like object code for version 1.1.4 (or whatever) of the Microsoft VM". Java - as a write once, run anywhere language - is dead.
You want to debate further? OK, can you lay your hands on one of those java-like cell phone applications, because I'd like to try running it on my PC under a variety of browsers and appletviewer. Want to bet that it'll work? Bet your career?
Microsoft does not provide a "JVM". They provide the Microsoft Virtual Machine or Microsoft VM. This may or may not be compatible with any given version of valid Java object code: Microsoft doesn't make that claim any more.
Further, Microsoft VM object code compiled with Microsoft J++ is definitely not guaranteed to work with any version of the Sun JVM. Further further, Microsoft VM object code compiled for any given version of the Microsoft VM is not guaranteed to - and sometimes does not - work with newer versions of the Microsoft VM.
Let me give you an example of what this means in practice. My employer uses the web based Rational ClearQuest for bug tracking. It used java-like applets, and works with all versions of Microsoft IE on 9x/NT/2K/XP platforms using the Microsoft VM that we've tried it with, but with no versions of the Sun JVM in IE, or indeed with any browser other than IE.
It gets worse. Our actual product uses java-like applets, built using Microsoft J++. They work with IE 5.5 under Windows 9x/NT/2K using the supplied VM. And nothing else, which exactly fulfills the specification given to the developers. Our tools don't work with any other browser, nor with the Sun JVM, nor (and this is where it gets silly) nor with XP and IE 6 using the latest downloaded Microsoft VM. Yes, our code is "write once, run once" in the worst sense. By tying ourselves to the Microsoft platform, Microsoft browsers and Microsoft VM, we've even managed to build in obsolescence and ensure non-forwards compatibility on our chosen platform.
The scary part for me isn't that the java-like "experts" in my company don't care, but that so many of them don't even understand what I'm talking about. As far as they're concerned, IE running java-like applets using the Microsoft VM on Windows is Java. They don't even seem to know about other platforms or VM's or appletviewers or applications, or that they're creating java-like object code rather than correct Java.
As a hobbyist Java programmer (using the Sun JVM on multiple platforms) this both pisses me off, and makes me very sad indeed. I greatly fear that Microsoft has succeeded in assimilating and killing Java. I worry that Java has already been dealt the fatal blow, but it's still staggering on under its own momentum, shedding limbs and slowly dissolving. When it finally expires, the beast that will erupt from its tattered corpse won't even be J++, but C#
This is hardly news. I can't remember the last time that I shared a music file from gnutella that was correctly named, labelled, untruncated and not a radio edit (mea non culpla, the first thing that I do is to fix the damn things, before making them available for re-sharing).
For exe's, it's even worse. There seems to be a deliberate misnamimg of some files, e.g. GTA2 labelled as GTA3, or in some bizarre cases files named as "game Foo (actually game Bar)". What on earth is the point of that? If you're warning that there are misnamed versions out there with this filesize, then say that, otherwise just name it correctly and be done with it.
Porn is the worst of all. I've lost count of the number of god damn bangbus promos (or worse, trailers that spawn popups) that I've shared and ditched, and I'm now so sick of it that I won't download anything under 5MB (most of the trailers are smaller than that).
What I can't understand in all this is that I'm sharing these from other gnutella users. Sure, they are injected through malice (or avarice), but what is wrong in the heads of users that they don't understand that this is our network, and our responsibility to clean up the file naming? Nobody is going to step in and do it for us. It's only going to get worse over time, and I'd rather download three different but accurately named versions of the same file than one misnamed version that turns out to be another badly encoded asian lipstick lesbian popup spawning commercial.
Repeat the mantra: our network, our responsibility.
It's not practical for us to stop using Microsoftware, because it's simply too pervasive and dominant, and the costs and penalties for switching are too high.
What? What do you mean "That's the definition of an abusive monopoly!"? But it's so hard to switch away from Microsoft. We know that's the point, but, uuh, we don't wanna. We'd have to learn stuff! We're civil servants, that's not in our job description. And don't get us started on the long term career risks of being in the same room where an actual decision gets made to switch from the biggest, safest option... [etc, ad nauseum]
As an aside, it would perhaps be more accurate to call the Guardian an English and Welsh (rather than a UK) publication. I mention this because there have been a few cases recently of English papers being gagged and prevented from disclosing details on certain released criminals. The idiocy of this is highlighted in the last line of this Guardian article; publishing in England would be illegal, but take one step over the open Scottish border, and it becomes legal.
In that respect, the English courts appear to have little idea how to deal with the complexities of international jurisdiction. It's going to be very interesting when a Scottish newpaper finally does nail its colours to the mast and defy one of these English bans.
Nice summary. I think we're beginning to understand just how badly patents and the GPL mix. I'm sure there's a bunch of guys out there tearing out their hair and screaming "I told you so! Why did nobody listen?". Sorry, guys, we should have listened.
As an addenda to your point about defensive patents and anyone cracking if they're offered enough money, let's not forget that if (e.g.) Red Hat go Chapter 11, then administrators will step in and just flat out sell their assets, including their patents, to the highest bidder. And we've always said that Microsoft couldn't kill the GPL code base by assimilation...
Also, let's please be careful to never, ever refer to a crippled disk as a "CD", because (by the Red Book standard) it isn't.