Thanks for the clarification, but using a Java SecurityManager in a Servlet container would allow me to not only segment users with different security privileges, but considerably finer-grain privileges than those provided by UNIX security.
And as much as everyone rags on Java speed, Servlets are far and away faster than CGI.
CGI, under UNIX, is the best method of allowing secure dynamic content creation in the case of multiple users. mod_perl, mod_php, etc, do not permit security boundaries between the users.
I don't understand this. As far as I know, CGI scripts all run as the same user the web server is running as. Why is that more secure than PHP? More specifically, how can you claim that this puts some kind of "security boundaries between users."
I suppose you could run the HTTPd as root and use the HTTP Basic Authentication info to su, but then you're running your web server as root, which is considerably less secure than running it as an unprivileged user.
A minor point, but I would draw a wide line between the "free" licenses (GPL, BSD, etc ) and "corporate" EULAs. The free licenses grant you more rights than you would normally be granted via copyright law.
I agree with what you're getting at. It's not a minor point, either, and the distinction you are making is really the reason why EULA is a "four letter word" in the Open Source community.
The reality is that all licenses give you more rights than would normally be granted under copyright law. Even the word "license" itself means "a granted privilege to perform actions beyond the default privileges."
The confusion arises because commercial licenses tend to be so restrictive that they don't even look like licenses to people used to GPL. It is desirable to foment change in the industry to open up these licenses, but removing the ability to offer commecial licenses, also screws up the protection of Open Souce Licenses, and then things would get really, really ugy. Truse me.
I was looking to see if I was the only person who read the EULA. I don't play the game (although it sounds fun), so I went to the site and poked around. It didn't take me long to find the clause in the Terms of Service restricting players from seeking financial gain by using the system.
Thank you for boiling it down to this issue, but I have to disagree with you about EULAs. Many of "us Slashdotters" hate EULAs because of the way Microsoft (and IBM before them) has used them to choke computing freedom. The point that is missed there is that the GPL is a EULA, as is every Open Source license. GPL, APL, LGPL... the
"L" is for License, folks.
I think Americans, in particular, have lost sight of the benefits of living in a society that respects its own laws. Over the last decade or so, members of the Reagan administration were found to be subverting their own government, President Clinton was impeached and President Bush was elected in what can most politely described as a "seriously flawed" election. Yet, all we suffered was a lot of 24-hour-news coverage and Jay Leno monologues.
I'm old enough to remember the Watergate scandal. There was a palpable sense of fear that Nixon, having gone as far as he did, would invoke his executive powers and US Army tanks would roll into Washington to enforce his presidental power. It didn't happen, and now people can't even seem to imagine it happening. I'm not complaining; I think it's great! Look at any country where the military is called up to prop up a failing regime and ask yourself if you'd want to live there.
Now find countries where EULAs are not taken seriously. Look at their software industry. What software industry? Exactly. How can you be in business when there is no expectation that you will be paid for you work?
Trust me, if Sony is robbed of its ability to impose a Terms of Service (and it ain't gonna happen anyway), they will cease to provide the service at all.
I have to agree 100% with the people who predict that HDTV will fail. The proponents of HDTV cite improved image quality, "special features" and "enhancements" such as "widescreen aspect ratio." Such questionable advances are thouroughly eclipsed by obvious drawbacks. These include an enormous cost increase for HDTV gear, the lack of content that exploits the new format and the simple fact that the general public never asked for any of these "features." If you find my skepticism far-fetched, it's probably because you are too young to remember the collossal failure of the Compact Disc.
In 1983, Sony and Phillips introduced a new format called the "Compact Disc." This was a plastic disc, roughly 5 inches in diameter with music encoded on it digitally. A laser was used to read binary data encoded in "pits" and "runs" on the surface of the disc. It sounded like a great idea, but it was immediately plagued by the same problems we are about to see with HDTV.
First was the equipment cost. A laser was needed to track a spiralling stream of runs to an accuracy less than the width of a human hair. Did anyone expect this system to be anything less than exorbitantly priced? Compact Disc players started at $800 apiece. Meanwhile you could buy a decent record turntable at any Radio Shack for under $100.
If you think that price differential was stupid, get this: due to the expense of studio-quality digital recording equipment and the manufacturing cost of the high-tech discs themselves, a Compact Disc release of an album was typically twice the price of the vinyl release. The same music for twice the price! Where's my checkbook?
Of course, pretensious stereophiles argued that people would shell out the extra dollars for the improved quality (sound familiar?). They were too wrapped up in their obsessive little world to realize that terms like "16 bit sampling" and "dynamic range" were never going to be anything other than gibberish to the general public. Another argument was that by allowing 90 minutes of continuous music, you could listen to an entire symphony without breaking to flip the disc to side two. What percentage of the music-buying public lies awake at night fretting over a side flip in the middle of a symphony? Most people buy records containing popular music broken down in songs, allowing for a natural break between Side 1 and Side 2. Bottom line: no one cares about having to flip sides.
Ironically, Compact Discs were touted as being more durable than vinyl. The fact is that a properly cared for LP might last centuries while some engineers predicted that the reflective metallic layer on a Compact Disc might oxidize to unreadability in as little as 20 years. If you bought a Compact Disc in 1985, what would you do if it was becoming unreadable today in 2001? Make a copy of it? No, Compact Discs aren't recordable! Back it up onto a cassette tape? Sure, but you'd lose your precious "digital quality" so why buy the Compact Disc in the first place? I know! You could back up the data to your personal computer! Of course, since a Compact Disc might contain up to 650Mega (not Kilo!) bytes of data, you probably couldn't find enough storage space for more than one of your albums unless you owned IBM or something.
In the end, we're much better off because the Compact Disc failed to supplant vinyl. One reason that is seldom explored is the effect the Compact Disc would have had on the variety of music. Go to see any up-and-coming local band and most of the time you'll find them selling a vinyl EP of their music for a few bucks. Had the Compact Disc become the dominant format, music publishing would have become the exclusive domain of those with enough money to buy the newfangled digital recording technology (a studio-quality digital recorder cost upwards of $100K at the time!). Goodbye independant record labels. Goodbye garage bands.
HDTV is just the latest attempt by the large players in the entertainment industry to put an entire art-form into a chokehold by introducing an unwanted technological "innovation." Last time it was music, this time it's TV. What next? Film? Am I going to live to see a day when the next Disney animated film is "all digital"? (Would "Snow White" or "Fantasia" have been better "digital"?)
I predict that my children won't remember what HDTV was the same way teenagers today have no idea what a "Compact Disc" was.
extra quality that they don't really notice anyway
Um. The quality difference is startling. Only the legally blind will fail to notice the improvement in quality.
Your point is quite valid, however. So you get awesome quality... why is it valuable when the current quality seems acceptable. The answer is that the broadcasters need to come up with compelling content. It remains to be seen if they will succeed.
In the United States, the plan is to leverage the popularity of America's State Religion: Football[1]. If you need a solid demonstration of the primacy of Football in American pop culture, note that the arrival of dot-com companies into mainstream society was heralded by advertisements during the Super Bowl[2].
Note: when I say "Football", I mean "American Football" which is not to be confused with the game that American's call Soccer and the rest of the civilized world calls Football.
Note: The Super Bowl is the American Football world championship. When I say "world", I mean "the parts of the world that give a rats ass about American Football." This includes Texas, Michigan and a handful of other American states.
consumers will eventually win. The free market demands it.
"Market Forces" are the "God's Will" of secular society. Why not just say that God will take care of consumers? It's equally meaningful.
The fact is that market forces serve the market, not consumers. Market forces drove down the price VHS VCRs and made them as common as dirt. Market forces didn't force Sony to license the Beta standard to other manufacturers and Beta disappeared. The consumers did not win.
You are correct that consumers are used to being able to record TV shows and watch them later. There's nothing in the proposed technology that will stop them. I expect that HDCP-compliant receivers will gladly pipe output to an HDCP-compliant Tivo. This HDCP Tivo would only deliver the content back to a display device, but not to a media recorder of any type. Thus, Joe Sixpack can timeshift to his heart's content, but he can't record "Battlefield Earth" off HBO-HD, transfer it to HD-DVD and resell it on Ebay. His HDCP Tivo will refuse transfer that valuable intellectual property to the DVD recorder.
Sure, there will be some way to make a copy of the HBO-HD broadcast of "BattleField Earth," but the pirate copy will be robbed of the full glory of the original digital clarity, robbing the viewer of the full effect of the spine-tingling special effects.
Of course, you will also be prevented from doing something perfectly legal, such as making a "Best of the Simpsons" compilation for your own personal use. You lose. The question is, will the market care? My money says "no".
when you are watching a PAL or NTSC television set, you are unconsciously aware that what you are watching is false, at some deep level.
...and when you are watching a SECAM television set, you are unconciously aware that you might be in France.
However, at high framerates and definitions, this is not the case. The id can no longer seperate fantasy and fiction
Wow! If I could invent an extremely high resolution image with no flicker at all, I could control the world! I'd give this terrifying new technology some kind of fancy name, with a Greek root or something... How about photograph?
Another thing that was tough in this age was aiming artillery. If you know the distance, the characteristic of the gun, the characteristics of the shell, and the windspeed, physics equations tell you how to aim the gun to hit your target. Realistically, the equations cannot be solved in battlefield conditions where time is a factor and competent mathematicians are in short supply.
The solution to this problem was to issue huge books of pre-computed tables to artillery gunners. Each new gun and new shell needed a new book generated. That involved many hours of computation to be done by a small army of geeks. Because the guy-geeks were busy cracking codes, inventing atomic weapons, running logistics and stopping lead, a cadre of girl geeks was assembled in Annapolis and tasked with generating these artillery tables. The women were brought up to speed on Calculus and Physics (if they needed to be) and they were know as (you guessed it) "Computers."
While the lady Computers toiled, some other geeks were trying to automate their task using analog and digital electronic systems. Because the first automated calculation machines were targetted to the labor-intensive task of generating artillery tables, these devices were called "electronic computers."
Every time I see a flame session about the lack of women in computer engineering, I find it ironic that the word "computer" itself is an artifact of a group of geek girls.
I have a laptop. I bought a SCSI ZIP drive with a SCSI PCMCIA card to go with it.
Windows 98
Boot computer. Insert SCSI card. Crash.
Reboot computer. Insert SCSI card. SCSI driver install occurs. Crash.
Reboot computer with SCSI card. SCSI driver loads. Uh... where is ZIP drive?
Reboot computer with SCSI card. SCSI driver loads. ZIP drive shows up as removable drive.
(BTW, this method won't work on NT at all because it can't handle dynamic loading of PCMCIA drivers)
Linux
(Computer never rebooted.) Insert SCSI card. Beep indicates driver load.
My buddy looking over my shoulder said "Why are you putting usually in your sentence," and I said,"Well, 'cause some dimwit will immediately pipe up with a whiny email about how Linux didn't work with his soundcard and he had to go back to NT." I wish I could post a recording of the conversation.
He gets confused, whines, and then goes back to Windows.
This may be what happened when your hobbiest pal "gives that RedHat a shot," but the numbers show that people who seriously try Linux to solve their problems find it pleasantly servicable. They don't give a shit that it won't work with the system they bought at Best Buy three years ago. They don't care that it won't run the funny joke EXE their sister sent them this morning.
They are server people running enterprise applications. Why do people have a hard time grasping the concept that their technical needs might not be the same as someone else's -- perhaps even a lot of other peoples?
won't stop me from using Windows to save myself the trouble of learning to tweak my OS.
This statement is hilariously ironic. Don't worry -- you won't get the joke. Go back to sleep.
You could argue that Microsoft's desktop OS is "so great that people would rather pay for it," but it's pretty clear that they're losing that battle in the server marketplace. The change isn't going to happen overnight.
First of all, there is the Microsoft Zombie Army. These are hoards of mediocre developers who have discovered that they can quickly and easily put together mediocre applications and systems using Microsoft technology. I've come across these people and they are entrenched. Basically they are motivated by fear of losing their '1337 status in a move to an unfamiliar technology.
The second effect is what I call the "Japanese Car Effect." Those of you unfortunate enough to have been conscious in the early 70's will remember a time when the Detroit auto makers could Do No Wrong(tm) and Japanese imports were considered crappy "rice burners" bought only by Communists. Unfortunately for Detroit, everyone who "went over" to the Japanese imports discovered that they were high-quality and efficient. They never bought an American car again.
Guess what (usually) happens when an NT user finally "goes over" to Linux?
A few years ago, I worked at an office with an early-adopter of Linux and Java. One of the small company "brags" was "You can use any OS you prefer" ('cause we work in Java, right?). Most of the developers used Linux, administrators and execs ran Windows and creative ran Macs. I decided to run OS/2.
This resulted in a lot of snide remarks and one-upsmanship from the Linux advocates. At the time, OS/2 and Linux were a close match (and are still somewhat competetive depending on what you want). The Linux guys finally won the debate with one simple point: no matter how much I (or Team OS/2) loved OS/2, it was IBMs decision to promote it, improve it or continue it. As long as there is one person who really wants to use Linux, Linux will be alive.
The only way Microsoft can threaten Linux is to put out a product so great that people will be willing to pay for it rather than get something free. In addition, Microsoft has to support it so well that people don't feel like they need to source so they can support it themselves. If that happened, we'd all be happy, but I expect it these events will occur right after the release of OS/2 Warp version 6 with accompanying Super Bowl ads.
The real issue is whether or not we get to use Linux at our "real" jobs, which is increasingly the case. That's something that needs to be fought for and counts on market share, etc.
So... you know your cache doesn't work well with common code execution patterns, and you blame the programmers. "What are you doing wrong with my bug-free product?!"
Did you think about a stack-based cache?
I'm sure if you designed cars, they'd get great gas mileage... unless you drove them at speeds between 20 and 70 MpH, right?
I'm sure the better way is to invest those $100K to improve NetFoo v.0.1.
That is a possible approach.
That's the approach I'm taking with Jabber -- an open-source instant messaging system. My company needed to offer IM with gateways to the popular services. The commercial vendors of such systems are asking prices that would make you pee your pants from laughter. The solution? Jabber! The problem? The Jabber source base sucks donkeys!
Oh... I could go through the litany of Open Source Mistakes(tm) that the Jabber team has committed, but suffice to say that at version 1.2 (with 1.4 in prerelease), the code is worse than many 0.2 versions of other software I've used. Still, it's got a lot of good ideas and the crummy code base will pass -- particularly since I've hired someone to help fix it.
I've got some tight deadlines, but the bottom line was that paying someone to help patch up Jabber was more cost-effective than paying for someone else's proprietary code plus give me all the benefits of Open Source.
But this is a particular case. If I needed enterprise-ready IM today, I might be shelling out bucks for a commercial system. Open Source Jabber isn't ready for prime time yet.
Look, all I'm saying is that every approach has advantages, disadvantages, risks and rewards. You need to balance those (management types often do a SWOT [Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats] analysis). Anyone who insists that that Open Source is always the best way is just another fucking moronic idealogue. Yes, we've all had a bad experience with crappy software vendor who should be on trial in The Hague, but then you find someone or other with a clue.
Life goes on. If was easy, we wouldn't call it "code."
You have obviously not paid attention to most EULA's.
You obviously have never paid more than $39.95 for a piece of software. Try buying a billing system for $100K. You don't get a CD ROM in an envelope with a EULA stuck on the outside. You get a CD-ROM and a multi-page contract, probably customized for you. Believe me, any such contract that released the vendor from reasonable liability would be laughed out of the corporate counsel's office.
At least with open source software you "can" crack open the hood and look at it.
I agree 100%. You can also do that if you purchase a source license if the commercial software you buy offers one. Heck, if you're so 1337, you can always write it yourself. (Isn't this the point in the debate where someone claims that a billing system can be written in 10 lines of Perl?)
The issue is cost/benefit. If I get an open-source program, do I have an expectation that I'll spend my valuable time repairing it? If I buy a commercial offering, I may get screwed (many have), but I have an expectation that I won't. Believe it or not, most people who buy software find that it does what they need it to do (even people who buy it from Microsoft... imagine that!).
Apache, Linux, GNU emacs and other popular open source software are popular because they allow me to hack the code, but they don't require me to do so. If I install Debian, I have a reasonable expectation that it will work pretty well without me hacking the kernal. That makes it a very valuable piece of Open Source software. If I install NetFoo v.0.1, I may be in for more of an adventure. If NetFoo is critical to my financial success, I might want to buy the commercial offering.
Well, going back to my first paragraph, most commercial software doesn't have a warranty that actually does any good.
Let's try to keep things in perspective. We're not talking about "Space Rampage, Network Edition" or any other boxed software you can find on the shelf at CompUSA. We're talking expensive, vertical-market billing software. Anything generalizations you have about "commercial software," no matter how true, probably don't apply.
Yeah, that's the ticket. I'm sure everyone at Slashdot has read every line of code they've ever run. This guy is going through the rather time-consuming task of setting up an ISP. He has time to "read the fscking [how 'l337] code" when?
Who read the "fscking" code to WU-FTPD, the FTP daemon that ships with many distros? Last summer, it got his by yet another buffer overflow attack. The source has been available how long? I'm sure you read it, Mr. 1337 H4X0R, so how come you didn't fix it right away?
It's much easier to put a back door in proprietary code. Sheesh.
Sure it is, but proprietary code is backed by legal liability. Billing systems can cost anywhere from $50K to $1M. For that kind of money, I'm going to put in a back door? Sheesh.
The real danger isn't deliberate back doors, it's accidental ones. Free software has NO WARANTEE. No one said it was going to work correctly, so too bad for you if it doesn't.
I know, I know, "read the fscking code." Yeah, that's practical. In fact, next time I buy I used car, I'll dismantle the engine and unpack the wheel bearings just to see if there are any problems. I'm sure that's what you do.
I'm not slamming Open Source, or even an Open Source billing system, but real people live in a world of risk, including the risk that the Open Source software they want to use might suck. Spending some money can be a reasonable way to mitigate that risk. I suppose that's hard to understand when your biggest risk in life is doing too many bong hits and missing The Powerpuff Girls.
You raise some obvious issues about Open Source as a direct source of income, but don't forget "vertical markets." Vertical Markets are specialized niches where the likelyhood of finding existing, shrink-wrapped technology is very, very small. A vertical market I'm working with right now is telecom billing.
There are, at most, a few thousand companies, worldwide, who need the level of billing software I'm working with. On top of that, each one of them needs heavy customization, which really means that each one of these companies practically has a custom billing system. This means there isn't enough "critical mass" to start an "open source" project to perform this level of billing, so there are going to be zillions of dollars in it for the foreseeable future.
What I'd like to see in the future is a day when Microsoft can't make money selling Exchange because nobody pays for basic email anymore. When I set up my company's internal email, it never occured to me that I'd have to pay a dime for the software. I have to pay for the hardware. I have to pay an administrator. If I want some feature that is specific to my vertical market, I'll have to pay some geeks (possibly myself) to create that function. And that's how I like it -- email is not an interesting problem anymore, but some quirky new feature... hey, that's geekworthy!
So, there's plenty of money out there, but Open Source means it's going to the people solving the interesting, new problems, not last year's basic, recurring problems. (Yeah, that's a bit worrisome to VA Linux and RedHat...)
Unfortunately it's a financial review and last time I looked this wasn't News for Stock Brokers
A common "nerd experience" is the entry into the workforce, either as teenage "whiz kid" or shiny new college grad, and making the observation, "Wow! I can't believe someone will pay me to do something I'd do anyway!"
Maybe you make a living selling beads at crafts shows and this "nerd" thing is just a passionate hobby of yours. Good for you, if that's the case, but for the majority of us who's profession is intertwined with their interests in Things Geeky, the "business of Open Source" is Stuff That Matters.
Show me what you can do? Perhaps in JSP? Something like this?
I could write a Servlet to dump the results on an arbitrary SQL query as an XML document like this (including schema) in under 50 lines of code. In fact, this is the sort of thing that you'd do as a student excercise to teach Servlets and JDBC. You'd cover it in an hour or so in an afternoon introductory course.
You seem capable of constantly missing the point.... This is pretty much totally unlike anything that has gone before, and your cheap shots do you no credit.
Fair enough, and maybe it's because I can't read any of your web pages that I haven't been able to see the coolness that you are offering, but I don't see anything particularly interesting, much less revolutionary about what you are doing.
You and I both know that [Netscape] is the inferior browser, and has little penetration in the corporate market where IE and Outlook rule.
Inferior at what? Handling the latest cutting-edge HTML extensions? The fact that supplying basic "can't miss" HTML to a popular client "pains you" is a pretty solid indication that your technology isn't very good. Every leading presentation and web-authoring technology provides for straight-forward client-sensitive content. It should be easy for an arbitrary web application to support Netscape (as well as WML) in any "modern" web application technology. No excuses or finger-pointing is going to change that.
If you bothered to try learn what is going on, then you may understand why the demo's are impressive. Right now, you can't see the wood for the trees.
Right now, I see browser windows full of blankness. Maybe if you could explain what was going on without being annoyingly vague... "this is unlike anthing that has gone before"... "we have a demonstrably useful XML dialect" (you and everyone else)... "our language is a Chomskian P-grammar dialect geegaw whoohah".
What is something that's hard to do that Language P makes easy?
There is more, if you care to continue, mail me.
Take a stab at answering this question and I might. As it is, I'm contributing to the TLS and Servlet API standards discussions -- things which people will actually use -- I don't feel like expending much more on this unless you can't convince me it's more than it seems now.
...a statement that would seem considerably more credible if your pages rendered on the worlds second most popular web browser. Whining that Netscape's browser is brain-damaged when you can't even close a <table> tag is pretty fucking weak, dude. (BTW, closing your tags is require by XML -- that standard you keep talking about but clearly haven't the foggiest grasp of.)
Well, we know a *little* bit about XML.... Here is a bit of fun, as is here and here.
Wow. You've generated XML documents straight out of "XML for Dummies." Better buy a ticket to Stockholm... I think there's a Nobel Prize in your future.
...there are things that [Language P] can do quite exquisitely simply that are practically impossible in other languages, or quite clumsy
I hope you're not under the delusion that any of those sample XML documents are more than trivial to generate in other languages.
Slashdot Mirror
- I work at a company that is currently building an EJB e-commerce backend, and I think Java completely rocks for that.
Most people do. Who gives a shit if Microsoft get's- MS is better at implementing kick-ass fast VMs than Sun is
And IBM is better still, by a factor of four. CLR isn't going to beat Java in the speed test with IBM around...And as much as everyone rags on Java speed, Servlets are far and away faster than CGI.
- it can run ASP, do all sorts of database stuff, etc, locally without needing a real web server.
But... but... if you're doing ASP programming, you're already not running a real web server!(Unless you're running Halcyon's Java-based ASP engine under Apache Tomcat, but that's just the first step on a road to madness.)
- CGI, under UNIX, is the best method of allowing secure dynamic content creation in the case of multiple users. mod_perl, mod_php, etc, do not permit security boundaries between the users.
I don't understand this. As far as I know, CGI scripts all run as the same user the web server is running as. Why is that more secure than PHP? More specifically, how can you claim that this puts some kind of "security boundaries between users."I suppose you could run the HTTPd as root and use the HTTP Basic Authentication info to su, but then you're running your web server as root, which is considerably less secure than running it as an unprivileged user.
- A minor point, but I would draw a wide line between the "free" licenses (GPL, BSD, etc ) and "corporate" EULAs. The free licenses grant you more rights than you would normally be granted via copyright law.
I agree with what you're getting at. It's not a minor point, either, and the distinction you are making is really the reason why EULA is a "four letter word" in the Open Source community.The reality is that all licenses give you more rights than would normally be granted under copyright law. Even the word "license" itself means "a granted privilege to perform actions beyond the default privileges."
The confusion arises because commercial licenses tend to be so restrictive that they don't even look like licenses to people used to GPL. It is desirable to foment change in the industry to open up these licenses, but removing the ability to offer commecial licenses, also screws up the protection of Open Souce Licenses, and then things would get really, really ugy. Truse me.
Thank you for boiling it down to this issue, but I have to disagree with you about EULAs. Many of "us Slashdotters" hate EULAs because of the way Microsoft (and IBM before them) has used them to choke computing freedom. The point that is missed there is that the GPL is a EULA, as is every Open Source license. GPL, APL, LGPL... the "L" is for License, folks.
I think Americans, in particular, have lost sight of the benefits of living in a society that respects its own laws. Over the last decade or so, members of the Reagan administration were found to be subverting their own government, President Clinton was impeached and President Bush was elected in what can most politely described as a "seriously flawed" election. Yet, all we suffered was a lot of 24-hour-news coverage and Jay Leno monologues.
I'm old enough to remember the Watergate scandal. There was a palpable sense of fear that Nixon, having gone as far as he did, would invoke his executive powers and US Army tanks would roll into Washington to enforce his presidental power. It didn't happen, and now people can't even seem to imagine it happening. I'm not complaining; I think it's great! Look at any country where the military is called up to prop up a failing regime and ask yourself if you'd want to live there.
Now find countries where EULAs are not taken seriously. Look at their software industry. What software industry? Exactly. How can you be in business when there is no expectation that you will be paid for you work?
Trust me, if Sony is robbed of its ability to impose a Terms of Service (and it ain't gonna happen anyway), they will cease to provide the service at all.
In 1983, Sony and Phillips introduced a new format called the "Compact Disc." This was a plastic disc, roughly 5 inches in diameter with music encoded on it digitally. A laser was used to read binary data encoded in "pits" and "runs" on the surface of the disc. It sounded like a great idea, but it was immediately plagued by the same problems we are about to see with HDTV.
First was the equipment cost. A laser was needed to track a spiralling stream of runs to an accuracy less than the width of a human hair. Did anyone expect this system to be anything less than exorbitantly priced? Compact Disc players started at $800 apiece. Meanwhile you could buy a decent record turntable at any Radio Shack for under $100.
If you think that price differential was stupid, get this: due to the expense of studio-quality digital recording equipment and the manufacturing cost of the high-tech discs themselves, a Compact Disc release of an album was typically twice the price of the vinyl release. The same music for twice the price! Where's my checkbook?
Of course, pretensious stereophiles argued that people would shell out the extra dollars for the improved quality (sound familiar?). They were too wrapped up in their obsessive little world to realize that terms like "16 bit sampling" and "dynamic range" were never going to be anything other than gibberish to the general public. Another argument was that by allowing 90 minutes of continuous music, you could listen to an entire symphony without breaking to flip the disc to side two. What percentage of the music-buying public lies awake at night fretting over a side flip in the middle of a symphony? Most people buy records containing popular music broken down in songs, allowing for a natural break between Side 1 and Side 2. Bottom line: no one cares about having to flip sides.
Ironically, Compact Discs were touted as being more durable than vinyl. The fact is that a properly cared for LP might last centuries while some engineers predicted that the reflective metallic layer on a Compact Disc might oxidize to unreadability in as little as 20 years. If you bought a Compact Disc in 1985, what would you do if it was becoming unreadable today in 2001? Make a copy of it? No, Compact Discs aren't recordable! Back it up onto a cassette tape? Sure, but you'd lose your precious "digital quality" so why buy the Compact Disc in the first place? I know! You could back up the data to your personal computer! Of course, since a Compact Disc might contain up to 650Mega (not Kilo!) bytes of data, you probably couldn't find enough storage space for more than one of your albums unless you owned IBM or something.
In the end, we're much better off because the Compact Disc failed to supplant vinyl. One reason that is seldom explored is the effect the Compact Disc would have had on the variety of music. Go to see any up-and-coming local band and most of the time you'll find them selling a vinyl EP of their music for a few bucks. Had the Compact Disc become the dominant format, music publishing would have become the exclusive domain of those with enough money to buy the newfangled digital recording technology (a studio-quality digital recorder cost upwards of $100K at the time!). Goodbye independant record labels. Goodbye garage bands.
HDTV is just the latest attempt by the large players in the entertainment industry to put an entire art-form into a chokehold by introducing an unwanted technological "innovation." Last time it was music, this time it's TV. What next? Film? Am I going to live to see a day when the next Disney animated film is "all digital"? (Would "Snow White" or "Fantasia" have been better "digital"?)
I predict that my children won't remember what HDTV was the same way teenagers today have no idea what a "Compact Disc" was.
- extra quality that they don't really notice anyway
Um. The quality difference is startling. Only the legally blind will fail to notice the improvement in quality.Your point is quite valid, however. So you get awesome quality... why is it valuable when the current quality seems acceptable. The answer is that the broadcasters need to come up with compelling content. It remains to be seen if they will succeed.
In the United States, the plan is to leverage the popularity of America's State Religion: Football[1]. If you need a solid demonstration of the primacy of Football in American pop culture, note that the arrival of dot-com companies into mainstream society was heralded by advertisements during the Super Bowl[2].
- consumers will eventually win. The free market demands it.
"Market Forces" are the "God's Will" of secular society. Why not just say that God will take care of consumers? It's equally meaningful.The fact is that market forces serve the market, not consumers. Market forces drove down the price VHS VCRs and made them as common as dirt. Market forces didn't force Sony to license the Beta standard to other manufacturers and Beta disappeared. The consumers did not win.
You are correct that consumers are used to being able to record TV shows and watch them later. There's nothing in the proposed technology that will stop them. I expect that HDCP-compliant receivers will gladly pipe output to an HDCP-compliant Tivo. This HDCP Tivo would only deliver the content back to a display device, but not to a media recorder of any type. Thus, Joe Sixpack can timeshift to his heart's content, but he can't record "Battlefield Earth" off HBO-HD, transfer it to HD-DVD and resell it on Ebay. His HDCP Tivo will refuse transfer that valuable intellectual property to the DVD recorder.
Sure, there will be some way to make a copy of the HBO-HD broadcast of "BattleField Earth," but the pirate copy will be robbed of the full glory of the original digital clarity, robbing the viewer of the full effect of the spine-tingling special effects.
Of course, you will also be prevented from doing something perfectly legal, such as making a "Best of the Simpsons" compilation for your own personal use. You lose. The question is, will the market care? My money says "no".
- However, at high framerates and definitions, this is not the case. The id can no longer seperate fantasy and fiction
Wow! If I could invent an extremely high resolution image with no flicker at all, I could control the world! I'd give this terrifying new technology some kind of fancy name, with a Greek root or something... How about photograph?Another thing that was tough in this age was aiming artillery. If you know the distance, the characteristic of the gun, the characteristics of the shell, and the windspeed, physics equations tell you how to aim the gun to hit your target. Realistically, the equations cannot be solved in battlefield conditions where time is a factor and competent mathematicians are in short supply.
The solution to this problem was to issue huge books of pre-computed tables to artillery gunners. Each new gun and new shell needed a new book generated. That involved many hours of computation to be done by a small army of geeks. Because the guy-geeks were busy cracking codes, inventing atomic weapons, running logistics and stopping lead, a cadre of girl geeks was assembled in Annapolis and tasked with generating these artillery tables. The women were brought up to speed on Calculus and Physics (if they needed to be) and they were know as (you guessed it) "Computers."
While the lady Computers toiled, some other geeks were trying to automate their task using analog and digital electronic systems. Because the first automated calculation machines were targetted to the labor-intensive task of generating artillery tables, these devices were called "electronic computers."
Every time I see a flame session about the lack of women in computer engineering, I find it ironic that the word "computer" itself is an artifact of a group of geek girls.
Windows 98
- Boot computer. Insert SCSI card. Crash.
(BTW, this method won't work on NT at all because it can't handle dynamic loading of PCMCIA drivers)Reboot computer. Insert SCSI card. SCSI driver install occurs. Crash.
Reboot computer with SCSI card. SCSI driver loads. Uh... where is ZIP drive?
Reboot computer with SCSI card. SCSI driver loads. ZIP drive shows up as removable drive.
Linux
- (Computer never rebooted.) Insert SCSI card. Beep indicates driver load.
- mount
/dev/sda /mnt/floppy
You're right. Linux is a bitch.- He gets confused, whines, and then goes back to Windows.
This may be what happened when your hobbiest pal "gives that RedHat a shot," but the numbers show that people who seriously try Linux to solve their problems find it pleasantly servicable. They don't give a shit that it won't work with the system they bought at Best Buy three years ago. They don't care that it won't run the funny joke EXE their sister sent them this morning.They are server people running enterprise applications. Why do people have a hard time grasping the concept that their technical needs might not be the same as someone else's -- perhaps even a lot of other peoples?
- won't stop me from using Windows to save myself the trouble of learning to tweak my OS.
This statement is hilariously ironic. Don't worry -- you won't get the joke. Go back to sleep.First of all, there is the Microsoft Zombie Army. These are hoards of mediocre developers who have discovered that they can quickly and easily put together mediocre applications and systems using Microsoft technology. I've come across these people and they are entrenched. Basically they are motivated by fear of losing their '1337 status in a move to an unfamiliar technology.
The second effect is what I call the "Japanese Car Effect." Those of you unfortunate enough to have been conscious in the early 70's will remember a time when the Detroit auto makers could Do No Wrong(tm) and Japanese imports were considered crappy "rice burners" bought only by Communists. Unfortunately for Detroit, everyone who "went over" to the Japanese imports discovered that they were high-quality and efficient. They never bought an American car again.
Guess what (usually) happens when an NT user finally "goes over" to Linux?
This resulted in a lot of snide remarks and one-upsmanship from the Linux advocates. At the time, OS/2 and Linux were a close match (and are still somewhat competetive depending on what you want). The Linux guys finally won the debate with one simple point: no matter how much I (or Team OS/2) loved OS/2, it was IBMs decision to promote it, improve it or continue it. As long as there is one person who really wants to use Linux, Linux will be alive.
The only way Microsoft can threaten Linux is to put out a product so great that people will be willing to pay for it rather than get something free. In addition, Microsoft has to support it so well that people don't feel like they need to source so they can support it themselves. If that happened, we'd all be happy, but I expect it these events will occur right after the release of OS/2 Warp version 6 with accompanying Super Bowl ads.
The real issue is whether or not we get to use Linux at our "real" jobs, which is increasingly the case. That's something that needs to be fought for and counts on market share, etc.
tee hee hee
Did you think about a stack-based cache?
I'm sure if you designed cars, they'd get great gas mileage... unless you drove them at speeds between 20 and 70 MpH, right?
- I'm sure the better way is to invest those $100K to improve NetFoo v.0.1.
That is a possible approach.That's the approach I'm taking with Jabber -- an open-source instant messaging system. My company needed to offer IM with gateways to the popular services. The commercial vendors of such systems are asking prices that would make you pee your pants from laughter. The solution? Jabber! The problem? The Jabber source base sucks donkeys!
Oh... I could go through the litany of Open Source Mistakes(tm) that the Jabber team has committed, but suffice to say that at version 1.2 (with 1.4 in prerelease), the code is worse than many 0.2 versions of other software I've used. Still, it's got a lot of good ideas and the crummy code base will pass -- particularly since I've hired someone to help fix it.
I've got some tight deadlines, but the bottom line was that paying someone to help patch up Jabber was more cost-effective than paying for someone else's proprietary code plus give me all the benefits of Open Source.
But this is a particular case. If I needed enterprise-ready IM today, I might be shelling out bucks for a commercial system. Open Source Jabber isn't ready for prime time yet.
Look, all I'm saying is that every approach has advantages, disadvantages, risks and rewards. You need to balance those (management types often do a SWOT [Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats] analysis). Anyone who insists that that Open Source is always the best way is just another fucking moronic idealogue. Yes, we've all had a bad experience with crappy software vendor who should be on trial in The Hague, but then you find someone or other with a clue.
Life goes on. If was easy, we wouldn't call it "code."
- You have obviously not paid attention to most EULA's.
You obviously have never paid more than $39.95 for a piece of software. Try buying a billing system for $100K. You don't get a CD ROM in an envelope with a EULA stuck on the outside. You get a CD-ROM and a multi-page contract, probably customized for you. Believe me, any such contract that released the vendor from reasonable liability would be laughed out of the corporate counsel's office.- At least with open source software you "can" crack open the hood and look at it.
I agree 100%. You can also do that if you purchase a source license if the commercial software you buy offers one. Heck, if you're so 1337, you can always write it yourself. (Isn't this the point in the debate where someone claims that a billing system can be written in 10 lines of Perl?)The issue is cost/benefit. If I get an open-source program, do I have an expectation that I'll spend my valuable time repairing it? If I buy a commercial offering, I may get screwed (many have), but I have an expectation that I won't. Believe it or not, most people who buy software find that it does what they need it to do (even people who buy it from Microsoft... imagine that!).
Apache, Linux, GNU emacs and other popular open source software are popular because they allow me to hack the code, but they don't require me to do so. If I install Debian, I have a reasonable expectation that it will work pretty well without me hacking the kernal. That makes it a very valuable piece of Open Source software. If I install NetFoo v.0.1, I may be in for more of an adventure. If NetFoo is critical to my financial success, I might want to buy the commercial offering.
- Well, going back to my first paragraph, most commercial software doesn't have a warranty that actually does any good.
Let's try to keep things in perspective. We're not talking about "Space Rampage, Network Edition" or any other boxed software you can find on the shelf at CompUSA. We're talking expensive, vertical-market billing software. Anything generalizations you have about "commercial software," no matter how true, probably don't apply.- You read the fscking code.
Yeah, that's the ticket. I'm sure everyone at Slashdot has read every line of code they've ever run. This guy is going through the rather time-consuming task of setting up an ISP. He has time to "read the fscking [how 'l337] code" when?Who read the "fscking" code to WU-FTPD, the FTP daemon that ships with many distros? Last summer, it got his by yet another buffer overflow attack. The source has been available how long? I'm sure you read it, Mr. 1337 H4X0R, so how come you didn't fix it right away?
- It's much easier to put a back door in proprietary code. Sheesh.
Sure it is, but proprietary code is backed by legal liability. Billing systems can cost anywhere from $50K to $1M. For that kind of money, I'm going to put in a back door? Sheesh.The real danger isn't deliberate back doors, it's accidental ones. Free software has NO WARANTEE. No one said it was going to work correctly, so too bad for you if it doesn't.
I know, I know, "read the fscking code." Yeah, that's practical. In fact, next time I buy I used car, I'll dismantle the engine and unpack the wheel bearings just to see if there are any problems. I'm sure that's what you do.
I'm not slamming Open Source, or even an Open Source billing system, but real people live in a world of risk, including the risk that the Open Source software they want to use might suck. Spending some money can be a reasonable way to mitigate that risk. I suppose that's hard to understand when your biggest risk in life is doing too many bong hits and missing The Powerpuff Girls.
There are, at most, a few thousand companies, worldwide, who need the level of billing software I'm working with. On top of that, each one of them needs heavy customization, which really means that each one of these companies practically has a custom billing system. This means there isn't enough "critical mass" to start an "open source" project to perform this level of billing, so there are going to be zillions of dollars in it for the foreseeable future.
What I'd like to see in the future is a day when Microsoft can't make money selling Exchange because nobody pays for basic email anymore. When I set up my company's internal email, it never occured to me that I'd have to pay a dime for the software. I have to pay for the hardware. I have to pay an administrator. If I want some feature that is specific to my vertical market, I'll have to pay some geeks (possibly myself) to create that function. And that's how I like it -- email is not an interesting problem anymore, but some quirky new feature... hey, that's geekworthy!
So, there's plenty of money out there, but Open Source means it's going to the people solving the interesting, new problems, not last year's basic, recurring problems. (Yeah, that's a bit worrisome to VA Linux and RedHat...)
- Unfortunately it's a financial review and last time I looked this wasn't News for Stock Brokers
A common "nerd experience" is the entry into the workforce, either as teenage "whiz kid" or shiny new college grad, and making the observation, "Wow! I can't believe someone will pay me to do something I'd do anyway!"Maybe you make a living selling beads at crafts shows and this "nerd" thing is just a passionate hobby of yours. Good for you, if that's the case, but for the majority of us who's profession is intertwined with their interests in Things Geeky, the "business of Open Source" is Stuff That Matters.
- Show me what you can do? Perhaps in JSP? Something like this?
I could write a Servlet to dump the results on an arbitrary SQL query as an XML document like this (including schema) in under 50 lines of code. In fact, this is the sort of thing that you'd do as a student excercise to teach Servlets and JDBC. You'd cover it in an hour or so in an afternoon introductory course.- You seem capable of constantly missing the point.
... This is pretty much totally unlike anything that has gone before, and your cheap shots do you no credit.
Fair enough, and maybe it's because I can't read any of your web pages that I haven't been able to see the coolness that you are offering, but I don't see anything particularly interesting, much less revolutionary about what you are doing.- You and I both know that [Netscape] is the inferior browser, and has little penetration in the corporate market where IE and Outlook rule.
Inferior at what? Handling the latest cutting-edge HTML extensions? The fact that supplying basic "can't miss" HTML to a popular client "pains you" is a pretty solid indication that your technology isn't very good. Every leading presentation and web-authoring technology provides for straight-forward client-sensitive content. It should be easy for an arbitrary web application to support Netscape (as well as WML) in any "modern" web application technology. No excuses or finger-pointing is going to change that.- If you bothered to try learn what is going on, then you may understand why the demo's are impressive. Right now, you can't see the wood for the trees.
Right now, I see browser windows full of blankness. Maybe if you could explain what was going on without being annoyingly vague... "this is unlike anthing that has gone before"What is something that's hard to do that Language P makes easy?
- There is more, if you care to continue, mail me.
Take a stab at answering this question and I might. As it is, I'm contributing to the TLS and Servlet API standards discussions -- things which people will actually use -- I don't feel like expending much more on this unless you can't convince me it's more than it seems now.- Well, we know a *little* bit about XML.
... Here is a bit of fun, as is here and here.
Wow. You've generated XML documents straight out of "XML for Dummies." Better buy a ticket to Stockholm... I think there's a Nobel Prize in your future. - ...there are things that [Language P] can do quite exquisitely simply that are practically impossible in other languages, or quite clumsy
I hope you're not under the delusion that any of those sample XML documents are more than trivial to generate in other languages.nil
- Uhhhhhhh I believe the article said 12 mill not 1.6 mill
My bad. Push out my estimate a quarter.