And yet it's still the people that matter, not the technology. We all know that, and despite this being a site for nerds, this is stuff that Matters.
Yes, well spoken. And this is true of all the arguments for and against technology. Is technology evil? Is it good? Does is change our lives? Yes to all -- but it is really people who evil and good, people who change one another's lives.
Technology makes ideas powerful, and this changes the world. This was true when language appeared thousands of years ago, and it's true of the computer within our lifetime. In the arc of history, it is the people who matter most. That is why all of the choices we make now as individuals about our thoughts and actions are tremendously important.
Technology makes ideas powerful. If there is hate in the world, if there is vengeance, if there is fear, they will become powerful. And if there is wisdom, it can become powerful, too.
I get the feeling that the author's popularity makes her stuff "hand's off" to editors. And she needs one. That book should have been trimmed by about 40%.
As much as I loved the book overall, I sort of felt that way about Cryptonomicon, too. But it was still cool. Sometimes we can forgive verbosity....
Thanks for the recommendation! I appreciate, and I'm not turned off by the title -- I think a "realistic radical" is a fine thing to be. I'll check it out.
The problem is that not enough people band together, start a (semi) formal development programme with solid requirements, and then code/test it to completion...
Agreed -- absolutely. Programmers, in spite of being so social online, are still too reclusive about their work.
I'm sure Source Forge is littered with thousands of "Version 0.001" releases that will never make it to the "actually useful" stage.
But this is necessary and inevitable -- it's important that people have a shot at developing their own ideas, even if it's just a little bit... even if they're really bad ideas! It's the opportunity that matters.
One big difference between the open source and commercial worlds is that with OSS, even if you're working on somebody else's project, you could be working on your own. It's a world of pure choice, and that's a beautiful thing.
It's evolution -- in a large pool of ideas, most don't make it far. But the large pool is very important, even if most of it dies off quickly.
I second this. Thank you for having the courage to be honest, even if some people do think it's "corny".
I think this is not a rare motivation at all. As programmers, most of our work goes into little systems that only helps some corner of some company for a limited time... and it's frustrating. So much effort goes into coding, it just feels like it should be doing a lot of people a lot of good. So some programmers choose to actually make that happen!
I'm part of the group that's organizing the DMCA protests in Minnesota. We're passing out fliers and staging protests, but haven't managed to get any press. We're also trying to get a face-to-face meeting with our senators...but no luck so far -- their offices haven't even called us back, despite both written and phoned requests for a meeting.
The problem is, we're technology people, not activists, and we don't know how to lobby effectively. What's your advice? How can we get the attention of our senators? How can we attract media attention (in a respectful way, that is)? Are there other activities we should be undertaking that would be more effective than what we're doing?
...the cynical side of my nature suspects that at least part of that popularity is due to their safe, harmless nature.
You said you've only read the first, which really is pretty harmless. But the award was for the fourth, which is interesting -- the books in the series get progressively more complex, and much darker. There's a lot more death and unfairness in the world, etc. I think it's not an accident that they chose the fourth for the award....
So what we get is the dictatorship of the majority.
Look, it's not as though jubilant throngs are filling the streets, demanding anti-circumvention laws. What's going on here is that most people are either unaware or indifferent, and there is a power vacuum -- where there is no popular interest, vested interests have full sway. The solution to this is not griping about democracy, but rather taking action to make your opinion known, and to educate others.
The technology community (i.e. us) shares a lot of blame for the DMCA's passage. Discussion of technology issues in legislatures, courts, and media is confused and uninformed. And here we are, the people with the information that would inform this debate, and what do we do? Do we work to spread the word? Do we lobby our representatives? Do we provide simple, clear, explanations of the issues to the public? Do we work to communicate with non-technology people of all kinds, on their own terms, finding ways of educating and informing instead of simply looking down on their ignorance?
Well, the EFF does some of this. Yay for them!
But most of us just sit on our asses and tap away little flames about political philosophy for other members of our little geek ghetto to read. Great.
This is not a tyranny of the majority; it's a tyranny of those who are capable of taking effective action over those who aren't. And whose fault is that?
True, destroying copyrighted works is not a violation of copyright. However, I claim that the indelible paint prevents people from putting a piece of paper over my graffiti and rubbing a copy of my art onto their paper. Such action is definitely a violation of copyright, my indelible paint is thus a protection measure, and anything which circumvents that protection is illegal under the DMCA, regardless of how it's actually used.
Actually, it doesn't even matter whether you use the soap at all; simply distributing or describing the soap is a felony. Of course, if you invented the soap yourself, you're in the clear.
It may be illegal to paint graffiti, but it's still creative work and thus automatically copyrighted by its creator. Could the indelibility of the paint be considered a "technological protection measure"? If so, is strong soap a "circumvention device", and would washing it off the sidewalk thus be illegal under the DMCA?
How about making a donation to the EFF in the developer's or project's name? In light of any number of recent events, that may be one of the best ways to help free software. And I'd be honored by the gesture, with no sense of awkwardness at all, if I were in the developer's place!
...and whoever cracked this virus is heading to ja
on
PDF Virus Spotted
·
· Score: 2
If Adobe's past actions are any indication, whoever figured this thing out is in deep doo-doo. The coderz article says:
The password for changing the security options of the PDF file is "OUTLOOK.PDFWorm"
So somebody's cracked the PDF format, and is now distributing a method of circumventing copy protection on a popular document. This is, of course, a federal crime under the DMCA. I'd advise whichever security expert figured this password out to flee to the safety of Russia immediately.
My mom, an educated but non-technical person, had heard about it. So had my friend who's a social worker for the YWCA. This story has definitely broken out of the "techie bubble".
I don't believe that the government should have a say in how companies go about doing their business.
Really? Should businesses be able to engage in libelous advertising? Pollute indiscriminately? Kill people who protest their actions? Can them and sell them as food? Where do you draw the line?
The whole point of having a government is to set up a power structure to compete with the power structure of business -- I think it was Jefferson (?) who talked about government balancing the "monied interests". We should be very careful when we limit the freedom of corporations, but we should still be willing to do it.
Sad to say boys, but you've all forgotten that Windows BELONGS to Microsoft and they have every right to make it as closed a platform as they'd like.
Actually, no, the courts say they don't. If they want that right, they should do business in a different country. You may argue whether anti-trust law is a good idea, but we do have it here in the US, they are violating it, and I don't think that we're looking at civil disobedience on Microsoft's part here -- just good old-fashioned megalomania.
Come on... these guys who run Slashdot are not journalists, nor are they experts in particle physics for that matter. Their job is to look through a gazillion submissions and pick out the ones that seem the most informative, provocative, and interesting, and let the community sort it out. They are not even claiming to provide the same kinds of research and editorial control that a newspaper does.
The headline is not an intentional exaggeration; it's just a non-expert summarizing as best they can something that may interest you. If you want to gripe about headlines, talk to your local newspaper.
If the court does interpret the patent broadly at all, they're going to be nailed on prior art. Basically, if anyone can prove they were using the same method before the patent was filed, then the patent will crumble. And it was 1985 that they filed it? Are we to believe that nobody had distributed software to a point-of-sale location over a network prior to 1985? I doubt that.
Isn't it self contradictory on one hand to produce a product as Open Source...while fighting vigorously to protect the trademark?
It's not hypocritical at all. It's very important that when a name like "MySQL" or "Perl" or "Linux" represents a standard for compatibility, that name remain meaningful. If it weren't for trademark law, malicious companies could embrace and subvert all our open-source languages by creating their own incompatible versions, releasing the code, and stealing the brand in public perception with a big marketing blitz. Most people are not going to take the time to sort it out if many sites are providing different versions of Perl, and if Microsoft pre-installed a "Perl" that only ran under Windows and allowed embedded Visual Basic, people would use it and think it's Perl. Only trademark law prevents them from doing this.
AbiWord uses this combination of copyright (to keep the code open) and trademark (to keep the name meaningful), and they have a nice FAQ about the AbiWord trademark which explains both the legal and the philosophical issues (see also this post).
All of that said, the real issue here is that MySQL was dumb not to register every available form of their domain.
Just a terminology clarification: you folks are talking about RAD (rapid application development) tools -- the sort of thing where you drag GUI widgets around to make your interface.
Visual Programming means that the programming language itself is graphical (e.g. Prograph). See the com.lang.visual FAQ.
In spite of its name, Visual Basic is not a Visual Programming language. It is a RAD tool.
OK, I'll grant that Apple's page is no encyclopedia of security. But it sounds like you didn't even read through what's there. The security page has several concrete and useful bits of information, including:
general directions for disabling FTP, HTTP, Telnet, SSH, and Appleshare (nice and simple for the non-techies);
a security mailing list, with directions for verifying Apple's PGP signature; and
links to three other relevant security sites (CERT, FIRST, and FreeBSD security).
It would be nice if they had links to security software such as Brickhouse, and community security sites such as SecureMac. But they page is not as useless as you make it out to be.
Sure you don't need more speed now, but remember someone-or-other's law: Software will expand to consume all available resources.
My Apple ][+ had 48k of RAM, and somehow still managed to do all sorts of cool stuff. And although it was probably about four orders of magnitude slower than my current machine, it didn't feel that much slower. Somehow, modern software manages to use resources at rates that we would hardly have dreamed of in 1980.
This isn't necessarily a bad thing. It's easy to blame programmers for being lazy, but they're actually making intelligent decisions that lead to ever-increasing resource use. Every new increase in speed or memory opens up options that just hadn't been there before -- scripting languages, multitasking, multiple users, OOP, application frameworks, garbage collection...all made possible because there was a little power to spare. OS X uses gobs and gobs of memory double-buffering everything on the screen, which is just fine with me -- memory is so cheap they gave me 256 megs free when I got my machine, and the UI looks really cool for all the extra RAM it uses.
So hang in there. I'm sure somebody will find a way to burn up all the power your hardware can muster. And oddly, it will probably be worth it.
Interpersonal skills count for a heck of a lot in professional programming. In many projects / companies / situations, the ability to play nicely with the other kids and communicate well can end up being much more important than the ability to code fast or well.
While there is likely some correlation between programming skill and open-source participation, I doubt that somebody doing great open-source work will tell you much about what kind of human being they are, and what it's like to work with them. Since open-source projects usually happen over the net, in a very decentralized, distributed, and impersonal fashion, they really require a very different set of social skills than the tight-knight topsy-turvy hum of an office.
In an open source project, you can choose a bug to fix or an idea to implement, do the work at your leisure, and send the diffs off to the project with only the most minimal communication -- "Hi. Here's some code. I wrote it. Try it. You can use it. Bye.".
In a business setting, all your work is subject to a set of priorities and desires which are not your own. Even the best ideas can die if there's not consensus behind them, and even the brightest people can end up contributing little of value if they're alienated from the others they work with. The ratio of social interaction to coding in a programming job is generally somewhere between 4:1 and 9:1, I'd say.
So the moral of Plugh's story?
For managers: the open source world is a great place to fish for technical talent, but offers no protection from difficult personalities. There are plenty of decent and non-egomaniacal people in the open source world, so don't let one stinker sour you to the whole thing.
For developers: it's not enough to be fantastically good with the computer. If you can't interact respectfully and productively with others, even people who are not as smart as you or whom you disagree with, reality will catch up with you.
These GPL vigilantes are a threat to your company's intellectual property. It's only a matter of time before the free software community starts forming terrorist organizations. And you know they'll just steal office supplies all day.
Slashdot Mirror
And yet it's still the people that matter, not the technology. We all know that, and despite this being a site for nerds, this is stuff that Matters.
Yes, well spoken. And this is true of all the arguments for and against technology. Is technology evil? Is it good? Does is change our lives? Yes to all -- but it is really people who evil and good, people who change one another's lives.
Technology makes ideas powerful, and this changes the world. This was true when language appeared thousands of years ago, and it's true of the computer within our lifetime. In the arc of history, it is the people who matter most. That is why all of the choices we make now as individuals about our thoughts and actions are tremendously important.
Technology makes ideas powerful. If there is hate in the world, if there is vengeance, if there is fear, they will become powerful. And if there is wisdom, it can become powerful, too.
Let's be wise in the face of this tragedy.
I get the feeling that the author's popularity makes her stuff "hand's off" to editors. And she needs one. That book should have been trimmed by about 40%.
As much as I loved the book overall, I sort of felt that way about Cryptonomicon, too. But it was still cool. Sometimes we can forgive verbosity....
Thanks for the recommendation! I appreciate, and I'm not turned off by the title -- I think a "realistic radical" is a fine thing to be. I'll check it out.
The problem is that not enough people band together, start a (semi) formal development programme with solid requirements, and then code/test it to completion ...
... even if they're really bad ideas! It's the opportunity that matters.
Agreed -- absolutely. Programmers, in spite of being so social online, are still too reclusive about their work.
I'm sure Source Forge is littered with thousands of "Version 0.001" releases that will never make it to the "actually useful" stage.
But this is necessary and inevitable -- it's important that people have a shot at developing their own ideas, even if it's just a little bit
One big difference between the open source and commercial worlds is that with OSS, even if you're working on somebody else's project, you could be working on your own. It's a world of pure choice, and that's a beautiful thing.
It's evolution -- in a large pool of ideas, most don't make it far. But the large pool is very important, even if most of it dies off quickly.
I second this. Thank you for having the courage to be honest, even if some people do think it's "corny".
... and it's frustrating. So much effort goes into coding, it just feels like it should be doing a lot of people a lot of good. So some programmers choose to actually make that happen!
I think this is not a rare motivation at all. As programmers, most of our work goes into little systems that only helps some corner of some company for a limited time
I'm part of the group that's organizing the DMCA protests in Minnesota. We're passing out fliers and staging protests, but haven't managed to get any press. We're also trying to get a face-to-face meeting with our senators...but no luck so far -- their offices haven't even called us back, despite both written and phoned requests for a meeting.
The problem is, we're technology people, not activists, and we don't know how to lobby effectively. What's your advice? How can we get the attention of our senators? How can we attract media attention (in a respectful way, that is)? Are there other activities we should be undertaking that would be more effective than what we're doing?
...the cynical side of my nature suspects that at least part of that popularity is due to their safe, harmless nature.
You said you've only read the first, which really is pretty harmless. But the award was for the fourth, which is interesting -- the books in the series get progressively more complex, and much darker. There's a lot more death and unfairness in the world, etc. I think it's not an accident that they chose the fourth for the award....
Synaptic shutdown? No, no, they were all firing. No self-respecting rant should be without a little self-mocking!
So what we get is the dictatorship of the majority.
Look, it's not as though jubilant throngs are filling the streets, demanding anti-circumvention laws. What's going on here is that most people are either unaware or indifferent, and there is a power vacuum -- where there is no popular interest, vested interests have full sway. The solution to this is not griping about democracy, but rather taking action to make your opinion known, and to educate others.
The technology community (i.e. us) shares a lot of blame for the DMCA's passage. Discussion of technology issues in legislatures, courts, and media is confused and uninformed. And here we are, the people with the information that would inform this debate, and what do we do? Do we work to spread the word? Do we lobby our representatives? Do we provide simple, clear, explanations of the issues to the public? Do we work to communicate with non-technology people of all kinds, on their own terms, finding ways of educating and informing instead of simply looking down on their ignorance?
Well, the EFF does some of this. Yay for them!
But most of us just sit on our asses and tap away little flames about political philosophy for other members of our little geek ghetto to read. Great.
This is not a tyranny of the majority; it's a tyranny of those who are capable of taking effective action over those who aren't. And whose fault is that?
True, destroying copyrighted works is not a violation of copyright. However, I claim that the indelible paint prevents people from putting a piece of paper over my graffiti and rubbing a copy of my art onto their paper. Such action is definitely a violation of copyright, my indelible paint is thus a protection measure, and anything which circumvents that protection is illegal under the DMCA, regardless of how it's actually used.
Actually, it doesn't even matter whether you use the soap at all; simply distributing or describing the soap is a felony. Of course, if you invented the soap yourself, you're in the clear.
Welcome to the Digital Millennium, old chap!
It may be illegal to paint graffiti, but it's still creative work and thus automatically copyrighted by its creator. Could the indelibility of the paint be considered a "technological protection measure"? If so, is strong soap a "circumvention device", and would washing it off the sidewalk thus be illegal under the DMCA?
How about making a donation to the EFF in the developer's or project's name? In light of any number of recent events, that may be one of the best ways to help free software. And I'd be honored by the gesture, with no sense of awkwardness at all, if I were in the developer's place!
If Adobe's past actions are any indication, whoever figured this thing out is in deep doo-doo. The coderz article says:
The password for changing the security options of the PDF file is "OUTLOOK.PDFWorm"
So somebody's cracked the PDF format, and is now distributing a method of circumventing copy protection on a popular document. This is, of course, a federal crime under the DMCA. I'd advise whichever security expert figured this password out to flee to the safety of Russia immediately.
My mom, an educated but non-technical person, had heard about it. So had my friend who's a social worker for the YWCA. This story has definitely broken out of the "techie bubble".
I don't believe that the government should have a say in how companies go about doing their business.
Really? Should businesses be able to engage in libelous advertising? Pollute indiscriminately? Kill people who protest their actions? Can them and sell them as food? Where do you draw the line?
The whole point of having a government is to set up a power structure to compete with the power structure of business -- I think it was Jefferson (?) who talked about government balancing the "monied interests". We should be very careful when we limit the freedom of corporations, but we should still be willing to do it.
Sad to say boys, but you've all forgotten that Windows BELONGS to Microsoft and they have every right to make it as closed a platform as they'd like.
Actually, no, the courts say they don't. If they want that right, they should do business in a different country. You may argue whether anti-trust law is a good idea, but we do have it here in the US, they are violating it, and I don't think that we're looking at civil disobedience on Microsoft's part here -- just good old-fashioned megalomania.
Come on ... these guys who run Slashdot are not journalists, nor are they experts in particle physics for that matter. Their job is to look through a gazillion submissions and pick out the ones that seem the most informative, provocative, and interesting, and let the community sort it out. They are not even claiming to provide the same kinds of research and editorial control that a newspaper does.
The headline is not an intentional exaggeration; it's just a non-expert summarizing as best they can something that may interest you. If you want to gripe about headlines, talk to your local newspaper.
If the court does interpret the patent broadly at all, they're going to be nailed on prior art. Basically, if anyone can prove they were using the same method before the patent was filed, then the patent will crumble. And it was 1985 that they filed it? Are we to believe that nobody had distributed software to a point-of-sale location over a network prior to 1985? I doubt that.
In order to register as a ".org", an organization must meet certain criteria.
Is that still true? I know that such restrictions on TLDs have eroded over time as they proved unenforcable.
Isn't it self contradictory on one hand to produce a product as Open Source...while fighting vigorously to protect the trademark?
It's not hypocritical at all. It's very important that when a name like "MySQL" or "Perl" or "Linux" represents a standard for compatibility, that name remain meaningful. If it weren't for trademark law, malicious companies could embrace and subvert all our open-source languages by creating their own incompatible versions, releasing the code, and stealing the brand in public perception with a big marketing blitz. Most people are not going to take the time to sort it out if many sites are providing different versions of Perl, and if Microsoft pre-installed a "Perl" that only ran under Windows and allowed embedded Visual Basic, people would use it and think it's Perl. Only trademark law prevents them from doing this.
AbiWord uses this combination of copyright (to keep the code open) and trademark (to keep the name meaningful), and they have a nice FAQ about the AbiWord trademark which explains both the legal and the philosophical issues (see also this post).
All of that said, the real issue here is that MySQL was dumb not to register every available form of their domain.
Just a terminology clarification: you folks are talking about RAD (rapid application development) tools -- the sort of thing where you drag GUI widgets around to make your interface.
Visual Programming means that the programming language itself is graphical (e.g. Prograph). See the com.lang.visual FAQ.
In spite of its name, Visual Basic is not a Visual Programming language. It is a RAD tool.
It would be nice if they had links to security software such as Brickhouse, and community security sites such as SecureMac. But they page is not as useless as you make it out to be.
Sure you don't need more speed now, but remember someone-or-other's law: Software will expand to consume all available resources.
My Apple ][+ had 48k of RAM, and somehow still managed to do all sorts of cool stuff. And although it was probably about four orders of magnitude slower than my current machine, it didn't feel that much slower. Somehow, modern software manages to use resources at rates that we would hardly have dreamed of in 1980.
This isn't necessarily a bad thing. It's easy to blame programmers for being lazy, but they're actually making intelligent decisions that lead to ever-increasing resource use. Every new increase in speed or memory opens up options that just hadn't been there before -- scripting languages, multitasking, multiple users, OOP, application frameworks, garbage collection...all made possible because there was a little power to spare. OS X uses gobs and gobs of memory double-buffering everything on the screen, which is just fine with me -- memory is so cheap they gave me 256 megs free when I got my machine, and the UI looks really cool for all the extra RAM it uses.
So hang in there. I'm sure somebody will find a way to burn up all the power your hardware can muster. And oddly, it will probably be worth it.
Interpersonal skills count for a heck of a lot in professional programming. In many projects / companies / situations, the ability to play nicely with the other kids and communicate well can end up being much more important than the ability to code fast or well.
While there is likely some correlation between programming skill and open-source participation, I doubt that somebody doing great open-source work will tell you much about what kind of human being they are, and what it's like to work with them. Since open-source projects usually happen over the net, in a very decentralized, distributed, and impersonal fashion, they really require a very different set of social skills than the tight-knight topsy-turvy hum of an office.
In an open source project, you can choose a bug to fix or an idea to implement, do the work at your leisure, and send the diffs off to the project with only the most minimal communication -- "Hi. Here's some code. I wrote it. Try it. You can use it. Bye.".
In a business setting, all your work is subject to a set of priorities and desires which are not your own. Even the best ideas can die if there's not consensus behind them, and even the brightest people can end up contributing little of value if they're alienated from the others they work with. The ratio of social interaction to coding in a programming job is generally somewhere between 4:1 and 9:1, I'd say.
So the moral of Plugh's story?
For managers: the open source world is a great place to fish for technical talent, but offers no protection from difficult personalities. There are plenty of decent and non-egomaniacal people in the open source world, so don't let one stinker sour you to the whole thing.
For developers: it's not enough to be fantastically good with the computer. If you can't interact respectfully and productively with others, even people who are not as smart as you or whom you disagree with, reality will catch up with you.
These GPL vigilantes are a threat to your company's intellectual property. It's only a matter of time before the free software community starts forming terrorist organizations. And you know they'll just steal office supplies all day.