Doctorow's assertion, of course, is entirely anecdotal. Where are the numbers that might substantiate it?
Reminds me of an "anecdotal proof" that I like to use to confuse people who think that anecdotes can't prove anything.
Hereabouts there are a number of "tech" bookstores, mostly at colleges but not entirely. If you walk in, the first thing you see is the display of the current tech bestsellers. A quick check will verify that almost all of these are available online, usually in PDF form, and most of the downloads are free. But there the hard copy is, sitting in the display that's reserved for bestsellers.
It's even worse: If you open the books, most of they have a foreword that tells you about the online download. Most give the URL.
So how can the sales possibly be nonzero? They're being given away free, and they tell you right up front that you can get them free. But people walk into the bookstores and buy them. Are these people idiots? Given the usual clientele of these stores, I'd guess not.
Now, I'll point out that this is in fact "just another anecdote". I haven't given any numbers. I haven't said anything that would prove that there are any sales at all.
But these books wouldn't be on those particular shelves unless the people running the store thought that they'd sell. Some of these stores have been there for years. The people running them aren't idiots. They are successful businessmen making the judgement that these books are good ones to display up front.
So here we have rather convincing "anecdotal evidence" that giving things away free doesn't necessarily kill sales. It may well be helping sales (but that's really hard to infer from anecdotes).
Actually, I also wonder if there are real numbers on the topic. I haven't yet seen any that I trust. But seeing things being listed as bestsellers when they're available free online is sorta convincing that something funny is going on here.
However, when you get down to it, what does any of this have to do with criticism of repression in Cuba?
Well, as others here have pointed out it makes the US look rather hypocritical in much of the rest of the world. People hear American politicians criticising Cuba very loudly. Then they read about American treatment of captives at Guantanamo. They also hear and read of the treatment of millions of Americans who, mostly due to their race or ethnic background, are treated every bit as badly as Cubans, if not worse. They read news like the Abu Ghraib prisoners. This is followed by stories about the treatment of prisoners in American prisons, showing that Abu Ghraib is not an anomaly. Rush Limbaugh tells the world that the treatment of those prisoners was no worse than typical college frat initiations, and investigation shows that he was right. All this doesn't really look very good, does it?
Repression should be criticized and fought wherever it is found, including in the U.S.
Yup; that's what I was doing. And trying to put it into a bit of perspective. In many respects, American society is very open and free. But there are some glaring exceptions. With the advent of the Internet, it has become very difficult to keep this hidden from the rest of the world.
Now if we could use all this to improve the situation in the US. Yeah, maybe it's better than a lot of the world already. But that's no excuse, not when the US government is using "freedom" as an excuse to invade other countries. But perhaps by harping on the subject enough, we can get things cleaned up in the US a bit, too.
I think that was more recent. There was a period when mapquest, mapblast and mappoint all had Microsoft logos and copyright notices, but I don't remember when it was.
Actually, in looking over my small collection of gif maplets from the past 5 years, I see that nearly every one has a different set of copyright notices (though most include NavTech). And none of the images mentions Microsoft. The MS logos were all on the web pages, and the stuff there also seems to change every 6 months or so.
I wonder how many copyrights there are on your typical map image?
The real disappointment in online map sites is that National Geographic's web site is so crappy. They have such potential...
I have lived for a number of years in America, though, and my experience is that ordinary citizens there aren't afraid of their government(s) in the same way that they are in Cuba.
Close, but I think you meant to say "ordinary white citizens".
In the American subpopulations of the black and latino persuasions, there is quite a lot of fear of their government, especially of the police and drug-enforcement agents. How comparable this is to Cubans' fear of their government I can't say. But some parts of American society are subject to arbitrary arrest and detention without trial. Common estimates are that 1/3 of black men and around 1/5 or 1/6 of latino men will spend part of their life in prison. This is something to keep in mind when Americans congratulate themselves on their free and open society.
Re:Can Microsoft even legally sell Windows in Cuba
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Cuba Switching to Linux
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· Score: 3, Informative
Would you say that our "ownership" is simply a privilege granted to us by the state?
You got that exactly right.
In any country in the world, the government has the "right" to take your property, and pay you a price that they determine (which is sometimes zero).
In some countries, the government is up front about this, making it clear in property documents that you are merely granted use of the property until such time as the government wants it.
In others (such as the US), there's a pretense of private ownership. But when the government wants your property, they simply take it by "eminent domain" (google for it), and it's no longer yours. You have no recourse, unless you have the funds to bribe the right people.
You can talk all you like about property being yours. But it's just a nice social myth, belied by the actions of your own government.
A few years ago, there was a notorious case in Detroit. The city grabbed a big chunk of land by eminent domain, kicked out the people, tore down the houses - and sold it to an auto manufacturer for a price below market rates. This taught a lot of Americans just what "private property" really means to them. Some of us still remember it.
Mapquest really started going downhill after it was bought by Microsoft. They removed a lot of features (such as large maps), added ads, and generally stopped development of the publicly-visible web site. They really pushed to turn it into a money source, but saw the "free" web interface as merely an expense to be minimized.
Google's management seems to understand that their free public services are their own best ads. Maybe they'll keep this approach.
(Now if they'd just add the rest of the world to their maps. I've been using them to add perspective to news stories. But this doesn't work too well for Iraq or Indonesia or even Italy.)
[I]ts just as likely Microsoft will be considerably less powerful 5 years from now. 5 years ago would anyone predict Apple would be doing as well as it has?
Some 20 or 25 years ago there was a study of company lifetimes that got a bit of attention in economic circles. It was really just a large correlation report that attempted to relate company lifetimes with various measurable things about the companies. The interesting result was that size was uncorrelated with survival. They said that giants like GM or IBM were no more likely to exist 5, 10 or 20 years from now than your neighborhood mom-and-pop grocery store or gas station.
Now, I'll let others list the giant corporations of 1980 that are no longer with us. I'll just mention that in 1980, Microsoft was a little upstart, attempting to leverage IBM money and marketing. They succeeded, using methods that most of us here know all too well. But their size, sleaziness and money may not actually mean all that much. They could well be gone or irrelevant 5 or 10 years from now.
Their huge "campaign contributions" may not succeed in getting the US government to save them. Consider that the US government jumped in to save Chrysler with a huge bailout, just a few years ago, but now Chrysler is merely a division of Daimler-Benz. That bailout money didn't save Chrysler, it merely enriched a few top guys who then sold off the company anyway.
Something similar could easily happen with MS. Stories about Bill Gates being the world's richest man occasionally mention that most of this wealth is in the form of stock and stock options. That wealth could evaporate very quickly. If this becomes imminent, we shouldn't be surprised to see some sort of US government support effort that shores MS up while Bill and his buddies convert their funny-money wealth into real money in a flock of accounts scattered around the world. They they'll sell of the pieces of the bankrupt shell and go about their lives. (And conservative pundits will blame the government for the collapse.;-)
If you want to see this in action, read some of the histories of George Bush and his close relatives. Or look for info on the financial dealings of SCO's management.
They are so far behind they don't even have a creditable product to show an alternative to. But they will still tell you that there is a superior windows based solution available.
History shows that they don't need a superior windows-based "solution". They've killed off any number of upstarts (e.g. netscape) by offering something roughly comparable. The trick they use is simply putting it on the Windows desktop for "free". 99% of Windows users will use it, and not know or care that there might be an alternative.
It's pretty clear that they intend to do this with searching. Very soon, Windows will come with a Search icon, which most users will simply use, not knowing or caring whether it has anything to do with google Most of them will probably continue to talk about "googling" for something, while using the MS Search tool, because "google" is now a synonym for "search" in common speech.
But in the long run, this could be to our benefit. Imagine that google follow's netscape's lead, and open-sources their code. Then, as google dies by being gobbled by some giant soulless corporation, the code will be taken over and improved by a flock of geeks. As google's server farm is sold off, a replacement will arise on millions of geeks' machines, organized by a p2p-style network that's now a distributed OS. Whatever Larry and Sergey end up doing, they'll probably be the spiritual leaders of the google mob, and possibly the de-facto leaders along the lines of Linus's role.
Bill, Steve and RIAA/MAPP spokespeople will publicly denounce Larry and Sergey as communists and terrorists, of course, in the same subversive class as Linus, RMS and ESR.
As with the netscape/IE situation, searching will end up split into two different technologies. One will be MS-controlled and MS users' searches will be filtered by what MS wants them to find. The other will become an international, multilingual search system usable on any computer (especially the cheap ones used in Asia, Africa and Latin America). This one will be outside the control of any corporation or government, and will complete the process of becoming the universal source of information that everyone but MS users want.
(Whether it will actually be in use in China is an open question, though expatriot Chinese will be important in its development, in keeping with much of Chinese history.;-)
The Chinese government is paranoid, and quite frankly doesn't trust Microsoft to not have installed backdoors into their software...
They may be paranoid, but this case doesn't qualify for the term.
I remember back in the early 90's, when the first MS TCP/IP software came out, and there were a lot of reviews by early users. One repeated report was from people who noticed their modem lights flickering when the machine was supposedly idle and not running any Net software. So they put a line monitor between the modem and phone to see what the traffic was. They reported seeing lists of the contents of their disk going out some microsoft.com address.
This sort of discovery hasn't disappeared yet. Anyone who does even the most perfunctory study of the situation will conclude that any MS software is highly likely to contain spyware. And MS sells "remote control" software that will allow you to run your machine from a remote location. It doesn't take a lot of brains to understand what this implies.
Of course, such remote control is feasible with any linux or *BSD system, especially if it has X Windows. But in that case, the source code is available, the security system is open, accessible, and well documented. It's nearly impossible to sneak a trapdoor into such systems. In fact, one got into a linux distro last year; it was exposed and blocked in a matter of days. VPN and ssh do a good job of making machines remotely accessible by only the right people.
This was why China was interested in their own Linux distro, because they beleive that if it is done within China, they can make sure nobody slips in any backdoors.
Nah; it's probably for Chinese-language support, mostly. The security issues have been repeadedly beat to death by those thousands of "eyes" in the linux community. The Chinese may want to add their own backdoors to their own distro, but there's little danger of one sneaking in from an outside source. Download a distro off the web, follow the online discussions, and you're about as safe as you can be. Of course, they'll have their own team of hackers to go over everything; they'd be stupid not to. But they're going to find more bugs (especially in the language support) than backdoors. They'll have to add those themselves.
This "Farewell" explosion is one of the examples that has been used in a number of countries in the political push to adopt "open source" software. The basic argument is straightforward: "With proprietary software, you don't have the source, so you can't put your own people to work analyzing the software for spyware, trapdoors, trojans, and other nasty stuff. And, lest you think we're being paranoid, consider this well-documented story of what the US did to the Soviets back in the 1980's..."
Fact is, anyone who installs binary software is susceptible to this sort of attack. Considering the political history of our species, worrying about this is definitely not "paranoia". Whoever you are, if you have money or power, you are a potential target. And if you run binary software, all it takes is a few bribes to the right people and your software can do some really nasty things to you. You have no defense against this.
Most technical artifacts have detailed specs and drawings available to customers who want them. If you buy a vehicle, you can get a shop manual for it at a reasonable price. The major exception to this is software. Eventually, the world will probably wise up, and refuse to use software unless the source is available, just as we don't buy vehicles that don't have a shop manual.
But we're still in the transitional phase, in which decision makers don't yet understand this.
It sounds like the Chinese government has figured it out. A few others have, too, such as Brazil. They're just going through the political battle between those in the pockets of the big software vendors and those who understand the danger. Eventually the issue will be decided.
Of course, it could be decided in favor of a big software vendor, who will then 0wn the country's government.
This is just an Official Policy statement by the Chinese Government announcing they will pirate all software in the future...
So how're they gonna pirate "open" software?
Yeah, they could violate a copyright license like GPL. They could refuse to share their improvements with us. But then they lose the main value of OSS, those thousands of eyes that have given them software that doesn't contain the spyware that's in commercial software. They'd just be shooting themselves in the metaphorical foot. And this would hardly qualify as "piracy".
Not that a Chinese government committee is likely to be smart enough to understand this.
Obviously what's needed is a browser option to ignore width= attributes. This should be trivial to implement in anyy browser. They have to handle the case where no width is specified. So all that's needed is a global flag, a way to turn it on/off, and a test with "width=" is recognized to decide whether to process the attribute. Probably 3 or 4 lines of code in most browsers.
I wonder if any already has this?
I've found this to be the main gotcha in tabbed browsing. For some time, I didn't use it much, because I kept finding that I had to make all browser windows nearly full screen to satisfy the size demands of all the tabs. Eventualy I figured out that, in most cases, it's best to only use multiple tabs from a single site, because most sites use similar forced sizes. So I now use tabs a lot for the sites that I keep on the screen (such as news.google.com and slashdot). But I usually open a new window for a link to a different site, because I don't want it to mess up the sizing of the existing window.
I'll bet that users of tabs in IE will have to slowly learn the same lesson. But maybe firefox can have an ignore-width-attr option, and we can show it off to people who complain about the idiotic sizes of so many web sites. It'll then take MS another 5 years to add that feature to IE...
Popups capturing focus seems to be an inherent bug in all windowing systems. It happens to me all the time on my Mac and linux boxes. I've seen it with X Windows using every window manager I've ever tried. I've asked about it in a couple of newsgroups, and the answer was basically to inform me of what an idiot I am for not appreciating the brilliance of the design.
We should be hitting the developers of every platform for this problem.
Microsoft will now, of course, crow about their revolutionary new Tabbed Browsing(TM) feature that they have provided to enhance your browsing experience, and the unknowing masses will fall for it hook, line and sinker, praising Microsoft as an innovative company who puts the needs of its customers first. This is what, I think, gets most people's goat.
Close, but not quite correct. It doesn't get the goats of "most people, only of a minority. That's the minority that is aware that, once again, Microsoft was the last one in the market to adopt some useful feature.
For most people, it will be a Microsoft innovation, because they've never heard of it before, and will never hear of it until it appears on their Windows screen. They will be reinforced in this belief by the media, who will tell them how nice this new Microsoft feature is, with little mention that everyone else had it years ago.
I wonder if MS's lawyers have filed for a patent on Tabbed Browsing(TM), so they can fight all those others who stole their idea (before they even implemented it)?
Microsoft and Sun... each agree to grant you a license,... to their respective essential patent claims that are necessary to implement the Specification.
I'd imagine that any semi-competent lawyer would immedialy point out that they aren't granting you a license to sell your implementation.
Presumably you will negotiate that license after your have your implementation working...
Breaking into a computer system and appropriating sensistive information from it, and then expecting to be THANKED for doing so, shows a distinct lack of common sense.
Unfortunately, you're quite correct. "Common sense" does include understanding that most people don't want to hear about problems or get them fixed. Someone who demonstrates a problem and offers to fix it is usually punished. Understanding this is an important part of a young person's education.
In a similar story, about 20 years ago I was part of a team of consultants doing some work for a big corporation (which shall remain nameless). In addition to the small computers that we mostly worked on, we had to deal with some databases that lived on the big IBM mainframe. Out of the usual frustration with inter-departmental stuff that kept needed data out of our hands, one evening several of us stayed late and attacked the mainframe's file-security stuff. The next morning, we gave a demo that we could read any file on the system.
Now, in this case, our boss and the client's top management were overjoyed. They could get the reports they needed, and no amount of obstructionism from department DP people could block access to the databases. I even wrote some consistency-checking "sanity check" database programs and handed them over to users, so they could spot data-entry problems and fix them before they caused serious trouble. The DP people hated this loss of control, but the users were very happy.
Then our little gang of consultants had a serious discussion about whether we should inform IBM of what we'd done. Eventually we reached a concensus: Nah. IBM wouldn't reward us for the info. There would be lots of others that would pay us for giving them access to their own data. We'd be fools to do anything that could end this situation, which was good for nearly everyone involved.
You might say that we had "common sense" to keep quiet about our violation of file security. I'd have to agree. And I think this says a lot about the nature of most human organizations.
These kids should learn that they should never report such problems to the authorities. They should do as the authorities obvious want: They should keep what they've learned quiet, and look for people who will pay them for using the information.
If you don't like thinking of this, well, you should think about rewarding people who discover problems. Punishing them only leads to learning the obvious "common sense" lesson.
If anything will make Sun succeed it is this ability to deal with the Microsofts and IBMs and survive.
So how many companies have ever made a "strategic alliance" with Microsoft and survived more than a few years?
I remember working on a couple of consulting projects at DEC during their last years. Inside the company, the conventional explanation of their problems was that their PC division was a financial disaster forced on them by "GQ Bob" and "the suits". Everyone expected this to kill DEC, just like it had killed so many other companies that tried to encroach on MS turf.
It'll be, uh, "interesting" to see how Sun survives their attempt to make a deal with the computer industry's currently most-vicious predator.
(It's also interesting to watch IBM's attempt to downplay the fact that this used to be their rôle. Whether they've actually learned anything from the evolution of an even more powerful economic predator is yet to be seen.;-)
I telnet directly to port 80 and issue HTTP commands by hand.
Heh. I did that yesterday afternoon, to get the HTTP headers from a site without any filtering by overly user-friendly software. This was to diagnose a problem rendering some pages in mozilla and firefox. For some reason, browsers don't like to show you things like HTTP headers. I think it's because browser writers think the rest of us are too stupid or ignorant to understand such arcanae.
I've found that it can be fun to watch other people's reaction when I do this, then start pointing to various things in the reply. "Wow! You can do that!? Who'd have guessed?" (Some of them say "Is that all it takes?";-)
Gives you lots of geek points. They think you're a real web hacker.
(Actually, rather than telnet, I usually prefer to use a little perl wget-like tool that I wrote a few years back. I like to see a bit of analysis of the conversation with the server, so I know exactly what the program sent, exactly what the reply was, how long the delays were, etc. But telnet is good for simple cases like getting HTTP headers.)
Actually implementing it might be non-trivial. You'd have to get the readers installed in the appropriate bars, adult stores, cheap motels, etc. This would entail the cooperation of the management, many of whom would probably think it's a fun project. But still, it would mean a lot of one-on-one talks with managers. You'd have to install the equipment, check it out, and maintain the comm channels.
Actually, it sounds like something that both tabloid and muckraking news orgs might find interesting...
Just google for "shielded wallet" or "shielded clothes". Lots of hits.
This sort of product has been for sale for decades. There's nothing particularly secretive about it. Most of them were developed for electronics workers. If you work around electronic equipment, and have credit cards in your pocket, it can be sensible to shield them. If you're wearing a pacemaker, you might also be in the market for a sheilding t-shirt. And so on. The advent of RFID will probably increase the market.
I couldn't tell you how well any of them work. I haven't actually used any of them. I've just seen the ads over the years, probably because I've worked with computers for decades. I have had credit cards suddenly become unreadable, with no visible scratches on the strips, so I've considered a shielded wallet. But it hasn't happened often enough to make it an urgent purchase.
putting your ID in an anti-static bag to prevent reading will not be very popular with 'the man.'
Probably not. But they'll have to put up with it, for the same reason that they were forced to allow general use of encryption. RealID is an open invitation to identity theft, as is any ID based on RFID. It can be read without you knowing any time you get close to a hidden RFID reader.
Carrying a RealID card around unshielded makes about as much sense as sending your login/password across the Net in the clear. Anyone with any sense will shield the former, just as they encrypt the latter. No amount of intoning "National Security" will change this.
Sure, we'll hear lots of reassuring words. But all it'll take is a few reports of stolen RealID info, and reassuring words simply won't work.
We might note that there are already several RF-shielded wallets for sale in the US. I'll bet that sales will soon increase. And, y'know, my wallet is getting a bit old and worn...
Heh. As expected, you got comments from the "government is always corrupt" people.
But in a couple of decades of working in the corporate world, I've seen the same story over and over. Everything you wrote fits very nicely with most of the jobs that I've had. As a techie, I've often been in a position to advise the decision makers, but the decision on what to buy was always someone else's. And they almost always picked the middle-cost choice, regardless of technical merit. Your strategy of putting what you want in the middle is common everywhere.
In my experience, pretty much every criticism I've ever read about government applies equally well to any corporation. Probably because they're all organizations of humans, and human organizations have a common set of irrationalities.
What you should realize is that programming itself is a game.
The way it's scored is: Every time your code does something the way you intended, you get a point. Every time something in The System (the compiler, runtime runtime libraries, OS kernel, whatever) finds a way to interpret what you wrote differently from how you intended, the person who wrote that code gets a point.
A good programmer is one who wins more often than s/he loses.
One of the reasons that programmers like unixoid system so much is that it's much easier to win the programming game there than on other systems.
The AC who dissed it as "for the kids" is full of himself. (Or way smarter than I am) I first read it at ~14,...
So, by your own words, it obviously is for the kids.;-)
OK; it probably isn't for your typical mall rat. But there are plenty of intelligent, literate kids lurking about, looking for something worth spending their time on. Who cares if they're a minority? We need to get books like this into their hands.
The idea that a book is "for" people of a certain age is fundamentally flawed. It's for anyone who can understand it.
There have been a number of suggestions that copyright should expire when the protected work has been unavailable from the owner for a fixed period, typically 1 year.
This would protect works that are still generating income for the owner, while preventing the problem of having all our culture locked up in vaults forever, unavailable to anyone.
This has particularly been suggested for software, but usually with the concept of "support" thrown in. Imagine if, when a company's CS people told you that their product X is no longer supported, you could simply demand that they email you the source code, since their lack of support means that it's now public domain.
Not likely to happen, though. This would undercut a major business model of much of the software industry, based on forcing you to "upgrade" to a new! improved! product.
But it's fun to think of a society in which we could demand that the RIAA and MPAA companies hand over all those early works that they have locked up in their vaults, unavailable to anyone.
Slashdot Mirror
Doctorow's assertion, of course, is entirely anecdotal. Where are the numbers that might substantiate it?
Reminds me of an "anecdotal proof" that I like to use to confuse people who think that anecdotes can't prove anything.
Hereabouts there are a number of "tech" bookstores, mostly at colleges but not entirely. If you walk in, the first thing you see is the display of the current tech bestsellers. A quick check will verify that almost all of these are available online, usually in PDF form, and most of the downloads are free. But there the hard copy is, sitting in the display that's reserved for bestsellers.
It's even worse: If you open the books, most of they have a foreword that tells you about the online download. Most give the URL.
So how can the sales possibly be nonzero? They're being given away free, and they tell you right up front that you can get them free. But people walk into the bookstores and buy them. Are these people idiots? Given the usual clientele of these stores, I'd guess not.
Now, I'll point out that this is in fact "just another anecdote". I haven't given any numbers. I haven't said anything that would prove that there are any sales at all.
But these books wouldn't be on those particular shelves unless the people running the store thought that they'd sell. Some of these stores have been there for years. The people running them aren't idiots. They are successful businessmen making the judgement that these books are good ones to display up front.
So here we have rather convincing "anecdotal evidence" that giving things away free doesn't necessarily kill sales. It may well be helping sales (but that's really hard to infer from anecdotes).
Actually, I also wonder if there are real numbers on the topic. I haven't yet seen any that I trust. But seeing things being listed as bestsellers when they're available free online is sorta convincing that something funny is going on here.
However, when you get down to it, what does any of this have to do with criticism of repression in Cuba?
Well, as others here have pointed out it makes the US look rather hypocritical in much of the rest of the world. People hear American politicians criticising Cuba very loudly. Then they read about American treatment of captives at Guantanamo. They also hear and read of the treatment of millions of Americans who, mostly due to their race or ethnic background, are treated every bit as badly as Cubans, if not worse. They read news like the Abu Ghraib prisoners. This is followed by stories about the treatment of prisoners in American prisons, showing that Abu Ghraib is not an anomaly. Rush Limbaugh tells the world that the treatment of those prisoners was no worse than typical college frat initiations, and investigation shows that he was right. All this doesn't really look very good, does it?
Repression should be criticized and fought wherever it is found, including in the U.S.
Yup; that's what I was doing. And trying to put it into a bit of perspective. In many respects, American society is very open and free. But there are some glaring exceptions. With the advent of the Internet, it has become very difficult to keep this hidden from the rest of the world.
Now if we could use all this to improve the situation in the US. Yeah, maybe it's better than a lot of the world already. But that's no excuse, not when the US government is using "freedom" as an excuse to invade other countries. But perhaps by harping on the subject enough, we can get things cleaned up in the US a bit, too.
But probably not real soon.
Which month was that? ;-)
...
I think that was more recent. There was a period when mapquest, mapblast and mappoint all had Microsoft logos and copyright notices, but I don't remember when it was.
Actually, in looking over my small collection of gif maplets from the past 5 years, I see that nearly every one has a different set of copyright notices (though most include NavTech). And none of the images mentions Microsoft. The MS logos were all on the web pages, and the stuff there also seems to change every 6 months or so.
I wonder how many copyrights there are on your typical map image?
The real disappointment in online map sites is that National Geographic's web site is so crappy. They have such potential
I have lived for a number of years in America, though, and my experience is that ordinary citizens there aren't afraid of their government(s) in the same way that they are in Cuba.
Close, but I think you meant to say "ordinary white citizens".
In the American subpopulations of the black and latino persuasions, there is quite a lot of fear of their government, especially of the police and drug-enforcement agents. How comparable this is to Cubans' fear of their government I can't say. But some parts of American society are subject to arbitrary arrest and detention without trial. Common estimates are that 1/3 of black men and around 1/5 or 1/6 of latino men will spend part of their life in prison. This is something to keep in mind when Americans congratulate themselves on their free and open society.
Would you say that our "ownership" is simply a privilege granted to us by the state?
You got that exactly right.
In any country in the world, the government has the "right" to take your property, and pay you a price that they determine (which is sometimes zero).
In some countries, the government is up front about this, making it clear in property documents that you are merely granted use of the property until such time as the government wants it.
In others (such as the US), there's a pretense of private ownership. But when the government wants your property, they simply take it by "eminent domain" (google for it), and it's no longer yours. You have no recourse, unless you have the funds to bribe the right people.
You can talk all you like about property being yours. But it's just a nice social myth, belied by the actions of your own government.
A few years ago, there was a notorious case in Detroit. The city grabbed a big chunk of land by eminent domain, kicked out the people, tore down the houses - and sold it to an auto manufacturer for a price below market rates. This taught a lot of Americans just what "private property" really means to them. Some of us still remember it.
Google Maps kicks the pants off of Mapquest.
Mapquest really started going downhill after it was bought by Microsoft. They removed a lot of features (such as large maps), added ads, and generally stopped development of the publicly-visible web site. They really pushed to turn it into a money source, but saw the "free" web interface as merely an expense to be minimized.
Google's management seems to understand that their free public services are their own best ads. Maybe they'll keep this approach.
(Now if they'd just add the rest of the world to their maps. I've been using them to add perspective to news stories. But this doesn't work too well for Iraq or Indonesia or even Italy.)
[I]ts just as likely Microsoft will be considerably less powerful 5 years from now. 5 years ago would anyone predict Apple would be doing as well as it has?
;-)
..
Some 20 or 25 years ago there was a study of company lifetimes that got a bit of attention in economic circles. It was really just a large correlation report that attempted to relate company lifetimes with various measurable things about the companies. The interesting result was that size was uncorrelated with survival. They said that giants like GM or IBM were no more likely to exist 5, 10 or 20 years from now than your neighborhood mom-and-pop grocery store or gas station.
Now, I'll let others list the giant corporations of 1980 that are no longer with us. I'll just mention that in 1980, Microsoft was a little upstart, attempting to leverage IBM money and marketing. They succeeded, using methods that most of us here know all too well. But their size, sleaziness and money may not actually mean all that much. They could well be gone or irrelevant 5 or 10 years from now.
Their huge "campaign contributions" may not succeed in getting the US government to save them. Consider that the US government jumped in to save Chrysler with a huge bailout, just a few years ago, but now Chrysler is merely a division of Daimler-Benz. That bailout money didn't save Chrysler, it merely enriched a few top guys who then sold off the company anyway.
Something similar could easily happen with MS. Stories about Bill Gates being the world's richest man occasionally mention that most of this wealth is in the form of stock and stock options. That wealth could evaporate very quickly. If this becomes imminent, we shouldn't be surprised to see some sort of US government support effort that shores MS up while Bill and his buddies convert their funny-money wealth into real money in a flock of accounts scattered around the world. They they'll sell of the pieces of the bankrupt shell and go about their lives. (And conservative pundits will blame the government for the collapse.
If you want to see this in action, read some of the histories of George Bush and his close relatives. Or look for info on the financial dealings of SCO's management.
It's an old story
They are so far behind they don't even have a creditable product to show an alternative to. But they will still tell you that there is a superior windows based solution available.
;-)
History shows that they don't need a superior windows-based "solution". They've killed off any number of upstarts (e.g. netscape) by offering something roughly comparable. The trick they use is simply putting it on the Windows desktop for "free". 99% of Windows users will use it, and not know or care that there might be an alternative.
It's pretty clear that they intend to do this with searching. Very soon, Windows will come with a Search icon, which most users will simply use, not knowing or caring whether it has anything to do with google Most of them will probably continue to talk about "googling" for something, while using the MS Search tool, because "google" is now a synonym for "search" in common speech.
But in the long run, this could be to our benefit. Imagine that google follow's netscape's lead, and open-sources their code. Then, as google dies by being gobbled by some giant soulless corporation, the code will be taken over and improved by a flock of geeks. As google's server farm is sold off, a replacement will arise on millions of geeks' machines, organized by a p2p-style network that's now a distributed OS. Whatever Larry and Sergey end up doing, they'll probably be the spiritual leaders of the google mob, and possibly the de-facto leaders along the lines of Linus's role.
Bill, Steve and RIAA/MAPP spokespeople will publicly denounce Larry and Sergey as communists and terrorists, of course, in the same subversive class as Linus, RMS and ESR.
As with the netscape/IE situation, searching will end up split into two different technologies. One will be MS-controlled and MS users' searches will be filtered by what MS wants them to find. The other will become an international, multilingual search system usable on any computer (especially the cheap ones used in Asia, Africa and Latin America). This one will be outside the control of any corporation or government, and will complete the process of becoming the universal source of information that everyone but MS users want.
(Whether it will actually be in use in China is an open question, though expatriot Chinese will be important in its development, in keeping with much of Chinese history.
Anyone else got a good scenario?
The Chinese government is paranoid, and quite frankly doesn't trust Microsoft to not have installed backdoors into their software ...
;-)
They may be paranoid, but this case doesn't qualify for the term.
I remember back in the early 90's, when the first MS TCP/IP software came out, and there were a lot of reviews by early users. One repeated report was from people who noticed their modem lights flickering when the machine was supposedly idle and not running any Net software. So they put a line monitor between the modem and phone to see what the traffic was. They reported seeing lists of the contents of their disk going out some microsoft.com address.
This sort of discovery hasn't disappeared yet. Anyone who does even the most perfunctory study of the situation will conclude that any MS software is highly likely to contain spyware. And MS sells "remote control" software that will allow you to run your machine from a remote location. It doesn't take a lot of brains to understand what this implies.
Of course, such remote control is feasible with any linux or *BSD system, especially if it has X Windows. But in that case, the source code is available, the security system is open, accessible, and well documented. It's nearly impossible to sneak a trapdoor into such systems. In fact, one got into a linux distro last year; it was exposed and blocked in a matter of days. VPN and ssh do a good job of making machines remotely accessible by only the right people.
This was why China was interested in their own Linux distro, because they beleive that if it is done within China, they can make sure nobody slips in any backdoors.
Nah; it's probably for Chinese-language support, mostly. The security issues have been repeadedly beat to death by those thousands of "eyes" in the linux community. The Chinese may want to add their own backdoors to their own distro, but there's little danger of one sneaking in from an outside source. Download a distro off the web, follow the online discussions, and you're about as safe as you can be. Of course, they'll have their own team of hackers to go over everything; they'd be stupid not to. But they're going to find more bugs (especially in the language support) than backdoors. They'll have to add those themselves.
They will, of course.
This "Farewell" explosion is one of the examples that has been used in a number of countries in the political push to adopt "open source" software. The basic argument is straightforward: "With proprietary software, you don't have the source, so you can't put your own people to work analyzing the software for spyware, trapdoors, trojans, and other nasty stuff. And, lest you think we're being paranoid, consider this well-documented story of what the US did to the Soviets back in the 1980's ..."
Fact is, anyone who installs binary software is susceptible to this sort of attack. Considering the political history of our species, worrying about this is definitely not "paranoia". Whoever you are, if you have money or power, you are a potential target. And if you run binary software, all it takes is a few bribes to the right people and your software can do some really nasty things to you. You have no defense against this.
Most technical artifacts have detailed specs and drawings available to customers who want them. If you buy a vehicle, you can get a shop manual for it at a reasonable price. The major exception to this is software. Eventually, the world will probably wise up, and refuse to use software unless the source is available, just as we don't buy vehicles that don't have a shop manual.
But we're still in the transitional phase, in which decision makers don't yet understand this.
It sounds like the Chinese government has figured it out. A few others have, too, such as Brazil. They're just going through the political battle between those in the pockets of the big software vendors and those who understand the danger. Eventually the issue will be decided.
Of course, it could be decided in favor of a big software vendor, who will then 0wn the country's government.
This is just an Official Policy statement by the Chinese Government announcing they will pirate all software in the future ...
So how're they gonna pirate "open" software?
Yeah, they could violate a copyright license like GPL. They could refuse to share their improvements with us. But then they lose the main value of OSS, those thousands of eyes that have given them software that doesn't contain the spyware that's in commercial software. They'd just be shooting themselves in the metaphorical foot. And this would hardly qualify as "piracy".
Not that a Chinese government committee is likely to be smart enough to understand this.
I also don't like fixed-width websites, ...
...
Obviously what's needed is a browser option to ignore width= attributes. This should be trivial to implement in anyy browser. They have to handle the case where no width is specified. So all that's needed is a global flag, a way to turn it on/off, and a test with "width=" is recognized to decide whether to process the attribute. Probably 3 or 4 lines of code in most browsers.
I wonder if any already has this?
I've found this to be the main gotcha in tabbed browsing. For some time, I didn't use it much, because I kept finding that I had to make all browser windows nearly full screen to satisfy the size demands of all the tabs. Eventualy I figured out that, in most cases, it's best to only use multiple tabs from a single site, because most sites use similar forced sizes. So I now use tabs a lot for the sites that I keep on the screen (such as news.google.com and slashdot). But I usually open a new window for a link to a different site, because I don't want it to mess up the sizing of the existing window.
I'll bet that users of tabs in IE will have to slowly learn the same lesson. But maybe firefox can have an ignore-width-attr option, and we can show it off to people who complain about the idiotic sizes of so many web sites. It'll then take MS another 5 years to add that feature to IE
Popups capturing focus seems to be an inherent bug in all windowing systems. It happens to me all the time on my Mac and linux boxes. I've seen it with X Windows using every window manager I've ever tried. I've asked about it in a couple of newsgroups, and the answer was basically to inform me of what an idiot I am for not appreciating the brilliance of the design.
We should be hitting the developers of every platform for this problem.
Microsoft will now, of course, crow about their revolutionary new Tabbed Browsing(TM) feature that they have provided to enhance your browsing experience, and the unknowing masses will fall for it hook, line and sinker, praising Microsoft as an innovative company who puts the needs of its customers first. This is what, I think, gets most people's goat.
Close, but not quite correct. It doesn't get the goats of "most people, only of a minority. That's the minority that is aware that, once again, Microsoft was the last one in the market to adopt some useful feature.
For most people, it will be a Microsoft innovation, because they've never heard of it before, and will never hear of it until it appears on their Windows screen. They will be reinforced in this belief by the media, who will tell them how nice this new Microsoft feature is, with little mention that everyone else had it years ago.
I wonder if MS's lawyers have filed for a patent on Tabbed Browsing(TM), so they can fight all those others who stole their idea (before they even implemented it)?
Microsoft and Sun ... each agree to grant you a license, ... to their respective essential patent claims that are necessary to implement the Specification.
...
I'd imagine that any semi-competent lawyer would immedialy point out that they aren't granting you a license to sell your implementation.
Presumably you will negotiate that license after your have your implementation working
Breaking into a computer system and appropriating sensistive information from it, and then expecting to be THANKED for doing so, shows a distinct lack of common sense.
Unfortunately, you're quite correct. "Common sense" does include understanding that most people don't want to hear about problems or get them fixed. Someone who demonstrates a problem and offers to fix it is usually punished. Understanding this is an important part of a young person's education.
In a similar story, about 20 years ago I was part of a team of consultants doing some work for a big corporation (which shall remain nameless). In addition to the small computers that we mostly worked on, we had to deal with some databases that lived on the big IBM mainframe. Out of the usual frustration with inter-departmental stuff that kept needed data out of our hands, one evening several of us stayed late and attacked the mainframe's file-security stuff. The next morning, we gave a demo that we could read any file on the system.
Now, in this case, our boss and the client's top management were overjoyed. They could get the reports they needed, and no amount of obstructionism from department DP people could block access to the databases. I even wrote some consistency-checking "sanity check" database programs and handed them over to users, so they could spot data-entry problems and fix them before they caused serious trouble. The DP people hated this loss of control, but the users were very happy.
Then our little gang of consultants had a serious discussion about whether we should inform IBM of what we'd done. Eventually we reached a concensus: Nah. IBM wouldn't reward us for the info. There would be lots of others that would pay us for giving them access to their own data. We'd be fools to do anything that could end this situation, which was good for nearly everyone involved.
You might say that we had "common sense" to keep quiet about our violation of file security. I'd have to agree. And I think this says a lot about the nature of most human organizations.
These kids should learn that they should never report such problems to the authorities. They should do as the authorities obvious want: They should keep what they've learned quiet, and look for people who will pay them for using the information.
If you don't like thinking of this, well, you should think about rewarding people who discover problems. Punishing them only leads to learning the obvious "common sense" lesson.
If anything will make Sun succeed it is this ability to deal with the Microsofts and IBMs and survive.
;-)
So how many companies have ever made a "strategic alliance" with Microsoft and survived more than a few years?
I remember working on a couple of consulting projects at DEC during their last years. Inside the company, the conventional explanation of their problems was that their PC division was a financial disaster forced on them by "GQ Bob" and "the suits". Everyone expected this to kill DEC, just like it had killed so many other companies that tried to encroach on MS turf.
It'll be, uh, "interesting" to see how Sun survives their attempt to make a deal with the computer industry's currently most-vicious predator.
(It's also interesting to watch IBM's attempt to downplay the fact that this used to be their rôle. Whether they've actually learned anything from the evolution of an even more powerful economic predator is yet to be seen.
I telnet directly to port 80 and issue HTTP commands by hand.
;-)
Heh. I did that yesterday afternoon, to get the HTTP headers from a site without any filtering by overly user-friendly software. This was to diagnose a problem rendering some pages in mozilla and firefox. For some reason, browsers don't like to show you things like HTTP headers. I think it's because browser writers think the rest of us are too stupid or ignorant to understand such arcanae.
I've found that it can be fun to watch other people's reaction when I do this, then start pointing to various things in the reply. "Wow! You can do that!? Who'd have guessed?" (Some of them say "Is that all it takes?"
Gives you lots of geek points. They think you're a real web hacker.
(Actually, rather than telnet, I usually prefer to use a little perl wget-like tool that I wrote a few years back. I like to see a bit of analysis of the conversation with the server, so I know exactly what the program sent, exactly what the reply was, how long the delays were, etc. But telnet is good for simple cases like getting HTTP headers.)
Heh. Good idea.
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Actually implementing it might be non-trivial. You'd have to get the readers installed in the appropriate bars, adult stores, cheap motels, etc. This would entail the cooperation of the management, many of whom would probably think it's a fun project. But still, it would mean a lot of one-on-one talks with managers. You'd have to install the equipment, check it out, and maintain the comm channels.
Actually, it sounds like something that both tabloid and muckraking news orgs might find interesting
Just google for "shielded wallet" or "shielded clothes". Lots of hits.
This sort of product has been for sale for decades. There's nothing particularly secretive about it. Most of them were developed for electronics workers. If you work around electronic equipment, and have credit cards in your pocket, it can be sensible to shield them. If you're wearing a pacemaker, you might also be in the market for a sheilding t-shirt. And so on. The advent of RFID will probably increase the market.
I couldn't tell you how well any of them work. I haven't actually used any of them. I've just seen the ads over the years, probably because I've worked with computers for decades. I have had credit cards suddenly become unreadable, with no visible scratches on the strips, so I've considered a shielded wallet. But it hasn't happened often enough to make it an urgent purchase.
putting your ID in an anti-static bag to prevent reading will not be very popular with 'the man.'
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Probably not. But they'll have to put up with it, for the same reason that they were forced to allow general use of encryption. RealID is an open invitation to identity theft, as is any ID based on RFID. It can be read without you knowing any time you get close to a hidden RFID reader.
Carrying a RealID card around unshielded makes about as much sense as sending your login/password across the Net in the clear. Anyone with any sense will shield the former, just as they encrypt the latter. No amount of intoning "National Security" will change this.
Sure, we'll hear lots of reassuring words. But all it'll take is a few reports of stolen RealID info, and reassuring words simply won't work.
We might note that there are already several RF-shielded wallets for sale in the US. I'll bet that sales will soon increase. And, y'know, my wallet is getting a bit old and worn
Heh. As expected, you got comments from the "government is always corrupt" people.
But in a couple of decades of working in the corporate world, I've seen the same story over and over. Everything you wrote fits very nicely with most of the jobs that I've had. As a techie, I've often been in a position to advise the decision makers, but the decision on what to buy was always someone else's. And they almost always picked the middle-cost choice, regardless of technical merit. Your strategy of putting what you want in the middle is common everywhere.
In my experience, pretty much every criticism I've ever read about government applies equally well to any corporation. Probably because they're all organizations of humans, and human organizations have a common set of irrationalities.
But even now I would rather game than program.
What you should realize is that programming itself is a game.
The way it's scored is: Every time your code does something the way you intended, you get a point. Every time something in The System (the compiler, runtime runtime libraries, OS kernel, whatever) finds a way to interpret what you wrote differently from how you intended, the person who wrote that code gets a point.
A good programmer is one who wins more often than s/he loses.
One of the reasons that programmers like unixoid system so much is that it's much easier to win the programming game there than on other systems.
The AC who dissed it as "for the kids" is full of himself. (Or way smarter than I am) I first read it at ~14, ...
;-)
So, by your own words, it obviously is for the kids.
OK; it probably isn't for your typical mall rat. But there are plenty of intelligent, literate kids lurking about, looking for something worth spending their time on. Who cares if they're a minority? We need to get books like this into their hands.
The idea that a book is "for" people of a certain age is fundamentally flawed. It's for anyone who can understand it.
There have been a number of suggestions that copyright should expire when the protected work has been unavailable from the owner for a fixed period, typically 1 year.
This would protect works that are still generating income for the owner, while preventing the problem of having all our culture locked up in vaults forever, unavailable to anyone.
This has particularly been suggested for software, but usually with the concept of "support" thrown in. Imagine if, when a company's CS people told you that their product X is no longer supported, you could simply demand that they email you the source code, since their lack of support means that it's now public domain.
Not likely to happen, though. This would undercut a major business model of much of the software industry, based on forcing you to "upgrade" to a new! improved! product.
But it's fun to think of a society in which we could demand that the RIAA and MPAA companies hand over all those early works that they have locked up in their vaults, unavailable to anyone.