My brand new Powerbook doesn't seem to know what to do with it. It's sitting there in my home directory, as shown by:
: file BitT* BitTorrent_OSX_3.2.2a.dmg: VAX COFF executable not stripped - version 3277 :
VAX COFF? WFT? No mention that I can find of.dmg files anywhere in the online docs. The web site doesn't seem to point to any help or howto pages. Anyone got a pointer to an explanation for dummies like me?;-)
Long replies are fine. "There should be flexibility regarding the length of the reply, since there are (fewer) capacity limits for content than (there are) in off-line media."
This seems to be saying that if you make even a 1-line comment about my organization or country or whatever, I can flood you with terabytes of replies, and you must buy the disks to hold them.
This isn't a frivolous concern. In several political disputes (e.g., Turks re the Armenian massacre, Greeks re the state of Macedonia, and several others), there is a history of even a passing mention in a newsgroup producing a flood of automated "replies" that makes the newsgroup unusable. There is software that scans for keyworkd and posts the replies, which sometimes measure in gigabytes.
OTOH, if there is any sort of limit other than a hard byte count, we can expect that even the slightest fuzziness in the law will result in huge lawsuits with the intent of bankrupting the person who posted the passing comment. This is the nature of much politics.
Is there any reasonable defense against this, other than to never say anything about anyone that is less than the most fulsome praise?
Ah! I understand now. If I simply remove all the comments from my code, I won't have to worry about infringing SCO's copyrights.
I can do that. All it takes is a little perl program. I can probably do it as a one-liner. And I'll be sure not to comment it.
One thing that puzzles me, though. There is an old theory about the lack of comments in the original Bell Labs unix: Before sending it out to universities, the folks at Bell Labs ran it through a filter that deleted comments. This was later verified (by Ken, IIRC) as not a rumor at all; they had such a program.
This would imply that if you actually use the AT&T code, all you have to do is add comments, and your code would be different enough to avoid an infringement charge.
This is apparently what SCO did, since they are charging people with stealing their comments. So making any infringing linux code should be especially easy. Just strip out all the comments.
I'd post a URL for a comment stripper, but I'd bet that any perl, tcl or python hacker here can type the program faster than/. can get it into a web page, especially if I use the Preview button. In fact, I'd bet that a lot of they have typed in just such a program as soon as they read the parent comment.
Since I don't have the money to defend myself in court like IBM, I'd really like to comply with SCO's claims that not just linux, but a lot of other software infringes on SCO's claimed copyright. I'm just a bit puzzled as to how I might go about this.
For example, I'm looking at a line of code in one of my GPL'd programs:
i += j - n;
Does this infringe on any code claimed by SCO? How would I know?
The only way I can think of is that SCO should send me a copy of their code. I can easily write a little perl script that will compare every line of my code with every line of theirs, and I can rewrite anything that seems to be infringing.
Can anyone think of another way?
Since my code is GPL'd and on my web site, SCO could do it themselves. But they are probably pretty busy, so I'd rather do it myself. Anyway, recent history shows that when they find infringing code, they don't send the programmer a nice message so the code can be changed. SCO just sues them for big bucks. I'd much rather avoid this threat, and save them time, by eliminating any infringements myself.
SCO doesn't need to send me their code. If someone at SCO would just package it up in a few.tgz files and post the URL here, I can download it and take care of it myself.
Note that this bill requires that the carriers stop the spam. This requires that they develop and install software to detect it. So in addition to just transmitting messages, the carriers are required to install software that examines every message, classifies it as to content, and take some action based on that content.
It's hardly any secret that lots of governments are themselves developing such software. But in this case, the government has figured out that it doesn't have to pay for the development. It can require that the carriers pay for the development. Then the government can buy/take the software and reconfigure it for political uses.
Well, yeah, but TV isn't exactly an open window on the world. It's a limited set of shows, controlled by a small oligarchy of suppliers. And how many channels are available in Bhutan?
If you really want people exposed to all their choices, you should be pushing to bring them the Internet. They they can all read/. and find out what's really going on.;-)
Of course, feudal governments do like to block internet access. It's 80% porn, y'know. Even worse, people might discover google, start reading news.google.com, and following the links to the couple thousand news sources that they sample.
But, quite frankly, you can't even treat TV as a window on the whole world, not even in North Americ and Europe. It is full of social propaganda, yes, but for only a very narrow definition of "social". Better than what your local religious folks provide, maybe, but not anything that qualifies as education.
I'm more impressed by governments that permit full access to both the phone system and the Net. (And those are slowly converging, of course.)
Well, when I reread the article, I note that it was just a commentary on the real story, and the author made the same mistake of taking "free software" to mean "no-cost software". But the actual article used the phrase "Software Libre", which doesn't mean no-cost at all.
Also, there is a quote explaining that "our main concern is the security and the trust of our citizens". This makes it clear that the intent of the Brazilians is not just to save money (though they like that idea, too), but rather to have secure and trustworthy software. That can only be achieved with software that can be examined and understood, which means software for which the source is available to the public.
This seems to make it clear that the Brazilians are primarily demanding that software be open to examination. So it is very much like requiring a shop manual with a vehicle. Of course, the fact that such "open" software is usually cheaper than closed software is also nice and helps convince people to vote for it.
In any case, this doesn't prevent anyone at all from selling their software in Brazil. It merely says that if you want to sell to government agencies, you must also supply the source. Without any silly NDA.
And it's really no different than, say, if you want to sell vehicles to a government agency. It's routine for such buyers to insist on full shop manuals with every sale, so that the guys in their fleet shop can maintain them. Hardly any government agency anywhere takes their cars to the dealer for maintenance. (Well, actually, some do, but usually only if the dealer gives them a deal comparable with doing it themselves.)
How is it that software vendors think they can get away with keeping the inner workings of their products secret, when this is hardly done with any other products except for cheap disposables?
So, bravo for the Brazilian government. They're finally wising up. No government with a grain of sense would buy software whose inner workings are unknowable and unfixable. Especially not from a big foreign-owned company that doesn't have your interests at heart. And that's what we're really talking about here.
Heh, gotta get in a gratuitous Al Gore quip. There's a lotta truth to the idea that it was developed by a flock of college students with time on their hands. But this was because the Defense Department's ARPA project subsidised them. Instead of flipping burgers to pay their way through school, they could spend their spare time in the lab hacking the Arpanet.
So we had the wonderful irony of a bunch of idealistic, individualistic, and sometimes rather radical students being paid by the military to develop the communication system that the military needed but the commercial world wouldn't develop. Mostly because the DoD wanted every electronic device to talk to every other, using the same protocols, but commercial vendors do everything in their power to prevent this. What better idea than to turn all the equipment over to a gang of free-thinking students, and tell them to make everything play nice together. When they succeed, you grab copies of all their good stuff and you have your military comm system. Meanwhile, the students graduate into the Real World, sorely miss their comm system, and start sneaking it into the rest of our society.
And, of course, the commercial guys do everything in their power to convince everyone that they invented it all. And they don't even give Al Gore any credit.
I wouldn't make any large bets on it never happening. Remember that the Internet wasn't invented by those telcos or ISPs; it was develooped 100% on government-supported projects.
And there's an obvious metaphor that's been with us for years: The highway system. In most of the world, it is "free", and all you have to buy out of your own money is a vehicle.
It isn't really free, in the "free beer" sense, of course, since we all pay for it with taxes. But it is free in the "free speech" sense, since anyone can use most roads without paying anything extra.
It's true that there are a few privately-owned roads, but they are generally a very small portion of the roads. And there are toll roads, but they are mostly short, high-capacity roads.
We could very easily end up with the same system for bandwidth. In all parts of the world, bandwidth is legally "public" property, i.e., owned by the government. And when parts of it have been leased to private business, the result has generally been a "vast wasteland", built up with near total disregard for the needs or desires of the general population.
The business world has, quite frankly, done a crappy job of making Net access available to the masses. They provide support only to MS customers, block ports 80 and 25, and extract things from customer messages for commercial use. And they sue us for making use of it in the obvious ways.
All it would take is enough people getting disgusted with this to produce a widespread "public" network. It's already happening in many rural areas, where commercial comm companies see no prfit in supplying service.
Of course, if the telcos and ISPs would provide true Internet service over wide areas, they could probably become very popular. But there's no sign this is happening. They are being dragged kicking and screaming into the 21st century, all the while trying to protect their traditional way.
The new "mesh" buzzword could well be their death rattle. Stay tuned. It should be fun to watch.
Of course. But linux users are not a random sampling of all users. They have a strong tendency to be people who are interested in understanding what their computer is doing. That's why they use a system where such understanding is possible. (OSX is now producing an influx of such people into the Mac camp, and we're suggesting to the client that they consider replacing the Windoze machines with Macs for all their non-computer-geek users. You can probably recite the list of arguments for this.)
In the case at hand, I'd bet that most of the linux users could, with perhaps a bit of extra training, handle most of the in-house support that the client needs. We'd be happy to do the training, of course (for a small fee;-).
In fact, we're doing just that, though on a somewhat informal basis. We put up web interfaces on our development systems and invite the clients' people to help us test it. We get a lot of good feedback this way. The only problem is that they find it so useful that they start using it regularly, and then get upset when we do something that breaks a development system for a few hours. We have to keep reminding them that that machine's for development and isn't reliable. But they don't want to move to the "live" machines, because those don't yet have all the features they want.
In any case, it's fairly clear that the client's linux users are willing and able to jump in as alpha and beta testers and are already developing the in-house expertise that they need. The big problem is being impolite and saying "Sorry, but I don't really need your help just yet. I'll send some email when it's ready for testing."
We can praise the nations that throw caution to the wind and roll out Linux rapidly.
Funny thing: For the past year, I've been working for a little consulting company whose main contract is a big European conglomerate that's doing just that. Their management was getting more and more paranoid about the implications that their corporate data was under the control of a big American corporation. We're extracting all their data (with precious little help from that big American corporation, who know that they've lost the contract) and putting it into a flock of networked linux systems. And to do the the job, they hired an American company! But it makes sense, because our chief's main sales pitch has been to point out that we're building a system that they will control from the top to the bottom.
Linux is NOT a perfect beast, and it should surprise no rational person that it is, at this time, treated as "the devil you don't know".
One of the stories was of a big meeting at the big conglomerate's site. One of their managers brought up the subject of linux support. Our guy asked for a show of hands: How many ran linux at home. About 1/3 of the hands went up. He observed that they didn't need to hire any more linux expertise.
Linux is hardly an unknown. Anyone who says they'll have trouble finding linux expertise is simply shovelling a pile of BS. For that matter, finding BSD expertise is nearly as easy, especially now that OSX is getting rave reviews.
It makes sense to transition gradually. But it need not take many years. Especially when the inevitable happens and MS forces you to upgrade. Transitioning to linux then will be cheaper, and it won't take much more retraining. So you might as well do it, and get out from under the thumb of the American beast.
...politicians that even mention technology will often opt for closed source corporations, as they are paid handsomely to do so...
There's a common term for this: bribery
Open source saves the government money.
True but irrelevant. It doesn't save any money for the politicians who are making the decisions. Rather, it loses them their bribery income.
If you look back before the 2000 elections, you'll find a number of articles commenting on how Microsoft had suddenly increased its campaign contributions (to both parties) by several orders of magnitude. They were one of the biggest contributors. This is a very important part of the "Open Source in government" discussion.
Um, most people are not experts in electronics. And the growing complexity of consumer electronics has become a standard part of the repertoire of every standup comic in North America, Europe and Japan.
Most people no longer stand a chance of telling you whether a device is on or off. Thus, the new amplifier and CD player that I recently installed in my living room both keep some LEDs lit up. So are they "on" or "off"? In some very real sense, they are "on", but even with my background in electronics, I couldn't tell you whether they are "on" or "off" for the purposes of this discussion. Maybe I could unplug them, but that wouldn't necessarily mean that they're off. After all, I can unplug the Powerbook G4 that I'm typing this on, and it just keeps running for several hours. Does my new CD player have an internal rechargable battery that keeps it alive when the power is off? I don't know, and I'm not sure that I'd even recognize the battery if I opened it up.
Also, a neat new capability is under development: There are medical monitoring devices that can use low-power comm links like Bluetooth to talk to a cell phone. Some of them can be configured to use your cell phone to call a hospital if there's a medical emergency. People are going to be walking around with such devices Real Soon Now, if they're not already. I don't think they're going to want their phone turned off or blocked.
It's only a matter of time before someone with such a monitor dies because they were in a building or airplane that blocks cell phones. It'll be fun to read about the lawsuits that result from this.
There have already been some discussions of a push for laws that require the provision of unimpeded cell-phone and/or wireless net service in all public places. And it's quite possible that anyone who knowingly blocks such signals could find themselves liable to a homicide charge if someone with a wireless medical monitor dies on their property.
As such things come online, the airlines are going to find that they are required to provide cell-phone and wifi service in the cabin, and they will just have to properly shield the plane's electronics. This isn't all that difficult, y'know. Any 2nd-year EE student should be able to start writing down equations that explain just how to do it.
even receiving signals causes you to generate a signal
Not only has this been known for decades, but when I was in college back in the 70's, I had a friend who worked for a company that used this for commercial purposes. The company made gadgets that could detect radios within 100m or so and determine what stations they were tuned to. They used the weak signals radiated by the receivers.
Their main business was doing listener surveys for radio stations. They had a fleet of vans with their equipment, which they would drive around neighborhoods to learn what stations people were listening to. They would also park next to commuter highways to determine what stations drivers were listening to.
There was a bit of a discussion back then about the prospect of this being used by governments for the obvious political purposes. There was a technical problem, though; the equipment wasn't very directional, so specific radios could only be pinpointed in rural areas, where the radios were rather sparse. They also had some disclaimers about the accuracy in heavily-travelled highways, since the equipment had problems counting N radios tuned to the same station.
I expect that this equipment is still around and in use, though I haven't paid any attention for some years.
But yes, RF receivers do broadcast a weak signal in response to an incoming stronger signal, and this can cause problems for unshielded electronics near a receiver. This has been known and understood for a long time. It's now becoming a problem because of the rise of consumer wireless electronics, combined with aircraft that are using more (and finer) electronics onboard.
For that matter, a lot of new autos now have significant electronics. Some of them have onboard LANs, so a single wire can replace those old bundles of wires that older cars contain. Some cars are now "drive by wire". It's only a matter of time until we start reading of autos that go berserk when an onboard cell phone or wireless PDA receives an incoming connection.
What the schools should do is drop cursive and start teaching italic script. It's faster to write than either printing or cursive, and about as legible as printing. And with the right kind of pen, it looks really elegant.
Not that anything so sensible is likely to ever happen.
In any case, predictions of the eminent demise of handwriting have been with us even longer than predictions of the eminent demise of unix. Meanwhile, sales of quality pens and pencils have slowly grown.
The explanation seems to be that as people grow out of their (not unreasonable) hate of anything they were taught in school, a certain fraction of each generation develops an interest in artistic things. Some of this crowd come to realize that they like nice writing, and decide to learn to do it. Before you know it, they're buying nice pens and quality paper. Not in megaton quantities, but enough to keep the producers of quality writing goods in business.
I even know people who can tell you where the term "penknife" came from, and know how to use one.
Heh, yeah. I've used that argument myself in a number of discussions, when I felt like making assorted security schemes look mildly silly. The idea that decrypting a rot13-encrypted message is a violation of the DMCA is one of the better examples of the absurdity of it all. And pointing out that rot26 is just rot13 applied twice (so decrypting rot26 is also a violation of the DMCA) adds a whole new level of fun to the absurdity.
It's even more fun to post the couple-line C program that does xor encryption with another file, and point out that not only is this an unbreakable encryption scheme, but you can also use it to show that any file is an encryption of any other. Thus, your message and mine are both encryptions of any handy pornographic image, and the little xor program will quickly produce the decryption key. This tosses a really fun monkey wrench into any scheme to outlaw pronography in any digital medium.
Actually, they rot13-encrypted it. And then, to make double sure that the encryption was effective, they rot13-encrypted that. So the only way to read the actual interview is to doubly-decrypt it using the inverse of rot13.
I'd describe how this is done, but the margins of this message aren't wide enough...
So you set up your own privately-held corporation to record your own music. This is quite legal in most countries. Then Apple pays your corporation, and your corporation pays you a pittance. (This will help convince your government's tax agencies that it's a real recording company.;-) And only your "profits" are taxed.
I think I'll go register as a corporation this afternoon...
Plain ascii text isn't too bad, if you only write in English, and you don't want your text to look nice on tiny PDA screens.
But sensibly-done "plain" HTML is generally better. For an example, look at Baen.com. In the upper right is a "free" link that points to a bunch of sci-fi works that are online. You can get them in several formats. The HTML is a good choice in most cases, because it's not overly fancy, but produces good rendering in just about any HTML-capable window on any size screen.
So, even if you have a big screen, you can load the text into a narrow window along one side of your screen, and read it while you're waiting for a compile or a test run.
Of course, there's the inevitable problem of junk HTML produced by such things as Microsoft's various editors and word processors. But this isn't HTML's fault; it's the fault of the idiots who foisted such software on unsuspecting customers. And even then, most HTML renderers will display it sensible, so the only real problem it causes is the long download time for all the spurious junk that clutters up the text.
(Baen.com also had a thoughtful and entertaining essay on why they give out a lot of their books for free. It's an interesting summary of the impact of the Internet from an author's and a publisher's perspective.)
What of software that is released in the free software market?
We should be pointing out to the publick that in the Free/Open Software "market" (interesting concept, that), the piracy rate is exactly 0%. And some of it (e.g., apache) are market leaders.
If the proprietary software vendors would merely emulate the FOSS vendors, their piracy rate would also drop to zero.
Yeah, but it's still bloated in comparison with xwm, the wm that came with the earliest incarnations of X-Windows. And as far as I can tell, all these minimalist wms are really just reinventions of xwm.
What ever happened to xwm, by the way? Why can't I ever find it on modern X installations? It was so much easier to use than any of the current crop.
Slashdot Mirror
My brand new Powerbook doesn't seem to know what to do with it. It's sitting there in my home directory, as shown by:
.dmg files anywhere in the online docs. The web site doesn't seem to point to any help or howto pages. Anyone got a pointer to an explanation for dummies like me? ;-)
: file BitT*
BitTorrent_OSX_3.2.2a.dmg: VAX COFF executable not stripped - version 3277
:
VAX COFF? WFT? No mention that I can find of
One comment I found interesting was:
Long replies are fine. "There should be flexibility regarding the length of the reply, since there are (fewer) capacity limits for content than (there are) in off-line media."
This seems to be saying that if you make even a 1-line comment about my organization or country or whatever, I can flood you with terabytes of replies, and you must buy the disks to hold them.
This isn't a frivolous concern. In several political disputes (e.g., Turks re the Armenian massacre, Greeks re the state of Macedonia, and several others), there is a history of even a passing mention in a newsgroup producing a flood of automated "replies" that makes the newsgroup unusable. There is software that scans for keyworkd and posts the replies, which sometimes measure in gigabytes.
OTOH, if there is any sort of limit other than a hard byte count, we can expect that even the slightest fuzziness in the law will result in huge lawsuits with the intent of bankrupting the person who posted the passing comment. This is the nature of much politics.
Is there any reasonable defense against this, other than to never say anything about anyone that is less than the most fulsome praise?
Are you being intentionally moronic, or is that your natural state?
;-)?
Are you being intentionally humor-impaired, or is that your natural state?
(And do I really have to include a
Ah! I understand now. If I simply remove all the comments from my code, I won't have to worry about infringing SCO's copyrights.
/. can get it into a web page, especially if I use the Preview button. In fact, I'd bet that a lot of they have typed in just such a program as soon as they read the parent comment.
I can do that. All it takes is a little perl program. I can probably do it as a one-liner. And I'll be sure not to comment it.
One thing that puzzles me, though. There is an old theory about the lack of comments in the original Bell Labs unix: Before sending it out to universities, the folks at Bell Labs ran it through a filter that deleted comments. This was later verified (by Ken, IIRC) as not a rumor at all; they had such a program.
This would imply that if you actually use the AT&T code, all you have to do is add comments, and your code would be different enough to avoid an infringement charge.
This is apparently what SCO did, since they are charging people with stealing their comments. So making any infringing linux code should be especially easy. Just strip out all the comments.
I'd post a URL for a comment stripper, but I'd bet that any perl, tcl or python hacker here can type the program faster than
Since I don't have the money to defend myself in court like IBM, I'd really like to comply with SCO's claims that not just linux, but a lot of other software infringes on SCO's claimed copyright. I'm just a bit puzzled as to how I might go about this.
.tgz files and post the URL here, I can download it and take care of it myself.
...
For example, I'm looking at a line of code in one of my GPL'd programs:
i += j - n;
Does this infringe on any code claimed by SCO? How would I know?
The only way I can think of is that SCO should send me a copy of their code. I can easily write a little perl script that will compare every line of my code with every line of theirs, and I can rewrite anything that seems to be infringing.
Can anyone think of another way?
Since my code is GPL'd and on my web site, SCO could do it themselves. But they are probably pretty busy, so I'd rather do it myself. Anyway, recent history shows that when they find infringing code, they don't send the programmer a nice message so the code can be changed. SCO just sues them for big bucks. I'd much rather avoid this threat, and save them time, by eliminating any infringements myself.
SCO doesn't need to send me their code. If someone at SCO would just package it up in a few
Eagerly awaiting the URL
Here's my paranoid theory of the day:
;-)
Note that this bill requires that the carriers stop the spam. This requires that they develop and install software to detect it. So in addition to just transmitting messages, the carriers are required to install software that examines every message, classifies it as to content, and take some action based on that content.
It's hardly any secret that lots of governments are themselves developing such software. But in this case, the government has figured out that it doesn't have to pay for the development. It can require that the carriers pay for the development. Then the government can buy/take the software and reconfigure it for political uses.
Is this paranoid enough?
(If not, I could try harder.
Well, yeah, but TV isn't exactly an open window on the world. It's a limited set of shows, controlled by a small oligarchy of suppliers. And how many channels are available in Bhutan?
/. and find out what's really going on. ;-)
If you really want people exposed to all their choices, you should be pushing to bring them the Internet. They they can all read
Of course, feudal governments do like to block internet access. It's 80% porn, y'know. Even worse, people might discover google, start reading news.google.com, and following the links to the couple thousand news sources that they sample.
But, quite frankly, you can't even treat TV as a window on the whole world, not even in North Americ and Europe. It is full of social propaganda, yes, but for only a very narrow definition of "social". Better than what your local religious folks provide, maybe, but not anything that qualifies as education.
I'm more impressed by governments that permit full access to both the phone system and the Net. (And those are slowly converging, of course.)
Well, when I reread the article, I note that it was just a commentary on the real story, and the author made the same mistake of taking "free software" to mean "no-cost software". But the actual article used the phrase "Software Libre", which doesn't mean no-cost at all.
Also, there is a quote explaining that "our main concern is the security and the trust of our citizens". This makes it clear that the intent of the Brazilians is not just to save money (though they like that idea, too), but rather to have secure and trustworthy software. That can only be achieved with software that can be examined and understood, which means software for which the source is available to the public.
This seems to make it clear that the Brazilians are primarily demanding that software be open to examination. So it is very much like requiring a shop manual with a vehicle. Of course, the fact that such "open" software is usually cheaper than closed software is also nice and helps convince people to vote for it.
In any case, this doesn't prevent anyone at all from selling their software in Brazil. It merely says that if you want to sell to government agencies, you must also supply the source. Without any silly NDA.
And it's really no different than, say, if you want to sell vehicles to a government agency. It's routine for such buyers to insist on full shop manuals with every sale, so that the guys in their fleet shop can maintain them. Hardly any government agency anywhere takes their cars to the dealer for maintenance. (Well, actually, some do, but usually only if the dealer gives them a deal comparable with doing it themselves.)
How is it that software vendors think they can get away with keeping the inner workings of their products secret, when this is hardly done with any other products except for cheap disposables?
So, bravo for the Brazilian government. They're finally wising up. No government with a grain of sense would buy software whose inner workings are unknowable and unfixable. Especially not from a big foreign-owned company that doesn't have your interests at heart. And that's what we're really talking about here.
Heh, gotta get in a gratuitous Al Gore quip. There's a lotta truth to the idea that it was developed by a flock of college students with time on their hands. But this was because the Defense Department's ARPA project subsidised them. Instead of flipping burgers to pay their way through school, they could spend their spare time in the lab hacking the Arpanet.
So we had the wonderful irony of a bunch of idealistic, individualistic, and sometimes rather radical students being paid by the military to develop the communication system that the military needed but the commercial world wouldn't develop. Mostly because the DoD wanted every electronic device to talk to every other, using the same protocols, but commercial vendors do everything in their power to prevent this. What better idea than to turn all the equipment over to a gang of free-thinking students, and tell them to make everything play nice together. When they succeed, you grab copies of all their good stuff and you have your military comm system. Meanwhile, the students graduate into the Real World, sorely miss their comm system, and start sneaking it into the rest of our society.
And, of course, the commercial guys do everything in their power to convince everyone that they invented it all. And they don't even give Al Gore any credit.
It's a funny world.
I wouldn't make any large bets on it never happening. Remember that the Internet wasn't invented by those telcos or ISPs; it was develooped 100% on government-supported projects.
And there's an obvious metaphor that's been with us for years: The highway system. In most of the world, it is "free", and all you have to buy out of your own money is a vehicle.
It isn't really free, in the "free beer" sense, of course, since we all pay for it with taxes. But it is free in the "free speech" sense, since anyone can use most roads without paying anything extra.
It's true that there are a few privately-owned roads, but they are generally a very small portion of the roads. And there are toll roads, but they are mostly short, high-capacity roads.
We could very easily end up with the same system for bandwidth. In all parts of the world, bandwidth is legally "public" property, i.e., owned by the government. And when parts of it have been leased to private business, the result has generally been a "vast wasteland", built up with near total disregard for the needs or desires of the general population.
The business world has, quite frankly, done a crappy job of making Net access available to the masses. They provide support only to MS customers, block ports 80 and 25, and extract things from customer messages for commercial use. And they sue us for making use of it in the obvious ways.
All it would take is enough people getting disgusted with this to produce a widespread "public" network. It's already happening in many rural areas, where commercial comm companies see no prfit in supplying service.
Of course, if the telcos and ISPs would provide true Internet service over wide areas, they could probably become very popular. But there's no sign this is happening. They are being dragged kicking and screaming into the 21st century, all the while trying to protect their traditional way.
The new "mesh" buzzword could well be their death rattle. Stay tuned. It should be fun to watch.
This article is a prime example of why I think /. nees a "+1 flamebait" rating. ;-)
Users != Expertise.
;-).
Of course. But linux users are not a random sampling of all users. They have a strong tendency to be people who are interested in understanding what their computer is doing. That's why they use a system where such understanding is possible. (OSX is now producing an influx of such people into the Mac camp, and we're suggesting to the client that they consider replacing the Windoze machines with Macs for all their non-computer-geek users. You can probably recite the list of arguments for this.)
In the case at hand, I'd bet that most of the linux users could, with perhaps a bit of extra training, handle most of the in-house support that the client needs. We'd be happy to do the training, of course (for a small fee
In fact, we're doing just that, though on a somewhat informal basis. We put up web interfaces on our development systems and invite the clients' people to help us test it. We get a lot of good feedback this way. The only problem is that they find it so useful that they start using it regularly, and then get upset when we do something that breaks a development system for a few hours. We have to keep reminding them that that machine's for development and isn't reliable. But they don't want to move to the "live" machines, because those don't yet have all the features they want.
In any case, it's fairly clear that the client's linux users are willing and able to jump in as alpha and beta testers and are already developing the in-house expertise that they need. The big problem is being impolite and saying "Sorry, but I don't really need your help just yet. I'll send some email when it's ready for testing."
We can praise the nations that throw caution to the wind and roll out Linux rapidly.
Funny thing: For the past year, I've been working for a little consulting company whose main contract is a big European conglomerate that's doing just that. Their management was getting more and more paranoid about the implications that their corporate data was under the control of a big American corporation. We're extracting all their data (with precious little help from that big American corporation, who know that they've lost the contract) and putting it into a flock of networked linux systems. And to do the the job, they hired an American company! But it makes sense, because our chief's main sales pitch has been to point out that we're building a system that they will control from the top to the bottom.
Linux is NOT a perfect beast, and it should surprise no rational person that it is, at this time, treated as "the devil you don't know".
One of the stories was of a big meeting at the big conglomerate's site. One of their managers brought up the subject of linux support. Our guy asked for a show of hands: How many ran linux at home. About 1/3 of the hands went up. He observed that they didn't need to hire any more linux expertise.
Linux is hardly an unknown. Anyone who says they'll have trouble finding linux expertise is simply shovelling a pile of BS. For that matter, finding BSD expertise is nearly as easy, especially now that OSX is getting rave reviews.
It makes sense to transition gradually. But it need not take many years. Especially when the inevitable happens and MS forces you to upgrade. Transitioning to linux then will be cheaper, and it won't take much more retraining. So you might as well do it, and get out from under the thumb of the American beast.
...politicians that even mention technology will often opt for closed source corporations, as they are paid handsomely to do so ...
;-)
There's a common term for this: bribery
Open source saves the government money.
True but irrelevant. It doesn't save any money for the politicians who are making the decisions. Rather, it loses them their bribery income.
If you look back before the 2000 elections, you'll find a number of articles commenting on how Microsoft had suddenly increased its campaign contributions (to both parties) by several orders of magnitude. They were one of the biggest contributors. This is a very important part of the "Open Source in government" discussion.
(What, me cynical?
Why can't people play by the rules, ever?
Um, most people are not experts in electronics. And the growing complexity of consumer electronics has become a standard part of the repertoire of every standup comic in North America, Europe and Japan.
Most people no longer stand a chance of telling you whether a device is on or off. Thus, the new amplifier and CD player that I recently installed in my living room both keep some LEDs lit up. So are they "on" or "off"? In some very real sense, they are "on", but even with my background in electronics, I couldn't tell you whether they are "on" or "off" for the purposes of this discussion. Maybe I could unplug them, but that wouldn't necessarily mean that they're off. After all, I can unplug the Powerbook G4 that I'm typing this on, and it just keeps running for several hours. Does my new CD player have an internal rechargable battery that keeps it alive when the power is off? I don't know, and I'm not sure that I'd even recognize the battery if I opened it up.
Also, a neat new capability is under development: There are medical monitoring devices that can use low-power comm links like Bluetooth to talk to a cell phone. Some of them can be configured to use your cell phone to call a hospital if there's a medical emergency. People are going to be walking around with such devices Real Soon Now, if they're not already. I don't think they're going to want their phone turned off or blocked.
It's only a matter of time before someone with such a monitor dies because they were in a building or airplane that blocks cell phones. It'll be fun to read about the lawsuits that result from this.
There have already been some discussions of a push for laws that require the provision of unimpeded cell-phone and/or wireless net service in all public places. And it's quite possible that anyone who knowingly blocks such signals could find themselves liable to a homicide charge if someone with a wireless medical monitor dies on their property.
As such things come online, the airlines are going to find that they are required to provide cell-phone and wifi service in the cabin, and they will just have to properly shield the plane's electronics. This isn't all that difficult, y'know. Any 2nd-year EE student should be able to start writing down equations that explain just how to do it.
even receiving signals causes you to generate a signal
Not only has this been known for decades, but when I was in college back in the 70's, I had a friend who worked for a company that used this for commercial purposes. The company made gadgets that could detect radios within 100m or so and determine what stations they were tuned to. They used the weak signals radiated by the receivers.
Their main business was doing listener surveys for radio stations. They had a fleet of vans with their equipment, which they would drive around neighborhoods to learn what stations people were listening to. They would also park next to commuter highways to determine what stations drivers were listening to.
There was a bit of a discussion back then about the prospect of this being used by governments for the obvious political purposes. There was a technical problem, though; the equipment wasn't very directional, so specific radios could only be pinpointed in rural areas, where the radios were rather sparse. They also had some disclaimers about the accuracy in heavily-travelled highways, since the equipment had problems counting N radios tuned to the same station.
I expect that this equipment is still around and in use, though I haven't paid any attention for some years.
But yes, RF receivers do broadcast a weak signal in response to an incoming stronger signal, and this can cause problems for unshielded electronics near a receiver. This has been known and understood for a long time. It's now becoming a problem because of the rise of consumer wireless electronics, combined with aircraft that are using more (and finer) electronics onboard.
For that matter, a lot of new autos now have significant electronics. Some of them have onboard LANs, so a single wire can replace those old bundles of wires that older cars contain. Some cars are now "drive by wire". It's only a matter of time until we start reading of autos that go berserk when an onboard cell phone or wireless PDA receives an incoming connection.
What the schools should do is drop cursive and start teaching italic script. It's faster to write than either printing or cursive, and about as legible as printing. And with the right kind of pen, it looks really elegant.
Not that anything so sensible is likely to ever happen.
In any case, predictions of the eminent demise of handwriting have been with us even longer than predictions of the eminent demise of unix. Meanwhile, sales of quality pens and pencils have slowly grown.
The explanation seems to be that as people grow out of their (not unreasonable) hate of anything they were taught in school, a certain fraction of each generation develops an interest in artistic things. Some of this crowd come to realize that they like nice writing, and decide to learn to do it. Before you know it, they're buying nice pens and quality paper. Not in megaton quantities, but enough to keep the producers of quality writing goods in business.
I even know people who can tell you where the term "penknife" came from, and know how to use one.
Heh, yeah. I've used that argument myself in a number of discussions, when I felt like making assorted security schemes look mildly silly. The idea that decrypting a rot13-encrypted message is a violation of the DMCA is one of the better examples of the absurdity of it all. And pointing out that rot26 is just rot13 applied twice (so decrypting rot26 is also a violation of the DMCA) adds a whole new level of fun to the absurdity.
...
It's even more fun to post the couple-line C program that does xor encryption with another file, and point out that not only is this an unbreakable encryption scheme, but you can also use it to show that any file is an encryption of any other. Thus, your message and mine are both encryptions of any handy pornographic image, and the little xor program will quickly produce the decryption key. This tosses a really fun monkey wrench into any scheme to outlaw pronography in any digital medium.
There's a lot of absurdity flying about here
Actually, they rot13-encrypted it. And then, to make double sure that the encryption was effective, they rot13-encrypted that. So the only way to read the actual interview is to doubly-decrypt it using the inverse of rot13.
...
I'd describe how this is done, but the margins of this message aren't wide enough
if a song is over 7 minutes long, they won't offer it as a separate download. It will be available as part of the album only.
;-)
So they don't want the New Age market?
So you set up your own privately-held corporation to record your own music. This is quite legal in most countries. Then Apple pays your corporation, and your corporation pays you a pittance. (This will help convince your government's tax agencies that it's a real recording company. ;-) And only your "profits" are taxed.
...
I think I'll go register as a corporation this afternoon
Plain ascii text isn't too bad, if you only write in English, and you don't want your text to look nice on tiny PDA screens.
But sensibly-done "plain" HTML is generally better. For an example, look at Baen.com. In the upper right is a "free" link that points to a bunch of sci-fi works that are online. You can get them in several formats. The HTML is a good choice in most cases, because it's not overly fancy, but produces good rendering in just about any HTML-capable window on any size screen.
So, even if you have a big screen, you can load the text into a narrow window along one side of your screen, and read it while you're waiting for a compile or a test run.
Of course, there's the inevitable problem of junk HTML produced by such things as Microsoft's various editors and word processors. But this isn't HTML's fault; it's the fault of the idiots who foisted such software on unsuspecting customers. And even then, most HTML renderers will display it sensible, so the only real problem it causes is the long download time for all the spurious junk that clutters up the text.
(Baen.com also had a thoughtful and entertaining essay on why they give out a lot of their books for free. It's an interesting summary of the impact of the Internet from an author's and a publisher's perspective.)
What of software that is released in the free software market?
We should be pointing out to the publick that in the Free/Open Software "market" (interesting concept, that), the piracy rate is exactly 0%. And some of it (e.g., apache) are market leaders.
If the proprietary software vendors would merely emulate the FOSS vendors, their piracy rate would also drop to zero.
That oughta confuse 'em!
You want minimalist? Go for TWM.
Yeah, but it's still bloated in comparison with xwm, the wm that came with the earliest incarnations of X-Windows. And as far as I can tell, all these minimalist wms are really just reinventions of xwm.
What ever happened to xwm, by the way? Why can't I ever find it on modern X installations? It was so much easier to use than any of the current crop.