Was at Comdex in Chicago today and played with one for a few minutes. It looked like a PDA and did standard PDA things, so to me it's not much different than my Palm IIIx. I believe that the price is a bit high, however: at $199 or so it could be tempting (opening a terminal session on the PDA was *fun*) but at $299 I have doubts that they'll sell enough to pay the bills.
So let's say I'm discussing something techie via e-mail or a discussion forum using the Passport site and by way of example I include a snippet of GPL'd code. My reading of MS's Passport terms tells me that they now have the right to use that snippet of GPL code, create derivative products, etc. Doesn't that collide with the GPL? Sounds like a lawyer's wet dream...
"It's just James' and Mike's dumb luck that as co-founders, they're the ones left responsible for their business decisions and results -- including those of the executives that they appointed -- and they can't just resign and announce a new plan."
For me, this sentence neatly sums up all of the inspired entertainment the entire ".com" phenomenon has provided over the past two years. Honestly: Linuxgruven comes up with a business model straight out of "The Carpetbaggers", innocent 20-somethings fall for it in droves, then the wounded themselves feel sorry for the con artists who started the whole thing because the poor babies had to suffer the consequences of their own decisions and actions. The indignity of it all! Friends, geeks, fellow cynics: this is an innocence to be cherished! This is a naievete to be wrapped in silk and put away for special occasions down the road! This is a Kodak moment!:)
I'm sure that when you first became associated with Slashdot, you had ideas (maybe fantasies is a better term) about what/. would be like in times to come. Did it even come close? Do you think back and try to identify some singularity, some single moment when you chose Door #1 and in retrospect would now go with Door #2?
Why do you get out of bed in the morning? What drives you to get up and go out into the hard, cruel world and face the legions of trolls and misanthropes you know you're going to have to face during the day? What's the motivation? (Hey, could be worse: I could be asking this of Katz!)
First, how is it horrible, if a company takes measures to preserve their copyrights?
Good heavens, no. I can't recall anyone arguing that (although I haven't read all of the posts on this tp[ic, either.) What I personally object to is the concept of 'copyright', which deals with who owns it and who gets to reproduce it, being confused with the concept of 'fair use'. Should MS's ownership of copyright on MS Windows mean that if I upgrade my hard drive, I need to buy a new copy of Windows? How about the CPU? Motherboard? What if I add a DVD-RAM drive? What if I buy or build a whole new machine and throw the old one away? What if I sell my Intel box and buy a Mac: the copy of Windows that the old machine is running has to be burned? The conflict is between those forces which want to impose standards of use which are completely different from the standards I've lived with my whole life, and me, who is pretty much a lazy SOB who doesn't want to go to any more trouble than I have to. Nobody is saying Microsoft can't prohibit copying of its intellectual property. I am saying that once I've paid for a license, I ought to be able to use the damn thing with a minimum of interruption and frustration. (Pretty much eliminates Windows right there, doesn't it?)
Second, MS isn't so stupid as to make it impossible to move the license from one machine to another.
I agree. What they will do is make the process more annoying and intrusive than I am willing to put up with. For example, I have yet to register a copy of MS software with them. Why should I? What's in it for me? "Technical support"? That's a joke. Now I have to get someone's permission to install an old game on a new PC? I don't even want them to know who I am -- I'm just not interested in their spam, electronic or postal, and I could care less about special offers, co-branded marketing, or any of the rest of that crap. I opt out.
Unfortunately, the company I work for isn't quite as bothered by all of this as I am, so I have to put up with MS's crap to put bread on the table (save your snide remarks, please. This is Indiana, the in-duh-vidual capital of the Midwest. There aren't a lot of employment choices around here, unless 7-11 is hiring!) Frankly, I'm kinda hoping the next version of Office goes subscription: that'll irriate the hell out of some folks who matter!
A final thought. If something like this actually occurs (my bet is that it won't,) you can forget about -not- installing the latest software upgrade. You WILL upgrade when the old software won't authenticate any more...:)
I propose that the patent people charge US$1,000,000 for every patent granted which is later overturned/disqualified. That'd put a stop to this stupid shit.
IBM is a business, they exist to make money. From that, it's only a simple leap to knowing what they want.
They want to sell stuff.
From my perspective, that's an easy one. Thinkpads are already the best notebook I know of and if our company's Netfinity M20 server is representative, they make damn fine server hardware, too. And the service... *sigh* A month after we got the Netfinity, one of the 35GB drives in the primary RAID array died, late on a Friday afternoon. The service engineer was in our building by 7:00 PM (we're in a small town; she had to drive here from another town,) another service engineer drove the replacement part from Chicago while the first one was on the way (she'd ordered one of everything she thought could be the problem!) and we were back up that night. And I didn't have to listen to elevator music once during the entire process. Yeah, if we were a big company we'd have had spare drives on hand, etc. but we're not big: our company's annual turnover would be laughably small to most of you. We've got the one netfinity server and aren't likely to need another one for years, etc. We still get great service and I'm awfully impressed.
<I>The problem he mentions with 1/4 of laptops going down in a year surely has something to do with the fact most of those machines run Win9x. Just another ringing endorsement for our favourite OS;)</I>
I wouldn't agree with that. I've got a three year old Toshiba at work with 1/4 of the display dead (upper-right quadrant.) Did the deed just out of warranty. Then there was the Dell notebook that was flaky enough to drive me batty with one idiot problem after another; nothing ever lasted long enough to bother Dell with (found work-arounds for pretty much everything) until the warranty ran out and the LCD died. I won't even mention the Sony Vaio that managed to convert a chemist from the opinion that IBM is evil to threatening violence if anyone touches his Thinkpad. I could go on but... we've also got ancient Thinkpad 360's (486/33!!!) still going strong. 'Fact is, I wish they'd die so I could justify pitching them into the dumpster. Obviously, we don't buy anything but Thinkpads now and have no complaints (other than about Windows NT!!)
Sorry if this sounds like a Big Blue commercial but some people just know what they're doing.
Hmm. Discussion revolving around this post reminds me of why I quit coding as a full-time gig a few years back. I'm an old fart, I'll be the first to admit it, and one aspect of my old fartsterism is a refusal to make like a hampster and churn out crappy code just to make some from-the-ass deadline. Another reason I'm no longer coding for a living is, to be honest, after 20 years it got boring.
Back to the subject: IMAO there's plenty of room for both creativity and discipline in computer software but today, in our culture, creativity is 'cool' and discipline is so, like, old-wave. We see lots of the one and precious little of the other. I see quite a lot of creativity in software design; I see little useful creativity in the actual coding. Many years ago I went through a couple of years of friendly warfare with a colleague who insisted that creative code was better code. Several years later, when he was spending all of his time maintaining his 'creative' code because no one else could follow the clever ideas, he had changed his mind. It's always more fun to do something new than to climb those old creaking stairs one more time.
All-night coding marathons are, in my experience, a Bad Idea from the start. Most of what I did after midnight turned out to be a complete crock and often the clever crap that consumed me from midnight to 7:00 AM or so was easily replaced in a couple of hours once I was awake. Of course, it's still fun to look at it the next day and wonder where one's mind had wandered off to the previous night...:)
Here's some heresy for you: Windows doesn't suck because MS people can't code, Windows sucks because if it worked well, Microsoft would have to work a lot harder to feed the gravy train. Unix sucks because of antique design and lack of design discipline, not because hackers can't code. In my view Linux/BSD/et al could sweep microsoft far, far away if someone -anyone- would create and enforce design guidelines. But no one will: free-software today is a creative anarchy, which means we see lots of poorly or incompletely implemented great ideas and much, much redundency.
Acting under the orders of the Trilateral Commission, a young student, William Gates, was induced to modify computer programming at a major NASA research facility in the mid 1970's. The software modification inserted bogus indications of the presence of hydrogen peroxide in Martian soil samples analyzed by Viking experiments with the express purpose of providing a plausable alternative to other experiments' positive indications of Martian microbial life.
The Commission desired that the terrestrial public (in particular, the voting population of the United States) believe that no life existed on Mars in order that the American National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) would be financially strangled of public funding and thus not possess the exploration resources it would have received had the general population known of the existance of life on Mars. Had NASA pursued an aggressive Martian exploration program in the mid- to late 1980's it would almost certainly have discovered the secret Trilateral Commission base located inside the caldera of Olympus Mons, which at that time was responsible for the exploitation of the indigenous Martian population in its notorious gold mines. Gold mined from copious Martian resources has been secretly exported back to Earth for the past two decades and the Commission now has all of that valuable metal that it needs for its nefarious plan to destabilize world currency markets, bring on global economic chaos, and eventually end up owning the entire planet outright, which it intends to sell to Vogon civil engineers.
For the record, as payment for his programming exploit, Mr. Gates was rewarded with detailed knowledge of alien computer technology gleaned from a crashed UFO (see: "Area 51"). Mr. Gate's reward was not, however, as generous as it seemed as the technology he was given was used to create the famous "Windows" line of products which by themselves, due to their instability and unreliability, threaten to demolish industry and bring on global economic chaos.
Dear Jesus, you sound like my daughter. The last time we moved I must have hauled four large heavy boxes full of antique computer trash out from under her bed. No way was I going to transport that crap for her so I threw it in the trash. I found out later that she got up in the middle of the night to retrieve and hide it, then moved it herself. Now I've got those same damn four boxes in the new house! Someone explain to me that value of four munged RLL 30 MB hard drives? Full height, too. Do you know what those things weigh?
(Mommy's watching, dear. Ok, sport. Explain this: in your desk drawer I found a 20 MB MFM drive. You were saving it for what, again? And this Hercules monitor card from God knows when? How about that 386 motherboard [doggone it, it has 16MB of RAM on it! What else am I going to do with 16 30-pin 1MB SIMMS?] How about the dead TI 386 notebook? You resuscitated it twice: going for three, are we? Or the Tandy 1400 FD laptop? 'All it needs is a battery.' To do WHAT? Then there's the AT case behind the door. [They don't make 'em like that anymore: you could park a car on it and it wouldn't hurt it.] So park a car on it, laughing boy! I'm tired of tripping over it whenever I try to wrestle a load of laundry through the door. How about the carcass of that old Packard Bell 486? You didn't even bother trying to breathe new life into that one. [PB sucked. I keep its putrid remains around to remind me of how bad things could get.] Face it: the kid gets her packrat tendencies from you. I should have known to expect no better from someone who plugged a 5.25" floppy drive into his new PC. Remind me: just why did I marry you again? [That was an ID10T error, sweetie. But I love you anyway, even if you do use Windows.]
:)
Re:Correcting the failure of software copyright
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>>The only argument against this post, is that we live in a capitalist world where business methods, source code, contact, etc. are all valuble and are to be kept secret. >>
Yeah, but... Many years ago I found myself working for Company X, which was in need of new Enterprise Requirements Planning software. They'd taken their current platform/software as far as it would go but the company had grown and there wasn't much wiggle room in the current software to grow with it. So they migrated to new software on a new platform (RMS on an S/38, if you really want to know.) The vendor of the software, Professional Computer Resources, sent their customers the source to their software when you bought it. As a result, they had hundreds of customers writing their own bug fixes and enhancements and distributing them, via the vendor's user group, to all of the other customers. The software, specifically designed to make it easy to plug new stuff in, eventually grew to an incredible richness, PCR was acquired, making a lot of people reasonably wealthy, and the software is now, 20 years later, still in widespread use, still a profitable offering from its current owners. I can't seem to find a loser in that. Source code -is- knowledge and as such its value increases the more widely it is spread.
mjs
Re:Correcting the failure of software copyright
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Actually I was referring to application software, not the system stuff. So far as I know, IBM never released the source for SSP (S/34, S/36) or later minicomputers. But in my experience it was standard practice for application vendors to send the source code along with their product: IBM did it with IPICS and MAPICS, PCR/Pansophic did it with RMS, etc. Maybe MRP was a type of application where vendors expected that their customers needed to modify the code in order to make it work, I don't know, but the first experience I had with NOT receiving source was with Visicalc for the Apple ][; even older CP/M software often came with source. Over time, these creaking old applications got to be very rich in terms of functionality and there was considerable depth of expertise in both the end-user and technical communities. Today we see depth in end-users but not on the technical side (how many people outside of Microsoft could maintain the source for Excel?) Even the depth on the user side is eroding, I think: since the emphasis from the vendors is adding features rather than fixing bugs, using something like MS-Office becomes a full-time occupation just keeping up with the new features.
And that's another reason why software has become so unreliable: when every user had access to MAPICS or RMS source, we often fixed the bugs and sent the fixes back to the vendors for inclusion into the next release. Can't do that anymore, either: now all you can do is try to get someone's attention off the next marketing-mandated feature long enough to at least acknowledge that a bug exists. It's very frustrating for those of us used to providing software which actually works as expected.
Please understand that I'm not arguing against open source: I think the model is right even if I'm not entirely sure how masses of developers are going to be able to support themselves if everything went open. I was just pointing out that the concept isn't brand spanking shiny new; we have prior experience with at least one form of it before and it had some pretty compelling advantages even in ancient times.
mjs
Re:Correcting the failure of software copyright
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This may be one of the most cognizant posts I've ever read related to open source, on/. or anywhere else, and I thank you for taking the time to write it down. But that won't stop me from picking nits...:)
This is NOT "...the first time in the history of software the doors are thrown open. People are finally allowed, and encouraged to understand software instead of just use it..." People (especially young people) tend to forget that computing did not start in 1981 with the IBM PC.
Before that, I came from the world of minicomputers, specifically the IBM S/34/36/38 line that eventually became the AS/400. Almost all major products (such as an MRP system) came with the source code, and once you had that you modified it and shared it with other users of the software. Even IBM's software went this way and did so with their (at least tacit) blessing. Vendor's user groups were in part designed to make code sharing easier (I know, I helped to form a couple of them, and the vendors strongly supported us.) I'll bet somewhere in the USA there is still someone using one of my tweaks to IPICS or the original MAPICS packages. Now I'm stuck with a closed-source ERP package running on an NT network and it's pure shit that I can't fix because I don't have the source. (Actually, I'm not sure I want the source. What on God's Earth convinced them that Visual Foxpro was a suitable programming language for something like this? And what was I on when I agreed to buy the damn thing?)
Actually, in the world of application software at least, I belive that one could make a decent argument that the disease of closed source began with the IBM PC in 1981, and the world is just now beginning to come to its senses, not the other way around.
IANAL! Sadly, based on prior observation, the legal system would probably consider the following to be irrelevant and pointless.
Interesting question: what basic rights are being violated by this draconian piece of legislation?
1. Freedom of speech. The DCMA makes enforcable those onerous (and more frequently common,) license prohibitions of discussing or reporting of product performance testing.
2. Cruel and unusual punishment. A jail term plus fine for telling my daughter how to watch a region 2 DVD on a region 1 player? DCMA says, 'Yes!'
3. Besides specific rights ennumeriated by the Constitution and its amendments, many other freedoms are generally agreed upon. While each of these is open to specific judicial interpretation in individual cases, we commonly agree that an individual has the right to use their property in whatever manner they see fit, so long as such use does not infringe the law, constitute a danger to others, etc. As a trivial example, a screwdriver is designed to drive screws yet I can also use it as a chisel, can opener, gardening implement, etc. In more relevant terms, if I desire to watch a DVD and I do not own a DVD player but I do own a personal computer using the Linux operating system, I can not do so because the holders of the DVD's copyright have not specifically provided me with a means ('device') capable of doing that. Never mind that I have legally purchased the DVD from an authorized retailer: the argument is (as the DCMA says,) that I can not do this because by defeating their technology I could in theory then copy the DVD. Not only is the DVD copyright holder's insistence on the right to determine how I use their product a violation of commonly held consumer rights, their inherent and specific presumption of my guilt of pirating their product directly contradicts my express freedom of presumption of innocence until proven guilty in a court of law.
So there you have it: the big four reasons why I feel this law to be so onerous that I have no choice as a free individual but to protest its enactment by publicly refusing to obey it.
Has anyone considered the upside to Microsoft from this? MS can now (truthfully) say that antitrust action needs to be reconsidered, since -everyone knows- that once something is released to the internet, the whole world has it in minutes. They can claim, with some validity, that since Windows source is 'in the wild', they don't need to be broken up. Sooner or later some Chinese or Ukrainian company will release a Windows clone and all of a sudden they have competition. Kinda hard to argue for antirust relief if that happens.
Which, of course, makes me wonder: which low-level drone at MS did Bill pick on to give out the first password, and what did s/he do to deserve such a fate?:)
"Just because I'm paranoid doesn't mean they aren't out to get me."
I have no inside knowledge so this is just speculation but... given that many Windows PCs no longer come with an OS CD which gives the end user any choices about how Windows is installed, to me this indicates that MS has to some extent given up trying to support every third-party device which hits the market (and flakey support for which accounts for much of Windows' poor reliability.) I think that MS feels that if they can get some control over the hardware (trying to ensure that only 'supported' hardware is installed by 'authorized' dealers,) then Windows' reliability will improve. Think about it: if you don't have an OS CD which you can re-install or add missing drivers from, that would kinda put the brakes on adding that spiffy new device, wouldn't it? In other words, if your PC doesn't come with a DVD drive and you want one, you have to buy a new PC with an 'approved' drive already installed. Man, if I were a third-party device maker I'd be pissing my boots over this.:(
The only True Way to create a Geek House is to build it yourself. Sheesh: I'd have figured that the people here would have known that instinctively. For the Big Blue Room challenged among you, here's a quick-hit checklist:
1. Find significant other. Geeky S.O. HIGHLY preferred but surprisingly not absolutely required. What is required is a high tolerance of odd behavior.
2. Reproduce. Repeat until tolerance for messes, "unstructured environments", and lack of sleep (or lack of time for geeky activities) is exhausted.
3. Inhabit. Find a place to put the crowd.
4. Wire. Cat5 is your friend, but a pair of outlets in the bathroom is not necessarily a good idea. One is quite sufficient. Domestic note: Cat5 comes in many colors but there is NOT infinite variety. Try to choose carpet & paint colors which make the odd temporary visible wire run a bit less obvious. Note that Orange cat5 cable is -very- visible against white, blue, and even brown colors. Safety note: Cat5 cable seems to be reasonably safe from the viewpoint of children using it as a teething aid. But you do want to purchase high quality cable.
5. Educate. Geekdom is a Way of Life (as is science fiction fandom, and the two are not mutually exclusive.) One way to ensure that you live in a desirable environment is to instill solid family values in your offspring. For example, Open Source is Good/Closed Source is Bad is a concept even a two year old can grasp easily. Perhaps not strangely, "Windows Sucks" appears to be something even newborns understand. Research may be in order on that one.
6. Accumulate. You're going to need more computers than you ever imagined. On the other hand, no one need pay more than US $25 for an old 486 and my personal best price is free. 486's make great proxy servers and firewalls for your geek house and (trust me on this) when your little geeks become teenage geeks, you can't have too many firewalls. (For some reason, teenaged geeks think that breaking into Daddy's sub-network and encrypting his files is just so much fun. *Sigh*)
Obviously, this is a condensed list but overall (for me, anyway,) it's been quite a bit of fun. My oldest isn't as geeky as the other two (being born in 1977 was a distinct handicap for her: I didn't get my first computer until 1979 and the minis I was working on then did not exactly lend themselves to home installation. Surprisingly, my middle child (19 now,) is much more of a pain in the butt than my son, who is 17. She goes through phases where she'll devote weeks to breaking my firewalls, whereas my son gets bored if he can't do it in a couple of days or so. I'm sure that means something but I'm not sure I want to go there right now...:)
I called in a favor this weekend and asked an attorney to look at the issue. For obvious reasons, they don't want to be identified (but I can go so far as to say that this particular attorney likes imported beer. Good thing I do too!)
Anyway, the opinion is that no illegal activity has taken place. According to posted descriptions, the re-engineering activity which occured took place within permitted boundaries of US law. Furthermore, posting of the re-engineered driver to the Internet and use of the driver by persons who have NOT clicked agreement with their contract, is perfectly legal. In addition, if someone mailed you the device unsolicited or if Radio Shack gave you the device without telling you that it was on loan AND if you did not click to agree with their contract, the widget is yours for permissable use within US copyright and patent law. You can't rip it apart to find out how it works and then start cranking out clones, but that's just about the only thing you can't do with it. Specifically, using a different software driver which avoids reference to their site and/or usage tracking technology, is perfectly legal. If they wanted to bind users to a contract dictating terms of usage, they didn't do it properly and unless you click on the "Agree" button on their contract, no usage contract exists.
Have fun!
PS: The commenting interspersed with their reply letter disturbs me. It looks like heckling, for which I have no respect. Please, next time just present the response and comment on it afterward. Please don't abuse the forum. mjs
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My wife would say that if the gov'ment is letting us see a mach 7-10 aircraft then obviously the military has something much better...
You'd look a bit less silly if you actually read the article before commenting...
What is a 'meta-physicist'? How is that different from the old-fashioned physics we know and love?
Was at Comdex in Chicago today and played with one for a few minutes. It looked like a PDA and did standard PDA things, so to me it's not much different than my Palm IIIx. I believe that the price is a bit high, however: at $199 or so it could be tempting (opening a terminal session on the PDA was *fun*) but at $299 I have doubts that they'll sell enough to pay the bills.
So let's say I'm discussing something techie via e-mail or a discussion forum using the Passport site and by way of example I include a snippet of GPL'd code. My reading of MS's Passport terms tells me that they now have the right to use that snippet of GPL code, create derivative products, etc. Doesn't that collide with the GPL? Sounds like a lawyer's wet dream...
For me, this sentence neatly sums up all of the inspired entertainment the entire ".com" phenomenon has provided over the past two years. Honestly: Linuxgruven comes up with a business model straight out of "The Carpetbaggers", innocent 20-somethings fall for it in droves, then the wounded themselves feel sorry for the con artists who started the whole thing because the poor babies had to suffer the consequences of their own decisions and actions. The indignity of it all! Friends, geeks, fellow cynics: this is an innocence to be cherished! This is a naievete to be wrapped in silk and put away for special occasions down the road! This is a Kodak moment! :)
Thanks for the translation: my German is lousy after 20+ years of disuse. :)
1. Clone Seymore Cray and have him write an OS and key it in using front-panel switches (in octal -- no assembler needed.)
2. Have RMS write the rest.
Voila! Unix reborn, everything is GPL'd, and it'd be years before MS could recreate Windows.
:)
I'm sure that when you first became associated with Slashdot, you had ideas (maybe fantasies is a better term) about what /. would be like in times to come. Did it even come close? Do you think back and try to identify some singularity, some single moment when you chose Door #1 and in retrospect would now go with Door #2?
Why do you get out of bed in the morning? What drives you to get up and go out into the hard, cruel world and face the legions of trolls and misanthropes you know you're going to have to face during the day? What's the motivation? (Hey, could be worse: I could be asking this of Katz!)
Safety. Freedom. Choose one.
Good heavens, no. I can't recall anyone arguing that (although I haven't read all of the posts on this tp[ic, either.) What I personally object to is the concept of 'copyright', which deals with who owns it and who gets to reproduce it, being confused with the concept of 'fair use'. Should MS's ownership of copyright on MS Windows mean that if I upgrade my hard drive, I need to buy a new copy of Windows? How about the CPU? Motherboard? What if I add a DVD-RAM drive? What if I buy or build a whole new machine and throw the old one away? What if I sell my Intel box and buy a Mac: the copy of Windows that the old machine is running has to be burned? The conflict is between those forces which want to impose standards of use which are completely different from the standards I've lived with my whole life, and me, who is pretty much a lazy SOB who doesn't want to go to any more trouble than I have to. Nobody is saying Microsoft can't prohibit copying of its intellectual property. I am saying that once I've paid for a license, I ought to be able to use the damn thing with a minimum of interruption and frustration. (Pretty much eliminates Windows right there, doesn't it?)
Second, MS isn't so stupid as to make it impossible to move the license from one machine to another.
I agree. What they will do is make the process more annoying and intrusive than I am willing to put up with. For example, I have yet to register a copy of MS software with them. Why should I? What's in it for me? "Technical support"? That's a joke. Now I have to get someone's permission to install an old game on a new PC? I don't even want them to know who I am -- I'm just not interested in their spam, electronic or postal, and I could care less about special offers, co-branded marketing, or any of the rest of that crap. I opt out.
Unfortunately, the company I work for isn't quite as bothered by all of this as I am, so I have to put up with MS's crap to put bread on the table (save your snide remarks, please. This is Indiana, the in-duh-vidual capital of the Midwest. There aren't a lot of employment choices around here, unless 7-11 is hiring!) Frankly, I'm kinda hoping the next version of Office goes subscription: that'll irriate the hell out of some folks who matter!
A final thought. If something like this actually occurs (my bet is that it won't,) you can forget about -not- installing the latest software upgrade. You WILL upgrade when the old software won't authenticate any more... :)
mjs
I propose that the patent people charge US$1,000,000 for every patent granted which is later overturned/disqualified. That'd put a stop to this stupid shit.
mjs
IBM is a business, they exist to make money. From that, it's only a simple leap to knowing what they want.
They want to sell stuff.
From my perspective, that's an easy one. Thinkpads are already the best notebook I know of and if our company's Netfinity M20 server is representative, they make damn fine server hardware, too. And the service... *sigh* A month after we got the Netfinity, one of the 35GB drives in the primary RAID array died, late on a Friday afternoon. The service engineer was in our building by 7:00 PM (we're in a small town; she had to drive here from another town,) another service engineer drove the replacement part from Chicago while the first one was on the way (she'd ordered one of everything she thought could be the problem!) and we were back up that night. And I didn't have to listen to elevator music once during the entire process. Yeah, if we were a big company we'd have had spare drives on hand, etc. but we're not big: our company's annual turnover would be laughably small to most of you. We've got the one netfinity server and aren't likely to need another one for years, etc. We still get great service and I'm awfully impressed.
mjs
<I>The problem he mentions with 1/4 of laptops going down in a year surely has something to do with the fact most of those machines run Win9x. Just another ringing endorsement for our favourite OS ;)</I>
I wouldn't agree with that. I've got a three year old Toshiba at work with 1/4 of the display dead (upper-right quadrant.) Did the deed just out of warranty. Then there was the Dell notebook that was flaky enough to drive me batty with one idiot problem after another; nothing ever lasted long enough to bother Dell with (found work-arounds for pretty much everything) until the warranty ran out and the LCD died. I won't even mention the Sony Vaio that managed to convert a chemist from the opinion that IBM is evil to threatening violence if anyone touches his Thinkpad. I could go on but... we've also got ancient Thinkpad 360's (486/33!!!) still going strong. 'Fact is, I wish they'd die so I could justify pitching them into the dumpster. Obviously, we don't buy anything but Thinkpads now and have no complaints (other than about Windows NT!!)
Sorry if this sounds like a Big Blue commercial but some people just know what they're doing.
mjs
Hmm. Discussion revolving around this post reminds me of why I quit coding as a full-time gig a few years back. I'm an old fart, I'll be the first to admit it, and one aspect of my old fartsterism is a refusal to make like a hampster and churn out crappy code just to make some from-the-ass deadline. Another reason I'm no longer coding for a living is, to be honest, after 20 years it got boring.
:)
Back to the subject: IMAO there's plenty of room for both creativity and discipline in computer software but today, in our culture, creativity is 'cool' and discipline is so, like, old-wave. We see lots of the one and precious little of the other. I see quite a lot of creativity in software design; I see little useful creativity in the actual coding. Many years ago I went through a couple of years of friendly warfare with a colleague who insisted that creative code was better code. Several years later, when he was spending all of his time maintaining his 'creative' code because no one else could follow the clever ideas, he had changed his mind. It's always more fun to do something new than to climb those old creaking stairs one more time.
All-night coding marathons are, in my experience, a Bad Idea from the start. Most of what I did after midnight turned out to be a complete crock and often the clever crap that consumed me from midnight to 7:00 AM or so was easily replaced in a couple of hours once I was awake. Of course, it's still fun to look at it the next day and wonder where one's mind had wandered off to the previous night...
Here's some heresy for you: Windows doesn't suck because MS people can't code, Windows sucks because if it worked well, Microsoft would have to work a lot harder to feed the gravy train. Unix sucks because of antique design and lack of design discipline, not because hackers can't code. In my view Linux/BSD/et al could sweep microsoft far, far away if someone -anyone- would create and enforce design guidelines. But no one will: free-software today is a creative anarchy, which means we see lots of poorly or incompletely implemented great ideas and much, much redundency.
mjs
Acting under the orders of the Trilateral Commission, a young student, William Gates, was induced to modify computer programming at a major NASA research facility in the mid 1970's. The software modification inserted bogus indications of the presence of hydrogen peroxide in Martian soil samples analyzed by Viking experiments with the express purpose of providing a plausable alternative to other experiments' positive indications of Martian microbial life.
The Commission desired that the terrestrial public (in particular, the voting population of the United States) believe that no life existed on Mars in order that the American National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) would be financially strangled of public funding and thus not possess the exploration resources it would have received had the general population known of the existance of life on Mars. Had NASA pursued an aggressive Martian exploration program in the mid- to late 1980's it would almost certainly have discovered the secret Trilateral Commission base located inside the caldera of Olympus Mons, which at that time was responsible for the exploitation of the indigenous Martian population in its notorious gold mines. Gold mined from copious Martian resources has been secretly exported back to Earth for the past two decades and the Commission now has all of that valuable metal that it needs for its nefarious plan to destabilize world currency markets, bring on global economic chaos, and eventually end up owning the entire planet outright, which it intends to sell to Vogon civil engineers.
For the record, as payment for his programming exploit, Mr. Gates was rewarded with detailed knowledge of alien computer technology gleaned from a crashed UFO (see: "Area 51"). Mr. Gate's reward was not, however, as generous as it seemed as the technology he was given was used to create the famous "Windows" line of products which by themselves, due to their instability and unreliability, threaten to demolish industry and bring on global economic chaos.
Dear Jesus, you sound like my daughter. The last time we moved I must have hauled four large heavy boxes full of antique computer trash out from under her bed. No way was I going to transport that crap for her so I threw it in the trash. I found out later that she got up in the middle of the night to retrieve and hide it, then moved it herself. Now I've got those same damn four boxes in the new house! Someone explain to me that value of four munged RLL 30 MB hard drives? Full height, too. Do you know what those things weigh?
(Mommy's watching, dear. Ok, sport. Explain this: in your desk drawer I found a 20 MB MFM drive. You were saving it for what, again? And this Hercules monitor card from God knows when? How about that 386 motherboard [doggone it, it has 16MB of RAM on it! What else am I going to do with 16 30-pin 1MB SIMMS?] How about the dead TI 386 notebook? You resuscitated it twice: going for three, are we? Or the Tandy 1400 FD laptop? 'All it needs is a battery.' To do WHAT? Then there's the AT case behind the door. [They don't make 'em like that anymore: you could park a car on it and it wouldn't hurt it.] So park a car on it, laughing boy! I'm tired of tripping over it whenever I try to wrestle a load of laundry through the door. How about the carcass of that old Packard Bell 486? You didn't even bother trying to breathe new life into that one. [PB sucked. I keep its putrid remains around to remind me of how bad things could get.] Face it: the kid gets her packrat tendencies from you. I should have known to expect no better from someone who plugged a 5.25" floppy drive into his new PC. Remind me: just why did I marry you again? [That was an ID10T error, sweetie. But I love you anyway, even if you do use Windows.]
:)
>>The only argument against this post, is that we live in a capitalist world where business methods, source code, contact, etc. are all valuble and are to be kept secret. >>
Yeah, but... Many years ago I found myself working for Company X, which was in need of new Enterprise Requirements Planning software. They'd taken their current platform/software as far as it would go but the company had grown and there wasn't much wiggle room in the current software to grow with it. So they migrated to new software on a new platform (RMS on an S/38, if you really want to know.) The vendor of the software, Professional Computer Resources, sent their customers the source to their software when you bought it. As a result, they had hundreds of customers writing their own bug fixes and enhancements and distributing them, via the vendor's user group, to all of the other customers. The software, specifically designed to make it easy to plug new stuff in, eventually grew to an incredible richness, PCR was acquired, making a lot of people reasonably wealthy, and the software is now, 20 years later, still in widespread use, still a profitable offering from its current owners. I can't seem to find a loser in that. Source code -is- knowledge and as such its value increases the more widely it is spread.
mjs
Actually I was referring to application software, not the system stuff. So far as I know, IBM never released the source for SSP (S/34, S/36) or later minicomputers. But in my experience it was standard practice for application vendors to send the source code along with their product: IBM did it with IPICS and MAPICS, PCR/Pansophic did it with RMS, etc. Maybe MRP was a type of application where vendors expected that their customers needed to modify the code in order to make it work, I don't know, but the first experience I had with NOT receiving source was with Visicalc for the Apple ][; even older CP/M software often came with source. Over time, these creaking old applications got to be very rich in terms of functionality and there was considerable depth of expertise in both the end-user and technical communities. Today we see depth in end-users but not on the technical side (how many people outside of Microsoft could maintain the source for Excel?) Even the depth on the user side is eroding, I think: since the emphasis from the vendors is adding features rather than fixing bugs, using something like MS-Office becomes a full-time occupation just keeping up with the new features.
And that's another reason why software has become so unreliable: when every user had access to MAPICS or RMS source, we often fixed the bugs and sent the fixes back to the vendors for inclusion into the next release. Can't do that anymore, either: now all you can do is try to get someone's attention off the next marketing-mandated feature long enough to at least acknowledge that a bug exists. It's very frustrating for those of us used to providing software which actually works as expected.
Please understand that I'm not arguing against open source: I think the model is right even if I'm not entirely sure how masses of developers are going to be able to support themselves if everything went open. I was just pointing out that the concept isn't brand spanking shiny new; we have prior experience with at least one form of it before and it had some pretty compelling advantages even in ancient times.
mjs
This may be one of the most cognizant posts I've ever read related to open source, on /. or anywhere else, and I thank you for taking the time to write it down. But that won't stop me from picking nits... :)
This is NOT "...the first time in the history of software the doors are thrown open. People are finally allowed, and encouraged to understand software instead of just use it..." People (especially young people) tend to forget that computing did not start in 1981 with the IBM PC.
Before that, I came from the world of minicomputers, specifically the IBM S/34/36/38 line that eventually became the AS/400. Almost all major products (such as an MRP system) came with the source code, and once you had that you modified it and shared it with other users of the software. Even IBM's software went this way and did so with their (at least tacit) blessing. Vendor's user groups were in part designed to make code sharing easier (I know, I helped to form a couple of them, and the vendors strongly supported us.) I'll bet somewhere in the USA there is still someone using one of my tweaks to IPICS or the original MAPICS packages. Now I'm stuck with a closed-source ERP package running on an NT network and it's pure shit that I can't fix because I don't have the source. (Actually, I'm not sure I want the source. What on God's Earth convinced them that Visual Foxpro was a suitable programming language for something like this? And what was I on when I agreed to buy the damn thing?)
Actually, in the world of application software at least, I belive that one could make a decent argument that the disease of closed source began with the IBM PC in 1981, and the world is just now beginning to come to its senses, not the other way around.
mjs
IANAL! Sadly, based on prior observation, the legal system would probably consider the following to be irrelevant and pointless.
Interesting question: what basic rights are being violated by this draconian piece of legislation?
1. Freedom of speech. The DCMA makes enforcable those onerous (and more frequently common,) license prohibitions of discussing or reporting of product performance testing.
2. Cruel and unusual punishment. A jail term plus fine for telling my daughter how to watch a region 2 DVD on a region 1 player? DCMA says, 'Yes!'
3. Besides specific rights ennumeriated by the Constitution and its amendments, many other freedoms are generally agreed upon. While each of these is open to specific judicial interpretation in individual cases, we commonly agree that an individual has the right to use their property in whatever manner they see fit, so long as such use does not infringe the law, constitute a danger to others, etc. As a trivial example, a screwdriver is designed to drive screws yet I can also use it as a chisel, can opener, gardening implement, etc. In more relevant terms, if I desire to watch a DVD and I do not own a DVD player but I do own a personal computer using the Linux operating system, I can not do so because the holders of the DVD's copyright have not specifically provided me with a means ('device') capable of doing that. Never mind that I have legally purchased the DVD from an authorized retailer: the argument is (as the DCMA says,) that I can not do this because by defeating their technology I could in theory then copy the DVD. Not only is the DVD copyright holder's insistence on the right to determine how I use their product a violation of commonly held consumer rights, their inherent and specific presumption of my guilt of pirating their product directly contradicts my express freedom of presumption of innocence until proven guilty in a court of law.
So there you have it: the big four reasons why I feel this law to be so onerous that I have no choice as a free individual but to protest its enactment by publicly refusing to obey it.
mjs
Has anyone considered the upside to Microsoft from this? MS can now (truthfully) say that antitrust action needs to be reconsidered, since -everyone knows- that once something is released to the internet, the whole world has it in minutes. They can claim, with some validity, that since Windows source is 'in the wild', they don't need to be broken up. Sooner or later some Chinese or Ukrainian company will release a Windows clone and all of a sudden they have competition. Kinda hard to argue for antirust relief if that happens.
:)
Which, of course, makes me wonder: which low-level drone at MS did Bill pick on to give out the first password, and what did s/he do to deserve such a fate?
"Just because I'm paranoid doesn't mean they aren't out to get me."
mjs
I have no inside knowledge so this is just speculation but... given that many Windows PCs no longer come with an OS CD which gives the end user any choices about how Windows is installed, to me this indicates that MS has to some extent given up trying to support every third-party device which hits the market (and flakey support for which accounts for much of Windows' poor reliability.) I think that MS feels that if they can get some control over the hardware (trying to ensure that only 'supported' hardware is installed by 'authorized' dealers,) then Windows' reliability will improve. Think about it: if you don't have an OS CD which you can re-install or add missing drivers from, that would kinda put the brakes on adding that spiffy new device, wouldn't it? In other words, if your PC doesn't come with a DVD drive and you want one, you have to buy a new PC with an 'approved' drive already installed. Man, if I were a third-party device maker I'd be pissing my boots over this. :(
mjs
The only True Way to create a Geek House is to build it yourself. Sheesh: I'd have figured that the people here would have known that instinctively. For the Big Blue Room challenged among you, here's a quick-hit checklist:
:)
1. Find significant other. Geeky S.O. HIGHLY preferred but surprisingly not absolutely required. What is required is a high tolerance of odd behavior.
2. Reproduce. Repeat until tolerance for messes, "unstructured environments", and lack of sleep (or lack of time for geeky activities) is exhausted.
3. Inhabit. Find a place to put the crowd.
4. Wire. Cat5 is your friend, but a pair of outlets in the bathroom is not necessarily a good idea. One is quite sufficient. Domestic note: Cat5 comes in many colors but there is NOT infinite variety. Try to choose carpet & paint colors which make the odd temporary visible wire run a bit less obvious. Note that Orange cat5 cable is -very- visible against white, blue, and even brown colors. Safety note: Cat5 cable seems to be reasonably safe from the viewpoint of children using it as a teething aid. But you do want to purchase high quality cable.
5. Educate. Geekdom is a Way of Life (as is science fiction fandom, and the two are not mutually exclusive.) One way to ensure that you live in a desirable environment is to instill solid family values in your offspring. For example, Open Source is Good/Closed Source is Bad is a concept even a two year old can grasp easily. Perhaps not strangely, "Windows Sucks" appears to be something even newborns understand. Research may be in order on that one.
6. Accumulate. You're going to need more computers than you ever imagined. On the other hand, no one need pay more than US $25 for an old 486 and my personal best price is free. 486's make great proxy servers and firewalls for your geek house and (trust me on this) when your little geeks become teenage geeks, you can't have too many firewalls. (For some reason, teenaged geeks think that breaking into Daddy's sub-network and encrypting his files is just so much fun. *Sigh*)
Obviously, this is a condensed list but overall (for me, anyway,) it's been quite a bit of fun. My oldest isn't as geeky as the other two (being born in 1977 was a distinct handicap for her: I didn't get my first computer until 1979 and the minis I was working on then did not exactly lend themselves to home installation. Surprisingly, my middle child (19 now,) is much more of a pain in the butt than my son, who is 17. She goes through phases where she'll devote weeks to breaking my firewalls, whereas my son gets bored if he can't do it in a couple of days or so. I'm sure that means something but I'm not sure I want to go there right now...
mjs
I called in a favor this weekend and asked an attorney to look at the issue. For obvious reasons, they don't want to be identified (but I can go so far as to say that this particular attorney likes imported beer. Good thing I do too!)
Anyway, the opinion is that no illegal activity has taken place. According to posted descriptions, the re-engineering activity which occured took place within permitted boundaries of US law. Furthermore, posting of the re-engineered driver to the Internet and use of the driver by persons who have NOT clicked agreement with their contract, is perfectly legal. In addition, if someone mailed you the device unsolicited or if Radio Shack gave you the device without telling you that it was on loan AND if you did not click to agree with their contract, the widget is yours for permissable use within US copyright and patent law. You can't rip it apart to find out how it works and then start cranking out clones, but that's just about the only thing you can't do with it. Specifically, using a different software driver which avoids reference to their site and/or usage tracking technology, is perfectly legal. If they wanted to bind users to a contract dictating terms of usage, they didn't do it properly and unless you click on the "Agree" button on their contract, no usage contract exists.
Have fun!
PS: The commenting interspersed with their reply letter disturbs me. It looks like heckling, for which I have no respect. Please, next time just present the response and comment on it afterward. Please don't abuse the forum. mjs