If that is true, then maybe that would explain why MS OS's and applications is so susceptible to buffer overruns.
No, that's because they write them in C++.
Why not use a safe, modern language instead? Well, Ada wouldn't allow them to make proprietary language changes to lock in users, and the courts stopped them from doing it with Java. So now they have to go out and make their own entire custom language.
I fail to see what the big deal is about teachers grading down misspellings in papers (which is about all this amounts to). I always got an automatic %10 off in my highschool papers when I misspelled words like "their" (never could get the hang of all the stupid "i before e" rules. So if someone misspells "you" as "u", I don't really see the difference.
Perhaps the differece is that the kids are doing this on purpose, but I don't think that matters. It certianly would have been the height of arrogance on my part to declare all i and e combos will be spelled "ie", and then get ticked when the teacher knocked me down for misspelling "neighbor".
Fred lays out the data that was, even then, industry wisdom. According to the research IBM did, an average programmer can maintain 3 existing projects or work on 1 new one. But that's just an average. If the programmer is under 30 he can only maintain 1 (or be one of 3 junior programmers on a new project). If under 25 he is only fit to write documentation.
I have read M3. Multiple times. In fact, I have a copy of the anniverary edition right here. I neither recall, nor can find, any such thing. Please tell me what chapter you found this in, if in fact it is in there. The most likely candidate would be chapter 8, but I just reread it, and there's no such data or discussion.
In my own experience, most (but not all) developers need a fair amount of hand-holding when they first enter the industry, no matter what their age. As the years go by, most of them eventually get up to speed, but many never do.
Sheesh, you're saying that companies and/or the government (PARTICULARLY the latter) should everyone run different software? And the IT departments are supposed to support every oddball application, just because a user is too lazy and/or stubborn and/or religious to learn a different one?
I don't think it was quite intended this way. He's not saying that IT departments should have no control over what their users install. He's more saying IT departments *should* have control over what software they are able to decide to standardize on. That way you can choose the slick Microsoft tools if your company does't need things customized or supported much, or you can choose Free Software tools if you need to be able to modify your toolchain to support your needs and have the resources to do so.
A real implementation of this has been released (currently beta) here that acts as a POP3 proxy and works with any mail client.
I found several things I wasn't expecting when I looked into this.
First off, the link provided is not to its (PopFile's) homepage, or a page that indirectly refers to PopFile's homepate, or even to the latest version of the software! I had to do a google search to find the real homepage
Secondly, the program is not Free Software, or even OpenSource. No source distribution is available, and the readme on it clearly states his intention to charge for access to executables once it makes it out of beta. The charge is quite nominal, but there are oodles of other proprietary email filters out there, so I don't see why this one is special enough to rate a Slashdot plug.
Thirdly, there's no evidence I can find that this uses Perl, as stated. There's no.pl file in the distribution. It comes with some exe's and the cygwin dll (which probably makes any license other than GPL a license violation on his part, as you have to pay Cygnus to get a non-GPL license to cygwin). This probably doesn't mean it can't have Perl sources, but I saw no textual mention of Perl either, so I really don't know where Perl came into this.
Fourthly, there's similarly no proof I can find that Popfile uses any kind of advanced statistical modelling. That would be a strong suspicion, considering its user interface. But the sources aren't available, and the author makes absolutely no mention of his methods. I'm guessing this was purposely done to lessen the odds of someone making a free (or non-free) workalike. This would be OK if he at least had some kind of statisical study of its effectiveness, but there is none of that either. If you want to have any clue as to how well it will work, your only recourse is to download it and try it out for a while.
Personally, I think folks should be very leery about downloading and installing a closed-source program written by some random guy they don't know. There's no reason to believe that this guy isn't acutally collecting email addresses himself using the software. It unlikely, but possible.
I'm glad that you're looking out for all of our interests. I know I sure hate trying to take information in and make decisions for myself. Thank you for relieving me of independent thought.
Dude, believe me, I'm making this suggestion for your own mental health. I've never made a similar suggestion about equally (or even more) wrong stuff that Microsoft or others put out on the same subject. Doing so with a critical and informed mind will at least give you insight into where they are comming from. And they may even have a valid point or two.
This whitepaper is different. It is like the "third rail" of illogic; there is so much of it coursing through there that contacting your brain to it is liable to fry something. I'm just trying to save others the psycic agony I went through.
If you don't believe me, by all means, feel free to step on that third rail. But at least have a friend nearby to turn off your monitor or knock you out of your chair or something if you start to turn blue and foam at the mouth.
Preferably a blind friend, or someone who can't read English, so they don't get fried too...
Any part of Mr. Asay's article where he implies the GPL is bad or could use some work is merely due to his failing to comprehend or understand the meaning and scope of what the GPL in its entirety.
Actually, it would be more accurate to say "Any part of Mr. Asay's article where he implies anything whatsover about the GPL, good or bad, is merely due to his failing to comprehend or understand..."
Or better yet, borrow a disclaimer from TV: "This whitepaper is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual facts found in this paper, either living or dead, is purely coincidental."
You'd honestly be better off learning about the GPL from reading Microsoft whitepapers. That's how bad it is. At least Microsoft will use decent logic after spreading the initial foundation of mischaractarizations. This paper is about as accurate and well-reasoned as a statement from Lyndon Larouche.
I can tell you didn't actually read it before posting, but in this case I won't gripe at you for that, because on the balance that's probably a good thing. I read about halfway through, and just now got back from the subsequent bathroom trip (I feel much better now).
Normally we have trouble with folks posting here without even bothering to read the article in question. But in this case I'd argue that would be a good thing.
I read through about the first half of it, but his explanations of the GPL are so confused and horribly unsound that attempting to follow it was starting to muddle my brain.
In the first paragraph it struck me as odd that he claims that he was recently convinced of the GPL's innovation harming qualities, but now is convinced that the complete opposite is true. Executive summary: I know I sounded convinced yesterday. But I was actually full of shit then, and just didn't realize it. But today I really do know what I'm talking about. Honestly
However, after reading his embarassing attempts at logic, its perfectly understandable how something like that could happen to him. With logic that muddled, tomorrow he might be convinced the GPL has manged to retroactively kill the dinosarus.
My suggestion is that anyone who doesn't have a real good handle on the GPL already avoid this whitepaper like the plague. Folks who fully understand the GPL should take the Monty-Python "World's Funniest Joke" approach, and split up into teams with each person analyzing a small bit of it seperately. That way perhaps no one person will read enough of it to become fatally confused.
I don't do drugs and never have but if others wish to do it than so be it.
So you never have drunk anything with alcohol or caffine, and have never taken an asprin or cold remedy? No laxitives? No perscription medication?
I think you meant illegal drugs. We live in a society where its tough to get through a week without taking any drugs whatsoever. So it really shouldn't suprise anyone that a lot of people end up abusing them. However, our biggest drug problems come not from the illegal ones, but from the legal ones. All the illegal drugs put together are just a drop in the bucket against the big 2 of alcohol and tobacco.
Most of the spam I seem to get is in non-alphbetic character sets (Korean/Japaneese/Chineese, I'm not sure, I can't read it). I guess I hit the VIA support site in Taiwan one too many times or something.
I don't know much about that character set, but I suspect they don't use the same separator characters that his filter is looking for to separate its tokens.
That might do it, assuming you have (and kept) the receipt. I regularly keep them for all my purchase programs, but I suspect a lot of people don't.
For our hypothetical situation, we are talking about someone who acquires OSS software, and claims to not have read the license, and therefore not have agreed to it. Quibbles with my wording aside, said person has no leg to stand on if they try any activites that would break the OSS license, as long as the license only *gives* rights, rather than tries to take some away.
By default (in the US) you have no rights to do anything with the software, even run it.
You have several misconceptions about copyright law.
Copyright grants exclusive distribution rights to the creator, however there are limitations to this specified in Title 17. Two of those are the right of the user to utilize the software(i.e. by making a copy into the machine's memory) and to make a backup/archival copy.
That's also true, if you care to look at it that way. But you have to be a "legitimate owner" of the copy under Title 17. The only good way to prove that to the law's (and the BSA's) satisfaction is to produce a license. So all this statute really does is establish a minimum basline of rights that you must recieve from a license, if you manage to acquire one. Without a license, you still have no rights (unless you can somehow otherwise prove in court that you recieved a copy from a legitimate source in a legitimate way).
We are starting to split finer and finer hairs here, which is getting into pretty dangerous territory considering neither of us are probably licensed IP attorneys. So I suggest we stop the "no you're wrong because you overgeneralized" game here, before we get ourselves lost in the IP law equivalent of quantam theory.:-)
By default (in the US) you have no rights to do anything with the software, even run it.
...I'm pretty sure this is wrong. See 17 USC 117 [cornell.edu]. If you are the legitimate owner of a piece of software,
The words "legitimate owner" are pretty key here. If I find some software sitting on the internet (or even on my hard-drive for some reason) with no license, am I a "legitimate owner"? I don't think so. I certianly couldn't prove so in court, which is what counts.
Basicly this statute seems to be limiting how restrictive a license can be. It doesn't rid me of the nessecity of having a license at all. Without that license, I legally can't even load and run the software.
They are probably correct that click-through is helpful for typical proprietary licenses. But it is not needed for typical OSS licenses.
You can read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/enforcing-gpl.html for an explanation of why, from perhaps the world's foremost authority on the subject, FSF lawyer Eben Moglen. But by way of an executive summary:
This is there actually is a fundamental difference between OSS (or at least Free Software) licenses and proprietary ones. By default (in the US) you have no rights to do anything with the software, even run it. Proprietary software licenses offer you a deal whereby you are allowed to run the software, in exchange for agreeing not to do other things that you are typically legally allowed to do. So they give up rights, and you give up rights. But its tough to make a case (in court) that you agreed to give up those rights, if there is no proof that you ever even saw the agreement. That's where click-through comes in.
With a Free Software license, you are only given rights; none are taken away. You might not be able to do some things (like sell it to someone else with a different license), but you aren't allowed to do that stuff by default either. If you break this license, there is no question that you violated copyright law, whether you agreed to the license or not.
So unless they had something in that license that says the user agrees not to do XYZ, which they normally would have the legal right to do without the license, then click-through is completely unnessecary.
Note: IANAL. This comes from extensive reading of GPL materials, writings of IP lawyers like Eben Moglen, and discussions with folks who have actually been in court on IP cases. For advice on a specific situation, contact a good IP lawyer. For everyone else, I highly encourage reading http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/enforcing-gpl.html , which covers this in a bit of detail.
100G's of shock and vibration... sounds damn extreme to me
Obviously you weren't on the ship when it got hit by a torpedo.
I do realise getting hit in combat is part of the reason for this. But human bodies can't take 100G's. I kept picturing the now crewless destroyer with its still perfectly functioning engines motoring around in a big circle out in the middle of the Pacific.
I worked on the software for one of the first onboard PC systems in the US navy (and no, not the crappy CAE NT system that BSOD-ed and required the ship to be towed). There's a blurb about the overall project at http://198.65.138.161/military/systems/ship/ddg-51 -flt2a.htm , but it doesn't mention my stuff (and does mention that they will eventually be using the CAE system mentioned above. They call it "smart ship".:-)
In general, the requirements for these systems are unreal. Among other things, they have to be able to handle 100G's of shock and vibration (I'm not a Mechanical Engineer, but that sounds damn extreme to me). This pretty much means no moving parts, so hard drives have to be solid-state. We went with a solid-state PCMCIA card that looks like a hard-drive to the system for our boot drive. A trackball was used instead of a mouse for the control device, the keyboard was built into the cabinet, and the whole cabinet was fitted huge shock absorbers under it and inside it.
One GUI vendor was disqualified on the sole basis that they required a dongle which would have needed all sorts of extra bracing to keep it from snapping off. That's about the best example I've ever seen of copy-protection costing someone sales.
In all my systems (I put together my own), I have been putting in LS-120 drives instead of straight floppy drives. That way I can still boot floppies on the rare instance I need to, and I have a removable media drive that isn't completely useless the rest of the time.
The only problem is that I can't really use it to install OS's, as there's usually a mid-stage (between BIOS access and fully installed OS access) where they expect to see something on the motherboard's floppy connector rather than an ATA drive. With OS's on CD's these days, that isn't a big problem.
I don't think I'd accept a system that had no kind of writeable removable-media access at all. But a CD-ROM burner would probably be sufficient for most uses. If not that, then it should at least have a ZIP or LS-120 drive.
With every new toaster I go through at lot of bread trying to find just the right "Darkness" setting. With this, I could just have a web-based slider with a picture of a piece of toast that gets darker or lighter as you move the slider. You could even have a drop-down with pictures of Bagels and Pop-Tarts (after all, they toast to different darknesses on the same setting). The possibilities are endless!
Don't forget that the RIAA 5 record labels are probably more experienced in professional bribery than ANY other gang of crooks... They've been strategically bribing radio stations for DECADES, directly, or indirectly, to get airplay and manipulate the charts.
That's a good point. Back in the 50's it was found out that they were bribing DJ's directly, and there was a big stink raised. The upshot was a federal law against "payola". Rather than give up payola due to its clear perception in the public's mind as a reprehensible act, they just started doing it through middlemen. They didn't do this particularly secretly either. It was just a way to get around the letter of the law, without any concern whatsoever for the spirit of the law.
This episode clearly shows we are up against a gang of thugs who care nothing for anyone's moral sensibilities, if there's a dollar (or a bit of control) to be squeezed out.
As engineers we are used to dealing with people who can be won over, if we can only logicaly explain why our position is the Right Thing. We can't deal with these racketeers that way. They don't care what the Right Thing is, so there's no point in arguing it with them.
We have to recognize that we are in an all out brawl, and act accordingly.
It seems clear that corporate copyright holders are going to keep pressing through draconian legisation from various different angles until we have no rights to any ideas (what they call "content") or devices capable of holding them at all.
We may have managed to stop some of this stuff through judicial review, but for every one of those partial victories, they push though 3 more pieces of bad legislation.
The only way I see to possibly get back the initiative and stop this nonsense is to separate the MPAA and the RIAA from their pet legislators. What's making this legislative payola so effective is that there is no big downside to it for Congressmen. What we have to do is to make that downside.
I don't think we can achieve results by just complaining to our individual congressmen like we have been doing. Force spread out that diffuse just amounts to random heat. Instead, we should focus our attacks on just one target, and take it down. We have to make an example of one legisator, so that the others will sit up and take notice.
So I believe the only possible way out of this situation is to pick a good example congressman (Fritz Hollings, the "Senator from Disney" would do nicely), and do what we have to do to make sure he doesn't get re-elected.
I'm not talking about just billboards, bumper-stickers, and small paper signs (although those need to be there in abundance too). Radio ads need to be bought. TV ads need to be bought. Ads talking about his attacks on the freedoms and the consumers in his home state, and the US of A. Ads bordering on the distorting and unfair (because you can bet that's on the nice side of what the MPAA and RIAA will retort with).
And yes, it will take money; a lot of it. We'd have to do something that is anethma to a lot of us; put our money where our mouths are. But if we could succeed, then everyone in Congress would be afraid to take us on again. We might never have to spend another penny fighting off this crapola. In the long run, this would be far cheaper than sending in small amounts of money to the EFF every year, and paying jacked-up prices for approved playback devices and protected media for the rest of our lives.
but them MS will probably pay you $400,000 to keep it hush.
I love that idea. Just like a lot of farmers are paid to not grow corn, we can be paid to not write software! I can just picture it now...
(picks up phone and hits speedial #3) Hello, Bill? Yeah, I was thinking since I'm low on cash and not a lot of good games are out right now, perhaps I might do some work. Like maybe I'll try to get Linux running on the XBox or something. Folks would like that.
What? Well, yeah I guess I could use $400,000. Oh, a copy of Warcraft III is on the way too? Why, thank you, but you really don't have...oh? A prerelease for Age of Mythology too? Well, that's most generous of you. No, I don't suppose I will have time to code anything after all. It was a pleasure talking to you too...
ACT is a company that creates only free software. They've been around since the late 90's, and I understand they have been in the black for years, perhaps since inception. They are a privately held company, and as far as I know, have no plans to ever do an IPO. Perhaps that's why they don't get much press (although RMS likes to use them as examples in his speeches).
Slashdot Mirror
No, that's because they write them in C++.
Why not use a safe, modern language instead? Well, Ada wouldn't allow them to make proprietary language changes to lock in users, and the courts stopped them from doing it with Java. So now they have to go out and make their own entire custom language.
I fail to see what the big deal is about teachers grading down misspellings in papers (which is about all this amounts to). I always got an automatic %10 off in my highschool papers when I misspelled words like "their" (never could get the hang of all the stupid "i before e" rules. So if someone misspells "you" as "u", I don't really see the difference.
Perhaps the differece is that the kids are doing this on purpose, but I don't think that matters. It certianly would have been the height of arrogance on my part to declare all i and e combos will be spelled "ie", and then get ticked when the teacher knocked me down for misspelling "neighbor".
I have read M3. Multiple times. In fact, I have a copy of the anniverary edition right here. I neither recall, nor can find, any such thing. Please tell me what chapter you found this in, if in fact it is in there. The most likely candidate would be chapter 8, but I just reread it, and there's no such data or discussion.
In my own experience, most (but not all) developers need a fair amount of hand-holding when they first enter the industry, no matter what their age. As the years go by, most of them eventually get up to speed, but many never do.
I don't think it was quite intended this way. He's not saying that IT departments should have no control over what their users install. He's more saying IT departments *should* have control over what software they are able to decide to standardize on. That way you can choose the slick Microsoft tools if your company does't need things customized or supported much, or you can choose Free Software tools if you need to be able to modify your toolchain to support your needs and have the resources to do so.
I found several things I wasn't expecting when I looked into this.
First off, the link provided is not to its (PopFile's) homepage, or a page that indirectly refers to PopFile's homepate, or even to the latest version of the software! I had to do a google search to find the real homepage
Secondly, the program is not Free Software, or even OpenSource. No source distribution is available, and the readme on it clearly states his intention to charge for access to executables once it makes it out of beta. The charge is quite nominal, but there are oodles of other proprietary email filters out there, so I don't see why this one is special enough to rate a Slashdot plug.
Thirdly, there's no evidence I can find that this uses Perl, as stated. There's no
Fourthly, there's similarly no proof I can find that Popfile uses any kind of advanced statistical modelling. That would be a strong suspicion, considering its user interface. But the sources aren't available, and the author makes absolutely no mention of his methods. I'm guessing this was purposely done to lessen the odds of someone making a free (or non-free) workalike. This would be OK if he at least had some kind of statisical study of its effectiveness, but there is none of that either. If you want to have any clue as to how well it will work, your only recourse is to download it and try it out for a while.
Personally, I think folks should be very leery about downloading and installing a closed-source program written by some random guy they don't know. There's no reason to believe that this guy isn't acutally collecting email addresses himself using the software. It unlikely, but possible.
Dude, believe me, I'm making this suggestion for your own mental health. I've never made a similar suggestion about equally (or even more) wrong stuff that Microsoft or others put out on the same subject. Doing so with a critical and informed mind will at least give you insight into where they are comming from. And they may even have a valid point or two.
This whitepaper is different. It is like the "third rail" of illogic; there is so much of it coursing through there that contacting your brain to it is liable to fry something. I'm just trying to save others the psycic agony I went through.
If you don't believe me, by all means, feel free to step on that third rail. But at least have a friend nearby to turn off your monitor or knock you out of your chair or something if you start to turn blue and foam at the mouth.
Preferably a blind friend, or someone who can't read English, so they don't get fried too...
Actually, it would be more accurate to say "Any part of Mr. Asay's article where he implies anything whatsover about the GPL, good or bad, is merely due to his failing to comprehend or understand..."
Or better yet, borrow a disclaimer from TV:
"This whitepaper is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual facts found in this paper, either living or dead, is purely coincidental."
You'd honestly be better off learning about the GPL from reading Microsoft whitepapers. That's how bad it is. At least Microsoft will use decent logic after spreading the initial foundation of mischaractarizations. This paper is about as accurate and well-reasoned as a statement from Lyndon Larouche.
I can tell you didn't actually read it before posting, but in this case I won't gripe at you for that, because on the balance that's probably a good thing. I read about halfway through, and just now got back from the subsequent bathroom trip (I feel much better now).
Normally we have trouble with folks posting here without even bothering to read the article in question. But in this case I'd argue that would be a good thing.
I read through about the first half of it, but his explanations of the GPL are so confused and horribly unsound that attempting to follow it was starting to muddle my brain.
In the first paragraph it struck me as odd that he claims that he was recently convinced of the GPL's innovation harming qualities, but now is convinced that the complete opposite is true. Executive summary: I know I sounded convinced yesterday. But I was actually full of shit then, and just didn't realize it. But today I really do know what I'm talking about. Honestly
However, after reading his embarassing attempts at logic, its perfectly understandable how something like that could happen to him. With logic that muddled, tomorrow he might be convinced the GPL has manged to retroactively kill the dinosarus.
My suggestion is that anyone who doesn't have a real good handle on the GPL already avoid this whitepaper like the plague. Folks who fully understand the GPL should take the Monty-Python "World's Funniest Joke" approach, and split up into teams with each person analyzing a small bit of it seperately. That way perhaps no one person will read enough of it to become fatally confused.
I still have that bit saved on my TiVo. Its classic!
Triumph pointing to buttons on chest device of Darth Vader suit:
And which ones of these calls your mom to drive you home?
So you never have drunk anything with alcohol or caffine, and have never taken an asprin or cold remedy? No laxitives? No perscription medication?
I think you meant illegal drugs. We live in a society where its tough to get through a week without taking any drugs whatsoever. So it really shouldn't suprise anyone that a lot of people end up abusing them. However, our biggest drug problems come not from the illegal ones, but from the legal ones. All the illegal drugs put together are just a drop in the bucket against the big 2 of alcohol and tobacco.
They also have a paper from 1998 describing it here
Most of the spam I seem to get is in non-alphbetic character sets (Korean/Japaneese/Chineese, I'm not sure, I can't read it). I guess I hit the VIA support site in Taiwan one too many times or something.
I don't know much about that character set, but I suspect they don't use the same separator characters that his filter is looking for to separate its tokens.
For our hypothetical situation, we are talking about someone who acquires OSS software, and claims to not have read the license, and therefore not have agreed to it. Quibbles with my wording aside, said person has no leg to stand on if they try any activites that would break the OSS license, as long as the license only *gives* rights, rather than tries to take some away.
We are starting to split finer and finer hairs here, which is getting into pretty dangerous territory considering neither of us are probably licensed IP attorneys. So I suggest we stop the "no you're wrong because you overgeneralized" game here, before we get ourselves lost in the IP law equivalent of quantam theory.
Basicly this statute seems to be limiting how restrictive a license can be. It doesn't rid me of the nessecity of having a license at all. Without that license, I legally can't even load and run the software.
They are probably correct that click-through is helpful for typical proprietary licenses. But it is not needed for typical OSS licenses.
You can read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/enforcing-gpl.html for an explanation of why, from perhaps the world's foremost authority on the subject, FSF lawyer Eben Moglen. But by way of an executive summary:
This is there actually is a fundamental difference between OSS (or at least Free Software) licenses and proprietary ones. By default (in the US) you have no rights to do anything with the software, even run it. Proprietary software licenses offer you a deal whereby you are allowed to run the software, in exchange for agreeing not to do other things that you are typically legally allowed to do. So they give up rights, and you give up rights. But its tough to make a case (in court) that you agreed to give up those rights, if there is no proof that you ever even saw the agreement. That's where click-through comes in.
With a Free Software license, you are only given rights; none are taken away. You might not be able to do some things (like sell it to someone else with a different license), but you aren't allowed to do that stuff by default either. If you break this license, there is no question that you violated copyright law, whether you agreed to the license or not.
So unless they had something in that license that says the user agrees not to do XYZ, which they normally would have the legal right to do without the license, then click-through is completely unnessecary.
Note: IANAL. This comes from extensive reading of GPL materials, writings of IP lawyers like Eben Moglen, and discussions with folks who have actually been in court on IP cases. For advice on a specific situation, contact a good IP lawyer. For everyone else, I highly encourage reading http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/enforcing-gpl.html , which covers this in a bit of detail.
(Sorry; it had to be said).
I worked on the software for one of the first onboard PC systems in the US navy (and no, not the crappy CAE NT system that BSOD-ed and required the ship to be towed). There's a blurb about the overall project at http://198.65.138.161/military/systems/ship/ddg-51 -flt2a.htm , but it doesn't mention my stuff (and does mention that they will eventually be using the CAE system mentioned above. They call it "smart ship". :-)
In general, the requirements for these systems are unreal. Among other things, they have to be able to handle 100G's of shock and vibration (I'm not a Mechanical Engineer, but that sounds damn extreme to me). This pretty much means no moving parts, so hard drives have to be solid-state. We went with a solid-state PCMCIA card that looks like a hard-drive to the system for our boot drive. A trackball was used instead of a mouse for the control device, the keyboard was built into the cabinet, and the whole cabinet was fitted huge shock absorbers under it and inside it.
One GUI vendor was disqualified on the sole basis that they required a dongle which would have needed all sorts of extra bracing to keep it from snapping off. That's about the best example I've ever seen of copy-protection costing someone sales.
In all my systems (I put together my own), I have been putting in LS-120 drives instead of straight floppy drives. That way I can still boot floppies on the rare instance I need to, and I have a removable media drive that isn't completely useless the rest of the time.
The only problem is that I can't really use it to install OS's, as there's usually a mid-stage (between BIOS access and fully installed OS access) where they expect to see something on the motherboard's floppy connector rather than an ATA drive. With OS's on CD's these days, that isn't a big problem.
I don't think I'd accept a system that had no kind of writeable removable-media access at all. But a CD-ROM burner would probably be sufficient for most uses. If not that, then it should at least have a ZIP or LS-120 drive.
With every new toaster I go through at lot of bread trying to find just the right "Darkness" setting. With this, I could just have a web-based slider with a picture of a piece of toast that gets darker or lighter as you move the slider. You could even have a drop-down with pictures of Bagels and Pop-Tarts (after all, they toast to different darknesses on the same setting). The possibilities are endless!
This episode clearly shows we are up against a gang of thugs who care nothing for anyone's moral sensibilities, if there's a dollar (or a bit of control) to be squeezed out.
As engineers we are used to dealing with people who can be won over, if we can only logicaly explain why our position is the Right Thing. We can't deal with these racketeers that way. They don't care what the Right Thing is, so there's no point in arguing it with them.
We have to recognize that we are in an all out brawl, and act accordingly.
It seems clear that corporate copyright holders are going to keep pressing through draconian legisation from various different angles until we have no rights to any ideas (what they call "content") or devices capable of holding them at all.
We may have managed to stop some of this stuff through judicial review, but for every one of those partial victories, they push though 3 more pieces of bad legislation.
The only way I see to possibly get back the initiative and stop this nonsense is to separate the MPAA and the RIAA from their pet legislators. What's making this legislative payola so effective is that there is no big downside to it for Congressmen. What we have to do is to make that downside.
I don't think we can achieve results by just complaining to our individual congressmen like we have been doing. Force spread out that diffuse just amounts to random heat. Instead, we should focus our attacks on just one target, and take it down. We have to make an example of one legisator, so that the others will sit up and take notice.
So I believe the only possible way out of this situation is to pick a good example congressman (Fritz Hollings, the "Senator from Disney" would do nicely), and do what we have to do to make sure he doesn't get re-elected.
I'm not talking about just billboards, bumper-stickers, and small paper signs (although those need to be there in abundance too). Radio ads need to be bought. TV ads need to be bought. Ads talking about his attacks on the freedoms and the consumers in his home state, and the US of A. Ads bordering on the distorting and unfair (because you can bet that's on the nice side of what the MPAA and RIAA will retort with).
And yes, it will take money; a lot of it. We'd have to do something that is anethma to a lot of us; put our money where our mouths are. But if we could succeed, then everyone in Congress would be afraid to take us on again. We might never have to spend another penny fighting off this crapola. In the long run, this would be far cheaper than sending in small amounts of money to the EFF every year, and paying jacked-up prices for approved playback devices and protected media for the rest of our lives.
I love that idea. Just like a lot of farmers are paid to not grow corn, we can be paid to not write software! I can just picture it now...
(picks up phone and hits speedial #3)
Hello, Bill? Yeah, I was thinking since I'm low on cash and not a lot of good games are out right now, perhaps I might do some work. Like maybe I'll try to get Linux running on the XBox or something. Folks would like that.
What? Well, yeah I guess I could use $400,000. Oh, a copy of Warcraft III is on the way too? Why, thank you, but you really don't have...oh? A prerelease for Age of Mythology too? Well, that's most generous of you. No, I don't suppose I will have time to code anything after all. It was a pleasure talking to you too...
ACT is a company that creates only free software. They've been around since the late 90's, and I understand they have been in the black for years, perhaps since inception. They are a privately held company, and as far as I know, have no plans to ever do an IPO. Perhaps that's why they don't get much press (although RMS likes to use them as examples in his speeches).