Why in the fuck was the navy using Windows NT, when they could have been using Solaris or Linux or even fucking HP-UX?
See my reply to the parent of this post for the answer to this question. The exectutive summary is that it was a political, not technical decision. If it was technical, they would have been following their own policies, which would mean it would have been migrated (rather than developed from scratch) to HP/UX boxes using Ada (HP/UX was their standard OS at the time, and Ada their standard language), which together would have provided orders of magnitude more reliability.
I know a little about that, since I used to work for the competitor to the contractor that developed that software.
The fact of the matter is that the Navy, like any other large beuracracy, has all sorts of mutually-antagonistic factions that love or hate various systems more for internal political reasons than for their inherent value.
My old group (the Marine Systems division of Lockheed Martin - great bunch of guys and gals...) developed and maintained the engine control systems for all of the Navy's guided-missile destroyers. This class of ship has been around for a while, so it was originally developed using technologies that are incredibly outdated by today's standards. The sensible thing to do with such a system is to slowily modernize things, with an eye towards longevity and maintainability.
You first have to realise that Naval systems have to be way more reliable than your average PC. The open ocean is not kind to electronics, and warfare certainly isn't. The shock and vibration requirements are unreal (like 100G's). The sailors might all die, but the engines would be just fine. I guess the ship would be puttering around in a big circle in the open ocean.:-)
Also, you must realise that it is considered a disgrace for a captain to have his ship towed back to port. Thus naval engine control systems have to be very reliable, or captains are very unhappy with you. It was not unheard of for our engineers to get woken up in the middle of the night and flown to a diabled destroyer via heliocopter to fix a bug, rather than have it towed in. So a "tow-in" bug is even worse than it sounds to an uniformed civilian. Nasty things happen that a peon like me doesn't really want to think about.:-(
For that reason, the natural and sensible route is to update these systems using Naval-standard COTS hardware (HP/UX based), and to develop all new software in Ada (the only language designed for use in "life-critical" applications), using accepted (and time-consuming) software development processes.
However, there was an R&D branch of the Navy that was investigating use of all sorts of new unproven technologies. In this case, they were using C++, expert systems, common 'PC's, and lassise-faire development processes. Experimenting is what R&D folks should be doing, so that's all good. But these technologies are notoriously bug-ridden, compared to what we were using in the actual fleet. We didn't bid on the R&D stuff, (I'm not sure why), so it went to a competitor of ours who I won't name. (But who's initials are CAE:-) ).
Now of course the commander who has the R&D folks under his command wants to see his stuff used, as that will validate his R&D group, and of course give him a good reason for an increase in funding. So he fights hard to get us thrown off of all future contracts, and our competitors on. But the other Naval oganizations have a lot invested in our stuff, and the captains are understandably leery of massive changes. It probably didn't hurt us any that our competitor was a Canadian company too. So its a big hard political battle, with us mostly winning. I'd like to think this was a victory of reliability and proven techniques over fashion and flash, but I'm not that naieve.
However, apparently they did manage to get the R&D system put on one ship as a test case. Probably it had something to do with CAE having a better position in Crusiers than us. Imagine the captain's displeasure, and our secret delight, when that system failed in the middle of the ocean and the ship had to be towed back.:-)
The moral of the story is that you can probably get something thrown together with whatever's considered "cool" today and that might make it an easier sell, but if you *need* reliablity, you use Unix and Ada, and good software development processes.
(disclaimer: I currently work for a competitor to CAE in a different market.)
Sorry pal, but if this fellow is not telling the truth then the burden of proof is on you to prove him a liar, until then his story is true.
Errr...why? Because you say so?
In a logical argument, the "burden of convincing", if you want to call it that, has to go with party making an initial statement. If it were said by someone I know, or wasn't particularly contraversial, or was something easliy checked on (thus decreasing the incentive to make something up), then I might be willing to give someone a pass.
However, this story was posted by an AC, is impossible for us to verify, and relates behavior that 80 years ago would have had the Masons (if not the whole town) showing up at the perpetrator's door with firearms.
Given that, I think I'd like to use a bit of healthy sceptascism. Otherwise, I might as well believe the folks who say the moon landing was faked, or whatever whacked-out story the guy standing on a box in the mall downtown is shouting at passerby today.
Whose fault is that, Microsoft's, or the inept Head Start administrators who pirated software and got caught red-handed?
No one said anyone "pirated" software. You don't have to make an unauthorised copy of software to get hit with expensive damages from an audit. All you have to do is be unable to come up with proof of purchase for every bit of proprietary software installed on your machines. Its "guilty until proven innocent" with these clowns.
I'd wadger that at least %90 of PC-owning households with legal OS's wouldn't be able to prove it, if audited. A small charity with a very limited budget is liable to be running on old donated PC's. What is the likelyhood that they will have access to the original boxes, reciepts, and/or licensing materials? Pretty damn slim. Microsoft could probably shut down nearly any little charity it wants to on a whim.
As an aside, I really don't like the term "piracy". It may serve Microsoft's interests to have you thinking that sharing useful software with your friends is morally equivalent to attacking shipping on the high seas, kidnapping, murder, etc., but this isn't even close to accurate. A more accurate term would be "unauthorized copying"
My dad had a filmed-from-the-theater-screen VHS bootleg of the original Star Wars about 3 months after it came out ('77?). This was back when VCR's were brand new, and the MPAA was pushing congress hard about how such activity was going to kill them.
For their sake, I hope they don't win this time either.:-)
Errr...the whole point of having the word "Firmware" around is to be able to describe stuff that isn't quite either. Perhaps its both and neither at the same time.:-)
But I was just throwing him a bone anyway. As far as I'm concerned, anything in my PC whose replacement involves a set of pliers is *hardware*.
Likewise, algorithms that trade stock and interact in such a way that a crash can occur are buggy algorithms.
The "buggy algorithm" in this case is Wall Street itself, because this can happen (and has in the past happened) with or without software. All the software did in this one case was help nature along a bit, if indeed it had any effect at all.
Now it might be nice to add "market crash detection" features to the software. But there is no evidence that the software in this case was taking any actions that its users (the individual traders) would have disagreed with at the time. Calling this a software bug is like calling a slashdotting a software bug.
I think of this whenever I read about computers used in medical, transportation, or other areas where malfunctioning software could put lives at risk.I don't believe that the "software culture" has changed significantly in this respect since then.
That's precisely why people developing safety-critical apps should be (and quite often are) using Ada, rather than Fortran or C. Not only does the languge put in all the checks you mention (and more), but the "software culture" among Ada programmers is significantly better where bugs and safety are concerned.
Take a look at Praxis' SPARK for a look at how responsible people develop safety-critical software. The approach takes more effort than the typical "hack something together then bash it into shape with the debugger" approach. But in many cases, it is well worth the cost.
The specifications bug is a software bug. We, as programmers, should make sure that our software are comunicating properly.
Errr...no. This problem had nothing to do with how well the software was communicating. The problem was that some initial data was entered into the system (by human beings) using the wrong units. That was done because the data came from the contracting agency without any notion of units attached to it, and the contracting agency assumed the wrong units. The system that had the "bug" was not the software, it was the human system of communications between the contractor and the contracting agency.
Then to make it funnier, turns out the system engineers had decided that since software is infallible, any exception condition would indicate a hardware failure(!), so instead of a reset they shut the affected computer down altogether.
Not quite. The software was built for the Arianne 4. On the Arianne 4, it was physically impossible for that value to ever get high enough to overflow. So on the Arianne 4 the assumption that an overflow could only be due to a hardware failure was entirely correct. If they had known that years later an Arianne 5 would come along, and those engineers would stupidly reuse the Arianne 4 code without testing it once, then perhaps they would have made a different decision. But I think the blame goes on entirely on the Arianne 5 guys, who were *not* the ones who wrote that code.
That's a good start, but I don't think it goes quite far enough. The Web has always worked on free linking, and anything that threatens that threatens the Web itself. Its clear they are doing this for completly selfish reasons, without even a second thought to the systemic repurcussions of their actions.
What needs to be done to people who won't play right on the Web is exactly what is done to people who don't play right with their email servers...they should be blacklisted. Search engines should remove *all* links to *any* of their pages, as should everyone else.
If they don't like the rules of our Web, cut them out of it and let them be in their own little web.
I had exactly the same experience at my company, except that I cut out all that early and middle stuff and just never signed anything. I didn't get in their face and *refuse* to sign, I just didn't ever bother to do it.
I don't know what IP owership defaults to if a "Professional" (IRS classified "exempt") doesn't sign anything. I'm not a lawyer. But my dad is, and he seemed happy with the arrangement when I related it to him. (yes, I do Free Software work, and yes he does know about that).
FAIR at least can count and present evidence that the deck not only is stacked cold at FOX, it is dripping liquid helium. Dispute their counting abilities; don't ad hominem them for being "liberal" (GASP!) which only impresses the rightwingers among us anyway.
Well, the epithet liberal sure seems to impress the folks over at "Media Research Center". They use the word in no less than 3 places on their front page alone! They also used "far left" once, just for variety. Apparently the irony of being completely unbalanced political hacks while simultaniously claiming to support "political balance" is totally lost on them.:-)
FAIR is at least sophisticated enough to see this and keep partisian language off their main page.
You think FAIR is biased. I'll buy that, they bill themselves as "progressive".
So instead you point people to a website that is on a "Ring of Conservative Sites"????
I wouldn't unresevedly trust any info I got from FAIR either. But at least they make some pretense of being balanced. I at least like some flowers and sweet talk before I get mind-fucked by politicos.
Oh wait! You were probably being sarcastic. I see. I'm sorry for my weak sense of humor.
>Please raise your hand if you develop software for >a living; that is, you support yourself and/or >your family by developing software.
>Now, keep your hand raised if you believe that >your company could offer the same software that >you helped to create as a free, open-source >download and still keep you employed.
My hand's still up too. My company, like the vast majority of the software developer employers out there, performs sofware work under 3 circumstances:
1) Some other company (or the g'mit) has something they want developed or fixed, and we negotiate a contract to do so.
2) Some other company wants a slightly modified version of our hardware, which of course will require slightly modified software to drive it.
3) We are doing something internally that could be made enough more efficient with some new s/w thingy to justify the cost of building same.
In case 1, the other company is not going to get this desriable s/w unless they pay someone to make it. They usually insist on getting all sources and build tools anyway, so there'd be absolutely no harm in GPLing and posting the stuff.
In case 2, we amortize the software development cost over the amount of units that will be shipped. If its more than 1 or 2, it usually ends up being a negligable amount comprared to hardware and assembly costs (our simulators typically cost in the millions each, due to all the specialized hardware). So software is just something we have to have, it isn't where our money is made. It also wouldn't be horribly useful w/o our hardware, so there'd be no harm in GPLing it (not much benifit either though).
In case 3, the software is never distributed outside the company, so licenses aren't even an issue. But if we were talking about things that others could use too, then presumably GPLing such things would allow the development costs for these tools to get spread out over multiple companies. That would make the cost/benifit equation I mentioned a lot lighter on the cost side, which would lead to more of these tools being made, which would lead to us being more efficient.
Just because Mundie can't (or doesn't want to) imagine any other way of making money doesn't mean they aren't out there. The fact of the matter is that most software developers are not employed writing stuff that is sold in mass-produced shrink-wrapped boxes. If all that stuff went away tomorrow, the job market would hardly notice.
Cracking and defacing websites. Clearly an illegal activity. Perhaps it shouldn't be treated as anything more than vandalism, but it's reasonable to involve the Feds, since some of the sites certianly weren't in his home state.
Advocating the violent overthrow of the government. I'm not entirely sure that I agree with this particular law. It was enacted in the early 20th century, cheifly to give the government a reason to arrest Communists who hadn't committed a crime. So its not exactly a new law. If you disagree with it, fine. But then where the heck were you and your complaints the last 50 years when Communists were getting thrown in jail because of it?
I notice that lots of folks have criticisms about the article. I certainly do too. (eg: RJS must be having kittens about now for being referred to as having started the Open Source movement). And I know the ususal/. solution is to spell out these criticisms in follow-up postings.
However, this situation is different. Since the article is copylefted, rather than complain about it, let's just fix it!:-)
So if anyone posts a criticism about the article here, post a "show me the source" reply.:-)
Besides, OpenGL is goverened by a board of companies, not just SGI.
It doesn't matter who "governs" OpenGL. All Microsoft has to do to kill it now is refuse to license their 3D patents to any hardware vendor who chooses to make OpenGL drivers instead of DirectX.
Re:Unfortunately, an end to wars
on
The Drone War
·
· Score: 1
The Jews were peaceful during the Holocaust. What makes you think this is any different?
Passive resistance is a political strategy, just as war, diplomacy, and terrorisim are. Like any other strategic game, there are times when some approaches are more effective than others. Each approach has certian parameters it needs to be at its most effective.
Passive resistance relies on the moral outrage of onlookers, or on sheer power of numbers. For the former to be effective you have a situation where the governement with the power is accountable to the people and has a free press. For the latter to be effective, you have to have way more supporters than the people in power.
The Jews in Germany during the Holocaust had neither factor going for them. The Palestinians have both factors in their favor. If they were to suddenly wise up and start using this approach, they'd probably be running Israel (politically at least) in 10 years.
Slashdot Mirror
I hear FBI is on their way over to interrogate you about your Al-queda contacts.
See my reply to the parent of this post for the answer to this question. The exectutive summary is that it was a political, not technical decision. If it was technical, they would have been following their own policies, which would mean it would have been migrated (rather than developed from scratch) to HP/UX boxes using Ada (HP/UX was their standard OS at the time, and Ada their standard language), which together would have provided orders of magnitude more reliability.
I know a little about that, since I used to work for the competitor to the contractor that developed that software.
:-)
:-(
:-) ).
:-)
The fact of the matter is that the Navy, like any other large beuracracy, has all sorts of mutually-antagonistic factions that love or hate various systems more for internal political reasons than for their inherent value.
My old group (the Marine Systems division of Lockheed Martin - great bunch of guys and gals...) developed and maintained the engine control systems for all of the Navy's guided-missile destroyers. This class of ship has been around for a while, so it was originally developed using technologies that are incredibly outdated by today's standards. The sensible thing to do with such a system is to slowily modernize things, with an eye towards longevity and maintainability.
You first have to realise that Naval systems have to be way more reliable than your average PC. The open ocean is not kind to electronics, and warfare certainly isn't. The shock and vibration requirements are unreal (like 100G's). The sailors might all die, but the engines would be just fine. I guess the ship would be puttering around in a big circle in the open ocean.
Also, you must realise that it is considered a disgrace for a captain to have his ship towed back to port. Thus naval engine control systems have to be very reliable, or captains are very unhappy with you. It was not unheard of for our engineers to get woken up in the middle of the night and flown to a diabled destroyer via heliocopter to fix a bug, rather than have it towed in. So a "tow-in" bug is even worse than it sounds to an uniformed civilian. Nasty things happen that a peon like me doesn't really want to think about.
For that reason, the natural and sensible route is to update these systems using Naval-standard COTS hardware (HP/UX based), and to develop all new software in Ada (the only language designed for use in "life-critical" applications), using accepted (and time-consuming) software development processes.
However, there was an R&D branch of the Navy that was investigating use of all sorts of new unproven technologies. In this case, they were using C++, expert systems, common 'PC's, and lassise-faire development processes. Experimenting is what R&D folks should be doing, so that's all good. But these technologies are notoriously bug-ridden, compared to what we were using in the actual fleet. We didn't bid on the R&D stuff, (I'm not sure why), so it went to a competitor of ours who I won't name. (But who's initials are CAE
Now of course the commander who has the R&D folks under his command wants to see his stuff used, as that will validate his R&D group, and of course give him a good reason for an increase in funding. So he fights hard to get us thrown off of all future contracts, and our competitors on. But the other Naval oganizations have a lot invested in our stuff, and the captains are understandably leery of massive changes. It probably didn't hurt us any that our competitor was a Canadian company too. So its a big hard political battle, with us mostly winning. I'd like to think this was a victory of reliability and proven techniques over fashion and flash, but I'm not that naieve.
However, apparently they did manage to get the R&D system put on one ship as a test case. Probably it had something to do with CAE having a better position in Crusiers than us. Imagine the captain's displeasure, and our secret delight, when that system failed in the middle of the ocean and the ship had to be towed back.
The moral of the story is that you can probably get something thrown together with whatever's considered "cool" today and that might make it an easier sell, but if you *need* reliablity, you use Unix and Ada, and good software development processes.
(disclaimer: I currently work for a competitor to CAE in a different market.)
Errr...why? Because you say so?
In a logical argument, the "burden of convincing", if you want to call it that, has to go with party making an initial statement. If it were said by someone I know, or wasn't particularly contraversial, or was something easliy checked on (thus decreasing the incentive to make something up), then I might be willing to give someone a pass.
However, this story was posted by an AC, is impossible for us to verify, and relates behavior that 80 years ago would have had the Masons (if not the whole town) showing up at the perpetrator's door with firearms.
Given that, I think I'd like to use a bit of healthy sceptascism. Otherwise, I might as well believe the folks who say the moon landing was faked, or whatever whacked-out story the guy standing on a box in the mall downtown is shouting at passerby today.
I hope you put it all into your BSA defence fund...
No one said anyone "pirated" software. You don't have to make an unauthorised copy of software to get hit with expensive damages from an audit. All you have to do is be unable to come up with proof of purchase for every bit of proprietary software installed on your machines. Its "guilty until proven innocent" with these clowns.
I'd wadger that at least %90 of PC-owning households with legal OS's wouldn't be able to prove it, if audited. A small charity with a very limited budget is liable to be running on old donated PC's. What is the likelyhood that they will have access to the original boxes, reciepts, and/or licensing materials? Pretty damn slim. Microsoft could probably shut down nearly any little charity it wants to on a whim.
As an aside, I really don't like the term "piracy". It may serve Microsoft's interests to have you thinking that sharing useful software with your friends is morally equivalent to attacking shipping on the high seas, kidnapping, murder, etc., but this isn't even close to accurate. A more accurate term would be "unauthorized copying"
> I question the truth of this post. It's rather
:-)
Good point. It would have been nice if it were at least posted by a real person instead of an AC.
Normally I wouldn't be so sceptical, but this message seems to be carefully crafted to send people up to Redmond with torches and pitchforks.
OTOH: If someone can back this up, I'll bring a pitchfork.
I guess we've come full circle then.
:-)
My dad had a filmed-from-the-theater-screen VHS bootleg of the original Star Wars about 3 months after it came out ('77?). This was back when VCR's were brand new, and the MPAA was pushing congress hard about how such activity was going to kill them.
For their sake, I hope they don't win this time either.
Errr...the whole point of having the word "Firmware" around is to be able to describe stuff that isn't quite either. Perhaps its both and neither at the same time.
But I was just throwing him a bone anyway. As far as I'm concerned, anything in my PC whose replacement involves a set of pliers is *hardware*.
The "buggy algorithm" in this case is Wall Street itself, because this can happen (and has in the past happened) with or without software. All the software did in this one case was help nature along a bit, if indeed it had any effect at all.
Now it might be nice to add "market crash detection" features to the software. But there is no evidence that the software in this case was taking any actions that its users (the individual traders) would have disagreed with at the time. Calling this a software bug is like calling a slashdotting a software bug.
That's precisely why people developing safety-critical apps should be (and quite often are) using Ada, rather than Fortran or C. Not only does the languge put in all the checks you mention (and more), but the "software culture" among Ada programmers is significantly better where bugs and safety are concerned.
Take a look at Praxis' SPARK for a look at how responsible people develop safety-critical software. The approach takes more effort than the typical "hack something together then bash it into shape with the debugger" approach. But in many cases, it is well worth the cost.
"burned in" != Software.
At best, you can call it firmware.
Errr...no. This problem had nothing to do with how well the software was communicating. The problem was that some initial data was entered into the system (by human beings) using the wrong units. That was done because the data came from the contracting agency without any notion of units attached to it, and the contracting agency assumed the wrong units. The system that had the "bug" was not the software, it was the human system of communications between the contractor and the contracting agency.
Not quite. The software was built for the Arianne 4. On the Arianne 4, it was physically impossible for that value to ever get high enough to overflow. So on the Arianne 4 the assumption that an overflow could only be due to a hardware failure was entirely correct.
If they had known that years later an Arianne 5 would come along, and those engineers would stupidly reuse the Arianne 4 code without testing it once, then perhaps they would have made a different decision. But I think the blame goes on entirely on the Arianne 5 guys, who were *not* the ones who wrote that code.
The bug that caused Airane explosion was a requirements analysis bug. The Pentium FP bug was a hardware bug.
A quick skim of the rest nets me at least 6 more non-software software bugs
After seeing that, I can't really trust the list on things I don't have a good knowledge about.
Here's a challenge for someone: Go through the list and find out how many (if any) of the listed software bugs are actually software bugs.
That's a good start, but I don't think it goes quite far enough. The Web has always worked on free linking, and anything that threatens that threatens the Web itself. Its clear they are doing this for completly selfish reasons, without even a second thought to the systemic repurcussions of their actions.
What needs to be done to people who won't play right on the Web is exactly what is done to people who don't play right with their email servers...they should be blacklisted. Search engines should remove *all* links to *any* of their pages, as should everyone else.
If they don't like the rules of our Web, cut them out of it and let them be in their own little web.
I had exactly the same experience at my company, except that I cut out all that early and middle stuff and just never signed anything. I didn't get in their face and *refuse* to sign, I just didn't ever bother to do it.
I don't know what IP owership defaults to if a "Professional" (IRS classified "exempt") doesn't sign anything. I'm not a lawyer. But my dad is, and he seemed happy with the arrangement when I related it to him. (yes, I do Free Software work, and yes he does know about that).
T.E.D.
FAIR at least can count and present evidence that the deck not only is stacked cold at FOX, it is dripping liquid helium. Dispute their counting abilities; don't ad hominem them for being "liberal" (GASP!) which only impresses the rightwingers among us anyway.
:-)
Well, the epithet liberal sure seems to impress the folks over at "Media Research Center". They use the word in no less than 3 places on their front page alone! They also used "far left" once, just for variety. Apparently the irony of being completely unbalanced political hacks while simultaniously claiming to support "political balance" is totally lost on them.
FAIR is at least sophisticated enough to see this and keep partisian language off their main page.
I wouldn't unresevedly trust any info I got from FAIR either. But at least they make some pretense of being balanced. I at least like some flowers and sweet talk before I get mind-fucked by politicos.
Oh wait! You were probably being sarcastic. I see. I'm sorry for my weak sense of humor.
>Please raise your hand if you develop software for
>a living; that is, you support yourself and/or
>your family by developing software.
>Now, keep your hand raised if you believe that
>your company could offer the same software that
>you helped to create as a free, open-source
>download and still keep you employed.
My hand's still up too. My company, like the vast majority of the software developer employers out there, performs sofware work under 3 circumstances:
1) Some other company (or the g'mit) has something they want developed or fixed, and we negotiate a contract to do so.
2) Some other company wants a slightly modified version of our hardware, which of course will require slightly modified software to drive it.
3) We are doing something internally that could be made enough more efficient with some new s/w thingy to justify the cost of building same.
In case 1, the other company is not going to get this desriable s/w unless they pay someone to make it. They usually insist on getting all sources and build tools anyway, so there'd be absolutely no harm in GPLing and posting the stuff.
In case 2, we amortize the software development cost over the amount of units that will be shipped. If its more than 1 or 2, it usually ends up being a negligable amount comprared to hardware and assembly costs (our simulators typically cost in the millions each, due to all the specialized hardware). So software is just something we have to have, it isn't where our money is made. It also wouldn't be horribly useful w/o our hardware, so there'd be no harm in GPLing it (not much benifit either though).
In case 3, the software is never distributed outside the company, so licenses aren't even an issue. But if we were talking about things that others could use too, then presumably GPLing such things would allow the development costs for these tools to get spread out over multiple companies. That would make the cost/benifit equation I mentioned a lot lighter on the cost side, which would lead to more of these tools being made, which would lead to us being more efficient.
Just because Mundie can't (or doesn't want to) imagine any other way of making money doesn't mean they aren't out there. The fact of the matter is that most software developers are not employed writing stuff that is sold in mass-produced shrink-wrapped boxes. If all that stuff went away tomorrow, the job market would hardly notice.
T.E.D.
I notice that lots of folks have criticisms about the article. I certainly do too. (eg: RJS must be having kittens about now for being referred to as having started the Open Source movement). And I know the ususal /. solution is to spell out these criticisms in follow-up postings.
:-)
:-)
However, this situation is different. Since the article is copylefted, rather than complain about it, let's just fix it!
So if anyone posts a criticism about the article here, post a "show me the source" reply.
Did anyone else notice that the name of the FTC Commissioner cc'ed at the end is Orson Swindle?
Talk about putting the fox in charge of the henhouse...
Besides, OpenGL is goverened by a board of companies, not just SGI.
It doesn't matter who "governs" OpenGL. All Microsoft has to do to kill it now is refuse to license their 3D patents to any hardware vendor who chooses to make OpenGL drivers instead of DirectX.
The Jews were peaceful during the Holocaust. What makes you think this is any different?
Passive resistance is a political strategy, just as war, diplomacy, and terrorisim are. Like any other strategic game, there are times when some approaches are more effective than others. Each approach has certian parameters it needs to be at its most effective.
Passive resistance relies on the moral outrage of onlookers, or on sheer power of numbers. For the former to be effective you have a situation where the governement with the power is accountable to the people and has a free press. For the latter to be effective, you have to have way more supporters than the people in power.
The Jews in Germany during the Holocaust had neither factor going for them. The Palestinians have both factors in their favor. If they were to suddenly wise up and start using this approach, they'd probably be running Israel (politically at least) in 10 years.