Does anybody know if there are any precedents on this? Does the law on evidence obtained by illegal wiretaps apply?
As I recall, Alan Dershowitz did a column in the New York Times when the movie version of "Bonfire of the Vanities" came out. In it, he said only the government was not allowed to use evidence from an illegal wiretap (i.e., one which had been recorded without the knowledge of any of the parties to the conversation).
Dershowitz claimed (in my memory) that there were no restrictions in a civil suit such as was portrayed in the movie. He also said that it was even OK for the government to use evidence it had obtained illegally if it was being used to discredit perjurous testimony.
Perhaps an unintended consequence of this incident is that no Microsoft will be able to lie in court about source code without fear of dramatic repercussions. That should severely restrict their traditional deposition-courtroom strategies.
Anyone know what the law is on this matter?
Re:Wrong != crackpot, but I may be...
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Does P = NP?
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...a crackpot.
A very respected proof theorist this summer submitted a proof in the major logic conference in Paris this summer. He claims that the P=NP problem is independent of the Peano axioms...
I am puzzled by this statement, so some kind of further info or a link would be greatly appreciated.
I've recently been looking into the possibility that Goedel's proof can be adapted to demonstrate that a great many problems can be subsumed within the Peano axioms. Much of what I have proved so far has been counter-intuitive (at least to me and I've already suggested I may be a crackpot) so it would not surprise me if I'm wrong.
I would like to know more about this proof from the summer conference. Anyone with more info or links is invited to post them.
...and business are not common at this point, but there have been several good books about emergent phenomena and complexity-theory attempts to explain them:
Complexity: the Emerging Science at the Edge of Order and Chaos by M. Mitchell Waldrop is my favorite. It's very readable and a good introduction for the layperson.
Complexity: Life at the Edge of Chaos by Roger Lewin takes a more biological perspective, using the Cambrian explosion and subsequent extinctions as a primary theme of inquiry. I haven't finished it yet, but find it almost as interesting as Waldrop's book. (Personally Lewin's style is chatty for my taste with its constant recreation of his conversations with various scientists.)
Lewin and Birute Regine have recently written a book called The Soul at Work, but I haven't read it yet. It may prove interesting since Regine's area of specialty is developmental psychology (which is a natural for complexity studies, but whose practitioners have not yet become interested in studying emergence). This book is perhaps the most direct competition for this book being reviewed. I hope someone who has read it will post something to this discussion.
John Holland has two good books out which may/.ers may relate more directly to, since he is a bit of a renagade in the computer science community (or was until he started turning out to be proven right). His books are very good for the detail (and even some math). But they are almost written from a lab-notebook perspective, recreating the evolution of his thought even to the point of exploring dead ends which he later abandons.
Given all this, I have some difficulty with this reviewer's blanket denunciation of the field. None of these books is long on business-babble or psycho-pspeak, so I'm at a loss to understand his generalization.
I will check this book out, but I would offer the following caveat: Complexity science is an interesting outgrowth of chaos theory which is still controversial within the scientific community. It's on the bleeding edge of current scientific thought and may yet pan out to be a dead end (or a world-changing advance).
I am personally following it with considerable interest and have already come up with a number of applications which helped with both my programming and my business. But anyone who makes blanket evaluations of it (pro or con) is probably exaggerating their actual knowledge.
I assumed any attractive idiot with a star on the Hollywood "Walk of Fame" was an actor.
You are right. He's always been a shill. (Well, since his time as a military pilot.) But anyone who has read Jack's "LA Times" piece on DeCSS or seen his testimony knows he was hopelessly overmatched here.
I especially remember his defense of Pres. Clinton on various talk shows during the Monica debacle. Maybe he can use the same arguments in the unlikely event that any of his perjury ever catches up to him.
Is this just a set-up to make look Ivy-League law professors look good?
Headline: "Industry Shill Has-Been Actor Versus a Professional Debater"
Heck, they even posted Valenti's perjurous testimony before Congress and the DeCSS trial (where he contradicted himself under oath).
Can we look forward to David Boies versus Ray Romano next? (I don't mean to pick on Ray, but he just admitted to Charlie Rose on Friday that he pretends to use the computer on TV because he's never opened the PC he has at home.)
Arthaus: I don't know why WW hasn't produced...
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Mage The Ascension
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...much original material of interest over the past couple years.
But anyone who finds their recent stuff so repetitive they've given up should check out their new imprint: Arthaus. (Yeah, I know it's pretentious sounding, but it's really worth looking at.)
The swashbucking supplement is really useful.
Ars Magica, originality, and contribution...
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Mage The Ascension
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...of new ideas to our culture.
Yes, Mage borrowed some ideas from the previous works of some of its authors (notably Ars Magica). Yes, it was set in the World of Darkness universe (a setting dominated by much more popular games like Vampire and Werewolf). Yes, it tried to incorporate elements of ancient myth into a game system (like most RPGs).
And it even stole insights from various pop-culture metaphysicians like Robert Pirsig and Carlos Castaneda (in some ways improving on their philosophical rigor).
But it also did some things which none of these did, attempting to integrate all of these into a coherent (but fictional) worldview and then using that worldview as the basis of a role-playing game. An ambitious and laudable project, whatever you think of the results.
I enjoy it. I recognize it's not everybody's cup of tea. But it's my favorite RPG at this moment. The swashbuckling supplement should be in every gamer's library no matter what they play. There is nothing better available.
There are some important things to be said about Mage in terms of the degree to which it actually seems to be written by people who believe they can say something important about the universe in a game. People with passion. People who care. And people with something to say.
Maybe this is why Katz wrote about it. His article seems vague on exactly why it was done. I don't consider the cyberpunk element all that important in Mage, although it's certainly there and I use it in my campaign.
I have little use, however, for Katz-bashers who cannot respond to a slightly-more-vacant-than-I'd-prefer piece with totally vacant flames. Those who are flaming Mage as derivative seem to break into two camps: those who know little of Mage and those who know little of intellectual progress.
Those who know little of Mage look at some superficial aspects which it borrows from much less ambitious works (Ars Magica and Shadowrun) and say their preferred game is better 'cause it was first. OK, if that's your definition of "better."
Those who know little of intellectual progress complain that it's based on ideas first propounded by the Greeks (or Pirsig or whoever). Well, yeah. But, if you're trying an ambitious philosophical work in a game format, you'd better take into account earlier ideas.
So: ambitious game, worthy effort, and a good time was had by all.
And: uninspired column, worthless flames, and a good time was had by all.
That's what I love about/.
BTW, does anybody know why all references to Pirsig were excised from the second edition of Mage? I've always wondered if he protested or something. Which would be too bad, since they actually made his ideas look good (not that they don't have some merit on their own).
Hey, these guys even made Castaneda look good. Just think what they could do for Katz.
When you put together some of the things Dell has been saying lately, it's pretty clear he has problems with Microsoft, even if he cannot discuss them openly.
Dell (from this interview, with emphasis added): "I think it definitely has the potential for a lot of change -- and disruptive change. Not so much on our business models, but on other business models. The whole open source movement has the potential to really change the way value is created and distributed in the software industry -- the speed at which applications and tools are developed and deployed. And Dell's the perfect hardware platform to do that on."
Dell (from a Charlie Rose interview at a conference in Paris): "If you had a business that was based on tricking your customer -- which, in fact, a lot of businesses were fundamentally, assumed that the customer didn't have much information and the customer was, in fact, uninformed -- well, that's going away."
When you put these together, it seems to me that Dell is inching away from Microsoft because he sees a big fall in their future. And why not? Look at the MS business model from Dell's point of view:
He can remember the days when PCs sold for $3,000 and the OS cost $15. Today he sees computers selling for $500 to $800 with an OS that costs $85 to $250. And the vendor selling the cheap box has to provide support for the OS, even if it turns out to be a piece of crap.
Somebody's getting squeezed here, and Dell knows who it is (even though he probably has a really sweet deal with Microsoft). He knows the main reason he has to keep selling MS OSes is because of the ignorance of its users. But that doesn't mean he has to like it. And he sees the Internet as working against software vendors who rely on the ignorance of their users.
Sure, he dare not speak its name. But Microsoft clearly fits his description of software companies whose business models will not survive in the Internet economy. We should not be too quick to doubt his sincerity since his conversion (though late) seems to be based on solid values and genuine interests (that's interests as in business-type interests, not curiosity-type interests.
My content is very similar to that being discussed. I do not own the copyrights. I have the ability to provide the data in a form that contentville can use. I can provide metadata which will allow contentville to set up a searchable database. I own the copyrights to the metadata. I sell it for the copyright owners and send them royalties.
Bell and Howell has been selling these theses for years in a database which only allowed access to the last two years' work, even though their data goes back much further (1890, I believe). As far as I know, they clearly have the rights to do so. They just do such an uninspired job of it that they hardly ever sell any, so nobody gets any royalties.
Now, we have somebody coming along with the idea that a good searchable database would be helpful. And/.ers are complaining?
I wonder if a searchable database of theses would throw a wet blanket on fraudulent patent claims. Might help with the prior-art research. Might help establish definitively that the idea could be suggested by anyone.
Before we all go stomping on contentville for doing something that will help everyone, perhaps we should review a few facts. This kind of republishing has been going on -- done badly -- for years. Lexis-Nexis (Brill's big competitor in this) not only charges for downloads of the copyrighted material, but they also charge for search hits. (They used to have a special screen that warned you if your search for common words resulted in thousands of hits, which could result in those micropayments really adding up.) They also charge for the right to be able to search.
Brill's contentville is offering much higher royalties than Lexis-Nexis ever offered (although you don't get paid just for making your content available and you don't get all those micropayments on search results). Be careful about biting the hand which might one day feed you.
This is not about Esther Dyson slamming the Internet. She wasn't.
This is not about Esther Dyson's relationship to corporations. This is not about Esther Dyson's place in the computer community. It's about a very simple mistake which Dyson has fallen into: assuming the networked nature of the Internet is something new.
The author has some valid points to make, particularly about how networked phenomena were part of our economic past. They were.
But the author makes a minor mistake of his own: assuming the corporate world precluded a networked economy.
Networks have sometimes grown sparser in the corporate-style economies of the past 100 years and they have sometimes grown more rhizomorphic and more thickly branching. But they have remained fundamentally networks.
It has become popular in the past few years to assume the networked nature of the Internet is something new. That is what many people are assuming with Napster and Gnutella. Esther Dyson is correct in pointing out that this assumption is mistaken because the Internet was fundamentally a networked economy long before Napster.
She was wrong in assuming the economy was not networked long before the Internet. The author of this piece was correct in pointing this out. He was wrong in assuming (to the extent he did) that it was corporate economies of the past 100 years which have led to a decline in networked economies.
The corporate economies of the recent past have been replete with corporate success stories based on network effects: from sailing ships to steamships; from railroads to interstates; from phones to fax machines; from the post office to FedEx.
These corporate economies have also been replete with stories of failures of businesses who believed the new technologies of the day would make the old networks obsolete. Internet IPO-mongers are convinced they have invented "disintermediation" with the web.
Their assumption is just as wrong as all the others. Disintermediation schemes have been trying to "eliminate the middleman" for as long as there have been middlemen to eliminate. The middlemen (who are really the nodes of the networks which make the networked economy work) have been beating out those who would replace them with corporate central planning for as long as the big guys have been trying to eliminate them.
The big guys who pushed these efforts too hard (stealing the names of their retailers from their distributors, stealing the names of the customers from their retailers) usually ended up going out of business. They lost the value the network provided to their systems. As long as their central planning made the right choices, they thrived. But, once they started seeing chances to profit at the expense of their customers, they had no checks or balances on their power to prevent their mistakes.
The networks couldn't save them, so the networks routed around them.
It behooves us all to remember as we point out the errors in the assumptions of others that we be watchful for our own assumptions. It is our own which can prove disastrous for each of us.
Watching "Triumph of the Nerds" I couldn't help notice the difference in the treatment of Microsoft's reverse engineering of CPM and Compaq's reverse engineering of IBM's PC BIOS.
You carefully showed how Compaq vetted its engineers and made sure they had an open-and-shut case to argue they had a legitimate product. The same issues so carefully covered there were glossed over when discussing the port of CPM to Intel's 16-bit chip.
Was the difference in the care you took with two virtually identical situations deliberate? And, if so, were you trying to demonstrate the difference by omission? In other words, by so blatantly treating the two situations so differently were you trying point up the distinction without offending Microsoft?
Or were you simply trying to hide the fact that Bill Gate's fortune has been built on stolen code?
The economic assumptions underlying this article are completely and totally false. They are so far off base as make it virtually impossible that they are not intentional *LIES*.
I run a company which makes a good living off of very short-run videotape sales. I actually have some tapes which I have made money off of by selling a single copy. I have NO economies of scale and I cannot (AM NOT CAPABLE OF) spending more than $6.25 on a dub of a one-hour Superbeta master onto a high-quality slow-play VHS tape.
Anyone who tells you they cannot make a profit selling tapes at the numbers which anime-purchasers provide is taking you for a ride. Anybody who tells you DVD production is better for keeping short-production-run costs down is trying to steal your money.
If you want to buy your anime on DVD because you like the quality better on DVD, buy it that way. But do not buy DVDs because it is somehow more cost-effective for the production houses that charge so much for anime.
DVD production costs scale much more dramatically than video, especially when you figure the cost of licensing the technology. So, the difference between the costs of anime and mass-market video will actually increase if the whole market switches to DVD (assuming the sales volumes remain constant).
If you're paying $40 for an anime tape, the most you can squeeze out from cutting production costs is $5. If there's money to be saved, it's in the distribution.
VHS is the great equalizer. As long as most consumers have them, prices will be reasonable because anybody can dub a tape if somebody gets too outrageous on their charges.
The real danger is what happens when too many people get locked into a proprietary technology like DVD. Then you'll really see some price-gouging. The industry knows this. This is the only reason DVD even exists. It's a desperate industry's attempt to get back a power they never really had.
I cannot believe such a brazen attempt at FUD gets such a glowing review on/.
Go ahead. Sell your tape machines. Buy a proprietary technology. Remember that Bill Gates once was only able to sell an operating system for $15 a pop.
You don't like $40 anime tapes? How do $200 DVDs sound?
As much as I like much of what ESR has said in a number of areas, I have to agree the his libertarianism does not represent my viewpoint. He is definitely overstepping some important bounds when he claims it does.
If libertarianism is not about freedom, then it is not about any value I have an interest in. When ESR uses that perverted version of libertarianism which claims that government actions are inherently threats to freedom (and thus worse than corporate threats to freedom or private threats to freedom), then he has placed another value higher in the his values hierarchy than freedom itself: his dislike of government.
Now, it is perfectly all right to dislike government in any way you wish. Government can be good, and government can be bad. If you would like to concentrate on the bad, that is your prerogative. But don't pretend your prejudice is in defense of liberty or freedom. If you intend to protect liberty, you have to recognize that government action can promote freedom and it can attack freedom.
If we intend to promote freedom, we will have to do the hard work of figuring out what each individual action of each government, of each corporation, and of each person does to promote or diminish freedom and liberty. If we substitute any ideology (like "government is always opposed to freedom" or "corporations are always bad" or "individuals never harm anyone else's liberty") for the effort required to find out what actually does promote liberty, then that ideology becomes the value we are placing above freedom.
And, in that substitution, we have become the true enemies of liberty. Even if we call ourselves "libertarians."
Now, ESR has every right to make that choice. But he does not have the right to say (even if a large number of his fellow hackers are seduced by the same form of pseudo-libertarianism) that "we hackers" all agree with him.
The really disturbing thing about Raymond's "Round Three" attack on Lessig (and there is no doubt it is an ad-hominem attack of the codier-than-thou variety) is his inexact use of language. The two prongs of his argument use the term "hackers" in two different ways: In his "we hackers" manifesto, he assumes the word means those who agree with him; in his Chinese-empire metaphor, he assumes that everyone who is learning to code is automatically a part of his Hacker Empire.
You can't have it both ways. If everybody who becomes a hacker or a coder or a programmer is automatically absorbed into the hacker culture, each of those new hackers are going to dilute the degree to which one person can be the spokesperson of that culture, especially if that spokesperson continues to make the outrageous comments which have always made Raymond interesting.
We have a word for people who claim to speak for large and amorphous groups of humans: politician.
And the only way such a person gets any legitimacy for the kinds of claims Raymond makes in Round Three is to set up a structure whereby the geeks, coders and hackers can determine their spokesperson. We have a word for that, too: government.
Guess what, Eric? I think you've already become the enemy you've been demonizing.
Bill: "I'm having a bit of trouble with the government."
Michael: "How can I help?"
Bill: "Well, they think I have no competition. So, if you could pretend to sell Linux boxes, it'll look good for me."
Michael: "Sure, especially if you knock another five bucks off my OEM licenses."
Bill: "No problem."
But, after Michael Dell's appearance on Charlie Rose last week, I'm beginning to have doubts. (Or at least I'm beginning to suspect Dell has doubts.) The following is a quote from that interview in which he talks about how businesses have to adapt their business.
"If you had a business that was based on tricking your customer -- which, in fact, a lot of businesses were fundamentally, you know, assumed that the customer didn't have very much information and the customer was, in effect, uninformed -- well, that's going away. And you have to assume that the customer is knowledgeable and has access to resources around the world and can compare and contrast and gain access to new ideas extremely rapidly. So you have to be able to thrive on that."
I don't know who fits the description of a company who assumes the customer is uninformed better than MS. So, maybe Michael Dell is finally having some doubts about his relationship with a company as dishonest as Microsoft.
MS is for games. Remember back when IBM was crippling their boxes because they didn't want to be seen by corporate clients as a game machine. When corporate buyers find out their purchasers have been buying a system which only excells at games, that's when Microsoft is in trouble.
"So that's why our productivity hasn't been going up."
The problem with making money on the Internet right now is a the people with next-big-thing fever were looking for a way to make a killing on the web before most consumers had web access. That led to a variety get-rich-quick business models which didn't work (everything from banner ads to pyramid schemes to "disintermediation").
I started a small information-based business in 1997, and I knew I had to be on the Internet in the long run. I couldn't afford a million-dollar site, so we put up a Linux box running Apache and MySQL (total expenses over three years are less than $10,000). Our web site does not have e-commerce, but it generates $200-$500 a day in phone sales.
We get about 3,000 hits a day, many of them 304s (especially during spikes). Our web site has been the crucial difference between our business going out of business and making a modest profit.
Are we going to go IPO next week and become billionaires? No. We'll just keep growing modestly and add e-commerce when it will increase profits.
We recognized from the beginning we had to give something away on the web (we chose to give away the ability to research our proprietary database information). But we knew we had to keep selling something for a profit. Today orders which originate from the web are our highest-profit segment, even though we offer discounts for people who have been to our web site.
"The Web changes everything!" is a mantra for bankruptcy. The Web changes nothing. You still have to make money by providing something of value to people who have access to it.
"Disintermediation" was a failed business concept before the Web. And all the Web did was make it much easier to fail by adopting the disintermediation business model. Those who succeeded with it (Dell and... well, Dell) did so because their business had unique factors (rapidly deflating prices and rapidly advancing technology which could make competitors' inventory-based models a Really Bad Thing[tm]). The result: Many more businesses are failing with the disintermediation model now than before the Web.
The deposition he took from Bill Gates was like taking candy from a baby. He admits it himself. He told Charlie Rose Gates was completely unprepared, no challenge at all as long as the lawyer cross-examining him was prepared with a working knowledge of the computer industry.
Westmoreland was one of the toughest cases ever: Snot-nosed kid lawyer hot-shot up against a icon of patriotism, wronged by unpopular media about a war which many in the jury were sure to have supported. He had to convince the jury he really respected the general and that he was just trying to clarify what Westmoreland was saying. Then he had to show him documents which seemed to contradict his testimony and let the general tear his own credibility to shreds.
Reading the transcripts of this testimony should be required in any cross-examination class. Jack Valenti will show up in court well prepared, bet on it. (I know, I know. He says "I don't know" a lot. That's what guys who listen to their lawyers say. Only incompetents like Bill Gates volunteer information which the examiner might have contradictory emails on.) This is the guy Napster needs - a courtroom specialist.
This probably means Napster thinks it's going to be in court.
Or, as most of us would put it, clueless or a liar?
In Mr. Valenti's L.A. Times opinion piece he quoted some of the web sites offering DeCSS as saying the software would allow piracy. Now, most of us have been to a few DeCSS sites and we know that most of them were very clear in saying that DeCSS did not offer functionality that would enable piracy.
There are two possible explanations for this: Either Mr. Valenti was deliberately trying to deceive the Times readers or someone deliberately deceived him.
It would be very interesting to hear some questioning of this flack on the subject of what did he know and when did he know it. While a deposition would be a great place for that (perjury and oaths and all of that), any reporter or call-in show which allows open questioning of the guy should be just as useful. After all, he is a PR guy who has a message he needs to get out, even if it is a deceptive message.
Somebody had to search through a whole bunch of DeCSS sites to find any that promoted themselves the way Mr. Valenti claimed. I doubt it was Jack himself. What if a reporter interviewing him presented him with a computer with an Internet connection and asked him to show the sites?
I doubt he could find one (Can you say, "I don't know," Mr. Valenti?), so the reporter would have to have a backup plan. A simple possibility: Do a search on Google for "DeCSS piracy." I'm betting most of the hits would say, "Here is DeCSS. The MPAA says it can be used for piracy, but it can't. All it's good for is playing DVDs which you legally own and a have a legal right to play."
It would be interesting to see his response. Another "I didn't know" would suggest he has himself been deceived. And the obvious follow-up question would be who told him the information he put in his article.
Another interesting possibility in all this: We all know how easy it is for any of use to put up a DeCSS mirror. Wouldn't it be just as easy for the Motion Picture Association of America to put up one of their own, claiming to be pirates? If we could catch them in a fraud like that, we might be able to really rock their world.
...to look at the question. All of their press appearances have been crafted to make it look like this is a threat to IP.
The real question is: Does somebody else (anybody else, but Microsoft is one of the few who have ever tried) have the right to put something on your computer that allows them to do something that you cannot do?
That is theft of private property, no matter how you look at it. It is so brazen that even MS doesn't dare claim in their click-through licenses. Now they are trying to seize that right in a court of law, claiming it derives from IP rights.
The press has largely ignored this turn in MS's arguments, even though it greatly contributed to the remedies selected by the judge. They gave up claiming that they had never used closed APIs and are now claiming that opening APIs will destroy their business. Bill Gates has even made the claim Windows9X and Office could never have been developed without close cooperation between the two teams. Why aren't the TV networks showing this footage back-to-back with Steve Ballmer reassuring developers that there was a "Chinese wall" between the two divisions which was never breached?
These remedies demonstrate both what the judge understands and what he doesn't understand. He has ordered open APIs, showing that he understands the APIs are the key to the abusive use of the monopoly. He has accepted the government's strange call for a "secure facility" where ISVs can examine the source code for the APIs, demonstrating he doesn't understand how it can be done.
_Rant on meaning of "secure facility" omitted._
I have proposed one way to police open APIs, which doesn't violate IP: Hire a small group of independent experts (paid for by MS) to verify the completeness of all APIs. They have to be allowed access to source code that compiles to exact copies of all binaries sold to the public. Fines if they are shown to have undocumented APIs; enormous fines if those APIs turn out to be used by MS apps.
Bob Lewis of _Infoworld_ has proposed another policing mechanism, which also does not violate IP: Take them at their word and offer a bounty for each undocumented API found by an outsider. Bounties to be paid by MS.
The only good thing about the movie is that it enables you to avoid reading the book, which I "bought" accidentally when it first came out by failing to send in my book club please-don't-send-this notice.
I was desperately poor and in need of cheap entertainment at the time, so I tried to read it. I didn't get 10 pages before I gave up and re-read "Merchanter's Luck" again. Years later, I convinced myself it couldn't be that bad and might offer some insight into Scientology. I didn't get any further.
The guy's only idea seems to be that if you hyphenate two words together you get a sci-fi concept. My personal theory is that this was a test for the "galactic overlord" concept which eventually made it into the supersecret higher levels of the Scientology canon. ("You see, now that you've paid the $110,000 we told you would be required to remove the psychological engrams which we told you were lousing up you life, we can tell you the real truth: Your body has been infested by nice-but-misguided aliens who are fleeing a galactic overlord. For another fee, we can remove them.")
Does anybody know how this piece of trash got to be a bestseller? Travolta has been going around telling everyone it's the best-selling science-fiction novel of all time. Has that any basis in fact? Is there some kind of fraud here?
BTW, Travolta told Charlie Rose they were only able to fit half the book into the movie, making it a sure thing for a sequel.
...is because such a high percentage of Linux users are gamers, not because there is particularly good reason for Linux games to be written.
I know this will probably trash my Karma, but I would suggest that the one thing Windows is good at is games. I'll bet many/.ers are much like me: We have an Athlon at home which runs Win98SE which is essentially a dedicated game box, while at work we use a real operating system.
I'm old enough to remember when IBM held back the technical development of the PC because they didn't want to be seen as a "game" machine and ruin their relationship with business. Unfortunately, this psychology would never occur to most Linux users, even though it might be a much better argument to use with suits: "Oh, sure, I use Windows for games because that's clearly what it was designed for. But for real computing on a network, I need an operating system which was designed for that environment, like Linux."
Unfortunately, most Linux users are gamers. So this kind of thinking never occurs to them. But to the suits the idea they are using a toy really might affect their decision-making. Of course, to geeks like us a computer is a toy, even if the game we are playing is WebSite Tycoon ][, the game of getting up a high-volume site before the suits promise the customers something we can't deliver. ("Blast that marketing dude before he talks to the CEO!")
I say this even though I spend my spare time working on an open-source game called FaerieMUD, which (like most MUDs) is fully Linux-compatible.
On a couple of slightly off-topic notes: Am I the only one who has stopped reading Gamespot since they did that terrible makeover? And when are we going to have a smackdown between Robyn Limos and Robert Lemos over the trademark on their names?
...in this law, then Tom Ridge is in violation of his own anti-hacking law?
Even Win95 had the ability to go to a web site and update the dll's. If Channel updates don't meet the definition of virus in this law, then the definition is worthless. If it doesn't ban programs that go to a web site and change the kernal, that's a loophole big enough to drive a 2,600-ton truck through.
So, any governor who forced the installation of an OS that meets the definition of a virus (probably Symantec's "Norton SystemWorks" would qualify as well) is guilty of violation of this law.
Maybe that explains the inclusion of the "intentional" escape clause.
Excerpts from the Napster debate on Charlie Rose have been posted, but the whole interview is 20 minutes long. It's available (as a video or transcript) from 1-800-ALL-NEWS (1-800-255-6397).
The cameras do record Chuck D's bemused look while Lars is trying to explain technical issues (like how MP3s are perfect digital reproductions of the original masters).
Slashdot Mirror
Does anybody know if there are any precedents on this? Does the law on evidence obtained by illegal wiretaps apply?
As I recall, Alan Dershowitz did a column in the New York Times when the movie version of "Bonfire of the Vanities" came out. In it, he said only the government was not allowed to use evidence from an illegal wiretap (i.e., one which had been recorded without the knowledge of any of the parties to the conversation).
Dershowitz claimed (in my memory) that there were no restrictions in a civil suit such as was portrayed in the movie. He also said that it was even OK for the government to use evidence it had obtained illegally if it was being used to discredit perjurous testimony.
Perhaps an unintended consequence of this incident is that no Microsoft will be able to lie in court about source code without fear of dramatic repercussions. That should severely restrict their traditional deposition-courtroom strategies.
Anyone know what the law is on this matter?
...a crackpot.
A very respected proof theorist this summer submitted a proof in the major logic conference in Paris this summer. He claims that the P=NP problem is independent of the Peano axioms...
I am puzzled by this statement, so some kind of further info or a link would be greatly appreciated.
I've recently been looking into the possibility that Goedel's proof can be adapted to demonstrate that a great many problems can be subsumed within the Peano axioms. Much of what I have proved so far has been counter-intuitive (at least to me and I've already suggested I may be a crackpot) so it would not surprise me if I'm wrong.
I would like to know more about this proof from the summer conference. Anyone with more info or links is invited to post them.
...and business are not common at this point, but there have been several good books about emergent phenomena and complexity-theory attempts to explain them:
Complexity: the Emerging Science at the Edge of Order and Chaos by M. Mitchell Waldrop is my favorite. It's very readable and a good introduction for the layperson.
Complexity: Life at the Edge of Chaos by Roger Lewin takes a more biological perspective, using the Cambrian explosion and subsequent extinctions as a primary theme of inquiry. I haven't finished it yet, but find it almost as interesting as Waldrop's book. (Personally Lewin's style is chatty for my taste with its constant recreation of his conversations with various scientists.)
Lewin and Birute Regine have recently written a book called The Soul at Work, but I haven't read it yet. It may prove interesting since Regine's area of specialty is developmental psychology (which is a natural for complexity studies, but whose practitioners have not yet become interested in studying emergence). This book is perhaps the most direct competition for this book being reviewed. I hope someone who has read it will post something to this discussion.
John Holland has two good books out which may /.ers may relate more directly to, since he is a bit of a renagade in the computer science community (or was until he started turning out to be proven right). His books are very good for the detail (and even some math). But they are almost written from a lab-notebook perspective, recreating the evolution of his thought even to the point of exploring dead ends which he later abandons.
Given all this, I have some difficulty with this reviewer's blanket denunciation of the field. None of these books is long on business-babble or psycho-pspeak, so I'm at a loss to understand his generalization.
I will check this book out, but I would offer the following caveat: Complexity science is an interesting outgrowth of chaos theory which is still controversial within the scientific community. It's on the bleeding edge of current scientific thought and may yet pan out to be a dead end (or a world-changing advance).
I am personally following it with considerable interest and have already come up with a number of applications which helped with both my programming and my business. But anyone who makes blanket evaluations of it (pro or con) is probably exaggerating their actual knowledge.
I assumed any attractive idiot with a star on the Hollywood "Walk of Fame" was an actor.
You are right. He's always been a shill. (Well, since his time as a military pilot.) But anyone who has read Jack's "LA Times" piece on DeCSS or seen his testimony knows he was hopelessly overmatched here.
I especially remember his defense of Pres. Clinton on various talk shows during the Monica debacle. Maybe he can use the same arguments in the unlikely event that any of his perjury ever catches up to him.
Is this just a set-up to make look Ivy-League law professors look good?
Headline: "Industry Shill Has-Been Actor Versus a Professional Debater"
Heck, they even posted Valenti's perjurous testimony before Congress and the DeCSS trial (where he contradicted himself under oath).
Can we look forward to David Boies versus Ray Romano next? (I don't mean to pick on Ray, but he just admitted to Charlie Rose on Friday that he pretends to use the computer on TV because he's never opened the PC he has at home.)
...much original material of interest over the past couple years.
But anyone who finds their recent stuff so repetitive they've given up should check out their new imprint: Arthaus. (Yeah, I know it's pretentious sounding, but it's really worth looking at.)
The swashbucking supplement is really useful.
...of new ideas to our culture.
/.
Yes, Mage borrowed some ideas from the previous works of some of its authors (notably Ars Magica). Yes, it was set in the World of Darkness universe (a setting dominated by much more popular games like Vampire and Werewolf). Yes, it tried to incorporate elements of ancient myth into a game system (like most RPGs).
And it even stole insights from various pop-culture metaphysicians like Robert Pirsig and Carlos Castaneda (in some ways improving on their philosophical rigor).
But it also did some things which none of these did, attempting to integrate all of these into a coherent (but fictional) worldview and then using that worldview as the basis of a role-playing game. An ambitious and laudable project, whatever you think of the results.
I enjoy it. I recognize it's not everybody's cup of tea. But it's my favorite RPG at this moment. The swashbuckling supplement should be in every gamer's library no matter what they play. There is nothing better available.
There are some important things to be said about Mage in terms of the degree to which it actually seems to be written by people who believe they can say something important about the universe in a game. People with passion. People who care. And people with something to say.
Maybe this is why Katz wrote about it. His article seems vague on exactly why it was done. I don't consider the cyberpunk element all that important in Mage, although it's certainly there and I use it in my campaign.
I have little use, however, for Katz-bashers who cannot respond to a slightly-more-vacant-than-I'd-prefer piece with totally vacant flames. Those who are flaming Mage as derivative seem to break into two camps: those who know little of Mage and those who know little of intellectual progress.
Those who know little of Mage look at some superficial aspects which it borrows from much less ambitious works (Ars Magica and Shadowrun) and say their preferred game is better 'cause it was first. OK, if that's your definition of "better."
Those who know little of intellectual progress complain that it's based on ideas first propounded by the Greeks (or Pirsig or whoever). Well, yeah. But, if you're trying an ambitious philosophical work in a game format, you'd better take into account earlier ideas.
So: ambitious game, worthy effort, and a good time was had by all.
And: uninspired column, worthless flames, and a good time was had by all.
That's what I love about
BTW, does anybody know why all references to Pirsig were excised from the second edition of Mage? I've always wondered if he protested or something. Which would be too bad, since they actually made his ideas look good (not that they don't have some merit on their own).
Hey, these guys even made Castaneda look good. Just think what they could do for Katz.
When you put together some of the things Dell has been saying lately, it's pretty clear he has problems with Microsoft, even if he cannot discuss them openly.
Dell (from this interview, with emphasis added): "I think it definitely has the potential for a lot of change -- and disruptive change. Not so much on our business models, but on other business models. The whole open source movement has the potential to really change the way value is created and distributed in the software industry -- the speed at which applications and tools are developed and deployed. And Dell's the perfect hardware platform to do that on."
Dell (from a Charlie Rose interview at a conference in Paris): "If you had a business that was based on tricking your customer -- which, in fact, a lot of businesses were fundamentally, assumed that the customer didn't have much information and the customer was, in fact, uninformed -- well, that's going away."
When you put these together, it seems to me that Dell is inching away from Microsoft because he sees a big fall in their future. And why not? Look at the MS business model from Dell's point of view:
He can remember the days when PCs sold for $3,000 and the OS cost $15. Today he sees computers selling for $500 to $800 with an OS that costs $85 to $250. And the vendor selling the cheap box has to provide support for the OS, even if it turns out to be a piece of crap.
Somebody's getting squeezed here, and Dell knows who it is (even though he probably has a really sweet deal with Microsoft). He knows the main reason he has to keep selling MS OSes is because of the ignorance of its users. But that doesn't mean he has to like it. And he sees the Internet as working against software vendors who rely on the ignorance of their users.
Sure, he dare not speak its name. But Microsoft clearly fits his description of software companies whose business models will not survive in the Internet economy. We should not be too quick to doubt his sincerity since his conversion (though late) seems to be based on solid values and genuine interests (that's interests as in business-type interests, not curiosity-type interests.
...to sell my content.
/.ers are complaining?
My content is very similar to that being discussed. I do not own the copyrights. I have the ability to provide the data in a form that contentville can use. I can provide metadata which will allow contentville to set up a searchable database. I own the copyrights to the metadata. I sell it for the copyright owners and send them royalties.
Bell and Howell has been selling these theses for years in a database which only allowed access to the last two years' work, even though their data goes back much further (1890, I believe). As far as I know, they clearly have the rights to do so. They just do such an uninspired job of it that they hardly ever sell any, so nobody gets any royalties.
Now, we have somebody coming along with the idea that a good searchable database would be helpful. And
I wonder if a searchable database of theses would throw a wet blanket on fraudulent patent claims. Might help with the prior-art research. Might help establish definitively that the idea could be suggested by anyone.
Before we all go stomping on contentville for doing something that will help everyone, perhaps we should review a few facts. This kind of republishing has been going on -- done badly -- for years. Lexis-Nexis (Brill's big competitor in this) not only charges for downloads of the copyrighted material, but they also charge for search hits. (They used to have a special screen that warned you if your search for common words resulted in thousands of hits, which could result in those micropayments really adding up.) They also charge for the right to be able to search.
Brill's contentville is offering much higher royalties than Lexis-Nexis ever offered (although you don't get paid just for making your content available and you don't get all those micropayments on search results). Be careful about biting the hand which might one day feed you.
This is not about Esther Dyson slamming the Internet. She wasn't.
This is not about Esther Dyson's relationship to corporations. This is not about Esther Dyson's place in the computer community. It's about a very simple mistake which Dyson has fallen into: assuming the networked nature of the Internet is something new.
The author has some valid points to make, particularly about how networked phenomena were part of our economic past. They were.
But the author makes a minor mistake of his own: assuming the corporate world precluded a networked economy.
Networks have sometimes grown sparser in the corporate-style economies of the past 100 years and they have sometimes grown more rhizomorphic and more thickly branching. But they have remained fundamentally networks.
It has become popular in the past few years to assume the networked nature of the Internet is something new. That is what many people are assuming with Napster and Gnutella. Esther Dyson is correct in pointing out that this assumption is mistaken because the Internet was fundamentally a networked economy long before Napster.
She was wrong in assuming the economy was not networked long before the Internet. The author of this piece was correct in pointing this out. He was wrong in assuming (to the extent he did) that it was corporate economies of the past 100 years which have led to a decline in networked economies.
The corporate economies of the recent past have been replete with corporate success stories based on network effects: from sailing ships to steamships; from railroads to interstates; from phones to fax machines; from the post office to FedEx.
These corporate economies have also been replete with stories of failures of businesses who believed the new technologies of the day would make the old networks obsolete. Internet IPO-mongers are convinced they have invented "disintermediation" with the web.
Their assumption is just as wrong as all the others. Disintermediation schemes have been trying to "eliminate the middleman" for as long as there have been middlemen to eliminate. The middlemen (who are really the nodes of the networks which make the networked economy work) have been beating out those who would replace them with corporate central planning for as long as the big guys have been trying to eliminate them.
The big guys who pushed these efforts too hard (stealing the names of their retailers from their distributors, stealing the names of the customers from their retailers) usually ended up going out of business. They lost the value the network provided to their systems. As long as their central planning made the right choices, they thrived. But, once they started seeing chances to profit at the expense of their customers, they had no checks or balances on their power to prevent their mistakes.
The networks couldn't save them, so the networks routed around them.
It behooves us all to remember as we point out the errors in the assumptions of others that we be watchful for our own assumptions. It is our own which can prove disastrous for each of us.
Watching "Triumph of the Nerds" I couldn't help notice the difference in the treatment of Microsoft's reverse engineering of CPM and Compaq's reverse engineering of IBM's PC BIOS.
You carefully showed how Compaq vetted its engineers and made sure they had an open-and-shut case to argue they had a legitimate product. The same issues so carefully covered there were glossed over when discussing the port of CPM to Intel's 16-bit chip.
Was the difference in the care you took with two virtually identical situations deliberate? And, if so, were you trying to demonstrate the difference by omission? In other words, by so blatantly treating the two situations so differently were you trying point up the distinction without offending Microsoft?
Or were you simply trying to hide the fact that Bill Gate's fortune has been built on stolen code?
The economic assumptions underlying this article are completely and totally false. They are so far off base as make it virtually impossible that they are not intentional *LIES*.
/.
I run a company which makes a good living off of very short-run videotape sales. I actually have some tapes which I have made money off of by selling a single copy. I have NO economies of scale and I cannot (AM NOT CAPABLE OF) spending more than $6.25 on a dub of a one-hour Superbeta master onto a high-quality slow-play VHS tape.
Anyone who tells you they cannot make a profit selling tapes at the numbers which anime-purchasers provide is taking you for a ride. Anybody who tells you DVD production is better for keeping short-production-run costs down is trying to steal your money.
If you want to buy your anime on DVD because you like the quality better on DVD, buy it that way. But do not buy DVDs because it is somehow more cost-effective for the production houses that charge so much for anime.
DVD production costs scale much more dramatically than video, especially when you figure the cost of licensing the technology. So, the difference between the costs of anime and mass-market video will actually increase if the whole market switches to DVD (assuming the sales volumes remain constant).
If you're paying $40 for an anime tape, the most you can squeeze out from cutting production costs is $5. If there's money to be saved, it's in the distribution.
VHS is the great equalizer. As long as most consumers have them, prices will be reasonable because anybody can dub a tape if somebody gets too outrageous on their charges.
The real danger is what happens when too many people get locked into a proprietary technology like DVD. Then you'll really see some price-gouging. The industry knows this. This is the only reason DVD even exists. It's a desperate industry's attempt to get back a power they never really had.
I cannot believe such a brazen attempt at FUD gets such a glowing review on
Go ahead. Sell your tape machines. Buy a proprietary technology. Remember that Bill Gates once was only able to sell an operating system for $15 a pop.
You don't like $40 anime tapes? How do $200 DVDs sound?
As much as I like much of what ESR has said in a number of areas, I have to agree the his libertarianism does not represent my viewpoint. He is definitely overstepping some important bounds when he claims it does.
If libertarianism is not about freedom, then it is not about any value I have an interest in. When ESR uses that perverted version of libertarianism which claims that government actions are inherently threats to freedom (and thus worse than corporate threats to freedom or private threats to freedom), then he has placed another value higher in the his values hierarchy than freedom itself: his dislike of government.
Now, it is perfectly all right to dislike government in any way you wish. Government can be good, and government can be bad. If you would like to concentrate on the bad, that is your prerogative. But don't pretend your prejudice is in defense of liberty or freedom. If you intend to protect liberty, you have to recognize that government action can promote freedom and it can attack freedom.
If we intend to promote freedom, we will have to do the hard work of figuring out what each individual action of each government, of each corporation, and of each person does to promote or diminish freedom and liberty. If we substitute any ideology (like "government is always opposed to freedom" or "corporations are always bad" or "individuals never harm anyone else's liberty") for the effort required to find out what actually does promote liberty, then that ideology becomes the value we are placing above freedom.
And, in that substitution, we have become the true enemies of liberty. Even if we call ourselves "libertarians."
Now, ESR has every right to make that choice. But he does not have the right to say (even if a large number of his fellow hackers are seduced by the same form of pseudo-libertarianism) that "we hackers" all agree with him.
The really disturbing thing about Raymond's "Round Three" attack on Lessig (and there is no doubt it is an ad-hominem attack of the codier-than-thou variety) is his inexact use of language. The two prongs of his argument use the term "hackers" in two different ways: In his "we hackers" manifesto, he assumes the word means those who agree with him; in his Chinese-empire metaphor, he assumes that everyone who is learning to code is automatically a part of his Hacker Empire.
You can't have it both ways. If everybody who becomes a hacker or a coder or a programmer is automatically absorbed into the hacker culture, each of those new hackers are going to dilute the degree to which one person can be the spokesperson of that culture, especially if that spokesperson continues to make the outrageous comments which have always made Raymond interesting.
We have a word for people who claim to speak for large and amorphous groups of humans: politician.
And the only way such a person gets any legitimacy for the kinds of claims Raymond makes in Round Three is to set up a structure whereby the geeks, coders and hackers can determine their spokesperson. We have a word for that, too: government.
Guess what, Eric? I think you've already become the enemy you've been demonizing.
...as a favor to Microsoft. As in:
Bill: "I'm having a bit of trouble with the government."
Michael: "How can I help?"
Bill: "Well, they think I have no competition. So, if you could pretend to sell Linux boxes, it'll look good for me."
Michael: "Sure, especially if you knock another five bucks off my OEM licenses."
Bill: "No problem."
But, after Michael Dell's appearance on Charlie Rose last week, I'm beginning to have doubts. (Or at least I'm beginning to suspect Dell has doubts.) The following is a quote from that interview in which he talks about how businesses have to adapt their business.
"If you had a business that was based on tricking your customer -- which, in fact, a lot of businesses were fundamentally, you know, assumed that the customer didn't have very much information and the customer was, in effect, uninformed -- well, that's going away. And you have to assume that the customer is knowledgeable and has access to resources around the world and can compare and contrast and gain access to new ideas extremely rapidly. So you have to be able to thrive on that."
I don't know who fits the description of a company who assumes the customer is uninformed better than MS. So, maybe Michael Dell is finally having some doubts about his relationship with a company as dishonest as Microsoft.
And hedging his bets.
...should be taking.
MS is for games. Remember back when IBM was crippling their boxes because they didn't want to be seen by corporate clients as a game machine. When corporate buyers find out their purchasers have been buying a system which only excells at games, that's when Microsoft is in trouble.
"So that's why our productivity hasn't been going up."
...just like business has always done.
The problem with making money on the Internet right now is a the people with next-big-thing fever were looking for a way to make a killing on the web before most consumers had web access. That led to a variety get-rich-quick business models which didn't work (everything from banner ads to pyramid schemes to "disintermediation").
I started a small information-based business in 1997, and I knew I had to be on the Internet in the long run. I couldn't afford a million-dollar site, so we put up a Linux box running Apache and MySQL (total expenses over three years are less than $10,000). Our web site does not have e-commerce, but it generates $200-$500 a day in phone sales.
We get about 3,000 hits a day, many of them 304s (especially during spikes). Our web site has been the crucial difference between our business going out of business and making a modest profit.
Are we going to go IPO next week and become billionaires? No. We'll just keep growing modestly and add e-commerce when it will increase profits.
We recognized from the beginning we had to give something away on the web (we chose to give away the ability to research our proprietary database information). But we knew we had to keep selling something for a profit. Today orders which originate from the web are our highest-profit segment, even though we offer discounts for people who have been to our web site.
"The Web changes everything!" is a mantra for bankruptcy. The Web changes nothing. You still have to make money by providing something of value to people who have access to it.
"Disintermediation" was a failed business concept before the Web. And all the Web did was make it much easier to fail by adopting the disintermediation business model. Those who succeeded with it (Dell and... well, Dell) did so because their business had unique factors (rapidly deflating prices and rapidly advancing technology which could make competitors' inventory-based models a Really Bad Thing[tm]). The result: Many more businesses are failing with the disintermediation model now than before the Web.
...he's a cross-examination specialist.
The deposition he took from Bill Gates was like taking candy from a baby. He admits it himself. He told Charlie Rose Gates was completely unprepared, no challenge at all as long as the lawyer cross-examining him was prepared with a working knowledge of the computer industry.
Westmoreland was one of the toughest cases ever: Snot-nosed kid lawyer hot-shot up against a icon of patriotism, wronged by unpopular media about a war which many in the jury were sure to have supported. He had to convince the jury he really respected the general and that he was just trying to clarify what Westmoreland was saying. Then he had to show him documents which seemed to contradict his testimony and let the general tear his own credibility to shreds.
Reading the transcripts of this testimony should be required in any cross-examination class. Jack Valenti will show up in court well prepared, bet on it. (I know, I know. He says "I don't know" a lot. That's what guys who listen to their lawyers say. Only incompetents like Bill Gates volunteer information which the examiner might have contradictory emails on.) This is the guy Napster needs - a courtroom specialist.
This probably means Napster thinks it's going to be in court.
Or, as most of us would put it, clueless or a liar?
In Mr. Valenti's L.A. Times opinion piece he quoted some of the web sites offering DeCSS as saying the software would allow piracy. Now, most of us have been to a few DeCSS sites and we know that most of them were very clear in saying that DeCSS did not offer functionality that would enable piracy.
There are two possible explanations for this: Either Mr. Valenti was deliberately trying to deceive the Times readers or someone deliberately deceived him.
It would be very interesting to hear some questioning of this flack on the subject of what did he know and when did he know it. While a deposition would be a great place for that (perjury and oaths and all of that), any reporter or call-in show which allows open questioning of the guy should be just as useful. After all, he is a PR guy who has a message he needs to get out, even if it is a deceptive message.
Somebody had to search through a whole bunch of DeCSS sites to find any that promoted themselves the way Mr. Valenti claimed. I doubt it was Jack himself. What if a reporter interviewing him presented him with a computer with an Internet connection and asked him to show the sites?
I doubt he could find one (Can you say, "I don't know," Mr. Valenti?), so the reporter would have to have a backup plan. A simple possibility: Do a search on Google for "DeCSS piracy." I'm betting most of the hits would say, "Here is DeCSS. The MPAA says it can be used for piracy, but it can't. All it's good for is playing DVDs which you legally own and a have a legal right to play."
It would be interesting to see his response. Another "I didn't know" would suggest he has himself been deceived. And the obvious follow-up question would be who told him the information he put in his article.
Another interesting possibility in all this: We all know how easy it is for any of use to put up a DeCSS mirror. Wouldn't it be just as easy for the Motion Picture Association of America to put up one of their own, claiming to be pirates? If we could catch them in a fraud like that, we might be able to really rock their world.
...than for an equivalently equipped Win98 box.
My suggestion: buy it with with Windows (you're paying for it anyway with Dell) and install Linux yourself.
...to look at the question. All of their press appearances have been crafted to make it look like this is a threat to IP.
The real question is: Does somebody else (anybody else, but Microsoft is one of the few who have ever tried) have the right to put something on your computer that allows them to do something that you cannot do?
That is theft of private property, no matter how you look at it. It is so brazen that even MS doesn't dare claim in their click-through licenses. Now they are trying to seize that right in a court of law, claiming it derives from IP rights.
The press has largely ignored this turn in MS's arguments, even though it greatly contributed to the remedies selected by the judge. They gave up claiming that they had never used closed APIs and are now claiming that opening APIs will destroy their business. Bill Gates has even made the claim Windows9X and Office could never have been developed without close cooperation between the two teams. Why aren't the TV networks showing this footage back-to-back with Steve Ballmer reassuring developers that there was a "Chinese wall" between the two divisions which was never breached?
These remedies demonstrate both what the judge understands and what he doesn't understand. He has ordered open APIs, showing that he understands the APIs are the key to the abusive use of the monopoly. He has accepted the government's strange call for a "secure facility" where ISVs can examine the source code for the APIs, demonstrating he doesn't understand how it can be done.
_Rant on meaning of "secure facility" omitted._
I have proposed one way to police open APIs, which doesn't violate IP: Hire a small group of independent experts (paid for by MS) to verify the completeness of all APIs. They have to be allowed access to source code that compiles to exact copies of all binaries sold to the public. Fines if they are shown to have undocumented APIs; enormous fines if those APIs turn out to be used by MS apps.
Bob Lewis of _Infoworld_ has proposed another policing mechanism, which also does not violate IP: Take them at their word and offer a bounty for each undocumented API found by an outsider. Bounties to be paid by MS.
Do not be diverted by the Microsoft PR machine.
The only good thing about the movie is that it enables you to avoid reading the book, which I "bought" accidentally when it first came out by failing to send in my book club please-don't-send-this notice.
I was desperately poor and in need of cheap entertainment at the time, so I tried to read it. I didn't get 10 pages before I gave up and re-read "Merchanter's Luck" again. Years later, I convinced myself it couldn't be that bad and might offer some insight into Scientology. I didn't get any further.
The guy's only idea seems to be that if you hyphenate two words together you get a sci-fi concept. My personal theory is that this was a test for the "galactic overlord" concept which eventually made it into the supersecret higher levels of the Scientology canon. ("You see, now that you've paid the $110,000 we told you would be required to remove the psychological engrams which we told you were lousing up you life, we can tell you the real truth: Your body has been infested by nice-but-misguided aliens who are fleeing a galactic overlord. For another fee, we can remove them.")
Does anybody know how this piece of trash got to be a bestseller? Travolta has been going around telling everyone it's the best-selling science-fiction novel of all time. Has that any basis in fact? Is there some kind of fraud here?
BTW, Travolta told Charlie Rose they were only able to fit half the book into the movie, making it a sure thing for a sequel.
...is because such a high percentage of Linux users are gamers, not because there is particularly good reason for Linux games to be written.
I know this will probably trash my Karma, but I would suggest that the one thing Windows is good at is games. I'll bet many /.ers are much like me: We have an Athlon at home which runs Win98SE which is essentially a dedicated game box, while at work we use a real operating system.
I'm old enough to remember when IBM held back the technical development of the PC because they didn't want to be seen as a "game" machine and ruin their relationship with business. Unfortunately, this psychology would never occur to most Linux users, even though it might be a much better argument to use with suits: "Oh, sure, I use Windows for games because that's clearly what it was designed for. But for real computing on a network, I need an operating system which was designed for that environment, like Linux."
Unfortunately, most Linux users are gamers. So this kind of thinking never occurs to them. But to the suits the idea they are using a toy really might affect their decision-making. Of course, to geeks like us a computer is a toy, even if the game we are playing is WebSite Tycoon ][, the game of getting up a high-volume site before the suits promise the customers something we can't deliver. ("Blast that marketing dude before he talks to the CEO!")
I say this even though I spend my spare time working on an open-source game called FaerieMUD, which (like most MUDs) is fully Linux-compatible.
On a couple of slightly off-topic notes: Am I the only one who has stopped reading Gamespot since they did that terrible makeover? And when are we going to have a smackdown between Robyn Limos and Robert Lemos over the trademark on their names?
...in this law, then Tom Ridge is in violation of his own anti-hacking law?
Even Win95 had the ability to go to a web site and update the dll's. If Channel updates don't meet the definition of virus in this law, then the definition is worthless. If it doesn't ban programs that go to a web site and change the kernal, that's a loophole big enough to drive a 2,600-ton truck through.
So, any governor who forced the installation of an OS that meets the definition of a virus (probably Symantec's "Norton SystemWorks" would qualify as well) is guilty of violation of this law.
Maybe that explains the inclusion of the "intentional" escape clause.
Excerpts from the Napster debate on Charlie Rose have been posted, but the whole interview is 20 minutes long. It's available (as a video or transcript) from 1-800-ALL-NEWS (1-800-255-6397).
The cameras do record Chuck D's bemused look while Lars is trying to explain technical issues (like how MP3s are perfect digital reproductions of the original masters).
O'Reilly, which has a partnership with ActiveState, has a very interesting piece up about this IDE.
The O'Reilly has some details not found in the other two links, especially concerning the features and protocols supported in the IDE.