You have to ask yourself, "What exactly is the problem I am trying to solve?"
I'm really not seeing what the big deal is here. You want a proprietary, members-only protocol, you run AIM or whatever the hell Microsoft is pushing this week. You want an open protocol, designed by geeks for simplicity and interoperability, use IRC. Done deal.
How is this any different from cycling your hardware out every three years for desktops and every two years for laptops? That's been a standard business practice for a very long time.
Hardware wears out. Software doesn't.
Hardware gets noticeably faster with each three-year generation, always a benefit. Software tends to add features that may or may not be beneficial depending on your needs.
We need a universal printer language for inkjets...
...like it would kill them to use PostScript? AFAIK there's a royalty on the language itself, but at least you don't have to re-invent YET ANOTHER WHEEL.
The dialer knows that there will be calls like this so for the 10 people it is making 20 or 30 calls at a time. A dialer coordinator monitors the situation and can slow down or speed up the dialer accordingly.
But clearly the coordinators, if they do exist, don't ever slow down the dialers enough. Everybody I know gets those answer-and-wait calls all the time. They're a majority of telemarketing calls at my home; in other words, when we answer the phone it is more common to get dead air than a live telemarketer.
So not only do we get the nuisance of telemarketing, more than half the time the telemarketer's time is deemed more valuable than ours. I am disgusted by that attitude on the part of the telemarketing industry.
True. I feel.com,.org,.net,.int, and perhaps.edu should belong to
some long-established organization such as ITU, CCITT, or even
UN. Obviously the oddball US-specific top-level domains (.gov and.mil) should still belong to the US government--it's a weird legacy thing but there's not much point in changing them now.
I think most of the uproar against ICANN comes from the thought, "Who died and made them boss?" (Answer: Jon Postel died, the US Department of Commerce made them boss, but still...)
What about commerce? Our existing interstate commerce laws, tax regimes, etc. are more than sufficient and can be applied equally to online commerce as they are to brick and mort[a]r commerce. Buying something online should be no different, legally, than picking up the phone and ordering someting by voice.
Largely agreed with all of this. I'd like to add that there is some room for definitional tweaking, such as for Congress or the courts to resolve definitively where jurisdiction resides in an e-commerce dispute or which jurisdiction has taxing authority when product is shipped. What is a reasonable equivalent of a "signature" on a purchase order sent via the Internet or an EDI network? And so on.
These are minor details. These questions don't change the world.
But that's not the main point. The main point is that the Internet isn't magic. It's a bunch of computers all connected together, not fundamentally different from the telephone network. Society's rulebook doesn't have to be rewritten just because of a little change in technology.
Where the article is wrong is that the technologists are not the ones calling for the laws. It is the army of self appointed experts who think everything is changing, Internet time, etc. etc.
The media thinks that the experts on the Internet are academics who write books on it not the people who write RFCs, architect standards etc. They think that everything is changing at the speed of light only because they have so little grasp of the technology.
Mod up, my brother.
The WSJ article read like a Katzian strawman exercise. "Cyberbuffs" (who are they?) believe everyday laws shouldn't apply to "cyberspace." And how do we know this? Because that Declaration document has been around a few websites, and because so many of these visionaries are testifying at conferences. With few being named.
Oh. *shrug* I just figured they could quote just one proponent of this "exceptionalism" view that the article is so busy tearing down.
If there's anyone seriously pushing the exceptionalism theory, it's clueless and/or sinister members of Congress, doing so to justify crazy new laws like DMCA. ("Digital Millenium Copyright Act"? Does any real geek ever talk about this being the "Digital Millenium"?)
Other organisations closer to home, such as CCITT tend to be bureaucratic and inefficient but not particularly corrupt.
Doesn't ITU already assign things like telephone country codes? It seems like doling out top-level domains would be well within their area of expertise and authority.
Well, even though people hate it, IT MAKES MONEY. I dont care what it is: drugs, pop, cd's, DVD's, equipment... People do what makes money. Evidently spam makes a lot, even though the heavy equipment required to send it.
Hey, robbing banks pays pretty well too.
I don't understand what you're saying. Is it that anti-spammers should lay off Scelson because what he's doing is so profitable for him? That doesn't even begin to make sense.
Well, you're not forwarding mail, you're forwarding visitors to your house to Bill Gates' house.
You're not even going that far. You're just saying, if anyone ever asks about "suckyville" or "hobohouse," what you're referring to is such-and-such address. Nobody's forwarding visitors. The visitors might choose to forward themselves, maybe.
Suing someone for doing that is like suing someone for referring to your street address in less-than-glowing terms.
Indeed it's rather hard to find any section of government in the US, at any level. Which is not utterly dominated by these two parties
If you get two you're doing well these days. Here in.cleveland.oh.us the two parties are the Dimora Democrats and the O'Malley Democrats. Many state legislative seats are uncontested.
Yep. I paid about $120.00 for the Win2K Professional that was bundled with my new white-box PC, but I assume the vendor had the favorable OEM pricing.
Win2K Professional is about $300.00 retail in a typical mail-order catalog.
Granted it's not Microsoft's low-end operating system, but the point is that yes, you can pay $300.00 for just the OS now, on a single PC.
Repeating myself
on
ICANN Updates
·
· Score: 5, Informative
Nobody's yet explained why it takes a raft of lawyers, eighty
million dollars, and meetings all over the world to accomplish
what Jon Postel did in his spare time on his office workstation.
The Internet has gotten bigger, but damitall, IP addresses are
still IP addresses and DNS is supposed to be a hierarchical,
delegated system. What's the big problem? Jon just
ran a root server and kept backups like it was the most obvious
and natural thing in the world. What else is there to do?
I understand the frustration -- but, well, you can always *not upgrade* if what you have works for you.
Not always. In an arena of gratuitous backward incompatibility, such as Microsoft Word documents, you can't. When your client base is all running Word 2000, you are too or you can't work with their documents. (And they are likely using Word 2000 because their business partners upgraded, and so on.)
This wouldn't be such a big problem except for the combination of Microsoft's monopoly in so many applications areas and the maturity of those markets. Because of the maturity you can't sell upgrades unless you introduce churn, and because of the monopoly you can.
Which also goes a long way to explain why Linux and the *BSDs are so stable, relatively speaking. When the interfaces and requirements change slowly and predictably, quality improves. Moving targets are hard to hit.
Much of what we consider "Unix-like" behavior has hardly changed since the 1980s. This is a feature, not a bug.
The fact that the system you're working on had to be redesigned at all is unique to software. Refrigerators today still do the same thing, in the same circumstances, and in the same environment as they did decades ago. If you were making refrigerators you wouldn't be starting over yet again this year with refrigerator-dot-NET, nor ten years ago with the 32-bit refrigerator, nor twenty years ago when they started asking for refrigerators that were compatible with the new PC-based kitchens.
It's not that quality is going backwards. It's that quality is always starting over from the beginning, because "they" keep changing the background on us.
But the refrigerator does exactly one thing, and the interfaces are perfectly standardized. It's not programmable, and it's nearly impossible to use incorrectly. The perfect refrigerator is not a moving target. And the money you put into design and quality control in 1970 is still paying off now.
Hell, if software just had to do what it was doing in 1970, it would be more perfect than refrigerators.
Joel "read me I'm the next Jon Katz" Spolsky wrote, inter alia:
Headline: IBM Spends Millions to Develop Open Source Software.
Myth: They're doing this because Lou Gerstner read the GNU Manifesto and decided he doesn't actually like capitalism.
Headline: Sun and HP Pay Ximian To Hack on Gnome.
Myth: Sun and HP are supporting free software because they like Bazaars, not Cathedrals.
Where does Spolsky get these myths? Does anybody seriously believe that Gerstner has gone all hippy-love on his shareholders? Has anybody published the idea that Sun and HP are ideological converts to Free Software? Does this even past the "huh?" test?
The "myths" are straw men, uncited, unsupported. Without them, what is Spolsky saying? That businesses use Open Source for... business reasons? That wouldn't be much of a story, would it?
Move along, nothing to see here. Proving you're smarter than people who don't exist by making up their positions and knocking them down isn't much of an exercise.
The problem with techs and unix-mongers, I've found, is that they'll always turn to you and go: Stop whining and go on using windows! This isn't for you anyway, it's for us!
Look, my five-year-old son can use SuSE. It's not that big a deal.
If you honestly think current Linuces aren't friendly enough, you're comparing to some ideal that doesn't exist in the real world. Do you really think it's so simple to "understand where to click when there's no sound coming from my game" on Windows? (I still don't get it. I usually end up reinstalling the drivers and rebooting.)
Windows is not as easy as claimed, and Linux is not as difficult as claimed.
Stop whining and go on using Windows! This isn't for you anyway, it's for people who don't mind learning something new and would rather solve problems than complain about them!
Time for my neighbour to fix the dodgy shed door: 2 months. Time for me to fix the dodgy wiring in the kettle: 15 minutes.
If your neighbor's life depends on his shed door, and your life depends on the kettle, I'd say your circumstances are better than his. What matters isn't a "fair" comparison between the fixes, what matters is where you are on the continuum between resilience and brittleness.
Or back on topic, it would be a "fair" comparison if an Open Source X server were to open up an equally awful security hole, and if you compared the time-to-fix against Microsoft's. But that wouldn't be a relevant comparison because it's not a typical situation; X's similar wide-open security exploits are AFAIK a thing of the distant past.
Slashdot Mirror
You have to ask yourself, "What exactly is the problem I am trying to solve?"
I'm really not seeing what the big deal is here. You want a proprietary, members-only protocol, you run AIM or whatever the hell Microsoft is pushing this week. You want an open protocol, designed by geeks for simplicity and interoperability, use IRC. Done deal.
Yeah, worst case I spend a hundred bucks and I get to use Perl all I want. I feel like such a sucker.
I'd been procrastinating this long enough. Thanks for the warning.
My $100.00 contribution just went in a minute ago.
Hardware wears out. Software doesn't.
Hardware gets noticeably faster with each three-year generation, always a benefit. Software tends to add features that may or may not be beneficial depending on your needs.
But clearly the coordinators, if they do exist, don't ever slow down the dialers enough. Everybody I know gets those answer-and-wait calls all the time. They're a majority of telemarketing calls at my home; in other words, when we answer the phone it is more common to get dead air than a live telemarketer.
So not only do we get the nuisance of telemarketing, more than half the time the telemarketer's time is deemed more valuable than ours. I am disgusted by that attitude on the part of the telemarketing industry.
True. I feel .com, .org, .net, .int, and perhaps .edu should belong to
some long-established organization such as ITU, CCITT, or even
UN. Obviously the oddball US-specific top-level domains (.gov and .mil) should still belong to the US government--it's a weird legacy thing but there's not much point in changing them now.
I think most of the uproar against ICANN comes from the thought, "Who died and made them boss?" (Answer: Jon Postel died, the US Department of Commerce made them boss, but still...)
Largely agreed with all of this. I'd like to add that there is some room for definitional tweaking, such as for Congress or the courts to resolve definitively where jurisdiction resides in an e-commerce dispute or which jurisdiction has taxing authority when product is shipped. What is a reasonable equivalent of a "signature" on a purchase order sent via the Internet or an EDI network? And so on.
These are minor details. These questions don't change the world.
But that's not the main point. The main point is that the Internet isn't magic. It's a bunch of computers all connected together, not fundamentally different from the telephone network. Society's rulebook doesn't have to be rewritten just because of a little change in technology.
Mod up, my brother.
The WSJ article read like a Katzian strawman exercise. "Cyberbuffs" (who are they?) believe everyday laws shouldn't apply to "cyberspace." And how do we know this? Because that Declaration document has been around a few websites, and because so many of these visionaries are testifying at conferences. With few being named.
Oh. *shrug* I just figured they could quote just one proponent of this "exceptionalism" view that the article is so busy tearing down.
If there's anyone seriously pushing the exceptionalism theory, it's clueless and/or sinister members of Congress, doing so to justify crazy new laws like DMCA. ("Digital Millenium Copyright Act"? Does any real geek ever talk about this being the "Digital Millenium"?)
Doesn't ITU already assign things like telephone country codes? It seems like doling out top-level domains would be well within their area of expertise and authority.
Hey, robbing banks pays pretty well too.
I don't understand what you're saying. Is it that anti-spammers should lay off Scelson because what he's doing is so profitable for him? That doesn't even begin to make sense.
What are you saying?
You're not even going that far. You're just saying, if anyone ever asks about "suckyville" or "hobohouse," what you're referring to is such-and-such address. Nobody's forwarding visitors. The visitors might choose to forward themselves, maybe.
Suing someone for doing that is like suing someone for referring to your street address in less-than-glowing terms.
If you get two you're doing well these days. Here in .cleveland.oh.us the two parties are the Dimora Democrats and the O'Malley Democrats. Many state legislative seats are uncontested.
Yep. I paid about $120.00 for the Win2K Professional that was bundled with my new white-box PC, but I assume the vendor had the favorable OEM pricing.
Win2K Professional is about $300.00 retail in a typical mail-order catalog.
Granted it's not Microsoft's low-end operating system, but the point is that yes, you can pay $300.00 for just the OS now, on a single PC.
Nobody's yet explained why it takes a raft of lawyers, eighty million dollars, and meetings all over the world to accomplish what Jon Postel did in his spare time on his office workstation.
The Internet has gotten bigger, but damitall, IP addresses are still IP addresses and DNS is supposed to be a hierarchical, delegated system. What's the big problem? Jon just ran a root server and kept backups like it was the most obvious and natural thing in the world. What else is there to do?
Not always. In an arena of gratuitous backward incompatibility, such as Microsoft Word documents, you can't. When your client base is all running Word 2000, you are too or you can't work with their documents. (And they are likely using Word 2000 because their business partners upgraded, and so on.)
This wouldn't be such a big problem except for the combination of Microsoft's monopoly in so many applications areas and the maturity of those markets. Because of the maturity you can't sell upgrades unless you introduce churn, and because of the monopoly you can.
Funny but, uh, true.
Which also goes a long way to explain why Linux and the *BSDs are so stable, relatively speaking. When the interfaces and requirements change slowly and predictably, quality improves. Moving targets are hard to hit.
Much of what we consider "Unix-like" behavior has hardly changed since the 1980s. This is a feature, not a bug.
You're missing the analogy.
The fact that the system you're working on had to be redesigned at all is unique to software. Refrigerators today still do the same thing, in the same circumstances, and in the same environment as they did decades ago. If you were making refrigerators you wouldn't be starting over yet again this year with refrigerator-dot-NET, nor ten years ago with the 32-bit refrigerator, nor twenty years ago when they started asking for refrigerators that were compatible with the new PC-based kitchens.
It's not that quality is going backwards. It's that quality is always starting over from the beginning, because "they" keep changing the background on us.
But the refrigerator does exactly one thing, and the interfaces are perfectly standardized. It's not programmable, and it's nearly impossible to use incorrectly. The perfect refrigerator is not a moving target. And the money you put into design and quality control in 1970 is still paying off now.
Hell, if software just had to do what it was doing in 1970, it would be more perfect than refrigerators.
Or, more likely still, the Postal Service has decided that, damitall, if your zip code is 12345 you live in Appleville.
USPS place names don't map precisely to "real" place names, but they're valid for mail delivery purposes.
Joel "read me I'm the next Jon Katz" Spolsky wrote, inter alia:
Where does Spolsky get these myths? Does anybody seriously believe that Gerstner has gone all hippy-love on his shareholders? Has anybody published the idea that Sun and HP are ideological converts to Free Software? Does this even past the "huh?" test?
The "myths" are straw men, uncited, unsupported. Without them, what is Spolsky saying? That businesses use Open Source for... business reasons? That wouldn't be much of a story, would it?
Move along, nothing to see here. Proving you're smarter than people who don't exist by making up their positions and knocking them down isn't much of an exercise.
It seems to me that "under this EULA" would cover things nicely from your employer's point of view.
Under the EULA, Microsoft's liability is five bucks. Under the other contract, which also applies, their liability is \$$BIGNUM.
Dude from Grinnell invented the integrated circuit.
Go Pioneers!
Look, my five-year-old son can use SuSE. It's not that big a deal.
If you honestly think current Linuces aren't friendly enough, you're comparing to some ideal that doesn't exist in the real world. Do you really think it's so simple to "understand where to click when there's no sound coming from my game" on Windows? (I still don't get it. I usually end up reinstalling the drivers and rebooting.)
Windows is not as easy as claimed, and Linux is not as difficult as claimed.
Stop whining and go on using Windows! This isn't for you anyway, it's for people who don't mind learning something new and would rather solve problems than complain about them!
If your neighbor's life depends on his shed door, and your life depends on the kettle, I'd say your circumstances are better than his. What matters isn't a "fair" comparison between the fixes, what matters is where you are on the continuum between resilience and brittleness.
Or back on topic, it would be a "fair" comparison if an Open Source X server were to open up an equally awful security hole, and if you compared the time-to-fix against Microsoft's. But that wouldn't be a relevant comparison because it's not a typical situation; X's similar wide-open security exploits are AFAIK a thing of the distant past.