Without a doubt. I can't help but smile at the whole thing. I am sure Sun would rather die than allow IBM to 'help' them.
Maybe IBM is doing this as underhanded payback for Sun's "offer of assistance" moving IBM to the so-called Java Desktop a month or two back.
As for OSS Java from what I understand, creating the VM is a well understood engineering problem. OSS VMs and compilers already exist. The problem is that a complete implementation of Java includes an immense number of classes that would have to be implemented for real application compatibility.
All of these antitrust "remedies" miss the mark completely. Bundling software into Windows is only one anticompetitive tactic and it isn't even the most important one. It is amusing in a watch-a-train-wreck way to watch them kill categories of software. AV vendors are about to feel the pinch. But then, we've been bitching at MS forever to beef up their security.
Besides as given categories of software become ubiqitous people start expecting more things to come with the OS. MS would probably have to bundle a browser and a media player even if destroying Netscape and Real weren't on their minds at all. Now they need to bundle a firewall and an AV scanner to protect the rest of the net from their own customers.
The true factors that give their monopoly power are secret OEM agreements and undocumented protocols and file formats. Breaking them up won't necessarily fix those and neither will dictating what MS can and can't ship with their OS. Take away the gun away from vendor's heads and document the formats and protocols. Their source code is not needed, wanted, or even particularly useful. It would have to be reverse engineered for those specs anyway.
Will it be possible for there to be an Open Source monopoly, or will it be inherrently impossible because Open Source isn't an entity, but simply a classification for individual efforts?
I would imagine the second. Open Source only looks like a monolith to those who feel threatened by it. Even the biggest and most successful OSS projects don't seem to affect the development of their competitors much. There seems to be room for both Kapersky antivirus and ClamAV for instance or even Konqueror and Mozilla. I suppose that comes of people doing this just because they want to or they have VERY specific requirements that preclude customizing someone else's project.
None of this seems very true for large MS projects. I see the ultra right wing developer/vendor crowd constantly bitching that OSS hippies are out to eat their lunch and that all OSS developers should be hauled off to Guantanomo Bay in chains. Hell, if MS integrates your functionality into Windows then you are done. Some of the other posters are right. This is going to severely prune the market for a number of third-party windows utilities. I don't think it will be a substitute for server managed antivirus products (yet) but the writing seems to be on the wall for consumer Windows AV products.
I'll also point out that ambitious OSS projects take years to snowball. Think KDE or Mozilla. If a project really starts growing, a proprietary competitor still has those years to react. On the other hand, MS can keep their projects as secret or as acknowledged as they like. You won't see them coming unless they want you to.
On the bright side, Windows being a little more secure by default can't be a bad thing. Maybe I'll get a little less virus traffic in my inbox.
And will your legal department have the gumption to sue SCO for fraud when IBM, Novell, and RedHat finish whooping up on them? Your company just paid SCO for something they don't own.
What is the address of your company's billing department? Since its all that easy to beat money out of them, I figure I can make some shit up and get them to pay me too.
Unbiased? No but they do freely admit their bias. On the other hand you can't fault Groklaw for not being thorough. Groklaw at least does a good job validating their bias.
PJ at Groklaw coined the term "didiot" for "analysts" who seem to be excessively ignorant of their subject matter and/or behave like paid shills. It also works as adjective and adverb as in "Enderle has another didiotic troll up on Linuxinsider."
The "scogelt" rolls of the tongue acceptably well.
Re:Piers Anthony advocates DRM
on
Singularity Sky
·
· Score: 1
I would have had the same opinion even if he hadn't corresponded with me. He said in his newsletter that he agreed with Harlan Ellison about DRM. He has also said himself and in his fiction that he claims to oppose injustice and tyranny. With no correspondence with me whatsover, I would have formed the opinion. At best, his correspondence with me gave added weight and justification to my opinion of him but I would have had it nonetheless.
As for the cart in front of the horse, DRM isn't just about putting silly little locks on the latest Britney album. It has far reaching implications on our rights to use and develop technology. It will also enable new forms of censorship, consolidation of markets and control. For instance, all digital non-DVD releases from Disney will use Windows DRM. No skin off my ass for now but this sort of thing will continue. Its obvious that MS would love their OS to be a chokepoint for consuming any form of home entertainment. They won't suceed utterly at it. Nonetheless, just about every form of home entertainment going forward will have obnoxious strings attached. No thanks.
Have you considered the possibility that debugging is done in the original source code and only obfuscated before it ships?
To the extent that is possible, sure. I could easily see this obfuscator clobbering fragile code. I suppose that can be tested for but that only defers the pain. Your customers won't necessarily come for your ass but the development team will love it.
This comes up with debugging normal code. Sometimes the debugging environment is just different enough to let flawed code seem to work ok but breaks horrendously otherwise.
Re:Piers Anthony advocates DRM
on
Singularity Sky
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
It is because I find his position in context to be utterly offensive. Yes, he answers his own email. Yes he'll even discuss his own views. I'm not "punishing" him because he interacts with his fans. I'm "punishing" him for rank hypocrasy.
His favoring of DRM is completely counter to everything he claims to stand for. I also try to avoid funding DRM advocates on general principle. I'll grant that is difficult these days but I will boycott the more obvious ways of giving Disney money for instance.
I'll even still read his stuff but only if I can pick it legitimately without funding him. I'm thinking of things like libraries and used bookshops.
Piers Anthony advocates DRM
on
Singularity Sky
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Piers Anthony will never see another dime from me. He wrote in one his newsletters last year that he can't see "why some people get so outraged about protections on digital works". He often claims to hate tyranny and love personal liberty but is completely unable to see the connection those things have to DRM.
I had an email back and forth with him and he brushed off as completely unimportant:
Forced format changes Locking independents out of the market Forced choice of platforms Retroactive changes of licensing terms Rewriting history Every other thing about DRM that is problematic.
Oh and he completely doesn't get that what one clever human can do another clever human can undo which ultimately makes the so-called benefits of DRM moot.
He seems to think that DRM is his only hope of getting paid in the future. I got the distinct impression that to him Disney and the *IAA are completely reasonable aggrieved souls. For all of his professed love of liberty and justice, he comes off like Jack Valenti when it comes to his wallet. His works emphasize his dislike of censorship. He hasn't seen anything yet and he has no idea that he is now an advocate of censorship. If he likes DRM then he'll have to like everything that comes with it.
This is fine. I won't misappropriate his stuff online but I won't fund him anymore.
What if your car was hit in the front while that thing is in your mouth? Depending on the design, you will have at least one of these happen to you: a tube jammed into the back of your throat, lose some teeth, get your face smashed, or a neck injury. You might even get some other part of your body impaled on thing. Not only will this thing cause accidents, it will increase driver injuries as well.
Even a hit to the back might jerk some front teeth out.
Doubtless this lady did violate the law. I also don't doubt that the racketeering angle won't stick. Come to think of it, the RIAA is going to legally win this one one way or another. The thing is, the RIAA has been fighting a PR war as well as a legal one. Most people could see a downloader having to pay for the tracks and maybe even a (reasonable) fine on top as additional discouragement. That level of punishment fits the crime. There is compensation and nominal punitive damages. I don't see anyone blinking at the price of several Britney CDs and few hundred dollars thrown on top for good measure.
The RIAA's problem is they will lose that level of sympathy if they drop too many million dollar shithammers on Joe Sixpack. It just doesn't sound good on the six o'clock news. If they take it too far, reining in the entertainment cartels could become political gold instead of political suicide. It's all about public perception. Right now, Joe Sixpack doesn't even know what the RIAA is. It's just the record company people going after someone who's been been naughty on that intarweb. A few of his buddies get ruined and hauled off the jail and it becomes "someone oughta do something about those RIAA guys".
Their current model of several thousand dollar settlements or get ruined in court will work just fine until too many people get uppity like this woman. A few token downloaders being publically shamed and hit with a $5000 ticket won't trigger the PR disaster. But it only works if those Budweiser swilling consumers don't actually go to court like they're supposed to.
press ctrl-alt-F1 after booting to Knoppix and type lspci. It will give a list of everything sitting on the pci bus whether Knoppix configured it or not./proc also has a wealth of information especially if you look at the files in/proc/bus. For instance:
cat/proc/bus/usb/devices will spit out a handy list of everything on the pci bus.
I have a private remaster of Knoppix with the captive ntfs drivers and every recovery and diagnostic tool I could find on it. It comes in extremely handy for rescuing/reimaging Windows machines. When your only tool is a Knoppix CD then every problem looks like... ah screw it.
The GPL contains language about linking to libraries that are "customary" to a particular system. This why it is possible to run and distribute GPLed software for Windows. The question here is to what degree XFree86 can be considered "customary" on a BSD or Linux system. Since XFree86 is a replaceable module, I suspect the answer is that the "customary" exception does not apply.
This is primarily a legal question. Linux and BSD distros need to be legally compliant when they distribute binaries. XFree86 replaceable infrastructure that it is puts legal compliance into question for large numbers of software packages. Any distro that is intended for a large userbase has to dot the i's and cross the t's. It sucks but there it is.
there's no problem linking GPL code to non-free X11 implementations, such as OpenWindows, so why would there be a problem linking it with a Free X11 implementation like XFree86-4.4?
This isn't an ideological issue on the part of Linux distros. The only Linux distros that will be able to live with XFree's new license are source based distros like Gentoo. Linking GPLed source with the new XFree86 is no problem provided you do it yourself. Distributing the binaries is. For all that the likes of SCO say that IP isn't respected, it is. The new XFree86 will make it potentially illegal to distribute vast tracts of software as binaries. This is not a practical situation for the Linux distros.
There will eventually be a fork of XFree86 that the distros will use. It will this fork that gets the drivers and eventually most other development as well. What we really should be worried about is Debian having one codebase, RedHat another, and Suse still another. The sooner there is a legally kosher common codebase the better.
I upgraded recently and at some point the 4X AGP card currently in the system will be replaced with an 8X card and the 2.4Ghx P4 will be replaced with a 3.2Ghz unit. I don't intend to pay more $75 or so for both and those small mobo maxing out upgrades will buy another usable year or two for the system.
I'm basically looking ahead to the point where I can max out my current motherboard for a minimum amount of money.
This works if you aren't an upgrade wienie who has to be the first kid on your block with the latest ATI card.
I propose a thumbnail version of him in his Jedi Master outfit. I feel "Community Spokesmen" like ESR with great deal of effort can do some small amount of good. CatB had some influence on some pointy haired types when FOSS was just starting to critical mass. On the other hand, they can do damage far more easily than doing good. His expression of "shame" at what "one of us" did to SCO was stooopid. What really happened still isn't clear. No tin foil hat here, I could easily see some Slashdot troll calling up ESR with a "confession"....truly a Troll Masterpiece if it went down that way. There's no need for MS and SCO conspiracy theories although those are fun too.
In any case, we didn't need Mr. Big Community Leader collectively confessing things on our behalf. It did nothing to improve how FOSS is perceived outside the community and fed SCO more grist for their FUD mill.
Well, we'd have a steaming hot cup of coffee up against a musical notation looking thingy. How is this going to end? Will Java scald C# to death with it's hot acid coffee bath?
My ass IE works fine. Pop-ups and -unders galore and scads of spyware come marching in through it. Don't get me started on what it does when you try to serve dynamically generated pdfs on a secure connection as well. For that matter, let's also ignore the way its cache behaves on secure sites. It used to be Netscape 4 that caused web developer hell. NS 4 has been dethroned. It's every bit the non-standard supporting cruft monster that NS 4 is. Oh, and then there's multiple gaping security holes that aren't patched for months. And when they are patched, the patches break more standards.
Sure, if you know what you are doing and diddle this and install that then the worst of IE's faults can be mitigated. But that shoots large holes in a favorite argument against OSS: It just works. You don't have to know what you are doing.
Of course when these things are finally fixed and IE can do what Opera and OSS browsers have been doing for years, MS will say that they're "innovating" and insinuate they invented everything worthwhile in computing.
Slashdot Mirror
Without a doubt. I can't help but smile at the whole thing. I am sure Sun would rather die than allow IBM to 'help' them.
Maybe IBM is doing this as underhanded payback for Sun's "offer of assistance" moving IBM to the so-called Java Desktop a month or two back.
As for OSS Java from what I understand, creating the VM is a well understood engineering problem. OSS VMs and compilers already exist. The problem is that a complete implementation of Java includes an immense number of classes that would have to be implemented for real application compatibility.
Okay MS, let's see how you like it!
"This is a bust. Step awaay from your keyboards. NOW!"
All of these antitrust "remedies" miss the mark completely. Bundling software into Windows is only one anticompetitive tactic and it isn't even the most important one. It is amusing in a watch-a-train-wreck way to watch them kill categories of software. AV vendors are about to feel the pinch. But then, we've been bitching at MS forever to beef up their security.
Besides as given categories of software become ubiqitous people start expecting more things to come with the OS. MS would probably have to bundle a browser and a media player even if destroying Netscape and Real weren't on their minds at all. Now they need to bundle a firewall and an AV scanner to protect the rest of the net from their own customers.
The true factors that give their monopoly power are secret OEM agreements and undocumented protocols and file formats. Breaking them up won't necessarily fix those and neither will dictating what MS can and can't ship with their OS. Take away the gun away from vendor's heads and document the formats and protocols. Their source code is not needed, wanted, or even particularly useful. It would have to be reverse engineered for those specs anyway.
Will it be possible for there to be an Open Source monopoly, or will it be inherrently impossible because Open Source isn't an entity, but simply a classification for individual efforts?
I would imagine the second. Open Source only looks like a monolith to those who feel threatened by it. Even the biggest and most successful OSS projects don't seem to affect the development of their competitors much. There seems to be room for both Kapersky antivirus and ClamAV for instance or even Konqueror and Mozilla. I suppose that comes of people doing this just because they want to or they have VERY specific requirements that preclude customizing someone else's project.
None of this seems very true for large MS projects. I see the ultra right wing developer/vendor crowd constantly bitching that OSS hippies are out to eat their lunch and that all OSS developers should be hauled off to Guantanomo Bay in chains. Hell, if MS integrates your functionality into Windows then you are done. Some of the other posters are right. This is going to severely prune the market for a number of third-party windows utilities. I don't think it will be a substitute for server managed antivirus products (yet) but the writing seems to be on the wall for consumer Windows AV products.
I'll also point out that ambitious OSS projects take years to snowball. Think KDE or Mozilla. If a project really starts growing, a proprietary competitor still has those years to react. On the other hand, MS can keep their projects as secret or as acknowledged as they like. You won't see them coming unless they want you to.
On the bright side, Windows being a little more secure by default can't be a bad thing. Maybe I'll get a little less virus traffic in my inbox.
SA has a Bayes classifer in addition to it's other tests. The end user can adjust the Bayes scores up or down to suit.
That is likely a way for Bill to *nudge nudge* *wink wink* "respect Intellectual Property".
And will your legal department have the gumption to sue SCO for fraud when IBM, Novell, and RedHat finish whooping up on them? Your company just paid SCO for something they don't own.
What is the address of your company's billing department? Since its all that easy to beat money out of them, I figure I can make some shit up and get them to pay me too.
Unbiased? No but they do freely admit their bias. On the other hand you can't fault Groklaw for not being thorough. Groklaw at least does a good job validating their bias.
PJ at Groklaw coined the term "didiot" for "analysts" who seem to be excessively ignorant of their subject matter and/or behave like paid shills. It also works as adjective and adverb as in "Enderle has another didiotic troll up on Linuxinsider."
The "scogelt" rolls of the tongue acceptably well.
I would have had the same opinion even if he hadn't corresponded with me. He said in his newsletter that he agreed with Harlan Ellison about DRM. He has also said himself and in his fiction that he claims to oppose injustice and tyranny. With no correspondence with me whatsover, I would have formed the opinion. At best, his correspondence with me gave added weight and justification to my opinion of him but I would have had it nonetheless.
As for the cart in front of the horse, DRM isn't just about putting silly little locks on the latest Britney album. It has far reaching implications on our rights to use and develop technology. It will also enable new forms of censorship, consolidation of markets and control. For instance, all digital non-DVD releases from Disney will use Windows DRM. No skin off my ass for now but this sort of thing will continue. Its obvious that MS would love their OS to be a chokepoint for consuming any form of home entertainment. They won't suceed utterly at it. Nonetheless, just about every form of home entertainment going forward will have obnoxious strings attached. No thanks.
Have you considered the possibility that debugging is done in the original source code and only obfuscated before it ships?
To the extent that is possible, sure. I could easily see this obfuscator clobbering fragile code. I suppose that can be tested for but that only defers the pain. Your customers won't necessarily come for your ass but the development team will love it.
This comes up with debugging normal code. Sometimes the debugging environment is just different enough to let flawed code seem to work ok but breaks horrendously otherwise.
It is because I find his position in context to be utterly offensive. Yes, he answers his own email. Yes he'll even discuss his own views. I'm not "punishing" him because he interacts with his fans. I'm "punishing" him for rank hypocrasy.
His favoring of DRM is completely counter to everything he claims to stand for. I also try to avoid funding DRM advocates on general principle. I'll grant that is difficult these days but I will boycott the more obvious ways of giving Disney money for instance.
I'll even still read his stuff but only if I can pick it legitimately without funding him. I'm thinking of things like libraries and used bookshops.
Piers Anthony will never see another dime from me. He wrote in one his newsletters last year that he can't see "why some people get so outraged about protections on digital works". He often claims to hate tyranny and love personal liberty but is completely unable to see the connection those things have to DRM.
I had an email back and forth with him and he brushed off as completely unimportant:
Forced format changes
Locking independents out of the market
Forced choice of platforms
Retroactive changes of licensing terms
Rewriting history
Every other thing about DRM that is problematic.
Oh and he completely doesn't get that what one clever human can do another clever human can undo which ultimately makes the so-called benefits of DRM moot.
He seems to think that DRM is his only hope of getting paid in the future. I got the distinct impression that to him Disney and the *IAA are completely reasonable aggrieved souls. For all of his professed love of liberty and justice, he comes off like Jack Valenti when it comes to his wallet. His works emphasize his dislike of censorship. He hasn't seen anything yet and he has no idea that he is now an advocate of censorship. If he likes DRM then he'll have to like everything that comes with it.
This is fine. I won't misappropriate his stuff online but I won't fund him anymore.
What if your car was hit in the front while that thing is in your mouth? Depending on the design, you will have at least one of these happen to you: a tube jammed into the back of your throat, lose some teeth, get your face smashed, or a neck injury. You might even get some other part of your body impaled on thing. Not only will this thing cause accidents, it will increase driver injuries as well.
Even a hit to the back might jerk some front teeth out.
Doubtless this lady did violate the law. I also don't doubt that the racketeering angle won't stick. Come to think of it, the RIAA is going to legally win this one one way or another. The thing is, the RIAA has been fighting a PR war as well as a legal one. Most people could see a downloader having to pay for the tracks and maybe even a (reasonable) fine on top as additional discouragement. That level of punishment fits the crime. There is compensation and nominal punitive damages. I don't see anyone blinking at the price of several Britney CDs and few hundred dollars thrown on top for good measure.
The RIAA's problem is they will lose that level of sympathy if they drop too many million dollar shithammers on Joe Sixpack. It just doesn't sound good on the six o'clock news. If they take it too far, reining in the entertainment cartels could become political gold instead of political suicide. It's all about public perception. Right now, Joe Sixpack doesn't even know what the RIAA is. It's just the record company people going after someone who's been been naughty on that intarweb. A few of his buddies get ruined and hauled off the jail and it becomes "someone oughta do something about those RIAA guys".
Their current model of several thousand dollar settlements or get ruined in court will work just fine until too many people get uppity like this woman. A few token downloaders being publically shamed and hit with a $5000 ticket won't trigger the PR disaster. But it only works if those Budweiser swilling consumers don't actually go to court like they're supposed to.
cat /proc/bus/usb/devices will spit out a handy list of everything on the pci bus.
That command will actually spit out a handy list of everything on the USB bus. Ooops......
press ctrl-alt-F1 after booting to Knoppix and type lspci. It will give a list of everything sitting on the pci bus whether Knoppix configured it or not. /proc also has a wealth of information especially if you look at the files in /proc/bus. For instance:
/proc/bus/usb/devices will spit out a handy list of everything on the pci bus.
cat
I have a private remaster of Knoppix with the captive ntfs drivers and every recovery and diagnostic tool I could find on it. It comes in extremely handy for rescuing/reimaging Windows machines. When your only tool is a Knoppix CD then every problem looks like ... ah screw it.
The GPL contains language about linking to libraries that are "customary" to a particular system. This why it is possible to run and distribute GPLed software for Windows. The question here is to what degree XFree86 can be considered "customary" on a BSD or Linux system. Since XFree86 is a replaceable module, I suspect the answer is that the "customary" exception does not apply.
This is primarily a legal question. Linux and BSD distros need to be legally compliant when they distribute binaries. XFree86 replaceable infrastructure that it is puts legal compliance into question for large numbers of software packages. Any distro that is intended for a large userbase has to dot the i's and cross the t's. It sucks but there it is.
there's no problem linking GPL code to non-free X11 implementations, such as OpenWindows, so why would there be a problem linking it with a Free X11 implementation like XFree86-4.4?
This isn't an ideological issue on the part of Linux distros. The only Linux distros that will be able to live with XFree's new license are source based distros like Gentoo. Linking GPLed source with the new XFree86 is no problem provided you do it yourself. Distributing the binaries is. For all that the likes of SCO say that IP isn't respected, it is. The new XFree86 will make it potentially illegal to distribute vast tracts of software as binaries. This is not a practical situation for the Linux distros.
There will eventually be a fork of XFree86 that the distros will use. It will this fork that gets the drivers and eventually most other development as well. What we really should be worried about is Debian having one codebase, RedHat another, and Suse still another. The sooner there is a legally kosher common codebase the better.
I upgraded recently and at some point the 4X AGP card currently in the system will be replaced with an 8X card and the 2.4Ghx P4 will be replaced with a 3.2Ghz unit. I don't intend to pay more $75 or so for both and those small mobo maxing out upgrades will buy another usable year or two for the system.
I'm basically looking ahead to the point where I can max out my current motherboard for a minimum amount of money.
This works if you aren't an upgrade wienie who has to be the first kid on your block with the latest ATI card.
Slashdot needs an ESR graphic.
I propose a thumbnail version of him in his Jedi Master outfit. I feel "Community Spokesmen" like ESR with great deal of effort can do some small amount of good. CatB had some influence on some pointy haired types when FOSS was just starting to critical mass. On the other hand, they can do damage far more easily than doing good. His expression of "shame" at what "one of us" did to SCO was stooopid. What really happened still isn't clear. No tin foil hat here, I could easily see some Slashdot troll calling up ESR with a "confession"....truly a Troll Masterpiece if it went down that way. There's no need for MS and SCO conspiracy theories although those are fun too.
In any case, we didn't need Mr. Big Community Leader collectively confessing things on our behalf. It did nothing to improve how FOSS is perceived outside the community and fed SCO more grist for their FUD mill.
Well, we'd have a steaming hot cup of coffee up against a musical notation looking thingy. How is this going to end? Will Java scald C# to death with it's hot acid coffee bath?
IE has been working fine for many, many years.
My ass IE works fine. Pop-ups and -unders galore and scads of spyware come marching in through it. Don't get me started on what it does when you try to serve dynamically generated pdfs on a secure connection as well. For that matter, let's also ignore the way its cache behaves on secure sites. It used to be Netscape 4 that caused web developer hell. NS 4 has been dethroned. It's every bit the non-standard supporting cruft monster that NS 4 is. Oh, and then there's multiple gaping security holes that aren't patched for months. And when they are patched, the patches break more standards.
Sure, if you know what you are doing and diddle this and install that then the worst of IE's faults can be mitigated. But that shoots large holes in a favorite argument against OSS: It just works. You don't have to know what you are doing.
Of course when these things are finally fixed and IE can do what Opera and OSS browsers have been doing for years, MS will say that they're "innovating" and insinuate they invented everything worthwhile in computing.