How does Creative get around the encryption issue with the DVD people?
dxr2 implements encryption in hardware, so it's OS-independent, and drivers don't contain any code related to it. The problem is, dxr2 is already an obsolete model, and later one -- dxr3 -- has software CSS. Creative refuses to provide any drivers or documentation for it citing "secret" nature of CSS as the reason.
There is a very appropriate joke about propaganda.
A book about elephants was published in India, as a single volume. When translated and published in other countries, various forewords and additions by local biologists were included, more or less departing from the subject. In Russia the book consisted of two volumes: "Marxism-Leninism about elephants" and "Russia, the home of the elephants".
While it's, of course, exaggerration (have to say that, or American patriots will take it for the face value), it explains pretty well, what should be expected from sources of informartion that mix huge amount of propaganda into everything.
They were adequate in trusted environment, and were replaced with ssh after the Internet became a bit less "trusted". The same thing will happen to game protocols -- they will be replaced with versions that will keep "world" integrity even if clients are hostile. And since this still allows cheating by giving player more information than he normally would have (for example, by making things transparent), more advanced future servers would have to limit the amount of information, every client receives from the server to only things that player will be able to see -- but this will benefit the game as a whole because it reduces the lag and amount of calculations in the clients' 3d engines.
The kinds of "cheating" that will always remain possible will thus become limited to client-side "automation" (scripts that determine parts of character's behavior, information keepers,...), however those things can be legitimized -- they require skills and creativity to be used, so the advantage won't be "unfair".
they repeat bogus reasons for using Microsoft servers ("if you have existing business logic, such as pricing strategies, written in Visual Basic..." -- hello, you want to call Visual Basic script, written by an accountant's assistant from HTTP server in secure environment?), measurements made with CGI scripts on Unix (heard of anything else?), their WebBench tests that have nothing to do with real-life environments other than that it uses HTTP, never use Gigabit ethernet cards in their low-latency tests, "demonstrate" that SSL servers are dominated by Microsoft IIS by splitting branded Apache-derivatives into different categories, don't include Unix servers other than Apache and Netscape, omit *BSD, etc.
In other words, usual advertisers-driven "Editors' Choice" stuff from ZDNet.
Fast. Buggy. Weird UI design. Windows-like widgets
on
Opera Beta Released
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· Score: 2
The whole thing has StarOffice-ish "look and feel" -- large window, MDI in it, widgets are exactly the same as in StarOffice.
It has good chances to become usable, however MDI shouldn't be the only option for windows handling -- while it may be tolerable in Windows, in X it looks like an insult to the idea of window manager.
Sorry if I haven't made it clear -- socialist system that existed in USSR was _not_ supposed to implement "from everyone according to abilities, to everyone according to needs" principle precisely because it was declared to be not achievable by any means until people will voluntarily subscribe to this goal. While this Communists' final goal does not seem to be realistic, at least they admitted the imperfection of the system that they have used, and did not try to apply it to the things, it was useless for.
Similarly with communism, the inherent notion that each contributes according to their ability and receives according to their need in an egalitarian context ignores the fundamental requirement that someone must administer the collection and distribution of goods. This administrator has inherent power over others, and the equality of the system is compromized.
This is a very common mistake about the nature of political/economical system that was present in USSR. While the idea of the "communism" was "from everyone according to abilities, to everyone according to needs", USSR never claimed to have actually implemented it. While the ruling party was called "Communist", "communism" was declared to be a distant goal of the development of _socialist_ country (USSR, Union of Soviet _Socialist_ Republics). It was declared that while people can't regulate themselves based on their own conscience, some system, in part based on governmental regulation, in part based on money, should be in place.
1) Central planning vs. unplanned "organic" self-organization. In the USSR, one government planned and executed the entire economy. In western capitalism, while each company (large and small) may or may not be autocratic, the economy is composed of thousands upon thousands of these autonomous entities operating within the economy. The only force even remotely "controlling" the economy is the Federal Reserve, and while it is in many ways far too involved in micromanaging the economy (see an earlier post I made), it is not the same as an economy centrally managed around Five Year Plans.
USSR was a Federation with 15 members, each with its own government and one central federal government. "Five Years Plans" never were detailed in the degree that can be called "micromanagement", AFAIK they mostly consisted of the planned volumes of production, and it "companies" were encouraged to exceed them in the reasonable range. Different branches of industry were handled by different "Ministries" (Departments) of the executive branch of government, and only finances and general planning/market prediction were centralized across the branches (Gosplan/Gossnab/...). Locally the decisions still were made by Directors of "companies" of various sizes, who were responsible to "the government" through various structures.
At least formally Ministries were responsible to "the people" through the government -- legislative branch of it ("Soviets") was elected just like everywhere else. Of course, since Communist Party had significant power over the whole this system, this mechanism quickly became screwed up, however this is not too unlike other countries where one or two similar parties taken over the whole political process.
To quote you, what kind of fantasy world are you living in? They have had to import food staples for years. Don't tell me GUM was a lot of fun to shop at.
It was sufficient for its main purpose -- why shopping is supposed to be some kind of enterntainment (probably people here love having all their senses attacked with ads) is beyond me.
This difference is, companies fail when they plan wrong. They don't force anyone to do anything. They don't have an army.
After getting big enough company has as little chances to fail as a country with its government even when it makes completely bogus decisions at the upper level -- see GM, IBM, AT&T, etc. Even Microsoft in the very worst (for Microsoft) case will unlikely "fail" -- see examples of AT&T and Standard Oil.
Please explain why it is you think command economies and a populace with no rights outside those granted by the govenrment are better than capitalism and personal autonomy and freedom. And don't rant about how bad the US is.
I am not trying to defend abstract ideas of "communism", "capitalism" and "democracy". "No rights" isn't exactly how I can describe USSR, and "personal autonomy and freedom" is not exactly what I see in US. Discussion about extremes and utopias can be endless, and I refuse to even go into that direction. I am talking only about real countries and current political situation.
Actually tell us what's so hot about the USSR, or any totalitarian socialist regeime anywhere.
Where have I said that USSR or Communists were "good", or that I like or liked them? I only compare things and show the lies that anti-soviet propaganda put into americans' heads.
I'l admint to US isn't perfect -- especially since 1913. But I don't want to hear about how the US is "no better than" the USSR. I want to hear about why the USSR was so good, in your opinion.
Again, neither USSR, nor US were/are "good" -- both made more than enough of things that have nothing to do with "good". The problem is, Russians admitted them and even made a clumsy attempt of correcting the political system while Americans still insist that they are right in everything, that their political system is the best possible, that monopoly-infested economy works, and that they have a "right" to attack every country that they think, is not "democratic" enough for their taste. I find it to be hypocritic in the highest degree possible.
And it looks to me like something similar is happening in Russia. *Something* is causing people there to barter, whether it's a black market (which would imply those trade restrictions again), a government reduction in the money supply (trying to fight inflation, perhaps?) or simply the chain reaction of people pulling their money out of the country to avoid what they see as a financially dangerous situation.
While I am not up to date with the current development, I know how it started because I was there. I may omit or distort some details in this description, so I welcome other Russians (no American poltitcians and journalists, pls.) to correct me where I am wrong.
USSR economy originally was handled by the government. Government handled prices and planning of distribution of products, so while money and contracts existed and worked, government had power to determine possible relationships between "companies", import/export, prices, salaries, etc. Some things intentionally operated at loss, getting funds directly from the government.
When reforms started, originally the ownership wasn't changed, however some "companies" were switched to more money-based model -- they had to keep more of their profits, had more choice in prices, salaries and their relationships with others even though the "owner" remained the same -- government. In a lot of cases it worked, however old low prices became impossible to maintain -- "companies" became disinterested in keeping prices low enough to let the rest of the economy, still entirely sponsored by the government, coexist with them. At the same time government started encouraging the creation of small businesses that were privately owned and had nothing to do with government except paying (high) taxes. Of course, those businesses were interested in increasing prices, however since most of them had to buy raw materials and equipment from "companies" owned by government, they still benefitted from arftificially limited prices that were in use there.
After some time prices became split -- everything under strict control of the government tried to keep their prices low, everything else tried to keep them upper to reflect production cost, supply and demand. While unrestricted prices were growing, government had to increase their prices and funds allocated for government-sponsored production, education, research, health care and defense. Inflation started, however with no mechanism that balances government-handled part of economy in the presence of [semi-]independent and private parts of the economy, spending started to increase fast, pulling the inflation upper. To make things worse, salaries of people still working for the government (what was a majority of the economy) became significantly lower than employees of private companies, so large number of well-educated people left government-handled industry.
Government started industry "privatization" campaign in attempt to create a kind of balance in the economy that does not require government to constantly adjust things (what it was clearly incapable of), however "privatization" quickly turned into looting -- former managers and government bureaucrats became "owners" and "shareholders" of what they previously managed, and with their personal wealth increased by many orders of magnitude they didn't become interested in any kind of useful economic activity. The rest of population got nothing.
With still unbalanced economy, disinterested and incapable managers and businesses owners, choking government-sponsored education and health care, inflation continued to grow. Businesses started to switch to banking, trade, import-export from their original activities. Underfunded government became a victim of widespread corruption -- it became less profitable and safe to operate a legitimate business than to bribe bureaucrats to accept some bogus contract, make something worthless or near to worthless, get money, then use them to bribe more bureaucrats. Organized crime expanded, stability decreased even less, and businessmen started looking for means to secure their money. Since investment became unsafe in this kind of conditions, they had to convert money into stable currency and leave Russia, continuing to operate their still profitable businesses in Russia from abroad.
This caused more instability, less production and further deterioration of everything that remained in the hands of the government. In addition to inflation money became unreliable simply because the production decreased below the demand.
And it looks to me like something similar is happening in Russia. *Something* is causing people there to barter, whether it's a black market (which would imply those trade restrictions again), a government reduction in the money supply (trying to fight inflation, perhaps?) or simply the chain reaction of people pulling their money out of the country to avoid what they see as a financially dangerous situation.
While I am not up to date with the current development, I know how it started because I was there. I may omit or distort some details in this description, so I welcome other Russians (no American poltitcians and journalist, pls.) to correct me where I am wrong.
USSR economy originally was handled by the government. Government handled prices planning of distribution of products, so while money and contracts existed and worked, government had power to determine possible relationships between "companies", import/export, prices, salaries, etc. Some things intentionally operated at loss, getting funds directly from the government.
When reforms started, originally the ownership wasn't changed, however some "companies" were switched to more money-based model -- they had to keep more of their profits, had more choice in prices, salaries and their relationships with others even though the "owner" remained the same -- government. In a lot of cases it worked, however old low prices became impossible to maintain -- "companies" became disinterested in keeping prices low enough to let the rest of the economy, still entirely sponsored by the government coexist with them. At the same time government started encouraging the creation of small businesses that were privately owned and had nothing to do with government except paying (high) taxes. Of course, those businesses were interested in increasing prices, however since most of them had to buy raw materials and equipment from "companies" owned by government, they still benefitted from arftificially limited prices that were in use there.
After some time prices became split -- everything under strict control of the government tried to keep their prices low, everything else tried to keep them upper to reflect production cost, supply and demand. While unrestricted prices were growing, government had to increase their prices and funds allocated for government-sponsored production, education, research, health care and defense. Inflation started, however with no mechanism that balances government-handled part of economy in the presence of [semi-]independent and private parts of the economy, spending started to increase fast, pulling the inflation upper. To make things worse, salaries of people still working for the government (what was a majority of the economy) became significantly lower than employees of private companies, so large number of well-educated people left government-handled industry.
Government started industry "privatization" campaign in attempt to create a kind of balance in the economy that does not require government to constantly adjust things (what it was clearly incapable of), however "privatization" quickly turned into looting -- former managers and government bureaucrats became "owners" and "shareholders" of what they previously managed, and with their personal wealth increased by many orders of magnitude they didn't became interested in any kind of useful economic activity. The rest of population got nothing, and was thrown away from any further paritcipation in the development of the economy.
With still unbalanced economy, disinterested and incapable managers and businesses owners, choking government-sponsored education and health care, inflation continued to grow. Businesses started to switch their to banking, trade, import-export from their original activities. Underfunded government became a victim of widespread corruption -- it became less profitable and safe to operate a legitimate business than to bribe bureaucrats to accept some bogus contract, make something worthless or near to worthless, get money, then use them to bribe more bureaucrats. Organized crime expanded, stability decreased even less, and businessmen started looking for means to secure their money. Since investment became unsafe in this kind of conditions, they had to convert money into stable currency and leave Russia, continuing to operate their still profitable businesses in Russia from abroad.
Zhirinovsky is probably the most ridiculously-looking politician ever. Over all his political career he managed to spout insults on everyone but himself and ultra-right extremists, promised/threatened ridiculous things, and at least at one occasion started a brawl in the Parlaiment session, but so far haven't done anything visible to back his words. I have no idea who voted for him, but I suspect that such a vote could only be taken as a desperate expression of complete disrespect to Russian Parliament (Duma). In Russia no one except probably some drunken mentally sick types really cares what he says or does -- certainly not Russian hackers that mostly are intelligent people.
Publishing his rants in any non-tabloid place can mean one of two things -- either journalist is a moron, or it is done as an anti-Russian propaganda piece.
...led you to believe. I lived there for 23 years, and can definitely say that it was not "slavery" -- it was s system with significant flaws, however -- surprise -- the magnitude of human rights violations was in the same range a s what was practiced in most of the Western countries at the same time. The "economic engine" that Russia had was inefficient, however so is stock market -- contrary to the popular belief economic systems can be something other than capitalism. While I don't like Communists or their actions (and criticized their political decisions when I lived there), I have to acknowledge that they did have working and stable economy for at least half a century, and most of people in Russia (surprise again) didn't feel more threatened by the government and society in their everyday life than americans do now in US.
Eventually too many of the slaves drop their wrenches in the gears.
This is a blatant rewriting of history. At the time when political reforms started economy still worked normally. Only after that when unblalnced, screwed up reforms started, people started losing their income and started leaving their normal jobs for various kinds of "exploitation of the flaws in the system". USSR was destroyed because of political problems, not because its economy suddently became incapable of supporting itself.
As for your other point, why couldn't the USSR sustain an expensive arms rage with "the most prosperous country in the world?"
What kind of fantasy world are you talking about? Arms race was sustained for all duration of the Cold War with no noticeable advantage to any side.
They had more people, more natural resources. Rumor had it their populace was even "better educated." They didn't have any silly worker's rights and environmental laws to worry about.
Russian population was (and probably still is) better educated than american one -- US has probably the worst education system among developed countries, and Russians, with Communists or not, always taken education very seriously. Communists understood well that with their political and economical system they had to pay _more_ attention to education than other countries to keep the development of technology at the level and rate, comparable with others. And again, contrary to what propaganda led you to believe, there are worker rights laws, unions (however they are even more corrupt and affected by politics there than in US) and environmental protection laws.
They ignored age-old lessons. Rule of law (not men) and equal treatment under that law are essential.
Again, this is bullshit. While government often ignored their own laws when it could get away with it (what is not too much unlike US), laws actually existed and were enforced. One may say that those laws were unjust, however it's a different question -- IMHO american immigration-related laws are unjust, too. The part about "lesson" is especially ridiculous -- Russia, just like say, Japan, had no "age-old" traditions of democracy or capitalism.
You have to provide the means for people to succeed,
This (with "success" as multi-million income) is only specific to one particular kind of society. The remote possibility to "strike big" at the expense of all others (reality check -- most of people will never be able to reach anywhere close to the level of wealth they set their goals for because scarcity and concentration of wealth won't allow them) may be a valid driving force of human activity, however it's not the only one possible, and with the amount of blatant abuse that we see now (from Microsoft to Amazon.com) one can wonder if it more often works or being abused.
without mandating what they do and how they do it. Real prosperity is a bottom-up phenomenon.
This entirely depends on the society in question. Of course, in US concentration of wealth already made this point close to becoming moot. And considering that US depends on the import and dirt-cheap labor abroad like an addict on crack, it becomes even less relevant. With all its flaws USSR at least was capable of producing within its borders everything that was consumed there.
The Soviets tried to plan in advance, with some type of self-awarded omnipotence, what everyone was and was not going to do to make the USSR "successful."
The same things happen within any large company -- the same organization is responsible for all decisions. In companies there is upper management in HQ, management in offices/branches, middle management, etc., all making their decisions on behalf of the company. The same kind of system was used in USSR. While I am not a fan of huge companies, last time I have checked, American economy is mostly ruled by them, so I don't see any fundamental difference.
Most harmful of all is the message that Microsoft's hax0rz have conveyed to every hax0r with the potential to 0wn in the skr1ptz industry. Through its conduct toward Netscape, Naked and Petrified Guy, Compaq, Anonymous Coward, and others, Microsoft has demonstrated that it will use its prodigious market power and immense 31337 to harm any firm that insists on pursuing initiatives that could intensify competition against one of Microsoft's lame products. Microsoft's past success in hurting such kiddiez and stifling innovation deters investment in technologies and sitez that exhibit the potential to r00t Microsoft. The ultimate result is that some innovations that would truly suck consumers never occur for the sole reason that they do not rule with Microsoft's lamer.
What if tapes will be smaller, but will contain complete image of each disk on separate tape? Then they can be copied in parallel, then disks will be reassembled as RAID. 18 HDs will decrease the copying speed 18 times at the cost of adding more tape drives, copying boxes and switching SCSI buses between RAID adapter and copying box -- still cheap compared to the rest of equipment involved.
Instant mesaging protocols so far did nothing that IRC protocol can't or doesn't do efficiently, so I would rather prefer improvement of IRC clients/scripts (yes, scripts exist not only for ops wars and flooding), so they will provide functionality, "instant messenger" do now. For me ircII on console and XChat in X already provide everything I need, and the less people will sit on the networks that don't interoperate with IRC, the better.
I have some Red Hat and VA Linux stock (mind you, not much -- I am just a developer who got both "letters"), and I know that it *is* overinflated considering what both companies actually have and do now -- just probably much less overinflated than most of other computers-related stocks. There is nothing to be jealous about -- still no one knows what will happen with them later. Both companies can use this overinflated stock wisely, strenghten their main business and make it a self-fulfilling prophecy, or do the opposite and crash later.
OTOH, I have serious doubt that amazon.com will be able to pull the same trick and become Wal*mart of the Internet, no matter how smart they will do their business -- any attempt of making profit that will justify their price will open doors for competitors.
It was sent to my address, however, just like the initial letter it didn't have my address in "To:", so pine didn't show it as a "personal", as opposed to the email with account number. While this is normal, most of people, accustomed to huge amount of garbage in their email, could overlook it (I used a filter by sender, so I have seen it immediately).
Phone was busy, and after it answered it still forwarded me to the mailbox, mailbox was full, and only then it forwarded me to actual person.
Standards bodies are in general very conservative bodies. That makes sense, as they, umm... are there to set standards.
As a result of this, they rely on established bodies of law, and historical precedent. The notion that it's somehow a bad thing that standards bodies "don't know about" Open Source licenses and therefore don't embrace them is as ridiculous as attacking the New York Philharmonic because they won't "cover" the latest RAP songs.
They definitely aren't there to set standards on documentation licensing, so it would make sense for them to use superior form of handling the documents that benefit from being distributed, massively quoted and modified in proposals by large number of people and organization.
Actually standards committees that care about the usefullness of their standards probably would rather prefer a license that allows redistribution and requires explicit mentioning of changes made from "blessed" original version. Ex:
THIS IS THE VERSION OF FTP PROTOCOL, AS IMPLEMENTED BY WU-FTPD Vx.y. ORIGINALLY BASED ON RFC-959. CHANGES FROM THE ORIGINAL RFC-959 ARE MARKED BY "+", "-" and "!".
(copy of RFC-959 follows, changed to reflect numerous violations of RFC-959 and additions to it that wu-ftpd does).
While I think, it's still allowed to make that particular document now (and it would be quite useful if someone did it), it definitely isn't the case with ISO and ITU standards. Worse yet, their redistribution is restricted just like redistribution of any other copyrighted material that doesn't have explicit redistribution license attached.
So unless we should assume that standard committees are created to make money from selling texts of their standards, requirement of assigning copyright to them with no redistribution license is inferior to the kind of special Open Source license that merely requires to mention the organization that maintains the standard and explicitly mark changes from the official version. Actually it's inferior to even assigning copyright to them in exchange to plain free redistribution in original form license.
I don't really understand the article, it said that Sun would have to abdicate their copyrights. Is that right or am I reading it wrong? You can't hardly blame sun for wanting to keep the copyrights to their work.
Copyright of the text of standard, not the implementation. When standard body modifies standard it must be able to modify and redistribute its text, and this requires either owning the copyright or having a license that allows making modifications and unrestricted distribution. The idea of Open Source licenses isn't known to standard bodies, so they demand copyright.
Take a look at http://www.dialpad.com/ Thier program is in java, and it's very worthwhile.
Since it works on only one OS they could save themselves a lot of grief by writing it in C++ and providing as a plugin -- it's not like a program from untrusted source that uses TCP/IP and your microphone can be at any degree called "secure". And ironically if written in C++ it most likely would be more portable.
Slashdot Mirror
How does Creative get around the encryption issue with the DVD people?
dxr2 implements encryption in hardware, so it's OS-independent, and drivers don't contain any code related to it. The problem is, dxr2 is already an obsolete model, and later one -- dxr3 -- has software CSS. Creative refuses to provide any drivers or documentation for it citing "secret" nature of CSS as the reason.
There is a very appropriate joke about propaganda.
A book about elephants was published in India, as a single volume. When translated and published in other countries, various forewords and additions by local biologists were included, more or less departing from the subject. In Russia the book consisted of two volumes: "Marxism-Leninism about elephants" and "Russia, the home of the elephants".
While it's, of course, exaggerration (have to say that, or American patriots will take it for the face value), it explains pretty well, what should be expected from sources of informartion that mix huge amount of propaganda into everything.
They were adequate in trusted environment, and were replaced with ssh after the Internet became a bit less "trusted". The same thing will happen to game protocols -- they will be replaced with versions that will keep "world" integrity even if clients are hostile. And since this still allows cheating by giving player more information than he normally would have (for example, by making things transparent), more advanced future servers would have to limit the amount of information, every client receives from the server to only things that player will be able to see -- but this will benefit the game as a whole because it reduces the lag and amount of calculations in the clients' 3d engines.
The kinds of "cheating" that will always remain possible will thus become limited to client-side "automation" (scripts that determine parts of character's behavior, information keepers,...), however those things can be legitimized -- they require skills and creativity to be used, so the advantage won't be "unfair".
they repeat bogus reasons for using Microsoft servers ("if you have existing business logic, such as pricing strategies, written in Visual Basic..." -- hello, you want to call Visual Basic script, written by an accountant's assistant from HTTP server in secure environment?), measurements made with CGI scripts on Unix (heard of anything else?), their WebBench tests that have nothing to do with real-life environments other than that it uses HTTP, never use Gigabit ethernet cards in their low-latency tests, "demonstrate" that SSL servers are dominated by Microsoft IIS by splitting branded Apache-derivatives into different categories, don't include Unix servers other than Apache and Netscape, omit *BSD, etc.
In other words, usual advertisers-driven "Editors' Choice" stuff from ZDNet.
The whole thing has StarOffice-ish "look and feel" -- large window, MDI in it, widgets are exactly the same as in StarOffice.
It has good chances to become usable, however MDI shouldn't be the only option for windows handling -- while it may be tolerable in Windows, in X it looks like an insult to the idea of window manager.
Sorry if I haven't made it clear -- socialist system that existed in USSR was _not_ supposed to implement "from everyone according to abilities, to everyone according to needs" principle precisely because it was declared to be not achievable by any means until people will voluntarily subscribe to this goal. While this Communists' final goal does not seem to be realistic, at least they admitted the imperfection of the system that they have used, and did not try to apply it to the things, it was useless for.
Similarly with communism, the inherent notion that each contributes according to their ability and receives according to their need in an egalitarian context ignores the fundamental requirement that someone must administer the collection and distribution of goods. This administrator has inherent power over others, and the equality of the system is compromized.
This is a very common mistake about the nature of political/economical system that was present in USSR. While the idea of the "communism" was "from everyone according to abilities, to everyone according to needs", USSR never claimed to have actually implemented it. While the ruling party was called "Communist", "communism" was declared to be a distant goal of the development of _socialist_ country (USSR, Union of Soviet _Socialist_ Republics). It was declared that while people can't regulate themselves based on their own conscience, some system, in part based on governmental regulation, in part based on money, should be in place.
1) Central planning vs. unplanned "organic" self-organization. In the USSR, one government planned and executed the entire economy. In western capitalism, while each company (large and small) may or may not be autocratic, the economy is composed of thousands upon thousands of these autonomous entities operating within the economy. The only force even remotely "controlling" the economy is the Federal Reserve, and while it is in many ways far too involved in micromanaging the economy (see an earlier post I made), it is not the same as an economy centrally managed around Five Year Plans.
USSR was a Federation with 15 members, each with its own government and one central federal government. "Five Years Plans" never were detailed in the degree that can be called "micromanagement", AFAIK they mostly consisted of the planned volumes of production, and it "companies" were encouraged to exceed them in the reasonable range. Different branches of industry were handled by different "Ministries" (Departments) of the executive branch of government, and only finances and general planning/market prediction were centralized across the branches (Gosplan/Gossnab/...). Locally the decisions still were made by Directors of "companies" of various sizes, who were responsible to "the government" through various structures.
At least formally Ministries were responsible to "the people" through the government -- legislative branch of it ("Soviets") was elected just like everywhere else. Of course, since Communist Party had significant power over the whole this system, this mechanism quickly became screwed up, however this is not too unlike other countries where one or two similar parties taken over the whole political process.
To quote you, what kind of fantasy world are you living in? They have had to import food staples for years. Don't tell me GUM was a lot of fun to shop at.
It was sufficient for its main purpose -- why shopping is supposed to be some kind of enterntainment (probably people here love having all their senses attacked with ads) is beyond me.
This difference is, companies fail when they plan wrong. They don't force anyone to do anything. They don't have an army.
After getting big enough company has as little chances to fail as a country with its government even when it makes completely bogus decisions at the upper level -- see GM, IBM, AT&T, etc. Even Microsoft in the very worst (for Microsoft) case will unlikely "fail" -- see examples of AT&T and Standard Oil.
Please explain why it is you think command economies and a populace with no rights outside those granted by the govenrment are better than capitalism and personal autonomy and freedom. And don't rant about how bad the US is.
I am not trying to defend abstract ideas of "communism", "capitalism" and "democracy". "No rights" isn't exactly how I can describe USSR, and "personal autonomy and freedom" is not exactly what I see in US. Discussion about extremes and utopias can be endless, and I refuse to even go into that direction. I am talking only about real countries and current political situation.
Actually tell us what's so hot about the USSR, or any totalitarian socialist regeime anywhere.
Where have I said that USSR or Communists were "good", or that I like or liked them? I only compare things and show the lies that anti-soviet propaganda put into americans' heads.
I'l admint to US isn't perfect -- especially since 1913. But I don't want to hear about how the US is "no better than" the USSR. I want to hear about why the USSR was so good, in your opinion.
Again, neither USSR, nor US were/are "good" -- both made more than enough of things that have nothing to do with "good". The problem is, Russians admitted them and even made a clumsy attempt of correcting the political system while Americans still insist that they are right in everything, that their political system is the best possible, that monopoly-infested economy works, and that they have a "right" to attack every country that they think, is not "democratic" enough for their taste. I find it to be hypocritic in the highest degree possible.
And it looks to me like something similar is happening in Russia. *Something* is causing people there to barter, whether it's a black market (which would imply those trade restrictions again), a government reduction in the money supply (trying to fight inflation, perhaps?) or simply the chain reaction of people pulling their money out of the country to avoid what they see as a financially dangerous situation.
While I am not up to date with the current development, I know how it started because I was there. I may omit or distort some details in this description, so I welcome other Russians (no American poltitcians and journalists, pls.) to correct me where I am wrong.
USSR economy originally was handled by the government. Government handled prices and planning of distribution of products, so while money and contracts existed and worked, government had power to determine possible relationships between "companies", import/export, prices, salaries, etc. Some things intentionally operated at loss, getting funds directly from the government.
When reforms started, originally the ownership wasn't changed, however some "companies" were switched to more money-based model -- they had to keep more of their profits, had more choice in prices, salaries and their relationships with others even though the "owner" remained the same -- government. In a lot of cases it worked, however old low prices became impossible to maintain -- "companies" became disinterested in keeping prices low enough to let the rest of the economy, still entirely sponsored by the government, coexist with them. At the same time government started encouraging the creation of small businesses that were privately owned and had nothing to do with government except paying (high) taxes. Of course, those businesses were interested in increasing prices, however since most of them had to buy raw materials and equipment from "companies" owned by government, they still benefitted from arftificially limited prices that were in use there.
After some time prices became split -- everything under strict control of the government tried to keep their prices low, everything else tried to keep them upper to reflect production cost, supply and demand. While unrestricted prices were growing, government had to increase their prices and funds allocated for government-sponsored production, education, research, health care and defense. Inflation started, however with no mechanism that balances government-handled part of economy in the presence of [semi-]independent and private parts of the economy, spending started to increase fast, pulling the inflation upper. To make things worse, salaries of people still working for the government (what was a majority of the economy) became significantly lower than employees of private companies, so large number of well-educated people left government-handled industry.
Government started industry "privatization" campaign in attempt to create a kind of balance in the economy that does not require government to constantly adjust things (what it was clearly incapable of), however "privatization" quickly turned into looting -- former managers and government bureaucrats became "owners" and "shareholders" of what they previously managed, and with their personal wealth increased by many orders of magnitude they didn't become interested in any kind of useful economic activity. The rest of population got nothing.
With still unbalanced economy, disinterested and incapable managers and businesses owners, choking government-sponsored education and health care, inflation continued to grow. Businesses started to switch to banking, trade, import-export from their original activities. Underfunded government became a victim of widespread corruption -- it became less profitable and safe to operate a legitimate business than to bribe bureaucrats to accept some bogus contract, make something worthless or near to worthless, get money, then use them to bribe more bureaucrats. Organized crime expanded, stability decreased even less, and businessmen started looking for means to secure their money. Since investment became unsafe in this kind of conditions, they had to convert money into stable currency and leave Russia, continuing to operate their still profitable businesses in Russia from abroad.
This caused more instability, less production and further deterioration of everything that remained in the hands of the government. In addition to inflation money became unreliable simply because the production decreased below the demand.
And it looks to me like something similar is happening in Russia. *Something* is causing people there to barter, whether it's a black market (which would imply those trade restrictions again), a government reduction in the money supply (trying to fight inflation, perhaps?) or simply the chain reaction of people pulling their money out of the country to avoid what they see as a financially dangerous situation.
While I am not up to date with the current development, I know how it started because I was there. I may omit or distort some details in this description, so I welcome other Russians (no American poltitcians and journalist, pls.) to correct me where I am wrong.
USSR economy originally was handled by the government. Government handled prices planning of distribution of products, so while money and contracts existed and worked, government had power to determine possible relationships between "companies", import/export, prices, salaries, etc. Some things intentionally operated at loss, getting funds directly from the government.
When reforms started, originally the ownership wasn't changed, however some "companies" were switched to more money-based model -- they had to keep more of their profits, had more choice in prices, salaries and their relationships with others even though the "owner" remained the same -- government. In a lot of cases it worked, however old low prices became impossible to maintain -- "companies" became disinterested in keeping prices low enough to let the rest of the economy, still entirely sponsored by the government coexist with them. At the same time government started encouraging the creation of small businesses that were privately owned and had nothing to do with government except paying (high) taxes. Of course, those businesses were interested in increasing prices, however since most of them had to buy raw materials and equipment from "companies" owned by government, they still benefitted from arftificially limited prices that were in use there.
After some time prices became split -- everything under strict control of the government tried to keep their prices low, everything else tried to keep them upper to reflect production cost, supply and demand. While unrestricted prices were growing, government had to increase their prices and funds allocated for government-sponsored production, education, research, health care and defense. Inflation started, however with no mechanism that balances government-handled part of economy in the presence of [semi-]independent and private parts of the economy, spending started to increase fast, pulling the inflation upper. To make things worse, salaries of people still working for the government (what was a majority of the economy) became significantly lower than employees of private companies, so large number of well-educated people left government-handled industry.
Government started industry "privatization" campaign in attempt to create a kind of balance in the economy that does not require government to constantly adjust things (what it was clearly incapable of), however "privatization" quickly turned into looting -- former managers and government bureaucrats became "owners" and "shareholders" of what they previously managed, and with their personal wealth increased by many orders of magnitude they didn't became interested in any kind of useful economic activity. The rest of population got nothing, and was thrown away from any further paritcipation in the development of the economy.
With still unbalanced economy, disinterested and incapable managers and businesses owners, choking government-sponsored education and health care, inflation continued to grow. Businesses started to switch their to banking, trade, import-export from their original activities. Underfunded government became a victim of widespread corruption -- it became less profitable and safe to operate a legitimate business than to bribe bureaucrats to accept some bogus contract, make something worthless or near to worthless, get money, then use them to bribe more bureaucrats. Organized crime expanded, stability decreased even less, and businessmen started looking for means to secure their money. Since investment became unsafe in this kind of conditions, they had to convert money into stable currency and leave Russia, continuing to operate their still profitable businesses in Russia from abroad.
Zhirinovsky is probably the most ridiculously-looking politician ever. Over all his political career he managed to spout insults on everyone but himself and ultra-right extremists, promised/threatened ridiculous things, and at least at one occasion started a brawl in the Parlaiment session, but so far haven't done anything visible to back his words. I have no idea who voted for him, but I suspect that such a vote could only be taken as a desperate expression of complete disrespect to Russian Parliament (Duma). In Russia no one except probably some drunken mentally sick types really cares what he says or does -- certainly not Russian hackers that mostly are intelligent people.
Publishing his rants in any non-tabloid place can mean one of two things -- either journalist is a moron, or it is done as an anti-Russian propaganda piece.
I am Russian, and I don't _ever_ drink anything "stronger" than coffee. You have problem with that?
...led you to believe. I lived there for 23 years, and can definitely say that it was not "slavery" -- it was s system with significant flaws, however -- surprise -- the magnitude of human rights violations was in the same range a s what was practiced in most of the Western countries at the same time. The "economic engine" that Russia had was inefficient, however so is stock market -- contrary to the popular belief economic systems can be something other than capitalism. While I don't like Communists or their actions (and criticized their political decisions when I lived there), I have to acknowledge that they did have working and stable economy for at least half a century, and most of people in Russia (surprise again) didn't feel more threatened by the government and society in their everyday life than americans do now in US.
Eventually too many of the slaves drop their wrenches in the gears.
This is a blatant rewriting of history. At the time when political reforms started economy still worked normally. Only after that when unblalnced, screwed up reforms started, people started losing their income and started leaving their normal jobs for various kinds of "exploitation of the flaws in the system". USSR was destroyed because of political problems, not because its economy suddently became incapable of supporting itself.
As for your other point, why couldn't the USSR sustain an expensive arms rage with "the most prosperous country in the world?"
What kind of fantasy world are you talking about? Arms race was sustained for all duration of the Cold War with no noticeable advantage to any side.
They had more people, more natural resources. Rumor had it their populace was even "better educated." They didn't have any silly worker's rights and environmental laws to worry about.
Russian population was (and probably still is) better educated than american one -- US has probably the worst education system among developed countries, and Russians, with Communists or not, always taken education very seriously. Communists understood well that with their political and economical system they had to pay _more_ attention to education than other countries to keep the development of technology at the level and rate, comparable with others. And again, contrary to what propaganda led you to believe, there are worker rights laws, unions (however they are even more corrupt and affected by politics there than in US) and environmental protection laws.
They ignored age-old lessons. Rule of law (not men) and equal treatment under that law are essential.
Again, this is bullshit. While government often ignored their own laws when it could get away with it (what is not too much unlike US), laws actually existed and were enforced. One may say that those laws were unjust, however it's a different question -- IMHO american immigration-related laws are unjust, too. The part about "lesson" is especially ridiculous -- Russia, just like say, Japan, had no "age-old" traditions of democracy or capitalism.
You have to provide the means for people to succeed,
This (with "success" as multi-million income) is only specific to one particular kind of society. The remote possibility to "strike big" at the expense of all others (reality check -- most of people will never be able to reach anywhere close to the level of wealth they set their goals for because scarcity and concentration of wealth won't allow them) may be a valid driving force of human activity, however it's not the only one possible, and with the amount of blatant abuse that we see now (from Microsoft to Amazon.com) one can wonder if it more often works or being abused.
without mandating what they do and how they do it. Real prosperity is a bottom-up phenomenon.
This entirely depends on the society in question. Of course, in US concentration of wealth already made this point close to becoming moot. And considering that US depends on the import and dirt-cheap labor abroad like an addict on crack, it becomes even less relevant. With all its flaws USSR at least was capable of producing within its borders everything that was consumed there.
The Soviets tried to plan in advance, with some type of self-awarded omnipotence, what everyone was and was not going to do to make the USSR "successful."
The same things happen within any large company -- the same organization is responsible for all decisions. In companies there is upper management in HQ, management in offices/branches, middle management, etc., all making their decisions on behalf of the company. The same kind of system was used in USSR. While I am not a fan of huge companies, last time I have checked, American economy is mostly ruled by them, so I don't see any fundamental difference.
Most harmful of all is the message that Microsoft's hax0rz have conveyed to every hax0r with the potential to 0wn in the skr1ptz industry. Through its conduct toward Netscape, Naked and Petrified Guy, Compaq, Anonymous Coward, and others, Microsoft has demonstrated that it will use its prodigious market power and immense 31337 to harm any firm that insists on pursuing initiatives that could intensify competition against one of Microsoft's lame products. Microsoft's past success in hurting such kiddiez and stifling innovation deters investment in technologies and sitez that exhibit the potential to r00t Microsoft. The ultimate result is that some innovations that would truly suck consumers never occur for the sole reason that they do not rule with Microsoft's lamer.
Pity none with equal capabilities is available right now or even in sight... Even without a requirement for cutting launch costs!
What about Rotary Rocket ?
...so Microsoft is looking for replacement.
What if tapes will be smaller, but will contain complete image of each disk on separate tape? Then they can be copied in parallel, then disks will be reassembled as RAID. 18 HDs will decrease the copying speed 18 times at the cost of adding more tape drives, copying boxes and switching SCSI buses between RAID adapter and copying box -- still cheap compared to the rest of equipment involved.
Instant mesaging protocols so far did nothing that IRC protocol can't or doesn't do efficiently, so I would rather prefer improvement of IRC clients/scripts (yes, scripts exist not only for ops wars and flooding), so they will provide functionality, "instant messenger" do now. For me ircII on console and XChat in X already provide everything I need, and the less people will sit on the networks that don't interoperate with IRC, the better.
I think, with so much of recent anti-China stuff in press some CNN guy included "PRC" in his spellchecker.
I have some Red Hat and VA Linux stock (mind you, not much -- I am just a developer who got both "letters"), and I know that it *is* overinflated considering what both companies actually have and do now -- just probably much less overinflated than most of other computers-related stocks. There is nothing to be jealous about -- still no one knows what will happen with them later. Both companies can use this overinflated stock wisely, strenghten their main business and make it a self-fulfilling prophecy, or do the opposite and crash later.
OTOH, I have serious doubt that amazon.com will be able to pull the same trick and become Wal*mart of the Internet, no matter how smart they will do their business -- any attempt of making profit that will justify their price will open doors for competitors.
- It was sent to my address, however, just like the initial letter it didn't have my address in "To:", so pine didn't show it as a "personal", as opposed to the email with account number. While this is normal, most of people, accustomed to huge amount of garbage in their email, could overlook it (I used a filter by sender, so I have seen it immediately).
- Phone was busy, and after it answered it still forwarded me to the mailbox, mailbox was full, and only then it forwarded me to actual person.
Other than that, everything worked as intended.Standards bodies are in general very conservative bodies. That makes sense, as they, umm... are there to set standards.
As a result of this, they rely on established bodies of law, and historical precedent. The notion that it's somehow a bad thing that standards bodies "don't know about" Open Source licenses and therefore don't embrace them is as ridiculous as attacking the New York Philharmonic because they won't "cover" the latest RAP songs.
They definitely aren't there to set standards on documentation licensing, so it would make sense for them to use superior form of handling the documents that benefit from being distributed, massively quoted and modified in proposals by large number of people and organization.
Actually standards committees that care about the usefullness of their standards probably would rather prefer a license that allows redistribution and requires explicit mentioning of changes made from "blessed" original version. Ex:
THIS IS THE VERSION OF FTP PROTOCOL, AS IMPLEMENTED BY WU-FTPD Vx.y. ORIGINALLY BASED ON RFC-959. CHANGES FROM THE ORIGINAL RFC-959 ARE MARKED BY "+", "-" and "!".
(copy of RFC-959 follows, changed to reflect numerous violations of RFC-959 and additions to it that wu-ftpd does).
While I think, it's still allowed to make that particular document now (and it would be quite useful if someone did it), it definitely isn't the case with ISO and ITU standards. Worse yet, their redistribution is restricted just like redistribution of any other copyrighted material that doesn't have explicit redistribution license attached.
So unless we should assume that standard committees are created to make money from selling texts of their standards, requirement of assigning copyright to them with no redistribution license is inferior to the kind of special Open Source license that merely requires to mention the organization that maintains the standard and explicitly mark changes from the official version. Actually it's inferior to even assigning copyright to them in exchange to plain free redistribution in original form license.
I don't really understand the article, it said that Sun would have to abdicate their copyrights. Is that right or am I reading it wrong? You can't hardly blame sun for wanting to keep the copyrights to their work.
Copyright of the text of standard, not the implementation. When standard body modifies standard it must be able to modify and redistribute its text, and this requires either owning the copyright or having a license that allows making modifications and unrestricted distribution. The idea of Open Source licenses isn't known to standard bodies, so they demand copyright.
Take a look at http://www.dialpad.com/ Thier program is in java, and it's very worthwhile.
Since it works on only one OS they could save themselves a lot of grief by writing it in C++ and providing as a plugin -- it's not like a program from untrusted source that uses TCP/IP and your microphone can be at any degree called "secure". And ironically if written in C++ it most likely would be more portable.