agreed; I am especially happy with the sections on the anatomy of an SSH1 and SSH2 session. For administrative use and documentation, the descriptions are as comprehensive as the draft standard, but much more clearly written.
Lucas wants to erase the cultural memory that the first film was good, the second better, and it all went into the toilet after that.
Having learned from the previous Special Editions that it is possible to make a good film worse, he will now bring all the films to the same level of quality, thus shutting down any future debates over which movies were worse than the others.
Unfortunately, his benchmark for quality seems to be that late-70's made-for-TV Wookie holiday special.
Besides, re-editing the original films could make them better, you know (it worked for the video/cable release of Battlefield Earth. Right?)
In the years I have been in business, adding up the pennies is the difference between success and failure.
I have no illusions that Nike will take the savings from dumping Windows 2000 and send it to some deserving worker in Thailand, but Henry Feuerstein, owner of Malden Mills (Polartec fabric) probably would try to find a way to spread out the benefit of any savings.
I am not naive about corporations' interests, but in the context of this discussion, I think that it is worthwhile to look at the money a company like MS takes out of a business and compare that to what they provide, and the problems that their business model causes. At some point, it does affect the number of employees one can afford and how well they are compensated.
Excellent point. The purpose of copyrights was to balance the benefits for the individual and the rest of society. Derivation is the essence of progress in science and computer programming, and essential to artistic and literary creation. It is hard to imagine Brahms without Beethoven, or Herman Melville without free reign to rework Shakespeare. Would you trade music and literature like that in order to allow David Geffen profit from Nirvana albums at age 85? or Disney Corp exclusive right to Mickey?
The 'individual' who benefits from current copyright law is likely to be a corporation, not the original creator, and that corporation is given great incentive to take the rewards out of the US for tax purposes, leaving society (and probably the original creator!) poorer in all respects. I find it hard to believe that this is what the framers had in mind.
One reply here points out that Ayn Rand wanted copyrights of only 7 years, so that people would not 'rest on their laurels.' It's funny to contrast that with Sonny Bono, who wanted copyrights to last forever, at the same time that 'I Got You Babe' was undergoing its obligatory retro-revival in movies and TV.
Stallman cares about freedom only. He is enthusiastic about it.
So, first, what is so wrong with that viewpoint? I've heard many people say that non-free software fosters innovation because of the profit motive. Meanwhile, the richest software companies in the world are fat, complacent, and releasing some of the slowest, most insecure stuff we've ever seen. And they pay their developers well to do this!
Second, what is so nutty about refusing to compromise principles? When I see Bill Gates kissing all the asses he can in Washington to prevent his precious company from having to pay for its illegal behavior, when I see senators, representatives, and presidents promise reform and then take a dip in the bribery pool, I can see why Stallman appears crazy; he is one of the few public figures who does not back down from his principles. His opponents are reduced to personal insults, because he has never done anything illegal nor has he advocated illegal behavior. (If you disagree, please prove it as has been done with Microsoft.) If you dislike Stallman because he does not compromise, at least tell the truth: "He scares me because his integrity could get us into trouble with powerful people." I think that's the story of freedom everywhere.
My career would not have been possible without free software. When I started out, a crappy PC C compiler was at least $500, and my choice of OS was windows. A choice made for me by someone else.
Other resources were closed to me unless I worked at a university. When I found the free Linux kernel, I had already been using GNU tools on my windows machine. This combo allowed be to study to become a professional UNIX admin/developer _without_ having to spend a dime on school or software licenses, and I did it on a 386 that my employer threw away. At the time, I was poor. The kind of poor that's ignored except when you miss a spot mopping the floor or stack cans of soup in the wrong pattern. I could not think of buying a place to live or starting a family, because I had no skills. I did not own a TV, or a car; I could not afford new clothes when old ones wore out. After paying bills, I usually had about $2 in my bank account.
Thanks in large part to free software, that's in the past. For 11 years I have used and supported free software and been paid good money for it. No employer can take away my computing environment, because I have the same thing at home. My small business clients have saved thousands of dollars by using GPL'd Linux, GNU, and samba instead of NT server with client connection fees. A portion of that savings comes to me as an hourly rate for set up and support, and it's 15X what I made mopping grocery store floors.
Next time you're in a retail store or a school, ask yourself how much the place is forced to spend on licenses and upgrades, then find out how much their janitors and teachers and security guards are paid. If Nike or the Gap says that they have to pay their workers in other countries low wages to contain expenses, find out how much of that expense is a Microsoft tax for crappy, insecure software that comes with no warranty, and the tech support solution is often "pay us for the upgrade".
Stallman is not the problem here, folks. He and other advocates of freedom helped make the Linux revolution possible, and even when I disagree with him, he's earned my respect. And yes, I do make monetarty donations to the FSF; I know there are other people out there who've made it the way I did.
"have I committed a crime?" No. However, if you know for a fact that there is an organized group calling themselves an "army against pornography" (like, say, the "Army of God," who says that is it right and justified to kill doctors who perform abortions, and whose members are affiliated with the creator of the web site in question), and that your exposure of me could, say, lead to my murder, AND, you yourself have advocated the murder of pornography consumers, yes, you have committed a crime. In fact, in most US jurisdictions it is called "criminal incitement."
My point being that this is not an issue to me that involves my stance on abortion (I prefer to keep that opinion private), but I do know the law. It is illegal for me to incite murder (and there are numerous legal precedents to uphold this opinion); it is arguably illegal for me to celebrate murder and complement the murderers if that could be seen as further incitement.
During WWI, the Supreme Court upheld the gov't right to imprison anti-draft protesters, because as the US was at war, a protest against the draft was a 'clear and present danger' to the US. The same has been ruled in the case of abortion protesters who advocate violence, then pretend they don't condone it when it happens the way they want it to, because at this time in our history abortion is known to be an inflammatory issue.
So, whatcher saying is that it's OK for me to put up a website with the names, addresses, photos, schedules, and habits of Operation Rescue leaders, along with this statement:
If these people could not organize their followers, doctors would be safer and women would have the freedom that is their God given right. Also, here are the names of their children.
DISCLAIMER: this site is not meant to threaten anyone. It is for fun and educational purposes only.
Give me a break. A threat is a threat, and the law cannot make allowances for "thinly-veiled" threats. The entire foundation of our nation is respect for other peoples' rights as equals, which requires us to make distasteful compromises. This is often why our society seems so shakey, because the strength of this foundation is susceptible to fads and uncontrolled emotion.
The Nuremberg files and sites like it are nothing more than the whiney rants of immature people who want to force the world to do things their way. In the USA, we call this "fascism." Intimidation through threats of violence is in NO WAY protected by the Constitution. Strictly speaking, our own government is only permitted to threaten force in the protection of everyone's rights (in which they too fall to the same human weaknesses of us all).
Lost in the noise of these temper tantrums are the real contributions made by those people who adopt babies that nobody else wants, or help to convince the parents of a young girl that she is not evil for becoming pregnant, and that she should not be thrown out on the streets. But then again, those people probably read the "Judge not, lest ye be judged" bits of the Bible a little more carefully than the foot soldiers in the "Army of God."
I have to disagree with the replies here. Bad publicity can go on forever, true, and MS can take small hits here and there for a while, but eventually the bad publicity will inspire others to organize around a better alternative.
The "Linux Community" has been negatively focused on MS for years, and now that the software itself is getting more mature, I think people have more time to devote to positive alternatives.
I think that if we try to make the entire goal of Linux "free software for the schools," that it will give people who want to crush Free Software a target to attack. I say, allow local Linux users and developers to choose their own battles. Mine was corporate acceptance of Linux from the bottom up in a professional software environment.
On the side, my consulting business has made me money while saving my clients (small businesses with fewer than 10 employees) thousands of dollars on MS server licenses, using Linux/samba as a PDC and fileserver. And, unlike a large company, these customers know that Linux has saved them real money.
When I worked at Lotus, we were told to keep focusing on the smaller customers, because a MS tactic is to release immature software that works in low-end installations, and then, as the software improves, they nibble away at the high end market from below. Linux has been using this same tactic, sometimes unknowingly. But, because the licensing is free, Linus, Alan Cox. etc can work on 16-way SMP support while I can still afford to install it in a small shop. That is an advantage MS and Lotus never had.
Careful now, even smaller municipal entites like a School District have LOTS of legal services available to them.....EVEN IF they'd rather spend it elsewhere.
School districts in my region are lacking good textbooks for want of money; I find it hard to believe that they can hire the kind of tenacious lawyers that Microsoft can afford. Hell, they even wore down the DOJ in settlement talks by arguing every single point into the wee hours.
A school district defending against a suit by some local parents I can see, but a company with a big warchest might see an expensive legal battle as insurance for the future; if you legally batter one school district until they cannot afford to do anything but settle, most others will not risk it in the future.
I think the point is that MS says that you are entering into a contract when you click "I agree" on any of their installation license windows. One of the terms is that they can come in and audit you at any time.
But, what about a business that says "we used to have Windows, Office, and SQLServer, but now we use Solaris, Linux, StarOffice, and Sybase. Get bent."
Would they sue? What would their burden of proof be to get their audit approved? How far could I take this argument: "I will not expose any of my computers or the sensitive data on them (like school records) to ANY outside party."
I wonder if someone could challenge this 'right to audit' in court. A comment in the earlier story on the GPL mentioned possible contract problems with license terms that you cannot read until you open or install the software.
Especially troubling is that MS seems to picking on organizations without much money to defend themselvs in court, like the Texas Justice Dept, or school districts. I do not know much abot the history of this sort of intimidation, but I wonder how it would work if they gave the same ultimatum to IBM, or Fidelity Investments, or a tobacco company.
I buy books at a store in my town that has a huge selection of publishers' overstock, which allows me to buy books at a fraction of their cover price. If it was not for this, I could not buy as many books as I do. I also buy many used books that are out of print, which I could otherwise not obtain.
I think I am helping the publishing industry by spending many dollars at local bookstores, which allows them to stay in business and order more new books.
By buying at locally-owned stores instead of chains, I help the booksellers who are more willing to special-order or search out hard-to-find stuff for me, which also helps keep publishing healthy and diversified.
And, by buying lots of small press titles, at the reduced publishers' overstock prices, I get books that I could normally not afford (university press books are often 2 or 3 times the price of a large publisher title). Presumably I am helping smaller publishers more than hurting them, because my purchase is one book that won't get returned to them for credit.
Finally, saving money on used and overstock books means that I can occasionally get that $100 reprint of, say, Kepler's 'Harmony of the World,' which helps the small publisher who struggled to produce such an esoteric but historically important and fascinating book.
Having worked in the publishing industry, I know that the cover price is vastly inflated, and most publishers know that they are going to end up dumping lots of books near or at cost as overstock. Maybe the publishers need to find a better balance in their pricing schemes.
I don't feel I can criticize this amazon habit unless I am willing to change all of my own buying habits. This would mean a change in my reading habits (like buying less, and getting more from libraries), and would actually bring less of my money to publishers, bookstores, and authors. Also, I'd have to stop buying used records and CDs, used cars, used houses, used clothing. God, I just wouldn't be the same person!
I saw a talk by Wayne Thiebauld, who made fun paintings of big cakes and cool San Fran Landscapes. He said that after his first successful show, he read some positive critical notices about his work, and the next set of paintings he made was terrible. Not an exact quote, from my memory: "I found that everything I did was affected by what I had read someone else write about my paintings. But, I had no choice but to continue on and ruin the painting I was working on so I could keep finding my own way of working."
I wish that the movie industry could be like that. Lucas can afford to make really ambitious failures, becase he has billions of dollars. Many filmmakers would love that freedom. Why play it safe when you can make (or fund) any type of movie you want? Look at the films George Harrison funded through Handmade Films; those are very original and all different from one another.
I disagree. The article points out many instances where Lucas himself is taking his own entertainment too seriously, and the more he does this the more his own work goes into the crapper.
Star Wars is not a great movie, but it is at least consistent and a lot of fun. I watched it the other day and still enjoyed it (having first seen it when I was in 3rd grade). Phantom Menace made me fall asleep. As a movie, it was incompetent. As "myth," it was hilarious and pathetic. And come on, admit it: "Return of the Jedi" was also a piece of badly acted, poorly written and edited junk.
I also think that it's past time for the popular media to point out that Campbell is no genius either. He's another cut and paste hack, who studied a lot of mythology but really had very little understanding of it. Study the original sources of his work, and you can draw his conclusions in a weekend. He did a lot to popularize mythology, but other people take him work as the final say on the subject, which is wrong.
Criticism in our culture seems to mean "insult," which upsets many people, but intelligent criticism and skepticism is a big part of our culture. So, when some guy climbs up on his soapbox and talks about his fun movie as a theology, I say knock him down.
Very few people know the epic of Gilgamesh, yet most action movies are in many ways a pale shadow of that story. Very few people have read or listened to a telling of the Odyssey, yet movie makers could learn a lot from that story, as well as novels like Moby Dick.
A good friend of mine has memorized the Odyssey, and takes jobs performing it at high schools and colleges. I was surprised at first to see how many students are spellbound by his dramatic telling of the story. It's just him on stage, talking for 90 - 120 minutes, yet a lot of people find it more interesting than a $100 million dollar movie. It's a better story, has better characters, does not pretend to hold "big messages" (in fact, this story and Gilgamesh are stories about small victories and large failures, and the understanding of this over time).
Another example with a different director: Werner Herzog made perhaps two of the greatest movie studies of imperialism, cultural misunderstanding, and monomania: Aguirre, the Wrath of God, and Fitzcarraldo. They're also both great stories, and deserve better than to be relegated to the "art-house" category. His other movies before 1982 are all pretty great too. Unfortunately, after working on Fitzcarraldo, Herzog started to believe what other people had written about him, that he was some kind of visionary, and his output has been pretty bad since then. A very Lucas-like rise and fall, without all that money and popular recognition that tends to make failures look like successes.
It only takes one bad line of code to crash everything.
I think you may be quoting a comment I did not write, since that sentence is not in my post.
It is not my assertion that we should re-write the whole app based on bugs.
What I was trying to address is Joel's equation of "redesign to address faulty assumptions" = "rewrite or perfectly good code," which is part of the confusion his first article caused.
Also, Joel seems to agree that code (even his) left untouched will be harder to maintain over time, and that at some point the benefits of a rewrite could outweight the costs of doing so. However, he also talks about re-examining old functions and rewriting them. The confusion I have about his statements is that he seems to be saying in this interview "re-write your code over time or all at once, but you will re-write your code if you want to keep it working."
I agree with him that if Ye Olde Fortran code works and your sysadmin is willing to install the Fortran libs on the systems, leave it alone. And I agree with his assertion that if only 1% of your code is broken, just fix that 1%.
When I read the "leaked" security memo from Bill Gates, however, it seems that BG realizes that software can have security problems caused by bugs in good features and bad features that simply should not be part of the design. Now, what do you do if that feature is at the heart of your application suite, and is the thing which allows them to share files? Based on that vague question, I can't answer, but I can see where it could be possible to conclude one of two things:
"This info sharing via SuperInfoMarkupLanguage was a fundamentally bad idea, because it was never designed to be a robust database. Let's come up with something else and completely rewrite the datastore for our next release."
or
"Oh, the problem is that our SuperInfoMarkupLanguage implementation is buggy, even though there is nothing wrong with the standard. Let's examine and fix code."
If either of those means rewriting a lot of code, Joel could accept that. What Joel seems to object to is the assumption that "a rewrite automatically fixes everything because something done twice is something done better." Most of us agree with that idea, I think.
Those two points that you noted could be fixed in about a week by someone who knows the product.
I was not talking about just those two points, just using examples. But since we're on the subject: they could be fixed in about a week, so the reason they're not is, what?
When I refer to the design of an application or a ground-up rewrite, I don't mean rewrite all the linked functions. A company should consider functions such as encryption, smtp sessions, and spell checkers (or whatever), should be considered separate products, even though they are purely internal products. This way, if someone wants to rewrite his smtp connect functions and classes, he can, and once the changes are doc'd and released, new versions of apps can use the upgrade. What I refer to is rethinking all the assumptions and design decisions in a product. I have been involved in several projects called "re-writes" where not everything was written from scratch, but everything was re-examined to look for possible improvements and effects of changes. Very few "re-writes" fit Joel's definition.
Even Joel says that there can be a cost-benefit analysis case where this makes sense. For example, an appplication like Outlook Express which started as a nice simple e-mail client, but was clumsily connected to the world of http, vbscript, none of which appear to be sufficiently understood by the architects of the app.
Joel seems to admire himself for doing just that, as when he talks about why his own code doesn't decay (he keeps freshening it up, you see. In other words, rewriting it over time).
This is easier to do when it's just his code, versus a large set that more than one person maintaining it over a decade (like the evaluated software that was foudn to 'decay').
Also, Joel stated that the problems with Outlook were with "1%" of the code, but that is not the point. The slashdot comment was not commenting on the quality of Outlook's code, but on the flaws inherent in the design of the application (such as executing untrusted software and not following mime type information when passing data to the OS). I think that the post was talking about a redesign, which would mean a rewrite, and Joel dodged that one (or just didn't understand it). Fixing bugs in good features is different from tossing bad features.
If you want to contribute to a "commons" for software, release it under the GPL. If you want to sell it, you should probably not release the software or code under the GPL or a BSD license.
The important point here is not how much you are permitted to charge for access to the software and source code, but that you cannot stop the recipient from redistributing it.
If he wants his friends to be able to use his mail server, his responsibility is to set up some kind of authentication and account management. Simple as that.
If I were his ISP I would cut off all access until he proved to me that he had secured this hole. After all, it's his machine, but it's his ISP's network.
I agree with this so strongly it hurts. However, I suspect you and i have different ideas of how a society ought to punish said business. In cases like this, you punish that business by withholding your business from them, their sponsors, and anyone else you care to rope into their side of the field. It's not about passing laws, it's about social and economic pressure that encourages companies to do "the right thing".
Laws are the way a society says "this is how you have to behave if you want to do business here." I completely agree with the idea that you take your business where you want, but if a company is allowed to completely hide what it is doing, and there is no law against that, well then, the threat of withheld business is pretty empty, and actually an incentive to lie if you can get away with it. How many times do businesses say "we did nothing illegal" to justify unethical behaviour that they just happened to try and hide from everyone?
Re:public utility vs private company
on
Search Engine Payola
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
So a tobacco company could load a search engine with links to "reports" about how there is no proof that smoke is bad for your lungs.
A car company could buy up enough ad space through fake companies so that reports on how its SUV tips over at 10 MPH are buried in the "search results."
And you, as the customer, have no rights to demand that the search engine reveal whether or not it is allowing this or maintaining a strict division between sponsored or objective search results (for my purposes, I use the term "objective" to mean that the search engine algorithm is not weighted towards advertising dollars).
While it is a customer's responsibility to do his research, it is also a business' responsibility to be honest. Caveat emptor has been used to permit all sorts of business actions that we today view as "crimes." I don't hear anyone complaining about a law when its enforcement "protects" someone from a "criminal." Why promote a corporate right to lie? What purpose is served by doing that?
I'm not saying that every kind of enforcement is possible, but that at least if a society requires businesses to behave honestly, they protect society's right to penalize a dishonestly run business when they catch one. There is no "invisible hand" of the free market, that is, a guiding force that exists outside of the market players; those with the most clout (money) get to manipulate the market more than anyone else. If they get to manipulate the very information on which the market depends, it ain't free no more.
The conflict here is that search engines were originally set up as public utilities, not by rule of law, but simply by intention. They would do the best job of indexing that they could and sort the search results as best they could.
In reality, they are private applications that can run any way the owner sees fit, but they really should not present themselves as an "Internet user's aid," if they are really behaving like an advertising tool.
Television and radio ads are a different story because there is no pretense that the commercial plays because you asked for information on floor polish or 1-900-SEX-GIRLZ, but because the provider of the service or product paid to have it aired at that time.
There are laws governing what commercials are allowed to claim for their products or services, and we also need enforcable laws which name the conditions under which you can call your service a "search engine." One such condition should certainly be Impartiality, no payment accepted for listing. I would pay Google 3.50 per month for a service that strives for objectivity (I say 3.50 because that's how much I pay each month for online access to Consumer Reports).
If the GPL should fail to hold up under legal scrutiny, the EFF or other intereseted group could challenge the validity of ANY End User License Agreement which limits the terms under which the software may be redistributed, modified, or used.
As much as some companies and people hate the GPL, it is in their best interest to see these licenses as a whole have the status of contracts.
Slashdot Mirror
agreed; I am especially happy with the sections on the anatomy of an SSH1 and SSH2 session. For administrative use and documentation, the descriptions are as comprehensive as the draft standard, but much more clearly written.
Lucas wants to erase the cultural memory that the first film was good, the second better, and it all went into the toilet after that.
Having learned from the previous Special Editions that it is possible to make a good film worse, he will now bring all the films to the same level of quality, thus shutting down any future debates over which movies were worse than the others.
Unfortunately, his benchmark for quality seems to be that late-70's made-for-TV Wookie holiday special.
Besides, re-editing the original films could make them better, you know (it worked for the video/cable release of Battlefield Earth. Right?)
That is true about the name of the bill, but I was referring to this quote, which indicates why he co-sponsored the bill:
:)
``Actually, Sonny [Bono] wanted the term of copyright protection to last forever.''
--Rep. Mary Bono
posted on the FSF site and reprinted in this discussion. It is hearsay of course, but then again we're not on the stand testifying
In the years I have been in business, adding up the pennies is the difference between success and failure.
I have no illusions that Nike will take the savings from dumping Windows 2000 and send it to some deserving worker in Thailand, but Henry Feuerstein, owner of Malden Mills (Polartec fabric) probably would try to find a way to spread out the benefit of any savings.
I am not naive about corporations' interests, but in the context of this discussion, I think that it is worthwhile to look at the money a company like MS takes out of a business and compare that to what they provide, and the problems that their business model causes. At some point, it does affect the number of employees one can afford and how well they are compensated.
Excellent point. The purpose of copyrights was to balance the benefits for the individual and the rest of society. Derivation is the essence of progress in science and computer programming, and essential to artistic and literary creation. It is hard to imagine Brahms without Beethoven, or Herman Melville without free reign to rework Shakespeare. Would you trade music and literature like that in order to allow David Geffen profit from Nirvana albums at age 85? or Disney Corp exclusive right to Mickey?
The 'individual' who benefits from current copyright law is likely to be a corporation, not the original creator, and that corporation is given great incentive to take the rewards out of the US for tax purposes, leaving society (and probably the original creator!) poorer in all respects. I find it hard to believe that this is what the framers had in mind.
One reply here points out that Ayn Rand wanted copyrights of only 7 years, so that people would not 'rest on their laurels.' It's funny to contrast that with Sonny Bono, who wanted copyrights to last forever, at the same time that 'I Got You Babe' was undergoing its obligatory retro-revival in movies and TV.
Stallman cares about freedom only. He is enthusiastic about it.
So, first, what is so wrong with that viewpoint? I've heard many people say that non-free software fosters innovation because of the profit motive. Meanwhile, the richest software companies in the world are fat, complacent, and releasing some of the slowest, most insecure stuff we've ever seen. And they pay their developers well to do this!
Second, what is so nutty about refusing to compromise principles? When I see Bill Gates kissing all the asses he can in Washington to prevent his precious company from having to pay for its illegal behavior, when I see senators, representatives, and presidents promise reform and then take a dip in the bribery pool, I can see why Stallman appears crazy; he is one of the few public figures who does not back down from his principles. His opponents are reduced to personal insults, because he has never done anything illegal nor has he advocated illegal behavior. (If you disagree, please prove it as has been done with Microsoft.) If you dislike Stallman because he does not compromise, at least tell the truth: "He scares me because his integrity could get us into trouble with powerful people." I think that's the story of freedom everywhere.
My career would not have been possible without free software. When I started out, a crappy PC C compiler was at least $500, and my choice of OS was windows. A choice made for me by someone else.
Other resources were closed to me unless I worked at a university. When I found the free Linux kernel, I had already been using GNU tools on my windows machine. This combo allowed be to study to become a professional UNIX admin/developer _without_ having to spend a dime on school or software licenses, and I did it on a 386 that my employer threw away. At the time, I was poor. The kind of poor that's ignored except when you miss a spot mopping the floor or stack cans of soup in the wrong pattern. I could not think of buying a place to live or starting a family, because I had no skills. I did not own a TV, or a car; I could not afford new clothes when old ones wore out. After paying bills, I usually had about $2 in my bank account.
Thanks in large part to free software, that's in the past. For 11 years I have used and supported free software and been paid good money for it. No employer can take away my computing environment, because I have the same thing at home. My small business clients have saved thousands of dollars by using GPL'd Linux, GNU, and samba instead of NT server with client connection fees. A portion of that savings comes to me as an hourly rate for set up and support, and it's 15X what I made mopping grocery store floors.
Next time you're in a retail store or a school, ask yourself how much the place is forced to spend on licenses and upgrades, then find out how much their janitors and teachers and security guards are paid. If Nike or the Gap says that they have to pay their workers in other countries low wages to contain expenses, find out how much of that expense is a Microsoft tax for crappy, insecure software that comes with no warranty, and the tech support solution is often "pay us for the upgrade".
Stallman is not the problem here, folks. He and other advocates of freedom helped make the Linux revolution possible, and even when I disagree with him, he's earned my respect. And yes, I do make monetarty donations to the FSF; I know there are other people out there who've made it the way I did.
"have I committed a crime?" No. However, if you know for a fact that there is an organized group calling themselves an "army against pornography" (like, say, the "Army of God," who says that is it right and justified to kill doctors who perform abortions, and whose members are affiliated with the creator of the web site in question), and that your exposure of me could, say, lead to my murder, AND, you yourself have advocated the murder of pornography consumers, yes, you have committed a crime. In fact, in most US jurisdictions it is called "criminal incitement."
My point being that this is not an issue to me that involves my stance on abortion (I prefer to keep that opinion private), but I do know the law. It is illegal for me to incite murder (and there are numerous legal precedents to uphold this opinion); it is arguably illegal for me to celebrate murder and complement the murderers if that could be seen as further incitement.
During WWI, the Supreme Court upheld the gov't right to imprison anti-draft protesters, because as the US was at war, a protest against the draft was a 'clear and present danger' to the US. The same has been ruled in the case of abortion protesters who advocate violence, then pretend they don't condone it when it happens the way they want it to, because at this time in our history abortion is known to be an inflammatory issue.
The Nuremberg files and sites like it are nothing more than the whiney rants of immature people who want to force the world to do things their way. In the USA, we call this "fascism." Intimidation through threats of violence is in NO WAY protected by the Constitution. Strictly speaking, our own government is only permitted to threaten force in the protection of everyone's rights (in which they too fall to the same human weaknesses of us all).
Lost in the noise of these temper tantrums are the real contributions made by those people who adopt babies that nobody else wants, or help to convince the parents of a young girl that she is not evil for becoming pregnant, and that she should not be thrown out on the streets. But then again, those people probably read the "Judge not, lest ye be judged" bits of the Bible a little more carefully than the foot soldiers in the "Army of God."
I have to disagree with the replies here. Bad publicity can go on forever, true, and MS can take small hits here and there for a while, but eventually the bad publicity will inspire others to organize around a better alternative.
The "Linux Community" has been negatively focused on MS for years, and now that the software itself is getting more mature, I think people have more time to devote to positive alternatives.
I think that if we try to make the entire goal of Linux "free software for the schools," that it will give people who want to crush Free Software a target to attack. I say, allow local Linux users and developers to choose their own battles. Mine was corporate acceptance of Linux from the bottom up in a professional software environment.
On the side, my consulting business has made me money while saving my clients (small businesses with fewer than 10 employees) thousands of dollars on MS server licenses, using Linux/samba as a PDC and fileserver. And, unlike a large company, these customers know that Linux has saved them real money.
When I worked at Lotus, we were told to keep focusing on the smaller customers, because a MS tactic is to release immature software that works in low-end installations, and then, as the software improves, they nibble away at the high end market from below. Linux has been using this same tactic, sometimes unknowingly. But, because the licensing is free, Linus, Alan Cox. etc can work on 16-way SMP support while I can still afford to install it in a small shop. That is an advantage MS and Lotus never had.
Careful now, even smaller municipal entites like a School District have LOTS of legal services available to them.....EVEN IF they'd rather spend it elsewhere.
School districts in my region are lacking good textbooks for want of money; I find it hard to believe that they can hire the kind of tenacious lawyers that Microsoft can afford. Hell, they even wore down the DOJ in settlement talks by arguing every single point into the wee hours.
A school district defending against a suit by some local parents I can see, but a company with a big warchest might see an expensive legal battle as insurance for the future; if you legally batter one school district until they cannot afford to do anything but settle, most others will not risk it in the future.
I think the point is that MS says that you are entering into a contract when you click "I agree" on any of their installation license windows. One of the terms is that they can come in and audit you at any time.
But, what about a business that says "we used to have Windows, Office, and SQLServer, but now we use Solaris, Linux, StarOffice, and Sybase. Get bent."
Would they sue? What would their burden of proof be to get their audit approved? How far could I take this argument: "I will not expose any of my computers or the sensitive data on them (like school records) to ANY outside party."
Especially troubling is that MS seems to picking on organizations without much money to defend themselvs in court, like the Texas Justice Dept, or school districts. I do not know much abot the history of this sort of intimidation, but I wonder how it would work if they gave the same ultimatum to IBM, or Fidelity Investments, or a tobacco company.
I buy books at a store in my town that has a huge selection of publishers' overstock, which allows me to buy books at a fraction of their cover price. If it was not for this, I could not buy as many books as I do. I also buy many used books that are out of print, which I could otherwise not obtain.
I think I am helping the publishing industry by spending many dollars at local bookstores, which allows them to stay in business and order more new books.
By buying at locally-owned stores instead of chains, I help the booksellers who are more willing to special-order or search out hard-to-find stuff for me, which also helps keep publishing healthy and diversified.
And, by buying lots of small press titles, at the reduced publishers' overstock prices, I get books that I could normally not afford (university press books are often 2 or 3 times the price of a large publisher title). Presumably I am helping smaller publishers more than hurting them, because my purchase is one book that won't get returned to them for credit.
Finally, saving money on used and overstock books means that I can occasionally get that $100 reprint of, say, Kepler's 'Harmony of the World,' which helps the small publisher who struggled to produce such an esoteric but historically important and fascinating book.
Having worked in the publishing industry, I know that the cover price is vastly inflated, and most publishers know that they are going to end up dumping lots of books near or at cost as overstock. Maybe the publishers need to find a better balance in their pricing schemes.
I don't feel I can criticize this amazon habit unless I am willing to change all of my own buying habits. This would mean a change in my reading habits (like buying less, and getting more from libraries), and would actually bring less of my money to publishers, bookstores, and authors. Also, I'd have to stop buying used records and CDs, used cars, used houses, used clothing. God, I just wouldn't be the same person!
I've read both. I'd be interested in hearing the reasoning behind your conclusion.
I completely missed this NBC atrocity of which you speak. Sounds good for a laugh.
I saw a talk by Wayne Thiebauld, who made fun paintings of big cakes and cool San Fran Landscapes. He said that after his first successful show, he read some positive critical notices about his work, and the next set of paintings he made was terrible. Not an exact quote, from my memory: "I found that everything I did was affected by what I had read someone else write about my paintings. But, I had no choice but to continue on and ruin the painting I was working on so I could keep finding my own way of working."
I wish that the movie industry could be like that. Lucas can afford to make really ambitious failures, becase he has billions of dollars. Many filmmakers would love that freedom. Why play it safe when you can make (or fund) any type of movie you want? Look at the films George Harrison funded through Handmade Films; those are very original and all different from one another.
I disagree. The article points out many instances where Lucas himself is taking his own entertainment too seriously, and the more he does this the more his own work goes into the crapper.
Star Wars is not a great movie, but it is at least consistent and a lot of fun. I watched it the other day and still enjoyed it (having first seen it when I was in 3rd grade). Phantom Menace made me fall asleep. As a movie, it was incompetent. As "myth," it was hilarious and pathetic. And come on, admit it: "Return of the Jedi" was also a piece of badly acted, poorly written and edited junk.
I also think that it's past time for the popular media to point out that Campbell is no genius either. He's another cut and paste hack, who studied a lot of mythology but really had very little understanding of it. Study the original sources of his work, and you can draw his conclusions in a weekend. He did a lot to popularize mythology, but other people take him work as the final say on the subject, which is wrong.
Criticism in our culture seems to mean "insult," which upsets many people, but intelligent criticism and skepticism is a big part of our culture. So, when some guy climbs up on his soapbox and talks about his fun movie as a theology, I say knock him down.
Very few people know the epic of Gilgamesh, yet most action movies are in many ways a pale shadow of that story. Very few people have read or listened to a telling of the Odyssey, yet movie makers could learn a lot from that story, as well as novels like Moby Dick.
A good friend of mine has memorized the Odyssey, and takes jobs performing it at high schools and colleges. I was surprised at first to see how many students are spellbound by his dramatic telling of the story. It's just him on stage, talking for 90 - 120 minutes, yet a lot of people find it more interesting than a $100 million dollar movie. It's a better story, has better characters, does not pretend to hold "big messages" (in fact, this story and Gilgamesh are stories about small victories and large failures, and the understanding of this over time).
Another example with a different director: Werner Herzog made perhaps two of the greatest movie studies of imperialism, cultural misunderstanding, and monomania: Aguirre, the Wrath of God, and Fitzcarraldo. They're also both great stories, and deserve better than to be relegated to the "art-house" category. His other movies before 1982 are all pretty great too. Unfortunately, after working on Fitzcarraldo, Herzog started to believe what other people had written about him, that he was some kind of visionary, and his output has been pretty bad since then. A very Lucas-like rise and fall, without all that money and popular recognition that tends to make failures look like successes.
I think you may be quoting a comment I did not write, since that sentence is not in my post.
It is not my assertion that we should re-write the whole app based on bugs.
What I was trying to address is Joel's equation of "redesign to address faulty assumptions" = "rewrite or perfectly good code," which is part of the confusion his first article caused.
Also, Joel seems to agree that code (even his) left untouched will be harder to maintain over time, and that at some point the benefits of a rewrite could outweight the costs of doing so. However, he also talks about re-examining old functions and rewriting them. The confusion I have about his statements is that he seems to be saying in this interview "re-write your code over time or all at once, but you will re-write your code if you want to keep it working."
I agree with him that if Ye Olde Fortran code works and your sysadmin is willing to install the Fortran libs on the systems, leave it alone. And I agree with his assertion that if only 1% of your code is broken, just fix that 1%.
When I read the "leaked" security memo from Bill Gates, however, it seems that BG realizes that software can have security problems caused by bugs in good features and bad features that simply should not be part of the design. Now, what do you do if that feature is at the heart of your application suite, and is the thing which allows them to share files? Based on that vague question, I can't answer, but I can see where it could be possible to conclude one of two things:
"This info sharing via SuperInfoMarkupLanguage was a fundamentally bad idea, because it was never designed to be a robust database. Let's come up with something else and completely rewrite the datastore for our next release."
or
"Oh, the problem is that our SuperInfoMarkupLanguage implementation is buggy, even though there is nothing wrong with the standard. Let's examine and fix code."
If either of those means rewriting a lot of code, Joel could accept that. What Joel seems to object to is the assumption that "a rewrite automatically fixes everything because something done twice is something done better." Most of us agree with that idea, I think.
I was not talking about just those two points, just using examples. But since we're on the subject: they could be fixed in about a week, so the reason they're not is, what?
When I refer to the design of an application or a ground-up rewrite, I don't mean rewrite all the linked functions. A company should consider functions such as encryption, smtp sessions, and spell checkers (or whatever), should be considered separate products, even though they are purely internal products. This way, if someone wants to rewrite his smtp connect functions and classes, he can, and once the changes are doc'd and released, new versions of apps can use the upgrade. What I refer to is rethinking all the assumptions and design decisions in a product. I have been involved in several projects called "re-writes" where not everything was written from scratch, but everything was re-examined to look for possible improvements and effects of changes. Very few "re-writes" fit Joel's definition.
Even Joel says that there can be a cost-benefit analysis case where this makes sense. For example, an appplication like Outlook Express which started as a nice simple e-mail client, but was clumsily connected to the world of http, vbscript, none of which appear to be sufficiently understood by the architects of the app.
Joel seems to admire himself for doing just that, as when he talks about why his own code doesn't decay (he keeps freshening it up, you see. In other words, rewriting it over time).
This is easier to do when it's just his code, versus a large set that more than one person maintaining it over a decade (like the evaluated software that was foudn to 'decay').
Also, Joel stated that the problems with Outlook were with "1%" of the code, but that is not the point. The slashdot comment was not commenting on the quality of Outlook's code, but on the flaws inherent in the design of the application (such as executing untrusted software and not following mime type information when passing data to the OS). I think that the post was talking about a redesign, which would mean a rewrite, and Joel dodged that one (or just didn't understand it). Fixing bugs in good features is different from tossing bad features.
If you want to contribute to a "commons" for software, release it under the GPL. If you want to sell it, you should probably not release the software or code under the GPL or a BSD license.
The important point here is not how much you are permitted to charge for access to the software and source code, but that you cannot stop the recipient from redistributing it.
If he wants his friends to be able to use his mail server, his responsibility is to set up some kind of authentication and account management. Simple as that.
If I were his ISP I would cut off all access until he proved to me that he had secured this hole. After all, it's his machine, but it's his ISP's network.
A car company could buy up enough ad space through fake companies so that reports on how its SUV tips over at 10 MPH are buried in the "search results."
And you, as the customer, have no rights to demand that the search engine reveal whether or not it is allowing this or maintaining a strict division between sponsored or objective search results (for my purposes, I use the term "objective" to mean that the search engine algorithm is not weighted towards advertising dollars).
While it is a customer's responsibility to do his research, it is also a business' responsibility to be honest. Caveat emptor has been used to permit all sorts of business actions that we today view as "crimes." I don't hear anyone complaining about a law when its enforcement "protects" someone from a "criminal." Why promote a corporate right to lie? What purpose is served by doing that?
I'm not saying that every kind of enforcement is possible, but that at least if a society requires businesses to behave honestly, they protect society's right to penalize a dishonestly run business when they catch one. There is no "invisible hand" of the free market, that is, a guiding force that exists outside of the market players; those with the most clout (money) get to manipulate the market more than anyone else. If they get to manipulate the very information on which the market depends, it ain't free no more.
The conflict here is that search engines were originally set up as public utilities, not by rule of law, but simply by intention. They would do the best job of indexing that they could and sort the search results as best they could.
In reality, they are private applications that can run any way the owner sees fit, but they really should not present themselves as an "Internet user's aid," if they are really behaving like an advertising tool.
Television and radio ads are a different story because there is no pretense that the commercial plays because you asked for information on floor polish or 1-900-SEX-GIRLZ, but because the provider of the service or product paid to have it aired at that time.
There are laws governing what commercials are allowed to claim for their products or services, and we also need enforcable laws which name the conditions under which you can call your service a "search engine." One such condition should certainly be Impartiality, no payment accepted for listing. I would pay Google 3.50 per month for a service that strives for objectivity (I say 3.50 because that's how much I pay each month for online access to Consumer Reports).
If the GPL should fail to hold up under legal scrutiny, the EFF or other intereseted group could challenge the validity of ANY End User License Agreement which limits the terms under which the software may be redistributed, modified, or used.
As much as some companies and people hate the GPL, it is in their best interest to see these licenses as a whole have the status of contracts.