Movies stink; that's why people won't pay to go see them. Music stinks, that's why nobody is paying for the CDs. And oh yeah, THEY CHARGE TOO MUCH for such crap.
If a movie is good, I'll pay 8.50 to go see it in the theaters. If it seems OK, I'll wait and see it on cable, or rent it at the store.
If music is good, I'll pay for it in the store.
RIAA and MPAA need to learn a lesson that the web learned way back - content! I get more good content from online mags at $24 per year than I get from a DVD that costs more than that or a music CD that costs nearly that much.
When I worked at Lotus Development, it took weeks to get the small team I worked on to change directions. This initiative from Microsoft is the equivalent of steering the aircraft carrier in the middle of a battle at full speed.
The article tells the hard-ass truth, that it may mean halting the.NET rollout for years if "security over features" is a sincere goal.
Microsoft's products strive to be "highly visible," so they tout features the way People Magazine puts cleavage on their covers. For example, the strange advertising notion that WindowsXP users can fly, even though the multimedia features shown in those ads have been easy to obtain on Macs and Windows for, literally, years.
So, I think that this is a good article because it asks the big question: "How serious are you, Microsoft? Serious enough to stop shipping for a while?"
I mean, if anyone can take the revenue hit that would involve, its Microsoft with its huge cash reserves. But with the continuing allegations that they use reserve cash to illegally pad their financial results (and please shareholders), I just don't know if they can stomach the fact that they might take a Wall Street beating for a while.
The author also claims....(Re:Those opening paragr
on
.NETly News
·
· Score: 1
...that with.NET, Microsoft is returning to "its highly innovative roots."
I think that just the act of typing that quote has opened a singularity in my CPU.
I agree. Teach critical thinking, which is at the root of all creativity, whether artistic or logical. When I went to school, I could type or hand write my papers. No graphics unless I drew them myself.
Teachers, in order to properly judge performance, need to see evidence of a mind at work, not evidence of facility with a tool.
The student who will write it again and again to get it right, or who will work on a math problem over and over in order to understand it will not be afraid of computers.
I went to "manual" schools from 1973 - 1990, never took a class with a computer in my life, and now I work as a UNIX administrator and database systems architect. I learned to do this by reading books, testing authors' assertions on real computer equipment, and so on. Plus, when I have burned out on sql performance for the day, I can read a book.
I worry about children who may be subtly and unintentionally taught that knowledge from a computer is somehow worth more than their own thoughts, simply because it is more polished in appearance.
One thing that irks me to no end is that my home firewall is a noisy old Pentium 200 with disks and fans. I've been looking into embedded systems to do this, and the current access points I've seen are not effective firewalls at all; no logging, and they don't _reall_ block everything, even though they say they do.
A small Linux kernel which does not need to be built up with support for PCI, two ethernet cards, disks and multiple filesystems might just do the trick.
At first I applauded this decision, then I started to wonder, what do I do if 10 people start posting hundreds of negative messages about my company using different accounts? How can I prove that those posts are lies, versus opinions based on real experiences with my business? What if my business has been damaged by this, and I find out who did it? Have I any recourse at all?
For example, the/. community can help to overcome 'anonymously' planted FUD about linux or OpenBSD, due to our numbers and the fact that many of us feel we have a stake in the outcome.
What would I, as a business owner, be able to do? I guess that instead of suing, I could politely ask the forum moderator for prominent space to answer the complaints, and challenge the posters to come forward with proof of their bad experience. If they cannot, I could claim victory, otherwise, it may be that I run a bad business. That is, I guess, one purpose of an open forum, but it still concerns me.
On the other hand, there seem to be so many bad businesses out there making plenty of money, that it is essential that the right to express an opinion is protected.
I guess what I do not understand is the 'running out' of licenses. Does that refer to the discs with the proper piece of paper enclosed? Has their SQLServer run out of table space to keep track of the family licenses? What I was saying in my post is that for a company that claims to be all about the Internet and Application Services, they have a pretty poor understanding of what the sale of a single 'license' means. It's nothing more than a record of who paid for what. In the world of software, how do you 'run out?' Why not just sell one disc, and say 'when you logon, choose your license?'
I am not sure why they could not could not have tied the activation scheme into a credit card system to allow you to purchase additional licenses at install time.
Just tell the SSL web page how many computers you want to install on, pay $10-$15 for each additional license (not $80), and receive an activation code that you transmit to the central server each time you install on a new machine (and will work up to the number of licenses you bought).
I seems foolish to charge $90 for the upgrade, then another $80 for each additional, since MS only needs to sell one CD per household. With the lower price, MS still makes more money than they would off of a pirated copy, and the customer gets a licensing cost that is only slightly more torturous than the MacOS or Linux.
Regardless of what one thinks of MS' predatory behavior towards other software/hardware makers, it's in any company's interest to carefully think out and plan their consumer sales channel. MS' scheme looks pretty half-baked, indicating that it waqs not well-planned, and that nobody who actually works for the company has ever actually been a customer, and seen what it's like.
As a longtime sysadmin, I use one big file system/usr/bin and drop everything in there. I hardly ever need to look inside/usr/bin.
Even if my pkg data gets trashed (and I am too foolish to mirror it), I at least know where to look for the programs:/usr/bin.
I've seen various postings and rants around technical sites looking for a 'new paradigm' to replace the file cabinet/desktop metaphor. Well, if we use the info in a system using pkgadd or RPM, it could be possible to ask the computer: 'any spreadsheet apps on this system?' Of course, the answer is only as good as the package maintainer's enclosed info, but it's an idea for a better way to manage a system, especially if you could add your own comments and keywords to your pkg database. Much better than 'find; cd; ls; strings.'
Look at how the Mac improved things with resource forks. I don't care where Excel is installed, because I open the _file_, not the app. If Excel is not installed, my Mac can still tell me it's an Excel file (whatever that is, but still, I know to ask the helpdesk for Excel).
On my UNIX systems, if I want to know what all those files in/usr/bin are, I feed the path to the pkg manager to find out. Why should I muck about with subdirs, huge $PATH's, and symlinks? In my experience, that makes a system too complex for one person to manage well, and every system's different paths figure into the management hassle.
If I need to secure an app from unauthorised users, I'd like to say 'set this installed package so that the owner is sybase, the users are fred and tony, and the only owner can use pkg manager to upgrade these files,' instead of poking around in/usr/subdir and using chmod, faclset for the rest of the day.
If you look at the history of RedHat, the manual I got for version 3 says that RPM was developed because more time was being spent maintaining a linux system than using it. Amen. When I started using RPM, I could manage much more software on many more machines than I could when I was using the old 'make, make install' method.
At my office, I never compile and install software with 'make install' scripts. I instead install it to a special chroot environment and build a Solaris pkg file from there. Then I can install, upgrade, or erase it from any of my 100 servers very easily. Add cfengine to the mix, and I can do it all from one server.
Are we sysadmins, or users? Thank goodness for package managers, I say. When I am dealing with executable binaries and shared libraries, I only want a file system to prevent corruption, provide security and fast i/o (and maybe give me historical views of itself, a la Clearcase, but that's a different thread). I want package managers to monitor installed software, unauthorised changes to binaries, new binaries that don't belong to a known package, and other management/security info. If you think of your computer as a file cabinet, it'll soon look as messy as your physical file cabinet. I like to think that as meta-data management improves, that will matter less and less.
In the Orwell novel, terrorism and terrorists existed, but it was left unanswered as to whether these were outside forces or a Party invention.
The attacks on Sept 11 were carried out by real terrorists (as opposed to government agents trying to fool us into believing in terrorists), but it appears as though the Bush administration is trying to define our rights solely on a belief in "future terrorists."
I wish they would get this through their stupid minds: THE SEPT 11 ATTACKS WERE THE RESULT OF CAREFUL PLANNING AND LAX SECURITY. By lax security, I mean that there were no armed guards on the planes, no security for the cockpits, and no procedures in place to make it difficult for the criminals to take control of the planes. FIX THESE PROBLEMS before turning our nation into a police state.
Notice that these actions are not being taken as 'wartime' or 'emergency' actions; instead the administration is trying to create a permanent state in which we do not have the right to know what they are doing unless they decide that we will use the information properly (which they get to define, naturally).
Is it necessary? In the short term, it may be. However, these actions are definitely setting up the tools for a totalitarian state to flourish (if not this administration, some future one). Look what Joe Stalin and Sadaam Hussein "accomplished" when they got control of an all-powerful state.
There are people like this in our nation, but they've never been able to control the US government before. Bush and his friends, by thinking of next week to the complete exclusion of the next decade or more, are setting us up for a future in which another War of Independence may be necessary, except this time we won't be fighting a foreign power; we'll be fighting ourselves.
What I think may more likely occur is that some future administration will loosen these restrictions if the world situation is calmer. But, I have not heard anyone in Bush's administration talking this way. They basically say it is too dangerous for our government to be open and under the control of its citizens.
Come to think of it, a new revolution in the future may work out fine for born-again Christians who eagerly await the final battle. Luckily there are none of those in Bush's administration. Wait a minute...
I think that you got it wrong. Microsoft was found to be a monopoly. That is a finding of fact.
Being a monopoly is not, by itself, illegal.
Microsoft was found guilty of illegally mainaining its monopoly status. That is a finding of law, in other words, it's the crime of which they are guilty.
It is possible to find that my company holds a monopoly in its market, but that I have done nothing illegal to maintain that monopoly. In that case, my company is not guilty. This is not what happened in the MS case.
The Appeals Court did not, in any way, overturn the findings of fact, nor fault with the findings of law (the verdict). It only overturned the remedy, because the remedy may have come out of personal bias on the part of the judge. The Court did not say that another judge without bias could not find the same remedy appropriate.
Another example: it is legal for me to bundle products if my company is not a monopoly; it would be difficult to prove that I am using a bundled browser to give my OS an unfair advantage in the market. If I held an OS monopoly, however, it could be proven that my browser has an unfair, unearned advantage because I bundle it with my OS.
A company with a monopoly must be much more careful about bundling, because the rules that it must follow are different than those for other companies, and bundling, api-hiding, and so forth are tools that MS uses to leverage their OS monopoly to kill competing browsers, media players, or office suites.
That, to my understanding, is the spirit of the law. There is a reason convicted criminals get up on the stand and apologize at sentencing; they want to get a lighter sentence. MS could have admitted that their actions were in line with Jackson's findings, but it was that refusal to do so (and evidence tampering, and lying in depositions) that made Jackson think that MS had repeatedly put its interests above the law.
If he had not granted interviews with the press (a judge is really not supposed to talk with reporters about cases, ever), his ruling might have stood, because it would have been harder to prove bias. In a jury trial, a judge has to keep from laughing and so forth, but with no jury but himself, a judge can snicker when a defendant lies and that alone is not grounds for overturning his findings.
The US has not revoked a corporate charter in decades. If they allowed the cigarette makers to stay in business, I don't know why anyone expected them to really go after MS.
This is not to say that success in a market means you're evil, or that tobbacco should be illegal, but that your business must be conducted in a responsible manner that does benefit the nation that granted you your corporate charter.
Starting a corporation in the US was meant to be a privilege which carried great responsibility (in return for the possibility of great rewards). For decades, though, corporations have been given more rights than citizens, a clear perversion of the original intent (is it legal for you and me to shove cash to offshore accounts tax-free?).
So, while it may be unethical to try and run MS out of business and put all those people out of work, there appears to be nothing really illegal about it, so go go go *BSD and Linux.
Notice also that the consent decree says that there is no admission of fact or law, which means MS admits to doing nothing wrong. Arrogance is also legal.
BTW, has anyone seen the Biography spots on A&E, in which "Windows XP" sponsors a look at the people who've changed history? Gandhi, Churchill, Gates, Mandela... wait a minute, Gates? Notice that there are no pictures of Carnegie and the rest of the robber barons.
Actually, my reading of the article is that Microsoft and./ oppose this for the same reasons:
1) it interferes with the first amendment; there are court precedents which define source code as protected speech, and others which say that it is not. Guess which definition most of./ likes?
2) best case: it would force the industry to design all of their technology to meet a certain standard, without any compelling, clear and present danger to public safety or the economy, or else,
3) the government would step to design the technology, and thereby interfere with the free market.
Basically, it is another in a long line of corporate protection/welfare measures which our economic and political system is said to oppose.
I was very impressed with the BealeScreamer's comments on the original intent of copyright. What the hell are they teaching kids in school these days?
Any lawyers out there who can explain a Constitutional justification of both copyright and fair use? I ask because it seems that the DMCA would be found unconstitutional if it is found to restrict protected speech. Since there seem to be contradictory rulings on the status of computer code as protected speech, it would seem logical to let a federal appeals court decide, then see if the Supreme Court is interested in hearing about it (and maybe redeem themselves for fixing, er, I mean, providing finality for, the last election).
If it works as well as Oracle Applications 10.7 or 11i, the NSA will be installing and patching until the next century. Then come the consultants to "fix" it, which will strip their budget down to 0. So I would not worry about it.
also uses PGP to report on human rights abuses without fear of being detected. Often organizations like this leave the private key back in a safe country, and only carry the public key to encrypt their reports and notes.
We rely TOO MUCH on our technology, then blame it when we fuck up. Terrorism is a HUMAN, not a technological problem. If a drug dealer uses encryption to run his sales network, we can ban encryption without solving the problem of why his sales are so high to begin with.
I was in an airport last year, and saw a young boy (too young to read) walk through a 'RESTRICTED' door, setting off an alarm. I watched for 5 minutes, and nobody came to investigate why the alarm was sounding. That is not a technological problem.
We need human solutions to crime. Like guards on the planes. Like law enforcement officials who listen to threats they receive. Like airport security that gets paid more and trained better than the McDonalds counter staff.
The fact that Phil Zimmerman is losing sleep over this is a sign that he is human, not that he did the wrong thing. I don't see the executives at Smith&Wesson losing any sleep over crimes committed with their products. I don't see any airline executives apologizing for their weak security which helped lead to this attack. And I don't see any apologies from the terrorist organizations.
My mistake; I did not mean to imply that I can sell you the CDROM of binaries, and then as part of that transaction charge you an additional $100 for access to the source. I was talking about two different examples of how I could respect the license and make some money.
Using the GPL at
http://www.fsf.org/copyleft/gpl.html
I see the following statements which support my claim. I have added italics.
Our General Public Licenses are designed to make
sure that you have the freedom to distribute copies of free software (and charge for this service if you wish)...and that you know you can do these things.
...
For example, if you distribute copies of such a program, whether gratis or for a fee, you must give the recipients all the rights that you have.
In TERMS AND CONDITIONS, section 1:
You may charge a fee for the physical act of transferring a copy, and you may at your option offer warranty protection in exchange for a fee.
In TERMS AND CONDITIONS, section 3:
You may copy and distribute the Program (or a work based on it, under Section 2) in object code or executable form under the terms of Sections 1 and 2 above provided that you
...
b) Accompany it with a written offer, valid for at least three years, to give any third party, for a charge no more than your cost of physically performing source distribution, a complete machine-readable copy of the corresponding source code, to be distributed under the terms of Sections 1 and 2 above on a medium customarily used for software interchange...
I respectfully submit that if I maintain a server, pay for the ISP connection, perform backups, system administration, and so on, I can charge a monthly or yearly subscription fee to access the server to cover these costs. In this example, it took me quite a while to build the archive and organize it, and I spend a lot of time updating and maintaining content. If I want to charge for the binaries, your $100 buys you a login account which has one-time access to the binary and (for 3 years) the source to that particular binary. Naturally, you inherit the license rights what you get the binary version of the program.
If I do not distribute binaries, I can still charge you to access my online content, namely, the source code that I painstakingly catalog and update. Section 3 of the GPL only dictates the terms of source code availability should you wish to distribute machine or object code. My source-only archive is covered in section 1.
Newton gave particular credit to Kepler, another "open science" advocate. In Max Caspar's bio of Kepler, when told that Galileo was in Italy presenting Kepler's discoveries as his own, Kepler basically said that this was OK, since the truth spread by anyone was still the truth, and that the world would be richer for it. How could he possibly give up his 'property' like that? Becuase he did not think of knowledge as his.
Galileo, on the other hand, was persecuted by the Catholic Church (an intellectual property monopoly), and lost his right to even present his findings in public.
Many of the scientific conclusions Kepler and Galileo reached are incorrect, but science is nearly as much about seeing thought processes at work as it is about finding the truth. According to Mundie's speech, this process has no value to Microsoft, unless it is paid for by the governement and then given to them to use as their own.
I like to think of OS and GPL in terms of the US legal system; when a lawyer does 'pro bono' work, it does not mean "for free," it means "for the public good." Refusing payment is one characteristic of pro bono work, but the term also means that you put yourself on the line for something you believe in, something that will otherwise be ignored or left undone. Can you imagine the trial system if a lawyer says "Your honor, I bring to your attention Brown vs. the Board of Education" and a lawyer in the audience says, "Wait! Part of that decision is my intellectual property! You must pay me before you can use that in your client's defense!" So how does anyone make money if legal work is in the public domain? Lawyers pay for their law books, and they pay for Lexis-Nexis access to legal research. And so, lawyers charge a high hourly or contingency fee for most of their work, and if they do good research and make good arguments, they deserve it.
In the same way, I am permitted under the GPL to sell my improvements in the form of binaries on CD-ROM, but I need to make the source available as well. I can charge $100 to access my online archive of source. If it is a great archive that is kept up-to-date, people, companies, and universities may pay, and there is nothing in the GPL that prevents this. I cannot stop you from redistributing it, though, just as Lexis-Nexis cannot stop a law researcher from teaching his students the public info found in their database. In fact, my reading of the GPL says that I can refuse to release my changes without payment. If anyone wants to pay me, they can. In fact, a lot of my consulting work is based on this, and I get paid well because I do a good job.
Computing began as a government/university venture, including Bill Gates' first major programming project, an implementation of BASIC on a Harvard-owned, government funded machine. The field has been taken over by rich private interests. The GPL is one attempt to restore some balance in favor of research, and based on the progress the Linux kernel has made in just 8 years, it's succeeding.
In many muslim countries, (I presume you mean countries where the governemt represents the interests of Islam over all other religions)the behavior you speak of is illegal: The advertising we see in the US and Europe, single people dating without escorts, women driving cars, women voting. In addition, in many of these countries, a man is not held responsible for physically abusing his wife.
But you can walk down the streets feeling safe, unless you openly disagree with this totalitarian way of life. I think that of the major religions, Islam is the one with the most promise, but I disagree with any system of government which uses the interpretation of one religion to establish a totalitarean society.
The US Constitution is not a matter of being fashionable. If I have to listen to government officials use thinly-disguised racism to advance their careers, I should at least have the right to use the media in my own way.
And anyway, what about the bastards that supplied troubled teenagers with guns? They actually broke some laws, y'know, and they knew they were doing it.
ArsDigita is around the corner from my old house. I applied for a job there 8 months ago, told they were looking for experienced UNIX/Oracle developers/admins with a focus on security. I got a tour from a developer who gave me details about their hoped-for IPO (violating 2 SEC regulations), major contracts under negotiation, and details of their network (in)security. Hm. I was scheduled for a phone interview 2 days later, which the interviewer forgot, then called me 30 minutes late from his car and asked 3 vague, stupid questions (like "so you can program in C++, huh?"), while talking to the person next to him about the location of their next meeting. He also did not have a job description of the position for which I was interviewing.
Three months after I forgot about it I got a FedEx box with an AD cap and shirt, and a letter written in nearly incomprehensible english explaining that they did not need UNIX nor security staff (yeah, that's what they thought). The letter went on to apologize for the company's lack of professionalism, then made excuses for same ("we're really young, and growing fast"). I would never get to use the Playstations in the nap room, nor look at the fish tanks, nor get my own $1000 Herman Miller office chair. But, I could wear the gear and advertise for them. Sheesh.
The current regime at AD seems to be falling back on the 'safest' business model it can find. Too bad about that, but I have 10 years business experience as well as 6 years technical, and if I were to invest in that company, I would have required management to grow up in order to keep the venture sustainable. I really do not think the company that I saw 8 months ago could have lasted.
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Movies stink; that's why people won't pay to go see them. Music stinks, that's why nobody is paying for the CDs. And oh yeah, THEY CHARGE TOO MUCH for such crap.
If a movie is good, I'll pay 8.50 to go see it in the theaters. If it seems OK, I'll wait and see it on cable, or rent it at the store.
If music is good, I'll pay for it in the store.
RIAA and MPAA need to learn a lesson that the web learned way back - content! I get more good content from online mags at $24 per year than I get from a DVD that costs more than that or a music CD that costs nearly that much.
When I worked at Lotus Development, it took weeks to get the small team I worked on to change directions. This initiative from Microsoft is the equivalent of steering the aircraft carrier in the middle of a battle at full speed.
.NET rollout for years if "security over features" is a sincere goal.
The article tells the hard-ass truth, that it may mean halting the
Microsoft's products strive to be "highly visible," so they tout features the way People Magazine puts cleavage on their covers. For example, the strange advertising notion that WindowsXP users can fly, even though the multimedia features shown in those ads have been easy to obtain on Macs and Windows for, literally, years.
So, I think that this is a good article because it asks the big question: "How serious are you, Microsoft? Serious enough to stop shipping for a while?"
I mean, if anyone can take the revenue hit that would involve, its Microsoft with its huge cash reserves. But with the continuing allegations that they use reserve cash to illegally pad their financial results (and please shareholders), I just don't know if they can stomach the fact that they might take a Wall Street beating for a while.
...that with .NET, Microsoft is returning to "its highly innovative roots."
I think that just the act of typing that quote has opened a singularity in my CPU.
I agree. Teach critical thinking, which is at the root of all creativity, whether artistic or logical. When I went to school, I could type or hand write my papers. No graphics unless I drew them myself.
Teachers, in order to properly judge performance, need to see evidence of a mind at work, not evidence of facility with a tool.
The student who will write it again and again to get it right, or who will work on a math problem over and over in order to understand it will not be afraid of computers.
I went to "manual" schools from 1973 - 1990, never took a class with a computer in my life, and now I work as a UNIX administrator and database systems architect. I learned to do this by reading books, testing authors' assertions on real computer equipment, and so on. Plus, when I have burned out on sql performance for the day, I can read a book.
I worry about children who may be subtly and unintentionally taught that knowledge from a computer is somehow worth more than their own thoughts, simply because it is more polished in appearance.
One thing that irks me to no end is that my home firewall is a noisy old Pentium 200 with disks and fans. I've been looking into embedded systems to do this, and the current access points I've seen are not effective firewalls at all; no logging, and they don't _reall_ block everything, even though they say they do. A small Linux kernel which does not need to be built up with support for PCI, two ethernet cards, disks and multiple filesystems might just do the trick.
At first I applauded this decision, then I started to wonder, what do I do if 10 people start posting hundreds of negative messages about my company using different accounts? How can I prove that those posts are lies, versus opinions based on real experiences with my business? What if my business has been damaged by this, and I find out who did it? Have I any recourse at all?
/. community can help to overcome 'anonymously' planted FUD about linux or OpenBSD, due to our numbers and the fact that many of us feel we have a stake in the outcome.
For example, the
What would I, as a business owner, be able to do? I guess that instead of suing, I could politely ask the forum moderator for prominent space to answer the complaints, and challenge the posters to come forward with proof of their bad experience. If they cannot, I could claim victory, otherwise, it may be that I run a bad business. That is, I guess, one purpose of an open forum, but it still concerns me.
On the other hand, there seem to be so many bad businesses out there making plenty of money, that it is essential that the right to express an opinion is protected.
I guess what I do not understand is the 'running out' of licenses. Does that refer to the discs with the proper piece of paper enclosed? Has their SQLServer run out of table space to keep track of the family licenses? What I was saying in my post is that for a company that claims to be all about the Internet and Application Services, they have a pretty poor understanding of what the sale of a single 'license' means. It's nothing more than a record of who paid for what. In the world of software, how do you 'run out?' Why not just sell one disc, and say 'when you logon, choose your license?'
I am not sure why they could not could not have tied the activation scheme into a credit card system to allow you to purchase additional licenses at install time.
Just tell the SSL web page how many computers you want to install on, pay $10-$15 for each additional license (not $80), and receive an activation code that you transmit to the central server each time you install on a new machine (and will work up to the number of licenses you bought).
I seems foolish to charge $90 for the upgrade, then another $80 for each additional, since MS only needs to sell one CD per household. With the lower price, MS still makes more money than they would off of a pirated copy, and the customer gets a licensing cost that is only slightly more torturous than the MacOS or Linux.
Regardless of what one thinks of MS' predatory behavior towards other software/hardware makers, it's in any company's interest to carefully think out and plan their consumer sales channel. MS' scheme looks pretty half-baked, indicating that it waqs not well-planned, and that nobody who actually works for the company has ever actually been a customer, and seen what it's like.
As a longtime sysadmin, I use one big file system /usr/bin and drop everything in there. I hardly ever need to look inside /usr/bin.
Even if my pkg data gets trashed (and I am too foolish to mirror it), I at least know where to look for the programs: /usr/bin.
/usr/bin are, I feed the path to the pkg manager to find out. Why should I muck about with subdirs, huge $PATH's, and symlinks? In my experience, that makes a system too complex for one person to manage well, and every system's different paths figure into the management hassle.
/usr/subdir and using chmod, faclset for the rest of the day.
I've seen various postings and rants around technical sites looking for a 'new paradigm' to replace the file cabinet/desktop metaphor. Well, if we use the info in a system using pkgadd or RPM, it could be possible to ask the computer: 'any spreadsheet apps on this system?' Of course, the answer is only as good as the package maintainer's enclosed info, but it's an idea for a better way to manage a system, especially if you could add your own comments and keywords to your pkg database. Much better than 'find; cd; ls; strings.'
Look at how the Mac improved things with resource forks. I don't care where Excel is installed, because I open the _file_, not the app. If Excel is not installed, my Mac can still tell me it's an Excel file (whatever that is, but still, I know to ask the helpdesk for Excel).
On my UNIX systems, if I want to know what all those files in
If I need to secure an app from unauthorised users, I'd like to say 'set this installed package so that the owner is sybase, the users are fred and tony, and the only owner can use pkg manager to upgrade these files,' instead of poking around in
If you look at the history of RedHat, the manual I got for version 3 says that RPM was developed because more time was being spent maintaining a linux system than using it. Amen. When I started using RPM, I could manage much more software on many more machines than I could when I was using the old 'make, make install' method.
At my office, I never compile and install software with 'make install' scripts. I instead install it to a special chroot environment and build a Solaris pkg file from there. Then I can install, upgrade, or erase it from any of my 100 servers very easily. Add cfengine to the mix, and I can do it all from one server.
Are we sysadmins, or users? Thank goodness for package managers, I say. When I am dealing with executable binaries and shared libraries, I only want a file system to prevent corruption, provide security and fast i/o (and maybe give me historical views of itself, a la Clearcase, but that's a different thread). I want package managers to monitor installed software, unauthorised changes to binaries, new binaries that don't belong to a known package, and other management/security info. If you think of your computer as a file cabinet, it'll soon look as messy as your physical file cabinet. I like to think that as meta-data management improves, that will matter less and less.
In the Orwell novel, terrorism and terrorists existed, but it was left unanswered as to whether these were outside forces or a Party invention.
The attacks on Sept 11 were carried out by real terrorists (as opposed to government agents trying to fool us into believing in terrorists), but it appears as though the Bush administration is trying to define our rights solely on a belief in "future terrorists."
I wish they would get this through their stupid minds: THE SEPT 11 ATTACKS WERE THE RESULT OF CAREFUL PLANNING AND LAX SECURITY. By lax security, I mean that there were no armed guards on the planes, no security for the cockpits, and no procedures in place to make it difficult for the criminals to take control of the planes. FIX THESE PROBLEMS before turning our nation into a police state.
Notice that these actions are not being taken as 'wartime' or 'emergency' actions; instead the administration is trying to create a permanent state in which we do not have the right to know what they are doing unless they decide that we will use the information properly (which they get to define, naturally).
Is it necessary? In the short term, it may be. However, these actions are definitely setting up the tools for a totalitarian state to flourish (if not this administration, some future one). Look what Joe Stalin and Sadaam Hussein "accomplished" when they got control of an all-powerful state.
There are people like this in our nation, but they've never been able to control the US government before. Bush and his friends, by thinking of next week to the complete exclusion of the next decade or more, are setting us up for a future in which another War of Independence may be necessary, except this time we won't be fighting a foreign power; we'll be fighting ourselves. What I think may more likely occur is that some future administration will loosen these restrictions if the world situation is calmer. But, I have not heard anyone in Bush's administration talking this way. They basically say it is too dangerous for our government to be open and under the control of its citizens.
Come to think of it, a new revolution in the future may work out fine for born-again Christians who eagerly await the final battle. Luckily there are none of those in Bush's administration. Wait a minute...
I think that you got it wrong. Microsoft was found to be a monopoly. That is a finding of fact. Being a monopoly is not, by itself, illegal.
Microsoft was found guilty of illegally mainaining its monopoly status. That is a finding of law, in other words, it's the crime of which they are guilty.
It is possible to find that my company holds a monopoly in its market, but that I have done nothing illegal to maintain that monopoly. In that case, my company is not guilty. This is not what happened in the MS case.
The Appeals Court did not, in any way, overturn the findings of fact, nor fault with the findings of law (the verdict). It only overturned the remedy, because the remedy may have come out of personal bias on the part of the judge. The Court did not say that another judge without bias could not find the same remedy appropriate.
Another example: it is legal for me to bundle products if my company is not a monopoly; it would be difficult to prove that I am using a bundled browser to give my OS an unfair advantage in the market. If I held an OS monopoly, however, it could be proven that my browser has an unfair, unearned advantage because I bundle it with my OS.
A company with a monopoly must be much more careful about bundling, because the rules that it must follow are different than those for other companies, and bundling, api-hiding, and so forth are tools that MS uses to leverage their OS monopoly to kill competing browsers, media players, or office suites.
That, to my understanding, is the spirit of the law. There is a reason convicted criminals get up on the stand and apologize at sentencing; they want to get a lighter sentence. MS could have admitted that their actions were in line with Jackson's findings, but it was that refusal to do so (and evidence tampering, and lying in depositions) that made Jackson think that MS had repeatedly put its interests above the law. If he had not granted interviews with the press (a judge is really not supposed to talk with reporters about cases, ever), his ruling might have stood, because it would have been harder to prove bias. In a jury trial, a judge has to keep from laughing and so forth, but with no jury but himself, a judge can snicker when a defendant lies and that alone is not grounds for overturning his findings.
Starting a corporation in the US was meant to be a privilege which carried great responsibility (in return for the possibility of great rewards). For decades, though, corporations have been given more rights than citizens, a clear perversion of the original intent (is it legal for you and me to shove cash to offshore accounts tax-free?).
So, while it may be unethical to try and run MS out of business and put all those people out of work, there appears to be nothing really illegal about it, so go go go *BSD and Linux. Notice also that the consent decree says that there is no admission of fact or law, which means MS admits to doing nothing wrong. Arrogance is also legal.
BTW, has anyone seen the Biography spots on A&E, in which "Windows XP" sponsors a look at the people who've changed history? Gandhi, Churchill, Gates, Mandela... wait a minute, Gates? Notice that there are no pictures of Carnegie and the rest of the robber barons.
> definition most of ./ likes?
/. easily :-)
I cannot type
Actually, my reading of the article is that Microsoft and ./ oppose this for the same reasons:
./ likes?
1) it interferes with the first amendment; there are court precedents which define source code as protected speech, and others which say that it is not. Guess which definition most of
2) best case: it would force the industry to design all of their technology to meet a certain standard, without any compelling, clear and present danger to public safety or the economy, or else,
3) the government would step to design the technology, and thereby interfere with the free market.
Basically, it is another in a long line of corporate protection/welfare measures which our economic and political system is said to oppose.
I was very impressed with the BealeScreamer's comments on the original intent of copyright. What the hell are they teaching kids in school these days?
Any lawyers out there who can explain a Constitutional justification of both copyright and fair use? I ask because it seems that the DMCA would be found unconstitutional if it is found to restrict protected speech. Since there seem to be contradictory rulings on the status of computer code as protected speech, it would seem logical to let a federal appeals court decide, then see if the Supreme Court is interested in hearing about it (and maybe redeem themselves for fixing, er, I mean, providing finality for, the last election).
If it works as well as Oracle Applications 10.7 or 11i, the NSA will be installing and patching until the next century. Then come the consultants to "fix" it, which will strip their budget down to 0. So I would not worry about it.
also uses PGP to report on human rights abuses without fear of being detected. Often organizations like this leave the private key back in a safe country, and only carry the public key to encrypt their reports and notes.
We rely TOO MUCH on our technology, then blame it when we fuck up. Terrorism is a HUMAN, not a technological problem. If a drug dealer uses encryption to run his sales network, we can ban encryption without solving the problem of why his sales are so high to begin with. I was in an airport last year, and saw a young boy (too young to read) walk through a 'RESTRICTED' door, setting off an alarm. I watched for 5 minutes, and nobody came to investigate why the alarm was sounding. That is not a technological problem.
We need human solutions to crime. Like guards on the planes. Like law enforcement officials who listen to threats they receive. Like airport security that gets paid more and trained better than the McDonalds counter staff.
The fact that Phil Zimmerman is losing sleep over this is a sign that he is human, not that he did the wrong thing. I don't see the executives at Smith&Wesson losing any sleep over crimes committed with their products. I don't see any airline executives apologizing for their weak security which helped lead to this attack. And I don't see any apologies from the terrorist organizations.
http://www.fsf.org/copyleft/gpl.html
I see the following statements which support my claim. I have added italics.
Our General Public Licenses are designed to make sure that you have the freedom to distribute copies of free software (and charge for this service if you wish)...and that you know you can do these things.
...
For example, if you distribute copies of such a program, whether gratis or for a fee, you must give the recipients all the rights that you have.
In TERMS AND CONDITIONS, section 1:
You may charge a fee for the physical act of transferring a copy, and you may at your option offer warranty protection in exchange for a fee.
In TERMS AND CONDITIONS, section 3:
You may copy and distribute the Program (or a work based on it, under Section 2) in object code or executable form under the terms of Sections 1 and 2 above provided that you
...
b) Accompany it with a written offer, valid for at least three years, to give any third party, for a charge no more than your cost of physically performing source distribution, a complete machine-readable copy of the corresponding source code, to be distributed under the terms of Sections 1 and 2 above on a medium customarily used for software interchange...
I respectfully submit that if I maintain a server, pay for the ISP connection, perform backups, system administration, and so on, I can charge a monthly or yearly subscription fee to access the server to cover these costs. In this example, it took me quite a while to build the archive and organize it, and I spend a lot of time updating and maintaining content. If I want to charge for the binaries, your $100 buys you a login account which has one-time access to the binary and (for 3 years) the source to that particular binary. Naturally, you inherit the license rights what you get the binary version of the program.
If I do not distribute binaries, I can still charge you to access my online content, namely, the source code that I painstakingly catalog and update. Section 3 of the GPL only dictates the terms of source code availability should you wish to distribute machine or object code. My source-only archive is covered in section 1.
Newton gave particular credit to Kepler, another "open science" advocate. In Max Caspar's bio of Kepler, when told that Galileo was in Italy presenting Kepler's discoveries as his own, Kepler basically said that this was OK, since the truth spread by anyone was still the truth, and that the world would be richer for it. How could he possibly give up his 'property' like that? Becuase he did not think of knowledge as his.
Galileo, on the other hand, was persecuted by the Catholic Church (an intellectual property monopoly), and lost his right to even present his findings in public.
Many of the scientific conclusions Kepler and Galileo reached are incorrect, but science is nearly as much about seeing thought processes at work as it is about finding the truth. According to Mundie's speech, this process has no value to Microsoft, unless it is paid for by the governement and then given to them to use as their own.
I like to think of OS and GPL in terms of the US legal system; when a lawyer does 'pro bono' work, it does not mean "for free," it means "for the public good." Refusing payment is one characteristic of pro bono work, but the term also means that you put yourself on the line for something you believe in, something that will otherwise be ignored or left undone. Can you imagine the trial system if a lawyer says "Your honor, I bring to your attention Brown vs. the Board of Education" and a lawyer in the audience says, "Wait! Part of that decision is my intellectual property! You must pay me before you can use that in your client's defense!" So how does anyone make money if legal work is in the public domain? Lawyers pay for their law books, and they pay for Lexis-Nexis access to legal research. And so, lawyers charge a high hourly or contingency fee for most of their work, and if they do good research and make good arguments, they deserve it.
In the same way, I am permitted under the GPL to sell my improvements in the form of binaries on CD-ROM, but I need to make the source available as well. I can charge $100 to access my online archive of source. If it is a great archive that is kept up-to-date, people, companies, and universities may pay, and there is nothing in the GPL that prevents this. I cannot stop you from redistributing it, though, just as Lexis-Nexis cannot stop a law researcher from teaching his students the public info found in their database. In fact, my reading of the GPL says that I can refuse to release my changes without payment. If anyone wants to pay me, they can. In fact, a lot of my consulting work is based on this, and I get paid well because I do a good job.
Computing began as a government/university venture, including Bill Gates' first major programming project, an implementation of BASIC on a Harvard-owned, government funded machine. The field has been taken over by rich private interests. The GPL is one attempt to restore some balance in favor of research, and based on the progress the Linux kernel has made in just 8 years, it's succeeding.
In many muslim countries, (I presume you mean countries where the governemt represents the interests of Islam over all other religions)the behavior you speak of is illegal: The advertising we see in the US and Europe, single people dating without escorts, women driving cars, women voting. In addition, in many of these countries, a man is not held responsible for physically abusing his wife. But you can walk down the streets feeling safe, unless you openly disagree with this totalitarian way of life. I think that of the major religions, Islam is the one with the most promise, but I disagree with any system of government which uses the interpretation of one religion to establish a totalitarean society. The US Constitution is not a matter of being fashionable. If I have to listen to government officials use thinly-disguised racism to advance their careers, I should at least have the right to use the media in my own way. And anyway, what about the bastards that supplied troubled teenagers with guns? They actually broke some laws, y'know, and they knew they were doing it.
ArsDigita is around the corner from my old house. I applied for a job there 8 months ago, told they were looking for experienced UNIX/Oracle developers/admins with a focus on security. I got a tour from a developer who gave me details about their hoped-for IPO (violating 2 SEC regulations), major contracts under negotiation, and details of their network (in)security. Hm. I was scheduled for a phone interview 2 days later, which the interviewer forgot, then called me 30 minutes late from his car and asked 3 vague, stupid questions (like "so you can program in C++, huh?"), while talking to the person next to him about the location of their next meeting. He also did not have a job description of the position for which I was interviewing.
Three months after I forgot about it I got a FedEx box with an AD cap and shirt, and a letter written in nearly incomprehensible english explaining that they did not need UNIX nor security staff (yeah, that's what they thought). The letter went on to apologize for the company's lack of professionalism, then made excuses for same ("we're really young, and growing fast"). I would never get to use the Playstations in the nap room, nor look at the fish tanks, nor get my own $1000 Herman Miller office chair. But, I could wear the gear and advertise for them. Sheesh.
The current regime at AD seems to be falling back on the 'safest' business model it can find. Too bad about that, but I have 10 years business experience as well as 6 years technical, and if I were to invest in that company, I would have required management to grow up in order to keep the venture sustainable. I really do not think the company that I saw 8 months ago could have lasted.