DVD is still a very new format... it still lacks majority acceptance, as evidenced by the inventories of your neighboorhood video rental store... yet DVD has a lot of advantages... portability, compactness, robustness, cost effectiveness...
Thus far, there are only two things this system brings that DVD doesn't: 1) a semi-decent copy protection system and 2) high definition. Is high definition really that big of a deal? Digital widescreen on a DVD is more than enough for 95% of home video watchers... the sounds on DVD is phenomenal... the video quality is scores better than regular VHS... and really, consumers just aren't that picky...
And definitely, to be able to get the increase in video quality, 99% of consumers ain't gonna run out and buy no $2000 system and pay no $35 per media to get high definition... cause it's just not that big of a deal...
I really do like the analogy of these corporations to religious cults. And in some ways, that's very true. But I keep thinking of Hunter S. Thompson:
"You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning... And that, I think, was the handle- that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn't need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting- on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave."
Consider this against corporate cults...
- Apple: Apple is exactly what Thompson describes. Hell, just look at where Cupertino is on a map.
- Microsoft: Microsoft is less this hippie, dancing-around-a-campfire, karma-rules-all type of atmosphere, and more of the "old and evil". Microsoft is a cult that was militarized from the start. I think much more of McCarthy-ism and the struggle against the evils of communism when I think of Microsoft. Not that Linux is communism in the pejorative sense, but that Linux flies completely in the face of their existing model of practice and they react violently with all the FUD they can muster.
- Amazon: Amazon is like the group of hippies in the middle of some place like Topeka, Kansas, or maybe Salt Lake City, Utah. They see this revolution going on somewhere. And they think they've got the gist of it. And so they join in what they think is going on, but then realize very quickly that they're really just posers who don't understand the essence of the movement and then they sell out without really realizing that they never had it in the first place. Or buy in. Depends on your perspective. (Anybody ever see SLC Punk?)
Anyways, just thought the cult corporation is an accurate characterization.
I can't say I follow your analogy. Passwords can be stored entirely encrypted and never decrypted because you just need to prove you and this supposed user share a secret... The one-way hash is great for this...
I don't see this applying to credit cards... because as with passwords it doesn't matter what the unencrypted (unhashed) data is, it *does* matter with credit cards... The idea of storing credit cards is so that the user won't have to enter them again, so you can maintain billing records, etc... This is very different from the use of the password...
Bill Cosby said at the Rice University commencement this year that his grandmother who had a third-grade education came up to the answer of the glass half-full/half-empty dilemma whereas he as a doctoral student could not. Her answer was:
"It depends whether you're pouring or drinking."
I personally say it doesn't matter. Top it off and let's get vashnukad!!!
The reviewer seems remarkably uninformed about the state of alternate browsers, possibly because, as he suggests, he's been enslaved to IE for the last few years. But he seems naive to certain subleties, such as Mozilla has about as much cross platform support as Opera does or that both Mozilla/Netscape (new betas) and Galeon have support for tabbed browsing. Galeon's is as if not more versatile as Opera's.
But in his defense, some of his inexperience put some shock back into some of the things we have become immune to. For example I'm glad to see he addressed Opera's outrageous subscriber price.
Not the best browser competitive analysis I've read. It reads much like a paid endorsement for Opera.
XML will help you for things like word processor documents, spreadsheets, and the like... but what about like Windows Media? You can't exactly represent the video content as cleartext XML... and if you represent it in some binary format within an XML tag then that binary representation can subvert the entire goal of making a format understandable by all... The solution won't be as simple as "Make everything convertable to XML" though I wish it were.
1) IANAL, but I think given the legalese this statement was written in, it is likely legally enforcable... Meaning if RH sued you over patent violation on their open-source software and you never engaged in litigation against them for patent violation, then you are entitled to countersue them for breach of contract or something like that.
2) One of the things about MS and some of these other big companies is that if the company violates a promise, what are you going to do? Whine about it? Bitch about it? Pull all of your servers and clients off Win2K and MS Exchange and switch over to some other solution simply because they broke a promise? What are you going to do if you're a developer and MS makes a promise and then violates it? Stop development for Windows and start developing for some other OS? No. You're not. You're going to bend over, take it up the a$$, and say "Thank you sir! May I have another?"
RedHat on the other hand *wants* people to develop with RH Linux, *wants* people to develop using their open source technology, and *wants* you to promote their OS. And if they piss you off and you go away, which is entirely likely because not only are there other distros, there are other UNIX flavors, they lose.
RedHat makes this promise to make sure that you don't think they're becoming MS. RedHat makes this promise because they aren't MS. And it is not in anybody's interests (except maybe United Linux) for them to do so.
1) toilet paper, two ply, quilted, the good kind... buy it in bulk rolls... at college, they only have t.p. from the "ChaffYourAss" manufacturing corporation...
2) duct tape... for some reason I was always asking people for duct tape... to run wires... to hang stuff... stuff like that...
3) staple gun... industrial grade... something that will drive a staple into the concrete walls they have in dorms...
4) blank CD-R's... we all know colleges are pits of mass copyright violation...
5) Room decorations: for 90% of college kids, this means Christmas lights, a Salvador Dali poster, and an M.C. Escher poster...
6) A steam-vac cleaner... college dorm room floors are *NASTY*...
7) Pickup/delivery laundry service... cause you don't want laundry to be that *other* "time of the month"...
8) Linux/BSD/MacOS X... cause ***EVERYBODY*** in college passes around those @!$#ing MS Outlook and Win32 email worms...
It can be enjoyed as a single film. Anyone can see Spiderman
I strongly disagree... I think to appreciate Spiderman you had to have read/been a fan of the comic book... I have never read it nor had any interest in comic books whatsoever... And I thought the movie was absolutely terrible... it was a joke... it lacked a certain genuine quality... Spiderman swinging all the time happening to be in the exact right moment to catch whomever was plummetting to their doom only to be wisked away in his arms... it was just another in the current trend of comic-books-turned-movies... X-Men, Spiderman, and next summer it will be the Incredible Hulk... just another sellout...
Spiderman was nothing special... not that AotC was either... but let's not start calling Spiderman something it's not...
And please don't moderate me as flamebait... an honest opinion contrary to the popular one is not flamebait...
So that article included a link to infinging material. What was at that link? Was it illegal copies of NAI software? Or does this meen NAI is trying to crackdown on open source implementations of PGP?
What's wrong with Sawfish? It's light. It's configurable. It's themable. It gets the job done without bells and whistles. Let's face it: this is a window manager; this is not a killer app. Sawfish has good placement algorithms, good community support, good stability, so what's the @!$#ing point of starting over from scratch with a whole new development process? The people Sun's paying to do this stuff are some of the few paid people working on the GNOME project. Their labor is best used to progress the project, not to drop back to ground zero and start over.
RMS wrote: "Just consider: the GNU Project starts developing an operating system, and years later Linus Torvalds adds one important piece. The GNU Project says, 'Please give our project equal mention,' but Linus says, 'Don't give them a share of the credit; call the whole thing after my name alone!'"
Maybe I'm wrong about this and if I am please correct me, but isn't that "one important piece" the kernel?! Don't play down the significance of this, RMS. It seems to me that you could take the source of the GNU tools, use any compiler for the kernel that you have, and make a system that functions more or less the same. The kernel is a critical underlying piece and it's what makes Linux Linux. It could be a BSD. It could be a SysV distro. GNU gave a lot of the core functionality on top of the kernel, and props to them and especially for gcc, but the kernel makes the OS what it is. The binaries that sit on top of it are just that.
If there were different sets of binaries, so let's say that the system worked of a lot of BSD binaries instead of GNU binaries, then I could see the need for the distinction GNU/Linux vs. BSD/Linux. But there aren't.
Again, mad props to the GNU project because nobody in the OSS community will deny them a $hitload of credit, but it could still be Linux without the GNU binaries. And I don't want to start including the name of every project that contributes a large amount of binaries to my system. "Yes, on my desktop I'm using XFree86/KDE/Ximian/GNU/Linux."
Anybody have a URL to the post on spam-l? And thank you to those who explained the acronyms to those of us not familiar with them or the dramatis personae...
Less buggy browser: the Mozilla codebase after 4:30 yesterday when the patch to this bug was applied. Better performing browser: that browser that the guys at Greymagic are really thinking about getting around to writing since they (of course) write bug free code.
Give me a @!$#ing break! What kind of solution advice is that? How about include a link to the patch?! That might be more useful than dismissing the entire Mozilla project as poor performing and buggy.
... most kids got their pr0n from the www... the truth is more likely that they get it by going on IRC or by getting on public ftp sites running on peoples' computers holding repositories of pr0n, warez, etc...
You're probably asking at this point... wait a sec... how do *you* know all this... well... um... hey! get that videocamera out of my window! you can't videotape me downloading anything from www.ftpcrawler.net! it's illegal!
You miss the point of the op-ed. Yes, software implementations are copyrightable and licensable. Perens isn't saying that MS should make their implementation of CIFS anything other than they already do. However, it's been a hallmark of competition for a competitor to simply look at the way the product works and the reverse engineer it. They can then license their implementation any way they choose. And this has happened the SAMBA project engineered their own implementation of CIFS and it runs on any *NIX system that wants windows file sharing compatibility.
However, what Perens *is* saying is that if Microsoft patents certain features or qualities of its implementation, then if SAMBA wants to make an interoperable product, they have to pay royalties to Microsoft in order to be able to use the *patented* (not copyrighted) technologies. And it's this type of IP patent abuse that has got Perens and the entire computing world (except those with legal monopolies gained from unjust patents) scared $hitless.
One of the advantages of Kerberos is not having to have multiple passwords across multiple boxes/changing a password on one box affects the passwords on all other boxes.
Anyways, Krb5 is supported on almost all platforms, I think. Definitely the ones you listed.
Maybe this is a silly analogy... But take two other examples: Microsoft and AOL...
An issue of contention in antitrust litigation against Microsoft was that their licensing with OEM's forced consumer's to purchase a copy of Windows even if they had another OS installed on the system... Windows was being sold on 98% of the systems anyways, but there was no point in making money of the last 2% because in the grand scheme of things, they wouldn't make any money off it and it does way more harm than it's worth...
AOL kinda realized this when they purchased NaviServer... AOL could have charged what NaviServer charged to get copies of AOLServer and AOLPress, but they gave it away for free... why? there was no point in selling it... they were going to develop it anyways... might as well make some friends and give it away for free...
In this case, Sun's not basing the financial health of the company on StarOffice... bet you they use it internally... bet on every Solaris box within the corporation and every Solaris box they sell, they want a powerful office suite, and so they'll develop StarOffice anyways... it's not that much effort to do the porting (lord knows they don't use native code from the different OS's)... so what's the point in charging for it when you could give away a useful thing and make friends in the meantime?
Usually,/. is pretty good about determining what posted rumors get put online and which ones don't, but I don't exactly see what in this post give the author any credibility... They might as well go ahead and post that Microsoft has a special new technology that can track email forwards and will send you $5 if you forward this email to all of your friends...
C'mon,/. editors, get some credible source verification before posting something like this... not saying it's not true, but there's not a whole lot of reason to believe it other than paranoia...
Slashdot Mirror
DVD is still a very new format... it still lacks majority acceptance, as evidenced by the inventories of your neighboorhood video rental store... yet DVD has a lot of advantages... portability, compactness, robustness, cost effectiveness...
Thus far, there are only two things this system brings that DVD doesn't: 1) a semi-decent copy protection system and 2) high definition. Is high definition really that big of a deal? Digital widescreen on a DVD is more than enough for 95% of home video watchers... the sounds on DVD is phenomenal... the video quality is scores better than regular VHS... and really, consumers just aren't that picky...
And definitely, to be able to get the increase in video quality, 99% of consumers ain't gonna run out and buy no $2000 system and pay no $35 per media to get high definition... cause it's just not that big of a deal...
-jag
I really do like the analogy of these corporations to religious cults. And in some ways, that's very true. But I keep thinking of Hunter S. Thompson:
"You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning... And that, I think, was the handle- that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn't need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting- on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave."
Consider this against corporate cults...
- Apple: Apple is exactly what Thompson describes. Hell, just look at where Cupertino is on a map.
- Microsoft: Microsoft is less this hippie, dancing-around-a-campfire, karma-rules-all type of atmosphere, and more of the "old and evil". Microsoft is a cult that was militarized from the start. I think much more of McCarthy-ism and the struggle against the evils of communism when I think of Microsoft. Not that Linux is communism in the pejorative sense, but that Linux flies completely in the face of their existing model of practice and they react violently with all the FUD they can muster.
- Amazon: Amazon is like the group of hippies in the middle of some place like Topeka, Kansas, or maybe Salt Lake City, Utah. They see this revolution going on somewhere. And they think they've got the gist of it. And so they join in what they think is going on, but then realize very quickly that they're really just posers who don't understand the essence of the movement and then they sell out without really realizing that they never had it in the first place. Or buy in. Depends on your perspective. (Anybody ever see SLC Punk?)
Anyways, just thought the cult corporation is an accurate characterization.
-jag
I can't say I follow your analogy. Passwords can be stored entirely encrypted and never decrypted because you just need to prove you and this supposed user share a secret... The one-way hash is great for this...
I don't see this applying to credit cards... because as with passwords it doesn't matter what the unencrypted (unhashed) data is, it *does* matter with credit cards... The idea of storing credit cards is so that the user won't have to enter them again, so you can maintain billing records, etc... This is very different from the use of the password...
Bill Cosby said at the Rice University commencement this year that his grandmother who had a third-grade education came up to the answer of the glass half-full/half-empty dilemma whereas he as a doctoral student could not. Her answer was:
"It depends whether you're pouring or drinking."
I personally say it doesn't matter. Top it off and let's get vashnukad!!!
-jag
The reviewer seems remarkably uninformed about the state of alternate browsers, possibly because, as he suggests, he's been enslaved to IE for the last few years. But he seems naive to certain subleties, such as Mozilla has about as much cross platform support as Opera does or that both Mozilla/Netscape (new betas) and Galeon have support for tabbed browsing. Galeon's is as if not more versatile as Opera's.
But in his defense, some of his inexperience put some shock back into some of the things we have become immune to. For example I'm glad to see he addressed Opera's outrageous subscriber price.
Not the best browser competitive analysis I've read. It reads much like a paid endorsement for Opera.
-jag
XML will help you for things like word processor documents, spreadsheets, and the like... but what about like Windows Media? You can't exactly represent the video content as cleartext XML... and if you represent it in some binary format within an XML tag then that binary representation can subvert the entire goal of making a format understandable by all... The solution won't be as simple as "Make everything convertable to XML" though I wish it were.
-jag
Two points on this...
1) IANAL, but I think given the legalese this statement was written in, it is likely legally enforcable... Meaning if RH sued you over patent violation on their open-source software and you never engaged in litigation against them for patent violation, then you are entitled to countersue them for breach of contract or something like that.
2) One of the things about MS and some of these other big companies is that if the company violates a promise, what are you going to do? Whine about it? Bitch about it? Pull all of your servers and clients off Win2K and MS Exchange and switch over to some other solution simply because they broke a promise? What are you going to do if you're a developer and MS makes a promise and then violates it? Stop development for Windows and start developing for some other OS? No. You're not. You're going to bend over, take it up the a$$, and say "Thank you sir! May I have another?"
RedHat on the other hand *wants* people to develop with RH Linux, *wants* people to develop using their open source technology, and *wants* you to promote their OS. And if they piss you off and you go away, which is entirely likely because not only are there other distros, there are other UNIX flavors, they lose.
RedHat makes this promise to make sure that you don't think they're becoming MS. RedHat makes this promise because they aren't MS. And it is not in anybody's interests (except maybe United Linux) for them to do so.
-jag
1) toilet paper, two ply, quilted, the good kind... buy it in bulk rolls... at college, they only have t.p. from the "ChaffYourAss" manufacturing corporation...
2) duct tape... for some reason I was always asking people for duct tape... to run wires... to hang stuff... stuff like that...
3) staple gun... industrial grade... something that will drive a staple into the concrete walls they have in dorms...
4) blank CD-R's... we all know colleges are pits of mass copyright violation...
5) Room decorations: for 90% of college kids, this means Christmas lights, a Salvador Dali poster, and an M.C. Escher poster...
6) A steam-vac cleaner... college dorm room floors are *NASTY*...
7) Pickup/delivery laundry service... cause you don't want laundry to be that *other* "time of the month"...
8) Linux/BSD/MacOS X... cause ***EVERYBODY*** in college passes around those @!$#ing MS Outlook and Win32 email worms...
Just off the top of my head...
-jag
It can be enjoyed as a single film. Anyone can see Spiderman
I strongly disagree... I think to appreciate Spiderman you had to have read/been a fan of the comic book... I have never read it nor had any interest in comic books whatsoever... And I thought the movie was absolutely terrible... it was a joke... it lacked a certain genuine quality... Spiderman swinging all the time happening to be in the exact right moment to catch whomever was plummetting to their doom only to be wisked away in his arms... it was just another in the current trend of comic-books-turned-movies... X-Men, Spiderman, and next summer it will be the Incredible Hulk... just another sellout...
Spiderman was nothing special... not that AotC was either... but let's not start calling Spiderman something it's not...
And please don't moderate me as flamebait... an honest opinion contrary to the popular one is not flamebait...
-jag
So that article included a link to infinging material. What was at that link? Was it illegal copies of NAI software? Or does this meen NAI is trying to crackdown on open source implementations of PGP?
-jag
What's wrong with Sawfish? It's light. It's configurable. It's themable. It gets the job done without bells and whistles. Let's face it: this is a window manager; this is not a killer app. Sawfish has good placement algorithms, good community support, good stability, so what's the @!$#ing point of starting over from scratch with a whole new development process? The people Sun's paying to do this stuff are some of the few paid people working on the GNOME project. Their labor is best used to progress the project, not to drop back to ground zero and start over.
RMS wrote: "Just consider: the GNU Project starts developing an operating system, and years later Linus Torvalds adds one important piece. The GNU Project says, 'Please give our project equal mention,' but Linus says, 'Don't give them a share of the credit; call the whole thing after my name alone!'"
Maybe I'm wrong about this and if I am please correct me, but isn't that "one important piece" the kernel?! Don't play down the significance of this, RMS. It seems to me that you could take the source of the GNU tools, use any compiler for the kernel that you have, and make a system that functions more or less the same. The kernel is a critical underlying piece and it's what makes Linux Linux. It could be a BSD. It could be a SysV distro. GNU gave a lot of the core functionality on top of the kernel, and props to them and especially for gcc, but the kernel makes the OS what it is. The binaries that sit on top of it are just that.
If there were different sets of binaries, so let's say that the system worked of a lot of BSD binaries instead of GNU binaries, then I could see the need for the distinction GNU/Linux vs. BSD/Linux. But there aren't.
Again, mad props to the GNU project because nobody in the OSS community will deny them a $hitload of credit, but it could still be Linux without the GNU binaries. And I don't want to start including the name of every project that contributes a large amount of binaries to my system. "Yes, on my desktop I'm using XFree86/KDE/Ximian/GNU/Linux."
Anybody have a URL to the post on spam-l? And thank you to those who explained the acronyms to those of us not familiar with them or the dramatis personae...
-jag
Less buggy browser: the Mozilla codebase after 4:30 yesterday when the patch to this bug was applied.
Better performing browser: that browser that the guys at Greymagic are really thinking about getting around to writing since they (of course) write bug free code.
Give me a @!$#ing break! What kind of solution advice is that? How about include a link to the patch?! That might be more useful than dismissing the entire Mozilla project as poor performing and buggy.
... most kids got their pr0n from the www... the truth is more likely that they get it by going on IRC or by getting on public ftp sites running on peoples' computers holding repositories of pr0n, warez, etc...
You're probably asking at this point... wait a sec... how do *you* know all this... well... um... hey! get that videocamera out of my window! you can't videotape me downloading anything from www.ftpcrawler.net! it's illegal!
hehehe...
-jag
You miss the point of the op-ed. Yes, software implementations are copyrightable and licensable. Perens isn't saying that MS should make their implementation of CIFS anything other than they already do. However, it's been a hallmark of competition for a competitor to simply look at the way the product works and the reverse engineer it. They can then license their implementation any way they choose. And this has happened the SAMBA project engineered their own implementation of CIFS and it runs on any *NIX system that wants windows file sharing compatibility.
However, what Perens *is* saying is that if Microsoft patents certain features or qualities of its implementation, then if SAMBA wants to make an interoperable product, they have to pay royalties to Microsoft in order to be able to use the *patented* (not copyrighted) technologies. And it's this type of IP patent abuse that has got Perens and the entire computing world (except those with legal monopolies gained from unjust patents) scared $hitless.
One word: Kerberos
One of the advantages of Kerberos is not having to have multiple passwords across multiple boxes/changing a password on one box affects the passwords on all other boxes.
Anyways, Krb5 is supported on almost all platforms, I think. Definitely the ones you listed.
Maybe this is a silly analogy... But take two other examples: Microsoft and AOL...
An issue of contention in antitrust litigation against Microsoft was that their licensing with OEM's forced consumer's to purchase a copy of Windows even if they had another OS installed on the system... Windows was being sold on 98% of the systems anyways, but there was no point in making money of the last 2% because in the grand scheme of things, they wouldn't make any money off it and it does way more harm than it's worth...
AOL kinda realized this when they purchased NaviServer... AOL could have charged what NaviServer charged to get copies of AOLServer and AOLPress, but they gave it away for free... why? there was no point in selling it... they were going to develop it anyways... might as well make some friends and give it away for free...
In this case, Sun's not basing the financial health of the company on StarOffice... bet you they use it internally... bet on every Solaris box within the corporation and every Solaris box they sell, they want a powerful office suite, and so they'll develop StarOffice anyways... it's not that much effort to do the porting (lord knows they don't use native code from the different OS's)... so what's the point in charging for it when you could give away a useful thing and make friends in the meantime?
Usually, /. is pretty good about determining what posted rumors get put online and which ones don't, but I don't exactly see what in this post give the author any credibility... They might as well go ahead and post that Microsoft has a special new technology that can track email forwards and will send you $5 if you forward this email to all of your friends...
/. editors, get some credible source verification before posting something like this... not saying it's not true, but there's not a whole lot of reason to believe it other than paranoia...
C'mon,