Consider the numerous instances where something is supplied for use on a single PC only (pretty much any "OEM" software, for example). I don't know of any test cases either way, but there's certainly historical precedent, if not legal, for the idea that you buy something at one price with the right to transfer it, and another (presumably cheaper) price without that right. There's a lot of merit to that position as well, as long as the consumer isn't misled during the purchase.
Of course it's a copy if you burn it to CD. The question is whether the copying process is allowed by the terms under which you paid for the material, or otherwise permitted by the law.
This is excellent and brings up quite a few legal questions.
I'm not sure those claims are compatible.
Here, at last, we have a major player offering a realistically-priced, legal, electronic means of distribution for music. This is something people have been crying out for since the Internet discovered file transfer, and something I'm sure many of us would want to encourage.
So this guy goes along, and turns it into one big test case. That might be beneficial if it works out, though it's not guaranteed. If it doesn't work out, he's potentially just shooting huge great holes into the embryonic legitimate electronic music distribution market. And looking at the track records, RIAA vs. small guy is a very one-sided legal battle.
To fight big test cases like this, the pro's set up zillions of minor precedents first to strengthen their argument, and they don't even look at the courtroom for the big case until they're pretty likely to win it. This guy seems to have none of that groundwork in place, and is basically flying blind.
This could be yet another case of a fool with noble intentions doing far more harm than good, which is not excellent at all.
My point is that he's writing as if he's buying and selling the same way as a CD, when there are earlier questions that need to be answered, such as whether this constitutes copying the material or whether it's a transfer. With a CD, it's obvious, but using pure electronics, it's not.
You can't compare the right to transfer a product until you've established that a transfer (and not, for example, a copy being made) is actually what is happening, and that question has no useful parallel with the hardware case.
If he's proposing to make a copy, he probably requires explicit permission to do so under standard copyright law. I think it would be tough to argue that no copying is involved, even if he deletes it from his system later.
If you're going to argue it's a transfer of licence, you probably need some sort of permission for that, too. I don't know of any jurisdiction where copyright law explicitly allows this, or requires a specific exemption to make it against the rules. I'd be curious to know how this works if you sell on a CD or cassette holding copyright material; presumably there's some implicit permission to transfer granted when you buy it (or it's been technically illegal all the time, but no-one ever complained). Any IP lawyers out there?
At any rate, personally, I think this is just asking to be made an example by the RIAA, and could turn out to be a very expensive mistake.:-(
IOWs, Europe alone is roughly a third larger than the US. Now consider markets in the rest of the world as well, and the law in the US isn't really as important to the economics of a company like Microsoft as a lot of people assume it is.
Realistically, any attempt to force upgrades by DRM-izing documents would more likely result in a mass rejection of upgrades to that DRM-enabled Office version. Even if people in the US upgraded, everyone else would carry on regardless, and the US would wind up sufficiently damaged by the lack of ability to exchange documents in a de facto standard format with outside bodies that something would have to give.
But those figures aren't the relevant ones. The point is that Sun could, and probably would, hire just as many lawyers as Microsoft and fight them all the way to the highest courts in the land.
Any company can fix the problems with open source software because they can and do employ developers.
A lot of companies don't employ developers, particularly the smaller ones who are most vulnerable to an OSS project dying.
Even if you do, the cost of entry is simply too high a price for many. I've looked at some of the source code for Mozilla and OpenOffice, and it was line noise to me. (I'm a professional programmer with several years of experience using all of the relevant languages and technologies in other contexts.) The frameworks involved are simply too large to grok without background material.
In real companies working on large (MLOC) projects, one of the biggest problems is inadequate documentation when the project first gets going. As the early developers move to other projects or leave, the knowledge of "why" is lost, and all that remains is the "how". As knowledge of the "how" also fades over time, it is impossible to replace without the "why". Eventually, the project becomes usable but effectively unmaintainable, because even if you bring in the smartest programmers in the world, they can't find their way around millions of lines of code without background knowledge.
This is why almost all of the development on each of the major projects is now done by a very small group of people, many of them sponsored by major organisations to work on it full-time. The "mass contribution" idea simply doesn't scale in practice, on current evidence.
Sure, there are a very few people out there with enough knowledge to work effectively on a large OSS project without months getting up to speed, but for any given project, it's a vanishingly small number. Unless you can find one, if you want to make anything more than a trivial change, you're all out of luck. This is why the "you're safe, anyone can change it" claims are misleading.
Certifying the developers wont help if the management is still pushing pushing to ship software with inadequate testing.
It will if those developers are personally responsible for the work, accountable to a supervisory professional body, and liable to lose their professional status and hence livelihood if they make a serious mistake. All the managers in the world won't get a known bad product out the door at that point, because every professional developer will tell them where to go. It's like unionisation, but with a somewhat different (and arguably less dangerous) slant.
The problem of course, is how to form a suitable supervisory body to do the accreditation. I sure as hell wouldn't trust most of the guys I've worked with to sit in judgement over the coding practices of another. Almost no-one invests the time and effort to get their skills to that level, because in most software development industries it's not worth it unless you're doing it as much out of interest and professionalism as out of a desire to earn your pay. In civil engineering, we have a long history of success stories and failures to provide concrete evidence (no pun intended) of what works and what doesn't. There is no analogue in software development today, and without it, who's to say what really constitutes "best practice"?
I have three brothers and a father who access the Internet via dial up. Every one of them was hit with the MS Blaster worm. Do you know why they didn't patch their systems? Because there are so many patches and service packs that it takes hours per month to download them all via modem.
If, OTOH, they'd installed any of the freely available personal firewalls when they set up their PCs -- a one-off action that any competent person would take before connecting any machine to the Internet -- they wouldn't have had the problem.
Yes, Microsoft's patching system is annoying, particularly for dial-up users, and could be much better. But please don't use it as an excuse for being naive and failing to do even elementary homework before using a powerful and complex system in ways you don't understand.
You wouldn't expect a teenager to get into a car and drive it competently and safely without any lessons. You wouldn't expect to buy a VCR and have it record your favourite programmes without reading how to set the timer. Why people assume you can use an Internet-connected PC -- a much more complicated and powerful tool -- safely and correctly, without reading even the most basic newbie advice, is beyond me. (I'm guessing "anyone can do it in two minutes" style marketing from certain major ISPs has a lot to do with it...)
Well, when you mention the features to your customers, you should present a disclaimer saying that the features "only worked on our test cases at the times they were tested".
Yes, this is exactly the problem. What the hell else could customers reasonably expect? Anyone who thinks software is perfectly engineered without explicit claims to that effect has no business being a consumer of software, and the law has no business protecting them. This is why we have concepts of "common sense", "reasonable assumptions", "good faith", etc.
Customers should have a duty of investigation when it comes to making a purchase, and if they fail to do even basic homework or to understand the fundamental nature of the product they're purchasing, they are the negligent ones. If a customer loses all of their data because a hard drive fails after two years and they never once backed up, is it the hard drive manufacturer's fault?
On the flip side, the software companies should have a duty of reasonable disclosure in good faith: they should be required to point out anything significant that a customer might not reasonably be expected to determine on their own. Their liability should begin if and when they fail to meet that obligation, not just the first time something goes wrong, whether or not they could reasonably have done anything about it.
Why [should companies have a right to ban reverse engineering their software]? If I buy a car, I can dig around under the hood to my heart's content. If I buy a book, I can study the writing style.
I guess the difference is the concept of a "trade secret". You can look under the hood of the car, but you can't tell what equipment was used to make and test the parts, and thus can't directly compete with the car manufacturer based on that knowledge.
Similarly, you can study the writing style, but you don't get access to the same editorial input the author had, nor his notes for the forthcoming next book in the series. You don't get the right to compete with him based on his own work.
With software, if you can reverse engineer it, you potentially have access to a lot of trade secrets, and thus the ability to compete with someone based on his own work rather than yours. Of course, there's an argument that this is a good thing, improving competition in the market, but that's basically the same philosophical argument as saying copyright on software should be abolished, and has the same drawbacks as well.
If you want to study someone's coding techniques and the results of their R&D, you can approach them and offer to make them a deal for those rights, which they may accept for mututally agreeable compensation if they wish. But that's not what you're buying when you pay for the shrinkwrap, and if it says so clearly when you make that purchase, I don't see either a moral or a legal problem with that.
Reverse engineering, and its implications for future development by the originator and the reverser, is just an inherent consideration with information-based resources, where those implications don't translate to a physical resource context.
...Almost no-one has the knowledge, skill and time to analyse the code to the required depth and then make fixes such as those you suggest. The "anyone can fix it" claim of OSS is mostly an illusory benefit for large-scale projects like Linux, Apache or Mozilla.
"This software is provided as-is, and comes with no warranty, explicit or implied, including but not limited to fitness for any particular purpose. In the event of any claim, <supplier>'s liability will not extend beyond the purchase price of the product. This product is not intended for use in safety-critical situations, including but not limited to life-support systems, air traffic control systems, power station control systems and military applications."
You see words to that effect on almost every piece of software you buy, commercial or free, open or closed. It basically says "We take no responsibility for anything, use this software at your peril." And yet, since it's 105% standard practice to include it, everyone gets away with it.
Now, you can argue this is unreasonable, that if I'm using your database software and it corrupts all my data causing my business to fail, you should have some liability for my losses. You can (and people around here frequently do) argue that providing an OS that is not 100% secure should make you liable for downtime in the event of a crack, worm or whatever.
But the simple truth is that these things cost. You get ever decreasing returns on QA investments. Producing a 99% bug-free program is much harder than producing a 95% bug-free one. Producing a program safe enough to use in health equipment or air traffic control requires vastly more resources than the average consumer is prepared to finance. In software, as in most things, to an extent you do get what you pay for. If you want all these guarantees, you gotta put your money where your mouth is.
This not to say that software companies (or anyone else) should be allowed to engage in blatantly unreasonable marketing, such as making claims they know to be false, of course. This is where the points cited in the article make sense: they're not saying "manufacturers should be liable for every little defect", they're saying "manufacturers must make reasonable claims about their product" and "manufacturers must not knowingly screw customers". There's a big difference between that and what a lot of comments on this thread seem to want, and the difference is practicality.
Similarly, a warning that an Internet-connected computer is not guaranteed to be completely secure and you should back up regularly would be fair enough. However, the labels you cite are meaningless, because everyone would include them as soon as the law required it, and thus they gain nothing.
I've seen plenty of idiots in charge of things, but mercifully haven't worked under one for a while.
I think good management is a culture that comes down from the top. In the company where I work, there are around 50 of us. The MD (also owner of the company) is a very down-to-earth guy, knows the technical side but is also the kind of manager who reminds you to take regular breaks because they're good for you. He hired a smart guy to lead the half of the company I work in, and he in turn hired/promoted smart team leaders for each individual project. Working conditions are among the best I've ever seen, and almost no-one ever leaves...
Firstly, Microsoft were allegedly guilty of numerous accounting irregularities in the late 90s. They were investigated by the SEC, resulting in effectively a promise not to misbehave in future (with no admission of guilt) and the issue being dropped. Strangely, this happened only a year or so from the time the DoJ settled their antitrust suit against Microsoft with little more than a slapped wrist.
Secondly, there's even a guy who has a whole web page making detailed claims about Microsoft's dubious accounting practices. Apparently he actually sends off recorded copies of these findings to several significant individuals at places like the SEC and Microsoft, since this would prove charges against them in court at a later stage if they don't act on them appropriately. Sorry I can't find the link right now, but several people have mentioned the page on/. before, so it's bound to turn up sooner or later.
At any rate, if you really believe that Microsoft's only potential financial problem is the size of its bank balance, you should probably do a little more research.
Recent versions of MS Outlook won't let you open executable attachments at all, as a "security measure", so they pretty much trump your argument about difficulty in running executable code by mistake.
Of course, that also makes the software completely useless if I actually do want to mail a current build of an executable to my mate Joe in Testing.
In fairness, the article you cite is based on six-year-old policy, well before both the recent world-wide "killer" worms/viruses and before the wave of many actual exploits kicked in. It's quite possible the policy has changed in that time.
And of course, the quote was right. Windows 2000 was much more stable than any previous Windows OS, maybe even comparable to a Unix platform if both were set up by a reasonably competent sysadmin. Such a shame about XP...;-)
There was nothing wrong with a load of Enron shares in your portfolio a few years ago, either...
Yes, Microsoft is about money, but I wouldn't want to risk my investment money in a company with the medium term business issues Microsoft currently face, or in a company that engages in the same sorts of dubious accounting practices as Enron (don't ask, Google) and just hasn't been caught yet.
u want genue new ideas perfectly glued together ? Perl6 is coming go read Lary Wall - Apocalypses on perl.com. Then u feel your head will blow up...ok go read Damian Conway - Exgesises...
Thanks for the tip. I had a read of both articles, and noticed this inspired piece of refinement in the conclusion of Damian's column:
What we used to write as:
sub feed {
my ($who, $how_much, @what) = @_; ...
}
we now write as:
sub feed ($who, $how_much, *@what) { ...
}
I'm sure we'll all rest easier knowing that radical new techniques such as this are still being developed. Perhaps in time, they will even become popular in more mainstream languages like C or Java.
From a genuine interview with a US high school principal (names omitted for obvious reasons)...
Q: What's the first thing you consider when you're planning a school trip?
A: How not to get sued.
It's just sad, really. With a government owned by corporations and a "sue anyone" mentality apparently prevalent amongst much of the population (witness the average response to any sort of even slightly unfortunate incident here on/.) you're heading for a non-existent education and a workforce of unfit and unskilled adults in 20-30 years unless something starts to change RSN.
Yes, I know what so-called web services are (and aren't), thanks. It was intended to be an ironic comment: look which way most of the big companies with copyright infringement problems are pushing.
Slashdot Mirror
Consider the numerous instances where something is supplied for use on a single PC only (pretty much any "OEM" software, for example). I don't know of any test cases either way, but there's certainly historical precedent, if not legal, for the idea that you buy something at one price with the right to transfer it, and another (presumably cheaper) price without that right. There's a lot of merit to that position as well, as long as the consumer isn't misled during the purchase.
Of course it's a copy if you burn it to CD. The question is whether the copying process is allowed by the terms under which you paid for the material, or otherwise permitted by the law.
I'm not sure those claims are compatible.
Here, at last, we have a major player offering a realistically-priced, legal, electronic means of distribution for music. This is something people have been crying out for since the Internet discovered file transfer, and something I'm sure many of us would want to encourage.
So this guy goes along, and turns it into one big test case. That might be beneficial if it works out, though it's not guaranteed. If it doesn't work out, he's potentially just shooting huge great holes into the embryonic legitimate electronic music distribution market. And looking at the track records, RIAA vs. small guy is a very one-sided legal battle.
To fight big test cases like this, the pro's set up zillions of minor precedents first to strengthen their argument, and they don't even look at the courtroom for the big case until they're pretty likely to win it. This guy seems to have none of that groundwork in place, and is basically flying blind.
This could be yet another case of a fool with noble intentions doing far more harm than good, which is not excellent at all.
Yes, I understand the nature of the story.
My point is that he's writing as if he's buying and selling the same way as a CD, when there are earlier questions that need to be answered, such as whether this constitutes copying the material or whether it's a transfer. With a CD, it's obvious, but using pure electronics, it's not.
You can't compare the right to transfer a product until you've established that a transfer (and not, for example, a copy being made) is actually what is happening, and that question has no useful parallel with the hardware case.
Yes, I can read, thanks. However, the relevant question is not what he considers to be copying, but what the law does.
If he's proposing to make a copy, he probably requires explicit permission to do so under standard copyright law. I think it would be tough to argue that no copying is involved, even if he deletes it from his system later.
If you're going to argue it's a transfer of licence, you probably need some sort of permission for that, too. I don't know of any jurisdiction where copyright law explicitly allows this, or requires a specific exemption to make it against the rules. I'd be curious to know how this works if you sell on a CD or cassette holding copyright material; presumably there's some implicit permission to transfer granted when you buy it (or it's been technically illegal all the time, but no-one ever complained). Any IP lawyers out there?
At any rate, personally, I think this is just asking to be made an example by the RIAA, and could turn out to be a very expensive mistake. :-(
I was about to post the exact same thing...
To bring a sense of perspective to this, let's contrast the US and Europe.
US: total population approx 280m.
EU: total population approx 380m.
IOWs, Europe alone is roughly a third larger than the US. Now consider markets in the rest of the world as well, and the law in the US isn't really as important to the economics of a company like Microsoft as a lot of people assume it is.
Realistically, any attempt to force upgrades by DRM-izing documents would more likely result in a mass rejection of upgrades to that DRM-enabled Office version. Even if people in the US upgraded, everyone else would carry on regardless, and the US would wind up sufficiently damaged by the lack of ability to exchange documents in a de facto standard format with outside bodies that something would have to give.
But those figures aren't the relevant ones. The point is that Sun could, and probably would, hire just as many lawyers as Microsoft and fight them all the way to the highest courts in the land.
A lot of companies don't employ developers, particularly the smaller ones who are most vulnerable to an OSS project dying.
Even if you do, the cost of entry is simply too high a price for many. I've looked at some of the source code for Mozilla and OpenOffice, and it was line noise to me. (I'm a professional programmer with several years of experience using all of the relevant languages and technologies in other contexts.) The frameworks involved are simply too large to grok without background material.
In real companies working on large (MLOC) projects, one of the biggest problems is inadequate documentation when the project first gets going. As the early developers move to other projects or leave, the knowledge of "why" is lost, and all that remains is the "how". As knowledge of the "how" also fades over time, it is impossible to replace without the "why". Eventually, the project becomes usable but effectively unmaintainable, because even if you bring in the smartest programmers in the world, they can't find their way around millions of lines of code without background knowledge.
This is why almost all of the development on each of the major projects is now done by a very small group of people, many of them sponsored by major organisations to work on it full-time. The "mass contribution" idea simply doesn't scale in practice, on current evidence.
Sure, there are a very few people out there with enough knowledge to work effectively on a large OSS project without months getting up to speed, but for any given project, it's a vanishingly small number. Unless you can find one, if you want to make anything more than a trivial change, you're all out of luck. This is why the "you're safe, anyone can change it" claims are misleading.
It will if those developers are personally responsible for the work, accountable to a supervisory professional body, and liable to lose their professional status and hence livelihood if they make a serious mistake. All the managers in the world won't get a known bad product out the door at that point, because every professional developer will tell them where to go. It's like unionisation, but with a somewhat different (and arguably less dangerous) slant.
The problem of course, is how to form a suitable supervisory body to do the accreditation. I sure as hell wouldn't trust most of the guys I've worked with to sit in judgement over the coding practices of another. Almost no-one invests the time and effort to get their skills to that level, because in most software development industries it's not worth it unless you're doing it as much out of interest and professionalism as out of a desire to earn your pay. In civil engineering, we have a long history of success stories and failures to provide concrete evidence (no pun intended) of what works and what doesn't. There is no analogue in software development today, and without it, who's to say what really constitutes "best practice"?
If, OTOH, they'd installed any of the freely available personal firewalls when they set up their PCs -- a one-off action that any competent person would take before connecting any machine to the Internet -- they wouldn't have had the problem.
Yes, Microsoft's patching system is annoying, particularly for dial-up users, and could be much better. But please don't use it as an excuse for being naive and failing to do even elementary homework before using a powerful and complex system in ways you don't understand.
You wouldn't expect a teenager to get into a car and drive it competently and safely without any lessons. You wouldn't expect to buy a VCR and have it record your favourite programmes without reading how to set the timer. Why people assume you can use an Internet-connected PC -- a much more complicated and powerful tool -- safely and correctly, without reading even the most basic newbie advice, is beyond me. (I'm guessing "anyone can do it in two minutes" style marketing from certain major ISPs has a lot to do with it...)
Yes, this is exactly the problem. What the hell else could customers reasonably expect? Anyone who thinks software is perfectly engineered without explicit claims to that effect has no business being a consumer of software, and the law has no business protecting them. This is why we have concepts of "common sense", "reasonable assumptions", "good faith", etc.
Customers should have a duty of investigation when it comes to making a purchase, and if they fail to do even basic homework or to understand the fundamental nature of the product they're purchasing, they are the negligent ones. If a customer loses all of their data because a hard drive fails after two years and they never once backed up, is it the hard drive manufacturer's fault?
On the flip side, the software companies should have a duty of reasonable disclosure in good faith: they should be required to point out anything significant that a customer might not reasonably be expected to determine on their own. Their liability should begin if and when they fail to meet that obligation, not just the first time something goes wrong, whether or not they could reasonably have done anything about it.
I guess the difference is the concept of a "trade secret". You can look under the hood of the car, but you can't tell what equipment was used to make and test the parts, and thus can't directly compete with the car manufacturer based on that knowledge.
Similarly, you can study the writing style, but you don't get access to the same editorial input the author had, nor his notes for the forthcoming next book in the series. You don't get the right to compete with him based on his own work.
With software, if you can reverse engineer it, you potentially have access to a lot of trade secrets, and thus the ability to compete with someone based on his own work rather than yours. Of course, there's an argument that this is a good thing, improving competition in the market, but that's basically the same philosophical argument as saying copyright on software should be abolished, and has the same drawbacks as well.
If you want to study someone's coding techniques and the results of their R&D, you can approach them and offer to make them a deal for those rights, which they may accept for mututally agreeable compensation if they wish. But that's not what you're buying when you pay for the shrinkwrap, and if it says so clearly when you make that purchase, I don't see either a moral or a legal problem with that.
Reverse engineering, and its implications for future development by the originator and the reverser, is just an inherent consideration with information-based resources, where those implications don't translate to a physical resource context.
...Almost no-one has the knowledge, skill and time to analyse the code to the required depth and then make fixes such as those you suggest. The "anyone can fix it" claim of OSS is mostly an illusory benefit for large-scale projects like Linux, Apache or Mozilla.
[Reaching into overcoat] Now, can anyone tell me what's wrong with this burger?
(Sorry, someone had to...)
But then Mozilla 1.4 wouldn't save the file, so I had to use IE instead.
You mean like this?
You see words to that effect on almost every piece of software you buy, commercial or free, open or closed. It basically says "We take no responsibility for anything, use this software at your peril." And yet, since it's 105% standard practice to include it, everyone gets away with it.
Now, you can argue this is unreasonable, that if I'm using your database software and it corrupts all my data causing my business to fail, you should have some liability for my losses. You can (and people around here frequently do) argue that providing an OS that is not 100% secure should make you liable for downtime in the event of a crack, worm or whatever.
But the simple truth is that these things cost. You get ever decreasing returns on QA investments. Producing a 99% bug-free program is much harder than producing a 95% bug-free one. Producing a program safe enough to use in health equipment or air traffic control requires vastly more resources than the average consumer is prepared to finance. In software, as in most things, to an extent you do get what you pay for. If you want all these guarantees, you gotta put your money where your mouth is.
This not to say that software companies (or anyone else) should be allowed to engage in blatantly unreasonable marketing, such as making claims they know to be false, of course. This is where the points cited in the article make sense: they're not saying "manufacturers should be liable for every little defect", they're saying "manufacturers must make reasonable claims about their product" and "manufacturers must not knowingly screw customers". There's a big difference between that and what a lot of comments on this thread seem to want, and the difference is practicality.
Similarly, a warning that an Internet-connected computer is not guaranteed to be completely secure and you should back up regularly would be fair enough. However, the labels you cite are meaningless, because everyone would include them as soon as the law required it, and thus they gain nothing.
I've seen plenty of idiots in charge of things, but mercifully haven't worked under one for a while.
I think good management is a culture that comes down from the top. In the company where I work, there are around 50 of us. The MD (also owner of the company) is a very down-to-earth guy, knows the technical side but is also the kind of manager who reminds you to take regular breaks because they're good for you. He hired a smart guy to lead the half of the company I work in, and he in turn hired/promoted smart team leaders for each individual project. Working conditions are among the best I've ever seen, and almost no-one ever leaves...
I'm afraid you've missed one or two things.
Firstly, Microsoft were allegedly guilty of numerous accounting irregularities in the late 90s. They were investigated by the SEC, resulting in effectively a promise not to misbehave in future (with no admission of guilt) and the issue being dropped. Strangely, this happened only a year or so from the time the DoJ settled their antitrust suit against Microsoft with little more than a slapped wrist.
Secondly, there's even a guy who has a whole web page making detailed claims about Microsoft's dubious accounting practices. Apparently he actually sends off recorded copies of these findings to several significant individuals at places like the SEC and Microsoft, since this would prove charges against them in court at a later stage if they don't act on them appropriately. Sorry I can't find the link right now, but several people have mentioned the page on /. before, so it's bound to turn up sooner or later.
At any rate, if you really believe that Microsoft's only potential financial problem is the size of its bank balance, you should probably do a little more research.
Recent versions of MS Outlook won't let you open executable attachments at all, as a "security measure", so they pretty much trump your argument about difficulty in running executable code by mistake.
Of course, that also makes the software completely useless if I actually do want to mail a current build of an executable to my mate Joe in Testing.
In fairness, the article you cite is based on six-year-old policy, well before both the recent world-wide "killer" worms/viruses and before the wave of many actual exploits kicked in. It's quite possible the policy has changed in that time.
And of course, the quote was right. Windows 2000 was much more stable than any previous Windows OS, maybe even comparable to a Unix platform if both were set up by a reasonably competent sysadmin. Such a shame about XP... ;-)
There was nothing wrong with a load of Enron shares in your portfolio a few years ago, either...
Yes, Microsoft is about money, but I wouldn't want to risk my investment money in a company with the medium term business issues Microsoft currently face, or in a company that engages in the same sorts of dubious accounting practices as Enron (don't ask, Google) and just hasn't been caught yet.
Thanks for the tip. I had a read of both articles, and noticed this inspired piece of refinement in the conclusion of Damian's column:
I'm sure we'll all rest easier knowing that radical new techniques such as this are still being developed. Perhaps in time, they will even become popular in more mainstream languages like C or Java.
From a genuine interview with a US high school principal (names omitted for obvious reasons)...
Q: What's the first thing you consider when you're planning a school trip?
A: How not to get sued.
It's just sad, really. With a government owned by corporations and a "sue anyone" mentality apparently prevalent amongst much of the population (witness the average response to any sort of even slightly unfortunate incident here on /.) you're heading for a non-existent education and a workforce of unfit and unskilled adults in 20-30 years unless something starts to change RSN.
Yes, I know what so-called web services are (and aren't), thanks. It was intended to be an ironic comment: look which way most of the big companies with copyright infringement problems are pushing.