Yeah, I noticed that too. They've gone from 7.3 billion in net income in 2001, to 12.5 billion in 2006. At this rate of spiraling downward, their collapse is imminent.
What puzzles me is how people acting out completely uninformed/. fantasies about Microsoft's demise, or the evils of software patents, or whatever, get rated "5, Insightful." Actually, I'm not puzzled at all; this is known as "preaching to the choir."
But really, the trouble here is that there's a lot of uninformed bashing going on, by people who are not familiar with either patents or the software industry. Please talk to some lawyers or legal scholars or people who actually deal with large corporate patent portfolios. You will hear different -- not necessarily correct, mind you, but different -- words from the sort of reflexive geek ranting one gets here.
I play Scrabble regularly over the web using the Internet Scrabble Club's Java client. I've used it under Windows, Linux, and Java. It's got some tics, but it's not bad. I wonder whether Hasbro will get on their ass about it as well.
No no no no no, a thousand times no. This sort of misrepresentation is what gives peer-to-peer a bad name.
Groove's major contributions are 1) that it encrypts everything both over the wire and on disk, without any user intervention (i.e., it's a UI improvement over PGP), 2) that it handles the firewall problem (see my earlier comment), and 3) that it handles synchronization when users are sometimes online, sometimes offline.
Check out the O'Reilly book on "Disruptive Technologies." There's a section in there on Groove's security model, written by Walt Tuvell and Nimisha Asthagiri, both of whom were Groove security designers at the time.
Get it through your heads: Groove is a tool for small teams spread across companies to work together. It is a set of technologies to enable that.
Has captwheeler actually used Groove? It seems doubtful; it appears that his description of Groove comes from a cursory glance at the website.
Groove is a tool to help groups work together across corporate boundaries. It is not a web tool; it uses a totally separate set of protocols. It uses the Simple Symmetric Transfer Protocol when it's in peer-to-peer mode. It tries to connect directly to remote clients, but if that fails -- because, say, there's a firewall in the middle -- the Groove client can connect to remote "relay servers," which are store-and-forward machines. The remote Groove client sitting behind the firewall then downloads the data from its relay server.
Groove is both a platform and an app. The platform is a set of functions to make other apps "Groovy" -- i.e., so that you can make your app support peer-to-peer groupware functions. The app is a collection of tools -- IM, chat, a notepad, a little drawing tool, file sharing, and so forth -- that use the Groove libraries. I've always viewed the Groove app itself as a proof of concept for the platform; building a community of developers around the platform has always been Groove's goal.
Please don't write any description of the product unless you actually know what it does. And please don't think you know what it does just because you've looked at Groove's website. That sort of uniformed spewage gives Slashdot a bad name.
Google has just as much of a problem as Microsoft does: it's centralized. The message of the Net -- to me -- is that decentralization is how we have to move. Relying on a search engine run by a single organization -- which can be silenced by governments or corporations -- is a bad idea generally. I love Google, but the sooner we can move away from the centralized model, the better.
You're trying to fix an inherently non-technological problem with a technological solution. This is the same sort of philosophy that led us to FreeNet, which is really a wonderful product; the problem is that the governments that we'd circumvent with FreeNet are the same governments that would probably make FreeNet illegal.
You'll want to be more paranoid in your response to a repressive government. Imagine that your government has complete control over what's on your computer. Imagine that a certain set of programs is legal, and everything not in that set is expressly forbidden. Anyone running SSH, say, is subject to execution. I think this is a valid way to set up the problem of how to get around the Chinese government. Our problem is not, fundamentally, how to get around firewalls.
I believe Ron Rivest had an idea about how to handle spam: make anyone who sends email to you perform a small computational task in order for the message to get through. The task would be something like factoring an N-bit number, with N tweaked to adjust the difficulty. (Actually, I believe they used a problem whose difficulty is known exactly, whereas the computational complexity of factoring is not presently known.) The idea is that only people who send out huge amounts of mail -- like spammers -- would find the total computational challenge daunting. The rest of us, sending even 300 messages a day, would see no speed penalty. I like the idea.
If someone can find a citation on this, that would be great. Rivest's paper was cited in Peer-To-Peer: Harnessing The Power Of Disruptive Technologies, published by O'Reilly and edited by Andy Oram. I wish I had a copy of it on me.
I think we all agree that abuse of the rental car is rare. Hence it seems to me that a less restrictive policy is best. The rental company should do exactly what it needs to in order to protect its interests, and nothing more. Just like free-speech laws: the government could certainly crack down on any vaguely offensive speech that has any potential to harm other people. But it doesn't. Instead, it attacks any harmful acts that result from free speech -- say, people being lynched after a fiery speaker talks to a mob. We want to punish violators, not law-abiding renters.
I dislike the ``what do you care if they monitor you?" approach. This is a license for any organization -- government, company, whatever -- to monitor your every action. ``You're a law-abiding citizen: surely you have nothing to hide. So here: let us put a Clipper chip in your phone." The fact that you're a law-abiding citizen and have nothing to hide is precisely why you shouldn't have your rights limited.
I see your point. It's similar to the objection that a lot of people -- myself included -- have to Clipper and CALEA. There, the issue is that the FBI can wiretap much more easily than they could before. They don't need to break into someone's house anymore; now all they have to do is get the court order (which, admittedly, might be difficult) and flip a switch at the telco's office. The same objection might hold against videotaping in Florida.
I can see the system getting out of hand if police officers don't control the computer's (presumably) high rate of false positives. If they monitor false positives, then it seems to me that the computer would just be a supplement to good police work -- as opposed to supplanting it.
I thought this was unconstitutional at first, but it's really not. Yes, we'd be creeped out if cops photographed us. But that's not really the issue. The computer is just like a police officer who happens to have a very good memory for faces. (Or maybe a bad memory, depending on the algorithm. That's immaterial.) He walks down the street, looking around at peoples' faces. If he finds someone who matches a most-wanted poster that he saw, he stops that person for questioning.
It's likely that a computer system would have a high rate of false positives. So just have human monitors look over the people that the computer has flagged. If you distrust this system, then you distrust human police officers and you reject the system we have now.
Slashdot Mirror
What puzzles me is how people acting out completely uninformed /. fantasies about Microsoft's demise, or the evils of software patents, or whatever, get rated "5, Insightful." Actually, I'm not puzzled at all; this is known as "preaching to the choir."
Incidentally, y'all might want to check out an article by Paul Graham whose premise is that "if you're against software patents, you're against patents in general."
But really, the trouble here is that there's a lot of uninformed bashing going on, by people who are not familiar with either patents or the software industry. Please talk to some lawyers or legal scholars or people who actually deal with large corporate patent portfolios. You will hear different -- not necessarily correct, mind you, but different -- words from the sort of reflexive geek ranting one gets here.
I play Scrabble regularly over the web using the Internet Scrabble Club's Java client. I've used it under Windows, Linux, and Java. It's got some tics, but it's not bad. I wonder whether Hasbro will get on their ass about it as well.
No no no no no, a thousand times no. This sort of misrepresentation is what gives peer-to-peer a bad name.
Groove's major contributions are 1) that it encrypts everything both over the wire and on disk, without any user intervention (i.e., it's a UI improvement over PGP), 2) that it handles the firewall problem (see my earlier comment), and 3) that it handles synchronization when users are sometimes online, sometimes offline.
Check out the O'Reilly book on "Disruptive Technologies." There's a section in there on Groove's security model, written by Walt Tuvell and Nimisha Asthagiri, both of whom were Groove security designers at the time.
Get it through your heads: Groove is a tool for small teams spread across companies to work together. It is a set of technologies to enable that.
Groove is a tool to help groups work together across corporate boundaries. It is not a web tool; it uses a totally separate set of protocols. It uses the Simple Symmetric Transfer Protocol when it's in peer-to-peer mode. It tries to connect directly to remote clients, but if that fails -- because, say, there's a firewall in the middle -- the Groove client can connect to remote "relay servers," which are store-and-forward machines. The remote Groove client sitting behind the firewall then downloads the data from its relay server.
Groove is both a platform and an app. The platform is a set of functions to make other apps "Groovy" -- i.e., so that you can make your app support peer-to-peer groupware functions. The app is a collection of tools -- IM, chat, a notepad, a little drawing tool, file sharing, and so forth -- that use the Groove libraries. I've always viewed the Groove app itself as a proof of concept for the platform; building a community of developers around the platform has always been Groove's goal.
Please don't write any description of the product unless you actually know what it does. And please don't think you know what it does just because you've looked at Groove's website. That sort of uniformed spewage gives Slashdot a bad name.
Google has just as much of a problem as Microsoft does: it's centralized. The message of the Net -- to me -- is that decentralization is how we have to move. Relying on a search engine run by a single organization -- which can be silenced by governments or corporations -- is a bad idea generally. I love Google, but the sooner we can move away from the centralized model, the better.
(Note that Google is on the record as believing that peer-to-peer search engines solve the wrong problem, but I think they're ignoring the legitimate concerns about centralization that P2P solves.)
You're trying to fix an inherently non-technological problem with a technological solution. This is the same sort of philosophy that led us to FreeNet, which is really a wonderful product; the problem is that the governments that we'd circumvent with FreeNet are the same governments that would probably make FreeNet illegal.
You'll want to be more paranoid in your response to a repressive government. Imagine that your government has complete control over what's on your computer. Imagine that a certain set of programs is legal, and everything not in that set is expressly forbidden. Anyone running SSH, say, is subject to execution. I think this is a valid way to set up the problem of how to get around the Chinese government. Our problem is not, fundamentally, how to get around firewalls.
If someone can find a citation on this, that would be great. Rivest's paper was cited in Peer-To-Peer: Harnessing The Power Of Disruptive Technologies, published by O'Reilly and edited by Andy Oram. I wish I had a copy of it on me.
I dislike the ``what do you care if they monitor you?" approach. This is a license for any organization -- government, company, whatever -- to monitor your every action. ``You're a law-abiding citizen: surely you have nothing to hide. So here: let us put a Clipper chip in your phone." The fact that you're a law-abiding citizen and have nothing to hide is precisely why you shouldn't have your rights limited.
I can see the system getting out of hand if police officers don't control the computer's (presumably) high rate of false positives. If they monitor false positives, then it seems to me that the computer would just be a supplement to good police work -- as opposed to supplanting it.
It's likely that a computer system would have a high rate of false positives. So just have human monitors look over the people that the computer has flagged. If you distrust this system, then you distrust human police officers and you reject the system we have now.