It's kind of one of those products that you don't think you have a use for, until you use it accidentally. Then it strikes you as being really handy.
I didn't remember that it existed when a friend brought a PowerBook over to my house and was sitting in the living room, plugged into my LAN; a while later he asked to print something. I said "sure, go for it" figuring he'd put it on a flash drive or something and I'd print it for him, or he'd email it to me. But no, he just sent it to my shared laser printer.
It's also how Apple products do a lot of their "sharing" magic, i.e., seeing other people's photo and audio libraries on your computer.
It's kind of a subtle technology, it's not going to wow people (my friend didn't even understand why what he did was interesting, he just selected the printer from the list in the dialog box), but it works pretty well.
It's not, I think you've basically just described the limitations of the system. They're more or less inherent to it; it's the disruption that occurs as the result of eavesdropping that gives the whole setup much of its security. If that didn't happen, you'd be better off just stringing some copper bell wire and being done with it.
There are other forms of encryption -- conventional Diffie-Hellman public key stuff, for example -- which although I don't think anyone says it's unbreakable, are more appropriate for use when you can't accept the limitations of a quantum system, or where you need a more robust system that can tolerate eavesdropping without compromising the transmission. Using a big enough keysize, you can have reasonably good security; it might not be "perfect forward security," like you'd get with a quantum OTP, but I can't think of too many places where it wouldn't be acceptable.
Well, it would have "no practicality," except for the fact that a quantum link (which is the centerpiece of the whole quantum encryption stuff) lets you transmit that one-time-pad keystream to your recipient, without it being intercepted in transit. It's physically possible, within the bounds of physics as we know them today, to intercept the keystream without altering it.
There are certainly side attacks on the system as a whole; there have got to be places at either end of the quantum link where the keystream exists in an unprotected form and could be intercepted, but it does seem like a system like this would be impervious to a completely remote third-party intercept.
I think it's safe to say that no cryptosystem is unbreakable, but I think there are certain features of particular modes of data transmission which may be. Whether or not you think that's significant or trivial depends on your point of view, though.
You know, I don't need to like everything that somebody says in order to agree with one of their points. I think this report hits the nail pretty much on the head; of what I've read of it so far, I think it makes a lot of good points. I think their stance on open source is a little weak, but it's certainly a step in the right direction.
How the authors or the responsible agency feels about globalization, outsourcing, or abortion shouldn't affect what you think of this one report. They could be Nazis--literally--and their point would still be valid if it was well argued and supported by facts. It's just like dealing with a politician that I don't like most of the time, but agree with occasionally. The fact that I think somebody's stance on immigration is stupid, doesn't automatically invalidate whatever opinion they hold on healthcare.
The CED's stances on other issues are irrelevant, unless you can come up with some reason why someone who supports globalization ought to feel a particular way about open standards. They're easily separable issues, and therefore I think your inference (that we ought to engage basically in an ad hominem, attacking the organization and all of their ideas because we might disagree with one or two) is wrong.
The fewer policies the better. There is no end of problems we can point to that resulted from "things that seemed like a good idea at the time".
This is true, and I agree with you heartily on not doing things just for the sake of "doing something." However I think it's important to point out that there are situations, and I think this is one of them, where if you don't take some sort of action you allow something else to occur by default.
In other words, there already IS a policy on electronic documents, it's "use Microsoft products or nobody will read your stuff." Not doing anything simply allows that policy -- unofficial or not -- to remain in effect.
So really you are not weighing the pros and cons of one policy versus no policy, you're weighing a new policy versus the existing one. And frankly, I think the existing one sucks pretty bad.
This isn't quite true. You wouldn't have to convert all of the past documents. As long as they're just sitting in place (on disk or wherever), they're fine in their current formats, provided a open-source interpreter / reader exists. Then they can be converted to the new, open format on demand, when they're accessed or needed. (This isn't much of a trick, I remember old versions of Clarisworks that would do this with old documents: open an old document and it would open, but on save you'd be prompted to create a new file for a the new format. If you really wanted an old version saved you Exported.)
Right now, most of the proprietary formats aren't so bad that we can't break out of them. OpenOffice will read DOC files, for example. So today's DOC files are relatively safe, but that does't mean the ones produced by the next version of Word will be. That's why it's important to move to creating documents in an open format, so you don't get any further locked-in, using whatever worse format MS invents tomorrow.
By stopping using newer versions of the proprietary format/software, you effectively freeze that format in place. You say "no more proprietary additions, no changes." That makes it a lot easier to reverse engineer and write an interpreter that can convert those documents on demand, as they're needed. It's the continual use and updating of documents into proprietary, undocumented formats that's the major problem, because the "moving target" effect makes them basically impossible to reverse-engineer. (Plus I'm waiting for the day when reverse engineering a Word document will be a DMCA violation.)
As long as you stop yourself from getting any deeper in the black hole of vendor lock-in, it's possible (at least right now) to dig yourself out and rescue your old documents using free tools, whenever you need them. Mass-conversion might be nice, since it'll make things a little easier to work with later, but it's really not necessary provided you have open source tools to convert them already (which we do in the case of Word documents, and that's the biggest issue).
Agreed; also, I think that medical research conducted with taxpayer dollars should have to be published openly. I'm not saying that it has to be under the GFDL or anything, but it has to be available for public review, not closed up in some expensive journal that doesn't let you submit anything unless you agree never to publish it elsewhere.
The U.S. government is the biggest single supporter of medical research (that I know of) in the world, I'd sure like to be able to see the results of my money.
If you want to see a 19th or early-20th century business model that's way past its time to die, forget the music industry, take a look at the scientific journals. Ridiculously inflated membership fees for access to nothing but a lot of information that was produced by public monies in the first place, conducted in many cases at public institutions. They're the ultimate middlemen, doing nothing but trading information back and forth, preserving themselves through exclusivity agreements and via the commonly held sentiment that if it's not published there, it can't be good.
Very well said. I tried to say something similar elsewhere, but I think you did a better job.
One thing I'd like to hammer home is the redundancy argument: with closed-source software, everyone pays for the same thing, OVER AND OVER again. I buy Windows, you buy Windows. We both got the exact same thing. With free software, you don't pay for the copy of the software, you pay to make that software better for you. It's only "free" (as in beer) if it does exactly what you want it to do out of the box, if it doesn't do that, you pay someone to customize it for you.
We (especially PHBs) don't think of software that way; we think about it in terms of black boxes. It either does what you want it to do or it doesn't. But that's not necessarily how it has to be; if we weren't all paying a few hundred dollars in order to have what everybody else has, we'd have a lot of money left over to make that software better (however we think 'better' is). Would we pour all the money we're now spending on duplicate copies into development? Probably not, but there would still be a giant net benefit. Paying people to improve something is always better than paying people to make one halfassed thing and then sell it a hundred million times over.
The problem is that traditional closed-source software houses are still stuck in a manufacturing analogy. They want to think of themselves as giant Ford or GM plants, turning out "units" that they then sell for a certain fixed price to everyone. But that's really a crummy way to market software, profitable as it may be in the short run for the people running the factories. It encourages a least-common-denominator approach to making software that results in gear that's inflexible and does many things poorly rather than one thing well.
A better approach would be for smaller software companies to concentrate on making a product that fulfills a particular role or job, while leveraging previously existing products. If you stick to open standards, then everyone can use their own customized tools, but still talk to each other, while at the same time the society gets more and more advanced software.
If there's one single contribution that Free Software makes, in my opinion, it's that. It keeps you from having to pay for the same old crap a hundred times over, and instead gives you the freedom to apply those resources that you would have used to other things -- including making the software better.
Straw man. One individual purcaser of Windows doesn't matter, but a few thousand or hundred thousand does. And that's the scale we're talking about when you start getting into government mandates.
If the government decides to use Format X, not only do all of the government's systems have to be upgraded to use this format, but everyone who wants to interact with the government needs to toe the line as well. That was the problem in Massachusetts: by using Microsoft Word, they were effectively telling citizens "If you want access to government archives, you have to go buy this program, because this is the format we're going to send you stuff in." And if the program in question only runs on one operating system, the required purchase is that much greater. OSes that it doesn't exist for are out of the running from the start. Same if it only runs on one architecture. (Seen many Sparcstations lately? Yeah, me neither.)
Of course, people really don't run out and purchase things in response to a government manadate, after the fact; if they're intelligent, they try to plan ahead. Thus the purchasing decisions are sometimes made ahead of the official standard, making the cost and scale hard to appreciate. If you know that your customer uses a particular OS/word-processing/collaboration suite, you probably would start off your list of possible purchase options with stuff that's compatible. And Microsoft works hard to ensure that if the people on the far end are using their gear, the only option you have to talk to them is also MS gear.
How much more diverse would the PC field be right now, if it wasn't for Microsoft Windows and Office? I'm willing to bet quite a bit. A whole lot of niche OSes and office programs that might have been the perfect tool for somebody's job bit the dust during MS's rise to power, and now we're all basically stuck with a one-size-fits-all-but-nobody-well de facto standard.
This is incredibly shortsighted. You seem to assume that if a lot of money wasn't flowing to Microsoft, it would just be going elsewhere, to China or something. This isn't true, the U.S. could still have it's dominant position in software and information technologies, without having crushed the field in the way that Microsoft has. In fact, the dominance of Microsoft and our economic reliance on it can only be a bad thing in the long run, since it means we're setting ourselves up for a great fall when Microsoft finally gets so big, it can't innovate anymore and becomes vulnerable to a small, more nimble, foreign competitor.
A more open desktop environment, without the prohibitively high licensing fees that Microsoft charges, could lead to a lot more small software companies doing customization and integration work, rather than just everyone accepting a one-size-fits-all "solution" from Microsoft. For example, I could think of a lot of things that we do in my workplace with Microsoft tools that really aren't well suited to the tools we're using, but since they're there and we've paid for them, that's what gets used. If we had been using a free desktop, we might have the budget left over for custom software for everybody; plus, we'd probably be more efficient.
The cost of inefficiency is embedded into the price of Microsoft's products. Making ourselves more efficient -- which free and open tools would do -- and eliminating the overhead of the "Windows tax" would help our economy in the long run. Trying to prop up the trade imbalance and the economy in general with a monopoly that's based not on innovation and consumer choice but on vendor lock-in is just setting ourselves up for a great fall later on down the road.
It's your sort of shortsighted protectionist thinking that leads to trade barriers that do more harm than good, and prevent US firms from competing based on quality and innovation.
If that's the only mention, it's pretty bad. Why? Because "Slashdot" doesn't mean anything to most government types, and if they're the intended readership of this report, then it indicates a pretty poor writing style: dropping a random word that they're not likely to understand in, and then never defining it or using it again.
I hope that there's a glossary somewhere that explains what "Slashdot" is.
I agree with some of what you say, the FCC has certainly exceeded its purpose and mission, and I think a radical cutting-back (along with a complete decapitation and replacement of its leadership) is necessary. However I think you're mistaken to think that we have enough technology to completely replace any form of spectrum management.
I mean, it's going to suck pretty bad for you, if I go and decide it would be cool to set up a 25KW spark-gap transmitter in my garage; that's a transmitter that emits on all EM frequencies simultaneously, limited only by the characteristics of the antenna I use. Using a good high-gain antenna pointed at your house, I don't care what kind of spread spectrum, frequency-hopping systems your cellphone tries to use, it's not going to work when there's enough EMF flying around to make your toaster run without being plugged in. That's pretty much the situation you'd have without some form of coordination; it's the communications equivalent of getting rid of traffic laws because you don't like waiting at lights.
And you could forget about radio telescopes--right now we have mandated "holes" in the spectrum for research use, so that the full gain of a receiver can be used to focus on far-away sources; without interference regulation, you'd raise the noise floor by so much that (given that your receiver can only discriminate between so much signal and noise) you're going to lose a great deal of signal.
The original purpose of the FCC--to coordinate spectrum allocation to maximize public utility--is still a valid one. In fact, I think it's more valid today, with more uses for the spectrum, than ever. Though they're worse than useless in their current state, on their knees with the collective cock of industry in their mouths, that doesn't mean they have to be.
The FCC actually runs itself more like a private corporation than a government entity; or rather, it has some of the worst of both worlds, it seems to be almost entirely profit-driven, but retains all the inefficiencies and bureaucratia common to a large and basically unaccountable government operation.
If you look at the proposals and rulemaking that they spend the most time on, it's perfectly clear that they spend their time on whatever is going to get them the most revenue. When it comes to auctioning off some radio spectrum to the highest bidder, I'll bet the Commissioner has a red phone on her nightstand just to clear up any 11th hour problems as they're pushing things through. But try to get something relatively simple done (like the relatively uncontroversial changes to Amateur Radio) and you'd better be teaching your kids about it, because you may not live that long.
Somewhere, something went very wrong inside that organization, their mission changed from being the electronic and radio equivalent of the Parks Service, to a division of Internal Revenue.
Going to war--really going to war--requires a specific Act of Congress, a Declaration of War. I think the last time this was actually done was after Pearl Harbor, 'wars' since then have been peackeeping or police actions (Truman I believe coined the phrase "police action" in reference to the UN deployment that began Korea).
The cynic's answer to your question is, the reason it's not often done is that it's perceived as being more difficult to garner the support in Congress necessary to pass a Declaration of War than it is to just send some troops in as peacekeepers, more or less start a war, and then get people to support it retroactively. It becomes markedly more difficult to oppose a war once troops are already on the ground there; one can fairly trivially paint one's opponents as unpatriotic, potentially treasonous, at that point, where it would be difficult to do that earlier.
The current War in Iraq is sort of in a grey area between a executive action and an actual, formally declared war, although tending towards the latter; it was approved by Congress via the "Joint Resolution to Authorize the Use of Force in Iraq" (I think I'm getting that name right) in advance of hostilities, but a real Declaration of War wasn't signed. I'm not exactly sure why they didn't go the extra step and just get a formal declaration, it seems as though there was enough support for it, and the Authorization they got is tantamount to one anyway. It serves the same function, but without the fancy name.
I'm not sure whether the War Powers Act effictively did away with Declarations of War and replaced them with the Authorizations that now seem to be more common; personally I always though the symbolism of the Congressional Declaration was useful, and it seems to me that if you have the political support for it, why not do it and remove the possibility of having your procedure questioned later.
I doubt many judges really care, in fact most of them are probably staring at Microsoft Windows while they're writing their opinion. I've known some judges (granted, not appellate level ones) and I don't think they have enough of a groupthink mentality to be collectively insulted by the outcome of one particular case or another, or hold some sort of general predisposed opinion on Microsoft one way or the other. Most of them, I think, are more interested in the intricacies law then in the nasty sausage-factory that is politics anyway.
Although, if I knew the judge wrote his opinions in Word, I'd have to wonder: how much does he hate Clippy, and want to make his master pay?
Actually, while I would normally agree with you about the majority of corporations in existence, this is not necessarily true when dealing with non-profit corporations.
The non-profit corporation is a strange creature; it's by definition a legal entity which cannot have as its primary goal "making money," although it's possible to get personally wealthy by running one or working for one.
I tend to view them with a certain amount of suspicion and skepticism, because while a for-profit corporation has a clear (profit) motive and thus will act predictably under various circumstances, non-profit ones have the potential to be loose cannons. You're really stuck basically trusting their mission statement, until they have some sort of track record.
That said, most of the Free Software-related non-profit corporations have so far proved to be reasonably true to their missions, and their actions have dictated that their primary aim is not to make money (if they had, their actions would have been substantially different). Furthermore, a person looking to make money doesn't incorporate as a nonprofit, because it makes it difficult legally to raise capital and turn profits back to shareholders.
You contradicted yourself. If there are other OSs, Windows is not monopolizing.
Not true. You don't need to control everything completely in order to be a monopoly, you just need to control enough of it to be able to distort the market and act anti-competitively. I'm sure there were other companies besides Standard Oil when it was broken up in the oil business (according to the Wikipedia article, it only controlled 91% of production and 85% of final sales, which I'm willing to bet is on par or lower than Windows' penetration in some markets), but that doesn't mean that Standard Oil wasn't a monopoly or wasn't anti-competitive, or that breaking it up wasn't a good idea.
Companies are monopolies when they become big enough to be price makers (rather than price takers) and block entry of new firms into the marketplace. Microsoft rather clearly does both of those, although one might be able to successfully argue that their hold is slipping somewhat on the entry blockage (however it's interesting that the only real competitor to them that's come out recently is an OS that's given away for free, and it still has trouble competing).
It makes perfect sense to me; every other desktop operating system, when you add their marketshare together, are insufficient to challenge the monopoly that Windows has over the market.
We've all seen the pie charts--it's 90-something percent Windows and a sliver of "everything else." It pains me to say that as a Linux and Mac user, but that's how it is. Even if every non-Windows computer in the world was running the same OS, and not a variety of different ones, Windows would still have a monopoly. It's not a 100% monopoly, but that's not what the word means.
You should get modded up -- that's actually an interesting way of using the flags. If Philips has a patent on using the flags to force viewing of commercials, maybe somebody else will use the same flags to skip them? That wouldn't infringe on the patent, would it?
Of course, they'll probably only ever roll out such flags inside an end-to-end DRMed; a Roman orgy that makes HDMI look like a wet dream by comparison. You'd only be able to view the media on an approved platform, and the approved platform would then be forced to use Philips "no skipping" features. (I propose the system be given the brand name "MindRape(TM)" -- think that'll fly with the focus groups?)
I do think though that implementing a feature like this would push average consumers towards pirated or illegally flashed equipment faster than anything else. Let's face it, Joe Consumer doesn't give a shit about playing HD content on Linux and probably won't own one of the early HDTV sets without HDMI... but skipping commercials? Now that's a feature worth trolling through some shady businesses in Chinatown for. Why? Because it's something you can easily show off. You and your beer buddies are sitting around watching the game you TiVoed the day before; a commercial comes on and everyone groans...but with a sly wink you pick up the remote and--wham!--back to the game. That's a hell of a lot more impressive than "look, I can play imported anime!" or "I can play weird subtitled French porn!" to most people, I'll bet.
Yes, it's sad when FF-ing through commercials is something that people will be able to get a slightly deviant thrill out of doing, like running a red light on a deserted street at night, but I think that's the future we're hurtling towards.
Kind of like somebody who works for a right-wing Christian organization and spends all their time raving about homosexuals. After a certain amount of time, you really start to wonder why they're so fixed on that one topic.
In Dvorak's case, I'd say he's writing in order to punish himself for the dreams he has. Dreams filled with smooth, glossy, white cases; windows with the close-widget lustily positioned on the left side; dark twisted dreams, somewhere in the dirtiest corners of his mind, of a mouse without any buttons.
It's really just public self-flagellation, products of someone deeply in denial.
That's pretty much what the judge said, from what I can tell.
He said 'it's a First Amendment issue, we realize you don't have that in France, but we're rather fond of it here, it takes precedence. Go home.' Of course, the French company didn't go home, they got angry and said they're going to appeal (which they have the right to do), but the judge and the justice system worked as it's supposed to work in this case.
At least it seems like it to me, having only read the Ars article so far. There's nothing inherently bad about the fact that this made it to court; a lot of people are reacting as if the judge ruled the other way, when in fact he didn't. He came down on the side of the First Amendment and free speech rights; in fact he said that was the defendant's only valid points, and yet he still ruled that way.
Actually, I think his ruling was pretty strongly worded, he even dragged out some choice quotes from the USSC to support his point of view. You don't see that a lot in lower-court rulings, it's a sign that there's an actual Constitutional issue at work. It's a heck of a lot better than some technicalities that other free speech / online rights cases have gotten dismissed or ruled one way or the other for.
From TFA: (quoted from the ruling)
Viewfinder's last, and sole persuasive, argument is that the French judgment is "repugnant to fundamental notions of what is decent and just" because Viewfinder's conduct is protected by the First Amendment. The freedoms of speech and of the press protected by the First Amendment are not mere vagaries of legal policy, matters of legal detail that might as easily have been resolved differently by our legislatures or courts. Freedom of speech is a matter of constitutional command, binding even on the will of the majority as expressed in legislation. The very Congress of the United States "shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press." Even among the basic human rights protected by the United States Constitution, the First Amendment occupies a special place. As Justice Cardozo put it, the American legal tradition "reflects a pervasive recognition of th[e] truth" that freedom of speech is "the matrix, the indispensable condition of nearly every other freedom."
Slashdot Mirror
It's kind of one of those products that you don't think you have a use for, until you use it accidentally. Then it strikes you as being really handy.
I didn't remember that it existed when a friend brought a PowerBook over to my house and was sitting in the living room, plugged into my LAN; a while later he asked to print something. I said "sure, go for it" figuring he'd put it on a flash drive or something and I'd print it for him, or he'd email it to me. But no, he just sent it to my shared laser printer.
It's also how Apple products do a lot of their "sharing" magic, i.e., seeing other people's photo and audio libraries on your computer.
It's kind of a subtle technology, it's not going to wow people (my friend didn't even understand why what he did was interesting, he just selected the printer from the list in the dialog box), but it works pretty well.
I'd love to see it get better supported on Linux.
It's not, I think you've basically just described the limitations of the system. They're more or less inherent to it; it's the disruption that occurs as the result of eavesdropping that gives the whole setup much of its security. If that didn't happen, you'd be better off just stringing some copper bell wire and being done with it.
There are other forms of encryption -- conventional Diffie-Hellman public key stuff, for example -- which although I don't think anyone says it's unbreakable, are more appropriate for use when you can't accept the limitations of a quantum system, or where you need a more robust system that can tolerate eavesdropping without compromising the transmission. Using a big enough keysize, you can have reasonably good security; it might not be "perfect forward security," like you'd get with a quantum OTP, but I can't think of too many places where it wouldn't be acceptable.
Well, it would have "no practicality," except for the fact that a quantum link (which is the centerpiece of the whole quantum encryption stuff) lets you transmit that one-time-pad keystream to your recipient, without it being intercepted in transit. It's physically possible, within the bounds of physics as we know them today, to intercept the keystream without altering it.
There are certainly side attacks on the system as a whole; there have got to be places at either end of the quantum link where the keystream exists in an unprotected form and could be intercepted, but it does seem like a system like this would be impervious to a completely remote third-party intercept.
I think it's safe to say that no cryptosystem is unbreakable, but I think there are certain features of particular modes of data transmission which may be. Whether or not you think that's significant or trivial depends on your point of view, though.
You know, I don't need to like everything that somebody says in order to agree with one of their points. I think this report hits the nail pretty much on the head; of what I've read of it so far, I think it makes a lot of good points. I think their stance on open source is a little weak, but it's certainly a step in the right direction.
How the authors or the responsible agency feels about globalization, outsourcing, or abortion shouldn't affect what you think of this one report. They could be Nazis--literally--and their point would still be valid if it was well argued and supported by facts. It's just like dealing with a politician that I don't like most of the time, but agree with occasionally. The fact that I think somebody's stance on immigration is stupid, doesn't automatically invalidate whatever opinion they hold on healthcare.
The CED's stances on other issues are irrelevant, unless you can come up with some reason why someone who supports globalization ought to feel a particular way about open standards. They're easily separable issues, and therefore I think your inference (that we ought to engage basically in an ad hominem, attacking the organization and all of their ideas because we might disagree with one or two) is wrong.
The fewer policies the better. There is no end of problems we can point to that resulted from "things that seemed like a good idea at the time".
This is true, and I agree with you heartily on not doing things just for the sake of "doing something." However I think it's important to point out that there are situations, and I think this is one of them, where if you don't take some sort of action you allow something else to occur by default.
In other words, there already IS a policy on electronic documents, it's "use Microsoft products or nobody will read your stuff." Not doing anything simply allows that policy -- unofficial or not -- to remain in effect.
So really you are not weighing the pros and cons of one policy versus no policy, you're weighing a new policy versus the existing one. And frankly, I think the existing one sucks pretty bad.
OpenDocument has the distinct advantage in the U.S. of not being French. It still might have a chance.
We need to start smashing computers so we can hire people to fix them, creating more jobs and improving the economy.
Why not just smash people any pay people to fix them?
Actually, let's cut out the middleman, let's just smash people and take their money.
This isn't quite true. You wouldn't have to convert all of the past documents. As long as they're just sitting in place (on disk or wherever), they're fine in their current formats, provided a open-source interpreter / reader exists. Then they can be converted to the new, open format on demand, when they're accessed or needed. (This isn't much of a trick, I remember old versions of Clarisworks that would do this with old documents: open an old document and it would open, but on save you'd be prompted to create a new file for a the new format. If you really wanted an old version saved you Exported.)
Right now, most of the proprietary formats aren't so bad that we can't break out of them. OpenOffice will read DOC files, for example. So today's DOC files are relatively safe, but that does't mean the ones produced by the next version of Word will be. That's why it's important to move to creating documents in an open format, so you don't get any further locked-in, using whatever worse format MS invents tomorrow.
By stopping using newer versions of the proprietary format/software, you effectively freeze that format in place. You say "no more proprietary additions, no changes." That makes it a lot easier to reverse engineer and write an interpreter that can convert those documents on demand, as they're needed. It's the continual use and updating of documents into proprietary, undocumented formats that's the major problem, because the "moving target" effect makes them basically impossible to reverse-engineer. (Plus I'm waiting for the day when reverse engineering a Word document will be a DMCA violation.)
As long as you stop yourself from getting any deeper in the black hole of vendor lock-in, it's possible (at least right now) to dig yourself out and rescue your old documents using free tools, whenever you need them. Mass-conversion might be nice, since it'll make things a little easier to work with later, but it's really not necessary provided you have open source tools to convert them already (which we do in the case of Word documents, and that's the biggest issue).
Agreed; also, I think that medical research conducted with taxpayer dollars should have to be published openly. I'm not saying that it has to be under the GFDL or anything, but it has to be available for public review, not closed up in some expensive journal that doesn't let you submit anything unless you agree never to publish it elsewhere.
The U.S. government is the biggest single supporter of medical research (that I know of) in the world, I'd sure like to be able to see the results of my money.
If you want to see a 19th or early-20th century business model that's way past its time to die, forget the music industry, take a look at the scientific journals. Ridiculously inflated membership fees for access to nothing but a lot of information that was produced by public monies in the first place, conducted in many cases at public institutions. They're the ultimate middlemen, doing nothing but trading information back and forth, preserving themselves through exclusivity agreements and via the commonly held sentiment that if it's not published there, it can't be good.
Very well said. I tried to say something similar elsewhere, but I think you did a better job.
One thing I'd like to hammer home is the redundancy argument: with closed-source software, everyone pays for the same thing, OVER AND OVER again. I buy Windows, you buy Windows. We both got the exact same thing. With free software, you don't pay for the copy of the software, you pay to make that software better for you. It's only "free" (as in beer) if it does exactly what you want it to do out of the box, if it doesn't do that, you pay someone to customize it for you.
We (especially PHBs) don't think of software that way; we think about it in terms of black boxes. It either does what you want it to do or it doesn't. But that's not necessarily how it has to be; if we weren't all paying a few hundred dollars in order to have what everybody else has, we'd have a lot of money left over to make that software better (however we think 'better' is). Would we pour all the money we're now spending on duplicate copies into development? Probably not, but there would still be a giant net benefit. Paying people to improve something is always better than paying people to make one halfassed thing and then sell it a hundred million times over.
The problem is that traditional closed-source software houses are still stuck in a manufacturing analogy. They want to think of themselves as giant Ford or GM plants, turning out "units" that they then sell for a certain fixed price to everyone. But that's really a crummy way to market software, profitable as it may be in the short run for the people running the factories. It encourages a least-common-denominator approach to making software that results in gear that's inflexible and does many things poorly rather than one thing well.
A better approach would be for smaller software companies to concentrate on making a product that fulfills a particular role or job, while leveraging previously existing products. If you stick to open standards, then everyone can use their own customized tools, but still talk to each other, while at the same time the society gets more and more advanced software.
If there's one single contribution that Free Software makes, in my opinion, it's that. It keeps you from having to pay for the same old crap a hundred times over, and instead gives you the freedom to apply those resources that you would have used to other things -- including making the software better.
Straw man. One individual purcaser of Windows doesn't matter, but a few thousand or hundred thousand does. And that's the scale we're talking about when you start getting into government mandates.
If the government decides to use Format X, not only do all of the government's systems have to be upgraded to use this format, but everyone who wants to interact with the government needs to toe the line as well. That was the problem in Massachusetts: by using Microsoft Word, they were effectively telling citizens "If you want access to government archives, you have to go buy this program, because this is the format we're going to send you stuff in." And if the program in question only runs on one operating system, the required purchase is that much greater. OSes that it doesn't exist for are out of the running from the start. Same if it only runs on one architecture. (Seen many Sparcstations lately? Yeah, me neither.)
Of course, people really don't run out and purchase things in response to a government manadate, after the fact; if they're intelligent, they try to plan ahead. Thus the purchasing decisions are sometimes made ahead of the official standard, making the cost and scale hard to appreciate. If you know that your customer uses a particular OS/word-processing/collaboration suite, you probably would start off your list of possible purchase options with stuff that's compatible. And Microsoft works hard to ensure that if the people on the far end are using their gear, the only option you have to talk to them is also MS gear.
How much more diverse would the PC field be right now, if it wasn't for Microsoft Windows and Office? I'm willing to bet quite a bit. A whole lot of niche OSes and office programs that might have been the perfect tool for somebody's job bit the dust during MS's rise to power, and now we're all basically stuck with a one-size-fits-all-but-nobody-well de facto standard.
The Communists are our friends now, didn't you get the memo? It's The Terrorists that are the enemy.
This is incredibly shortsighted. You seem to assume that if a lot of money wasn't flowing to Microsoft, it would just be going elsewhere, to China or something. This isn't true, the U.S. could still have it's dominant position in software and information technologies, without having crushed the field in the way that Microsoft has. In fact, the dominance of Microsoft and our economic reliance on it can only be a bad thing in the long run, since it means we're setting ourselves up for a great fall when Microsoft finally gets so big, it can't innovate anymore and becomes vulnerable to a small, more nimble, foreign competitor.
A more open desktop environment, without the prohibitively high licensing fees that Microsoft charges, could lead to a lot more small software companies doing customization and integration work, rather than just everyone accepting a one-size-fits-all "solution" from Microsoft. For example, I could think of a lot of things that we do in my workplace with Microsoft tools that really aren't well suited to the tools we're using, but since they're there and we've paid for them, that's what gets used. If we had been using a free desktop, we might have the budget left over for custom software for everybody; plus, we'd probably be more efficient.
The cost of inefficiency is embedded into the price of Microsoft's products. Making ourselves more efficient -- which free and open tools would do -- and eliminating the overhead of the "Windows tax" would help our economy in the long run. Trying to prop up the trade imbalance and the economy in general with a monopoly that's based not on innovation and consumer choice but on vendor lock-in is just setting ourselves up for a great fall later on down the road.
It's your sort of shortsighted protectionist thinking that leads to trade barriers that do more harm than good, and prevent US firms from competing based on quality and innovation.
If that's the only mention, it's pretty bad. Why? Because "Slashdot" doesn't mean anything to most government types, and if they're the intended readership of this report, then it indicates a pretty poor writing style: dropping a random word that they're not likely to understand in, and then never defining it or using it again.
I hope that there's a glossary somewhere that explains what "Slashdot" is.
I agree with some of what you say, the FCC has certainly exceeded its purpose and mission, and I think a radical cutting-back (along with a complete decapitation and replacement of its leadership) is necessary. However I think you're mistaken to think that we have enough technology to completely replace any form of spectrum management.
I mean, it's going to suck pretty bad for you, if I go and decide it would be cool to set up a 25KW spark-gap transmitter in my garage; that's a transmitter that emits on all EM frequencies simultaneously, limited only by the characteristics of the antenna I use. Using a good high-gain antenna pointed at your house, I don't care what kind of spread spectrum, frequency-hopping systems your cellphone tries to use, it's not going to work when there's enough EMF flying around to make your toaster run without being plugged in. That's pretty much the situation you'd have without some form of coordination; it's the communications equivalent of getting rid of traffic laws because you don't like waiting at lights.
And you could forget about radio telescopes--right now we have mandated "holes" in the spectrum for research use, so that the full gain of a receiver can be used to focus on far-away sources; without interference regulation, you'd raise the noise floor by so much that (given that your receiver can only discriminate between so much signal and noise) you're going to lose a great deal of signal.
The original purpose of the FCC--to coordinate spectrum allocation to maximize public utility--is still a valid one. In fact, I think it's more valid today, with more uses for the spectrum, than ever. Though they're worse than useless in their current state, on their knees with the collective cock of industry in their mouths, that doesn't mean they have to be.
The FCC actually runs itself more like a private corporation than a government entity; or rather, it has some of the worst of both worlds, it seems to be almost entirely profit-driven, but retains all the inefficiencies and bureaucratia common to a large and basically unaccountable government operation.
If you look at the proposals and rulemaking that they spend the most time on, it's perfectly clear that they spend their time on whatever is going to get them the most revenue. When it comes to auctioning off some radio spectrum to the highest bidder, I'll bet the Commissioner has a red phone on her nightstand just to clear up any 11th hour problems as they're pushing things through. But try to get something relatively simple done (like the relatively uncontroversial changes to Amateur Radio) and you'd better be teaching your kids about it, because you may not live that long.
Somewhere, something went very wrong inside that organization, their mission changed from being the electronic and radio equivalent of the Parks Service, to a division of Internal Revenue.
Deb can preach the myriad benefits of DRM from her 'bully pulpit' as much as she likes...the fact is that the FCC has no authority on this matter
Shhhh! Keep saying that, and the RIAA is going to ask for a refund on its new purchase.
Going to war--really going to war--requires a specific Act of Congress, a Declaration of War. I think the last time this was actually done was after Pearl Harbor, 'wars' since then have been peackeeping or police actions (Truman I believe coined the phrase "police action" in reference to the UN deployment that began Korea).
The cynic's answer to your question is, the reason it's not often done is that it's perceived as being more difficult to garner the support in Congress necessary to pass a Declaration of War than it is to just send some troops in as peacekeepers, more or less start a war, and then get people to support it retroactively. It becomes markedly more difficult to oppose a war once troops are already on the ground there; one can fairly trivially paint one's opponents as unpatriotic, potentially treasonous, at that point, where it would be difficult to do that earlier.
The current War in Iraq is sort of in a grey area between a executive action and an actual, formally declared war, although tending towards the latter; it was approved by Congress via the "Joint Resolution to Authorize the Use of Force in Iraq" (I think I'm getting that name right) in advance of hostilities, but a real Declaration of War wasn't signed. I'm not exactly sure why they didn't go the extra step and just get a formal declaration, it seems as though there was enough support for it, and the Authorization they got is tantamount to one anyway. It serves the same function, but without the fancy name.
I'm not sure whether the War Powers Act effictively did away with Declarations of War and replaced them with the Authorizations that now seem to be more common; personally I always though the symbolism of the Congressional Declaration was useful, and it seems to me that if you have the political support for it, why not do it and remove the possibility of having your procedure questioned later.
I doubt many judges really care, in fact most of them are probably staring at Microsoft Windows while they're writing their opinion. I've known some judges (granted, not appellate level ones) and I don't think they have enough of a groupthink mentality to be collectively insulted by the outcome of one particular case or another, or hold some sort of general predisposed opinion on Microsoft one way or the other. Most of them, I think, are more interested in the intricacies law then in the nasty sausage-factory that is politics anyway.
Although, if I knew the judge wrote his opinions in Word, I'd have to wonder: how much does he hate Clippy, and want to make his master pay?
Actually, while I would normally agree with you about the majority of corporations in existence, this is not necessarily true when dealing with non-profit corporations.
The non-profit corporation is a strange creature; it's by definition a legal entity which cannot have as its primary goal "making money," although it's possible to get personally wealthy by running one or working for one.
I tend to view them with a certain amount of suspicion and skepticism, because while a for-profit corporation has a clear (profit) motive and thus will act predictably under various circumstances, non-profit ones have the potential to be loose cannons. You're really stuck basically trusting their mission statement, until they have some sort of track record.
That said, most of the Free Software-related non-profit corporations have so far proved to be reasonably true to their missions, and their actions have dictated that their primary aim is not to make money (if they had, their actions would have been substantially different). Furthermore, a person looking to make money doesn't incorporate as a nonprofit, because it makes it difficult legally to raise capital and turn profits back to shareholders.
You contradicted yourself. If there are other OSs, Windows is not monopolizing.
Not true. You don't need to control everything completely in order to be a monopoly, you just need to control enough of it to be able to distort the market and act anti-competitively. I'm sure there were other companies besides Standard Oil when it was broken up in the oil business (according to the Wikipedia article, it only controlled 91% of production and 85% of final sales, which I'm willing to bet is on par or lower than Windows' penetration in some markets), but that doesn't mean that Standard Oil wasn't a monopoly or wasn't anti-competitive, or that breaking it up wasn't a good idea.
Companies are monopolies when they become big enough to be price makers (rather than price takers) and block entry of new firms into the marketplace. Microsoft rather clearly does both of those, although one might be able to successfully argue that their hold is slipping somewhat on the entry blockage (however it's interesting that the only real competitor to them that's come out recently is an OS that's given away for free, and it still has trouble competing).
It makes perfect sense to me; every other desktop operating system, when you add their marketshare together, are insufficient to challenge the monopoly that Windows has over the market.
We've all seen the pie charts--it's 90-something percent Windows and a sliver of "everything else." It pains me to say that as a Linux and Mac user, but that's how it is. Even if every non-Windows computer in the world was running the same OS, and not a variety of different ones, Windows would still have a monopoly. It's not a 100% monopoly, but that's not what the word means.
You should get modded up -- that's actually an interesting way of using the flags. If Philips has a patent on using the flags to force viewing of commercials, maybe somebody else will use the same flags to skip them? That wouldn't infringe on the patent, would it?
... but skipping commercials? Now that's a feature worth trolling through some shady businesses in Chinatown for. Why? Because it's something you can easily show off. You and your beer buddies are sitting around watching the game you TiVoed the day before; a commercial comes on and everyone groans...but with a sly wink you pick up the remote and--wham!--back to the game. That's a hell of a lot more impressive than "look, I can play imported anime!" or "I can play weird subtitled French porn!" to most people, I'll bet.
Of course, they'll probably only ever roll out such flags inside an end-to-end DRMed; a Roman orgy that makes HDMI look like a wet dream by comparison. You'd only be able to view the media on an approved platform, and the approved platform would then be forced to use Philips "no skipping" features. (I propose the system be given the brand name "MindRape(TM)" -- think that'll fly with the focus groups?)
I do think though that implementing a feature like this would push average consumers towards pirated or illegally flashed equipment faster than anything else. Let's face it, Joe Consumer doesn't give a shit about playing HD content on Linux and probably won't own one of the early HDTV sets without HDMI
Yes, it's sad when FF-ing through commercials is something that people will be able to get a slightly deviant thrill out of doing, like running a red light on a deserted street at night, but I think that's the future we're hurtling towards.
Kind of like somebody who works for a right-wing Christian organization and spends all their time raving about homosexuals. After a certain amount of time, you really start to wonder why they're so fixed on that one topic.
In Dvorak's case, I'd say he's writing in order to punish himself for the dreams he has. Dreams filled with smooth, glossy, white cases; windows with the close-widget lustily positioned on the left side; dark twisted dreams, somewhere in the dirtiest corners of his mind, of a mouse without any buttons.
It's really just public self-flagellation, products of someone deeply in denial.
He said 'it's a First Amendment issue, we realize you don't have that in France, but we're rather fond of it here, it takes precedence. Go home.' Of course, the French company didn't go home, they got angry and said they're going to appeal (which they have the right to do), but the judge and the justice system worked as it's supposed to work in this case.
At least it seems like it to me, having only read the Ars article so far. There's nothing inherently bad about the fact that this made it to court; a lot of people are reacting as if the judge ruled the other way, when in fact he didn't. He came down on the side of the First Amendment and free speech rights; in fact he said that was the defendant's only valid points, and yet he still ruled that way.
Actually, I think his ruling was pretty strongly worded, he even dragged out some choice quotes from the USSC to support his point of view. You don't see that a lot in lower-court rulings, it's a sign that there's an actual Constitutional issue at work. It's a heck of a lot better than some technicalities that other free speech / online rights cases have gotten dismissed or ruled one way or the other for.
From TFA: (quoted from the ruling)That's a pretty strong statement, I think.