Tech Support: "All right...now double-click on the File Manager icon." Customer: "That's why I hate this Windows -- because of the icons -- I'm a Protestant, and I don't believe in icons." Tech Support: "Well, that's just an industry term sir. I don't believe it was meant to --" Customer: "I don't care about any 'Industry Terms'. I don't believe in icons." Tech Support: "Well...why don't you click on the 'little picture' of a file cabinet...is 'little picture' OK?" Customer: [click]
Oh absolutely - and they're very good at it, otherwise they wouldn't be around any more. My argument isn't that.Net is vapourware, it's that the benefit of.Net to MS stems primarily from the marketing brouhaha surrounding the "product" rather than from any technological badassedness - and that this is no accident. I guess my "beef" isn't that it's mostly marketing, but that it's good marketing;)
.Net was (and still is) a marketing ploy to counter the sudden gains in mindspace being made first by Sun with J2EE and later by "web services" in general. Judging from the fact that most PHBs have heard about it it seems to have worked quite well - the fact that they (or, it seems, almost anybody) have no idea what it does it besides the point. As long as MS is still getting column inches ("comparing.Net to Crack Cocaine" or whatever) then it's working for them just fine, thanks. This isn't anything new - MS practically invented the word "vapourware" back in the 90's. I'm not saying.Net does nothing, i'm saying that the engineers got there after the marketing department and the advertising budget.
Just think of it as a government sponsored self study degree in network engineering. Those kids will grow up to be sysadmins, and good for them. The next step is to set up your own game server at home and have your friends VPN on over to play.
Whilst most of the comments thus far have lambasted Matt Oppenheim and/or the RIAA the best bit of the article was what Ian Clarke had to say... and the fact that he is talking in the present tense. Freenet is here: it works today. It will probably (IMHO) be the "next big thing in P2P" if and when the RIAA finally gets rid of KaZaa et al. This is no big surprise: we've all gotten used to the idea that shutting down P2P services is like playing whack a mole. Peer to peer file sharing - whether you consider it "free speach" or "theft" is here and it's not going anywhere. Either the RIAA (and other copyright owners) learn to work within this reality or somebody else will. Remember that we're all descended from small funny looking furrballs that displaced a whole bunch of big lizards.
"First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win." - Mahatma Ghandi, In Philosophy/t
As has been pointed out a couple of times in other comments, 2.1 is the development branch of the Apache web server - ie "beta", "buggy", "work in progress", etc. etc. In stead of reading this as "Apache has roughly as many defects as closed source web servers" let's read this as "the development version of Apache has as many defects as... well, some unidentified (beta? shiping?) version of some unknown (iPlanet? IIS?) web server". But you can be *much* more confident that these defects will be fixed in Apache than in the *other* product.
Heck, forget confidence - YOU CAN JUST CHECK.
The fact that Reasoning didn't have to go and get permission from Apache to run this test - coupled with the fact that we don't even know what Apache is being compared to - is the *real* point behind this "article"./t
ps: IANAL but don't they have to include a copy of the Apache License given that they publish fragments of the source code in their defect report?
No, because it is made by the Xerox corporation. If you had invented it, well then, yeah, it would be. This is a simple game: whoever has the most lawyers wins./t
No no no, this technology would only impose soft wall restrictions on planes flown by terrorists with the intention of crashing into buildings. It would even feature a special subconscious scanning algorythm that would know if the pilot was a terrorist, even if he didn't know it himself!
i mean, if you're going to live in a fantasy world, it might as well be a good one, no?/t
Sorry, but i disagree - the argument is that reverse engineering falls under copyright because it creates a copy or derivative work of the original. Otherwise, it wouldn't be reverse engineering - it would just be old fahioned "figuring things out" (still a free pursuit... for now)
Anyways - it's really just another example of how the DCMA is the "one size fits all" legislation tool of the 00's - in a digital world, almost **everything** involves making a copy - therefore any use of proprietary tech/ip/whatever that the owner isn't happy about can be litigated under copyright legislation, and the DCMA makes that very very easy. Until one of these cases is successfully defended in court (appeals and all) - this IS the law.
Documents related to the case i mentioned are available from the EFF./t
Copyright doesn't protect against reverse-engineering. Yes, it does: in MICROSYSTEMS SOFTWARE, INC. and MATTEL, INC. vs SCANDINAVIA ONLINE AB, ISLANDNET.COM, EDDY L.O. JANSSON, and MATTHEW SKALA , the plaintiffs argued that that:
By engaging in the process of what some call "reverse engineering" in order to determine how the program works, the person engaging in the "reverse engineering" inevitably creates a so-called "intermediate copy" of the software, and places such a copy, at least temporarily, in the "random-access memory" ("RAM") of the computer he or she is using. It is this creation of one or more "intermediate copies" of the Cyber Patrol software that plaintiff apparently contends is a violation of the U.S. Copyright Act.
Yet another case of "Open Source" being used as a catch-all label:
1) Open Source(r)(c)(tm) your software now! 2) Gadjillions of free developpers! 3) Magically improving source code 4) ??? 5) Profit!!
Extensive peer review and higher source code quality go hand in hand. A company that has hundreds of people actively reviewing source can expect to have higher quality code than an open source project with one or two developpers and nobody reviewing the code. I don't know if there are that many companies going to that extent in terms of code review (it's a cost, not a revenue generator), but i know there are loads of open source projects that fall into category 2. Comparing something like Linux or Apache with something like BrewNIX Beer Brewing Software is like comparing the software that runs the space shuttle with MS SQLServer.../t
ps: no offense to the BrewNIX coders, i just picked something with a really low activity score in sourceforge.
It's interesting that you mention Cerebus since Dave Sim publishes that himself (the man seems to have endless hatred an loathing for the comics "industry") and has been doing that since 1977! There's a pretty good article about him over here - here's a piece:
"It is almost unheard of for a comic book creator to publish his own material, but Sim has done just that since he started ''Cerebus'' in 1977. Self-publishing is usually thought of as a portfolio-builder at best, if not an act of desperation, for amateurs not yet good enough to get hired by a major company. But Sim has turned down offers from DC, a giant in the industry and a division of the Warner Communications empire."
Maybe his next project will be a web comic? I doubt it - the man has to get paid;)/t
... and don't forget to end it with "I will have to seriously reconsider my support for you if you support this bill".
Most elected officials know that very few people actually vote, no matter how hot and bothered they get about something. Sure, i can read up on the latest here at slashdot, click on over to Lessig's blog and from there, sign the petition to reclaim the public domain, or head off to the EFF's web site and send a pre-formatted email or fax... it's too easy. Let your congressfolk know that you get out of bed bright and early on election day if you want their attention.
The NRA has 4.3 million members which isn't really that many in the internet age (i'm guessing slashdot probably has about one third to half as many readers, if we count unregistered people), and they seem to get heard pretty loud and clear./t
Scientists grow decaffeinated coffee plants Last Updated Wed, 18 Jun 2003 18:17:17 NARA, JAPAN - Researchers have genetically modified coffee seedlings to produce up to 70 per cent less caffeine. [scientists baaaaaaaaaaaad. caffeine goooooooooood/t] The team says demand for decaffeinated coffee is growing worldwide. Caffeine can trigger palpitations, increase blood pressure and disrupt sleep in sensitive people. [so what? hey, if you can't stand the heat... i dunno, drink tea or something/t] Shinjiro Ogita and colleagues at the Nara Institute of Science and Technology [a fatwa on their heads!/t] in Japan used a tool called RNA interference to genetically engineer the one-year-old plants. [oh so they're child molesters as well then?? figures/t] Coffee plant cells make caffeine in a three-step process [bless their little souls/t]. The technique silenced an enzyme for the second step.[demand free speech for coffee enzymes!/t] "At present, coffee is decaffeinated industrially, but the process is expensive and the flavour of the product is poor [really, you mean coffee with no coffee in it tastes bad? who'd a thunk?/t]â" problems that could potentially be overcome by the genetic engineering of coffee plants," the researchers wrote in Thursday's issue of the journal Nature. The taste verdict won't be in until the plants mature in three to four years. The commercial definition of decaffeinated coffee in the U.S. is 97 per cent less caffeine, but geneticists haven't yet attained that level. The Japanese team used the robusta variety of coffee plant. Other researchers are trying genetic engineering techniques on the more commercial but slower growing arabica plant. [bet it was pretty tough to achieve this. bet they had to work a lot of nights./t]
If this thing takes off, MS will most likely fall all over itself to provide "deep discount" liscensing schemes for education. They're not stupid: this is basic strategy 101 for them - catch 'em when they're YOUNG. A mind is never too young for assimilation. When i went to college there were Macs everywhere.../t
welllll... i just had to steal the following from Lessig's latest book, The Future of Ideas - hope he (well, his publisher) won't mind:
In the 1970's RCA was experimenting with a new technology for distributing film on magnetic tape â" what we would come to call video. Researchers were keen not only to find a technology that could reproduce film with high fidelity; they were also keen to find a way to control the use of the technology. Their aim was a technology that could control the use of film distributed on video, so that the owner of the film could maximize the return from the distribution.
The technology eventually chosen was relatively simple. A video would play once, and when finished, the film would lock into place. If a renter of the video wanted to play the video again, he or she would have to return the video to the store and have the tape unlocked. In this way, the owner of the film could assure it was being compensated for every use of the copyrighted material.
RCA presented this technology to the Disney Corporation in the early 1970s. In a room with just five of the senior executives from Disney, a young RCA executive, Pat Feely, demonstrated RCA's device. The executives were horrified. They would "never", Feely reports their saying, permit their content to be distributed in this form. For the content, however clever the self-locking tape player was, was still insufficiently controlled. "How could they know," a Disney executive asked Feely, "how many people are going to be sitting there watching" a film? "What's to stop someone else coming in and watching it for free?"
The thing to realize is that DRM is something that people like the **AA have wanted for years... and we the geeks are the people who gave it to them... Odds are the eggheads behind the implementation of this latest version are people not that different from us.../t
Under this law a publication by a large software company critical of open source/free software has to allow a response and has to publish it.
Let's put this in perspective: What's to stop Microsoft(tm)(c)(r) from posting right here on/. (no points for answering "the moderation system") - but how often does/. get to post on the MS site?
Slashdot Mirror
"shoot the messenger" meets "stick your head in the sand"
/t
Denial - it's not just a river in Egypt...
Tech Support: "All right...now double-click on the File Manager icon."
/t
Customer: "That's why I hate this Windows -- because of the icons -- I'm a Protestant, and I don't believe in icons."
Tech Support: "Well, that's just an industry term sir. I don't believe it was meant to --"
Customer: "I don't care about any 'Industry Terms'. I don't believe in icons."
Tech Support: "Well...why don't you click on the 'little picture' of a file cabinet...is 'little picture' OK?"
Customer: [click]
it's a classic
Oh absolutely - and they're very good at it, otherwise they wouldn't be around any more. My argument isn't that .Net is vapourware, it's that the benefit of .Net to MS stems primarily from the marketing brouhaha surrounding the "product" rather than from any technological badassedness - and that this is no accident. I guess my "beef" isn't that it's mostly marketing, but that it's good marketing ;)
/t
.Net was (and still is) a marketing ploy to counter the sudden gains in mindspace being made first by Sun with J2EE and later by "web services" in general. Judging from the fact that most PHBs have heard about it it seems to have worked quite well - the fact that they (or, it seems, almost anybody) have no idea what it does it besides the point. As long as MS is still getting column inches ("comparing .Net to Crack Cocaine" or whatever) then it's working for them just fine, thanks. This isn't anything new - MS practically invented the word "vapourware" back in the 90's. I'm not saying .Net does nothing, i'm saying that the engineers got there after the marketing department and the advertising budget.
/t
Just think of it as a government sponsored self study degree in network engineering. Those kids will grow up to be sysadmins, and good for them. The next step is to set up your own game server at home and have your friends VPN on over to play.
/t
Whilst most of the comments thus far have lambasted Matt Oppenheim and/or the RIAA the best bit of the article was what Ian Clarke had to say... and the fact that he is talking in the present tense. Freenet is here: it works today. It will probably (IMHO) be the "next big thing in P2P" if and when the RIAA finally gets rid of KaZaa et al. This is no big surprise: we've all gotten used to the idea that shutting down P2P services is like playing whack a mole. Peer to peer file sharing - whether you consider it "free speach" or "theft" is here and it's not going anywhere. Either the RIAA (and other copyright owners) learn to work within this reality or somebody else will. Remember that we're all descended from small funny looking furrballs that displaced a whole bunch of big lizards.
/t
"First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win."
- Mahatma Ghandi, In Philosophy
As has been pointed out a couple of times in other comments, 2.1 is the development branch of the Apache web server - ie "beta", "buggy", "work in progress", etc. etc. In stead of reading this as "Apache has roughly as many defects as closed source web servers" let's read this as "the development version of Apache has as many defects as... well, some unidentified (beta? shiping?) version of some unknown (iPlanet? IIS?) web server". But you can be *much* more confident that these defects will be fixed in Apache than in the *other* product.
/t
Heck, forget confidence - YOU CAN JUST CHECK.
The fact that Reasoning didn't have to go and get permission from Apache to run this test - coupled with the fact that we don't even know what Apache is being compared to - is the *real* point behind this "article".
ps: IANAL but don't they have to include a copy of the Apache License given that they publish fragments of the source code in their defect report?
No, because it is made by the Xerox corporation. If you had invented it, well then, yeah, it would be. This is a simple game: whoever has the most lawyers wins. /t
No no no, this technology would only impose soft wall restrictions on planes flown by terrorists with the intention of crashing into buildings. It would even feature a special subconscious scanning algorythm that would know if the pilot was a terrorist, even if he didn't know it himself!
/t
i mean, if you're going to live in a fantasy world, it might as well be a good one, no?
Sorry, but i disagree - the argument is that reverse engineering falls under copyright because it creates a copy or derivative work of the original. Otherwise, it wouldn't be reverse engineering - it would just be old fahioned "figuring things out" (still a free pursuit... for now)
/t
Anyways - it's really just another example of how the DCMA is the "one size fits all" legislation tool of the 00's - in a digital world, almost **everything** involves making a copy - therefore any use of proprietary tech/ip/whatever that the owner isn't happy about can be litigated under copyright legislation, and the DCMA makes that very very easy. Until one of these cases is successfully defended in court (appeals and all) - this IS the law.
Documents related to the case i mentioned are available from the EFF.
Yes, it does: in MICROSYSTEMS SOFTWARE, INC. and MATTEL, INC. vs SCANDINAVIA ONLINE AB, ISLANDNET.COM, EDDY L.O. JANSSON, and MATTHEW SKALA , the plaintiffs argued that that:
it was even discussed here on slashdottage.
Yet another case of "Open Source" being used as a catch-all label:
/t
1) Open Source(r)(c)(tm) your software now!
2) Gadjillions of free developpers!
3) Magically improving source code
4) ???
5) Profit!!
Extensive peer review and higher source code quality go hand in hand. A company that has hundreds of people actively reviewing source can expect to have higher quality code than an open source project with one or two developpers and nobody reviewing the code. I don't know if there are that many companies going to that extent in terms of code review (it's a cost, not a revenue generator), but i know there are loads of open source projects that fall into category 2. Comparing something like Linux or Apache with something like BrewNIX Beer Brewing Software is like comparing the software that runs the space shuttle with MS SQLServer...
ps: no offense to the BrewNIX coders, i just picked something with a really low activity score in sourceforge.
Oh, you mean *this* gate key?
http://www.penny-arcade.com/view.php3?date=2000-01 -31&res=l (c'mon! - that's funny)
1 -26&res=l /t
http://www.sinfest.net/d/20030624.html
http://www.penny-arcade.com/view.php3?date=2000-0
Maybe his next project will be a web comic? I doubt it - the man has to get paid
"Open a can of Hadoken on your ass!"
/t
love that 8-bit - it's a classic. If you haven't read it, check it out.
> Apple's core competence is in making systems that are easy to set up and easy to administer and easy to use.
:)
/t
I beg to differ. Apple's core competence is in making systems that are sexy.
Apple's core competence is marketing. So is Microsoft's.
... and don't forget to end it with "I will have to seriously reconsider my support for you if you support this bill".
/t
Most elected officials know that very few people actually vote, no matter how hot and bothered they get about something. Sure, i can read up on the latest here at slashdot, click on over to Lessig's blog and from there, sign the petition to reclaim the public domain, or head off to the EFF's web site and send a pre-formatted email or fax... it's too easy. Let your congressfolk know that you get out of bed bright and early on election day if you want their attention.
The NRA has 4.3 million members which isn't really that many in the internet age (i'm guessing slashdot probably has about one third to half as many readers, if we count unregistered people), and they seem to get heard pretty loud and clear.
Scientists grow decaffeinated coffee plants /t] /t] /t] in Japan used a tool called RNA interference to genetically engineer the one-year-old plants. [oh so they're child molesters as well then?? figures /t] /t]. The technique silenced an enzyme for the second step.[demand free speech for coffee enzymes! /t] /t]â" problems that could potentially be overcome by the genetic engineering of coffee plants," the researchers wrote in Thursday's issue of the journal Nature. /t]
Last Updated Wed, 18 Jun 2003 18:17:17
NARA, JAPAN - Researchers have genetically modified coffee seedlings to produce up to 70 per cent less caffeine. [scientists baaaaaaaaaaaad. caffeine goooooooooood
The team says demand for decaffeinated coffee is growing worldwide. Caffeine can trigger palpitations, increase blood pressure and disrupt sleep in sensitive people. [so what? hey, if you can't stand the heat... i dunno, drink tea or something
Shinjiro Ogita and colleagues at the Nara Institute of Science and Technology [a fatwa on their heads!
Coffee plant cells make caffeine in a three-step process [bless their little souls
"At present, coffee is decaffeinated industrially, but the process is expensive and the flavour of the product is poor [really, you mean coffee with no coffee in it tastes bad? who'd a thunk?
The taste verdict won't be in until the plants mature in three to four years. The commercial definition of decaffeinated coffee in the U.S. is 97 per cent less caffeine, but geneticists haven't yet attained that level.
The Japanese team used the robusta variety of coffee plant. Other researchers are trying genetic engineering techniques on the more commercial but slower growing arabica plant. [bet it was pretty tough to achieve this. bet they had to work a lot of nights.
If this thing takes off, MS will most likely fall all over itself to provide "deep discount" liscensing schemes for education. They're not stupid: this is basic strategy 101 for them - catch 'em when they're YOUNG. A mind is never too young for assimilation. When i went to college there were Macs everywhere... /t
hmmmm, that's funny, Windows is patented but there hasn't been any public disclosure of its source code - not even to the patent office... /t
The thing to realize is that DRM is something that people like the **AA have wanted for years... and we the geeks are the people who gave it to them... Odds are the eggheads behind the implementation of this latest version are people not that different from us...
Over here in quaint old Europe, the UFC (Union Fédérale des Consommateurs) just sued EMI Music France, Warner Music France, Universal Pictures and the two largest retail chains over this kind of thing. They claim that:
/t
1) DRM violates the consumers' right to make a personal copy of CD/DVD media which they have bought.
2) In Europe, blank recordable digital media are subject to a "tax" which gets paid to copyright associations (yes, that's right, even if you're gonna use it to back up your pc...) and that lables/copyright holders just can't have it both ways.
3) Some of these copy-protected CDs won't play in car stereos, older CD players, etc etc
here's the link but it's in french.
Let's put this in perspective: What's to stop Microsoft(tm)(c)(r) from posting right here on /. (no points for answering "the moderation system") - but how often does /. get to post on the MS site?