They're hedging their bets. I'd guess that a business advisor inside or outside AOL sees it as a good idea to get into the Linux business.
Speculative reasons for acquiring promising Linux company:
Microsoft's strategy of buying small companies for possible good ideas has been extremely effective. Smart people repeat good ideas.
AOL wants to be able to move in new directions more easily if and when the ISP business becomes one of low profit margins.
AOL will tweak Linux for some megatron media servers and won't have to ask MS please
Keep HomeStation from getting a quick edge in the converged content delivery market
Something else.
Unlikely reasons:
Try to rewrite desktop OS for devices all pundits predict will be irrelevant soon.
We need to face the music here, kids, the only ones who care about a Linux based desktop are all here, except the two that forgot to read this site today.
Good point. Although I just built KDE3b1 on mdk8.1. Got all the libraries I needed off of RPMfind, which as great a service as it is, doesn't have the most thorough indexing... Should be hard to put apt-get or rpmfind or whatever into the KDE builder...
Or.... (visions of sugarplums):
A distro-based website that checks all my dependencies, pushes down code and builds updated versions of those libraries, then sets up all the scripts I need to just type 'yeah, build it now', and go. Even has load-based compiling w/ pause and restart, in case I want to work on my machine in the interim...
This would be a lot like Microsoft buying Visio and countless other "possibly interesting" tech companies before that, all of whose software may have found its way into Windows. Or maybe it didn't. Either way, it's the megacorp equivalent of diversifying your mutual - you don't really care who Limitless Powertronix Systems is, as long as they help your portfolio perform.
Could be good for the OS, but probably bad for the Church of Linux.
So why is some release manager at Redhat or SuSE your sysadmin-by-proxy?
The fact that I can recompile when I want colors their whole design philosophy - the program doesn't have to hide how it works. Not only do I not have to recompile to benefit from this, I much prefer to learn each programs compilation quirks as I go, rather than bang my head against the case of non-working box all weekend.
That said, a self-building system, like Debian, Sorcerer or FreeBSD is a great idea. Now if only someone would do the same for KDE and GNOME - or hell, the whole Sourceforge repository...
How can it not be illegal for a company (which by any measure is either a near-monopoly or monopoly) to demand (*) that you refuse to consider any other product in exchange for (**) not raising prices?
Trust:
8. A combination of firms or corporations for the purpose of reducing competition (c.f. *) and controlling prices (c.f. **) throughout a business or an industry.
Surely someone here can help me resolve my confusion.
Does anyone here work for the TV industry? Does anyone have any real idea of what their books look like, or what their rationale for this is?
Maybe I should be careful what I ask for -
If a read a/. discussion where more than 3 people knew what they were talking about, I might fall over dead.
Agreed. And I'd definitely take that a step further. Many, many industries are using public resources as the basis of their profits - oil, mining of all sorts, trucking (which uses the highways we pay for), tourism, etc, etc. All of these industries should ostensibly serve the public in return for the concessions they extract, and their use of societally maintained infrastructure.
The problem is the companies think they have a a right to any resources they need to operate, and the mere fact that they choose to employ people is a bargain for the locality they deign to operate in. And we've been duped into believing it.
Re:You /. people really like the word "monopoly"
on
Broadband Obstacles
·
· Score: 1
This is an extremely insightful comment: But it's not immune to influence, either... since it's staffed largely by veterans from the industry, they inevitably think along the lines of the established companies, and they have friends who are still in the industry. Regulatory agencies always turn out this way... the only way to avoid it is to staff them with people who have no experience, and that wouldn't be much of an improvement, if any.
The recent series of articles in the Washingtonpost alluded to this problem. A person doesn't know enough to really evaluate an industry unless she's worked in it, but if she does, she often gets so personally connected that she makes a bad judge. When it comes to deregulation, however, just saying "sic transit gloria mundi" is about the worst the public can do.
When a government makes big changes to the rules that govern a market, it is setting out huge spoils. The key is to have a fair and open, and well-observed process of changing regulations. Otherwise you will end up with Russian-style robber barons.
The current administration's dogmatic approach to deregulation is very dangerous. Not are they for "deregulate now, figure how later", but because of their close ties with business, they are not entirely averse to letting the spoils fall as they will.
Perhaps we should be electing regulators... or at least scrutinizing the process more, but one way or another, the kind of reckless deregulation we are engaging is asking for trouble.
P.S. -/.ers should think harder about this when they calls for lopping off Microsoft's head.
One of the nicest things about OSS being free as in beer (usually) is that you can just TRY stuff, without a large up-front cost. So if you have good ideas for integrating OSS into the IT infrastructure, you can start em going.
Also in OSS' favor, it comes with a community of volunteers who LIKE to work on projects. So you can recruit a couple people to start pilot projects for the infrastructure you want to replace or extend, and show people the goods before any substantial amount of money has been spent.
Starting small like this is also a good way to make sure your projects are really improving the situation.
Good luck, and good for you for running for office.
I agree, it is a luxury right now. I pay luxury prices for great DSL service from Speakeasy, and I ain't complaining.
But it's not hard to imagine a world 5 years from now, where it is not a luxury anymore, but a utility like trash collection, to which everyone ought to have access. Should whether your trash gets collected be contingent on whether your apartment building owner thinks you're upmarket enough to make trash collection worth their while? Perhaps we ought to think proactively before making and removing rules.
That it's much better not to have any measure of how well your advertising works (or doesn't work).
TV has much more subtle and less effective ways of tracking what people watch and what they subsequently buy. That's why they're able to make much more on ads that don't generate revenue.
Exactly, hence the need for regulation. The idea is - given that the market naturally falls into monopoly, do you prefer a regulated and sometimes less efficient (who can deny that companies have figured out inefficiency on their own) monopoly to an unregulated one?
Regulation can and often was carried too far. But the way Reagan, his brother Bush and his other brother Bush have deregulated throws out the baby with the bathwater. The dumbest thing to do when something isn't working right is to ignore what you've learned from your experience and charge full speed the other direction. Except if your interest is hooking your friends up with spoils.
Can't help but think that part of this is due to the LACK of regulation rather than regulatory delays. Thanks to careless deregulation (read Reaganomics), the telcos have merged with the content providers, and as a consequence the new behemoths are hedging, looking to provide a utility service at luxury-good prices.
If LDAP can do all this, why the brouhahahaha about.Net.My.Hailstorm.Services?
Could someone just build a huge public LDAP-over-Freenet, and everyone and their pet hamster could be authenticated? My tone is sarcastic, but I'm mostly serious. Why.Net? If the stuff that someone posted about Novell is correct, aren't they really the right people to build an authentication database?
Will LDAP form a part of.Net or someone else's distributed web authentication scheme (in the unlikely event that Microsoft doesn't win all the prizes)?
Given the law's emphasis on protecting against serial copying, this hardly seems open and shut to me. The AHRA requires them to allow first-generation digital copies, but mandates preventing serial copying. Nobody foresaw when the law was written that the home computer would take control of serial copying out of the hands of the music and music-reproduction-hardware industries. Last time the hardward industries were all lined up on the pro-copying side. I don't really see who's gonna line up on that side now, because there's no clear scent of money.
Seems to me this is yet another law on the big piles of things to be rejiggered when the idea of copyright finally catches up to digital distribution.
Isn't that essentially the software for rent model that everyone here lambasts Microsoft for?
I think the key to your logic rests on the $10 part. Everyone here would pay $10 a month, great, as long as you could stop, and as long as you got all the really good software. But you gotta buy the software somewhere. Start by raising the cost to $45-50 a month (Office retails $500, we want it every year). Now recall that the distributor will still want the $10 they were getting before, we're at $55 a mon. That's a pile of money every year!
So what people are really upset about, and rightfully so - is the COST of software. I say, unoriginally, that this is based on inadequate competition. Your ISP example works because ISP's are willing to accept lower profit margins than Microsoft.
There are two things I dislike about this analyis:
1) Economists in general seem to think everyone is motivated by money. To explain things that are very difficult to attribute to money, they come up with this roundabout theory (which is both commonsensical and not particulary illuminating) that people's need to make money shapes the society they live in. In the end, all I see demonstrated is that economists are interested in money and they extend this analogy to everyone else. Keep your money-grubbing paws of my motivations thank you very much.
2) Quantifications of people's lives most often reduce interesting observations of patterns to statistically provable but uninteresting conclusions. By the time you've numbered enough variability out of something to prove your point, you've squeezed out the very juice (the subtlety) you wanted to drink in the first place. Here this guy makes the interesting observation that more and more OSS development is happening in Europe. Even more insightful is his assertion that software capital may have hired up people who would otherwise work on OSS for free. Brilliant. Once he translates all that into the crap about maximizing tangible gains and opportunity costs, he crushes the flower he's grown.
And please spare me the "America WAS the home of freedom" blah DCMA blah blah. That's a great example of the narrow-minded, single-issue ignorance that I'm talking about. If you think any of these minor issues are significant in the big picture of freedom, then you need to expand your views are what freedom is.
I'm plenty comfortable with the idea that the US (America is a continent, mi paisano) is one of if not the most "free" country on earth in terms of your absolute ability to do exactly what you want. That seems to be the operating definition of freedom around here. (I don't agree that the exceptions to this are "minor", but let's leave that set of debates for another time.) It is essentially freedom from interference that we seem to value.
But the price we pay for that is high - it is tremendously lonely here in this country. Americans work a lot and sit on our front porches very little. Then in public we pull out our hair and wail about how our families are falling apart (if we're conservative) or our sense of community is disappearing (if we're liberal). This is not meant to be a we're all so materialistic and bad rant - but to note: working to get a better car, or a better cellphone is pretty solitary. The pleasure you get from other people is not greatly affected by how good your cellphone is.
In my experience our quality of life is not altogether better than other places, socialist or no. I'm not sure that kind of freedom is all it's cracked up to be, and I think it's worth asking hard questions about whether that's how we as humans want to shape our world, particularly know that we've made it more flexible than it ever was.
I can recall a conversation with a MS Lawyer/bizdev friend of mine in which he justified to me why it was OK for MS to change the APIs on smaller companies.
Thing is, I was told, Microsoft is the arbiter of all the conflicting API changes that driver and 3rd part software "subcontractors" want. So of course it's the subcontractors who have to change their code. Which just happens to suck for them when they have to do tons of last-minute code rewrites. And it just so happens that Microsoft has its own internal subcontractors changing APIs to suit them - no rewrites there. Anyone remember the "internal wall" that was supposed to exist between Windows and Office after one of the first consent decrees? Musta melted somewhere along the way...
Finally let me add a little more anecdotal reports on the APIs being crappy:
A couple other friends and acquaintances who have programmed there report that devs *HATE* using MFC cause they can't figure out what the hell is going on.
Yeah, Microsoft made much better business decisions than lots of other companies, but it's clear that Joel at least didn't really have the much-yapped-about consumers' benefit on the same page as imposing feature creep for profitability when he worked there. Which is why we need regulation of industries - companies do not look out for consumers, they look out for THEMSELVES.
BTW, IANASD, so this is good old-fashioned slashot-ranting for you all.
It's the developers prerogative what the hell they want to code on. More power to them. More toys for us dual-booters to play with.
Now to the more interesting points:
I'm sort of surprised that noone has mentioned how this could throw free (speech & beer) office apps into the limelight. Last I checked, Microsoft derived 60% of its revenue from Office - hence its frenzy (with the usual/. counter-frenzy) to push people into buying Office again. If one of the many emerging OS or Linux-friendly productivity suites makes it prime time, the transition from Linux to Windows is clear.
Having just installed XP, I have to say its pretty damn stable. But there's not much in this release that Linux couldn't do with a little config file work. And XP definitely has that "you must do things the way we intend" Windows feel. This Cygwin port could give people a chance to easily use tools that feel like Open Source software without getting totally frustrated by *nix's steep learning curve.
All they done is make clear to him that they will threaten him. They haven't actually really pursued any legal action against him, and they have declared (for what little it's worth) that they don't intend to. So they have in fact intimidated him, but with indirect threats.
It's as if the guy with the stick (or say, a lug wrench fixing his car) had glared across the street at you, and you knew he was trying to intimidate you. You still can't pursue legal action against him until he comes over and holds the lug wrench over your head, even though he's made his intentions clear.
Interestingly, as a result of your description of the hearing, I'm much more inclined to side with the judge than I otherwise would have been.
IANAL, but:
While it's almost certainly true that the RIAA will threaten people like Felten again, I believe the judge was upholding the following principle of the law: You can't punish people things they haven't yet done.
That is to say, the RIAA was flexing its muscles, but to issue and injunction or try to rule on the DMCA based merely on serving someone a letter would be overextending the reach of the law. It sucks, but you just can't punish people that kind of vague use of the law as intimidation.
We'll just have to hope for better in the next round.
As an amateur networking enthusiast, I'm quite dismayed both by the unbalanced slant of your article on network address translation
(http://www.cedmagazine.com/ced/2001/1101/11d.ht m) , and by its similarly unbalanced technical details.
You write for an industry magazine, and as such, it's very important that your readers have a clear understanding of the upsides and downsides of each type of technology.
Let me begin with technical details:
You do NAT a service by pointing out that it greatly simplifies routing. This is certainly true, and has allowed me to build my own home network, and thereby learn a great deal about networking.
However, this is overshadowed by a fact you neglect to mention, perhaps NAT's greatest advantage. By translating addresses, NAT allows home users to assign non-routed IP addresses to their devices. Non-routed means that Internet routers will send data packets to or from these IP addresses. This has great security implications. By assigning non-routed IP's, you greatly strengthen the security of that network - anyone attempting to attack machines within the network must first break through the NAT device. Hardware NAT routers have very few security holes, and therefore offer security to their consumers.
I would also greatly worry about replace NAT with a protocol with built in "holes". Not only is this an extensive violation of privacy - my information connectivity provider has absolutely no right to know whether my fridge is connected to my network, but worse yet, the ability to "see into" networks is an invitation to hackers to conduct attacks through these holes. I have no desire to have a hacker ask my fridge what's in it, or turn my stereo on. I am very dismayed that these broad questions did even merit mention as security challenges in your formulation.
Second, your interpretation that NAT is bad because it prevents cable providers from selling services they may like to sell is highly suspect. Additional IP address sales may be a perk for broadband providers, but by it is by no means the RIGHT of these providers to collect tolls for these IPs. A more apt analogy for NAT is that it makes broadband service like a telephone. One of the great advances when "Ma Bell" came when consumers could easily connect their own telephone to the wall, and not pay per unit. This resulted in explosive advances in technology and drops in cost for telephones - a huge service to consumers. If you believe that telcos should be able to charge per telephone in your home, perhaps you'd be willing to pay me those fees until the telcos can catch up.
I'm sensitive to the worry that the installation of NAT devices by end-users could result in very heavy loads on broadband providers, in return for minimal revenues. Furthermore, a wide open network behind a NAT device could result in a DMCA-generated liability nightmare if a user in a NAT-wireless "Neighborhood Area Network" decided to do something illegal or ugly.
However, this behavior can be controlled through strict terms on bandwidth monitoring, packet filtering, and license agreements controlling these elements of use.
While NAT does present some challenges to effectively providing broadband connectivity to home users, these challenges do not justify the intrusions into users' privacy and network security that you claim. I challenge the broadband industry to solve these problems in ways that help the consumer, rather than deprive her of her privacy and security.
James says that today various Internet features are woven more deeply into Windows, offering consumers such benefits as one-click access to the Internet from e-mail.
Yes, Chuck, and in exactly the same way one (double) click on a image file brings up LView (unless Office has assaulted Windows and you get MS PhotoEditor)
So it's pretty clear Mr. James he doesn't know a damn thing about how OSes work. But try explaining to your friends, even ones who are not terrified by their keyboard, or mildly interested in how such things work, why these two actions are essentially the same thing, and they'll just stare you, maybe say baaaaah.
The only way out of this is for people who are tech-savvy and interested to get involved with legislation of technology. To law school, my pretties!
I still don't really see the point. OK, we can deliver 40Gb of bandwidth. Why do we want it?
All of the scenarios in the article seemed dreamed up to show that such a network might eventually be useful. They mention virtual teaching, but as I understand it, the thorniest problems in distance learning have nothing to do with network speed.
How about things that change our lives in more human ways?
Slashdot Mirror
Unlikely reasons:
We need to face the music here, kids, the only ones who care about a Linux based desktop are all here, except the two that forgot to read this site today.
Good point. Although I just built KDE3b1 on mdk8.1. Got all the libraries I needed off of RPMfind, which as great a service as it is, doesn't have the most thorough indexing... Should be hard to put apt-get or rpmfind or whatever into the KDE builder...
Or.... (visions of sugarplums):
A distro-based website that checks all my dependencies, pushes down code and builds updated versions of those libraries, then sets up all the scripts I need to just type 'yeah, build it now', and go. Even has load-based compiling w/ pause and restart, in case I want to work on my machine in the interim...
we all think we're part of doesn't exist for AOL.
This would be a lot like Microsoft buying Visio and countless other "possibly interesting" tech companies before that, all of whose software may have found its way into Windows. Or maybe it didn't. Either way, it's the megacorp equivalent of diversifying your mutual - you don't really care who Limitless Powertronix Systems is, as long as they help your portfolio perform.
Could be good for the OS, but probably bad for the Church of Linux.
The fact that I can recompile when I want colors their whole design philosophy - the program doesn't have to hide how it works. Not only do I not have to recompile to benefit from this, I much prefer to learn each programs compilation quirks as I go, rather than bang my head against the case of non-working box all weekend.
That said, a self-building system, like Debian, Sorcerer or FreeBSD is a great idea. Now if only someone would do the same for KDE and GNOME - or hell, the whole Sourceforge repository...
Trust:
8. A combination of firms or corporations for the purpose of reducing competition (c.f. *) and controlling prices (c.f. **) throughout a business or an industry.
Surely someone here can help me resolve my confusion.
Maybe I should be careful what I ask for - If a read a /. discussion where more than 3 people knew what they were talking about, I might fall over dead.
Agreed. And I'd definitely take that a step further. Many, many industries are using public resources as the basis of their profits - oil, mining of all sorts, trucking (which uses the highways we pay for), tourism, etc, etc. All of these industries should ostensibly serve the public in return for the concessions they extract, and their use of societally maintained infrastructure.
The problem is the companies think they have a a right to any resources they need to operate, and the mere fact that they choose to employ people is a bargain for the locality they deign to operate in. And we've been duped into believing it.
But it's not immune to influence, either... since it's staffed largely by veterans from the industry, they inevitably think along the lines of the established companies, and they have friends who are still in the industry. Regulatory agencies always turn out this way... the only way to avoid it is to staff them with people who have no experience, and that wouldn't be much of an improvement, if any.
The recent series of articles in the Washingtonpost alluded to this problem. A person doesn't know enough to really evaluate an industry unless she's worked in it, but if she does, she often gets so personally connected that she makes a bad judge. When it comes to deregulation, however, just saying "sic transit gloria mundi" is about the worst the public can do.
When a government makes big changes to the rules that govern a market, it is setting out huge spoils. The key is to have a fair and open, and well-observed process of changing regulations. Otherwise you will end up with Russian-style robber barons.
The current administration's dogmatic approach to deregulation is very dangerous. Not are they for "deregulate now, figure how later", but because of their close ties with business, they are not entirely averse to letting the spoils fall as they will.
Perhaps we should be electing regulators... or at least scrutinizing the process more, but one way or another, the kind of reckless deregulation we are engaging is asking for trouble.
P.S. - /.ers should think harder about this when they calls for lopping off Microsoft's head.
One of the nicest things about OSS being free as in beer (usually) is that you can just TRY stuff, without a large up-front cost. So if you have good ideas for integrating OSS into the IT infrastructure, you can start em going.
Also in OSS' favor, it comes with a community of volunteers who LIKE to work on projects. So you can recruit a couple people to start pilot projects for the infrastructure you want to replace or extend, and show people the goods before any substantial amount of money has been spent.
Starting small like this is also a good way to make sure your projects are really improving the situation.
Good luck, and good for you for running for office.
I agree, it is a luxury right now. I pay luxury prices for great DSL service from Speakeasy, and I ain't complaining.
But it's not hard to imagine a world 5 years from now, where it is not a luxury anymore, but a utility like trash collection, to which everyone ought to have access. Should whether your trash gets collected be contingent on whether your apartment building owner thinks you're upmarket enough to make trash collection worth their while? Perhaps we ought to think proactively before making and removing rules.
That it's much better not to have any measure of how well your advertising works (or doesn't work).
TV has much more subtle and less effective ways of tracking what people watch and what they subsequently buy. That's why they're able to make much more on ads that don't generate revenue.
Exactly, hence the need for regulation. The idea is - given that the market naturally falls into monopoly, do you prefer a regulated and sometimes less efficient (who can deny that companies have figured out inefficiency on their own) monopoly to an unregulated one?
Regulation can and often was carried too far. But the way Reagan, his brother Bush and his other brother Bush have deregulated throws out the baby with the bathwater. The dumbest thing to do when something isn't working right is to ignore what you've learned from your experience and charge full speed the other direction. Except if your interest is hooking your friends up with spoils.
Can't help but think that part of this is due to the LACK of regulation rather than regulatory delays. Thanks to careless deregulation (read Reaganomics), the telcos have merged with the content providers, and as a consequence the new behemoths are hedging, looking to provide a utility service at luxury-good prices.
If LDAP can do all this, why the brouhahahaha about .Net.My.Hailstorm.Services?
.Net? If the stuff that someone posted about Novell is correct, aren't they really the right people to build an authentication database?
.Net or someone else's distributed web authentication scheme (in the unlikely event that Microsoft doesn't win all the prizes)?
Could someone just build a huge public LDAP-over-Freenet, and everyone and their pet hamster could be authenticated? My tone is sarcastic, but I'm mostly serious. Why
Will LDAP form a part of
Hate to be unpopular here, but:
Given the law's emphasis on protecting against serial copying, this hardly seems open and shut to me. The AHRA requires them to allow first-generation digital copies, but mandates preventing serial copying. Nobody foresaw when the law was written that the home computer would take control of serial copying out of the hands of the music and music-reproduction-hardware industries. Last time the hardward industries were all lined up on the pro-copying side. I don't really see who's gonna line up on that side now, because there's no clear scent of money.
Seems to me this is yet another law on the big piles of things to be rejiggered when the idea of copyright finally catches up to digital distribution.
Isn't that essentially the software for rent model that everyone here lambasts Microsoft for?
I think the key to your logic rests on the $10 part. Everyone here would pay $10 a month, great, as long as you could stop, and as long as you got all the really good software. But you gotta buy the software somewhere. Start by raising the cost to $45-50 a month (Office retails $500, we want it every year). Now recall that the distributor will still want the $10 they were getting before, we're at $55 a mon. That's a pile of money every year!
So what people are really upset about, and rightfully so - is the COST of software. I say, unoriginally, that this is based on inadequate competition. Your ISP example works because ISP's are willing to accept lower profit margins than Microsoft.
There are two things I dislike about this analyis:
1) Economists in general seem to think everyone is motivated by money. To explain things that are very difficult to attribute to money, they come up with this roundabout theory (which is both commonsensical and not particulary illuminating) that people's need to make money shapes the society they live in. In the end, all I see demonstrated is that economists are interested in money and they extend this analogy to everyone else. Keep your money-grubbing paws of my motivations thank you very much.
2) Quantifications of people's lives most often reduce interesting observations of patterns to statistically provable but uninteresting conclusions. By the time you've numbered enough variability out of something to prove your point, you've squeezed out the very juice (the subtlety) you wanted to drink in the first place. Here this guy makes the interesting observation that more and more OSS development is happening in Europe. Even more insightful is his assertion that software capital may have hired up people who would otherwise work on OSS for free. Brilliant. Once he translates all that into the crap about maximizing tangible gains and opportunity costs, he crushes the flower he's grown.
And please spare me the "America WAS the home of freedom" blah DCMA blah blah. That's a great example of the narrow-minded, single-issue ignorance that I'm talking about. If you think any of these minor issues are significant in the big picture of freedom, then you need to expand your views are what freedom is.
I'm plenty comfortable with the idea that the US (America is a continent, mi paisano) is one of if not the most "free" country on earth in terms of your absolute ability to do exactly what you want. That seems to be the operating definition of freedom around here. (I don't agree that the exceptions to this are "minor", but let's leave that set of debates for another time.) It is essentially freedom from interference that we seem to value.
But the price we pay for that is high - it is tremendously lonely here in this country. Americans work a lot and sit on our front porches very little. Then in public we pull out our hair and wail about how our families are falling apart (if we're conservative) or our sense of community is disappearing (if we're liberal). This is not meant to be a we're all so materialistic and bad rant - but to note: working to get a better car, or a better cellphone is pretty solitary. The pleasure you get from other people is not greatly affected by how good your cellphone is.
In my experience our quality of life is not altogether better than other places, socialist or no. I'm not sure that kind of freedom is all it's cracked up to be, and I think it's worth asking hard questions about whether that's how we as humans want to shape our world, particularly know that we've made it more flexible than it ever was.
I can recall a conversation with a MS Lawyer/bizdev friend of mine in which he justified to me why it was OK for MS to change the APIs on smaller companies.
Thing is, I was told, Microsoft is the arbiter of all the conflicting API changes that driver and 3rd part software "subcontractors" want. So of course it's the subcontractors who have to change their code. Which just happens to suck for them when they have to do tons of last-minute code rewrites. And it just so happens that Microsoft has its own internal subcontractors changing APIs to suit them - no rewrites there. Anyone remember the "internal wall" that was supposed to exist between Windows and Office after one of the first consent decrees? Musta melted somewhere along the way...
Finally let me add a little more anecdotal reports on the APIs being crappy:
A couple other friends and acquaintances who have programmed there report that devs *HATE* using MFC cause they can't figure out what the hell is going on.
Yeah, Microsoft made much better business decisions than lots of other companies, but it's clear that Joel at least didn't really have the much-yapped-about consumers' benefit on the same page as imposing feature creep for profitability when he worked there. Which is why we need regulation of industries - companies do not look out for consumers, they look out for THEMSELVES.
BTW, IANASD, so this is good old-fashioned slashot-ranting for you all.
It's the developers prerogative what the hell they want to code on. More power to them. More toys for us dual-booters to play with.
/. counter-frenzy) to push people into buying Office again. If one of the many emerging OS or Linux-friendly productivity suites makes it prime time, the transition from Linux to Windows is clear.
Now to the more interesting points:
I'm sort of surprised that noone has mentioned how this could throw free (speech & beer) office apps into the limelight. Last I checked, Microsoft derived 60% of its revenue from Office - hence its frenzy (with the usual
Having just installed XP, I have to say its pretty damn stable. But there's not much in this release that Linux couldn't do with a little config file work. And XP definitely has that "you must do things the way we intend" Windows feel. This Cygwin port could give people a chance to easily use tools that feel like Open Source software without getting totally frustrated by *nix's steep learning curve.
Carry on, boys and girls!
All they done is make clear to him that they will threaten him. They haven't actually really pursued any legal action against him, and they have declared (for what little it's worth) that they don't intend to. So they have in fact intimidated him, but with indirect threats.
It's as if the guy with the stick (or say, a lug wrench fixing his car) had glared across the street at you, and you knew he was trying to intimidate you. You still can't pursue legal action against him until he comes over and holds the lug wrench over your head, even though he's made his intentions clear.
Interestingly, as a result of your description of the hearing, I'm much more inclined to side with the judge than I otherwise would have been. IANAL, but: While it's almost certainly true that the RIAA will threaten people like Felten again, I believe the judge was upholding the following principle of the law:
You can't punish people things they haven't yet done.
That is to say, the RIAA was flexing its muscles, but to issue and injunction or try to rule on the DMCA based merely on serving someone a letter would be overextending the reach of the law. It sucks, but you just can't punish people that kind of vague use of the law as intimidation.
We'll just have to hope for better in the next round.
Leslie,
t m) , and by its similarly unbalanced technical details.
As an amateur networking enthusiast, I'm quite dismayed both by the unbalanced slant of your article on network address translation
(http://www.cedmagazine.com/ced/2001/1101/11d.h
You write for an industry magazine, and as such, it's very important that your readers have a clear understanding of the upsides and downsides of each type of technology.
Let me begin with technical details:
You do NAT a service by pointing out that it greatly simplifies routing. This is certainly true, and has allowed me to build my own home network, and thereby learn a great deal about networking.
However, this is overshadowed by a fact you neglect to mention, perhaps NAT's greatest advantage. By translating addresses, NAT allows home users to assign non-routed IP addresses to their devices. Non-routed means that Internet routers will send data packets to or from these IP addresses. This has great security implications. By assigning non-routed IP's, you greatly strengthen the security of that network - anyone attempting to attack machines within the network must first break through the NAT device. Hardware NAT routers have very few security holes, and therefore offer security to their consumers.
I would also greatly worry about replace NAT with a protocol with built in "holes". Not only is this an extensive violation of privacy - my information connectivity provider has absolutely no right to know whether my fridge is connected to my network, but worse yet, the ability to "see into" networks is an invitation to hackers to conduct attacks through these holes. I have no desire to have a hacker ask my fridge what's in it, or turn my stereo on. I am very dismayed that these broad questions did even merit mention as security challenges in your formulation.
Second, your interpretation that NAT is bad because it prevents cable providers from selling services they may like to sell is highly suspect. Additional IP address sales may be a perk for broadband providers, but by it is by no means the RIGHT of these providers to collect tolls for these IPs. A more apt analogy for NAT is that it makes broadband service like a telephone. One of the great advances when "Ma Bell" came when consumers could easily connect their own telephone to the wall, and not pay per unit. This resulted in explosive advances in technology and drops in cost for telephones - a huge service to consumers. If you believe that telcos should be able to charge per telephone in your home, perhaps you'd be willing to pay me those fees until the telcos can catch up.
I'm sensitive to the worry that the installation of NAT devices by end-users could result in very heavy loads on broadband providers, in return for minimal revenues. Furthermore, a wide open network behind a NAT device could result in a DMCA-generated liability nightmare if a user in a NAT-wireless "Neighborhood Area Network" decided to do something illegal or ugly.
However, this behavior can be controlled through strict terms on bandwidth monitoring, packet filtering, and license agreements controlling these elements of use.
While NAT does present some challenges to effectively providing broadband connectivity to home users, these challenges do not justify the intrusions into users' privacy and network security that you claim. I challenge the broadband industry to solve these problems in ways that help the consumer, rather than deprive her of her privacy and security.
Sincerely,
Eric
James says that today various Internet features are woven more deeply into Windows, offering consumers such benefits as one-click access to the Internet from e-mail.
Yes, Chuck, and in exactly the same way one (double) click on a image file brings up LView (unless Office has assaulted Windows and you get MS PhotoEditor)
So it's pretty clear Mr. James he doesn't know a damn thing about how OSes work. But try explaining to your friends, even ones who are not terrified by their keyboard, or mildly interested in how such things work, why these two actions are essentially the same thing, and they'll just stare you, maybe say baaaaah.
The only way out of this is for people who are tech-savvy and interested to get involved with legislation of technology. To law school, my pretties!
I still don't really see the point. OK, we can deliver 40Gb of bandwidth. Why do we want it?
All of the scenarios in the article seemed dreamed up to show that such a network might eventually be useful. They mention virtual teaching, but as I understand it, the thorniest problems in distance learning have nothing to do with network speed.
How about things that change our lives in more human ways?