Not everyone in the oil industry thinks that all petroleum is biological. Thomas Gold wrote a book called "The Deep Hot Biosphere" and he says there may be significant amounts of oil from the mantel.
Personally, I don't know enough to say if he might be right. But if some day oil is found say under the basement of the Peace River Arch then I won't be too suprised. There was a well planned to be drilled BTW but they ran into problems and ran out of money and then the promoter ran out too - and is now being extradited back:-)
If people want to invest a few schekles that well can probably be finished for only say about 1/2 million.
I don't know about on/off cycles because I never power machines down. Generally I try to use hich quality drives too.
So, a pair of 350MB full height ESDI drives are still running. I got them 2nd hand out of a VAX in about 1991. I gave that system to my brother in about 1995. They are Maxtor's.
Next I went into some 2GB Seagate Hawks 5400 rpm drives (cost about $1500 each - 5 year garantee) and some micropolis 5400 RPM drives. All are still running but they are now powered off. I'm using some old 3GB Seagate 5 1/4" 43400's. These are still fine. I think they have been more or less in continous service since about 1991 or so.
They were purchased when the 43400's first came out.
Well, the Seagate 410800N's were a disaster the first year they were out. I sold over 100 of them and every one died. I was going NUTZ on the rma's.
Meanwhile personally I started using Fujitsu IDE's. None of my Fujitsu IDE drives has died.
In the SCSI world we went to IBM's and Maxtor's and ended up pretty much dropping Seagate because they screwed the channel and we couldn't get them.
We also handled Quantum but these were the high end SCSI drives.
Of all of these drives, practically none failed. The Seagate 18 and 23 GB drivers were solid as a rock and to the best of my knowledge all made it through their warrenty period... If any had died we'd have been doing RMA's.
The last drive I bought is an 80GB Seagate IDE. Its still has a 3 year warrentee but I do worry about the newer products.
Since we were used to handling drives that cost up to about $5000 CDN my preference would have been for the manufactures to make a premium quality drive and bill us accordingly.
There is so damn much havock when a drive dies that it would be better to pay an extra couple hundred bux.
For instance - we charged for the RMA's just to cover the time we wasted. Imagine the disruption in the client's offices. I've seen client's almost in tears over dead drives back in the Seagate 410800N days.
These were the failing 9GB drives. None of the work that was on those drives was ever backed up because it never made sense even though the drives had a high failure rate.
It literally takes HOURS to back up to tape (say an exabyte) and DLT's weren't out back then. So even though the clients had literally dozen's of exabytes - when the drive died they reloaded the raw data and reprocessed, and sometimes lost their family life and holidays to do it.
I know some will say "Why didn't they use Raid?" and the answer is that some did. When you see over 100 drives in a Raid set you get an idea of how much storage they needed.
Well - Seagate solved the problem in the 9GB 410800N's and the reliablility on everything came up. I've seen very very few failures over the last few years.
Without awareness that damage can be done by intruders people will take no action. Even with awareness the vast majority take pathetically little action. The evidence for this is everywhere.
Any virus penetrating any PC for instance can cause massive damage ranging data being taken, destroyed, or spread all over the place through to actual physical damage to the machine.
Consider if the confidential files in a lawyer's computer ends up being broadcast willy nilly over the net, or if confidential records in an accountant's computer is broadcast to a competitor.
Damage to physical hardware can include wiping the bios so the machine can no longer boot, reprogramming the crtc register sweeps so that the monitors literally burn up, changing critical motherboard timings and more.
Yet - with all these risks the vast majority blindly putters along with virtually zero security. Vast numbers of people totally ignore the warnings sent by attack after attack of viruses and worms like code red and the slammer.
In fact, the slammer virtually took down the net and not much has changed. If I check my server logs I'll probably still see 1434 blocks. We had it blocked before it even happened. Yet 18 hours after slammer hit the Telco that we run through had not blocked 1434 in the router upstream of us. I even called the cops to see if they could convince these people to address their problems. Well - the cops said it was civil. Ignorance is civil, intent makes it criminal even if the damages are the same.
Several months after code red I was on the phone arguing!!! with my upstream that they should pull the plug on infected servers or at least call the damn owners so these machines could be fixed. The techs in that company later commented "Now you see what we are up against!".
I find it totally unacceptable that upstreams actually think it is just fine to accomodate cracked servers.
Of course there is pain involved when someone like Kevin slips in. But without pain there is no change. My observations tell me there will have to be a great deal more pain before things start to get better.
We are all very vulnerable to attacks and there are real enemies out there in cyberland. Kevin was never an enemy. He was just curious and never did any real harm. In fact, as I understand it much of the source code he looked at was opensourced long before his punishment ended.
This is no different than the government throwing someone in jail for tresspassing and then turning the land in question into a public park and meanwhile still keeping the guy locked up.
Basically all Kevin did was a minor trespass. Typically people are not thrown in jail for this. Often they are not even fined. So why was Kevin given such severe treatment? Does Les Miserables ring a bell?
Security is a necessity. Yes it costs money to make the patches and rebuild servers. But that is just part of the cost of doing business on the net. It is terribly unfair to blame the cracker whether black hat or white hat.
We do not use M$ servers. They are too insecure. I suppose M$ would want to attribute this lost business to people like Kevin. Perhaps there is a logic to this because if everyone was nice and acted like sheep then perhaps we could get away with bad products. On the other hand with billions on the net a more realistic approach might be to clean up the code.
I have many years of experiance as a consultant, as a programmer and as a manager. I have seen whole departments of people write really shitty code and justify it. An example of this is not properly checking return codes.
M$ has been guilty of this. I once accidently shut the power off on an external SCSI hard drive while winders was using it. There was no error message even.
I've had programmers fail do check return codes after I specifically instructed them to do proper return code checking. In one case over 3 weeks of project time was lost because a programmer had not checked the return code. In that case there was a typo in the database name meaning that the database system had no valid database to open up. The database system reported the "not found, invalid file name" of course, but the test for success on opening the database was not in place. Mistakes can be made, but in this case the programmer had left out ALL return code checking and this was in spite of the fact that we'd had a department meeting the week before she did this and discussed the issue to death. The rule was that regardless how tight deadlines were - we had time to properly handle return codes.
So the programmer was looking in the wrong direction for over 3 weeks... and the justification? She said she didn't have time to code in the return code tests!!!
Problems like this are not about security. They are about a mind set that is happy to take chances and IMHO its about being lasy.
Many of the exploits that black hat hackers use to walk into systems are due to lasyness. Some are due to simple ignorance. The ignorance factor can be improved via education. But this costs money. So there must be a motivation and that is supplied in part by the pain caused when systems get cracked.
So I still say that collectivly people like Kevin have done us a favour. Without them many programming managers would be to lasy to place the emphisis that must be placed on security. Even now M$ demonstrates just how lax people can be.
I have a great deal of difficulty following this logic. Attributing the cost of a manufacturer debugging flawed code to the person who illustrates the code is flawed makes about as much sense as killing the messenger.
If it weren't for Kevin cracking into these systems then someone else would have done it... and indeed many other crackers have done exactly this.
Kevin collectively did us all a service. Were it not for people like Keven the system we rely apon would even be more pathetically insecure.
The awareness that Kevin's activities helped foster has caused a lot of lazy programmers to clean up thier code.
Love music? Move to the Canada happy pirate zone
on
Copyright Rumblings
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· Score: 1
Yup - copying music (for personal use) is perfectly legal here in Canada. Its section 80 of the copyright act.
Well - if there was more competance in the ISP's and more accountability then there wouldn't be the problem.
Blocking port 1434 is quite trival. We've had it blocked for years. Its line 6 in our pf.conf file. We use OpenBSD firewalls and they are free and easy to configure and if YOU don't know how to configure your god damn firewall then either get your cheap ass server OFF the net or hire a competant systems admin (who probably needs the work) and PAY the guy a few sheckles (Like we did).
Next, Once the problem occurred it should NOT take the telcomunications industry literally HOURs to block the damn port.
If there were hospitals and the like incapacitated because of this then BLAME the damn ISP's and BACKBONE operators. Look - there are more than 100 million people on the bloody net. That some will cause a little mischief is to be expected and since we have had MANY MANY prior attacks I presume some of our Dimtwit managers should have figured out that maybe its going to happen again and maybe even get worse - so they better start paying their technical staff better and get better quality people and provide better training for them. These people are available. I know some of them. It is just not acceptable IMHO for a multi million dollar telco such as my upstream to simultaneously lay off competant admins (because they are too expensive?) and meanwhile not be able to deal effectively with this problem for more than 12 hours. Meanwhile we, with a pitance of their resources, had it under control before it started.
Don't blame the crackers. That is all too simple. It is a head in the sand ostrich approach and it shows a great deal of naivity. Blaming the crackers will accomplish nothing. There are just too many of them and they have virtual total anonymity anywys and this fact of life just ain't going to change anytime soon folks.
Besides - the crackers collectively do us a favour. The public is pathetically ignorant and if it weren't for the crackers they would be even worse. The pain must increase before people will deal with it. If it is not dealt with (present situation it would seem because the patches have been available for over 6 months) then when a real attack comes it will be no different than what happened at Perl Harbour. We have enemies out there in cyberspace. If the USA attacks Iraq I expect there are many who will want to respond with a real attack in cyberspace and this time they might use real payloads.
How would those server admins feel if Monday morning they came in to find (1) their crtc registers had been reprogrammed and their monitors were smoked and (2) bad data had been seeded throughout the databases literally for weeks or months and (3) as a final token the EEPROMS holding the bioses were erased? Machines treated like this are virtually unsalvagable. At least most of the techs in this city have no idea how to go about rebuilding a zeroed EEPROM.
Many of these servers have nice enterprise level automated backup systems in place too... which are vulnerable because they are on-line.
I hope there are law suits out of this. I hope these are directed at the ISP's that don't pull the plug on cracked Colos and against carriers that can't seem to implement simple firewall regress filters in a timely fashion. Maybe if this happens there will be more attention to having competant technical specialists on board in these organisation so that these bush fires can be put out before they cause real damage.
JMHO!
But when Code Red hit last year 2 weeks AFTER my ISP had not yet even advised some of their customers they had a problem and when I suggested to their ppl that perhaps it might be an idea to tell them I was attacked by incompetant customer relations people who wanted to continue to sweep it under the rug!!!
But nobody said Sheila Copps has much between her ears.
All we need is a nice card that will pick up the channels from 2 to 100. Many video cards can already do this. This lets any PC become a video recorder/player. The problem is that in the long term - I don't think this is where things are going to go.
Rather I expect P2P networks to become ubiqutous. I expect that a large number of ppl will set up recorders for whatever their favorite shows are and then they will drop them into a P2P system.
Ppl will compress it and encrypt it and P2P systems will share it. If this happens (and it already is) then the broadcasting industry itself will be challenged (read - reworked). Nobody likes their business model anyway. Personally I HATE the commercials so I don't watch TV. The _ONLY_ reason IMHO that the present system functions is because of a virtual monopoly on distribution. If you can control the distribution then you can drop in your commercials. If you lose control of the distribution (which is what P2P does) then nobody will give a damn about broadcast signals. But this will be the NEXT generation doing this - the present under 25 group.
The law may be there but it is unenforcable and who can prove where anything arrives from? This law only limits CANADIAN wannabe rebroadcasters. It doesn't limit USA rebroadcasters and besides - last I checked there IS no valuable Canadian Content anyway... save for hockey games and I personally don't give a damn about hockey.
What they are trying to do aint gonna work. As soon as the bandwidth climbs (DSL is almost too slow for this) the P2P aspects are going to mushroom and it will be from systems like Kaaza where you can't find a server to attack. In fact - We'll soon see if Kaaza can even be attacked as an organization... US courts are after them of course.
When we have terabyte hard drives and hopefully 36" high res monitors then people are NOT going to pay much attention to cable TV.
It will be much simpler to just pull in an MP4 and play it when you want to.
All we need is a well designed opensource P2P system and of course opensource video codecs. So far we don't have these. But the future is a long time and I figure within 5 years it will happen.
I'll probably get modded down for this but so what. The biggest pirate in the world is the telecommunications industry because they grab and duplicate copyrighted material from all over the world for delievery to their customers (the surfing public) and not only do they not pay a dime to the vast majority of the people who created this content - if the owners of the content were to ask even who the consumers were then they are told that would be a breach of privacy.
Not only this, the industry has so much influence that they were able to get "safe harbour" laws passed that makes it legal for them to do this.
But - not _all_ of the people who create this content are ripped off. Some - if they happen to be corporately attractive enough were able to do a "convergance" and these people do make money...
They say they make money from the "distribution" of the content - but then this is what the recording industry does too. The difference between creating web content for instance and musical content is that at least in the case of musical content the artists own the rights until they sign them away. In the case of web content the creators lose their right to distribution the moment it is put on the net. This right is taken from them with zero compensation.
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It has been said before that it is trivial to copy a dvd and play it back from say a tape or hard drive WITHOUT resorting to cracking the encryption. All that is required is the development of a VIRTUAL DVD device driver. If the windows player thinks it has a DVD out their in hardware land it will decrypt the bits even if they are actually comming from a file.
Does anyone dispute this? Do we have to create a virtual DVD driver before people will believe this? Perhaps we should - and sent it to Jon's defense team.
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The only way you can prevent the unauthorised copying of digital material in a computer is to prevent programmers from being able to access _any_ part of the data stream that is playing the material. This means programmers must be prevented from writing device drivers and memory probes etcetera. This is REALLY what paladium and DRM is all about. Microsoft is very much in favour of this because it will shut down independant programmers. The short of it is that if the programmer has access to ring 0 - then he can do anything he wants. He can even write his own DLL wrappers and trap the parameters going back and forth.
In order to prevent this, it is necessary to restrict end user from running the software. Thus the software must be certified and this will be both expensive (another microsoft tax) and restrictive.
This is a restraint of trade move of unprecedented porportions.
I'm a supporter of Mandrake. But this fiasco is because they ended up saddled with incompetant managment that blew the wad. This is in the Mandrake website. The problem is that there is limited accountability when the management of the company embarks on an idiotic business plan... later when the company loses its collective shirts and has to file for bankruptcy it is those who try to clean up the mess who suffer along with their customers. Remember the comments about the rats leaving the sinking ship?
Well - I purchased Mandrake and installed it in a system and it looks really great. This was an 8.1 system mind you and I have not found out how to apply the security patches or upgrades. This is a REALLY big problem of course.
So - I have Mandrake on one of my systems and I have decided to not use it. Instead I did a debian install on my main system and the reason I did this is because of the Debian Package managment system and the ease of upgrades and patches.
Personally, while I like Mandrake and I hope there continues to be a place for them in the Linux community, I do not expect that I shall be using their distro in the forseeable future. I shall not be using RedHat either and again the reason is upgradability.
If this takes off it will mean the end of independant developers. Simply stated, you can have a trusted OS and a trusted application but if some untrusted programmer is allowed to access the restricted hardware then the security is blown.
This means that such a system can only allow programs written by trusted programmers and we all know this means that M$ programmers will be able to write code but you and I won't be allowed to.
Well - at $25 bux per month for ISP services AOL alone bills about 33 million people and that generates almost 10 billion per year in revenues. This for access to content that as you put it "isn't worth paying for". I'd suggest that if the content that you say "isn't worth paying for" were not present on the net then perhaps AOL would not even exist.
None of this revenue stream is shared with the people who create the content AOL distributes of course.
Well - I don't like to pay my phone company either but I am willing to do it. Micropayments have to be built into the price of ISP services just as transportation is built into the cost of eggs.
This means we need to get the telecommunications industry onside. They'll make more money out of a micropayment system because they will be doing the billing and they can charge a percentage for this service.
The reason something like this has not been attempted is that the internet is unique in the manner in which content is dealt with as a matter of law.
In every other field the artist who creates the content (intellectual property) has the right to decide how it is distributed and whether copies can be made and on what terms.
With the interent, the idea of the people who create the content having control was switched around.
Safe harbour clauses in laws like the DMCA state that the moment content is put on the internet the carriers and ISP's gain the right to copy and distribute. Furthermore they may do this without any regard to compensation to the legal owners of the material.
This means that a large ISP like a baby bell will pay a backbone operator for access to the content that comes through a pop (point of presence) but if your server is connected into their system then they will bill you for the volume of content they pull out of your servers.
Mind you - if you can get really big - like Microsoft - then you can advise the phone company that it might be cheaper for them to access your private "pop" and get their content directly from you rather than off the backbone. If you have enough market clout they will talk to you about a "peering arrangement" and they may even pay you.
Its all about size and a monoploy/oligopoly negotiating who pays whom based on who has enough control to force the other party to do the paying. It has practically nothing to do with who is supplying a service and who is consuming the service. Its also probably against the fair trade practices legislation in most countries and I was talking to my lawyers about launching a class action suit this morning in fact.
I've read a number of the comments about T1 billings and how DS0's are bundled into T1's (or E1's if you are in europe) and how these are bundled into higher speed circuits and so on.
All of these comments are 100% correct - at least the ones I read. The problem is that this misses a very important issue.
The Telco's WANT interent content because this is what they are supplying to THEIR customer base and this customer base is HIGHLY tipped in favour of the surfing public. In effect anyone running a server is providing a service to the telecomunications industry IN SPITE OF THE FACT that the marketing arm of the telcos is trying to switch this around.
Ok. Suppose we were to look at the relationship between a relatively large telecomunications company and a backbone operator. The connection takes place via a POP (point of presence) and this is typically an expensive high speed router with fiber running into it. For the priviledge of this interconnect typically the telecomunications company will have to pay the backbone operator several $100,000 per month.
Ok. Suppose we have a web server get say slashdotted and this web server is accessed via the backbone. In this case the telco will be paying fees to that backbone operator for the bandwidth that their customer base demands.
This customer base does NOT include servers that they may host mind you. That should be obvious to everyone.
On the other hand if the slashdotted server were actually located within the system the Telco is running then they will of course have to install the SAME equipment required to support their customer base but they would NOT have to pay money towards the backbone - since obviously in this senerio the backbone is not involved. In fact - with bandwidth charges they'll be able to do some billing... right?
Now - as pointed out the issues of equipment costs and peak bandwidth are at the scale of the telecommunications industry normally governed by needed capacity and not how many packets happen to fly through a router from a given server on a given day. IE. If you want an OC3 pipe to a pop it will cost so much per month whether you use it all or not.
Given this. Once packets are in a telco's system, they generally have the capacity to route them to where-ever their customers happen to be located regardless of how the packets arrive in their system.
Now - a company operating a popular server will generally be told that they need to pay. Yet if this company has a server so popular that OCx speeds are required - then that company will be able to say "Hey - we run a POP - so you guys can pay us or you guys can pay the backbone... we're a bit cheaper".
This means that not all slashdotted server operators end up getting hosed over bandwidth charges. Some - if they are big enuf to negotiate a POP style connection actually make money.
For a moment lets look at the actual costs of a connection to the big switches the telcos use. Clearly one can set up a co-location office in a suitable location. The number of servers that can be located in such an office - even if very small is quite substancial. So lets consider the cost of running say a fibre link over to the telco's switch.
I'll use the example of a 100 mb/sec link which is about 2 T3's. (28x24x64kb/sec=43mb/sec)x2...
This can be handled by a pair of allied Telesyn fiber to ethernet drivers that I priced at under $1000 USD each. The fiber itself in 6 pair cable cost under $1 USD per foot. This means that a mile of fiber would cost under $5000 bux and with installation - say under $20,000. The fiber drivers in question will handle over 50 miles.
For a total cost of under $25,000 the physical equipment can be installed that will handle 2 T3's of capacity - and I am certain that people will realise that even a lowley PC can handle the routing of a 100 base-T nic. In fact for under $100 bux we can pick up a linksys unit or a d-link that can do it. Remember that once the packets are delivered to the telco's equipment - that it is their problem. If their customers want the content then the company has to get it somewhere - right?
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Lets look at the billings that typically are demanded for such a link. Typically as has been pointed out in other posts the demand is in the order of $1000 bux per month for each T1 equivalent. Since 100mb/sec is in the order of 2 T3's we get 2x28=56 T1 equivalents or a charge of over $50,000 per month for a line that costs less than $25,000 to install.
Now I want to make another point here. If the telco in question has enough customers to generate a combined demand of 100 mb/sec from a server - then that telco is going to have to pay the backbone in order to get at the content the server holds. If they are willing to pay the backbone - why not strike a deal with the owners of the servers? The point is that once the packets are in the telco's system that the costs are not going to vary much regardless how they got there.
Well - the reason companies that run servers are typically not offered a deal is because (1) they typically do not understand the game and (2) they typically are not supplying huge amounts of content so (3) typically they can be convinced by the market droids (who also do not know all that much about this) that if you run a server you should be treated as a consummer instead of as a supplier.
The facts are that in most industries if a company is willing to pay one group of suppliers, then fair trade practices legisaltion reguires a similar offer be made to all suppliers. A company running a server is a suppler. Furthermore the product they are supplying (internet content) is very valuable and generates revenues in the BILLIONS per month.
So to answer the question of why bandwidth shoudl cost so much if a server gets slashdotted for instance - well - the answer is that it is because the operator of the typical server does not have enough market clout to organise a fair deal.
Before people start flaming these ideas, let me point out that I have been on the phone with the VP of content development in the telco that serves me and he freely acknowleged that servers are suppliers and that the way to approach this is to contact the telco and speak to the people that negotiate peering arrangements. The people who handle high speed digital services are typically reading from the manuals that deal with consummer communications. Servers are suppliers not consummers but if you talk to the wrong group then expect a poor deal.
I do tend to agree somewhat. For the average person they tend to like only gui's. But then the average person really doesn't know much about a computer and doesn't do much with a computer.
Unix carries its command oriented legacy applications for a reason. Simply put they are a very useful and powerful way to get real work done and this is why I for instance like unix and why I don't like windows. Nevertheless I do have an NT desktop and I did use it as my primary desktop machine for at least 5 years. Of course - the first thing I did is open about 5 DOS PROMPTS and got my OS/2 version of Brief running - then I opened 6 terraterm sessions into my linux development boxen.
Now I find that Linux is a little better on the desktop than NT. I have zero interest in 2000 or XP and I do happen to own a copy of 2000 BTW.
There are HORRIBLE compromises in the WINDOWS world. One of these is that error messages have been pulled - this means you can shut off a SCSI disk on a win95 machine while it is being accessed and there will not be a message issued.
I had an OS/2 machine networked with my NT machine and these DID run the same microsoft networking code - because Microsoft did both OS's. I was never able to xfer a file using a microsoft protocol without that file arriving totally mangled - and never once did I receive an error message.
This leads me to beleive that if a network error were to occur or a file system error were to occur - that in the windows world the user's data will be trashed and no error or warning will be issued.
Simply put - the PC/windows world is unrealiable.
I think it was about the time that the Pentium came out that ECC and Parity memory were dropped in the PC for about 90% of machines that people relied upon.
IMHO this attitude is unacceptable. But then the vast majority of home users will proclaim that there is no reason for them to worry about security for instance because they don't have anything of value in their computers anyway. So there you go. Easy to use but not used for anything of value.
Unix is the way it is because the people who use unix typically use it for serious work and WE LIKE IT LIKE THIS. This does not mean it cannot be inmproved. There are some real rough spots and for the most part UNIX people are the first to admit it.
Things are being improved pretty rapidly as well. I personally think *nix is about ready for prime time and I do expect the usage stats to improve considerably over the next while. As for it moving into #1 position some day? Well - I think it will.
The history of the computer field is riddled with corpses. In fact - this is one of the primary reasons OpenSourse software exists - it seems to be the only way for us programmers to salvage our work. I know I personally lost YEARS of my life reprogramming for this platform or that platform or this database system or that one! In fact - I am again going through a port - this time out of Oracle into PostgreSQL.
Of the platforms I have programmed on - more than a DOZEN BTW - only 3 are in common use today. All the rest have failed.
This tells me the odds of Microsoft failing are very high - a virtual certainty. OpenSource will displace them. But this might happen 10 or 15 years from now.
As Churchill put it: Perhaps we are at the end of the beginning.
You make a good point. If I had moderator access today I'd toss you a point for this post!
Personally I used NT 4.0 for about 5 years on the desktop and linux on the servers. Servers are now openBSD but that isn't an issue. I've recently added a Debian Woody desktop after toying with the idea of Mandrake (I did buy it - but I've decided to not use it because I don't know how to upgrade it. With Debian I can do the upgrade).
What I find is that Mozilla is out of date (on woody) and it crashes, hangs and has to be killed periodically. Konquerer AFAIK doesn't do ssl. OpenOffice looks great! X works pretty good and supports my twin heads same as NT did - but I needed to be more than a mere mortal to get it running - same with XMMS and GRIP. For access to the soundcard for instance I had to add a user and change group permissions on/dev/sg* and/dev/scd*
These are things a competant sysadmin can do. Unfortunately they are things that must be done. For mere mortals I suspect these are things that would drive them back to winders.
We still need to improve the usability and upgradability and then we need to tackle things like the man pages and add some examples. They are just TERRIBLE at present. People like me have never managed to find out even how to upgrade them.
These are all quite fixable issues. Still - we need to get this done ASAP.
Nevertheless my daughter will be picking up her MANDRAKE box shortly and I think she will learn to love it. I told her it comes with tech support!!! If she tosses Mandrake down the track in favor of some flavour of winders she looses her free tech support from me. Now I guess I still need to figure out how to u/g Mandrake boxen. Alas! Even the simplest things are obsure in the *nix world. I sometimes think *nix programmers and systems admins like to live in an obsure world. Perhaps they think this gives them job security.
Prior to the DCMA, the owner of copyrighted materials had the right to duplication and distribution of his/her creations. These rights were subject to the abuse of organisations like the RIAA for instance, but at least the artistic community held the rights until they (often naively) negotiated them away.
With the DMCA, safe harbour provisions were created that transfered the right of distribution away from the creator into the hands of the distributor the moment the creator posted his/her material on the net. In effect the creator of a work lost the right to distribute and duplicate their work - without any negotiation or need for the creator to be compensated.
Thus, a company that owns content (which is presently not made available on the net) would be at a disadvantage because the moment they post it - they would effectivly lose control over distrribution. This ruling by the FCC will fix that. By merging media interests with distribution interests the combined mega corporation controls both the distribution as well as retaining control of their copyrighted materials - IE the problem is fixed.
Collateral damage includes anyone who is not powerful enuf to be a major carrier and/or who does not have a significant amount of internet content - enough to make them attractive enough for a large telecomunications interest to want to climb into bed with them.
Slashdot falls into this category. With no means of negotiating a sweetheart "convergance" contract with a telecommunications carrier, slashdot will get hosed on bandwidth charges. Meanwhile, having lost the "right to copy" their presumably copyrighted materials (DMCA transfers these rights to the carriers) Slashdot is unable to participate in the HUGE revenues that stem from the delivery of same to the consumming public.
What a sad commentary on manipulation of the unfolding cyber world.
This development is NOT in our interest! It certainly should be considered rather draconian by anyone aspiring to make a living utilizing the technologys presently being developed for cyberspace.
This group will include most webmasters, many systems admins, most HTML and CGI programmers and probably most of the flash programmers. The group includes a lot of wanna-be-professional web developers and artists - many of whom are doing brilliant work and may never know why the job offers they were hoping for didn't develop.
If anyone things this is an overestimate of the damages - then consider the number of layoffs in the dot.bomb sector. A good place to read on this is at fucked company
Over at FC, Pud declares that these were just shitty business plans and that any company that does not make a profit will simply go out of business. Ya, Pud is pretty ruthless - might not have a heart.
The point IMHO that Pud is overlooking is that some outfits like Slashdot.org do a RATHER GOOD JOB and they also are feeling a cash squeeze. Perhaps its a bad business plan... but I rather think the issue is having your work taken without compensation and being given no access to a rather HUGE revenue stream that this work helps to create.
Let me ask - if it were not for great websites like Slashdot, why would people like us bother to subscribe to an ISP? We pay our ISP's for access to this material and our ISP's pay their upstreams. Somewhere along the way over to the slashdot servers the money flow stops.
Slashdot is a very popular website - even so they have little market clout in the eyes of upsteams. So little slashdot with little bargaining power is placed in the situtation that they can either pack up their bags and go home - or try to find some way to fund the operation.
Meanwhile, if there are say 100,000 slashdot readers then "we" pay at least $25x100,000 = $2,500,000 per month for our interent access. In my case with the dropping content, I find that the docs over at gnu and a few other open source projects makes it worthwhile for me to have a dedicated connection. In total - slashdot probably represents over 10% of the total internet content I look at. I would be very happy if a percentage of the money I pay each month found itself flowing into the pockets of SlashDot.
But without any distribution clout - that isn't likely to happen.
Meanwhile we should expect that organizations like CNN, TSN, and so forth will find they can make good money distrubuting THEIR content - because THEY will have enough clout to bargan for an inside seat in the distribtution game.
In effect, the rest of us subsidize them because the content they have could NEVER create the net.
This would be true. There IS no method that can be used to protect a DVD. Let me explain.
A DVD carries about 4-5 GB of data. Apparently part of the DVD is non-recordable, Thus if you try to copy the DVD in a burner part of it cannot be written. So what? Just relocate...
An exabyte tape drive carries about 4-5GB. With a trivial amount of work one can copy the WHOLE DVD out to the tape. This is rather obvious. Tape drives were designed to be written to and DVD's were designed to be read. perhaps these idjots (read RIAA and MPAA) have in mind to outlaw computer devices that you can write to. Oh? did I forget that you can copy to your hard drive instead of say a tape? did I forget that exabytes are now obsolete? did I forget that there are LOTS of new tape drives that can handle anywhere up to 120GB or more?
Now - having done so... the issue becomes how to read it back in. This is rather trivial as well. Most computers support a read function. Perhaps the idjots will lobby to ban this as well.
Having read the data from whatever media it has been recorded onto the job simply becomes one of stuffing the data into the program that was designed to decode it. Any device driver will do this.
All that is needed is to write a DD that will emulate the DVD player. The operating system needs to be told that it has said DVD player out in hardware land. The Device driver does this. So the device driver then implements a virtual DVD player and the job is done. Why bother with DeCSS... but if you read papers on the CSS system it was pretty trivial to defeat the scheme anyway.
Perhaps the idjots would like to legislate against intellegence. Hell - throw all cleaver people in jail! What we are seeing is the attempted criminalization of the art of computer programming. The Norweigan prosecutor is attacking US. All of us. Next we'll hear that VMWare is illaegal because it will run winders and this allows a person to watch a DVD in linux.
Oh, perhaps the DVD reader does the decoding... well - this is fine too because then all that is required is the DD that drives the player has to spin off a copy. This is rather trivial as well because at the DD level we get a buffer full of data... that can be sent to another DD like the one that runs the hard drive with a rather trivial amount of work.
IMHO the conspiracy is that the RIAA and MPAA want only their corporate buddies (M$?) to be able to play a DVD because this will quash linux use. With patent law in one hand independant programmers are tied up in what they can do... and with DMCA style laws in the other hand users are tied up with what they can use. The winners are the monopolists who can then force artists to sign draconian contracts that bind them for years and prevent them from being able to distribute their material.
Meanwhile it is rather interesting that the internet content "we" develope that causes millions of people to pay their ISP's just happens to fall into a "safe Harbour" so that AOL for instance gets free access to any content we create and can distribute it to their 33 million odd customers without compensating us in any way.
You are RONG. Go dig out the Berne copyright conventions and talk with a lawyer.
If you hire a consultant then the consultant will own the copyright UNLESS you specifically contract that this is NOT the case - and this must be in writing.
If you hire an EMPLOYEE then the employer will AUTOMATICALLY own the copyright UNLESS there is a contract in writing that precludes this.
The reason for this is that the legal status of an employee is derived from said individual being a "servant" and since his employer bought his "servant's" time, his employer has a right to anything produced by his "servant". This means that legally if an employee creates something ON HIS OWN TIME then even in this case his employer MOST LIKELY has a claim to it. The bottom line is that a full time employee has sold ALL of his creativity and time to his employer whether he likes it or not. So if you don't like this idea folks, then QUIT.
Contractors and consultants on the other hand are providing a product. If a carpenter designs a nail gun and builds the house in 1/2 the time, the home owner does not have a claim to the nail gun. This is obvious I would think. However if a developer hires the same carpenter full time - well then the employer ownes the intellectual property associated with the nail gun.
Similary, a contractor may come in and peice together a large number of components and supply a finished system to the client. This should not mean that the client gains the copyrights to the components. In fact it should not even mean that the client gains the copyright the the glue code that stiches these components together. All the client gets is the right to use the finished product and usually the right to modify it somewhat.
There has been a lot of litigation in this area. Anyone affected _should_ run (not walk) to a good IP attourney.
I'm a developer and have been for a rather long time. Personally I disagree with the notion that I should not be allowed to "own" my own creations.
To suggest something like this is akin to suggesting that people must publish their personal diaries if asked to do so - the justification of this intrusion being that certain other people who shall remain nameless have published shoody works derived from diaries (not Anne Frank's of course) and since the public interest wasn't served... well hey - turn over your diaries folks.
Well, diaries are not computer programs but they are written instruments and they are intellectual property and it is my right to keep my sources confidential if I wish just as it is your right to have a personal diary.
That being said, the vast majority of the software I have written has been under contract and while it was NOT absolutely necassary to release the sources, in general I did so.
The result on one occation is that a job I bid at a little less than $30,000 ended up handed over to another contractor who eventually billed over $150,000 and used my source code as their starting point. Later I found they botched the job which was one reason it cost so much. It seems they got into trouble and as the project slowly sunk the client in desperation tried to fix the problem by adding more money. More recently there was some musings on the part of the end users that they really wish it would get a face lift. I suppose I should do it and then demo it and demand that lost $120,000 bux because I shall have to tear out 100% of that shitty code my competition layered in. So far I have not felt inspired enuf to take it on. There are a lot of people involved in this fiasco as it turns out because the software is in use by every major oil and gas exploration company in the world and a lot of government agencies as well.
So in this case IMHO, not only was I shafted, the customer ended up with a shaft as well. Indeed, some of the work in that project was under MY copyright and the contractor who worked with MY COPYRIGHTED SOFTWARE did not have a right to use it. In situtations like this this however, it is usually better to grin and bear it and meanwhile let them fall flat on their own faces.
Nevertheless it kinda hurts to have others F up your work and get paid 5x what you asked. In the contracting business I think this probably happens a lot mind you.
I am reminded of a contouring package written by an aquaintance of mine. This software was usually licensed under a binary only agreement but as I was told one Major oil company by the name of Amoco paid extra for access to the source. They next proceeded to improve the package in a number of ways until it no longer worked. At this point they had to go back to the original developer and buy it all over again.
Well, comments like "all software should be open source" are somewhat naive. There is a point here however. With most software, unless it becomes open source, it is quite likely that the package will die with its creator. That is the current situation with the contouring package. Were it open source, then some of us could take it over and improve it. As it stands it will probably eventually be lost forever.
I think for most developers, they are conserned about retaining control while they have an interest in it. Often this can be to the customer's advantage as well, because often beauracracies do not understand the creative processes as they apply to software. There is no surprise that there can be more than an order of magnitude productivity between programmers and this productivity can be multiplied by a further order of magnitude when one considers the algorithmic design aspect.
Perhaps Richard Stallman's contributions in the emacs and GCC areas illustrate this. Not only was Richard able to out program whole departments, his programs have a certain edge in the design area as well. Thus the GCC compiler for instance can compile pretty much any language for which one wants to define a grammer and it can compile to pretty much any architecture that one wishes to define to the back end. That is one awesome peice of work!
If we were to take the next 1000 programmers from any campus, or any technical colledge and try to find even one who could match Richard's work, then I say the odds would be rather low.
So one way to look at this is that Stallman chose the OpenSource solution as a vehical to retain control over his work. At the time he was programming GCC for instance, had he not been able to use the OpenSource vehical then I am totally convinced that some bean counter somewhere would have found a way to shuffle this marvelous work into a closet somewhere and the vast majority of us would never have know it even existed.
So Opensource has its place and it is appropriate for general purpose systems tools.
As for special purpose application software... Well, maybe. If programmers didn't have to make a living then I'd probably say OpenSource everything. But the truth is that we do have to make a living and programmers, especially contractors, always face the possibility that they will be excluded from further development on their own work simply because of politics, dirty tricks, or any one of a miriad of reasons that result in a contract being issued to the competition.
The problem is that programmers are not like carpenters. We are not created equal and one cannot just plug in a replacement part so to speak. The contract award process does not consider this. Maybe the market place does but I suspect not or we'd never have the really shitty commercial software crappola that hangs around.
Until some of these problems are solved I vote for programmers to have the right to retain control of their sources. However if someone can invent a fair compensation scheme for those who create the original works then I'll change my vote.
Consider a company like Telstra. This company supplies connectivity to internet content to Australian ISP's and a very large percentage of the content that Australians consume originates in the good ole USA.
Does anyone think for an instant that the USA interests that carry this content are willing to allow Testra to get access to it for FREE? Of course not - Telstra pays big bux to connect to the POP's.
The point is that while Telstra is willing to pay American interets to get access to internet content, at the same time Telstra does not offer this deal to any Australian interests, that is unless they happen to be part of a cosey little club that Telstra has organised a business arrangement with.
Not only is it likely illegal under Australian competition laws for Telstra to pay one group (americans) while simultaneously refusing to pay Australians for access to this internet content, it is extreemly unpatriotic.
This illustrates the problem with the business model the net operates under. Web Servers _ARE_ providing a service - to their upstreams who in turn pass this content on to other upstreams until it eventually reaches the backbone. Now - everyone in this pecking order of delivery of web content from the server through to the end user gets paid - EXCEPT THE PEOPLE WHO CREATE THE CONTENT AND RUN THE SERVERS.
It is the only business in the world that I can think of where success can bankrupt you and this is because it is the only business in the world where the supplier and owner of the content does not get paid by those who consume it.
The bottom line is that a webserver's upstream should be remitting money to the owner of the server based at least on the amount of content they suck out of the server.
If webmasters were to band together and block their content from distribution to certain large players (like say AOL) on certain days then I think the point might be made.
Please note that the end user does pay his upstream for access to the content they consume and ISP's also pay their upsreams. This chain of payments seems to stop somwhere.
Major players would make MORE MONEY if they would play by the rules that govern every other industry on the planet - that is those who are suppliers need to be paid for what they supply.
No one is expecting anyone to do the accounting and disbursement for free. Those who carry the content can expect to make say 15% or more for the service of collecting a royalty on the content they suck from web servers. Indeed in general this accounting is already being done because it forms the basis of billings that ISP's pay and the fees charged for access to the POP's.
The only thing is that the lowly webserver must be included in the business model. As it is now, it is not the end user who rips off the web master - it is the telecommunication industry that attempts to treat a webserver as a consumer instead of a supplier.
Slashdot Mirror
Not everyone in the oil industry thinks that all petroleum is biological. Thomas Gold wrote a book called "The Deep Hot Biosphere" and he says there may be significant amounts of oil from the mantel.
:-)
Personally, I don't know enough to say if he might be right. But if some day oil is found say under the basement of the Peace River Arch then I won't be too suprised. There was a well planned to be drilled BTW but they ran into problems and ran out of money and then the promoter ran out too - and is now being extradited back
If people want to invest a few schekles that well can probably be finished for only say about 1/2 million.
So when one of these dude's get slammer or code red how much is it going to cost them? And do they have to pay?
Datafast Broadband ADSL is available in three extremely fast speeds:
* 256 Kbps Downstream, 64 Kbps Upstream
* 512 Kbps Downstream, 128 Kbps Upstream
* 1500 Kbps Downstream, 256 Kbps Upstream
For the business users there is also a SDSL service in addition to Broadband ADSL:
* 512 Kbps Downstream, and 512 Kbps Upstream
so which do you have? Over in Canada you get 2.5 Mb/sec down and 640mb/sec up and 5 statics ona business plan for $79.95
I didn't know DSl could run as slow as the "extremely fast" service offered by "Datafast".
I don't know about on/off cycles because I never power machines down. Generally I try to use hich quality drives too.
So, a pair of 350MB full height ESDI drives are still running. I got them 2nd hand out of a VAX in about 1991. I gave that system to my brother in about 1995. They are Maxtor's.
Next I went into some 2GB Seagate Hawks 5400 rpm drives (cost about $1500 each - 5 year garantee) and some micropolis 5400 RPM drives. All are still running but they are now powered off. I'm using some old 3GB Seagate 5 1/4" 43400's. These are still fine. I think they have been more or less in continous service since about 1991 or so.
They were purchased when the 43400's first came out.
Well, the Seagate 410800N's were a disaster the first year they were out. I sold over 100 of them and every one died. I was going NUTZ on the rma's.
Meanwhile personally I started using Fujitsu IDE's. None of my Fujitsu IDE drives has died.
In the SCSI world we went to IBM's and Maxtor's and ended up pretty much dropping Seagate because they screwed the channel and we couldn't get them.
We also handled Quantum but these were the high end SCSI drives.
Of all of these drives, practically none failed. The Seagate 18 and 23 GB drivers were solid as a rock and to the best of my knowledge all made it through their warrenty period... If any had died we'd have been doing RMA's.
The last drive I bought is an 80GB Seagate IDE. Its still has a 3 year warrentee but I do worry about the newer products.
Since we were used to handling drives that cost up to about $5000 CDN my preference would have been for the manufactures to make a premium quality drive and bill us accordingly.
There is so damn much havock when a drive dies that it would be better to pay an extra couple hundred bux.
For instance - we charged for the RMA's just to cover the time we wasted. Imagine the disruption in the client's offices. I've seen client's almost in tears over dead drives back in the Seagate 410800N days.
These were the failing 9GB drives. None of the work that was on those drives was ever backed up because it never made sense even though the drives had a high failure rate.
It literally takes HOURS to back up to tape (say an exabyte) and DLT's weren't out back then. So even though the clients had literally dozen's of exabytes - when the drive died they reloaded the raw data and reprocessed, and sometimes lost their family life and holidays to do it.
I know some will say "Why didn't they use Raid?" and the answer is that some did. When you see over 100 drives in a Raid set you get an idea of how much storage they needed.
Well - Seagate solved the problem in the 9GB 410800N's and the reliablility on everything came up. I've seen very very few failures over the last few years.
Without awareness that damage can be done by intruders people will take no action. Even with awareness the vast majority take pathetically little action. The evidence for this is everywhere.
Any virus penetrating any PC for instance can cause massive damage ranging data being taken, destroyed, or spread all over the place through to actual physical damage to the machine.
Consider if the confidential files in a lawyer's computer ends up being broadcast willy nilly over the net, or if confidential records in an accountant's computer is broadcast to a competitor.
Damage to physical hardware can include wiping the bios so the machine can no longer boot, reprogramming the crtc register sweeps so that the monitors literally burn up, changing critical motherboard timings and more.
Yet - with all these risks the vast majority blindly putters along with virtually zero security. Vast numbers of people totally ignore the warnings sent by attack after attack of viruses and worms like code red and the slammer.
In fact, the slammer virtually took down the net and not much has changed. If I check my server logs I'll probably still see 1434 blocks. We had it blocked before it even happened. Yet 18 hours after slammer hit the Telco that we run through had not blocked 1434 in the router upstream of us. I even called the cops to see if they could convince these people to address their problems. Well - the cops said it was civil. Ignorance is civil, intent makes it criminal even if the damages are the same.
Several months after code red I was on the phone arguing!!! with my upstream that they should pull the plug on infected servers or at least call the damn owners so these machines could be fixed. The techs in that company later commented "Now you see what we are up against!".
I find it totally unacceptable that upstreams actually think it is just fine to accomodate cracked servers.
Of course there is pain involved when someone like Kevin slips in. But without pain there is no change. My observations tell me there will have to be a great deal more pain before things start to get better.
We are all very vulnerable to attacks and there are real enemies out there in cyberland. Kevin was never an enemy. He was just curious and never did any real harm. In fact, as I understand it much of the source code he looked at was opensourced long before his punishment ended.
This is no different than the government throwing someone in jail for tresspassing and then turning the land in question into a public park and meanwhile still keeping the guy locked up.
Basically all Kevin did was a minor trespass. Typically people are not thrown in jail for this. Often they are not even fined. So why was Kevin given such severe treatment? Does Les Miserables ring a bell?
Security is a necessity. Yes it costs money to make the patches and rebuild servers. But that is just part of the cost of doing business on the net. It is terribly unfair to blame the cracker whether black hat or white hat.
We do not use M$ servers. They are too insecure. I suppose M$ would want to attribute this lost business to people like Kevin. Perhaps there is a logic to this because if everyone was nice and acted like sheep then perhaps we could get away with bad products. On the other hand with billions on the net a more realistic approach might be to clean up the code.
I have many years of experiance as a consultant, as a programmer and as a manager. I have seen whole departments of people write really shitty code and justify it. An example of this is not properly checking return codes.
M$ has been guilty of this. I once accidently shut the power off on an external SCSI hard drive while winders was using it. There was no error message even.
I've had programmers fail do check return codes after I specifically instructed them to do proper return code checking. In one case over 3 weeks of project time was lost because a programmer had not checked the return code. In that case there was a typo in the database name meaning that the database system had no valid database to open up. The database system reported the "not found, invalid file name" of course, but the test for success on opening the database was not in place. Mistakes can be made, but in this case the programmer had left out ALL return code checking and this was in spite of the fact that we'd had a department meeting the week before she did this and discussed the issue to death. The rule was that regardless how tight deadlines were - we had time to properly handle return codes.
So the programmer was looking in the wrong direction for over 3 weeks... and the justification? She said she didn't have time to code in the return code tests!!!
Problems like this are not about security. They are about a mind set that is happy to take chances and IMHO its about being lasy.
Many of the exploits that black hat hackers use to walk into systems are due to lasyness. Some are due to simple ignorance. The ignorance factor can be improved via education. But this costs money. So there must be a motivation and that is supplied in part by the pain caused when systems get cracked.
So I still say that collectivly people like Kevin have done us a favour. Without them many programming managers would be to lasy to place the emphisis that must be placed on security. Even now M$ demonstrates just how lax people can be.
I have a great deal of difficulty following this logic. Attributing the cost of a manufacturer debugging flawed code to the person who illustrates the code is flawed makes about as much sense as killing the messenger.
If it weren't for Kevin cracking into these systems then someone else would have done it... and indeed many other crackers have done exactly this.
Kevin collectively did us all a service. Were it not for people like Keven the system we rely apon would even be more pathetically insecure.
The awareness that Kevin's activities helped foster has caused a lot of lazy programmers to clean up thier code.
Yup - copying music (for personal use) is perfectly legal here in Canada. Its section 80 of the copyright act.
Read it here: copyright act
Just before section 79 you will see the heading "Private copying". Is that a misspelling of "pirate" by any chance?
Well - if there was more competance in the ISP's and more accountability then there wouldn't be the problem.
Blocking port 1434 is quite trival. We've had it blocked for years. Its line 6 in our pf.conf file. We use OpenBSD firewalls and they are free and easy to configure and if YOU don't know how to configure your god damn firewall then either get your cheap ass server OFF the net or hire a competant systems admin (who probably needs the work) and PAY the guy a few sheckles (Like we did).
Next, Once the problem occurred it should NOT take the telcomunications industry literally HOURs to block the damn port.
If there were hospitals and the like incapacitated because of this then BLAME the damn ISP's and BACKBONE operators. Look - there are more than 100 million people on the bloody net. That some will cause a little mischief is to be expected and since we have had MANY MANY prior attacks I presume some of our Dimtwit managers should have figured out that maybe its going to happen again and maybe even get worse - so they better start paying their technical staff better and get better quality people and provide better training for them. These people are available. I know some of them. It is just not acceptable IMHO for a multi million dollar telco such as my upstream to simultaneously lay off competant admins (because they are too expensive?) and meanwhile not be able to deal effectively with this problem for more than 12 hours. Meanwhile we, with a pitance of their resources, had it under control before it started.
Don't blame the crackers. That is all too simple. It is a head in the sand ostrich approach and it shows a great deal of naivity. Blaming the crackers will accomplish nothing. There are just too many of them and they have virtual total anonymity anywys and this fact of life just ain't going to change anytime soon folks.
Besides - the crackers collectively do us a favour. The public is pathetically ignorant and if it weren't for the crackers they would be even worse. The pain must increase before people will deal with it. If it is not dealt with (present situation it would seem because the patches have been available for over 6 months) then when a real attack comes it will be no different than what happened at Perl Harbour. We have enemies out there in cyberspace. If the USA attacks Iraq I expect there are many who will want to respond with a real attack in cyberspace and this time they might use real payloads.
How would those server admins feel if Monday morning they came in to find (1) their crtc registers had been reprogrammed and their monitors were smoked and (2) bad data had been seeded throughout the databases literally for weeks or months and (3) as a final token the EEPROMS holding the bioses were erased? Machines treated like this are virtually unsalvagable. At least most of the techs in this city have no idea how to go about rebuilding a zeroed EEPROM.
Many of these servers have nice enterprise level automated backup systems in place too... which are vulnerable because they are on-line.
I hope there are law suits out of this. I hope these are directed at the ISP's that don't pull the plug on cracked Colos and against carriers that can't seem to implement simple firewall regress filters in a timely fashion. Maybe if this happens there will be more attention to having competant technical specialists on board in these organisation so that these bush fires can be put out before they cause real damage.
JMHO!
But when Code Red hit last year 2 weeks AFTER my ISP had not yet even advised some of their customers they had a problem and when I suggested to their ppl that perhaps it might be an idea to tell them I was attacked by incompetant customer relations people who wanted to continue to sweep it under the rug!!!
Yup - you are 100% correct.
But nobody said Sheila Copps has much between her ears.
All we need is a nice card that will pick up the channels from 2 to 100. Many video cards can already do this. This lets any PC become a video recorder/player. The problem is that in the long term - I don't think this is where things are going to go.
Rather I expect P2P networks to become ubiqutous. I expect that a large number of ppl will set up recorders for whatever their favorite shows are and then they will drop them into a P2P system.
Ppl will compress it and encrypt it and P2P systems will share it. If this happens (and it already is) then the broadcasting industry itself will be challenged (read - reworked). Nobody likes their business model anyway. Personally I HATE the commercials so I don't watch TV. The _ONLY_ reason IMHO that the present system functions is because of a virtual monopoly on distribution. If you can control the distribution then you can drop in your commercials. If you lose control of the distribution (which is what P2P does) then nobody will give a damn about broadcast signals. But this will be the NEXT generation doing this - the present under 25 group.
The law may be there but it is unenforcable and who can prove where anything arrives from? This law only limits CANADIAN wannabe rebroadcasters. It doesn't limit USA rebroadcasters and besides - last I checked there IS no valuable Canadian Content anyway... save for hockey games and I personally don't give a damn about hockey.
What they are trying to do aint gonna work. As soon as the bandwidth climbs (DSL is almost too slow for this) the P2P aspects are going to mushroom and it will be from systems like Kaaza where you can't find a server to attack. In fact - We'll soon see if Kaaza can even be attacked as an organization... US courts are after them of course.
When we have terabyte hard drives and hopefully 36" high res monitors then people are NOT going to pay much attention to cable TV.
It will be much simpler to just pull in an MP4 and play it when you want to.
All we need is a well designed opensource P2P system and of course opensource video codecs. So far we don't have these. But the future is a long time and I figure within 5 years it will happen.
I'll probably get modded down for this but so what. The biggest pirate in the world is the telecommunications industry because they grab and duplicate copyrighted material from all over the world for delievery to their customers (the surfing public) and not only do they not pay a dime to the vast majority of the people who created this content - if the owners of the content were to ask even who the consumers were then they are told that would be a breach of privacy.
Not only this, the industry has so much influence that they were able to get "safe harbour" laws passed that makes it legal for them to do this.
But - not _all_ of the people who create this content are ripped off. Some - if they happen to be corporately attractive enough were able to do a "convergance" and these people do make money...
They say they make money from the "distribution" of the content - but then this is what the recording industry does too. The difference between creating web content for instance and musical content is that at least in the case of musical content the artists own the rights until they sign them away. In the case of web content the creators lose their right to distribution the moment it is put on the net. This right is taken from them with zero compensation.
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It has been said before that it is trivial to copy a dvd and play it back from say a tape or hard drive WITHOUT resorting to cracking the encryption. All that is required is the development of a VIRTUAL DVD device driver. If the windows player thinks it has a DVD out their in hardware land it will decrypt the bits even if they are actually comming from a file.
Does anyone dispute this? Do we have to create a virtual DVD driver before people will believe this? Perhaps we should - and sent it to Jon's defense team.
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The only way you can prevent the unauthorised copying of digital material in a computer is to prevent programmers from being able to access _any_ part of the data stream that is playing the material. This means programmers must be prevented from writing device drivers and memory probes etcetera. This is REALLY what paladium and DRM is all about. Microsoft is very much in favour of this because it will shut down independant programmers. The short of it is that if the programmer has access to ring 0 - then he can do anything he wants. He can even write his own DLL wrappers and trap the parameters going back and forth.
In order to prevent this, it is necessary to restrict end user from running the software. Thus the software must be certified and this will be both expensive (another microsoft tax) and restrictive.
This is a restraint of trade move of unprecedented porportions.
I'm a supporter of Mandrake. But this fiasco is because they ended up saddled with incompetant managment that blew the wad. This is in the Mandrake website. The problem is that there is limited accountability when the management of the company embarks on an idiotic business plan... later when the company loses its collective shirts and has to file for bankruptcy it is those who try to clean up the mess who suffer along with their customers. Remember the comments about the rats leaving the sinking ship?
Well - I purchased Mandrake and installed it in a system and it looks really great. This was an 8.1 system mind you and I have not found out how to apply the security patches or upgrades. This is a REALLY big problem of course.
So - I have Mandrake on one of my systems and I have decided to not use it. Instead I did a debian install on my main system and the reason I did this is because of the Debian Package managment system and the ease of upgrades and patches.
Personally, while I like Mandrake and I hope there continues to be a place for them in the Linux community, I do not expect that I shall be using their distro in the forseeable future. I shall not be using RedHat either and again the reason is upgradability.
If this takes off it will mean the end of independant developers. Simply stated, you can have a trusted OS and a trusted application but if some untrusted programmer is allowed to access the restricted hardware then the security is blown.
This means that such a system can only allow programs written by trusted programmers and we all know this means that M$ programmers will be able to write code but you and I won't be allowed to.
Looks like the end of our careers guys.
The lesson is that I can't support something I rarely use. That should be pretty obvious to anyone eh?
Well - at $25 bux per month for ISP services AOL alone bills about 33 million people and that generates almost 10 billion per year in revenues. This for access to content that as you put it "isn't worth paying for". I'd suggest that if the content that you say "isn't worth paying for" were not present on the net then perhaps AOL would not even exist.
None of this revenue stream is shared with the people who create the content AOL distributes of course.
Well - I don't like to pay my phone company either but I am willing to do it. Micropayments have to be built into the price of ISP services just as transportation is built into the cost of eggs.
This means we need to get the telecommunications industry onside. They'll make more money out of a micropayment system because they will be doing the billing and they can charge a percentage for this service.
The reason something like this has not been attempted is that the internet is unique in the manner in which content is dealt with as a matter of law.
In every other field the artist who creates the content (intellectual property) has the right to decide how it is distributed and whether copies can be made and on what terms.
With the interent, the idea of the people who create the content having control was switched around.
Safe harbour clauses in laws like the DMCA state that the moment content is put on the internet the carriers and ISP's gain the right to copy and distribute. Furthermore they may do this without any regard to compensation to the legal owners of the material.
This means that a large ISP like a baby bell will pay a backbone operator for access to the content that comes through a pop (point of presence) but if your server is connected into their system then they will bill you for the volume of content they pull out of your servers.
Mind you - if you can get really big - like Microsoft - then you can advise the phone company that it might be cheaper for them to access your private "pop" and get their content directly from you rather than off the backbone. If you have enough market clout they will talk to you about a "peering arrangement" and they may even pay you.
Its all about size and a monoploy/oligopoly negotiating who pays whom based on who has enough control to force the other party to do the paying. It has practically nothing to do with who is supplying a service and who is consuming the service. Its also probably against the fair trade practices legislation in most countries and I was talking to my lawyers about launching a class action suit this morning in fact.
I've read a number of the comments about T1 billings and how DS0's are bundled into T1's (or E1's if you are in europe) and how these are bundled into higher speed circuits and so on.
All of these comments are 100% correct - at least the ones I read. The problem is that this misses a very important issue.
The Telco's WANT interent content because this is what they are supplying to THEIR customer base and this customer base is HIGHLY tipped in favour of the surfing public. In effect anyone running a server is providing a service to the telecomunications industry IN SPITE OF THE FACT that the marketing arm of the telcos is trying to switch this around.
Ok. Suppose we were to look at the relationship between a relatively large telecomunications company and a backbone operator. The connection takes place via a POP (point of presence) and this is typically an expensive high speed router with fiber running into it. For the priviledge of this interconnect typically the telecomunications company will have to pay the backbone operator several $100,000 per month.
Ok. Suppose we have a web server get say slashdotted and this web server is accessed via the backbone. In this case the telco will be paying fees to that backbone operator for the bandwidth that their customer base demands.
This customer base does NOT include servers that they may host mind you. That should be obvious to everyone.
On the other hand if the slashdotted server were actually located within the system the Telco is running then they will of course have to install the SAME equipment required to support their customer base but they would NOT have to pay money towards the backbone - since obviously in this senerio the backbone is not involved. In fact - with bandwidth charges they'll be able to do some billing... right?
Now - as pointed out the issues of equipment costs and peak bandwidth are at the scale of the telecommunications industry normally governed by needed capacity and not how many packets happen to fly through a router from a given server on a given day. IE. If you want an OC3 pipe to a pop it will cost so much per month whether you use it all or not.
Given this. Once packets are in a telco's system, they generally have the capacity to route them to where-ever their customers happen to be located regardless of how the packets arrive in their system.
Now - a company operating a popular server will generally be told that they need to pay. Yet if this company has a server so popular that OCx speeds are required - then that company will be able to say "Hey - we run a POP - so you guys can pay us or you guys can pay the backbone... we're a bit cheaper".
This means that not all slashdotted server operators end up getting hosed over bandwidth charges. Some - if they are big enuf to negotiate a POP style connection actually make money.
For a moment lets look at the actual costs of a connection to the big switches the telcos use. Clearly one can set up a co-location office in a suitable location. The number of servers that can be located in such an office - even if very small is quite substancial. So lets consider the cost of running say a fibre link over to the telco's switch.
I'll use the example of a 100 mb/sec link which is about 2 T3's. (28x24x64kb/sec=43mb/sec)x2...
This can be handled by a pair of allied Telesyn fiber to ethernet drivers that I priced at under $1000 USD each. The fiber itself in 6 pair cable cost under $1 USD per foot. This means that a mile of fiber would cost under $5000 bux and with installation - say under $20,000. The fiber drivers in question will handle over 50 miles.
For a total cost of under $25,000 the physical equipment can be installed that will handle 2 T3's of capacity - and I am certain that people will realise that even a lowley PC can handle the routing of a 100 base-T nic. In fact for under $100 bux we can pick up a linksys unit or a d-link that can do it. Remember that once the packets are delivered to the telco's equipment - that it is their problem. If their customers want the content then the company has to get it somewhere - right?
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Lets look at the billings that typically are demanded for such a link. Typically as has been pointed out in other posts the demand is in the order of $1000 bux per month for each T1 equivalent. Since 100mb/sec is in the order of 2 T3's we get 2x28=56 T1 equivalents or a charge of over $50,000 per month for a line that costs less than $25,000 to install.
Now I want to make another point here. If the telco in question has enough customers to generate a combined demand of 100 mb/sec from a server - then that telco is going to have to pay the backbone in order to get at the content the server holds. If they are willing to pay the backbone - why not strike a deal with the owners of the servers? The point is that once the packets are in the telco's system that the costs are not going to vary much regardless how they got there.
Well - the reason companies that run servers are typically not offered a deal is because (1) they typically do not understand the game and (2) they typically are not supplying huge amounts of content so (3) typically they can be convinced by the market droids (who also do not know all that much about this) that if you run a server you should be treated as a consummer instead of as a supplier.
The facts are that in most industries if a company is willing to pay one group of suppliers, then fair trade practices legisaltion reguires a similar offer be made to all suppliers. A company running a server is a suppler. Furthermore the product they are supplying (internet content) is very valuable and generates revenues in the BILLIONS per month.
So to answer the question of why bandwidth shoudl cost so much if a server gets slashdotted for instance - well - the answer is that it is because the operator of the typical server does not have enough market clout to organise a fair deal.
Before people start flaming these ideas, let me point out that I have been on the phone with the VP of content development in the telco that serves me and he freely acknowleged that servers are suppliers and that the way to approach this is to contact the telco and speak to the people that negotiate peering arrangements. The people who handle high speed digital services are typically reading from the manuals that deal with consummer communications. Servers are suppliers not consummers but if you talk to the wrong group then expect a poor deal.
I do tend to agree somewhat. For the average person they tend to like only gui's. But then the average person really doesn't know much about a computer and doesn't do much with a computer.
Unix carries its command oriented legacy applications for a reason. Simply put they are a very useful and powerful way to get real work done and this is why I for instance like unix and why I don't like windows. Nevertheless I do have an NT desktop and I did use it as my primary desktop machine for at least 5 years. Of course - the first thing I did is open about 5 DOS PROMPTS and got my OS/2 version of Brief running - then I opened 6 terraterm sessions into my linux development boxen.
Now I find that Linux is a little better on the desktop than NT. I have zero interest in 2000 or XP and I do happen to own a copy of 2000 BTW.
There are HORRIBLE compromises in the WINDOWS world. One of these is that error messages have been pulled - this means you can shut off a SCSI disk on a win95 machine while it is being accessed and there will not be a message issued.
I had an OS/2 machine networked with my NT machine and these DID run the same microsoft networking code - because Microsoft did both OS's. I was never able to xfer a file using a microsoft protocol without that file arriving totally mangled - and never once did I receive an error message.
This leads me to beleive that if a network error were to occur or a file system error were to occur - that in the windows world the user's data will be trashed and no error or warning will be issued.
Simply put - the PC/windows world is unrealiable.
I think it was about the time that the Pentium came out that ECC and Parity memory were dropped in the PC for about 90% of machines that people relied upon.
IMHO this attitude is unacceptable. But then the vast majority of home users will proclaim that there is no reason for them to worry about security for instance because they don't have anything of value in their computers anyway. So there you go. Easy to use but not used for anything of value.
Unix is the way it is because the people who use unix typically use it for serious work and WE LIKE IT LIKE THIS. This does not mean it cannot be inmproved. There are some real rough spots and for the most part UNIX people are the first to admit it.
Things are being improved pretty rapidly as well. I personally think *nix is about ready for prime time and I do expect the usage stats to improve considerably over the next while. As for it moving into #1 position some day? Well - I think it will.
The history of the computer field is riddled with corpses. In fact - this is one of the primary reasons OpenSourse software exists - it seems to be the only way for us programmers to salvage our work. I know I personally lost YEARS of my life reprogramming for this platform or that platform or this database system or that one! In fact - I am again going through a port - this time out of Oracle into PostgreSQL.
Of the platforms I have programmed on - more than a DOZEN BTW - only 3 are in common use today. All the rest have failed.
This tells me the odds of Microsoft failing are very high - a virtual certainty. OpenSource will displace them. But this might happen 10 or 15 years from now.
As Churchill put it: Perhaps we are at the end of the beginning.
You make a good point. If I had moderator access today I'd toss you a point for this post!
/dev/sg* and /dev/scd*
Personally I used NT 4.0 for about 5 years on the desktop and linux on the servers. Servers are now openBSD but that isn't an issue. I've recently added a Debian Woody desktop after toying with the idea of Mandrake (I did buy it - but I've decided to not use it because I don't know how to upgrade it. With Debian I can do the upgrade).
What I find is that Mozilla is out of date (on woody) and it crashes, hangs and has to be killed periodically. Konquerer AFAIK doesn't do ssl. OpenOffice looks great! X works pretty good and supports my twin heads same as NT did - but I needed to be more than a mere mortal to get it running - same with XMMS and GRIP. For access to the soundcard for instance I had to add a user and change group permissions on
These are things a competant sysadmin can do. Unfortunately they are things that must be done. For mere mortals I suspect these are things that would drive them back to winders.
We still need to improve the usability and upgradability and then we need to tackle things like the man pages and add some examples. They are just TERRIBLE at present. People like me have never managed to find out even how to upgrade them.
These are all quite fixable issues. Still - we need to get this done ASAP.
Nevertheless my daughter will be picking up her MANDRAKE box shortly and I think she will learn to love it. I told her it comes with tech support!!! If she tosses Mandrake down the track in favor of some flavour of winders she looses her free tech support from me. Now I guess I still need to figure out how to u/g Mandrake boxen. Alas! Even the simplest things are obsure in the *nix world. I sometimes think *nix programmers and systems admins like to live in an obsure world. Perhaps they think this gives them job security.
Prior to the DCMA, the owner of copyrighted materials had the right to duplication and distribution of his/her creations. These rights were subject to the abuse of organisations like the RIAA for instance, but at least the artistic community held the rights until they (often naively) negotiated them away.
With the DMCA, safe harbour provisions were created that transfered the right of distribution away from the creator into the hands of the distributor the moment the creator posted his/her material on the net. In effect the creator of a work lost the right to distribute and duplicate their work - without any negotiation or need for the creator to be compensated.
Thus, a company that owns content (which is presently not made available on the net) would be at a disadvantage because the moment they post it - they would effectivly lose control over distrribution. This ruling by the FCC will fix that. By merging media interests with distribution interests the combined mega corporation controls both the distribution as well as retaining control of their copyrighted materials - IE the problem is fixed.
Collateral damage includes anyone who is not powerful enuf to be a major carrier and/or who does not have a significant amount of internet content - enough to make them attractive enough for a large telecomunications interest to want to climb into bed with them.
Slashdot falls into this category. With no means of negotiating a sweetheart "convergance" contract with a telecommunications carrier, slashdot will get hosed on bandwidth charges. Meanwhile, having lost the "right to copy" their presumably copyrighted materials (DMCA transfers these rights to the carriers) Slashdot is unable to participate in the HUGE revenues that stem from the delivery of same to the consumming public.
What a sad commentary on manipulation of the unfolding cyber world.
This development is NOT in our interest! It certainly should be considered rather draconian by anyone aspiring to make a living utilizing the technologys presently being developed for cyberspace.
This group will include most webmasters, many systems admins, most HTML and CGI programmers and probably most of the flash programmers. The group includes a lot of wanna-be-professional web developers and artists - many of whom are doing brilliant work and may never know why the job offers they were hoping for didn't develop.
If anyone things this is an overestimate of the damages - then consider the number of layoffs in the dot.bomb sector. A good place to read on this is at fucked company
Over at FC, Pud declares that these were just shitty business plans and that any company that does not make a profit will simply go out of business. Ya, Pud is pretty ruthless - might not have a heart.
The point IMHO that Pud is overlooking is that some outfits like Slashdot.org do a RATHER GOOD JOB and they also are feeling a cash squeeze. Perhaps its a bad business plan... but I rather think the issue is having your work taken without compensation and being given no access to a rather HUGE revenue stream that this work helps to create.
Let me ask - if it were not for great websites like Slashdot, why would people like us bother to subscribe to an ISP? We pay our ISP's for access to this material and our ISP's pay their upstreams. Somewhere along the way over to the slashdot servers the money flow stops.
Slashdot is a very popular website - even so they have little market clout in the eyes of upsteams. So little slashdot with little bargaining power is placed in the situtation that they can either pack up their bags and go home - or try to find some way to fund the operation.
Meanwhile, if there are say 100,000 slashdot readers then "we" pay at least $25x100,000 = $2,500,000 per month for our interent access. In my case with the dropping content, I find that the docs over at gnu and a few other open source projects makes it worthwhile for me to have a dedicated connection. In total - slashdot probably represents over 10% of the total internet content I look at. I would be very happy if a percentage of the money I pay each month found itself flowing into the pockets of SlashDot.
But without any distribution clout - that isn't likely to happen.
Meanwhile we should expect that organizations like CNN, TSN, and so forth will find they can make good money distrubuting THEIR content - because THEY will have enough clout to bargan for an inside seat in the distribtution game.
In effect, the rest of us subsidize them because the content they have could NEVER create the net.
Ya - and teach everyone to fish and you run into the problem of no cod off the grand banks.
This would be true. There IS no method that can be used to protect a DVD. Let me explain.
A DVD carries about 4-5 GB of data. Apparently part of the DVD is non-recordable, Thus if you try to copy the DVD in a burner part of it cannot be written. So what? Just relocate...
An exabyte tape drive carries about 4-5GB. With a trivial amount of work one can copy the WHOLE DVD out to the tape. This is rather obvious. Tape drives were designed to be written to and DVD's were designed to be read. perhaps these idjots (read RIAA and MPAA) have in mind to outlaw computer devices that you can write to. Oh? did I forget that you can copy to your hard drive instead of say a tape? did I forget that exabytes are now obsolete? did I forget that there are LOTS of new tape drives that can handle anywhere up to 120GB or more?
Now - having done so... the issue becomes how to read it back in. This is rather trivial as well. Most computers support a read function. Perhaps the idjots will lobby to ban this as well.
Having read the data from whatever media it has been recorded onto the job simply becomes one of stuffing the data into the program that was designed to decode it. Any device driver will do this.
All that is needed is to write a DD that will emulate the DVD player. The operating system needs to be told that it has said DVD player out in hardware land. The Device driver does this. So the device driver then implements a virtual DVD player and the job is done. Why bother with DeCSS... but if you read papers on the CSS system it was pretty trivial to defeat the scheme anyway.
Perhaps the idjots would like to legislate against intellegence. Hell - throw all cleaver people in jail! What we are seeing is the attempted criminalization of the art of computer programming. The Norweigan prosecutor is attacking US. All of us. Next we'll hear that VMWare is illaegal because it will run winders and this allows a person to watch a DVD in linux.
Oh, perhaps the DVD reader does the decoding... well - this is fine too because then all that is required is the DD that drives the player has to spin off a copy. This is rather trivial as well because at the DD level we get a buffer full of data... that can be sent to another DD like the one that runs the hard drive with a rather trivial amount of work.
IMHO the conspiracy is that the RIAA and MPAA want only their corporate buddies (M$?) to be able to play a DVD because this will quash linux use. With patent law in one hand independant programmers are tied up in what they can do... and with DMCA style laws in the other hand users are tied up with what they can use. The winners are the monopolists who can then force artists to sign draconian contracts that bind them for years and prevent them from being able to distribute their material.
Meanwhile it is rather interesting that the internet content "we" develope that causes millions of people to pay their ISP's just happens to fall into a "safe Harbour" so that AOL for instance gets free access to any content we create and can distribute it to their 33 million odd customers without compensating us in any way.
You are RONG. Go dig out the Berne copyright conventions and talk with a lawyer.
If you hire a consultant then the consultant will own the copyright UNLESS you specifically contract that this is NOT the case - and this must be in writing.
If you hire an EMPLOYEE then the employer will AUTOMATICALLY own the copyright UNLESS there is a contract in writing that precludes this.
The reason for this is that the legal status of an employee is derived from said individual being a "servant" and since his employer bought his "servant's" time, his employer has a right to anything produced by his "servant". This means that legally if an employee creates something ON HIS OWN TIME then even in this case his employer MOST LIKELY has a claim to it. The bottom line is that a full time employee has sold ALL of his creativity and time to his employer whether he likes it or not. So if you don't like this idea folks, then QUIT.
Contractors and consultants on the other hand are providing a product. If a carpenter designs a nail gun and builds the house in 1/2 the time, the home owner does not have a claim to the nail gun. This is obvious I would think. However if a developer hires the same carpenter full time - well then the employer ownes the intellectual property associated with the nail gun.
Similary, a contractor may come in and peice together a large number of components and supply a finished system to the client. This should not mean that the client gains the copyrights to the components. In fact it should not even mean that the client gains the copyright the the glue code that stiches these components together. All the client gets is the right to use the finished product and usually the right to modify it somewhat.
There has been a lot of litigation in this area. Anyone affected _should_ run (not walk) to a good IP attourney.
I'm a developer and have been for a rather long time. Personally I disagree with the notion that I should not be allowed to "own" my own creations.
To suggest something like this is akin to suggesting that people must publish their personal diaries if asked to do so - the justification of this intrusion being that certain other people who shall remain nameless have published shoody works derived from diaries (not Anne Frank's of course) and since the public interest wasn't served... well hey - turn over your diaries folks.
Well, diaries are not computer programs but they are written instruments and they are intellectual property and it is my right to keep my sources confidential if I wish just as it is your right to have a personal diary.
That being said, the vast majority of the software I have written has been under contract and while it was NOT absolutely necassary to release the sources, in general I did so.
The result on one occation is that a job I bid at a little less than $30,000 ended up handed over to another contractor who eventually billed over $150,000 and used my source code as their starting point. Later I found they botched the job which was one reason it cost so much. It seems they got into trouble and as the project slowly sunk the client in desperation tried to fix the problem by adding more money. More recently there was some musings on the part of the end users that they really wish it would get a face lift. I suppose I should do it and then demo it and demand that lost $120,000 bux because I shall have to tear out 100% of that shitty code my competition layered in. So far I have not felt inspired enuf to take it on. There are a lot of people involved in this fiasco as it turns out because the software is in use by every major oil and gas exploration company in the world and a lot of government agencies as well.
So in this case IMHO, not only was I shafted, the customer ended up with a shaft as well. Indeed, some of the work in that project was under MY copyright and the contractor who worked with MY COPYRIGHTED SOFTWARE did not have a right to use it. In situtations like this this however, it is usually better to grin and bear it and meanwhile let them fall flat on their own faces.
Nevertheless it kinda hurts to have others F up your work and get paid 5x what you asked. In the contracting business I think this probably happens a lot mind you.
I am reminded of a contouring package written by an aquaintance of mine. This software was usually licensed under a binary only agreement but as I was told one Major oil company by the name of Amoco paid extra for access to the source. They next proceeded to improve the package in a number of ways until it no longer worked. At this point they had to go back to the original developer and buy it all over again.
Well, comments like "all software should be open source" are somewhat naive. There is a point here however. With most software, unless it becomes open source, it is quite likely that the package will die with its creator. That is the current situation with the contouring package. Were it open source, then some of us could take it over and improve it. As it stands it will probably eventually be lost forever.
I think for most developers, they are conserned about retaining control while they have an interest in it. Often this can be to the customer's advantage as well, because often beauracracies do not understand the creative processes as they apply to software. There is no surprise that there can be more than an order of magnitude productivity between programmers and this productivity can be multiplied by a further order of magnitude when one considers the algorithmic design aspect.
Perhaps Richard Stallman's contributions in the emacs and GCC areas illustrate this. Not only was Richard able to out program whole departments, his programs have a certain edge in the design area as well. Thus the GCC compiler for instance can compile pretty much any language for which one wants to define a grammer and it can compile to pretty much any architecture that one wishes to define to the back end. That is one awesome peice of work!
If we were to take the next 1000 programmers from any campus, or any technical colledge and try to find even one who could match Richard's work, then I say the odds would be rather low.
So one way to look at this is that Stallman chose the OpenSource solution as a vehical to retain control over his work. At the time he was programming GCC for instance, had he not been able to use the OpenSource vehical then I am totally convinced that some bean counter somewhere would have found a way to shuffle this marvelous work into a closet somewhere and the vast majority of us would never have know it even existed.
So Opensource has its place and it is appropriate for general purpose systems tools.
As for special purpose application software... Well, maybe. If programmers didn't have to make a living then I'd probably say OpenSource everything. But the truth is that we do have to make a living and programmers, especially contractors, always face the possibility that they will be excluded from further development on their own work simply because of politics, dirty tricks, or any one of a miriad of reasons that result in a contract being issued to the competition.
The problem is that programmers are not like carpenters. We are not created equal and one cannot just plug in a replacement part so to speak. The contract award process does not consider this. Maybe the market place does but I suspect not or we'd never have the really shitty commercial software crappola that hangs around.
Until some of these problems are solved I vote for programmers to have the right to retain control of their sources. However if someone can invent a fair compensation scheme for those who create the original works then I'll change my vote.
Consider a company like Telstra. This company supplies connectivity to internet content to Australian ISP's and a very large percentage of the content that Australians consume originates in the good ole USA.
Does anyone think for an instant that the USA interests that carry this content are willing to allow Testra to get access to it for FREE? Of course not - Telstra pays big bux to connect to the POP's.
The point is that while Telstra is willing to pay American interets to get access to internet content, at the same time Telstra does not offer this deal to any Australian interests, that is unless they happen to be part of a cosey little club that Telstra has organised a business arrangement with.
Not only is it likely illegal under Australian competition laws for Telstra to pay one group (americans) while simultaneously refusing to pay Australians for access to this internet content, it is extreemly unpatriotic.
This illustrates the problem with the business model the net operates under. Web Servers _ARE_ providing a service - to their upstreams who in turn pass this content on to other upstreams until it eventually reaches the backbone. Now - everyone in this pecking order of delivery of web content from the server through to the end user gets paid - EXCEPT THE PEOPLE WHO CREATE THE CONTENT AND RUN THE SERVERS.
It is the only business in the world that I can think of where success can bankrupt you and this is because it is the only business in the world where the supplier and owner of the content does not get paid by those who consume it.
The bottom line is that a webserver's upstream should be remitting money to the owner of the server based at least on the amount of content they suck out of the server.
If webmasters were to band together and block their content from distribution to certain large players (like say AOL) on certain days then I think the point might be made.
Please note that the end user does pay his upstream for access to the content they consume and ISP's also pay their upsreams. This chain of payments seems to stop somwhere.
Major players would make MORE MONEY if they would play by the rules that govern every other industry on the planet - that is those who are suppliers need to be paid for what they supply.
No one is expecting anyone to do the accounting and disbursement for free. Those who carry the content can expect to make say 15% or more for the service of collecting a royalty on the content they suck from web servers. Indeed in general this accounting is already being done because it forms the basis of billings that ISP's pay and the fees charged for access to the POP's.
The only thing is that the lowly webserver must be included in the business model. As it is now, it is not the end user who rips off the web master - it is the telecommunication industry that attempts to treat a webserver as a consumer instead of a supplier.