Great. You made my point. Free software isn't free. It has the same lifecycle costs as commercial stuff, plus additional baggage. What you chose to ignore is the productivity cost for users that are experienced in one platform to shift to another. I have a PC running Windows. I have to take time to uninstall that O/S and reinstall Linux, just so I can run that "free" software" You ignored data translation and migration costs. You skipped over the interoperability issues with enterprise systems that aren't supported in the minimal set of services in the new O/S.
Now factor in that I can get dedicated tech support from the commercial vendor, commercially supported extensions, documentation, and updates and explain to me again how I'm better off disrupting my entire organization with a shift to this "free" software?
Well, this is a nice sermon, but you aren't really explaining why commercial application software is damaging to a free O/S platform like Linux. That was the topic at hand.
I really don't understand the point you're trying to make by equating my statement against artificially imposed economies to your example of 18th century agrarian economies. One is a rebuke of a artificial constraint imposed on a natural marketplace and the other is a natural response to survival requirements in an unsophisticated market economy. There's no parallel to be drawn as far as I can see.
But your non sequiturs aside, the point IS that the market will choose. So grandstanding about why commercial software is bad and how your opinion is better than someone elses' is a vain effort when you seem to be agreeing in the next breath that the market will pick the best solution from the optimal source.
This is the whole point I'm trying to make. "Best" is precisely what the market determines. Not a bunch of holier-than-thou OSS zealots, not a bunch of zipper-headed Microsofties, not some marketing dweeb pushing some cheesy commercial app, and not a room full of college kids drinking professorial Kool Aid. The "market" is a different sort of animal that will not be herded by the opinions of individuals and small communities. It makes up its own mind.
I agree with you in that my measure of "best" also includes a measure of quality. But quality to me means polish, performance, support, and usability in addition to what it seems to mean here, which is reliability.
Oh please! If that doomsday scenario was right, there'd only be one software company in the world. Wake up! There's more to the software world than Evil Bill's tiny company in Redmond. Microsoft's commercial revenue is a tiny drop in the bucket compared to the size of the market for custom commercial, civilian, and defense applications. Microsoft is penny ante when compared with the size, complexity, scope, cost, and revenue associated with projects undertaken by Boeing, Lockheed, SAIC, Mitre, CSC, PRC, Oracle, SAP, etc.
One thing you need to realize is that the commercial desktop software marketplace accounts for less than 10% of the overall revenue generated by software development activities worldwide. You're fixated on something that is TINY. Look at the big picture for a change.
Picture the meeting with the CFO when you show him how you deployed all the software on all 544 of your 32 bit workstations for zero dollars. Imagine the meeting with the CFO when you point out how on the first day of deployment you have a 100%=ROI! PAYOFF=INSTANT! TCO=0! It's a nice dream, but you forgot a few things. Who installed all that "free" software? How long did it take? Who retrained all the users to use a new O/S they aren't familiar with? How long did that take and how much did that lost productivity cost? Who handles the support questions when the software doesn't work (it sure isn't the "manufacturer" now, is it?) How much overhead does that add to the company? And how long is it before you're out pounding the pavement because you just cost the company 10x what that off-the-shelf commercial solution would have cost?
Just because something is "free" doesn't mean there isn't a cost associated with it (TANSTAAFL). In a lot of cases, "free" solutions are many times more costly than a commercial alternative. If you think otherwise, you've never done what you propose.
We *DON'T* need them. Just look at KDE 2 with all the office applications. Linux is free as free speech. I don't want free beer (I'd prefer free wine by the way) I want software I can modifiy, enhance, tweak for my own needs. I have no problem with people making money on free software as long as it remains free software, free as free speech.
The problem is that your demographic (those who want to modify their own source code) accounts for significantly less than 1% of the entire installed base of computer users worldwide. (Look at Gartner's last report on user profiles to find which box you're really in.) I don't know of ANY software company that is willing to relegate itself to 1% market share. And that assumes they have no competition for that 1%.
You are entitled to make your choices in the marketplace, but your ideology seems to say that you get to make the choice for everyone else, too, and your choice is "free". A lot of people don't see the value in free, since free also generally means difficult to use, no support, no manual, etc., which doesn't fly well in the corporate and consumer space. Surely there are stellar exceptions to the rule, but the rule still stands.
So why do you feel qualified to choose for everyone else?
History is rife with "better ideas" that fall by the wayside because they can't grab enough mindshare from the mainstream. Look at the number of failed operating systems that litter the computer science landscape because nobody cared to put up with limited choices, hard to use applications, and no real support organization to help when they had problems.
It's completely absurd to think that having widespread industry support from commercial applications written for a platform could ever damage the platform unless the creators of the platform want it to happen. The authors of application software aren't the ones effecting change on the underlying O/S. It's the other way around.
The faction within the Linux community that fears the prospect of making money off of software needs to come to grips with the reality that some people have families to feed and working for free in a Western Capitalist Society isn't really a good way to satisfy that requirement. Once that little hurdle is passed, it is really irrelevant whether someone chooses to give their software away or charge for it. The market will pick the best solution after weighing costs and benefits.
Trying to impose some sort of external, artificial pricing model (i.e., "free") is at odds with the underlying economy and society in which most of us live. Just like bad O/S ideas, the world is rife with failed government experiments as well, most of which fall along the lines of socialism/communism where everyone thought it was a good idea for everything to be "free".
I'm definitely not equating OSS with communism, so don't even go there. My point is that it's silly to be worried about people supporting Linux with commercial software. The market will bear what the market will bear and it's not up to a bunch of free O/S afficianados to try and second guess the commercial market. Rather, the Linux community should continue to move the platform forward and let the applications take care of themselves.
And be very, very glad that the 99% of the software industry that is for-profit sees it as a viable platform. The alternative is to be ignored by that 99% and all of their customers and be forever relegated to a niche market.
That's because pizza-and-coke all-nighters are a direct byproduct of poor planning, either by the engineer implementing the code, the architect creating the design (if there even is such a person) or the person making the engineer's schedule. And the result is usually hastily written, incompletely tested software that is typical of most product offerings for use on the desktop.
The process of authoring mission critical, man rated software is so far removed from the ad hoc, informal, duct-tape-it-together approach that most programmers use that no direct comparison can be made. I've seen both ends of the software development spectrum and they each have their uses. You can't launch a shuttle with a bunch of last minute kernel patches and some stuff that was written the night before the launch date. But you can't compete in the commercial software marketplace with code that takes 2 or 3 years to specify, design, implement, test, and integrate, either.
Stand in awe of the people who have the skill and discipline to write software of this quality. Learn what you can from their process and try and use the lessons they've learned. Their stuff doesn't break, because when it does, people die. If O/S developers had that same attitude about their code, we'd never see blue screens of death, kernel panics, or any of the other flakiness we tolerate on our desktop machines.
This is a fallacy. You simply cannot assimilate all of the technology, techniques, and lessons learned that come from four+ years of study by trying to cram it all into one year. There are lots of experiences that require calendar time to fully absorb. This is a variation on the mythical man-month.
You could also argue that if you're smart enough to get into this program in the first place, you're probably smart enough to figure out most of the stuff by yourself anyway. Computer Science degrees are really about teaching you how to approach solving computer-related problems. A vast majority of the classroom content is either out of date or has little practical application for most graduates. So whether you get that in a year or 4 is irrelevant. What you're missing is the years of training your brain to look at and solve problems that are fundamentally different from most other disciplines.
I don't believe you can compress that experience into one year, and I certainly wouldn't consider hiring someone who claimed to have accomplished it in that timeframe.
Volkswagon beetle (Score:1) by mrfiddlehead (mrfiddlehead@yahoo.co.uk) on Thursday March 09, @07:32AM EST (#15) (User Info) Did anyone else notice a passing resemblance, a certain, je ne sais quois, between the new Volkswagon beetle and the iMac?
If anyone recalls the dumb terminal days of the '70's, they should readily recognize the iMac as a straight rip-off of the ADDS Viewpoint and older Data General terminals. The form factor is nearly identical and if I was DG or ADDS, I'd be crawling up Apple's backside.
The only innovation in the iMac's "trade dress" is the use of the translucent plastics. The shape has been around the computer industry for 25 years.
As long as they're not software patents, I'm not the slightest bit troubled by it. Hmmm. Well, it certainly seems hard to imagine how you can generate 450+ patent applications of what is essentially commoditized component hardware parts repackaged into a smaller form factor without including some software.
Don't you think an idiotic hardware patent on the order of "a computer hardware device designed to be worn by the user" is just as stifling to innovation as a software patent on something like "one click ordering"? It seems a bit hypocritical to limit yourself to saying that you only care about software. That, or it's pretty narrow-minded since a hardware product of any signficance has to include a substantial amount of software these days just to compete.
Everyone loves the fact that Xybernaut is building their technology around Linux. But it's clear that the sentiments of the Linux community lean strongly against using patents to control the marketplace.
Is anyone as troubled as I am by the following excerpt from their press release?
This combination of expanded battery life in conjunction with our patent portfolio of more than 450 patent applications awarded and pending will further position Xybernaut to maintain its leading role in the wearable computing industry.
Sounds a lot like they're preparing to crawl up the backside of anyone who tries to play in their sandbox, Open Source or not.
You have it backwards. It passed in the House of Delegates, but not in the Senate. It may actually end up dying in conference and never make it to a floor vote.
This article is likely wrong on one point. As of last night, UCITA has not been passed by the Virginia Senate and insiders there give it very little chance of passage. It passed easily in the House of Delegates because they know it won't pass in the Senate and can look good to their corporate constituents by voting for it.
Members of the Senate and the Governor all recognize that the bill is flawed and likely wouldn't withstand a court challenge. So if you want to affect the passage, pester the senators, not the governor. It's not his problem yet.
Oh, I don't care about their playback technology. But I can make my own, compatible playback technology, and there is not a thing wrong with that. That's a right.
I'm sure you believe it is your right, but it very likely is not. You can make bathtub gin that tastes just like Old Mr. Boston, but you have no "rights" to do so because you aren't licensed to distill alcohol. You can file down the firing pin on your daddy's hunting rifle and make it into an automatic weapon, but it's not your right to do that either. To carry your argument to the extreme, you could make your own "compatible" thermonuclear device. Clearly, that falls outside your legal rights, too.
Just because you can do something doesn't mean that society grants you the
right
to do it. In this case, you can reverse engineer a piece of proprietary, licensed software whose license terms prohibit that activity, and you can make your own DVD player. But you don't necessarily have that right under our current set of laws and are technically in violation of the license agreement and probably several intellectual property laws as well. Go to the next step and distribute that software to all your friends and the rest of the Internet and you can see what happens.
Your DSS analogy is not completely correct. I have purchased all the necessary hardware for viewing DVDs. I purchased a drive with a MPEG Decoder card and I have a small collection of legally purchased DVDs. Isn't that all that should be required of me?
Actually, no. You didn't purchase or license the software component that decrypts the MPEG stream. I can go out and purchase all of the components to build a DSS receiver. But I didn't get a license from DirecTV to decode their signal, so I'm technically in violation even though I own all the right hardware and pay for their service.
Jack Valenti: They're not at all. I don't follow you're logic there.
He doesn't seem to get it at all. Surely he must understand that all we wish to do is watch DVDs under Linux, why is that a crime?
Valenti's point is that no one is keeping you from watching the DVD you just bought. That you have chosen to try and play it on a computer running an operating system with no industry-supported play back software is your fault, not the MPAA. That you are using an operating system without a commercial organization behind it to effectively lobby software manufacturers to license and implement a player for your operating system is your fault, not the MPAA's.
For all of the rhetoric spewing from both camps, the Linux faction is just as guilty of ignoring reality as the MPAA and its minions. The simple fact is that DVDs are designed to be played by licensed DVD players. That you don't have one is something that can be easily rectified by switching operating systems or buying a stand-alone player.
Arguing that you shouldn't have to use their player is like arguing you shouldn't have to have a DSS receiver to watch DirecTV broadcasts or you shouldn't have to buy your cable company's cable modem to hook up to their net.
The plain, simple fact is that there are all sorts of regulated, metered, for pay content out there. DVDs happen to be one form. Complaining that you have "rights" to watch it any way you please is simply unfounded, given the ample precedence for other forms of content with controlled playback mechanisms.
The MPAA is certainly within their rights to claim their control over the playback mechanism for DVDs. Whether the markets and the courts uphold that claim is a completely different issue. But don't say the man is clueless when he says that no one is preventing you from watching a DVD.
The truth is this. You didn't buy a DVD prior to the existence of DeCSS for play on your Linux box. And I'd be willing to bet that no one rushed out to buy DVDs once it was released either. It makes for a great story, but the reality is something different than what the Linux community is trying to portray to the general public.
The reality is that some smart guys reverse engineered a piece of software. Some other not-so-smart guys decided they didn't like that and are trying to stuff the genie back in the bottle. EVERYONE is obfuscating the issue with crys of "fair use", "free speech", "piracy", etc. when the real issue is simply one of market economics.
Specifically, some people think buying a DVD should be a sufficient license to enable playing the DVD. The creators of that format and the playback algorithms feel differently, resulting in a closed system with a small number of licensees. If this seems too proprietary for you, then use your market muscle to switch to some other format (tape, direct broadcast, etc.)
The bottom line is that no one is forcing you to buy DVDs and the DVD playback software is a licensed product. So don't expect unrestricted access to playback technology. You're misinformed if you think it's your "right" to have it.
Since...what OS 8.1 or was it 8.5? And wern't there shareware/freeware extensions that allowed you to do this all the way back to 7.5?
Well ain't that sumptin'!?! I swear I never knew you could resize the columns (and more importantly, reorder them) until I tried it on a whim after reading your message.
Here I've been writing code on the Mac since '85, and this has to be the best Easter Egg of all. (And clearly, it has to be an Easter Egg because I never saw it mentioned in the docs anywhere, and of course, I always read all of the manuals.;)
any state that would EVEN consider such a fascist law isnt worth living in
Maybe, but it'd be a great place to run a software business and that is exactly the motivation behind these bills. The Northern Virginia area already has more high tech workers and companies than Silicon Valley, and the VA Legislature wants to make sure it stays that way.
All the rants about personal liberties are going to fall on deaf ears in these states. Their economies are in overdrive because of the huge influx of high tech capital and nobody wants that to stop. Pouring a little gasoline on the fire never hurts, either.
The reality is that there are plenty of existing interstate commerce laws and ample contract law precedent to challenge these bills if it's ever an issue. There's no sense in getting all bunched up because a lot of politicians have had their ears bent by some high tech lobbyists. This is just business as usual for both parties (legislators, lobbyists).
If you want to complain, complain to the companies you work for. They are the ones that are pushing these bills through. Of course, if you are in the business of making and selling software, it's in your best interests to let it pass. If you're in the "business" of making and giving away software, you probably view this as an unfair advantage being granted to your "competition".
Either way, the fault lies with the companies that are pushing for this legislation. The dumb, Luddite legislatures in these states can't reasonably be expected to understand the quality issues in the current software market, can they? It's just one more example of government by the checkbook, for the checkbook, and of the checkbook. So go out and vote with yours. If you don't like the license terms, don't buy the software.
This point is the only valid take-away from the whole article. The British database only captures a DNA fingerprint based on 6 loci and we've all seen the math on that. The vast majority of US states and all federal cases require DNA tests with more than 10 loci. The odds of this error cropping up in the states is significantly less.
p.s. This is an *old* story. It was reported at the beginning of the month in several British papers and ran on CNN on Tuesday. Granted, Saturday night is a slow time for Slashdot, but it'd be nice to hear stuff we didn't already know.:)
Re:Space Station: It's just Contractor Welfare
on
NASA Gets Smart
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· Score: 5
I think in the final analysis, if we simply built our own station as Reagan had originally planned we'd be further along, and would have spent less money than we ultimately will have once the current station is completed.
This is wishful thinking on a number of fronts. First, the space station program pre-dates Ronald Reagan's first term by many years, so he gets no credit other than that due for taking a space program that was looking at the moon and Mars and trapping it in low earth orbit for the next 50 years.
Second, I had the dubious honor of being one of the first members of the first contract ever awarded for the construction of the station. I can tell you from long, painful, inside experience that the space station was never intended to be anything more than an aerospace contractor welfare program during the downsizing of the US military and the end of the Cold War.
The large aerospace companies, especially Boeing and Lockheed, staffed these contracts to the gills with all of their cast-off, marginal, low talent employees in the early stages because the only work product was a mountain of documentation and anybody can create documents by the pound. All their talented people were still on lucrative military contracts.
Later, when it was time to bend real metal to make the station, NASA found that these programs were now all being run by these marginal bo-bos that had been promoted to senior project management over the preceding years. Coupled with repeated cuts in NASA's budget by Congress, NASA was stuck trying to build the station with 3rd string management, no dollars, and no public support.
The only choice they had was to bring in ESA, NASDA, Canada, and later, Russia, to get the thing built. It was never driven by some lofty ideal of "international cooperation." It was simple economics. We needed to suck cash out of the International partners to be able to maintain the level of contractor staffing and inefficiency that had been created around the station program in its first five years.
You can take it to the bank that no contract was ever scaled back below its original award amount, no prime contractor was ever fired, and no award fees were cut nor penalties assessed when the original launch date for the first station components ended up slipping from 1991 to 1998. A seven year slip with a 250% cost overrun has to get funded somehow. Thanks Europe, Canada, and Japan!!!
In this whole game, Russia was the only nod to an actual attempt at "international relations". If we hadn't paid money to all those ex-Soviet rocket scientists, they'd be working for hard currency in some bunker in Iraq or North Korea, building indigenous ICBM technology for countries that could give a rat's ass about international treaties against lobbing a nuke into NYC. That we got access to their robust LEO launch technology was a nice plus, too, since the flying the shuttle only 8 times a year meant that we could never construct, much less resupply, the completed station ourselves.
Don't throw too many rocks at the poor Russians for dropping the ball. You should squarely place ALL of the blame on NASA and Congress. The latter made the project 100's of times more difficult by gutting the budget and demanding pork barrel deals that moved key station tasks to 46 different states instead of keeping the work centralized. The former ensured a fiasco by mismanaging its contractors, allowing an outrageously inefficient distribution of work to over 150 individual contractors in 46 states and 15 foreign countries, and never articulating a clear vision of the station's value to the US people.
So, explain to me again how doing ourselves would have worked...?
This is a tired, tired, old rant and it isn't even that old. The simple fact is that there are all sorts of ways to avoid the tracking activities that commercial web sites foist on their "visitors". A entirely new wave of agent-based applications is about to hit the marketplace and all of the schemes and plans that the advertisers have constructed around Web browsers is about to get tossed out the window.
Anyone that thinks the net has stopped evolving and the Web browser is the pinnacle of the information food chain is sorely mistaken. The economics of the entire Internet are about to be upset radically by software that puts end users back in control of the information flow on the net. Until now, they've only had meager tools like Web browsers to work with. Once everyones' desktop includes some peer to peer software, strong agent capabilities, and richer media formats, the whole click and surf metaphor will be dead. And it'll take all the spammers, advertisers, profilers, and cookie vendors along with it.
Just wait and see. And in the meantime, please stop playing this broken "privacy-is-dead" record. It's simply feel-good fear mongering on your part, since it isn't really true.
This is an old thought experiment that has one flaw (see if you can spot it!) But it makes an interesting case for low tech solutions.
Iron Bar Storage System
First, take all your data and stream it out as one long multi-digit number. Now place a decimal point in front of the number and treat it as a very precise fraction. With the length of your iron bar treated as 1, measure off the distance along the bar equal to your data's fractional value and file a little notch in the bar.
That's it. The notch now represents the fraction that is your data. Anytime you want to recover your data, just measure the distance to the notch, divide it by the length of the bar, remove the decimal place, and convert the number back into your data bytes.
Slashdot Mirror
Marketshare. Period. It all comes down to economics and my business is going to expend maximum effort on the platforms with the greatest return.
Now factor in that I can get dedicated tech support from the commercial vendor, commercially supported extensions, documentation, and updates and explain to me again how I'm better off disrupting my entire organization with a shift to this "free" software?
I really don't understand the point you're trying to make by equating my statement against artificially imposed economies to your example of 18th century agrarian economies. One is a rebuke of a artificial constraint imposed on a natural marketplace and the other is a natural response to survival requirements in an unsophisticated market economy. There's no parallel to be drawn as far as I can see.
But your non sequiturs aside, the point IS that the market will choose. So grandstanding about why commercial software is bad and how your opinion is better than someone elses' is a vain effort when you seem to be agreeing in the next breath that the market will pick the best solution from the optimal source.
So, what was your point again?
I agree with you in that my measure of "best" also includes a measure of quality. But quality to me means polish, performance, support, and usability in addition to what it seems to mean here, which is reliability.
One thing you need to realize is that the commercial desktop software marketplace accounts for less than 10% of the overall revenue generated by software development activities worldwide. You're fixated on something that is TINY. Look at the big picture for a change.
Just because something is "free" doesn't mean there isn't a cost associated with it (TANSTAAFL). In a lot of cases, "free" solutions are many times more costly than a commercial alternative. If you think otherwise, you've never done what you propose.
The problem is that your demographic (those who want to modify their own source code) accounts for significantly less than 1% of the entire installed base of computer users worldwide. (Look at Gartner's last report on user profiles to find which box you're really in.) I don't know of ANY software company that is willing to relegate itself to 1% market share. And that assumes they have no competition for that 1%.
You are entitled to make your choices in the marketplace, but your ideology seems to say that you get to make the choice for everyone else, too, and your choice is "free". A lot of people don't see the value in free, since free also generally means difficult to use, no support, no manual, etc., which doesn't fly well in the corporate and consumer space. Surely there are stellar exceptions to the rule, but the rule still stands.
So why do you feel qualified to choose for everyone else?
It's completely absurd to think that having widespread industry support from commercial applications written for a platform could ever damage the platform unless the creators of the platform want it to happen. The authors of application software aren't the ones effecting change on the underlying O/S. It's the other way around.
The faction within the Linux community that fears the prospect of making money off of software needs to come to grips with the reality that some people have families to feed and working for free in a Western Capitalist Society isn't really a good way to satisfy that requirement. Once that little hurdle is passed, it is really irrelevant whether someone chooses to give their software away or charge for it. The market will pick the best solution after weighing costs and benefits.
Trying to impose some sort of external, artificial pricing model (i.e., "free") is at odds with the underlying economy and society in which most of us live. Just like bad O/S ideas, the world is rife with failed government experiments as well, most of which fall along the lines of socialism/communism where everyone thought it was a good idea for everything to be "free".
I'm definitely not equating OSS with communism, so don't even go there. My point is that it's silly to be worried about people supporting Linux with commercial software. The market will bear what the market will bear and it's not up to a bunch of free O/S afficianados to try and second guess the commercial market. Rather, the Linux community should continue to move the platform forward and let the applications take care of themselves.
And be very, very glad that the 99% of the software industry that is for-profit sees it as a viable platform. The alternative is to be ignored by that 99% and all of their customers and be forever relegated to a niche market.
That's because pizza-and-coke all-nighters are a direct byproduct of poor planning, either by the engineer implementing the code, the architect creating the design (if there even is such a person) or the person making the engineer's schedule. And the result is usually hastily written, incompletely tested software that is typical of most product offerings for use on the desktop.
The process of authoring mission critical, man rated software is so far removed from the ad hoc, informal, duct-tape-it-together approach that most programmers use that no direct comparison can be made. I've seen both ends of the software development spectrum and they each have their uses. You can't launch a shuttle with a bunch of last minute kernel patches and some stuff that was written the night before the launch date. But you can't compete in the commercial software marketplace with code that takes 2 or 3 years to specify, design, implement, test, and integrate, either.
Stand in awe of the people who have the skill and discipline to write software of this quality. Learn what you can from their process and try and use the lessons they've learned. Their stuff doesn't break, because when it does, people die. If O/S developers had that same attitude about their code, we'd never see blue screens of death, kernel panics, or any of the other flakiness we tolerate on our desktop machines.
You could also argue that if you're smart enough to get into this program in the first place, you're probably smart enough to figure out most of the stuff by yourself anyway. Computer Science degrees are really about teaching you how to approach solving computer-related problems. A vast majority of the classroom content is either out of date or has little practical application for most graduates. So whether you get that in a year or 4 is irrelevant. What you're missing is the years of training your brain to look at and solve problems that are fundamentally different from most other disciplines.
I don't believe you can compress that experience into one year, and I certainly wouldn't consider hiring someone who claimed to have accomplished it in that timeframe.
If anyone recalls the dumb terminal days of the '70's, they should readily recognize the iMac as a straight rip-off of the ADDS Viewpoint and older Data General terminals. The form factor is nearly identical and if I was DG or ADDS, I'd be crawling up Apple's backside.
The only innovation in the iMac's "trade dress" is the use of the translucent plastics. The shape has been around the computer industry for 25 years.
Don't you think an idiotic hardware patent on the order of "a computer hardware device designed to be worn by the user" is just as stifling to innovation as a software patent on something like "one click ordering"? It seems a bit hypocritical to limit yourself to saying that you only care about software. That, or it's pretty narrow-minded since a hardware product of any signficance has to include a substantial amount of software these days just to compete.
Is anyone as troubled as I am by the following excerpt from their press release?
This combination of expanded battery life in conjunction with our patent portfolio of more than 450 patent applications awarded and pending will further position Xybernaut to maintain its leading role in the wearable computing industry.
Sounds a lot like they're preparing to crawl up the backside of anyone who tries to play in their sandbox, Open Source or not.
You have it backwards. It passed in the House of Delegates, but not in the Senate. It may actually end up dying in conference and never make it to a floor vote.
This article is likely wrong on one point. As of last night, UCITA has not been passed by the Virginia Senate and insiders there give it very little chance of passage. It passed easily in the House of Delegates because they know it won't pass in the Senate and can look good to their corporate constituents by voting for it.
Members of the Senate and the Governor all recognize that the bill is flawed and likely wouldn't withstand a court challenge. So if you want to affect the passage, pester the senators, not the governor. It's not his problem yet.
I'm sure you believe it is your right, but it very likely is not. You can make bathtub gin that tastes just like Old Mr. Boston, but you have no "rights" to do so because you aren't licensed to distill alcohol. You can file down the firing pin on your daddy's hunting rifle and make it into an automatic weapon, but it's not your right to do that either. To carry your argument to the extreme, you could make your own "compatible" thermonuclear device. Clearly, that falls outside your legal rights, too.
Just because you can do something doesn't mean that society grants you the
- right
to do it. In this case, you can reverse engineer a piece of proprietary, licensed software whose license terms prohibit that activity, and you can make your own DVD player. But you don't necessarily have that right under our current set of laws and are technically in violation of the license agreement and probably several intellectual property laws as well. Go to the next step and distribute that software to all your friends and the rest of the Internet and you can see what happens.Actually, no. You didn't purchase or license the software component that decrypts the MPEG stream. I can go out and purchase all of the components to build a DSS receiver. But I didn't get a license from DirecTV to decode their signal, so I'm technically in violation even though I own all the right hardware and pay for their service.
They're not at all. I don't follow you're logic there.
He doesn't seem to get it at all. Surely he must understand that all we wish to do is watch DVDs under Linux, why is that a crime?
Valenti's point is that no one is keeping you from watching the DVD you just bought. That you have chosen to try and play it on a computer running an operating system with no industry-supported play back software is your fault, not the MPAA. That you are using an operating system without a commercial organization behind it to effectively lobby software manufacturers to license and implement a player for your operating system is your fault, not the MPAA's.
For all of the rhetoric spewing from both camps, the Linux faction is just as guilty of ignoring reality as the MPAA and its minions. The simple fact is that DVDs are designed to be played by licensed DVD players. That you don't have one is something that can be easily rectified by switching operating systems or buying a stand-alone player.
Arguing that you shouldn't have to use their player is like arguing you shouldn't have to have a DSS receiver to watch DirecTV broadcasts or you shouldn't have to buy your cable company's cable modem to hook up to their net.
The plain, simple fact is that there are all sorts of regulated, metered, for pay content out there. DVDs happen to be one form. Complaining that you have "rights" to watch it any way you please is simply unfounded, given the ample precedence for other forms of content with controlled playback mechanisms.
The MPAA is certainly within their rights to claim their control over the playback mechanism for DVDs. Whether the markets and the courts uphold that claim is a completely different issue. But don't say the man is clueless when he says that no one is preventing you from watching a DVD.
The truth is this. You didn't buy a DVD prior to the existence of DeCSS for play on your Linux box. And I'd be willing to bet that no one rushed out to buy DVDs once it was released either. It makes for a great story, but the reality is something different than what the Linux community is trying to portray to the general public.
The reality is that some smart guys reverse engineered a piece of software. Some other not-so-smart guys decided they didn't like that and are trying to stuff the genie back in the bottle. EVERYONE is obfuscating the issue with crys of "fair use", "free speech", "piracy", etc. when the real issue is simply one of market economics.
Specifically, some people think buying a DVD should be a sufficient license to enable playing the DVD. The creators of that format and the playback algorithms feel differently, resulting in a closed system with a small number of licensees. If this seems too proprietary for you, then use your market muscle to switch to some other format (tape, direct broadcast, etc.)
The bottom line is that no one is forcing you to buy DVDs and the DVD playback software is a licensed product. So don't expect unrestricted access to playback technology. You're misinformed if you think it's your "right" to have it.
Well ain't that sumptin'!?! I swear I never knew you could resize the columns (and more importantly, reorder them) until I tried it on a whim after reading your message.
Here I've been writing code on the Mac since '85, and this has to be the best Easter Egg of all. (And clearly, it has to be an Easter Egg because I never saw it mentioned in the docs anywhere, and of course, I always read all of the manuals. ;)
Maybe, but it'd be a great place to run a software business and that is exactly the motivation behind these bills. The Northern Virginia area already has more high tech workers and companies than Silicon Valley, and the VA Legislature wants to make sure it stays that way.
All the rants about personal liberties are going to fall on deaf ears in these states. Their economies are in overdrive because of the huge influx of high tech capital and nobody wants that to stop. Pouring a little gasoline on the fire never hurts, either.
The reality is that there are plenty of existing interstate commerce laws and ample contract law precedent to challenge these bills if it's ever an issue. There's no sense in getting all bunched up because a lot of politicians have had their ears bent by some high tech lobbyists. This is just business as usual for both parties (legislators, lobbyists).
If you want to complain, complain to the companies you work for. They are the ones that are pushing these bills through. Of course, if you are in the business of making and selling software, it's in your best interests to let it pass. If you're in the "business" of making and giving away software, you probably view this as an unfair advantage being granted to your "competition".
Either way, the fault lies with the companies that are pushing for this legislation. The dumb, Luddite legislatures in these states can't reasonably be expected to understand the quality issues in the current software market, can they? It's just one more example of government by the checkbook, for the checkbook, and of the checkbook. So go out and vote with yours. If you don't like the license terms, don't buy the software.
This point is the only valid take-away from the whole article. The British database only captures a DNA fingerprint based on 6 loci and we've all seen the math on that. The vast majority of US states and all federal cases require DNA tests with more than 10 loci. The odds of this error cropping up in the states is significantly less.
p.s. This is an *old* story. It was reported at the beginning of the month in several British papers and ran on CNN on Tuesday. Granted, Saturday night is a slow time for Slashdot, but it'd be nice to hear stuff we didn't already know. :)
This is wishful thinking on a number of fronts. First, the space station program pre-dates Ronald Reagan's first term by many years, so he gets no credit other than that due for taking a space program that was looking at the moon and Mars and trapping it in low earth orbit for the next 50 years.
Second, I had the dubious honor of being one of the first members of the first contract ever awarded for the construction of the station. I can tell you from long, painful, inside experience that the space station was never intended to be anything more than an aerospace contractor welfare program during the downsizing of the US military and the end of the Cold War.
The large aerospace companies, especially Boeing and Lockheed, staffed these contracts to the gills with all of their cast-off, marginal, low talent employees in the early stages because the only work product was a mountain of documentation and anybody can create documents by the pound. All their talented people were still on lucrative military contracts.
Later, when it was time to bend real metal to make the station, NASA found that these programs were now all being run by these marginal bo-bos that had been promoted to senior project management over the preceding years. Coupled with repeated cuts in NASA's budget by Congress, NASA was stuck trying to build the station with 3rd string management, no dollars, and no public support.
The only choice they had was to bring in ESA, NASDA, Canada, and later, Russia, to get the thing built. It was never driven by some lofty ideal of "international cooperation." It was simple economics. We needed to suck cash out of the International partners to be able to maintain the level of contractor staffing and inefficiency that had been created around the station program in its first five years.
You can take it to the bank that no contract was ever scaled back below its original award amount, no prime contractor was ever fired, and no award fees were cut nor penalties assessed when the original launch date for the first station components ended up slipping from 1991 to 1998. A seven year slip with a 250% cost overrun has to get funded somehow. Thanks Europe, Canada, and Japan!!!
In this whole game, Russia was the only nod to an actual attempt at "international relations". If we hadn't paid money to all those ex-Soviet rocket scientists, they'd be working for hard currency in some bunker in Iraq or North Korea, building indigenous ICBM technology for countries that could give a rat's ass about international treaties against lobbing a nuke into NYC. That we got access to their robust LEO launch technology was a nice plus, too, since the flying the shuttle only 8 times a year meant that we could never construct, much less resupply, the completed station ourselves.
Don't throw too many rocks at the poor Russians for dropping the ball. You should squarely place ALL of the blame on NASA and Congress. The latter made the project 100's of times more difficult by gutting the budget and demanding pork barrel deals that moved key station tasks to 46 different states instead of keeping the work centralized. The former ensured a fiasco by mismanaging its contractors, allowing an outrageously inefficient distribution of work to over 150 individual contractors in 46 states and 15 foreign countries, and never articulating a clear vision of the station's value to the US people.
So, explain to me again how doing ourselves would have worked...?
This is a tired, tired, old rant and it isn't even that old. The simple fact is that there are all sorts of ways to avoid the tracking activities that commercial web sites foist on their "visitors". A entirely new wave of agent-based applications is about to hit the marketplace and all of the schemes and plans that the advertisers have constructed around Web browsers is about to get tossed out the window.
Anyone that thinks the net has stopped evolving and the Web browser is the pinnacle of the information food chain is sorely mistaken. The economics of the entire Internet are about to be upset radically by software that puts end users back in control of the information flow on the net. Until now, they've only had meager tools like Web browsers to work with. Once everyones' desktop includes some peer to peer software, strong agent capabilities, and richer media formats, the whole click and surf metaphor will be dead. And it'll take all the spammers, advertisers, profilers, and cookie vendors along with it.
Just wait and see. And in the meantime, please stop playing this broken "privacy-is-dead" record. It's simply feel-good fear mongering on your part, since it isn't really true.
This is an old thought experiment that has one flaw (see if you can spot it!) But it makes an interesting case for low tech solutions.
Iron Bar Storage System
First, take all your data and stream it out as one long multi-digit number. Now place a decimal point in front of the number and treat it as a very precise fraction. With the length of your iron bar treated as 1, measure off the distance along the bar equal to your data's fractional value and file a little notch in the bar.
That's it. The notch now represents the fraction that is your data. Anytime you want to recover your data, just measure the distance to the notch, divide it by the length of the bar, remove the decimal place, and convert the number back into your data bytes.
Voila! Instant low tech storage!
Ever put a CD in a microwave? How about the dashboard of your car?
That metallic substrate makes a great antenna for all that EMP. Probably gets hot enough to warp the plastic if nothing else.