Well, they bought all that technology. They don't have the ability to produce that stuff on their own, or they wouldn't have bought it.
That said, I'm sure that if they need a military-grade UAV, the Chinese would be happy to provide one, just like they did with the anti-ship missiles may well have already done so. If on some off chance they took a pass, Russia would probably step in to fill the need, and if by some chance they didn't do it either, Iran could surely count on France to help them come up with a military-grade UAV.
So, no, in this particular case, I doubt that it's likely this software is going to contribute to support of the Iranian regime.
To answer the original question, yes, there is absolutely a case for letting national security in time of war dictate the limits of project. The thing is, with an open-source project, just how would you go about doing that? Let's assume for the moment that this software is actually military-grade, or close enough to it that it wouldn't be that hard to get it there and would save many months of development. Let's further assume for the sake of argument that the guy in Iran who made a UAV in the colors of the Iranian flag is an engineer and a member of the Qudz Brigades and was specifically tasked with finding a way to make a UAV good enough to use in further terrorist attacks in Iraq.
Even if you should now decide "Hey, bad guys could use my software to do bad things and probably are trying to" and you shut down your FTP site, the fact of the matter is that they guy in Iran already has the software. So does anybody else interested in trying to use it against us. Shutting down the FTP site doesn't put that horse back in the barn. It only stops them from getting any future releases you make, but as far as what's already out there goes, the bad guys are going to share it with each other. Restricting downloads to only US IP space wouldn't help, either. It's not like there aren't Iranian spies and Al Qaeda cells in the United States.
Therefore, shutting down the FTP site would not harm the bad guys at all; it would only hurt legitimate users of the software, so there's nothing to be gained at this point.
Circling back once again to the original question, yes, there is certainly a case for limiting an open source (or even closed source) project for national security interests. However, the time to make that judgment is before you've distributed any code, especially in the case of open source. Once you've started distributing, it's too late for that. You may remember the case of PGP being placed under export controls. That didn't stop anyone from using it. Code released prior to export controls was out there, and code released later was scanned, put into books (which made it protected speech) and sent to Europe, where it was OCRed and turned back into code and freely distributed.
It's true that Yum doesn't do those things. Adept doesn't do those things. YAST doesn't do those things. But neither does Windows Update, which is the nearest Microsoft equivalent to Yum, Adept, and YAST. In terms of features, functionality, and ease of use, though, those three all blow Windows Update away, but I guess we won't find him mentioning that. Windows Update is agonizing to use, compared to any major update tool on Linux or Mac.
Heck, even the command line is a lot better than Windows Update. apt-get update && apt-get -f dist-upgrade and all your updates are taken care of with greater ease and less time than Windows Update requires.
The ban is on speaking to reporters *on the record* not on speaking to reporters. The claim in TFA that reporters won't quote someone who is speaking off the record is disingenuous, at best. Either that or the author has never heard of a couple guys named Woodward and Bernstein. Seymour Hersh wrote an article or two using off the record sources, too. And how often do we see mainstream news articles quoting someone (usual in government) who answered their questions "on condition of anonymity?" That would be what, oh, just about every day?
As others have noted, there's nothing particularly unusual about this. Almost all companies have similar policies. I've never worked at one that didn't. Most of you probably haven't, either.
NHTSA staffers will doubtless continue to talk to reporters just like always, except anonymously. There is actually upside in this: if they all speak on condition of anonymity, it gets harder to figure out who spilled the beans.
Oh, one more thing for all you who are talking about bridges falling down: NHTSA doesn't do bridges; they're responsible for vehicle safety:
You can make the argument that it's cruel, if you want, but "unusual" isn't going to fly. Execution is, in fact, a pretty common punishment for first-degree murder. A punishment which is cruel but not unusual passed the "cruel and unusual" test. So does a punishment that is unusual but not cruel.
Of course, I won't buy the argument that capital punishment is cruel, either. The closest thing a murderer has to the value of the life he/she took is his/her own life (I say closest because the victim's life was of greater value than the murderer's), and thus should be compelled to surrender his/her life in payment for the crime. Consider what murderers put victims through, it would be cruel to not execute them.
A reporter asked Jessica Lunsford's dad if he would attend Couey's execution. He gave the same answer I would give: "I'd hold the syringe if they'd let me."
As for Scott McCausland, yeah, it sucks to have to choose between using Windows for five months and not using a computer at all. Not sure which way I'd go on that. Of course, it sucks to go to jail for five months, too. However, maybe he should have thought about that before he did it.
Of course, the argument could be made that what he did shouldn't be illegal. The argument could be made that he was engaging in civil disobedience. (I wouldn't buy it, but the argument could be made, and probably will be, by some.) The trouble is, people engaging in civil disobedience not only fully understand they may be jailed or fined for their actions, they fully expect to be. That's why they do it, to be a catalyst of change by their example. Scott McCausland is none of that. He's just a guy who caught violating copyright.
To put that in perspective, if Microsoft got caught violating copyright by incorporating GPLed software into some of their products and the people who were responsible for the violation were sentenced to five months of jail + five months of monitoring their computers, many people in this forum would be complaining that it was a slap on the wrist, because we expect those copyrights to be honored. We can't have it both ways; if we want copyright to be honored, we have to honor copyright. Are copyright terms too long? Absolutely. Should copyright be abolished entirely? Some people think so. We could have national debate on that. But in the meantime...
Actually, ISPs have always sought to have the legal status of common carriers, at least with respect to things like copyright infringement. The safe harbor provisions of the DMCA are aimed at exactly-that, conferring a common carrier-like status on network providers.
Jail time?! Gimme a break. Have you ever - *ever* - heard of anyone at a telco (which are common carriers) going to jail for anything other than financial malfeasance?
The trouble is, you'd have to look long and hard to find a worse bastion of political correctness than your average university, so sending more people there for education in poli sci/soc sci is likely to have the opposite affect of what you might desire.
Yes, it is OK. Perfectly OK. Walmart sells edited versions of music why? Because there is a demand for it in their customer base. That being the case, you could make an argument for them being remiss if they didn't sell edited versions.
Do I buy music there? No. OK, I don't buy music at other stores either, because I'm so fed up with the music establishment that it's been over five years since I bought anything that wasn't an Indie CD, purchased directly from the band at a live performance. But if Walmart had anything I wanted, sure, I'd probably buy it there. They have good prices. I buy other stuff there.
I filter spam for people. I believe in making it as difficult as possible for spammers to deliver their spew, and I'm pretty good at achieving that. Why do I do this? Not for the money. I could get paid to do a lot of things in IT. I do it because it suits my concept of morality. It seems to suit a lot of other people's concept of morality, too.
If you have a different concept of morality, that's fine. Buy your music somewhere else. Don't spam-filter your email. Whatever floats your boat. But don't tell others that because their concept of morality is different than your concept of morality, that they can't act as they see fit within the bounds of the law. That would be imposing your concept of morality on others, and to use your own words to describe your stance on that issue, it "isn't OK."
The thing is, net neutrality is not really about the last mile. I used to be a sysadmin at an ISP, and utilization of last mile bandwidth was never the issue. Whoever they are leasing the local loops from doesn't care per so about whether my DSL line is saturated all the time or not. Net neutrality is about load on the backbone carriers' networks, and below that, on downstream ISP networks. It can also be just about extra profits. A couple cases to illustrate each:
1) Simple load. There's an overselling of bandwidth formula by which all ISPs make money. If the aggregate bandwidth of all your customers is X, you don't have to have X amount of backbone bandwidth, because they aren't all online at once, or all fully utilizing their links when they are. You only need some fraction of that amount. You've got this all worked out, but then along comes Youtube, IM with voice, Vonage and other VoIP carriers, Bit Torrent, online music and video stores, etc., and in pretty short order, your average user is consuming far more bandwidth than they used to and your oversell ratio just went out the window. To maintain level of service, you can do a couple of things: the first is to throw a bunch of money at the problem, upgrading your bandwidth, your core and edge routers, the whole nine yards. The trouble is, this is expensive, and while the routers are a sunk cost, bandwidth is a running cost. Profit margins are very thin for ISPs, generally, so to remain profitable you would have to raise prices. But Internet access is very price sensitive, and the first one to raise prices is going to see customers walking, in large numbers. The other option is traffic-shaping. You prioritize some traffic over others, and put the bandwidth-hogging stuff like Youtube, BT, online music and vidoe stores, etc, at the end of the bandwidth line. Unless, of course, Google, the stores, etc., are willing to pay you money. Now you have a way to finance that infrastructure without raising rates. Net neutrality is dead, but you're still alive. And Bit Torrent? Oh well, nobody's paying there, so BT is just going to have crappy performance on your network.
2) Greed. I'm a big ISP. I want to get into the VoIP business for myself, so I do. My service is super, and it's cheaper than the phone company. My customers like this. Trouble is, there are VoIP companies out there competing with me, like Vonage and Packet 8. Their service isn't as good as mine (I used to use Packet 8, now use Vonage, and in between had a cable company's VoIP service, so I'm talking from experience here; but Vonage is pretty good), but it's almost as good and it's over 1/3 cheaper. A lot of customers like that even better. What to do? Ah, I know! Traffic shaping! Packets for my own VoIP service get routed at a higher priority than other VoIP services. No their service is no longer almost as good as mine. My customers may or may not really like this, if they even pin it on me, but now my service is worth the premium I charge for it b/c I made the others look bad. Net neutrality is dead, and I can no longer claim with a straight face to be a common carrier like a telco, but I'm making more money and can use it to finance the greater bandwidth demands from case 1, above (along with the fees I'm socking the content providers with to not be traffic-shaped on my network).
This, then, is the problem facing Copowi: They may practice complete net neutrality within their network, consisting of their edge, their core, and the local loops they are leasing. However, if their upstream (be it a major backbone carrier or just a larger ISP who in turn connects to a backbone provider) doesn't practice net neutrality, it doesn't really matter much that Copowi does, except on traffic local to their network, which isn't a whole lot.
Of course, if their upstream starts traffic shaping on VoIP, P2P, whatever, and Copowi wants neutrality, they do have an option: pay to have no shaping on traffic going in or out of their network. And lo and behold, this appears to be exactly what's going on
While the AC above is purely flamebait, he has kind of a point, despite his stupidity. That is, if you're really into games, a console for gaming and the hardware platform and OS of your choice for computing. A big reason why I don't care very much that Linux is in a similar (or worse?) gaming situation than the Mac is that I get my dose of gaming from the consoles we have in the game room at work. If that wasn't enough, I'd buy a console for home use. I just don't worry about computer gaming. I use Mac at work and Linux at home. Linux has enough children's games to satisfy my kids, and that's the extent to which I need to care about computer gaming.
I think the cubicle is another thing that drives it, on two fronts. One is privacy, or the lack of it, that a cubicle gives you. The other is that when you're having a phone conversation, it can bother people around you who are trying to focus on what they're doing. So, I use email for non-urgent communication at work. If it's more urgent, I'll use jabber or, if I think a call is best, I'm more likely to walk over and have a face to face conversation, which beats a phone call hands down.
If I have a non-business call to receive or make on my cell, I leave my desk and grab a nearby meeting room or go to the engineering lounge (no, we really have one, with a commercial beer fridge, even) or step outside for a few minutes.
My desk phone is bottom of the barrel in my list of communication devices, I think I've used it 2 or 3 times all year.
I don't know how much bandwidth you've got, but I have ~10 megabits down (cable, and late at night I can really get as close to that as TCP allows), but even at this speed, the largest thing I've ever downloaded (OpenSuSE) was far from instant. HD-DVD is ~30 GB/disc, and BluRay is ~50 GB/disc. You'd need an fsck of a lot more bandwidth than I or most people currently have to make this practical, not to mention that a lot more backbone capacity would have to be piled on before widespread downloading would be practical.
Then, having satisfied all those requirements, I still need to burn the thing to a DVD, because:
A) Even large disks would fill up pretty quickly with HD movies B) Watching a movie on my laptop (15" wide) or monitor (19" 4:3) is a lot less satisfying than watching it on my TV w/home theater system, and the rest of the family might want to watch it, too. Movies on computer are kind of a solitary thing. Of course, here on/., that might not be so out of place:)
Of course, for the price of an HD-DVD player (even though they've come down a lot) and the lack of really compelling movies (to me) coming out on HD, I don't plan to get one anytime soon anyway. They can talk to me about HD-DVD when I can buy a decent player for $100.
Completely OT to the topic at hand, but I've seen your tagline a number of times and my curiosity was piqued enough to google it this time. That turned out to be a wonderful read. Cheers, mate!
While I mostly agree with you, I also see where those who are highly suspicious of Microsoft (whether inside or outside of OSI) are coming from. Everything that Microsoft has ever done with respect to open source or open standards has been with the goal of slowing the adoption of and/or co-opting open source and open standards. "Embrace and extend" was official Microsoft strategy - take an open standard, develop some proprietary extensions to it, and make that the version Windows uses, putting the rest of the industry - which follows the true standard - on a weaker footing.
I'm not necessarily saying that was a bad business strategy from the viewpoint of Microsoft's narrow self-interest - it was obviously pretty successful - but it was bad for the industry as a whole, and was a a direct attack on open standards that everyone else had agreed to play by.
In addition, Microsoft has always most vociferously attacked the GPL. People remember words like "cancer" for a long time, as seen in the debate over the MSPL. Microsoft has never made any secret of its fear and loathing of the GPL, and its desire to destroy or undermine it, including through very concrete actions such as buying a SCO license to help SCO attack Linux. As TFA notes, code from pretty much any license other than the GPL can be combined with MSPL-licensed code. Coincidence, or explicit design? You make the call.
So, now we have Microsoft seeking OSI approval of the MSPL, and some people are looking at it and seeing a wolf in sheep's clothing, not helped by the fact that - MSPL notwithstanding - Microsoft does not seem to have really changed its spots with regard to FOSS, which is the main point that Chris DiBona seems to be making. The so-called "open" Office 2K7 document format and the attempt to get it on the standards fast-track is just the latest embrace and extend strategy, and at the same time they are doing that in an attempt to muddy the ODF waters/squash ODF, the are seeking OSI approval for the MSPL. With schizo behavior like this, it's really easy to believe that the MSPL is just another attack vector against the GPL, with Microsoft attempting to exploit OSI to advance its agenda.
Considering the past, it's no wonder that people are slow to trust MS when it produces an open-source license, especially one that appears deliberately constructed to be compatible with every major free license except the GPL. Submitting it to OSI is a brilliant political move, because as some have noted, OSI would lose a lot of credibility if the MSPL meets the standards but is denied because of its source. OTOH, if they follow the standards and the MSPL is approved thereby, OSI will still lose a certain amount of credibility in some quarters for approving a license which is (I believe correctly) perceived to be an attack on the GPL as much as a bona fide open source license.
That said, I think it's worth having constructive dialog with Microsoft, because to whatever extend they may be coming in from the cold (not much, probably; their open source moves are just positioning themselves to have survivability in a future where Linux and Mac have desktop parity with Windows), if we burn the olive branch instead of accepting it, they will certainly try to go back to their worst old ways. At the same time, this is still Microsoft we're talking about - a company that remains pretty hostile to open source in general and Free software in particular, long after even Sun has come around - so we need to proceed with caution. If it takes (a lot of) time to build trust with the FOSS community, that's no one fault but Microsoft's.
While I've never heard the term "micro-expression" before, I'm very familiar with the concept, although from a venue very different from an airport: in poker, these are called "tells" and it is very well established that they really do work. Skilled meatspace poker players really can get a very good read on an opponent's hand from little behavioral variances that the opponent is often unaware of and/or can't control.
Of course, skilled players do learn to control these tells and put on a poker face, use sunglasses at the table (apart from being just part of his shtick, there's a reason why Greg Raymer wears those cateye glasses). Terrorists may next work on trying to suppress these tells, but n the context of an airport security line, though, putting on a poker face could in itself be cause for suspicion.
I see a lot of whining (provocative term chosen deliberately, because so much of the complaint really is just whining, not well thought-out criticism) of TSA itself and various security measures, and what I find disturbing about that is that many of are directly involved with computer security, eitehr as sysadmins, working in some part of the security industry itself, working to write secure code, etc., and we understand perfectly well the basic principles of security:
1) There is no such thing as absolute security. Someone, somewhere can always get over on you. The closest thing to a secure computer is one that is disconnected from its power source, encased in glass, then steel, then concrete, and sunk to the bottom of the Marianas Trench. Even that computer could be recovered and broken into with sufficient effort.
2) Security is a continuum. Since you can't make a computer absolutely secure, or even close to absolutely secure while still remaining practically usable, you have to raise the bar as much as you reasonably can, to make successfully attacking it as difficult as you reasonably can.
This is basically what is being done with airport security. We know a number of techniques that terrorists have tried in the past, and they probably additionally know some that they have not tried yet but could be reasonably expected to try, or that intelligence tips indicate they will try. TSA checks for these things at the airport, naturally, because if you don't check for them, terrorists will continue to try and exploit at least some of them. To cast that in terms that will be better understood, if you have unpatched security holes, those holes will continue to be exploited until you patch them. Sure, it's inconvenient to have to go through these screenings; the time and effort we spend making sure our systems are up to patch level is inconvenient, too, but it beats the alternative.
I'm not saying that TSA isn't sometimes heavy-handed (although in my personal experience they have always been polite and professional, perhaps in part because I also have been) or that they don't sometimes seem to be hiring from the bottom of the barrel, or that other places don't do a better, polite job, but OTOH the Israelis have had decades to work out the kinks in their system, and maybe just have a politer culture (don't know, haven't been there, but a lot of the countries I have been to have a politer culture than ours, at least on the surface), but I am saying that they aren't nearly as bad as some here make them out to be, and that the security measures are a lot more than the security theater some here accuse them of being. To those people, all I can say is, "I'm glad you aren't responsible for the security on my networks, because there might not be any. You'd say IDSes, firewalls, security policies, password changing, WPA for wireless, etc., were all just security theater and would disable the lot.
I'm not trolling here, but I have to ask if maybe hmccabe is. For example, here are some of the issues that are important to me in the presidential election: the budget (getting it under control), the war (getting the Iraqis government/military to the point where it is largely self-sufficient as quickly as possible, including securing their borders and getting the insurgency under control), getting our own borders under control and doing something about the illegal alien problem, and being prepared to intervene (if necessary) if the housing credit crunch turns into a repeat of the S&L meltdown of the 1980s (gee, doesn't the banking business have a short memory?), patent reform, maybe even copyright reform, the e-voting problem, etc. In other words, issues that really matter.
An issue that is not of much importance to me in the election is whether a given candidate believes that the Genesis account is literal and meant to be taken literally, or if (?:s)?he believes that the Genesis account was God's way of getting across to people with little understanding of His creation, what it was that He did and how He did it, like "Let there be light" (Big Bang), wait a few billion years, form the earth, separate the land from the water, bring forth life, evolve it into people (making man from the dust of the earth), etc. Or, a candidate could even be (?:s)?he an atheist and think it was all just an accident for which science has yet to fully account but will in time completely explain. None of those viewpoints is terribly relevant to handling the important issues named in my first paragraph.
It may be because I have paid attention only to substantive issues such as those outlined in my first paragraph, but I actually don't know if any of the candidates are creationists, nor does the blurb name any names, so I am left wondering at this point if the whole thing is just an anti-Republican (I notice no other party was mentioned) troll. If there actually are creationist candidates, would someone be so kind as to post names, along with links containing supporting evidence (preferably the candidate's own words, and if possible, on the candidate's own website)? To reiterate, I don't believe whether a candidate is a creationist or not is important to the real issues, and in fact, trying to make that an issue is probably just someone's attempt at erecting a straw man to deflect attention from the real issues.
Single sign-on would be fine as long as it was done in conjunction with two-factor authentication. For example, where I work, I use a one-time password generator to get on the VPN. Having my username and PIN won't help you unless you also have that generator. I also have a real estate license, and access to MLS also uses a one-time password generator.
Now, if Microsoft, openID, or *someone* in the single sign-on space implemented a system that used a one-time password generator, you'd have something that would be pretty secure, while at the same time keeping you from having a generator for every important site you use, if outfits like banks, etc., ever get their crap together and start using those. That is something I would use. In the meantime, in the interests of security, I so maintain separate userids and passwords at different sites, and store them in Firefox, encrypted with the master password. For non-web resources, the OS X keychain takes care of it. These two things together give me something that's almost as good as Passport and a lot more secure, because it's under my control.
Note to anyone who's in bank IT: if your bank is first to market with a one-time password generator sign-on in California, I *will* move all of my accounts there.
My wife is from a third-world country and came to the US as an adult and she has similiar anecdotal evidence to relate. When she was born, in the 1970s, the country was so poor that there simply were no vaccinations and such for infants and toddlers. To jumpstart their immune systems, they would give each baby a cut on the hip. She has a scar there, and says everyone born in those days has one like it. It was battlefield medicine, but it worked. It was all they had. They have vaccinations now, but it's mostly funded by WTO money. The country is much more prosperous than it was then, but is still poor overall.
The general standards of cleanliness, sanitation, refrigeration (or lack thereof, in the tropical heat, no less) are a bit scary when you're used to living in the first world, but the combination of the immune system jumpstart and those unsanitary conditions are probably major contributing factors in her seemingly bulletproof immune system. She is almost never sick, and if she gets a cold, her symptoms will typically have vanished in a day or two. Even if our kids and I all have colds, she normally does not catch one from us. Her whole family is like that. It may also be partly genes, but OTOH, our kids were both born there, had all their vaccinations, and have spent most of their lives in the US. They seem to get about the average number of colds, etc., as other kids their ages, so I think her strong immune system is due more to environmental factors than genes.
My wife reports that she and her brothers and sisters were all very rarely sick as children, even though they regularly swam in very polluted water (a combination of "who knew?" and the fact that there was nowhere else to swim). Neighborhood bathrooms were a bunch of holes sawed in a covered pier over the river, people would dump garbage in the river, there were sometimes bodies in the river (she saw a number of them when she was a kid), etc., and people swam in it. Of course, it's even worse, today, except for no bodies. If you fell in, I bet you'd die of typhoid before they could even get you out:p
In addition to all that true stuff you wrote, another reason why IBM buying Sun would not be such a good acquisition is cultural fit. Everyone I know who has recently worked for IBM says it's the same kind of button-down place it always was (I was a mainframer in the 1980s, and it was typical for an IBM CE to show up for an emergency service call at 3:00 AM Sunday morning in a suit and tie, the only question being would the suit be navy or gray; now that's button-down). Sun ain't like that, so merging the two companies together would be difficult.
My previous employer was acquired by a big, well-known company that was a very bad cultural fit. It was no fun at all, and I'm very happy to no longer work there. My current employer was also recently acquired by a big, well-known company, but the cultural fit is excellent and it's been great. I loved my job before, and I love it now. If IBM bought Sun, it would be bad for competition, probably bad for Sun customers, and probably bad for both Sun and IBM employees. Sun and Apple might be a workable cultural fit, but Sun and IBM? I don't think so.
I'd go even further and challenge whether bad physics in movies really all that harmful, on a couple of points:
1) For somebody who doesn't know the physics anyway, is seeing somebody get blown through a window by a shotgun really going to make their understanding that much worse?
2) Even for those people whose understanding of physics is harmed by movies, so what? If they're not designing the next Mars mission, how does this hurt anybody, those people included? OTOH, considering the results of some Mars missions, maybe Hollywood Physics are doing more harm than I think
It's kind of like the ranting I see on/. from time to time about the view of strict creationists, that the Earth is really only about 7000 years old (or whatever) and people and dinosaurs existed at the same time (gee, Hollywood's actually done that one, too). We know that's not true, and that dinosaurs were long gone before even our most primitive ancestors evolved, but so what? The worst that can happen to you for thinking that people were chased around by dinosaurs is you get laughed at. Other than that, it doesn't really hurt them, or us. Even if they teach that in their private schools, it doesn't matter much. No actual, legit paleontology curriculum is going to be swayed by it.
Don't get me wrong, I'm all for accuracy in school subjects, and for good science in movies, too, but people actually being *harmed* by Hollywood science? I don't buy it, unless somebody really tries some of that stuff. Then they darwinize and society is better off:)
"Most medium and large companies don't risk pirating software, at least not on a major scale"
In what we call (or used to call?) first-world countries, no, they generally don't. However, in a lot of developing economies they do. I used to live in a country that falls into that category, and I can tell you that not only in companies, but also in government offices, locally built white-box PCs running pirated copies of Windows + the usual apps were the norm. The only place you'd see legit stuff is in the offices of large, international companies. I wouldn't have known where to even buy a legit copy of Windows in-country, if it can even be done. But you can get pirated anything for a dollar all over the place.
I don't agree with the article (well, to some extent) WRT the developed world, but it's premises hold very well in developing nations. Windows was there first, it was then and is now practically free, and because of that, is very well entrenched. Even in markets where Windows is expensive, Linux faces an uphill fight. In markets where Windows has cost parity, it's even tougher.
Google pack as a whole may be aimed primarily at home users, but Star Office is what we're talking about here. You can probably also expect Google Pack to become more business-oriented over time. Google's deal to buy Postini is going to bring enterprise-quality email security, archiving, etc., to Gmail's commercial offerings, and I wouldn't be surprised to see some tie-ins between Google Office and StarOffice, too.
As an aside, the Postini deal is quite a shot across the bow of the SS Redmond. I was a FrontBridge employee in 2005 when Microsoft acquired it and renamed it as Exchange Hosted Services. Postini was FrontBridge's number one competitor in those days (and still is now, I'm sure). I expect chairs were seen on orbital trajectories in Redmond when the news broke that Google was buying Postini:)
This isn't targeted at home users, it's targeted at business users. Sure, home users are welcome to use it too, and importing/exporting Word and Excel is generally good enough in that case. The StarOffice migration tools are very business-oriented:
The big one from that list is the macro migration wizard. There's also an analysis wizard that examines your documents and calculates migration costs and risks. For a business with thousands, or tens of thousands, or hundreds of thousands, of MS Office documents, these kinds of tools are essential. If the users (or worse, the IT department) had to manually migrate their MS Office docs to ODF, the project would be dead right there. That could be a deal-breaker even in a small business, and certainly is for a large business.
Slashdot Mirror
They're just lucky it's not 300 Slashdotters...
Well, they bought all that technology. They don't have the ability to produce that stuff on their own, or they wouldn't have bought it.
That said, I'm sure that if they need a military-grade UAV, the Chinese would be happy to provide one, just like they did with the anti-ship missiles may well have already done so. If on some off chance they took a pass, Russia would probably step in to fill the need, and if by some chance they didn't do it either, Iran could surely count on France to help them come up with a military-grade UAV.
So, no, in this particular case, I doubt that it's likely this software is going to contribute to support of the Iranian regime.
To answer the original question, yes, there is absolutely a case for letting national security in time of war dictate the limits of project. The thing is, with an open-source project, just how would you go about doing that? Let's assume for the moment that this software is actually military-grade, or close enough to it that it wouldn't be that hard to get it there and would save many months of development. Let's further assume for the sake of argument that the guy in Iran who made a UAV in the colors of the Iranian flag is an engineer and a member of the Qudz Brigades and was specifically tasked with finding a way to make a UAV good enough to use in further terrorist attacks in Iraq.
Even if you should now decide "Hey, bad guys could use my software to do bad things and probably are trying to" and you shut down your FTP site, the fact of the matter is that they guy in Iran already has the software. So does anybody else interested in trying to use it against us. Shutting down the FTP site doesn't put that horse back in the barn. It only stops them from getting any future releases you make, but as far as what's already out there goes, the bad guys are going to share it with each other. Restricting downloads to only US IP space wouldn't help, either. It's not like there aren't Iranian spies and Al Qaeda cells in the United States.
Therefore, shutting down the FTP site would not harm the bad guys at all; it would only hurt legitimate users of the software, so there's nothing to be gained at this point.
Circling back once again to the original question, yes, there is certainly a case for limiting an open source (or even closed source) project for national security interests. However, the time to make that judgment is before you've distributed any code, especially in the case of open source. Once you've started distributing, it's too late for that. You may remember the case of PGP being placed under export controls. That didn't stop anyone from using it. Code released prior to export controls was out there, and code released later was scanned, put into books (which made it protected speech) and sent to Europe, where it was OCRed and turned back into code and freely distributed.
Yes, that's exactly what I said. You *did* read to the end, right? Oh, wait. This is Slashdot.
No, he's not nuts. He's stupid :)
It's true that Yum doesn't do those things. Adept doesn't do those things. YAST doesn't do those things. But neither does Windows Update, which is the nearest Microsoft equivalent to Yum, Adept, and YAST. In terms of features, functionality, and ease of use, though, those three all blow Windows Update away, but I guess we won't find him mentioning that. Windows Update is agonizing to use, compared to any major update tool on Linux or Mac.
Heck, even the command line is a lot better than Windows Update. apt-get update && apt-get -f dist-upgrade and all your updates are taken care of with greater ease and less time than Windows Update requires.
The ban is on speaking to reporters *on the record* not on speaking to reporters. The claim in TFA that reporters won't quote someone who is speaking off the record is disingenuous, at best. Either that or the author has never heard of a couple guys named Woodward and Bernstein. Seymour Hersh wrote an article or two using off the record sources, too. And how often do we see mainstream news articles quoting someone (usual in government) who answered their questions "on condition of anonymity?" That would be what, oh, just about every day?
e m.30351f8e7e40c1cbf62a63101891ef9a/
As others have noted, there's nothing particularly unusual about this. Almost all companies have similar policies. I've never worked at one that didn't. Most of you probably haven't, either.
NHTSA staffers will doubtless continue to talk to reporters just like always, except anonymously. There is actually upside in this: if they all speak on condition of anonymity, it gets harder to figure out who spilled the beans.
Oh, one more thing for all you who are talking about bridges falling down: NHTSA doesn't do bridges; they're responsible for vehicle safety:
http://www.nhtsa.dot.gov/portal/site/nhtsa/menuit
You can make the argument that it's cruel, if you want, but "unusual" isn't going to fly. Execution is, in fact, a pretty common punishment for first-degree murder. A punishment which is cruel but not unusual passed the "cruel and unusual" test. So does a punishment that is unusual but not cruel.
Of course, I won't buy the argument that capital punishment is cruel, either. The closest thing a murderer has to the value of the life he/she took is his/her own life (I say closest because the victim's life was of greater value than the murderer's), and thus should be compelled to surrender his/her life in payment for the crime. Consider what murderers put victims through, it would be cruel to not execute them.
A reporter asked Jessica Lunsford's dad if he would attend Couey's execution. He gave the same answer I would give: "I'd hold the syringe if they'd let me."
As for Scott McCausland, yeah, it sucks to have to choose between using Windows for five months and not using a computer at all. Not sure which way I'd go on that. Of course, it sucks to go to jail for five months, too. However, maybe he should have thought about that before he did it.
Of course, the argument could be made that what he did shouldn't be illegal. The argument could be made that he was engaging in civil disobedience. (I wouldn't buy it, but the argument could be made, and probably will be, by some.) The trouble is, people engaging in civil disobedience not only fully understand they may be jailed or fined for their actions, they fully expect to be. That's why they do it, to be a catalyst of change by their example. Scott McCausland is none of that. He's just a guy who caught violating copyright.
To put that in perspective, if Microsoft got caught violating copyright by incorporating GPLed software into some of their products and the people who were responsible for the violation were sentenced to five months of jail + five months of monitoring their computers, many people in this forum would be complaining that it was a slap on the wrist, because we expect those copyrights to be honored. We can't have it both ways; if we want copyright to be honored, we have to honor copyright. Are copyright terms too long? Absolutely. Should copyright be abolished entirely? Some people think so. We could have national debate on that. But in the meantime...
"Even women should be able to beat it"
/.ers.
I dunno, I think an artificial arm would work better for helping guys to beat it...
Besides, having a woman beat it would just be so out of place for most
Actually, ISPs have always sought to have the legal status of common carriers, at least with respect to things like copyright infringement. The safe harbor provisions of the DMCA are aimed at exactly-that, conferring a common carrier-like status on network providers.
Jail time?! Gimme a break. Have you ever - *ever* - heard of anyone at a telco (which are common carriers) going to jail for anything other than financial malfeasance?
The trouble is, you'd have to look long and hard to find a worse bastion of political correctness than your average university, so sending more people there for education in poli sci/soc sci is likely to have the opposite affect of what you might desire.
Yes, it is OK. Perfectly OK. Walmart sells edited versions of music why? Because there is a demand for it in their customer base. That being the case, you could make an argument for them being remiss if they didn't sell edited versions.
Do I buy music there? No. OK, I don't buy music at other stores either, because I'm so fed up with the music establishment that it's been over five years since I bought anything that wasn't an Indie CD, purchased directly from the band at a live performance. But if Walmart had anything I wanted, sure, I'd probably buy it there. They have good prices. I buy other stuff there.
I filter spam for people. I believe in making it as difficult as possible for spammers to deliver their spew, and I'm pretty good at achieving that. Why do I do this? Not for the money. I could get paid to do a lot of things in IT. I do it because it suits my concept of morality. It seems to suit a lot of other people's concept of morality, too.
If you have a different concept of morality, that's fine. Buy your music somewhere else. Don't spam-filter your email. Whatever floats your boat. But don't tell others that because their concept of morality is different than your concept of morality, that they can't act as they see fit within the bounds of the law. That would be imposing your concept of morality on others, and to use your own words to describe your stance on that issue, it "isn't OK."
The thing is, net neutrality is not really about the last mile. I used to be a sysadmin at an ISP, and utilization of last mile bandwidth was never the issue. Whoever they are leasing the local loops from doesn't care per so about whether my DSL line is saturated all the time or not. Net neutrality is about load on the backbone carriers' networks, and below that, on downstream ISP networks. It can also be just about extra profits. A couple cases to illustrate each:
1) Simple load. There's an overselling of bandwidth formula by which all ISPs make money. If the aggregate bandwidth of all your customers is X, you don't have to have X amount of backbone bandwidth, because they aren't all online at once, or all fully utilizing their links when they are. You only need some fraction of that amount. You've got this all worked out, but then along comes Youtube, IM with voice, Vonage and other VoIP carriers, Bit Torrent, online music and video stores, etc., and in pretty short order, your average user is consuming far more bandwidth than they used to and your oversell ratio just went out the window. To maintain level of service, you can do a couple of things: the first is to throw a bunch of money at the problem, upgrading your bandwidth, your core and edge routers, the whole nine yards. The trouble is, this is expensive, and while the routers are a sunk cost, bandwidth is a running cost. Profit margins are very thin for ISPs, generally, so to remain profitable you would have to raise prices. But Internet access is very price sensitive, and the first one to raise prices is going to see customers walking, in large numbers. The other option is traffic-shaping. You prioritize some traffic over others, and put the bandwidth-hogging stuff like Youtube, BT, online music and vidoe stores, etc, at the end of the bandwidth line. Unless, of course, Google, the stores, etc., are willing to pay you money. Now you have a way to finance that infrastructure without raising rates. Net neutrality is dead, but you're still alive. And Bit Torrent? Oh well, nobody's paying there, so BT is just going to have crappy performance on your network.
2) Greed. I'm a big ISP. I want to get into the VoIP business for myself, so I do. My service is super, and it's cheaper than the phone company. My customers like this. Trouble is, there are VoIP companies out there competing with me, like Vonage and Packet 8. Their service isn't as good as mine (I used to use Packet 8, now use Vonage, and in between had a cable company's VoIP service, so I'm talking from experience here; but Vonage is pretty good), but it's almost as good and it's over 1/3 cheaper. A lot of customers like that even better. What to do? Ah, I know! Traffic shaping! Packets for my own VoIP service get routed at a higher priority than other VoIP services. No their service is no longer almost as good as mine. My customers may or may not really like this, if they even pin it on me, but now my service is worth the premium I charge for it b/c I made the others look bad. Net neutrality is dead, and I can no longer claim with a straight face to be a common carrier like a telco, but I'm making more money and can use it to finance the greater bandwidth demands from case 1, above (along with the fees I'm socking the content providers with to not be traffic-shaped on my network).
This, then, is the problem facing Copowi: They may practice complete net neutrality within their network, consisting of their edge, their core, and the local loops they are leasing. However, if their upstream (be it a major backbone carrier or just a larger ISP who in turn connects to a backbone provider) doesn't practice net neutrality, it doesn't really matter much that Copowi does, except on traffic local to their network, which isn't a whole lot.
Of course, if their upstream starts traffic shaping on VoIP, P2P, whatever, and Copowi wants neutrality, they do have an option: pay to have no shaping on traffic going in or out of their network. And lo and behold, this appears to be exactly what's going on
While the AC above is purely flamebait, he has kind of a point, despite his stupidity. That is, if you're really into games, a console for gaming and the hardware platform and OS of your choice for computing. A big reason why I don't care very much that Linux is in a similar (or worse?) gaming situation than the Mac is that I get my dose of gaming from the consoles we have in the game room at work. If that wasn't enough, I'd buy a console for home use. I just don't worry about computer gaming. I use Mac at work and Linux at home. Linux has enough children's games to satisfy my kids, and that's the extent to which I need to care about computer gaming.
I think the cubicle is another thing that drives it, on two fronts. One is privacy, or the lack of it, that a cubicle gives you. The other is that when you're having a phone conversation, it can bother people around you who are trying to focus on what they're doing. So, I use email for non-urgent communication at work. If it's more urgent, I'll use jabber or, if I think a call is best, I'm more likely to walk over and have a face to face conversation, which beats a phone call hands down.
If I have a non-business call to receive or make on my cell, I leave my desk and grab a nearby meeting room or go to the engineering lounge (no, we really have one, with a commercial beer fridge, even) or step outside for a few minutes.
My desk phone is bottom of the barrel in my list of communication devices, I think I've used it 2 or 3 times all year.
I don't know how much bandwidth you've got, but I have ~10 megabits down (cable, and late at night I can really get as close to that as TCP allows), but even at this speed, the largest thing I've ever downloaded (OpenSuSE) was far from instant. HD-DVD is ~30 GB/disc, and BluRay is ~50 GB/disc. You'd need an fsck of a lot more bandwidth than I or most people currently have to make this practical, not to mention that a lot more backbone capacity would have to be piled on before widespread downloading would be practical.
/., that might not be so out of place :)
Then, having satisfied all those requirements, I still need to burn the thing to a DVD, because:
A) Even large disks would fill up pretty quickly with HD movies
B) Watching a movie on my laptop (15" wide) or monitor (19" 4:3) is a lot less satisfying than watching it on my TV w/home theater system, and the rest of the family might want to watch it, too. Movies on computer are kind of a solitary thing. Of course, here on
Of course, for the price of an HD-DVD player (even though they've come down a lot) and the lack of really compelling movies (to me) coming out on HD, I don't plan to get one anytime soon anyway. They can talk to me about HD-DVD when I can buy a decent player for $100.
Completely OT to the topic at hand, but I've seen your tagline a number of times and my curiosity was piqued enough to google it this time. That turned out to be a wonderful read. Cheers, mate!
While I mostly agree with you, I also see where those who are highly suspicious of Microsoft (whether inside or outside of OSI) are coming from. Everything that Microsoft has ever done with respect to open source or open standards has been with the goal of slowing the adoption of and/or co-opting open source and open standards. "Embrace and extend" was official Microsoft strategy - take an open standard, develop some proprietary extensions to it, and make that the version Windows uses, putting the rest of the industry - which follows the true standard - on a weaker footing.
I'm not necessarily saying that was a bad business strategy from the viewpoint of Microsoft's narrow self-interest - it was obviously pretty successful - but it was bad for the industry as a whole, and was a a direct attack on open standards that everyone else had agreed to play by.
In addition, Microsoft has always most vociferously attacked the GPL. People remember words like "cancer" for a long time, as seen in the debate over the MSPL. Microsoft has never made any secret of its fear and loathing of the GPL, and its desire to destroy or undermine it, including through very concrete actions such as buying a SCO license to help SCO attack Linux. As TFA notes, code from pretty much any license other than the GPL can be combined with MSPL-licensed code. Coincidence, or explicit design? You make the call.
So, now we have Microsoft seeking OSI approval of the MSPL, and some people are looking at it and seeing a wolf in sheep's clothing, not helped by the fact that - MSPL notwithstanding - Microsoft does not seem to have really changed its spots with regard to FOSS, which is the main point that Chris DiBona seems to be making. The so-called "open" Office 2K7 document format and the attempt to get it on the standards fast-track is just the latest embrace and extend strategy, and at the same time they are doing that in an attempt to muddy the ODF waters/squash ODF, the are seeking OSI approval for the MSPL. With schizo behavior like this, it's really easy to believe that the MSPL is just another attack vector against the GPL, with Microsoft attempting to exploit OSI to advance its agenda.
Considering the past, it's no wonder that people are slow to trust MS when it produces an open-source license, especially one that appears deliberately constructed to be compatible with every major free license except the GPL. Submitting it to OSI is a brilliant political move, because as some have noted, OSI would lose a lot of credibility if the MSPL meets the standards but is denied because of its source. OTOH, if they follow the standards and the MSPL is approved thereby, OSI will still lose a certain amount of credibility in some quarters for approving a license which is (I believe correctly) perceived to be an attack on the GPL as much as a bona fide open source license.
That said, I think it's worth having constructive dialog with Microsoft, because to whatever extend they may be coming in from the cold (not much, probably; their open source moves are just positioning themselves to have survivability in a future where Linux and Mac have desktop parity with Windows), if we burn the olive branch instead of accepting it, they will certainly try to go back to their worst old ways. At the same time, this is still Microsoft we're talking about - a company that remains pretty hostile to open source in general and Free software in particular, long after even Sun has come around - so we need to proceed with caution. If it takes (a lot of) time to build trust with the FOSS community, that's no one fault but Microsoft's.
While I've never heard the term "micro-expression" before, I'm very familiar with the concept, although from a venue very different from an airport: in poker, these are called "tells" and it is very well established that they really do work. Skilled meatspace poker players really can get a very good read on an opponent's hand from little behavioral variances that the opponent is often unaware of and/or can't control.
Of course, skilled players do learn to control these tells and put on a poker face, use sunglasses at the table (apart from being just part of his shtick, there's a reason why Greg Raymer wears those cateye glasses). Terrorists may next work on trying to suppress these tells, but n the context of an airport security line, though, putting on a poker face could in itself be cause for suspicion.
I see a lot of whining (provocative term chosen deliberately, because so much of the complaint really is just whining, not well thought-out criticism) of TSA itself and various security measures, and what I find disturbing about that is that many of are directly involved with computer security, eitehr as sysadmins, working in some part of the security industry itself, working to write secure code, etc., and we understand perfectly well the basic principles of security:
1) There is no such thing as absolute security. Someone, somewhere can always get over on you. The closest thing to a secure computer is one that is disconnected from its power source, encased in glass, then steel, then concrete, and sunk to the bottom of the Marianas Trench. Even that computer could be recovered and broken into with sufficient effort.
2) Security is a continuum. Since you can't make a computer absolutely secure, or even close to absolutely secure while still remaining practically usable, you have to raise the bar as much as you reasonably can, to make successfully attacking it as difficult as you reasonably can.
This is basically what is being done with airport security. We know a number of techniques that terrorists have tried in the past, and they probably additionally know some that they have not tried yet but could be reasonably expected to try, or that intelligence tips indicate they will try. TSA checks for these things at the airport, naturally, because if you don't check for them, terrorists will continue to try and exploit at least some of them. To cast that in terms that will be better understood, if you have unpatched security holes, those holes will continue to be exploited until you patch them. Sure, it's inconvenient to have to go through these screenings; the time and effort we spend making sure our systems are up to patch level is inconvenient, too, but it beats the alternative.
I'm not saying that TSA isn't sometimes heavy-handed (although in my personal experience they have always been polite and professional, perhaps in part because I also have been) or that they don't sometimes seem to be hiring from the bottom of the barrel, or that other places don't do a better, polite job, but OTOH the Israelis have had decades to work out the kinks in their system, and maybe just have a politer culture (don't know, haven't been there, but a lot of the countries I have been to have a politer culture than ours, at least on the surface), but I am saying that they aren't nearly as bad as some here make them out to be, and that the security measures are a lot more than the security theater some here accuse them of being. To those people, all I can say is, "I'm glad you aren't responsible for the security on my networks, because there might not be any. You'd say IDSes, firewalls, security policies, password changing, WPA for wireless, etc., were all just security theater and would disable the lot.
I'm not trolling here, but I have to ask if maybe hmccabe is. For example, here are some of the issues that are important to me in the presidential election: the budget (getting it under control), the war (getting the Iraqis government/military to the point where it is largely self-sufficient as quickly as possible, including securing their borders and getting the insurgency under control), getting our own borders under control and doing something about the illegal alien problem, and being prepared to intervene (if necessary) if the housing credit crunch turns into a repeat of the S&L meltdown of the 1980s (gee, doesn't the banking business have a short memory?), patent reform, maybe even copyright reform, the e-voting problem, etc. In other words, issues that really matter.
An issue that is not of much importance to me in the election is whether a given candidate believes that the Genesis account is literal and meant to be taken literally, or if (?:s)?he believes that the Genesis account was God's way of getting across to people with little understanding of His creation, what it was that He did and how He did it, like "Let there be light" (Big Bang), wait a few billion years, form the earth, separate the land from the water, bring forth life, evolve it into people (making man from the dust of the earth), etc. Or, a candidate could even be (?:s)?he an atheist and think it was all just an accident for which science has yet to fully account but will in time completely explain. None of those viewpoints is terribly relevant to handling the important issues named in my first paragraph.
It may be because I have paid attention only to substantive issues such as those outlined in my first paragraph, but I actually don't know if any of the candidates are creationists, nor does the blurb name any names, so I am left wondering at this point if the whole thing is just an anti-Republican (I notice no other party was mentioned) troll. If there actually are creationist candidates, would someone be so kind as to post names, along with links containing supporting evidence (preferably the candidate's own words, and if possible, on the candidate's own website)? To reiterate, I don't believe whether a candidate is a creationist or not is important to the real issues, and in fact, trying to make that an issue is probably just someone's attempt at erecting a straw man to deflect attention from the real issues.
Single sign-on would be fine as long as it was done in conjunction with two-factor authentication. For example, where I work, I use a one-time password generator to get on the VPN. Having my username and PIN won't help you unless you also have that generator. I also have a real estate license, and access to MLS also uses a one-time password generator.
Now, if Microsoft, openID, or *someone* in the single sign-on space implemented a system that used a one-time password generator, you'd have something that would be pretty secure, while at the same time keeping you from having a generator for every important site you use, if outfits like banks, etc., ever get their crap together and start using those. That is something I would use. In the meantime, in the interests of security, I so maintain separate userids and passwords at different sites, and store them in Firefox, encrypted with the master password. For non-web resources, the OS X keychain takes care of it. These two things together give me something that's almost as good as Passport and a lot more secure, because it's under my control.
Note to anyone who's in bank IT: if your bank is first to market with a one-time password generator sign-on in California, I *will* move all of my accounts there.
My wife is from a third-world country and came to the US as an adult and she has similiar anecdotal evidence to relate. When she was born, in the 1970s, the country was so poor that there simply were no vaccinations and such for infants and toddlers. To jumpstart their immune systems, they would give each baby a cut on the hip. She has a scar there, and says everyone born in those days has one like it. It was battlefield medicine, but it worked. It was all they had. They have vaccinations now, but it's mostly funded by WTO money. The country is much more prosperous than it was then, but is still poor overall.
:p
The general standards of cleanliness, sanitation, refrigeration (or lack thereof, in the tropical heat, no less) are a bit scary when you're used to living in the first world, but the combination of the immune system jumpstart and those unsanitary conditions are probably major contributing factors in her seemingly bulletproof immune system. She is almost never sick, and if she gets a cold, her symptoms will typically have vanished in a day or two. Even if our kids and I all have colds, she normally does not catch one from us. Her whole family is like that. It may also be partly genes, but OTOH, our kids were both born there, had all their vaccinations, and have spent most of their lives in the US. They seem to get about the average number of colds, etc., as other kids their ages, so I think her strong immune system is due more to environmental factors than genes.
My wife reports that she and her brothers and sisters were all very rarely sick as children, even though they regularly swam in very polluted water (a combination of "who knew?" and the fact that there was nowhere else to swim). Neighborhood bathrooms were a bunch of holes sawed in a covered pier over the river, people would dump garbage in the river, there were sometimes bodies in the river (she saw a number of them when she was a kid), etc., and people swam in it. Of course, it's even worse, today, except for no bodies. If you fell in, I bet you'd die of typhoid before they could even get you out
In addition to all that true stuff you wrote, another reason why IBM buying Sun would not be such a good acquisition is cultural fit. Everyone I know who has recently worked for IBM says it's the same kind of button-down place it always was (I was a mainframer in the 1980s, and it was typical for an IBM CE to show up for an emergency service call at 3:00 AM Sunday morning in a suit and tie, the only question being would the suit be navy or gray; now that's button-down). Sun ain't like that, so merging the two companies together would be difficult.
My previous employer was acquired by a big, well-known company that was a very bad cultural fit. It was no fun at all, and I'm very happy to no longer work there. My current employer was also recently acquired by a big, well-known company, but the cultural fit is excellent and it's been great. I loved my job before, and I love it now. If IBM bought Sun, it would be bad for competition, probably bad for Sun customers, and probably bad for both Sun and IBM employees. Sun and Apple might be a workable cultural fit, but Sun and IBM? I don't think so.
Thank you, wish I had mod points for you.
/. from time to time about the view of strict creationists, that the Earth is really only about 7000 years old (or whatever) and people and dinosaurs existed at the same time (gee, Hollywood's actually done that one, too). We know that's not true, and that dinosaurs were long gone before even our most primitive ancestors evolved, but so what? The worst that can happen to you for thinking that people were chased around by dinosaurs is you get laughed at. Other than that, it doesn't really hurt them, or us. Even if they teach that in their private schools, it doesn't matter much. No actual, legit paleontology curriculum is going to be swayed by it.
:)
I'd go even further and challenge whether bad physics in movies really all that harmful, on a couple of points:
1) For somebody who doesn't know the physics anyway, is seeing somebody get blown through a window by a shotgun really going to make their understanding that much worse?
2) Even for those people whose understanding of physics is harmed by movies, so what? If they're not designing the next Mars mission, how does this hurt anybody, those people included? OTOH, considering the results of some Mars missions, maybe Hollywood Physics are doing more harm than I think
It's kind of like the ranting I see on
Don't get me wrong, I'm all for accuracy in school subjects, and for good science in movies, too, but people actually being *harmed* by Hollywood science? I don't buy it, unless somebody really tries some of that stuff. Then they darwinize and society is better off
"Most medium and large companies don't risk pirating software, at least not on a major scale"
In what we call (or used to call?) first-world countries, no, they generally don't. However, in a lot of developing economies they do. I used to live in a country that falls into that category, and I can tell you that not only in companies, but also in government offices, locally built white-box PCs running pirated copies of Windows + the usual apps were the norm. The only place you'd see legit stuff is in the offices of large, international companies. I wouldn't have known where to even buy a legit copy of Windows in-country, if it can even be done. But you can get pirated anything for a dollar all over the place.
I don't agree with the article (well, to some extent) WRT the developed world, but it's premises hold very well in developing nations. Windows was there first, it was then and is now practically free, and because of that, is very well entrenched. Even in markets where Windows is expensive, Linux faces an uphill fight. In markets where Windows has cost parity, it's even tougher.
Google pack as a whole may be aimed primarily at home users, but Star Office is what we're talking about here. You can probably also expect Google Pack to become more business-oriented over time. Google's deal to buy Postini is going to bring enterprise-quality email security, archiving, etc., to Gmail's commercial offerings, and I wouldn't be surprised to see some tie-ins between Google Office and StarOffice, too.
:)
As an aside, the Postini deal is quite a shot across the bow of the SS Redmond. I was a FrontBridge employee in 2005 when Microsoft acquired it and renamed it as Exchange Hosted Services. Postini was FrontBridge's number one competitor in those days (and still is now, I'm sure). I expect chairs were seen on orbital trajectories in Redmond when the news broke that Google was buying Postini
This isn't targeted at home users, it's targeted at business users. Sure, home users are welcome to use it too, and importing/exporting Word and Excel is generally good enough in that case. The StarOffice migration tools are very business-oriented:
p rise_tools.jsp#Setup
http://www.sun.com/software/star/staroffice/enter
The big one from that list is the macro migration wizard. There's also an analysis wizard that examines your documents and calculates migration costs and risks. For a business with thousands, or tens of thousands, or hundreds of thousands, of MS Office documents, these kinds of tools are essential. If the users (or worse, the IT department) had to manually migrate their MS Office docs to ODF, the project would be dead right there. That could be a deal-breaker even in a small business, and certainly is for a large business.