What the heck did the civil rights movement ever have to do with using a classic definition of "justice"? Use TRUE facts.
During the civil rights movement, there was a purposeful changing of the meaning of the word...
Make that "restoration of the meaning" and I might agree partially. See my earlier posts about the history of the jury system being able to actually achive justice (original sense!!) by acquitting prosecutions against unjust laws. (And also www.fija.org for information about how the current bureaucracy is fighting back against such stuff.)
The notion of law as a pure bureacracy is the revisionist, post-modernist, slashdot-reviled notion. Reviled because it's unjust, unfair, inhumane, illogical.
Laws were always intended to be part of a system of "Justice". But so long as laws can be passed by representatives that have been bought by corporate (and other) special interests, there will be unjust laws. (And yes, the appeals process is one of the processes intended to get rid of them.)
Don't go around asserting that all laws are just; it's provably untrue, always has been.
FYI: Definitions from Webster's:
Justice (2a) The property of being just, impartial, or fair
just (2a1) acting or being in conformance with what is morally upright or good; SYN see fair
Though in fairness they also mention the legalistic interpretation, "lawful" -- but it's not a synonym. Fairness and justice have always been firmly coupled. Lawfulness is there to help provide consistency of interpretation.
As it has classicly been defined, justice is when the law is carried out as it is written (or as it is interpreted in a common law derived system.)
Nope. Common law always preserved for Juries the right to acquit in cases brought using un-just laws... Justice in its classic sense is about fairness. It's the bureacratic "uphold laws as written" notion which is revisionist.
William Penn (yes, founder of Penn's Woods, AKA Pennsylvania) was tried in London for making a Quaker sermon. Jury acquitted, since the law was unjust. (England was in final stages of abolishing the notion of a state Church.)
Alexander Hamilton (you should know that name if you're vaguely literate in the history of the early US) tried a libel case in New York. The journalist (whose name I forget, sorry) was on trial for Libel. He'd published true facts about the King -- all agreed. Prosecution said that "truth is no defense, because truth is even more likely to cause insurrection". Jury said "hey, that's an unjust English Law", acquitted.
Know what you're flaming about. And also go read the Fully Informed Jury Asociation web site before you become a juror. (Not that, as a programmer, you're likely to be on a Jury. People who think for a living are rarely empaneled; on both sides of the case, lawyers want someone who's used to believing what they're told. So much for an "impartial jury of peers".)
The core problem is that the US legal system is unjust. It's enforcing unjust laws, and is no longer serving its original role of letting them be rejected before they do much damage. Only professional legalist bureacrats are now permitted to make such decisions... and you know that it takes years (often a decade) to appeal. Not a "prompt" of "fair" system.
To drive that home: The reason that many slashdotters have particular issues to pick with the legal system (CDA, patents, DVD association, medieval notions of copyright, etc) boils down, IMNSHO, to justice in the original sense.
Some folk use a revisionist definition of justice as "all laws are consistently followed". It should be apparent that has very little to do with being "just". Laws get passed by representatives, who you can all but buy on EBay nowadays. (And then there's administrative law, created by bureacrats nobody voted for!! Patent and regulatory law are examples.) True justice, by definition, is not something that can be bought. When it's possible to buy laws, then the law and justice have clearly diverged.
Not understanding lawyers is just a symptom. The problem is lack of trust in the legal system, because it's enforcing un-just laws (or in some cases, regulations).
... is that the legal system isn't about justice or fairness. That's a common misapprehension on the part of most non-lawyers, and including most techies. Heck, it's a shock to many first-year law students too.
Now there's an issue: Should the legal system be about justice and fairness?
I tend to say yes. And in fact, in Common Law (evolved since the English Magna Carta, and the original basis of US law) had a much stronger emphasis on justice. Particularly after they finally got rid of King and Church as being above the law. (Gee, those were significant issues in the US revolution too!)
As a pointed example, in the US many juries are instructed by judges that their job is only to evaluate facts. Whereas the founders of this country, and everyone else at the time of the American Revolution, understood that an "impartial jury" was also intended to protect against governmental abuses including passage of unjust laws. Check out the history. Did you ever wonder why jurors may only be registered voters? It's because voters have two kinds of votes: for representatives in elections, and for justice in court cases. Yes, that's a plug for the Fully Informed Jury Asociation. Read that site BEFORE you need to act as a juror, and of course make your own decisions.
That's only one example; there are many others, and surely there's one you'll believe even if you don't like the notion that the checks'n'balances against the US government include direct action by the citizenry, not just (as you were likely taught in school, by government-approved texts) (a) elections (choice between wings of the republicrat party), (b) representatives (who have long been more beholden to corporate interests than to voters, and note the poor choices most of us get due to the republicrat oligarchy), (c) other parts of the government (rather circular, that is!), (d) suing the government ("You can't fight City Hall"), and of course (e) violent overthrow of corrupt regimes (the option the founders were forced to use, and which is explicitly preserved in the Bill Of Rights).
Point being: in the US today, the legal system is a self-perpetuating bureaucracy which is fleeing not only its roots, but the remaining remnants of justice. It denies that justice is the intent of law, and enforces law not justice.
It's no wonder that members of professions that pride themselves on logic ("techies", in a broad way) don't much understand lawyers. No different from most citizens.
Of course, a home environment is not going to accomodate the exact same workstation as in an office
Pardon my french, but bullshit. There do exist jobs that require fancy workstations for 3D modeling, but those are by far the minority even in industries centered on such work.
For essentially all office jobs today, cheap off-the-shelf hardware does just fine. Same form factor as found in the office; and for most cost-sane companies, it may even be the same hardware. Particularly if augmented by fancy backends at the office to do stuff like crunch numbers, run simulations, and so on.
I'll note that if you listen to Intel, PCs at home need to be far more powerful than office ones, in order to play Quake III with an adequate response time. Of course, that applies equally well to low-ping net access...
Sure, companies that pay to have their employees work at home (e.g. pay ISP fees, offer ADSL etc) or explicitly encourage them to work at home (as many SF Bay Area companies do -- to cut down traffic) ought to be responsible.
Employees aren't there to subsidize the companies to make better profits by helping them to reduce costs of managing an office building.
One of the things I found most interesting in that article was the note about how many of the schools are creating their own problem by too-aggressive control of school newspapers.
it usta was... that students had real outlets at school. Not so much any more. And when students actually display some adaptability (and initiative) by putting a website together... explusion!
You'd think those school administrators would just try to grow up.
First, ensure the kitten is well and truly out of the bag, supporting any number of approaches.
Second, as a thousand flowers bloom, at least one of them should be legally enabled as supporting interoperability.
In what sense isn't the DVD forum acting "in restraint of trade" and "against competition"?? They don't want to be facing competition from systems other than Microsoft's monopoly (!) or from MacOS. As a consumer, I need real choices.
Folk forget that the original "eTrust" (not "Trusty" as they call it now) was pretty close to that. As I recall:
One eTrust logo meant that the site would never share your data;
Another mean that they'd do whatever the heck they wanted;
There was some intermediate one too
Part of getting watered down to become the "Trusty" service we know and loathe was removing all levels except the useless one.
What moron thought that was useful for consumers?
The hard issue is that corporations want pure reward, with no responsibility or risk. And they just don't know how to protect data once they've collected it... and it's too easy for any little team to start collecting that data, and big companies don't have that much control over the hundreds of teams that can represent them on the web by putting a site up. Control would restrict "innovation" (keyword cross-reference: "theft") and that's clearly bad, right?
Given that corporate incentives are exclusively to abuse private data, there is really no way that self-regulation can ever work.
Judge Jackson's ruling was, in fact, by far the most significant and far-reaching intrusion into Net commerce by a federal authority, and represents a landmark judicial effort to begin writing Net law.
But there was no intrusion at all into "net commerce". Not only is the case not about net commerce, but a finding of fact isn't by itself going to do anything. Similarly, this has NOTHING to do with "net law".
That could have lots of implications. Judge Jackson wasn't just curbing the power of a company, he was also seeking to redefine anti-trust law as it applies to commerce online.
Again, online commerce isn't the issue.
With "facts" like these, we don't need BillGatus of Borg to tell us his version.
In fact the only reason I've upgraded my copies of Netscape is to get bugfixes. It seems like there was a big increase in bugginess sometime after 4.0 shipped, but recent versions have been causing me fewer problems. 4.5 died several times a week (NT4) but 4.61 does so less than once a week. My Linuxen are on 4.71 and are pretty much OK, though they're fat and slow. And insufficiently conformant, though one is tempted to call that a feature issue.
The real problem is that Netscape never put enough effort into its browser! For one major example, they didn't invest enough to get a structure based rendering engine; the Gecko engine corresponds to stuff Microsoft did in order to ship IE4, as I recall. There was the post talking about how the IE/IIS teams (just engineering) were bigger than all Netscape. Clearly that's "enough" effort... but I sure hope that it can be done with a LOT less effort.
The web will be lost (to everyone, not just Linux folk) if people can't actually implement a standards-conformant browser unless they have monopoly resources backing them. And I'm sadly afraid that's what's been happening at the W3C... lots of huge specs, which MS implements at the 60%-80% level (plus proprietary features) and nobody else can afford to get even that far along.
For unrelated reasons I looked at the counter yesterday. It's very interesting; does anyone know who the single Linux user in the Wallis and Futuna Islands is? (Down at the bottom of the country list...) I can tell that person signed up earlier this year, and that they've elected to be private.
(I'm not picking on that person except that I happened to notice a 'one person per island listing' and that island sure looks nice right about now! I've yet to visit French Polynesia. Why not say hello to fellow Linux users in exotic locales?)
You can find out a scarey amount of info about people there. I'm glad that my listing (happy user since 1994!) is private. Most folk are letting a scarey amount of info about themselves be visible. Look at your town...
Jakarta was contributed last weekend to the Apache project under the Apache license (Open Source).
It's a servlet 2.2 engine. Runs by itself as a web server. Works fine with Linux 2.3 KHTTPD. Will plug into Apache soon too. Supports JSP.
SCSL isn't the entirety of Sun's thought on interacting with developers. The fact that executives tout it (Bill Joy is not a real developer any more!) is why it gets so much noise; too bad the other opinions don't seem to have any real visibility.
Of course, I happen to believe that Sun donated this code to Apache since they wanted to be "out" of the really Open end of the biz. By doing this they ensure that a good open source servlet engine exists, and can take the development resources that were doing a web server and apply them to areas where it'll be a lot harder for someone else to create a technology, like an EJB distributed transaction framework.
MS doesn't like CORBA since it's got a head of steam up, and they'd rather control anything like that. (Remember when Sun was pushing RMI instead of CORBA? They got their noodle whacked, and now are back to their indifferent CORBA support, but using RMI tools on top of it.)
I know a lot about IIOP, having done the first implementation and worked with OMG. That nasty multi-canonical stuff would be worth removing (it was an attempted compromise with the DCE/DCOM folk that fizzled). But otherwise it's not so bad as binary protols go -- easy enough to implement, but of course it's the infrastructure which most matters. SOAP would have a couple years to go before it could have the amount of infrastructure as CORBA.
If you want to do Open XML messaging over HTTP, you don't need (or want) SOAP to do it !!
There's a lot of potential with XML messaging on the web. Don't blow it by going retro with Yet Another RPC System. Adopt the model of document exchange to drive workflow. Going to the RPC world is really not forward motion.
So I'm curious now, can one program XUL using Java? Or is one stuck with JavaScript? Some of us aren't keen on JavaScript; the last bit of XUL I saw depended on it to a painful degree.
Sometimes beauty and elegance count for nothing. OS/9 was sort of nice too... I mean the real one, not Apple's attempt to violate that trademark ("Mac" OS/9 indeed!).
Even when it was in active use, the 6809 never had much real marketing. Motorola's strength wasn't appropriate to the task of World Domination, I guess.
- Jojo
Re:Agreed - the W3C is not the IETF
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Weaving The Web
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· Score: 1
Supporting the Web Consortium is a worthy idea; it's hard to believe all but a handful of those reading this review on Slashdot would disagree...
The reason is that not many people really know what's up with W3C; not that it's a fundamentally "worthy" idea. Raph noted some of the issues, but there's more to consider:
W3C process is really closed
It's so rushed there's no time for adequate consideration of its proposals
Trying to raise technical issues outside the small club of WG "insiders" isn't generally practical
One person (Tim B-L) has excessive power, namely the ability to ram decisions down WG throats in the face of considerable strong argument otherwise
There's no effective role for testing in their processs until after the spec's out the door (when it's too late)
W3C really needs some reform. Have a look at some of the discussions relating to XHTML and its abuse of the namespace spec. (The XML-DEV list, which has a significant portion of the key XML developers -- and way too much traffic, they need slashdot technology!) You see all of the points above brought out. W3C has achieved no credibility in those discussions; rather than addressing the issues that have been raised, the statements from W3C folk (none "official") all ignore those topics and arguments. The same is true for the official feedback channels... heck, it can be hard enough even getting your posts archived so they're part of the visible public record.
And those XHTML issues are not the only examples of such process failures. DOM has had them, as have other specs. This isn't being made up, and it may well be typical.
Tim's a nice enough guy in person, I guess, and he certainly knew enough to accept the ride the CERN stuff was offering. But to claim that he invented the web is a bit much, given the number of similar technologies that predate the HTML/HTTP package. He was lucky, right place at right time (just like the Web $Zillionaires). And his book is an attempt to capitalize on that.
Today, the web is evolving more significantly outside the scope of W3C. Consider Slashdot's backend, or Amazon's, or E*Trade's. Do they need more standards, particularly? Not a chance. How about needing the existing standards (HTML 4 from 1997, CSS 1 from 1996) to have real teeth? Now we're talking... but that's not what they're delivering, or trying to deliver.
I guess what I'm saying is that the web is ours, we're building it more than W3C, and don't assume the W3C has more than an accidental role. It could become worthy of more, but today it isn't; just look at the realities, and how few of the really useful technologies need to be driven by W3C to succeed. Other groups are already doing better.
It's great for beginners at assembly programing - it has a nice, simple, clean architecture and instruction set
Nah, that was the 6809 you're thinking of. It actually had addressing modes that were worth something... not like the PDP-11 (only applied to one operand) but it was easy to work with those.
The point about being able to modify DNS dynamically (DDNS) is that it makes it easier to run networks. You can write programs that update DNS remotely, and you don't need to hack your own Java/KSH/Perl/Tcl/whatever.
With Dynamic updates to DNS, you can easily have Graphical DNS Administration Tools that run anywhere on the network... versus ones that only run on your DNS primary and use some custom (and likely fragile) setup of BIND config files. When it comes to networking, Microsoft's strength is making tools that "the rest of us" can use. (Apologies to Apple; and how do I say I'm not one of that particular "us"?;-) That is, people who don't have serious training in Internet operations can get things done.
So that article is missing the point: What M$FT is trying to do is reduce the costs of administering an IP network. The political battle will the old one between "expert" UNIX-savvy admins, who cost, and the Win2K admins who won't need to know much (the tool can be smart enough to solve many problems) and hence won't cost much at all. Heck, the Win2K client tools should work with the BIND servers, right?
Keep an eye out for network admin salaries going down...
The big companies (most especially Sun) are killing off innovation. There's lots of Java component companies around, but not nearly as many as there would have been if Sun didn't keep...
I think I agree about Sun killing innovation, but not about how. Lots of little companies doing little widgets isn't innovation, it's backfilling. I'd rather have a rich basic platform that doesn't need it. JDK 1.1, and especially JDK 1.0, had big gaps to fill; I'm glad Sun worked on that. If we had to see hundreds of small shops arguing the details, we'd not have the cohesiveness we needed. (Somehow Microsoft has mostly been held at bay too - probably even more of a threat.)
How I see Sun killing the Java innovation is in its insistence on making it fit only in a few environments, in a few ways. Who needs a big wad of "Enterprise" features? Only a handful of those APIs are really needed. Bundling them into an expensive package might get Sun some money, but it doesn't make Java more useful to very many people (even to Enterprise developers).
In a similar vein, 100% Pure Java is useless to me except as a portability tool... and I happen to know how to write portable C/C++ code, as well as portable Java code. Sun wants a market in portable Java more than it wants a market in a hybrid of portable Java/C code. I think most of us are coming at it the other way around; look at how, say, Linux works (hybrid of portable C/assembler).
Frankly, while downloading code is a good tool to be able to depend on, I'm looking to projects like GCC 2.95 and its built in "GCJ" native Java compiler (and runtime; recent development versions have an interpreter too) for the future of Java, not to JDK 1.2 from Sun. With GCJ I can get past those nasty performance problems that Sun's code has never tried to fix.
To put it a bit differently: Sun's had its chance. We appreciate the good start, and the protection from Miccrosoft. Now can we please start developing Java as an Open (tm) systems technology? It's what we developers always wanted. And it's about time.
You're saying that if marijuana gets legalized, then society will have new costs to pay. Heck, if there are such costs, they're being paid already. How could it be otherwise? People have done studies, and concluded that costs for Alcohol are many orders of magnitude higher than any costs for Marijuana. Drunks drive and kill, and beat their families. Folk who get high are a lot more mellow...:-)
Instead, let's think of savings. Let's lop off 2/3 of the budget for the "war on drugs", at least half the prison budgets. And court costs. And substantial police budgets. Hmm, maybe we could just take all of that money (W.O.D., prisons, etc) and apply it to something worthwhile instead. That'd make sense. I'd say let's cut the national debt (huge part of the govt budget!) first, but others may think differently.
In the distance, screams from law enforcement folk, "no, don't cut off our funds, we're addicted and can't go cold turkey..." you hear them already with respect to forfeiture reform. Another cost of the drug war is the Bill Of Rights. Police can take all your property just based on the strength of a suspicion, and you have no defense... that's seizing everything you own, and they don't even have to charge you with a criminal act. Innocence is no defense; www.fear.org is illuminating, and scarey.
Seriously... anyone who's looked at the economics of Marijuana Prohibition has concluded that it's always been about a money transfer program from smokers to people with more power. That includes at the very beginning -- when organizations with rights to large tracts of forests were major backers to that prohibition, since it abolished the market for hemp paper and supported a market for wood pulp that hadn't previously been viable.
End prohibition. Stop taxing the weak to fund the vices of the strong. And yes, stop the related hypocrisy in high places. (You can say "gwbush" can't you?)
Maybe... there were two "JavaOS" products. Both got canned, this news is about the second one.
Think of "JavaOS" as the name for the OS that ran on a particular kind of "thin client", which was called the JavaStation. JavaStation never really sold well. A big part of it was because all incarnations of JavaOS were pretty much crap.
The first JavaOS was essentially a research project, writing an OS in Java to see what was missing from JDK 1.0... slow as all get-out. The outside world heard about it because Sun was crazy to pitch Java as usable for everything. (I mean that in multiple senses!) So it jumped straight from research to "product".
The second JavaOS ("JavaOS for Business") was basically JDK 1.1 hosted on top of a real time OS that Sun had bought, "Chorus". Somehow that never got ported to enough different platforms to make Chorus a better choice than one of the better established real time OS configs. It was the right idea, but the core OS wasn't portable enough to be interesting to its target customers - they couldn't create commodity hardware and compete purely on the cost of the resulting "thin client" systems.
Sun has a curious attitude towards Operating System Software. They want to own it, since if it integrates smoothly with their hardware, they can get some competitive advantages. It's not so odd, really, it's pretty traditional; but it's also far from their Open Systems for Open Minds roots. So they keep trying to do OS research to create some proprietary value. Going for a "big win" of some kind without understanding that customers still value the "open systems" model, still value the fact that Sun's competing on execution (and fumbles sometimes) rather than relying on vendor lockin. (They go to MSFT for that game.)
The Spring OS was nothing but a research project, and it never performed well enough to make anyone really want to run it. But it got funded for years (instead of layered software products) as sort of a mascot for a proprietary OS technology. When Spring got canned, many of the same folk went to do JavaOS I (the research project), which got canned for the same reasons Spring did: it was a big, slow non-solution to a non-problem. So nobody would choose to buy it. It got forced down their throats as the guts of the first JavaStation, and they chose not to buy.
JavaOS for Business wasn't needed either. Just take an off-the-shelf RTOS and slap a JDK on it. You're in business. Just -- Sun could never control that hardware infrastructure, it'd be too open. Great software model; but they want to make hardware money instead.
Canning this project was overdue, and is no loss at all from the business or technical perspectives. None at all. (Though doesn't it make you wonder what will replace it?:-)
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What the heck did the civil rights movement ever have to do with using a classic definition of "justice"? Use TRUE facts.
Make that "restoration of the meaning" and I might agree partially. See my earlier posts about the history of the jury system being able to actually achive justice (original sense!!) by acquitting prosecutions against unjust laws. (And also www.fija.org for information about how the current bureaucracy is fighting back against such stuff.)
The notion of law as a pure bureacracy is the revisionist, post-modernist, slashdot-reviled notion. Reviled because it's unjust, unfair, inhumane, illogical.
Laws were always intended to be part of a system of "Justice". But so long as laws can be passed by representatives that have been bought by corporate (and other) special interests, there will be unjust laws. (And yes, the appeals process is one of the processes intended to get rid of them.)
Don't go around asserting that all laws are just; it's provably untrue, always has been.
FYI: Definitions from Webster's:
Though in fairness they also mention the legalistic interpretation, "lawful" -- but it's not a synonym. Fairness and justice have always been firmly coupled. Lawfulness is there to help provide consistency of interpretation.
Nope. Common law always preserved for Juries the right to acquit in cases brought using un-just laws ... Justice in its classic sense is about fairness. It's the bureacratic "uphold laws as written" notion which is revisionist.
William Penn (yes, founder of Penn's Woods, AKA Pennsylvania) was tried in London for making a Quaker sermon. Jury acquitted, since the law was unjust. (England was in final stages of abolishing the notion of a state Church.)
Alexander Hamilton (you should know that name if you're vaguely literate in the history of the early US) tried a libel case in New York. The journalist (whose name I forget, sorry) was on trial for Libel. He'd published true facts about the King -- all agreed. Prosecution said that "truth is no defense, because truth is even more likely to cause insurrection". Jury said "hey, that's an unjust English Law", acquitted.
Know what you're flaming about. And also go read the Fully Informed Jury Asociation web site before you become a juror. (Not that, as a programmer, you're likely to be on a Jury. People who think for a living are rarely empaneled; on both sides of the case, lawyers want someone who's used to believing what they're told. So much for an "impartial jury of peers".)
The core problem is that the US legal system is unjust. It's enforcing unjust laws, and is no longer serving its original role of letting them be rejected before they do much damage. Only professional legalist bureacrats are now permitted to make such decisions ... and you know that it takes years (often a decade) to appeal. Not a "prompt" of "fair" system.
(I hate following up to myself, but ...)
To drive that home: The reason that many slashdotters have particular issues to pick with the legal system (CDA, patents, DVD association, medieval notions of copyright, etc) boils down, IMNSHO, to justice in the original sense.
Some folk use a revisionist definition of justice as "all laws are consistently followed". It should be apparent that has very little to do with being "just". Laws get passed by representatives, who you can all but buy on EBay nowadays. (And then there's administrative law, created by bureacrats nobody voted for!! Patent and regulatory law are examples.) True justice, by definition, is not something that can be bought. When it's possible to buy laws, then the law and justice have clearly diverged.
Not understanding lawyers is just a symptom. The problem is lack of trust in the legal system, because it's enforcing un-just laws (or in some cases, regulations).
... is that the legal system isn't about justice or fairness. That's a common misapprehension on the part of most non-lawyers, and including most techies. Heck, it's a shock to many first-year law students too.
Now there's an issue: Should the legal system be about justice and fairness?
I tend to say yes. And in fact, in Common Law (evolved since the English Magna Carta, and the original basis of US law) had a much stronger emphasis on justice. Particularly after they finally got rid of King and Church as being above the law. (Gee, those were significant issues in the US revolution too!)
As a pointed example, in the US many juries are instructed by judges that their job is only to evaluate facts. Whereas the founders of this country, and everyone else at the time of the American Revolution, understood that an "impartial jury" was also intended to protect against governmental abuses including passage of unjust laws. Check out the history. Did you ever wonder why jurors may only be registered voters? It's because voters have two kinds of votes: for representatives in elections, and for justice in court cases. Yes, that's a plug for the Fully Informed Jury Asociation. Read that site BEFORE you need to act as a juror, and of course make your own decisions.
That's only one example; there are many others, and surely there's one you'll believe even if you don't like the notion that the checks'n'balances against the US government include direct action by the citizenry, not just (as you were likely taught in school, by government-approved texts) (a) elections (choice between wings of the republicrat party), (b) representatives (who have long been more beholden to corporate interests than to voters, and note the poor choices most of us get due to the republicrat oligarchy), (c) other parts of the government (rather circular, that is!), (d) suing the government ("You can't fight City Hall"), and of course (e) violent overthrow of corrupt regimes (the option the founders were forced to use, and which is explicitly preserved in the Bill Of Rights).
Point being: in the US today, the legal system is a self-perpetuating bureaucracy which is fleeing not only its roots, but the remaining remnants of justice. It denies that justice is the intent of law, and enforces law not justice.
It's no wonder that members of professions that pride themselves on logic ("techies", in a broad way) don't much understand lawyers. No different from most citizens.
I'll mostly agree, except ...
Pardon my french, but bullshit. There do exist jobs that require fancy workstations for 3D modeling, but those are by far the minority even in industries centered on such work.
For essentially all office jobs today, cheap off-the-shelf hardware does just fine. Same form factor as found in the office; and for most cost-sane companies, it may even be the same hardware. Particularly if augmented by fancy backends at the office to do stuff like crunch numbers, run simulations, and so on.
I'll note that if you listen to Intel, PCs at home need to be far more powerful than office ones, in order to play Quake III with an adequate response time. Of course, that applies equally well to low-ping net access ...
Sure, companies that pay to have their employees work at home (e.g. pay ISP fees, offer ADSL etc) or explicitly encourage them to work at home (as many SF Bay Area companies do -- to cut down traffic) ought to be responsible.
Employees aren't there to subsidize the companies to make better profits by helping them to reduce costs of managing an office building.
One of the things I found most interesting in that article was the note about how many of the schools are creating their own problem by too-aggressive control of school newspapers.
it usta was ... that students had real outlets at school. Not so much any more. And when students actually display some adaptability (and initiative) by putting a website together ... explusion!
You'd think those school administrators would just try to grow up.
Think of it as a two stage effort:
In what sense isn't the DVD forum acting "in restraint of trade" and "against competition"?? They don't want to be facing competition from systems other than Microsoft's monopoly (!) or from MacOS. As a consumer, I need real choices.
Folk forget that the original "eTrust" (not "Trusty" as they call it now) was pretty close to that. As I recall:
Part of getting watered down to become the "Trusty" service we know and loathe was removing all levels except the useless one.
What moron thought that was useful for consumers?
The hard issue is that corporations want pure reward, with no responsibility or risk. And they just don't know how to protect data once they've collected it ... and it's too easy for any little team to start collecting that data, and big companies don't have that much control over the hundreds of teams that can represent them on the web by putting a site up. Control would restrict "innovation" (keyword cross-reference: "theft") and that's clearly bad, right?
Given that corporate incentives are exclusively to abuse private data, there is really no way that self-regulation can ever work.
But there was no intrusion at all into "net commerce". Not only is the case not about net commerce, but a finding of fact isn't by itself going to do anything. Similarly, this has NOTHING to do with "net law".
Again, online commerce isn't the issue.
With "facts" like these, we don't need BillGatus of Borg to tell us his version.
In fact the only reason I've upgraded my copies of Netscape is to get bugfixes. It seems like there was a big increase in bugginess sometime after 4.0 shipped, but recent versions have been causing me fewer problems. 4.5 died several times a week (NT4) but 4.61 does so less than once a week. My Linuxen are on 4.71 and are pretty much OK, though they're fat and slow. And insufficiently conformant, though one is tempted to call that a feature issue.
The real problem is that Netscape never put enough effort into its browser! For one major example, they didn't invest enough to get a structure based rendering engine; the Gecko engine corresponds to stuff Microsoft did in order to ship IE4, as I recall. There was the post talking about how the IE/IIS teams (just engineering) were bigger than all Netscape. Clearly that's "enough" effort ... but I sure hope that it can be done with a LOT less effort.
The web will be lost (to everyone, not just Linux folk) if people can't actually implement a standards-conformant browser unless they have monopoly resources backing them. And I'm sadly afraid that's what's been happening at the W3C ... lots of huge specs, which MS implements at the 60%-80% level (plus proprietary features) and nobody else can afford to get even that far along.
For unrelated reasons I looked at the counter yesterday. It's very interesting; does anyone know who the single Linux user in the Wallis and Futuna Islands is? (Down at the bottom of the country list...) I can tell that person signed up earlier this year, and that they've elected to be private.
(I'm not picking on that person except that I happened to notice a 'one person per island listing' and that island sure looks nice right about now! I've yet to visit French Polynesia. Why not say hello to fellow Linux users in exotic locales?)
You can find out a scarey amount of info about people there. I'm glad that my listing (happy user since 1994!) is private. Most folk are letting a scarey amount of info about themselves be visible. Look at your town ...
Jakarta was contributed last weekend to the Apache project under the Apache license (Open Source).
It's a servlet 2.2 engine. Runs by itself as a web server. Works fine with Linux 2.3 KHTTPD. Will plug into Apache soon too. Supports JSP.
SCSL isn't the entirety of Sun's thought on interacting with developers. The fact that executives tout it (Bill Joy is not a real developer any more!) is why it gets so much noise; too bad the other opinions don't seem to have any real visibility.
Of course, I happen to believe that Sun donated this code to Apache since they wanted to be "out" of the really Open end of the biz. By doing this they ensure that a good open source servlet engine exists, and can take the development resources that were doing a web server and apply them to areas where it'll be a lot harder for someone else to create a technology, like an EJB distributed transaction framework.
Right: CORBA is already open!!
MS doesn't like CORBA since it's got a head of steam up, and they'd rather control anything like that. (Remember when Sun was pushing RMI instead of CORBA? They got their noodle whacked, and now are back to their indifferent CORBA support, but using RMI tools on top of it.)
I know a lot about IIOP, having done the first implementation and worked with OMG. That nasty multi-canonical stuff would be worth removing (it was an attempted compromise with the DCE/DCOM folk that fizzled). But otherwise it's not so bad as binary protols go -- easy enough to implement, but of course it's the infrastructure which most matters. SOAP would have a couple years to go before it could have the amount of infrastructure as CORBA.
If you want to do Open XML messaging over HTTP, you don't need (or want) SOAP to do it !!
There's a lot of potential with XML messaging on the web. Don't blow it by going retro with Yet Another RPC System. Adopt the model of document exchange to drive workflow. Going to the RPC world is really not forward motion.
So I'm curious now, can one program XUL using Java? Or is one stuck with JavaScript? Some of us aren't keen on JavaScript; the last bit of XUL I saw depended on it to a painful degree.
Seconded. Right place, right time does not equate to genius; Tim didn't create the ubiquity or any (!!!) of the basic ideas.
Sometimes beauty and elegance count for nothing. OS/9 was sort of nice too ... I mean the real one, not Apple's attempt to violate that trademark ("Mac" OS/9 indeed!).
Even when it was in active use, the 6809 never had much real marketing. Motorola's strength wasn't appropriate to the task of World Domination, I guess.
- Jojo
The reason is that not many people really know what's up with W3C; not that it's a fundamentally "worthy" idea. Raph noted some of the issues, but there's more to consider:
W3C really needs some reform. Have a look at some of the discussions relating to XHTML and its abuse of the namespace spec. (The XML-DEV list, which has a significant portion of the key XML developers -- and way too much traffic, they need slashdot technology!) You see all of the points above brought out. W3C has achieved no credibility in those discussions; rather than addressing the issues that have been raised, the statements from W3C folk (none "official") all ignore those topics and arguments. The same is true for the official feedback channels ... heck, it can be hard enough even getting your posts archived so they're part of the visible public record.
And those XHTML issues are not the only examples of such process failures. DOM has had them, as have other specs. This isn't being made up, and it may well be typical.
Tim's a nice enough guy in person, I guess, and he certainly knew enough to accept the ride the CERN stuff was offering. But to claim that he invented the web is a bit much, given the number of similar technologies that predate the HTML/HTTP package. He was lucky, right place at right time (just like the Web $Zillionaires). And his book is an attempt to capitalize on that.
Today, the web is evolving more significantly outside the scope of W3C. Consider Slashdot's backend, or Amazon's, or E*Trade's. Do they need more standards, particularly? Not a chance. How about needing the existing standards (HTML 4 from 1997, CSS 1 from 1996) to have real teeth? Now we're talking ... but that's not what they're delivering, or trying to deliver.
I guess what I'm saying is that the web is ours, we're building it more than W3C, and don't assume the W3C has more than an accidental role. It could become worthy of more, but today it isn't; just look at the realities, and how few of the really useful technologies need to be driven by W3C to succeed. Other groups are already doing better.
- Jojo
Nah, that was the 6809 you're thinking of. It actually had addressing modes that were worth something ... not like the PDP-11 (only applied to one operand) but it was easy to work with those.
- Jojo
Anyone remember that movie?
What they actually saved was the head.
They were going to transplant it.
It screamed from inside its bell jar.
There were lots of Seig Heil!! salutes.
This article made me queasy. They really could have saved Hitler's brain.
- Jojo
The point about being able to modify DNS dynamically (DDNS) is that it makes it easier to run networks. You can write programs that update DNS remotely, and you don't need to hack your own Java/KSH/Perl/Tcl/whatever.
With Dynamic updates to DNS, you can easily have Graphical DNS Administration Tools that run anywhere on the network... versus ones that only run on your DNS primary and use some custom (and likely fragile) setup of BIND config files. When it comes to networking, Microsoft's strength is making tools that "the rest of us" can use. (Apologies to Apple; and how do I say I'm not one of that particular "us"? ;-) That is, people who don't have serious training in Internet operations can get things done.
So that article is missing the point: What M$FT is trying to do is reduce the costs of administering an IP network. The political battle will the old one between "expert" UNIX-savvy admins, who cost, and the Win2K admins who won't need to know much (the tool can be smart enough to solve many problems) and hence won't cost much at all. Heck, the Win2K client tools should work with the BIND servers, right?
Keep an eye out for network admin salaries going down ...
- Jojo
I think I agree about Sun killing innovation, but not about how. Lots of little companies doing little widgets isn't innovation, it's backfilling. I'd rather have a rich basic platform that doesn't need it. JDK 1.1, and especially JDK 1.0, had big gaps to fill; I'm glad Sun worked on that. If we had to see hundreds of small shops arguing the details, we'd not have the cohesiveness we needed. (Somehow Microsoft has mostly been held at bay too - probably even more of a threat.)
How I see Sun killing the Java innovation is in its insistence on making it fit only in a few environments, in a few ways. Who needs a big wad of "Enterprise" features? Only a handful of those APIs are really needed. Bundling them into an expensive package might get Sun some money, but it doesn't make Java more useful to very many people (even to Enterprise developers).
In a similar vein, 100% Pure Java is useless to me except as a portability tool ... and I happen to know how to write portable C/C++ code, as well as portable Java code. Sun wants a market in portable Java more than it wants a market in a hybrid of portable Java/C code. I think most of us are coming at it the other way around; look at how, say, Linux works (hybrid of portable C/assembler).
Frankly, while downloading code is a good tool to be able to depend on, I'm looking to projects like GCC 2.95 and its built in "GCJ" native Java compiler (and runtime; recent development versions have an interpreter too) for the future of Java, not to JDK 1.2 from Sun. With GCJ I can get past those nasty performance problems that Sun's code has never tried to fix.
To put it a bit differently: Sun's had its chance. We appreciate the good start, and the protection from Miccrosoft. Now can we please start developing Java as an Open (tm) systems technology? It's what we developers always wanted. And it's about time.
- Jojo
You're saying that if marijuana gets legalized, then society will have new costs to pay. Heck, if there are such costs, they're being paid already. How could it be otherwise? People have done studies, and concluded that costs for Alcohol are many orders of magnitude higher than any costs for Marijuana. Drunks drive and kill, and beat their families. Folk who get high are a lot more mellow ... :-)
Instead, let's think of savings. Let's lop off 2/3 of the budget for the "war on drugs", at least half the prison budgets. And court costs. And substantial police budgets. Hmm, maybe we could just take all of that money (W.O.D., prisons, etc) and apply it to something worthwhile instead. That'd make sense. I'd say let's cut the national debt (huge part of the govt budget!) first, but others may think differently.
In the distance, screams from law enforcement folk, "no, don't cut off our funds, we're addicted and can't go cold turkey..." you hear them already with respect to forfeiture reform. Another cost of the drug war is the Bill Of Rights. Police can take all your property just based on the strength of a suspicion, and you have no defense ... that's seizing everything you own, and they don't even have to charge you with a criminal act. Innocence is no defense; www.fear.org is illuminating, and scarey.
Seriously ... anyone who's looked at the economics of Marijuana Prohibition has concluded that it's always been about a money transfer program from smokers to people with more power. That includes at the very beginning -- when organizations with rights to large tracts of forests were major backers to that prohibition, since it abolished the market for hemp paper and supported a market for wood pulp that hadn't previously been viable.
End prohibition. Stop taxing the weak to fund the vices of the strong. And yes, stop the related hypocrisy in high places. (You can say "gwbush" can't you?)
- Jojo
Maybe ... there were two "JavaOS" products. Both got canned, this news is about the second one.
Think of "JavaOS" as the name for the OS that ran on a particular kind of "thin client", which was called the JavaStation. JavaStation never really sold well. A big part of it was because all incarnations of JavaOS were pretty much crap.
Other kinds of "thin client" can work better.
- Jojo
The first JavaOS was essentially a research project, writing an OS in Java to see what was missing from JDK 1.0 ... slow as all get-out. The outside world heard about it because Sun was crazy to pitch Java as usable for everything. (I mean that in multiple senses!) So it jumped straight from research to "product".
The second JavaOS ("JavaOS for Business") was basically JDK 1.1 hosted on top of a real time OS that Sun had bought, "Chorus". Somehow that never got ported to enough different platforms to make Chorus a better choice than one of the better established real time OS configs. It was the right idea, but the core OS wasn't portable enough to be interesting to its target customers - they couldn't create commodity hardware and compete purely on the cost of the resulting "thin client" systems.
Sun has a curious attitude towards Operating System Software. They want to own it, since if it integrates smoothly with their hardware, they can get some competitive advantages. It's not so odd, really, it's pretty traditional; but it's also far from their Open Systems for Open Minds roots. So they keep trying to do OS research to create some proprietary value. Going for a "big win" of some kind without understanding that customers still value the "open systems" model, still value the fact that Sun's competing on execution (and fumbles sometimes) rather than relying on vendor lockin. (They go to MSFT for that game.)
The Spring OS was nothing but a research project, and it never performed well enough to make anyone really want to run it. But it got funded for years (instead of layered software products) as sort of a mascot for a proprietary OS technology. When Spring got canned, many of the same folk went to do JavaOS I (the research project), which got canned for the same reasons Spring did: it was a big, slow non-solution to a non-problem. So nobody would choose to buy it. It got forced down their throats as the guts of the first JavaStation, and they chose not to buy.
JavaOS for Business wasn't needed either. Just take an off-the-shelf RTOS and slap a JDK on it. You're in business. Just -- Sun could never control that hardware infrastructure, it'd be too open. Great software model; but they want to make hardware money instead.
Canning this project was overdue, and is no loss at all from the business or technical perspectives. None at all. (Though doesn't it make you wonder what will replace it? :-)
- Jojo