I do think that he is being a little hypocritical about this subject. While the whole nCipher thing was obviously just "hacksationalism", it seems to me that the dividing line between cases where he is and isn't OK with publishing cracks depends competely on where party is making money or not. Not too sure I agree with that <grin>. What he seems to *me* to be saying is that he disagrees with either
Pushing out a "scare" advisory that, if a given set of circumstances occur, AND an attacker does something that would eat CPU time, AND he gets lucky, he MIGHT be able to read a SSL key, and therefore gain access to a SSL conversation that he shouldn't have - assuming he can capture and identify the packets as well, of course - or spoof his way in on that conversation provided it hasn't closed by the time he found the key. The fact that , in bang-for-your-buck terms, it would be more effective to try and grab the packet stream and brute-force the 40-bit key (which is a different issue of course) is being ignored by this company... why? because they don't sell a hardware solution for this. The other obvious issue (that if the key might get leaked into free memory by the webserver, then the plaintext might also) is similarly ignored. I think what it comes down to is this - if a major bug is reported to the world that can't be patched out of existance, and you appear with a hard or soft solution that fixes it without introducing more problems, then everyone will stand behind you and applaud. If *YOU* came up with the problem report, and everyone else thinks it is such a long-odds occurance it gets a backburner-status until more pressing problems are sorted, don't be *too* surprised if everyone looks a bit suspicious when you trot out your "solution".
Advisories being pushed out in a blaze of publicity, with the developers of whatever was targetted not given a fair amount of time to come up with a solution (I am in two minds about the eEye one - if their side of things is to be believed, they didn't even get the courtesy of an acknowledgement of their bug report from MS - however, the main thrust of their PR campaign was based around the fact that THEIR magical new scanner found the vunerability, and that it WASN'T known out in the script-kiddie community yet. If it wasn't public knowledge, why not give the programmer's an extra week or so? because someone else might find it and spoil your nice PR coup?) It is more common to find this sort of advisory in the Bugtraq mailing list, with a careful description of the vunerability, as limited an exploit as you can make that will demonstrate the problem without causing more damage, and (if you want the brownie points) a workaround or patch.
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If anything, I think one of the biggest faulty parties here is Slashdot. A lot of journalists read this site, so when the editors post a story like the nCipher one, it does a great deal to spread it further. May I recommend that the/. staff consider taking a Cypherpunk onboard to weed through stories about such issues to make sure they are real and not just sensationalist. Not too sure about that either - most readers of/. know to take a PR release with a grain or two of salt, and given most of the time one of the people respected in whatever field the post is in will either confirm or debunk a story within a few dozen posts (and rapidly get moderated up) why not just let/. take it's normal course and add an UPDATE: tag to the story if it looks too far out from the dock? With the possible exception of petrified females, the/. Delphi effect seems to work much better than a paid staff member could hope to, and it's cheaper too:+) --
Redhat is not here to promote causes. They are not a charity. They're a business, one pulicly incorporated. As such, this business exists to serve its stockholders first. In fact, if they don't, they're quite apt to get sued. Ever heard of fiduciary responsibility? That doesn't mean that one cannot try hard to live by one's principles, but the crucial principle here really is the bottom line. Hmm. I might dispute that slightly - Redhat knows it is in it's best interest to keep in good standing with the OSS community, who are the source of the Linux software it is selling, and takes pains to be seen to "do the right thing".
Then again, I suspect that what Macchiavelli said of States can be equally applied to corporations. They are not "moral" or "principled" in the sense that a man can be. no, but they are led by a board of directors that is small enough to reflect the personalities of it's members - governments just have too many people with too many agendas to do similarly. --
I am fairly surprised it took as long as it did - the guy registered "worldwrestlingfederation.com" purely to try and extort $1K from WWF, but they negotiated a settlement with him while the IICAN were considering it.. probably on the offchance the guy was right, and the IICAN guidelines wouldn't be enforced. It's good to see they will be though - even if it was a pretty clear-cut case. We need to see one a little closer to the bone (where a big american company is in the wrong, for instance?) --
Hmm. would it be possible for Webmasters of websites (particularly non-.au websites) individually, and daily, to email the operators of the system with a "I am unable to find a list of sites blocked by your software; can you confirm my site isn't blocked?" I can imagine one or two such requests being tolerable; one or two million every day might be a little harder to handle.... --
I've been trying to understand this encryption for a while. Obviously they inseret some codes that would tell a DVD writer not to write this data stream (simply to do without encryption, though encryption makes filtering impossible without breaking the encryption) That's the main point - the CCA encryption does't prevent (or even hinder) copying, but prevents a non-authorised player from playing the film, as every frame is encrypted, and supposedly only "authorised" players whose manufacturers/writers have paid their dues to the CCA receive details of the encryption used and the keys. This has two immediate effects:
Only people willing to buy their way into the CCA can produce software or hardware to play -LEGALLY OWNED- DVD disks
the world can be divided up into DVD "Zones" where movies from another Zone can't be played on your player - thus, if the.us version costs half as much as the.au, then you STILL need to pay the.au asking price, as the.us version just won't work (assuming you don't just set your box to.us and forget about buying.au movies, of course:+) YES, you can change the zone - but under the new spec, this can only be done a small number of times before the unit needs to be sent back to the manufacturer for the count to be reset.
What it comes down to is that the movie industry wishes it was still back in the days of movie theatres, where you pay per view, per seat. --
Hmm. I agree that this leaves almost all the certificates directly certified by today's browsers in the hands of one company - not an ideal state of affairs.... does anyone know what root certs Mozilla will be supplied with, when/if it gets to a stable release? --
<MS Helpdesk> Sorry sir, but we can't admit that $PRODUCT is at fault <FX: DaveHowe pokes doll with pin> <MS Helpdesk> Ow! <DaveHowe> Are you SURE you can't help? <MS Helpdesk> No, I'm sorry sir, we... <FX: DaveHowe makes use of soldering iron> <MS Helpdesk> Please! no more! I'll talk! just don't hurt me anymore
My first response to this story was "Who the heck is Uri Geller?" If the character had been "Pizza the Hut" and it had a red roof looking top half, ok maybe there is a reason for there to be alot of money... Hmm. given how popular these things are, I suspect PizzaHut would PAY for there to be a pokemon with a red roof:+) --
If this pokemon character can really bend spoons, then there is little similarity to Mr. Geller I would suggest the character carries around pre-bent spoons, but then Mr Geller's lawyers would be after me, too:+) --
Actually, having the complainant have to pay the costs is more than fair. If a big business deems an individual's domain somehow infringes on their trademark (i.e. pokey.org) then they could simply threaten to submit the complaint to intimidate the little guy. Who has $1000+ to spare just cause big business feels like rolling the dice and trying their luck. Assuming it is a Big Firm that is making the complaint - there are plenty of cases of big, international firms coming into.uk with what is admittedly an established Trademark in their home country, but finding an existing firm already trades under that name, but hasn't been big enough for the Large Corporation to notice before. Imagine for instance you are Jim McDonald, and have been trading under the name "McDonalds Foods" for years in scotland; when "McDonalds" comes to the UK, are they entitled to use that name? If you come to set up yourwebsite, and find that, not only McDonalds.co.uk but McDonaldsFoods.co.uk is taken, just to (in the words of a marketdroid) "avoid confusion" by the american company. $1000 might be three month's profit for a small firm, especially if they have just had to fight a Legal battle to keep their name:+) --
you may or may not have heard the domain name http://www.year2000.com just sold for ten million dollars....perhaps they are getting their slice of the cake and eating it too!! Problem is, The person that made that bid didn't contact the current holder with payment details - it is looking like a hoax. --
You've been eating too much Christmas fruitcake if you think that an el-cheapo lawyer is going to beat Sun or Microsoft. Who says they *have* to win? $BIG_COMPANY has to tie up lawyers, take the bad publicity, and RISK a judge making a ruling against them that costs them all their profits. Similarly, any of $BIG_COMPANY'S major Vendors will look twice at the package, not wanting to be caught up as a co-defendant or having to recall product, and then start looking at the GPL tree the product came from (which may even have incorporated 3rd party workalikes to the $BIG_CORP product by then, and wonder just WHY they have to pay $BIG_CORP 2/3 of the sales price if they can just *download* the same thing from the web and sell it for half the $BIG_CORP product price, and *still* make more from the deal? yes, $BIG_CORP could retaliate by making $OTHER_PRODUCT more expensive for the vendor if he doesn't play ball, but MS have already found out about what happens when you get caught at that one.
Now look at it for $UNKNOWN_LAWYERs view. he gets national publicity, and a reputation of being a champion of the people against the big corporations; not bad for a few hours in court. And assuming he either wins, or $BIG_CORP decides to settle rather than having the PR Nightmare of being caught with their hands in the cookie jar, he gets his costs and possibly more from the deal - not to mention all the work as people recognise him as someone going to bat against big companies, and bringing their contingency-fee cases for faulty products and bad workmanship. --
You're a brave man. You aren't allowed to question this. Surprisingly, no - I would be more likely to be accused of jumping on the "!GPL==BAD" Bandwaggon, recently aggravated by the Sun Community Licence and their recent aboutface, taking someone else's work, rebranding it as their own (or not acknowledging the originators, which amounts to the same thing) and suddenly starting charging for the right to call your compiler "Java".
If you are, you'll get branded offtopic or overrated. Hmm. I am seldom offtopic, but fairly often overrated:+)
But you're right: it's not free, and this is a problem. Not so much a problem as initially misleading - It *is* a step up from nothing, and a useful time-unlimited "trial" package if you wish to evaluate this package, but given it's very narrow field (Linux on Dec Alpha! how many people HAVE a spare dec Alpha, never mind one runnning Linux? Possibly a discarded NT box now that MS have dropped NT4Alpha like a hot stone:+) and the fact that fortran, despite it's huge legacy codebase, and that it is ideally suited for certain tasks, is very much a fringe language in the *nix environment. --
I am not particularly enthused by the licence on this one - it matches the licence commonly found on "get $$$ of sofware free with this magazine" copies of commercial software - It explicitly forbids any commercial use, or any non-commercial institutions (such as charities), and the licence is to an individual and can be withdrawn at 30-day's notice for no reason other than they would like you to buy a licence from them. That said, it *could* be of use to students to test any Fortran code they were developing at home - assuming they had a handy Dec Alpha box at home of course, as this is for ALPHA linux, not Intel..... --
No individual developer or group of developers-- or the FSF-- can match in dollars spent on lawyers and months spent on courtroom time the power of a potential violator True - but I suspect a good try could be had to send suitable "cease and desist" letters to the vendors, rather than $BIG_CORPORATION, in the hope the resulting bad publicity and the thought of being a co-defendant in a court case will reduce the avenues of sale for the offending product. For that matter, there must be SOME lawyers that would be willing to take on SUN or COREL both for a fraction of the damages and for the publicity they would get as a "defender of public software shamefully stolen". --
In return, MS would not port its office apps to X and compete against them in thier biggest market - the feds Hmm. the exact terms of this could be interesting - what does it specify - MS doesn't port OFFICE to X at all, MS doesn't compete with Enable in the Federal market, or some strange combination? --
Hmm. How about this for an idea: when a webbot sees a dynamic page, it changes the query to ?Webbot - and expects to get back a specially formatted page starting <H1>Webbot index</H1> and followed by a set of comma separated keywords, a break, an URL, a paragraph, then the next set? The webbots would be happy, as they don't have to waste bandwidth and cpu time spidering over the site; the server should be happy, as it doesn't have to support the webbot's spidering, and the site owners should be happy, as they can specify what keywords each result will be indexed under. obviously, just reformatting the index to the product database could generate this page for an ecommerce site, and more static sites could just use a static statement of what their site carries..... --
You should be thanking microsoft, not slagging them off at any opportunity. I do not like Microsoft and never have. They have done nothing for the computer user except deliver overpriced and buggy software, drive up computer support costs and drive out their most innovative competitors. Much of that is true - MS has evidently had a policy of dragging down or absorbing competitors, rather than just improving their product to compete better. On the other hand, they HAVE produced a halfway stable GUI product suitable for the Point-And-Drool generation; Much of the buggyness of Windows is due to backwards support considerations and the wide range of hardware they have to run it on. *I* don't like MS either, but I try to keep my dislike honest:+)
Microsoft has done so much for us, like create the internet The Defense Advanced Projects Research Agency created the internet. Timothy Berners-Lee made it popular by developing the WWW and making is invention free to all. Microsoft did NOTHING here. Even Bill Gates will tell you that Microsoft was very late in appreciating the internet. Yep, word for word with you there. MS is probably the least innovative company I have ever seen - they seem to only reach out to absorb, without considering how they could reach into the empty spaces and create anew. That MS made a bad call on the value of the Internet is probably one of the only reasons it is usable today:+)
bring down the price of PCs and software Since when? Microsoft has never lowered the price of software that I can recall, and in fact Win 2000 represents a big price increase. What Micrsoft has done is drive out companies like Borland who really DID try to lower the price of software. As far as PC's, what exactly does Microsoft manufacture or sell in the way of PC's? Probably the last sentence is the most important - the price of PCs has come down BECAUSE MS don't sell PCs, therefore the cheaper they can drag that price down, the better sales of their bundled software will be. Nevertheless, Hardware prices have plummetted, and both speed and size exploded - largely due to MS Bloat's ever increasing requirements for speed and space. When you change to $OS_OF_CHOICE, you get the hardware benefits without the MSBloat that negates them. Similarly, the prices of NON-MS software have dropped, too - despite it's bugs, the universality of the DOS, then Windows platforms led to economy of scale, and free-market competition that pulled prices down. if there were fifty different OSs out there, then there would be little x-platform support due to manufacturer market closure and artificially high prices. Consider that many "Dinosaur Pen" big iron systems are now effectively slower than a couple of networked PCs. Now compare the prices of that hardware, and the prices (and restrictive, per CPU, don't DARE upgrade your hardware licencing) that is and was common. That this may well have happened if IBM had picked someone else, is probably true, but beyond anything but idle speculation.
make an easy to use operating system. Without microsoft we would still be using DOS applications Nonsense. I bought my first Macintosh in 1984, long before Microsoft had a user friendly OS. Just like in the case of the Internet Microosoft was VERY late in delivering a real user friendly OS. Eleven years late to be exact. Yep, spot on - this guy is talking rubbish here - MS bought in DOS (having already sold it) and only wrote Windows to compete in an existing GUI market. Anyone remember GEM?
They have done so much for the world, brought PCs to a vast majority of people. Made it easy to connect to internet, all I have to do is load internet explorer, and internet is there. Have you ever seen the internet setup tools that come with a Macintosh? They make Microsoft Internet configuration look like stone knives. When Mac users had a PPP scripting tool that would watch the user login, and autogenerate scripts, Windows users were still hand coding dialup scripts. Hmm. Admittedly, the guy is talking rubbish again, but throwing Pro-MAC fud back isn't an advantage. While MS weren't doing much in the way of built-in NET support, most ISPs were pushing out one-click installing, point-and-go disks from the Win3.1 days. since you would still have to enter so much into the mac PPP support util (phone numbers, login name, password, DNS, and so forth) this was effectively easier. It's probabably better to point out that MS forced most of these innovative, front-leading software companies out of business when they started building inherent PPP support into their OSs, but no-one dared complain it wasn't a natural part of the OS, given that UNIX has come with it since it was designed:+)
Also, they have made programming easier, with Visual Basic. Has anyone ever told you the story of Apple's Mac BASIC? Back in 1984 Apple developed a really great, easy to use Basic - far better than anything Microsft had a the time. This product was the start of something really big for Apple. What happened to Mac BASIC? When Microsoft saw it they threatened Apple with discontinuation of all of their Mac products if Apple didn't kill Mac BASIC. Apple caved and killed Mac BASIC. Biggest mistake they ever made because it gave Microsoft control of the application base on the Mac. Just the sort of Position-Abuse the trial was about - and you can't blame Apple too much, given every other software and hardware manufacturer seems to have caved in too:+)
The truth of the matter is that Microsoft has been a huge drag on progress in the PC market. Hmm. MS, on the whole, has been good for the PC market. However, most of the bits that were benefitial seem to be in the past, and most of the bits that are detrimental are in the present. MS seems to be less and less a positive force, and more a parasite on the PC and now Internet. I *DID* mention I don't like MS either, didn't I?:+) --
VB *has* come a long way, but then, so has C. I see the VB Vs VC debate as follows:
Ease of use VB is VASTLY easier to use than VC - so much is just click-drag-and-drool that in VC takes a week of headscratching to find the obscure MS-Specific call that does $FOO
Rapid Prototyping With VB, you can have a "look and feel" prototype, will all screens in their final configuration but "dummy" fixed-text data, in about ten minutes. you can single-step in interpreted mode without having to recompile, you can add and remove forms, modules and so forth quickly and easily without having to recode half your calls.
Power With VC++, you can do anything the OS is willing to let you; in return for not having a pretty button for everything, you get a list a screenfull of buttons couldn't cover.
Speed Compiled C is just faster and smaller than VB - and less files. there isn't a why, it just is:+)
Personally, I think you should go for the middle ground under Windoze - use Delphi, which has the RAD and Drag/Drool frontend of VB, but with almost as much power as C - not to mention that for many years, Borland^WInprise^WBorland had the fastest and most optimising compiler in existance for the Intel platform - I don't have any current stats, but imagine it must still be pretty good:+) --
Hm, like what? Speedup type things, or additional features? I know there's proof for the undocumented library calls (DDJ), but are there any for this sort of stuff, or are we all just being paranoid? Well, I suppose it is VAGUELY possible they hand-code all these extra function calls to the undocumented stuff, but I suspect the compiler merely includes extra calls in its librarys, or during optimisation uses a "secret" call if it would make the program more efficient. --
Hmm. a lot of the problem is familarity - a person that knows a map well will do much better than someone who hasn't seen it. While variety is good, a new map really means downloading it, going offline and doing serious practice in the new level until you know your way around. A dedicated player would enjoy this, an average one probably just wants to get online and shooting, then wrap up for the day and do the same tomorrow:+) I *do* like Classic Doom and Doom2 though - mostly because I have enough low-spec machines to set up a lan game at home:+) --
A company should be able to talk to its largest customer. If this customer has a reasonable feature suggestion, then it should be implemented. And a feature requested by the company with the most number of users using its software would probably have a higher priority than one from a small developer with only a few customers. Oh, I don't doubt it - I just didn't think it worthwhile retyping the whole of the comment on the OS API for the compiler... What I am implying is that the MS Package writers, having requested an improvement or change to the compiler to accomodate what they need to do, would get a STANDARD PATCH that *any* of the compiler's customers could use - that way, any new features in the compiler can be taken advantage of by the package's competitors as well as the package team themselves. That way, improvements to the complier will benefit the industry as a whole, rather than one thin slice of it. As it stands now, almost certainly a lot of the compiler "patches" don't see light of day - they are for internal use only, and will only be released if a competing compiler has that functionality (and they can't sue them for decompiling the code). The other factor is only assumed - that "improvements" that are requested by customers in markets MS is competing in would currently be notified to the DEV team for that market, regardless of if the compiler team go ahead and create the patch. I don't know if this happens or not, but it would be foolish to assume it didn't, if you WERE that competitor... --
Assuming that MS is broken up into BabyBills, then I suggest the following:
Windows OS The Windows OS MUST be completely separate from all of the other products - Absolutely no private contact. The Windows API published, and any changes to that API requested at scheduled "product advancement" meetings that have members of the product team, representatives from the other MS product teams equal in status to representatives of any other industry body or large software house. I *don't* expect membership to be free, but the MS reps will have to pay the same fees. Each member able to table a number of "change requests" per year, to be discussed and approved/rejected by an elected committee with 40% representation by the product developers themselves.
The Bleeding Edge Products that are subject to rapid replacement (such as the recent rapid turnover of versions in the Compiler and Office markets) must have a reasonable duration "free" upgrade path - Say, two years from date of purchase. Products that have been discontinued and unsupported for the upgrade period fall into the public domain under a suitable OSS licence - suitable in this case allowing for NO commercial redistribution except where the product is on a separate and independently usable piece of media, clearly labelled with it's nature, that is included either nominally "free" or for a reasonable charge for the media. Maintainers to be chosen by the OSS community during a "handoff" period where control is still retained by MS. MS may well complain this makes *too* much proprietary code available for free - but if the upgrades aren't that great a leap, why aren't they just a Service Release?
Chinese Walls Break apart any alliances that are detrimental to the industry as a whole - for example, Compiler writers and the packages that compile under them shouldn't have a clear line of contact - the temptation to add just one more "feature" to the compiler to make the package a little better than the rest is currently too great - if the package users had to buy their compilers off the shelf, this would remove this channel. I'm not saying they must not ever speak - just that "special" improvements to suit MS products over non-ms ones must stop.
Platform support MS is currently leveraging it's Operating Systems by having major packages (such as Exchange) run only on that OS. All packages over a certain market share MUST support at least one _Real_ Unix (big metal systems like Sun, HPUX and so forth) and one other GUI (such as KDE, Mac or so on) from a list chosen by industry (the list, not the actual OS). For a larger percentage, more "minimum X-platform" support must be added - we are ADDING sales here, but admittedly broadening the amount of support needed - but as a larger market share requires more support personel, the number of those who can specialise per platform as second-line support staff also increases.
This is not a Statement of How Things Must Be, just how I see it - feel free to disagree:+) --
Slashdot Mirror
because 90% of online p0rn is crap too
erm
or so I am told :+)
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Not too sure I agree with that <grin>. What he seems to *me* to be saying is that he disagrees with either
I think what it comes down to is this - if a major bug is reported to the world that can't be patched out of existance, and you appear with a hard or soft solution that fixes it without introducing more problems, then everyone will stand behind you and applaud. If *YOU* came up with the problem report, and everyone else thinks it is such a long-odds occurance it gets a backburner-status until more pressing problems are sorted, don't be *too* surprised if everyone looks a bit suspicious when you trot out your "solution".
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If anything, I think one of the biggest faulty parties here is Slashdot. A lot of journalists read this site, so when the editors post a story like the nCipher one, it does a great deal to spread it further. May I recommend that the /. staff consider taking a Cypherpunk onboard to weed through stories about such issues to make sure they are real and not just sensationalist. /. know to take a PR release with a grain or two of salt, and given most of the time one of the people respected in whatever field the post is in will either confirm or debunk a story within a few dozen posts (and rapidly get moderated up) why not just let /. take it's normal course and add an UPDATE: tag to the story if it looks too far out from the dock? With the possible exception of petrified females, the /. Delphi effect seems to work much better than a paid staff member could hope to, and it's cheaper too :+)
Not too sure about that either - most readers of
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Hmm. I might dispute that slightly - Redhat knows it is in it's best interest to keep in good standing with the OSS community, who are the source of the Linux software it is selling, and takes pains to be seen to "do the right thing".
Then again, I suspect that what Macchiavelli said of States can be equally applied to corporations. They are not "moral" or "principled" in the sense that a man can be.
no, but they are led by a board of directors that is small enough to reflect the personalities of it's members - governments just have too many people with too many agendas to do similarly.
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I am fairly surprised it took as long as it did - the guy registered "worldwrestlingfederation.com" purely to try and extort $1K from WWF, but they negotiated a settlement with him while the IICAN were considering it.. probably on the offchance the guy was right, and the IICAN guidelines wouldn't be enforced. It's good to see they will be though - even if it was a pretty clear-cut case. We need to see one a little closer to the bone (where a big american company is in the wrong, for instance?)
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Hmm. would it be possible for Webmasters of websites (particularly non-.au websites) individually, and daily, to email the operators of the system with a "I am unable to find a list of sites blocked by your software; can you confirm my site isn't blocked?"
I can imagine one or two such requests being tolerable; one or two million every day might be a little harder to handle....
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That's the main point - the CCA encryption does't prevent (or even hinder) copying, but prevents a non-authorised player from playing the film, as every frame is encrypted, and supposedly only "authorised" players whose manufacturers/writers have paid their dues to the CCA receive details of the encryption used and the keys. This has two immediate effects:
- Only people willing to buy their way into the CCA can produce software or hardware to play -LEGALLY OWNED- DVD disks
- the world can be divided up into DVD "Zones" where movies from another Zone can't be played on your player - thus, if the
.us version costs half as much as the .au, then you STILL need to pay the .au asking price, as the .us version just won't work (assuming you don't just set your box to .us and forget about buying .au movies, of course :+)
What it comes down to is that the movie industry wishes it was still back in the days of movie theatres, where you pay per view, per seat.YES, you can change the zone - but under the new spec, this can only be done a small number of times before the unit needs to be sent back to the manufacturer for the count to be reset.
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Hmm. I agree that this leaves almost all the certificates directly certified by today's browsers in the hands of one company - not an ideal state of affairs....
does anyone know what root certs Mozilla will be supplied with, when/if it gets to a stable release?
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---wavy lines---
<MS Helpdesk> Sorry sir, but we can't admit that $PRODUCT is at fault
<FX: DaveHowe pokes doll with pin>
<MS Helpdesk> Ow!
<DaveHowe> Are you SURE you can't help?
<MS Helpdesk> No, I'm sorry sir, we...
<FX: DaveHowe makes use of soldering iron>
<MS Helpdesk> Please! no more! I'll talk! just don't hurt me anymore
---wavy lines---
Don't you just WISH sometimes? :+)
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My first response to this story was "Who the heck is Uri Geller?" If the character had been "Pizza the Hut" and it had a red roof looking top half, ok maybe there is a reason for there to be alot of money... :+)
Hmm. given how popular these things are, I suspect PizzaHut would PAY for there to be a pokemon with a red roof
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If this pokemon character can really bend spoons, then there is little similarity to Mr. Geller :+)
I would suggest the character carries around pre-bent spoons, but then Mr Geller's lawyers would be after me, too
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Actually, having the complainant have to pay the costs is more than fair. If a big business deems an individual's domain somehow infringes on their trademark (i.e. pokey.org) then they could simply threaten to submit the complaint to intimidate the little guy. Who has $1000+ to spare just cause big business feels like rolling the dice and trying their luck. .uk with what is admittedly an established Trademark in their home country, but finding an existing firm already trades under that name, but hasn't been big enough for the Large Corporation to notice before. Imagine for instance you are Jim McDonald, and have been trading under the name "McDonalds Foods" for years in scotland; when "McDonalds" comes to the UK, are they entitled to use that name? If you come to set up yourwebsite, and find that, not only McDonalds.co.uk but McDonaldsFoods.co.uk is taken, just to (in the words of a marketdroid) "avoid confusion" by the american company. $1000 might be three month's profit for a small firm, especially if they have just had to fight a Legal battle to keep their name :+)
Assuming it is a Big Firm that is making the complaint - there are plenty of cases of big, international firms coming into
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you may or may not have heard the domain name http://www.year2000.com just sold for ten million dollars....perhaps they are getting their slice of the cake and eating it too!!
Problem is, The person that made that bid didn't contact the current holder with payment details - it is looking like a hoax.
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Who says they *have* to win? $BIG_COMPANY has to tie up lawyers, take the bad publicity, and RISK a judge making a ruling against them that costs them all their profits. Similarly, any of $BIG_COMPANY'S major Vendors will look twice at the package, not wanting to be caught up as a co-defendant or having to recall product, and then start looking at the GPL tree the product came from (which may even have incorporated 3rd party workalikes to the $BIG_CORP product by then, and wonder just WHY they have to pay $BIG_CORP 2/3 of the sales price if they can just *download* the same thing from the web and sell it for half the $BIG_CORP product price, and *still* make more from the deal?
yes, $BIG_CORP could retaliate by making $OTHER_PRODUCT more expensive for the vendor if he doesn't play ball, but MS have already found out about what happens when you get caught at that one.
Now look at it for $UNKNOWN_LAWYERs view. he gets national publicity, and a reputation of being a champion of the people against the big corporations; not bad for a few hours in court. And assuming he either wins, or $BIG_CORP decides to settle rather than having the PR Nightmare of being caught with their hands in the cookie jar, he gets his costs and possibly more from the deal - not to mention all the work as people recognise him as someone going to bat against big companies, and bringing their contingency-fee cases for faulty products and bad workmanship.
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Surprisingly, no - I would be more likely to be accused of jumping on the "!GPL==BAD" Bandwaggon, recently aggravated by the Sun Community Licence and their recent aboutface, taking someone else's work, rebranding it as their own (or not acknowledging the originators, which amounts to the same thing) and suddenly starting charging for the right to call your compiler "Java".
If you are, you'll get branded offtopic or overrated. :+)
Hmm. I am seldom offtopic, but fairly often overrated
But you're right: it's not free, and this is a problem. :+) and the fact that fortran, despite it's huge legacy codebase, and that it is ideally suited for certain tasks, is very much a fringe language in the *nix environment.
Not so much a problem as initially misleading - It *is* a step up from nothing, and a useful time-unlimited "trial" package if you wish to evaluate this package, but given it's very narrow field (Linux on Dec Alpha! how many people HAVE a spare dec Alpha, never mind one runnning Linux? Possibly a discarded NT box now that MS have dropped NT4Alpha like a hot stone
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I am not particularly enthused by the licence on this one - it matches the licence commonly found on "get $$$ of sofware free with this magazine" copies of commercial software - It explicitly forbids any commercial use, or any non-commercial institutions (such as charities), and the licence is to an individual and can be withdrawn at 30-day's notice for no reason other than they would like you to buy a licence from them.
That said, it *could* be of use to students to test any Fortran code they were developing at home - assuming they had a handy Dec Alpha box at home of course, as this is for ALPHA linux, not Intel.....
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No individual developer or group of developers-- or the FSF-- can match in dollars spent on lawyers and months spent on courtroom time the power of a potential violator
True - but I suspect a good try could be had to send suitable "cease and desist" letters to the vendors, rather than $BIG_CORPORATION, in the hope the resulting bad publicity and the thought of being a co-defendant in a court case will reduce the avenues of sale for the offending product.
For that matter, there must be SOME lawyers that would be willing to take on SUN or COREL both for a fraction of the damages and for the publicity they would get as a "defender of public software shamefully stolen".
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In return, MS would not port its office apps to X and compete against them in thier biggest market - the feds
Hmm. the exact terms of this could be interesting - what does it specify - MS doesn't port OFFICE to X at all, MS doesn't compete with Enable in the Federal market, or some strange combination?
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Hmm. How about this for an idea:
when a webbot sees a dynamic page, it changes the query to ?Webbot - and expects to get back a specially formatted page starting <H1>Webbot index</H1> and followed by a set of comma separated keywords, a break, an URL, a paragraph, then the next set? The webbots would be happy, as they don't have to waste bandwidth and cpu time spidering over the site; the server should be happy, as it doesn't have to support the webbot's spidering, and the site owners should be happy, as they can specify what keywords each result will be indexed under. obviously, just reformatting the index to the product database could generate this page for an ecommerce site, and more static sites could just use a static statement of what their site carries.....
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I do not like Microsoft and never have. They have done nothing for the computer user except deliver overpriced and buggy software, drive up computer support costs and drive out their most innovative competitors.
Much of that is true - MS has evidently had a policy of dragging down or absorbing competitors, rather than just improving their product to compete better. On the other hand, they HAVE produced a halfway stable GUI product suitable for the Point-And-Drool generation; Much of the buggyness of Windows is due to backwards support considerations and the wide range of hardware they have to run it on. *I* don't like MS either, but I try to keep my dislike honest
Microsoft has done so much for us, like create the internet :+)
The Defense Advanced Projects Research Agency created the internet. Timothy Berners-Lee made it popular by developing the WWW and making is invention free to all. Microsoft did NOTHING here. Even Bill Gates will tell you that Microsoft was very late in appreciating the internet.
Yep, word for word with you there. MS is probably the least innovative company I have ever seen - they seem to only reach out to absorb, without considering how they could reach into the empty spaces and create anew. That MS made a bad call on the value of the Internet is probably one of the only reasons it is usable today
bring down the price of PCs and software
Since when? Microsoft has never lowered the price of software that I can recall, and in fact Win 2000 represents a big price increase. What Micrsoft has done is drive out companies like Borland who really DID try to lower the price of software. As far as PC's, what exactly does Microsoft manufacture or sell in the way of PC's?
Probably the last sentence is the most important - the price of PCs has come down BECAUSE MS don't sell PCs, therefore the cheaper they can drag that price down, the better sales of their bundled software will be.
Nevertheless, Hardware prices have plummetted, and both speed and size exploded - largely due to MS Bloat's ever increasing requirements for speed and space. When you change to $OS_OF_CHOICE, you get the hardware benefits without the MSBloat that negates them. Similarly, the prices of NON-MS software have dropped, too - despite it's bugs, the universality of the DOS, then Windows platforms led to economy of scale, and free-market competition that pulled prices down. if there were fifty different OSs out there, then there would be little x-platform support due to manufacturer market closure and artificially high prices. Consider that many "Dinosaur Pen" big iron systems are now effectively slower than a couple of networked PCs. Now compare the prices of that hardware, and the prices (and restrictive, per CPU, don't DARE upgrade your hardware licencing) that is and was common. That this may well have happened if IBM had picked someone else, is probably true, but beyond anything but idle speculation.
make an easy to use operating system. Without microsoft we would still be using DOS applications
Nonsense. I bought my first Macintosh in 1984, long before Microsoft had a user friendly OS. Just like in the case of the Internet Microosoft was VERY late in delivering a real user friendly OS. Eleven years late to be exact.
Yep, spot on - this guy is talking rubbish here - MS bought in DOS (having already sold it) and only wrote Windows to compete in an existing GUI market. Anyone remember GEM?
They have done so much for the world, brought PCs to a vast majority of people. Made it easy to connect to internet, all I have to do is load internet explorer, and internet is there. Have you ever seen the internet setup tools that come with a Macintosh? They make Microsoft Internet configuration look like stone knives. When Mac users had a PPP scripting tool that would watch the user login, and autogenerate scripts, Windows users were still hand coding dialup scripts. :+)
Hmm. Admittedly, the guy is talking rubbish again, but throwing Pro-MAC fud back isn't an advantage. While MS weren't doing much in the way of built-in NET support, most ISPs were pushing out one-click installing, point-and-go disks from the Win3.1 days. since you would still have to enter so much into the mac PPP support util (phone numbers, login name, password, DNS, and so forth) this was effectively easier. It's probabably better to point out that MS forced most of these innovative, front-leading software companies out of business when they started building inherent PPP support into their OSs, but no-one dared complain it wasn't a natural part of the OS, given that UNIX has come with it since it was designed
Also, they have made programming easier, with Visual Basic. Has anyone ever told you the story of Apple's Mac BASIC? Back in 1984 Apple developed a really great, easy to use Basic - far better than anything Microsft had a the time. This product was the start of something really big for Apple. What happened to Mac BASIC? When Microsoft saw it they threatened Apple with discontinuation of all of their Mac products if Apple didn't kill Mac BASIC. Apple caved and killed Mac BASIC. Biggest mistake they ever made because it gave Microsoft control of the application base on the Mac. :+)
Just the sort of Position-Abuse the trial was about - and you can't blame Apple too much, given every other software and hardware manufacturer seems to have caved in too
The truth of the matter is that Microsoft has been a huge drag on progress in the PC market. :+)
Hmm. MS, on the whole, has been good for the PC market. However, most of the bits that were benefitial seem to be in the past, and most of the bits that are detrimental are in the present. MS seems to be less and less a positive force, and more a parasite on the PC and now Internet.
I *DID* mention I don't like MS either, didn't I?
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- Ease of use
- Rapid Prototyping
- Power
- Speed
:+)
Personally, I think you should go for the middle ground under Windoze - use Delphi, which has the RAD and Drag/Drool frontend of VB, but with almost as much power as C - not to mention that for many years, Borland^WInprise^WBorland had the fastest and most optimising compiler in existance for the Intel platform - I don't have any current stats, but imagine it must still be pretty goodVB is VASTLY easier to use than VC - so much is just click-drag-and-drool that in VC takes a week of headscratching to find the obscure MS-Specific call that does $FOO
With VB, you can have a "look and feel" prototype, will all screens in their final configuration but "dummy" fixed-text data, in about ten minutes. you can single-step in interpreted mode without having to recompile, you can add and remove forms, modules and so forth quickly and easily without having to recode half your calls.
With VC++, you can do anything the OS is willing to let you; in return for not having a pretty button for everything, you get a list a screenfull of buttons couldn't cover.
Compiled C is just faster and smaller than VB - and less files. there isn't a why, it just is
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Hm, like what? Speedup type things, or additional features? I know there's proof for the undocumented library calls (DDJ), but are there any for this sort of stuff, or are we all just being paranoid?
Well, I suppose it is VAGUELY possible they hand-code all these extra function calls to the undocumented stuff, but I suspect the compiler merely includes extra calls in its librarys, or during optimisation uses a "secret" call if it would make the program more efficient.
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Hmm. a lot of the problem is familarity - a person that knows a map well will do much better than someone who hasn't seen it. While variety is good, a new map really means downloading it, going offline and doing serious practice in the new level until you know your way around. A dedicated player would enjoy this, an average one probably just wants to get online and shooting, then wrap up for the day and do the same tomorrow :+) :+)
I *do* like Classic Doom and Doom2 though - mostly because I have enough low-spec machines to set up a lan game at home
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A company should be able to talk to its largest customer. If this customer has a reasonable feature suggestion, then it should be implemented. And a feature requested by the company with the most number of users using its software would probably have a higher priority than one from a small developer with only a few customers.
Oh, I don't doubt it - I just didn't think it worthwhile retyping the whole of the comment on the OS API for the compiler... What I am implying is that the MS Package writers, having requested an improvement or change to the compiler to accomodate what they need to do, would get a STANDARD PATCH that *any* of the compiler's customers could use - that way, any new features in the compiler can be taken advantage of by the package's competitors as well as the package team themselves. That way, improvements to the complier will benefit the industry as a whole, rather than one thin slice of it. As it stands now, almost certainly a lot of the compiler "patches" don't see light of day - they are for internal use only, and will only be released if a competing compiler has that functionality (and they can't sue them for decompiling the code).
The other factor is only assumed - that "improvements" that are requested by customers in markets MS is competing in would currently be notified to the DEV team for that market, regardless of if the compiler team go ahead and create the patch. I don't know if this happens or not, but it would be foolish to assume it didn't, if you WERE that competitor...
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- Windows OS
- The Bleeding Edge
- Chinese Walls
- Platform support
This is not a Statement of How Things Must Be, just how I see it - feel free to disagreeThe Windows OS MUST be completely separate from all of the other products - Absolutely no private contact. The Windows API published, and any changes to that API requested at scheduled "product advancement" meetings that have members of the product team, representatives from the other MS product teams equal in status to representatives of any other industry body or large software house. I *don't* expect membership to be free, but the MS reps will have to pay the same fees. Each member able to table a number of "change requests" per year, to be discussed and approved/rejected by an elected committee with 40% representation by the product developers themselves.
Products that are subject to rapid replacement (such as the recent rapid turnover of versions in the Compiler and Office markets) must have a reasonable duration "free" upgrade path - Say, two years from date of purchase. Products that have been discontinued and unsupported for the upgrade period fall into the public domain under a suitable OSS licence - suitable in this case allowing for NO commercial redistribution except where the product is on a separate and independently usable piece of media, clearly labelled with it's nature, that is included either nominally "free" or for a reasonable charge for the media. Maintainers to be chosen by the OSS community during a "handoff" period where control is still retained by MS.
MS may well complain this makes *too* much proprietary code available for free - but if the upgrades aren't that great a leap, why aren't they just a Service Release?
Break apart any alliances that are detrimental to the industry as a whole - for example, Compiler writers and the packages that compile under them shouldn't have a clear line of contact - the temptation to add just one more "feature" to the compiler to make the package a little better than the rest is currently too great - if the package users had to buy their compilers off the shelf, this would remove this channel. I'm not saying they must not ever speak - just that "special" improvements to suit MS products over non-ms ones must stop.
MS is currently leveraging it's Operating Systems by having major packages (such as Exchange) run only on that OS. All packages over a certain market share MUST support at least one _Real_ Unix (big metal systems like Sun, HPUX and so forth) and one other GUI (such as KDE, Mac or so on) from a list chosen by industry (the list, not the actual OS). For a larger percentage, more "minimum X-platform" support must be added - we are ADDING sales here, but admittedly broadening the amount of support needed - but as a larger market share requires more support personel, the number of those who can specialise per platform as second-line support staff also increases.
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