People attribute all sorts of smart things to Gates that he didn't do, so he shouldn't get upset about this one.
In any case, people generally aren't saying that Microsoft was responsible for the 640k limit. What Microsoft really is responsible for is delivering MS-DOS and Windows 3.x. If Gates did that despite knowing better, deliberately condemning the industry to more than a decade of blue screens and flaky software, that would be much worse. So, which is it: was Gates merely ignorant or callously opportunistic back then?
but why should I bother? You obviously know *nothing* about Flash.
What do I need to know about the innards of Flash or what Macromedia promises for it? What matters is what real web sites actually do with it, relative to real web sites using (non-dynamic) HTML. Most web sites whose content is presented in HTML are usable on most handhelds, offer accessibility, work with form filling tools, and adapt to a wide variety of screen sizes. Almost no Flash sites do.
Macromedia has made lots of promises for Flash and all the things it can do, but real web sites fail to deliver them. For example, Macromedia has been offering Flash players for handheld devices, but that doesn't make Flash web sites usable on handhelds.
I could do a point-by-point rebuttal on all of your crap,
I doubt you could, because you don't understand that the problem isn't technology, it is how it is used.
That's even worse: while my credit card is processing quietly in the background, if I go to a new site, my reservation will just disappear? Or will the page refuse to unload?
The current web paradigm, where you wait for your page to reload in order to indicate completion of a transaction, is simple and works. Sites that try to fiddle with it by doing things behind the user's back are just asking for trouble.
Unless the speaker and microphone are on the back, it looks like this thing needs a headset. Can you imagine how frustrating it would be to get a call on this thing and not have your headset ready? You could perhaps try Morse code to get short messages through to your callers. Dit, dah, dah,...
For example, it's intended to eliminate page refreshes. Users will be able to continue to browse a site even while the Web page processes credit card information and other data.
Oh, goodie, what more does anyone need to know about it. If Macromedias "software architects" don't realize how bad an idea this is from a security and privace point of view, they have no business designing any web software. It will be fun to see this one crash and burn.
It's a much more controlled environment; it's much more stable than Java.
Anyone who thinks that their prerelease product is "more stable" than a product that's been continually tested in the field and improved for seven years must be rather inexperienced. Java is not perfect, but its security and applet code has been beaten on so much that one can begin to have some confidence in it.
But, yes, Flash is "much more controlled", in the sense that it doesn't have much functionality compared to Java. However, in the sense of security, anything that can continue to interact with the server after the user has unloaded the page has some serious issues.
Flash-based sites have about the worst usability imaginable. Accessibility goes completely out the window. They don't work on handheld devices or other small-screen devices. They don't work with automation tools for web pages (form filling, etc.). The idea is so stupid that it won't catch on.
Java tried this before and it failed. And Java, at least, has things like accessibility support and a real user interface toolkit.
In fact, this push for Flash is kind of good in a way: don't install a Flash plug-in, and you'll automatically filter out clueless and unusable sites.
If we taxed Microsoft employees for their capital gains at 95% (it would have to be retroactive to have any significant effect now, I suppose), the government would get a lot of money to "run schools" and all that.
I mean, I already pay this Microsoft tax with every new PC I buy even though I don't run Windows on most of them. It seems only fair that the government gets a larger cut from it.
Yes, indeed, iTunes works really well and it's very easy to use. It lets me put CDs that I paid for and own onto my harddisk by merely sticking them into the drive.
And, indeed, I do buy fewer CDs now--not because I download anything from the Internet (which I don't), but because I can actually find the music I have.
If Eisner would get off his behind and actually offer music on-line and on-demand at a reasonable price and under reasonable conditions, I wouldn't have to bother with the CDs or with maintaining harddisk space. The price should be somewhere where it reflects the costs, which would make it cheaper for me to download it when I want to listen to it rather than maintain 50G of my own disk space spinning.
I'd very much prefer prefer music on demand. But someone who makes many millions of dollars a year is perhaps a little too out of touch with real consumers to understand what they want.
They claim a patent on this, yet another one of those bogus patents. Radio amateurs have been "beaming" around GPS positions and even tracking them on portable computers (on channels where data transmissions are permitted) for many years.
As for "interference", well, it's not radio interference people are talking about, it's the use of channels for data that were designated for voice services. I mean, why stop at transmitting 100bytes or so? If this use is permitted, why not run a wireless modem over it?
Altogether, both the patent and the abuse of voice spectrum for data services reflect poorly on Garmin.
The biggest problem with Microsoft isn't their server software or their licensing, it's their software development tools. Visual Studio is the K-mart version of tools like those found in NeXTStep or Smalltalk. It has all the buttons and windows, it just isn't robust and doesn't give good results.
Students use the Microsoft tools and think that that's what software development is about. They end up being incapable of developing with anything else when they come out. In fact, they can barely develop with Microsoft's tools, but because Microsoft's tools make it easy to create lots of impressive looking windows, they think they are experienced. It takes a lot of work to bring those people up to speed, get them used to some professional tools, and fill in all the gaps and missing skills.
If you doubt the constitutional validity of Congress's regulations, feel free to bring the matter to the US Supreme Court, which is the ultimate arbiter of what is and what isn't constitutional. I suspect whatever Congress will do will be tested constitutionally within months (the test may be a few dozen attorneys looking at it and deciding that a constitutional challenge is hopeless).
The US government may sometimes behave in ways you don't like, but that doesn't make them illegitimate or their actions unconstitutional. We live in a democracy, and that's what you have to deal with in a democracy. It's not great, but it sure beats any of the alternatives anybody has been able to come up with. Or, to put it differently, imagine how much worse off we would be if idiots like Bush actually were kings.
Re:Ok let's stop looking for water for a bit
on
Lots of Ice On Mars
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· Score: 2
2.7% of Mars's atmosphere is still plenty of nitrogen. Maybe you won't get bacteria that can fix it right away, but you can easily convert that using technological means.
There are lots of things one can criticize about DSL and broadband providers, but this just doesn't seem like one of them. Either your business pays for a business line and gets better service, or you get the residential line and the second rate service.
Your most reliable bet is probably to get a second means of access; I mean, you have several choices: dial-up, wireless, cable, DSL, fixed wireless, etc. And you can always pick up your laptop and head to your local Internet cafe.
Besides, you can have downtime at work, too, when you can't work. Like when the coffee machine is malfunctioning.
If you are talking about thin clients to Windows servers, they don't work out economically: between the Windows licenses, the licenses for the client software, and the hassle of setting it all up and maintaining it, you end up paying more than if you had just bought new Windows machines, and you get pretty limited performance for each user anyway. Thin clients for Windows machines are something for corporate environments where the administrator wants control and centralization and can afford to pay a premium for the thin clients.
However, if you are talking about think clients to a Linux or UNIX server, that makes a lot of sense. You pay nothing extra on either the client or the server, it's trivial to set up and administer, and it works really well.
If you really want client access to Windows, at least consider getting the NIC; for $200, you get a devices that does Citrix ICA, X11, ssh, VNC, web browsing, and telnet out of the box. The reviews claim that they are easy to set up and upgrade (just pop in a new CD), and with that, you only need to worry about the server side for Windows.
The result is not particularly surprising. In some sense, the DMCA exists precisely because people can break these schemes: where technology can't enforce the behavior, you need the power of the state to enforce the behavior.
If 50% of the US population buy PCs at their current price level and the hardware costs fall, it follows that Microsoft can charge more for the OS, not less.
In any case, it doesn't matter. Microsoft can adjust their cost structure so that they can give away consumer-Windows and still be hugely profitable.
The movie industry picks an extreme position so that the debate moves in their direction. In this case, the industry may be putting up SSSCA, technological restrictions backed up by draconian laws, giving the appearance that purely technological restrictions are somehow a moderate compromise.
Make no mistake: they are not. Technological protections infringe fair use rights, they prevent the material from falling into the public domain when copyright terms run out, and they greatly increase the cost of entry into publishing. Rather than debating whether technological restrictions should be backed up by criminal law, we should be debating whether works published with technological restrictions should enjoy copyright protections at all.
I think companies should be free to use technological protections for their creations, but they should then not also enjoy legal and copyright protections because they have precluded the uses that were traditionally envisioned for published materials. It's the same with patents: either you publish and get patent protection, or you keep it a secret and don't get patent protection.
When an organization makes a promise about their software, I think they should be held legally responsible for it, whether it's Apache or Microsoft. The real problem is that companies like Microsoft create the impression in their marketing efforts that their software secure, but disclaim it all in their licensing contracts. This is primarily an issue of fair competition in the consumer marketplace. For consumer products, commercial software vendors should be held to their marketing promises, with a liability of at least the purchase price of the software if they don't live up to it.
In addition, there should perhaps be restrictions on what can be sold: for the sale to be legal, consumer software should perhaps have to conform to some basic safety standards, analogous to UL standards for electrical devices. (Since this is a restriction on sales, it would obviously not apply to free software.)
Large commercial customers are presumed to be competent, and they should be responsible for this themselves; they don't need regulations or legislation to protect them. For example, if a company exposes 10000 people to identity theft through an unsecure computer system, the company should be legally liable for that. The company will then insure against that risk (possible directly through the software vendor). The insurer will assess the risk and compute the cost of the insurance. The company then can take the cost of the insurance into account when selecting software. I.e., it comes down to the question of: is Apache plus insurance more or less expensive than IIS plus insurance?
Some people claim that NuSphere is now distributing source with their binaries. If that is true, they may still have lost the right to distribute the software in the long term, but the "irreparable harm" argument for a preliminary injunction seems lessened because it puts them back on equal footing with MySQL right now.
As you may notice, the action involves a contractual dispute, trademarks, and copyrights, not just a GPL violation. Furthermore, the MySQL suit was filed in response to a lawsuit by NuSphere.
So, I find your assertion that the MySQL people are acting like "spoiled children" unfounded--there is more going on here. In fact, it isn't even clear to me that NuSphere fixed the problem. Even if they did, it isn't their's to fix: once they fell out of compliance with the GPL, they can't fix it--they have lost all rights to using the code.
As for the issue of reaching compliance, if anybody can violate the GPL with impunity and then just fix it up without consequences, that will simply encourage a lot of companies to do that. Open source is at a serious disadvantage here because most GPL violations are very hard to detect. It makes sense to pursue some GPL violations seriously even if the violators eventually come into compliance.
Finally, as for damages, that's bogus. Open source companies live off things like consulting and documentation. If some other company comes out with an enhanced closed source version that ends up getting used widely, the open source companies lose business. The argument isn't as simple (or simplistic) as the MPAA's "1 million people copied Rocky XVII illegally", but there are still damages. And there are damages to the public as well (although they may be harder to enforce).
The big plexiglass window in the top probably does not. It's better than an all plexiglass case, but people really shouldn't leave unshielded holes in their computers.
This is molecular biology. Very neat molecular biology, to be sure. But it has nothing to do with nanotechnology. If you call this stuff "nanobots", then your big toe is mostly composed of nanobots.
Slashdot Mirror
In any case, people generally aren't saying that Microsoft was responsible for the 640k limit. What Microsoft really is responsible for is delivering MS-DOS and Windows 3.x. If Gates did that despite knowing better, deliberately condemning the industry to more than a decade of blue screens and flaky software, that would be much worse. So, which is it: was Gates merely ignorant or callously opportunistic back then?
What do I need to know about the innards of Flash or what Macromedia promises for it? What matters is what real web sites actually do with it, relative to real web sites using (non-dynamic) HTML. Most web sites whose content is presented in HTML are usable on most handhelds, offer accessibility, work with form filling tools, and adapt to a wide variety of screen sizes. Almost no Flash sites do.
Macromedia has made lots of promises for Flash and all the things it can do, but real web sites fail to deliver them. For example, Macromedia has been offering Flash players for handheld devices, but that doesn't make Flash web sites usable on handhelds.
I could do a point-by-point rebuttal on all of your crap,
I doubt you could, because you don't understand that the problem isn't technology, it is how it is used.
The current web paradigm, where you wait for your page to reload in order to indicate completion of a transaction, is simple and works. Sites that try to fiddle with it by doing things behind the user's back are just asking for trouble.
Unless the speaker and microphone are on the back, it looks like this thing needs a headset. Can you imagine how frustrating it would be to get a call on this thing and not have your headset ready? You could perhaps try Morse code to get short messages through to your callers. Dit, dah, dah, ...
Oh, goodie, what more does anyone need to know about it. If Macromedias "software architects" don't realize how bad an idea this is from a security and privace point of view, they have no business designing any web software. It will be fun to see this one crash and burn.
It's a much more controlled environment; it's much more stable than Java.
Anyone who thinks that their prerelease product is "more stable" than a product that's been continually tested in the field and improved for seven years must be rather inexperienced. Java is not perfect, but its security and applet code has been beaten on so much that one can begin to have some confidence in it.
But, yes, Flash is "much more controlled", in the sense that it doesn't have much functionality compared to Java. However, in the sense of security, anything that can continue to interact with the server after the user has unloaded the page has some serious issues.
Java tried this before and it failed. And Java, at least, has things like accessibility support and a real user interface toolkit.
In fact, this push for Flash is kind of good in a way: don't install a Flash plug-in, and you'll automatically filter out clueless and unusable sites.
I mean, I already pay this Microsoft tax with every new PC I buy even though I don't run Windows on most of them. It seems only fair that the government gets a larger cut from it.
And, indeed, I do buy fewer CDs now--not because I download anything from the Internet (which I don't), but because I can actually find the music I have.
If Eisner would get off his behind and actually offer music on-line and on-demand at a reasonable price and under reasonable conditions, I wouldn't have to bother with the CDs or with maintaining harddisk space. The price should be somewhere where it reflects the costs, which would make it cheaper for me to download it when I want to listen to it rather than maintain 50G of my own disk space spinning.
I'd very much prefer prefer music on demand. But someone who makes many millions of dollars a year is perhaps a little too out of touch with real consumers to understand what they want.
As for "interference", well, it's not radio interference people are talking about, it's the use of channels for data that were designated for voice services. I mean, why stop at transmitting 100bytes or so? If this use is permitted, why not run a wireless modem over it?
Altogether, both the patent and the abuse of voice spectrum for data services reflect poorly on Garmin.
Students use the Microsoft tools and think that that's what software development is about. They end up being incapable of developing with anything else when they come out. In fact, they can barely develop with Microsoft's tools, but because Microsoft's tools make it easy to create lots of impressive looking windows, they think they are experienced. It takes a lot of work to bring those people up to speed, get them used to some professional tools, and fill in all the gaps and missing skills.
The US government may sometimes behave in ways you don't like, but that doesn't make them illegitimate or their actions unconstitutional. We live in a democracy, and that's what you have to deal with in a democracy. It's not great, but it sure beats any of the alternatives anybody has been able to come up with. Or, to put it differently, imagine how much worse off we would be if idiots like Bush actually were kings.
2.7% of Mars's atmosphere is still plenty of nitrogen. Maybe you won't get bacteria that can fix it right away, but you can easily convert that using technological means.
Your most reliable bet is probably to get a second means of access; I mean, you have several choices: dial-up, wireless, cable, DSL, fixed wireless, etc. And you can always pick up your laptop and head to your local Internet cafe.
Besides, you can have downtime at work, too, when you can't work. Like when the coffee machine is malfunctioning.
However, if you are talking about think clients to a Linux or UNIX server, that makes a lot of sense. You pay nothing extra on either the client or the server, it's trivial to set up and administer, and it works really well.
If you really want client access to Windows, at least consider getting the NIC; for $200, you get a devices that does Citrix ICA, X11, ssh, VNC, web browsing, and telnet out of the box. The reviews claim that they are easy to set up and upgrade (just pop in a new CD), and with that, you only need to worry about the server side for Windows.
The result is not particularly surprising. In some sense, the DMCA exists precisely because people can break these schemes: where technology can't enforce the behavior, you need the power of the state to enforce the behavior.
I hope lawmakers and judges are as offended by Microsoft's outrageous statements and behavior as many computer people are.
In any case, it doesn't matter. Microsoft can adjust their cost structure so that they can give away consumer-Windows and still be hugely profitable.
Make no mistake: they are not. Technological protections infringe fair use rights, they prevent the material from falling into the public domain when copyright terms run out, and they greatly increase the cost of entry into publishing. Rather than debating whether technological restrictions should be backed up by criminal law, we should be debating whether works published with technological restrictions should enjoy copyright protections at all.
I think companies should be free to use technological protections for their creations, but they should then not also enjoy legal and copyright protections because they have precluded the uses that were traditionally envisioned for published materials. It's the same with patents: either you publish and get patent protection, or you keep it a secret and don't get patent protection.
Come on, don't be so dense. The lawsuit involves a contractual dispute that is different from the GPL violation, a contract involving $2.5M.
According to this story, megalosaurus (doesn't exactly sound small), a "mid-size" version of T-rex, did run at speeds of up to 20mph.
In addition, there should perhaps be restrictions on what can be sold: for the sale to be legal, consumer software should perhaps have to conform to some basic safety standards, analogous to UL standards for electrical devices. (Since this is a restriction on sales, it would obviously not apply to free software.)
Large commercial customers are presumed to be competent, and they should be responsible for this themselves; they don't need regulations or legislation to protect them. For example, if a company exposes 10000 people to identity theft through an unsecure computer system, the company should be legally liable for that. The company will then insure against that risk (possible directly through the software vendor). The insurer will assess the risk and compute the cost of the insurance. The company then can take the cost of the insurance into account when selecting software. I.e., it comes down to the question of: is Apache plus insurance more or less expensive than IIS plus insurance?
Some people claim that NuSphere is now distributing source with their binaries. If that is true, they may still have lost the right to distribute the software in the long term, but the "irreparable harm" argument for a preliminary injunction seems lessened because it puts them back on equal footing with MySQL right now.
So, I find your assertion that the MySQL people are acting like "spoiled children" unfounded--there is more going on here. In fact, it isn't even clear to me that NuSphere fixed the problem. Even if they did, it isn't their's to fix: once they fell out of compliance with the GPL, they can't fix it--they have lost all rights to using the code.
As for the issue of reaching compliance, if anybody can violate the GPL with impunity and then just fix it up without consequences, that will simply encourage a lot of companies to do that. Open source is at a serious disadvantage here because most GPL violations are very hard to detect. It makes sense to pursue some GPL violations seriously even if the violators eventually come into compliance.
Finally, as for damages, that's bogus. Open source companies live off things like consulting and documentation. If some other company comes out with an enhanced closed source version that ends up getting used widely, the open source companies lose business. The argument isn't as simple (or simplistic) as the MPAA's "1 million people copied Rocky XVII illegally", but there are still damages. And there are damages to the public as well (although they may be harder to enforce).
The big plexiglass window in the top probably does not. It's better than an all plexiglass case, but people really shouldn't leave unshielded holes in their computers.
This is molecular biology. Very neat molecular biology, to be sure. But it has nothing to do with nanotechnology. If you call this stuff "nanobots", then your big toe is mostly composed of nanobots.