Well, I hope this works and that somehow we can do something like this in the US.
I think it more likely though that the US will be embarrassed in a different way. As poorer countries in the world begin to computerize, and network themselves, there is a good chance they will rely on Open Source solutions to get started. India, and Brazil, notably have significant Linux user bases already. Eventually there will be some interesting comparisons I bet about how this has had an impact, not only on their cost of doing business, but the overall impact on computer literacy as well.
Watch someone who has NEVER used a computer use Windows for the first time. It's not a pretty sight. Windows is "intuitive" only after you have been using it for a year or so. The fact that most Windows programs use the same GUI elements, the same dropdown command set etc, makes each new program a bit easier to figure out than the previous ones. A large percentage of these new users will only learn the bare minimum to get by, and for them, it is to be expected that they will never want anything about that desktop to change.
A smaller percentage, but still a significant number of new users will want to learn more, such people in a Linux/Unix environment are instantly rewarded by how much stuff there is out there. They may shoot themselves in the foot a few times, but eventually these will be power users. Such a person, even without root access can do an order of magnitude more things on their own than a similarly motivated Windows user. I think this difference in user base will show up in subtle ways that will cause both business and governments in the US to wonder why we have been short changing ourselves.
The fact that a private company was involved does not alter the accuracy of what SysKoll said. What a company will do when it is acting as a contractor to the government, or as a sub sub sub contractor to another company bares no resemblance to how it would handle a situation for an internally developed product.
The contracting company has to develop what looks like a one-on-one defense when dealing with its government counterparts. Each government person is trying to do their best, impress their own management etc, and in so doing has a small army of contractor individuals at their disposal.
While there are rules in place to keep mid-level managers within the government from abusing their influence over contractors, I've never seen these safeguards applied without the whistle blowing company losing business in the process. Contractor personnel who can't tolerate taking orders from their underlings in the government either leave in frustration or transform themselves into sycophants who hear no evil, see no evil and speak no evil.
Thats why when things go wrong and there is an investigation they barely have to scratch the surface before getting a flood of revelations. Knowing something is wrong with the way things are being done is one thing. Being the person to bring this up in a meeting with your government contacts can be career suicide.
Lets look at this from the far simpler Microsoft perspective shall we?
Now that that pesky Justice Department has been anesthetized Microsoft can get back to integrating everything. Browser, office automation, everything, integrated into one big, err gigantic, program. This program will work with all web servers, but it will work a LOT BETTER with IIS web servers. Oracle, Semantec, and any other third party provider of Windows compatible software had better be prepared because MICROSOFT NEEDS YOUR CASHFLOW IN ORDER TO GROW!
Face it, they have won in all other areas, so the only way they can grow (which is required these days to impress the stock market) is to take over other market segments.
Microsoft still wants to take over the server room, and they are mad as hell that events beyond their control have slowed them down.
Why does this guy think it is going to take MS from 2 to 6 years (his estimates were all over the map!) to re-integrate IE. They have probably been working on this all along while the Justice Department were wringing their hands and cowering before the mighty Bill Gates.
While I think that the ultimate triumph of Open Source will occur for operating systems and other basic systems software, the battle ain't gonna be pretty because Microsoft would rather hold ground it has already won than give up and move to new conflict points.
If you have no stomach for such things, slink back into the Microsoft fold and get your MCSE so that you can utter the proper incantations at the next meeting with your sales rep.
If you want to keep your freedom and dignity, then avoid Windows-only features like the plaque. Don't tell me that you just HAVE to have some spinning doo-dad that can only be done with asp or you will lose your customer base. Thats total BS, and if you believe it you are halfway to having your MCSE certificate already. Congratulations.
The future of the Internet is CONTENT, not format, not color schemes. Provide a service, provide information, and users will come. Look at Drudge, Slashdot, and the many blogs that use a three color scheme and text and very little else.
Your mission, should you decide to accept it is to help these processes along:
PC Hardware = commodity Browsers = commodity Development Software = almost commodity OS = almost commodity Office Products = almost Servers = Just now moving toward commodity
Things that are not even on the trail yet are 3D-VR, artificial intelligence, speech and handwriting recognition, and some of these are going to take YEARS to shake out. Microsoft will of course take an interest in these things once some other company has shown that it can be done. For now they are fighting a losing battle over their own home turf.
In the end, Microsoft's unwillingness to concede this old ground will be their downfall. But like I said, it won't be pretty.
I totally agree that both parties have participated in bankrupting the country (in many ways).
But when I go to place blame, I also look at the total amount of time that each party has had control of the Presidency, the House and the Senate during the 50 so years of my lifetime.
You go take a look at those numbers and get back to me.
I think there is a lot of cluelessness going on in the article as well as the concept.
The first clue is that Microsoft has bought and paid for the US government by convincing it to send tens of thousands of its middle managers to MCSE brainwa...errr.... certification classes. Many of these people don't know anything about computers other than what Microsoft/Sylvan have taught them. The US Feds will be loyal Microsoft customers long after governments elsewhere have switched. They deserve each other.
The whole concept travels under the guise of making democracy more accessible. While in this case it is targeted at overseas voters, make no mistake that it will soon be followed by trials in-country. The problem is that it allows people to vote without thinking. We already have a system that make it easy to "buy" votes by bussing street people to the polls in exchange for smokes or spending money. The goal, by the same people who do that is to carry the process even further.
"inject substance into your left arm for candidate a, into your right arm for candidate b".
"Kay Maxwell, president of the League of Women Voters of the United States, said she welcomes the idea of Internet voting if it increases turnout. "
Right. It's the key to getting Democrats back into power. Why win on the issues when you can simply BRIBE voters to put you into office. Fifty years of making promises the country can't keep, lets do it till we are totally bankrupt!
The other thing he failed to mention (or I failed to notice) is that mainframes had ordered seek queuing since at least the 80s. Furthermore, the operating system could balance the advantage of ordering the queue to minimize seeks with other factors such as task priority, which is something the disk drive can't do.
I'm not saying that it is a bad idea to do this in hardware, but it is just one more thing that was invented long ago on mainframes and is now "new" for PCs.
I'm still convinced that in the long run most people will be working on something that combines the user interface of a PC with all the back-end data management activities of a mainframe (whether it is called that or not). Even now, the idea of a 4 member household having a central server and each family member carrying around a $100 laptop style i/o device makes more sense than the current model where mom and dad get a new PC and hand the old ones down to the kids.
I have both Mplayer for OS X (latest version) as well as an up-to-date and full ($29) version of Quicktime that both are able to play many AVI files I run across, but both of them claim I am missing DivX. Both are also capable of updating themselves on-demand with codecs, but neither will play the files on that site.
I find AVI files to be much more problematic than MPEGs in general though. I wonder why that is?:)
I was hosting my cheapo sites at Featureprice.com for 8 months or so before service started to suck. When my sites had been down for more than a day I moved. The featureprice.com site never went down though, and as far as I know they never used their own servers to host their own site! They are by far the most popular topic of yourhostsucks.com and I still go there to read up on their comedy of errors which include;
* continued downtimes for some customers as much as WEEKS * setting up domains for customers with passwords of "password" or matching the domain name * claiming that a major router outage for which they had no backup was an "act of god" * not being able to pay their bills and selling the customer base to another company followed by * investigation by the states attorney general * the owner replacing the companies web page with a rant about how the world was out to get him * mooning TV reporters who came to the office to interview them * the owner locking himself in the office and sabotaging the equipment that he has sold to the other hosting outfit
It's better than reading The Onion!
There is much more to selecting a hosting company than which operating system they run.
If you wanted to argue that many OSS supporters are liberal, or socialists, or communists for that matter, you would have no argument from me. You are obviously well read, so it surprises me that you would have such a narrow view on this subject. It is unfortunate that nothing quite like software existed at the time of Adam Smith and Karl Marx so that we could get more directly what their ideas would be on these subjects. Instead we have to make assumptions based on "similar" technologies of their eras.
Here is an interesting set of quotes from our era I stumbled on this whole paragraph while looking for a link to give you on the enclosure movement, but I can't resist passing them on, since they are so pertinent:
'And here is what a certain Bill Gates wrote about software patents: "If people had understood how patents would be granted when most of today's ideas were invented and had taken out patents, the industry would be at a complete standstill today." I am sure that you all 100 percent agree with this. But for Gates, this is a problem. And he has an idea how to solve this problem: "The solution is patenting as much as we can. A future startup with no patents of its own will be forced to pay whatever price the giants choose to impose. That price might be high. Established compa-nies have an interest in excluding future competitors." '
That is from this site: http://www.rosalux.de/engl/projects/international/ esf/landslides.htm
I have no idea what the site authors views are since I haven't read it in it's entirety, he does have some historical points on the enclosure movement(s) though. I'd love to get a more direct sourcing for those quotes.
Here is an even better source, with both Realplayer and MPEG videos and entire conference proceedings in PDF and text:
It is clear that a complex debate has been going on for a long time, at least since the invention of the printing press, about just what constitutes "property". Intellectual property (IP) is of far more importance these days than it was in Adam Smith's time. I know of no one that seriously wants all ideas, inventions or software to become public domain immediately upon publication.
In fact, and this is something you seem to miss entirely, OSS could not *exist* without strong IP laws. The ability of an author of software to designate the GNU license, or some other license for that matter is what IP laws are all about. No one is forcing Microsoft to give up its secrets. In fact, if developing software in a closed environment is such a great idea, then Microsoft's future is completely secure. Furthermore there is a common myth that Open and Closed software cannot commingle. In fact, nothing prevents Microsoft from developing a Windows front-end to run on top of Linux (which would save them a lot of development cost, fix a lot of their security problems and probably not eat into OS sales any more than Linux is going to do anyway).
For those of us who support Open Source the best way to settle the issue of which software should be Open Source and which should not is the marketplace. The only thing that can stop Open Source from succeeding, in my opinion, would be for it to be made illegal. Should that happen, a lot of our other freedoms will go along with it and I am afraid the apex of civilization will have been passed.
I'm travelling with an iBook. It handles most AVI files nicely, but maybe I have to track down a DivX. MPEG would have made more sense, considering the subject matter.
Like most candidates for political office I'm sure he will say things that he thinks are pleasing to his audience. No doubt each blog will be drafted by an aid and poured over by other aids to make sure they don't go too far in any area before they are shown to him for his approval.
I'd much rather evaluate a candidate based on live events where they have to think for themselves. As I said, his Meet the Press appearance sounded downright embarrassing to me, but for a potential voter who is already in love with the guy, maybe it wasn't noticeable.
I believe in smaller government, particularly at the federal level. I'll vote for whatever candidate convinces me they will try and reduce the size of the federal government. Unfortunately that doesn't give me much to choose from in either party.
I think that it is a mistake to cast your vote based on a single issue. So I don't vote based solely on issues of abortion, military spending, taxes, or the DMCA for that matter. Reducing the size of the federal government will impact all of these issues. In general the direction of that impact matches my views: A scaled back federal government will have more important things to worry about than the DMCA for example.
I'm not ruling out the possibility that I would vote for Dean. Once he knows what his beliefs are and has studied up on how many people we have in the military so that he can actually answer the question of whether the number is too small or too large I'll make up my mind.
I will certainly NOT make up my mind based on a forum in which he can't respond to direct questions and in which I don't even know for a fact that he is the author.
Lessig's selection of Dean to run his blog sounds an awful lot like an endorsement to me. I think it is way to early to endorse any of the candidates. About half of them need to drop out for starters so that those remaining can have meaningful debates. As much as I like the internet I don't want to see our election process carried out via weblogs.
The last few times I've checked Lesig's blog he has his head compleatly up Deans behind.
Is there a track record of how he might vote on something like the DMCA?
If you saw Dean's appearance on Meet the Press you can't possibly be too comfortable with him as President. If he aspires to the job he has a LOT of homework to do.
My guess is that Lesig is among the hard core liberals (surprise!) and all members of that group would gladly vote for Adolph Hitler next time around if it mean revenge for 2000.
Blind rage over what they feel was a stolen election will drive them to do totally irrational things until 2004.
I think it is irresponsible to turn over your blog to anyone else, particularly someone who has tremendous internet resources of their own. This is pure partisanship and has nothing that I can see to do with Open Source, DMCA, RIAA or any other issues for which Lesig is notable.
Thats exactly right. I vote for the party with core beliefs closest to mine and prepare to be disappointed with the compromises they make.
As someone else pointed out, what we need is a more responsible press and a more informed voting public.
The most dangerous thing we face right now is a voting population graduated (or not) from our horrible education system. If we could count on the fact that idiots would not bother to vote we would be fine, but some politicians (need I say who?) will keep pushing to make it easier and easier for clueless people to vote. This has nothing to do with democracy, this has everything to do with demagoguery.
It's not *my* site, I'm just a user there. They plan support for both Linux and OS X later this year. The servers for the system run Linux already (of course!). The way this systems works, MOST of the work is done on the server side and your PC is more like a TV set viewport into the world. So, theory is that the various client parts will be easy to convert. I've talked to several of the developers there and they are all really into Linux and Open Source in general. So I have high hopes for this. The only reason I still have a Windows machine at all is to run this program. I look forward to re-formatting the hard drive later in the year and then I'll be an "all Linux" shop.:)
The OSS is repeating the tired old slogan that anything involving money is evil, but the truth of the matter is that money is what makes a higher standard of living possible."
I have never seen any Open Source document claim that money is evil. In fact, the notion that Open Source has something to do with Communism, Socialism, or any other form of economic theory is a leap of reason no less mystifying to me than Cantor's dealings with infinity (as discussed on your web page).
I happen to be a proponent of capitalism. The two deadliest things for capitalism are excessive government control of the flow of goods and services and excessive control of that flow by a few arbitrarily large businesses. having Standard oil control the flow of all oil in the United States was not good for capitalism, nor is it good to have one company corner the market on operating system and office automation software. That is particularly true (as the article points out) when that results in the creation of numerous closed standard formats for data.
The money that should be spent on computers is for R&D in new technologies, including software. That R&D on the software side is happening at (a few) universities here, within companies using Open Source, and to a large extent in Europe. For the most part Microsoft is milking a cash cow and trying to figure out how to keep it giving milk. Examples of research on NEW technologies which you could at one time find at research.Microsoft.com seem to have been abandoned for the most part.
AMD and the PowerPC give Intel enough competition to keep things healthy as far as hardware goes. Between the two monopolies, Intel and Microsoft I have a lot more respect for Intel, even though I wish competition were hotter sooner.
Finally, having one company dominate software, and another company dominate hardware is not in the long term best interest of this country. As the article accurately states, Open Source represents not only an opportunity for poorer countries to catch up technologically without the need for large sums of money, but it will also result in the education of substantial numbers of their population in the computer sciences. Today we turn people out of grad schools with computer science degrees who think that installing Windows and compiling a C program is the pinnacle of their university experience. We have dumbed-down our curriculums drastically thanks to Microsoft and Windows and we are going to get (actually it is happening now) the crap kicked out of us by countries that did not become so obsessed with a single operating system.
We will deserve it too. I just hope there are enough people here who will wake up so that we can get back in the race before WE become the third world nation of computing.
"and from what I saw the biggest problem wasn't that the work was done by the lowest bidder, it was that the requirements were often created by people other than those that know the situation the best."
I agree... you just hit the ball out of the park with bases loaded.
Someone earlier pointed out that private businesses have projects that are mismanaged too. Thats true, but government projects by comparison have MUCH more money to spend.
I have no reason to doubt the veracity of the fellow from the USAF, but things don't work that way at the two civilian agencies I've worked with.
For one thing, it sounds like the USAF still uses it's own personnel, as opposed to contractors to do some of the work. Where I have been, government people were all acting as "middle managers". Their job (if you had to characterize it as such) was to funnel requirements between the part of the agency being serviced and the IT contractor(s) actually doing the work. These mid-level people are not qualified to be programmers, nor are they trained in management... yes they go to internal classes on how to do the government paperwork, and they attend classes on process engineering, but as far as actually managing a project they have NO hands on experience.
As to the MCSE process: being an MCSE government employee has about as much significance as being an AMWAY representative. The last agency I worked with offered a salary incentive to these same middle managers referenced above. Not only did the government pay to send these people to classes and take the tests, but they agreed to bump their salaries too. So many government people pursued this and got their certificates that they had to withdraw the program. I'm quite sure that MS sales reps gave the government incentives in this direction. In so doing, they have locked themselves in and anything else out for many years to come. These newly minted MCSEs who for the most part learned not much more than the Microsoft lexicon for data processing will never feel quite as comfortable with anything else, be it open source or not.
What it will take to change this is time, unfortunately a lot of it. Monumental infrastructure failures (which we are already experiencing in case you haven't noticed) followed by a lot of finger pointing and finally followed by the discovery of those one or two percent of government projects that actually are done properly (with real requirements definition for example). I declare total BS on anyone working in the government who thinks they are operating with limited budgets. I defy you to compare any government agency or department with a private company that has similar requirements and not find that the government expenditures are an order of magnitude higher.
This is not laziness or stupidity on the part of the people involved, be they government or contractor, it's just a bad system. The only way it will get fixed is if tax payers learn just how bad it is and then get totally pissed off about it. Of course this will never happen if you listen to entrenched people in the system (I don't care how many hours they work). They are looking through the wrong end of the telescope and just don't know it.
"We all know that Debian is technically one of the most advanced operating systems on the planet, but is it ready to ride the coming shockwave of the desktop Linux juggernaught?"
Juggernaut? I had to look that up (and correct the spelling in the process). Nothing about the word implies SPEED, so in that sense the Linux juggernaut is a reality. It will move so slowly though that many don't notice it coming. Industry pundits are for the most part still pronouncing Windows and Microsoft as invincible.
I think either Windows or Microsoft will transmogrify into something else as the irresistible goo that is Open Source begins to overwhelm it. I don't know what that something else will be, but they for sure won't just sit there and do nothing. They will try to "embrace and extend" but this time they won't be able to get their arms around the foe and will instead BECOME an extension. I think there will be multiple distributions for a long long time, and ultimately, that which is Windows will become just another distro, lost in a crowd.
Debian will become more like Knoppix, one way or another. All the other distros will get better device detection too and better dependency resolution. Why wouldn't they? Why shouldn't they? If you a part of the Open Source movement, you had better not be the type to form emotional attachments to old ways of doing things. You'll die of a broken heart.
Open source allows progress to flow around obstacles, whether the obstacle is a mediocre software company or a pack-rat hacker who longs for the good old days. That is it's beauty, and what makes it unstoppable.
At the levels that public funds are spent on either cancer research or space exploration having a space race of any kind will make no difference. An engineer or scientists with all of his training and work experience in aerospace sciences does not quit his job one day and go into cancer research the next. Furthermore, cancer research will continue to a greater or lesser extent independent of public funding. Space exploration, at this point probably still needs some artificial support in the form of military funding, or commercial incentives.
For the company that finds a cancer cure (or even a cure for a particular form) there is a jackpot to be had. Hard to find any similar short term jackpots in space exploration (tang anyone?)
I was in high school during the original space race. Federal funding to get us caught up to the Soviet lead in the sciences caused a room full of small white boxes to show up at our school. Inside: Slinkies! and other such toys designed (I suppose) to facilitate demonstrations of principles of physics. Whoop dee doo. They were stored permanently in the back room of the chemistry lab (where us lab assistants played with them after cleaning test tubes). Our physics classes were taught in an ordinary classroom on a blackboard, probably much the same as they were in the Soviet Union.
Psychologically it might be a good jolt for the Chinese to come up with a cure for cancer, or for someone in Spain to come up with a cold fusion process. In a big modern world, the US can't do everything and we shouldn't feel either entitled to that position, or burdened by it. Not only the US, but even more so the world can walk and chew gum at the same time. There are very few things which we do that keeps some other things from taking place to any great extent as well.
"Anything to helps to get the human race off of this death trap of a planet is a Good Thing(tm)."
I too support the exploration of other planets, but I find it amusing that we would escape off this "death trap" to planets where it is so cold that the carbon dioxide is in solid form.
If ultimately we learn to terraform planets such as Mars, then we will have much sooner than that developed technologies to bring our own ecosystem back into balance (assuming you believe that it is significantly out of balance as it is).
If on the other hand the "death trap" refers to interactions between people, then maybe it would make more sense as was done in Hitchhiker's Guide to send the trouble makers on ahead.
While the up-front development for a gadget such as this are high, I doubt they are much higher than a new motherboard, maybe less. Essentially these are tiny motherboards with some I/O devices screwed onto them. From keypads, to LCD screens there is nothing all that innovative about them.
I'm not just talking about the Zaurus though, the Palm and Windows CE devices are even worse.
I can hardly wait for the comoditization of these devices. Basically someone like Sharp, or Casio (it sure won't be Palm or HP) needs to start stamping these things out by the millions and let users supply their own OS (Linux based makes the most sense). Only then will we start to see the prices come down anywhere near the manufacturing cost. (Which I bet is under $50).
Slashdot Mirror
Well, I hope this works and that somehow we can do something like this in the US.
I think it more likely though that the US will be embarrassed in a different way. As poorer countries in the world begin to computerize, and network themselves, there is a good chance they will rely on Open Source solutions to get started. India, and Brazil, notably have significant Linux user bases already. Eventually there will be some interesting comparisons I bet about how this has had an impact, not only on their cost of doing business, but the overall impact on computer literacy as well.
Watch someone who has NEVER used a computer use Windows for the first time. It's not a pretty sight. Windows is "intuitive" only after you have been using it for a year or so. The fact that most Windows programs use the same GUI elements, the same dropdown command set etc, makes each new program a bit easier to figure out than the previous ones. A large percentage of these new users will only learn the bare minimum to get by, and for them, it is to be expected that they will never want anything about that desktop to change.
A smaller percentage, but still a significant number of new users will want to learn more, such people in a Linux/Unix environment are instantly rewarded by how much stuff there is out there. They may shoot themselves in the foot a few times, but eventually these will be power users. Such a person, even without root access can do an order of magnitude more things on their own than a similarly motivated Windows user. I think this difference in user base will show up in subtle ways that will cause both business and governments in the US to wonder why we have been short changing ourselves.
Too bad they can't figure it out sooner.
The fact that a private company was involved does not alter the accuracy of what SysKoll said. What a company will do when it is acting as a contractor to the government, or as a sub sub sub contractor to another company bares no resemblance to how it would handle a situation for an internally developed product.
The contracting company has to develop what looks like a one-on-one defense when dealing with its government counterparts. Each government person is trying to do their best, impress their own management etc, and in so doing has a small army of contractor individuals at their disposal.
While there are rules in place to keep mid-level managers within the government from abusing their influence over contractors, I've never seen these safeguards applied without the whistle blowing company losing business in the process. Contractor personnel who can't tolerate taking orders from their underlings in the government either leave in frustration or transform themselves into sycophants who hear no evil, see no evil and speak no evil.
Thats why when things go wrong and there is an investigation they barely have to scratch the surface before getting a flood of revelations. Knowing something is wrong with the way things are being done is one thing. Being the person to bring this up in a meeting with your government contacts can be career suicide.
So THATS what that thing was. I caught it nuzzling up to my silo and I shot it with my trusty 12-Gauge.
Farmer Dan
Lets look at this from the far simpler Microsoft perspective shall we?
Now that that pesky Justice Department has been anesthetized Microsoft can get back to integrating everything. Browser, office automation, everything, integrated into one big, err gigantic, program. This program will work with all web servers, but it will work a LOT BETTER with IIS web servers. Oracle, Semantec, and any other third party provider of Windows compatible software had better be prepared because MICROSOFT NEEDS YOUR CASHFLOW IN ORDER TO GROW!
Face it, they have won in all other areas, so the only way they can grow (which is required these days to impress the stock market) is to take over other market segments.
Microsoft still wants to take over the server room, and they are mad as hell that events beyond their control have slowed them down.
Why does this guy think it is going to take MS from 2 to 6 years (his estimates were all over the map!) to re-integrate IE. They have probably been working on this all along while the Justice Department were wringing their hands and cowering before the mighty Bill Gates.
While I think that the ultimate triumph of Open Source will occur for operating systems and other basic systems software, the battle ain't gonna be pretty because Microsoft would rather hold ground it has already won than give up and move to new conflict points.
If you have no stomach for such things, slink back into the Microsoft fold and get your MCSE so that you can utter the proper incantations at the next meeting with your sales rep.
If you want to keep your freedom and dignity, then avoid Windows-only features like the plaque. Don't tell me that you just HAVE to have some spinning doo-dad that can only be done with asp or you will lose your customer base. Thats total BS, and if you believe it you are halfway to having your MCSE certificate already. Congratulations.
The future of the Internet is CONTENT, not format, not color schemes. Provide a service, provide information, and users will come. Look at Drudge, Slashdot, and the many blogs that use a three color scheme and text and very little else.
Your mission, should you decide to accept it is to help these processes along:
PC Hardware = commodity
Browsers = commodity
Development Software = almost commodity
OS = almost commodity
Office Products = almost
Servers = Just now moving toward commodity
Things that are not even on the trail yet are 3D-VR, artificial intelligence, speech and handwriting recognition, and some of these are going to take YEARS to shake out. Microsoft will of course take an interest in these things once some other company has shown that it can be done. For now they are fighting a losing battle over their own home turf.
In the end, Microsoft's unwillingness to concede this old ground will be their downfall. But like I said, it won't be pretty.
Nevermind...I'll make it easy:
t rol.htm
http://arts.bev.net/roperldavid/politics/PartyCon
I totally agree that both parties have participated in bankrupting the country (in many ways).
But when I go to place blame, I also look at the total amount of time that each party has had control of the Presidency, the House and the Senate during the 50 so years of my lifetime.
You go take a look at those numbers and get back to me.
I also recommend this site:
http://www.atr.org
Good point. I know a lot of smart people who don't vote. They still complain about the results.
Go to cspan.org and view the video called:
Americans for Tax Reform Cost of Government Day Event
done on 7/11/2003
Its a great 30 minute expose regarding how our money is wasted (by both parties).
I wish I could make a link to this or even download he files, but I've never figured out how to beat their javascript juggling of the URLs.
Yes, it is very much like Snow Crash.
I made a Q&A for further information....
Q&A on Secondlife
The first clue is that Microsoft has bought and paid for the US government by convincing it to send tens of thousands of its middle managers to MCSE brainwa...errr.... certification classes. Many of these people don't know anything about computers other than what Microsoft/Sylvan have taught them. The US Feds will be loyal Microsoft customers long after governments elsewhere have switched. They deserve each other.
The whole concept travels under the guise of making democracy more accessible. While in this case it is targeted at overseas voters, make no mistake that it will soon be followed by trials in-country. The problem is that it allows people to vote without thinking. We already have a system that make it easy to "buy" votes by bussing street people to the polls in exchange for smokes or spending money. The goal, by the same people who do that is to carry the process even further.
"inject substance into your left arm for candidate a, into your right arm for candidate b".
"Kay Maxwell, president of the League of Women Voters of the United States, said she welcomes the idea of Internet voting if it increases turnout. "
Right. It's the key to getting Democrats back into power. Why win on the issues when you can simply BRIBE voters to put you into office. Fifty years of making promises the country can't keep, lets do it till we are totally bankrupt!
The other thing he failed to mention (or I failed to notice) is that mainframes had ordered seek queuing since at least the 80s. Furthermore, the operating system could balance the advantage of ordering the queue to minimize seeks with other factors such as task priority, which is something the disk drive can't do.
I'm not saying that it is a bad idea to do this in hardware, but it is just one more thing that was invented long ago on mainframes and is now "new" for PCs.
I'm still convinced that in the long run most people will be working on something that combines the user interface of a PC with all the back-end data management activities of a mainframe (whether it is called that or not). Even now, the idea of a 4 member household having a central server and each family member carrying around a $100 laptop style i/o device makes more sense than the current model where mom and dad get a new PC and hand the old ones down to the kids.
Well, thats odd...
:)
I have both Mplayer for OS X (latest version) as well as an up-to-date and full ($29) version of Quicktime that both are able to play many AVI files I run across, but both of them claim I am missing DivX. Both are also capable of updating themselves on-demand with codecs, but neither will play the files on that site.
I find AVI files to be much more problematic than MPEGs in general though. I wonder why that is?
HAHA you got that right!
I was hosting my cheapo sites at Featureprice.com for 8 months or so before service started to suck. When my sites had been down for more than a day I moved. The featureprice.com site never went down though, and as far as I know they never used their own servers to host their own site! They are by far the most popular topic of yourhostsucks.com and I still go there to read up on their comedy of errors which include;
* continued downtimes for some customers as much as WEEKS
* setting up domains for customers with passwords of "password" or matching the domain name
* claiming that a major router outage for which they had no backup was an "act of god"
* not being able to pay their bills and selling the customer base to another company followed by
* investigation by the states attorney general
* the owner replacing the companies web page with a rant about how the world was out to get him
* mooning TV reporters who came to the office to interview them
* the owner locking himself in the office and sabotaging the equipment that he has sold to the other hosting outfit
It's better than reading The Onion!
There is much more to selecting a hosting company than which operating system they run.
Here is an interesting set of quotes from our era I stumbled on this whole paragraph while looking for a link to give you on the enclosure movement, but I can't resist passing them on, since they are so pertinent:
'And here is what a certain Bill Gates wrote about software patents: "If people had understood how patents would be granted when most of today's ideas were invented and had taken out patents, the industry would be at a complete standstill today." I am sure that you all 100 percent agree with this. But for Gates, this is a problem. And he has an idea how to solve this problem: "The solution is patenting as much as we can. A future startup with no patents of its own will be forced to pay whatever price the giants choose to impose. That price might be high. Established compa-nies have an interest in excluding future competitors." '
That is from this site: http://www.rosalux.de/engl/projects/international/ esf/landslides.htm
I have no idea what the site authors views are since I haven't read it in it's entirety, he does have some historical points on the enclosure movement(s) though. I'd love to get a more direct sourcing for those quotes.
Here is an even better source, with both Realplayer and MPEG videos and entire conference proceedings in PDF and text:
http://www.law.duke.edu/pd/realcast.htm
It is clear that a complex debate has been going on for a long time, at least since the invention of the printing press, about just what constitutes "property". Intellectual property (IP) is of far more importance these days than it was in Adam Smith's time. I know of no one that seriously wants all ideas, inventions or software to become public domain immediately upon publication.
In fact, and this is something you seem to miss entirely, OSS could not *exist* without strong IP laws. The ability of an author of software to designate the GNU license, or some other license for that matter is what IP laws are all about. No one is forcing Microsoft to give up its secrets. In fact, if developing software in a closed environment is such a great idea, then Microsoft's future is completely secure. Furthermore there is a common myth that Open and Closed software cannot commingle. In fact, nothing prevents Microsoft from developing a Windows front-end to run on top of Linux (which would save them a lot of development cost, fix a lot of their security problems and probably not eat into OS sales any more than Linux is going to do anyway).
For those of us who support Open Source the best way to settle the issue of which software should be Open Source and which should not is the marketplace. The only thing that can stop Open Source from succeeding, in my opinion, would be for it to be made illegal. Should that happen, a lot of our other freedoms will go along with it and I am afraid the apex of civilization will have been passed.
I'm travelling with an iBook. It handles most AVI files nicely, but maybe I have to track down a DivX. MPEG would have made more sense, considering the subject matter.
Like most candidates for political office I'm sure he will say things that he thinks are pleasing to his audience. No doubt each blog will be drafted by an aid and poured over by other aids to make sure they don't go too far in any area before they are shown to him for his approval.
I'd much rather evaluate a candidate based on live events where they have to think for themselves. As I said, his Meet the Press appearance sounded downright embarrassing to me, but for a potential voter who is already in love with the guy, maybe it wasn't noticeable.
I believe in smaller government, particularly at the federal level. I'll vote for whatever candidate convinces me they will try and reduce the size of the federal government. Unfortunately that doesn't give me much to choose from in either party.
I think that it is a mistake to cast your vote based on a single issue. So I don't vote based solely on issues of abortion, military spending, taxes, or the DMCA for that matter. Reducing the size of the federal government will impact all of these issues. In general the direction of that impact matches my views: A scaled back federal government will have more important things to worry about than the DMCA for example.
I'm not ruling out the possibility that I would vote for Dean. Once he knows what his beliefs are and has studied up on how many people we have in the military so that he can actually answer the question of whether the number is too small or too large I'll make up my mind.
I will certainly NOT make up my mind based on a forum in which he can't respond to direct questions and in which I don't even know for a fact that he is the author.
Lessig's selection of Dean to run his blog sounds an awful lot like an endorsement to me. I think it is way to early to endorse any of the candidates. About half of them need to drop out for starters so that those remaining can have meaningful debates. As much as I like the internet I don't want to see our election process carried out via weblogs.
The last few times I've checked Lesig's blog he has his head compleatly up Deans behind.
Is there a track record of how he might vote on something like the DMCA?
If you saw Dean's appearance on Meet the Press you can't possibly be too comfortable with him as President. If he aspires to the job he has a LOT of homework to do.
My guess is that Lesig is among the hard core liberals (surprise!) and all members of that group would gladly vote for Adolph Hitler next time around if it mean revenge for 2000.
Blind rage over what they feel was a stolen election will drive them to do totally irrational things until 2004.
I think it is irresponsible to turn over your blog to anyone else, particularly someone who has tremendous internet resources of their own. This is pure partisanship and has nothing that I can see to do with Open Source, DMCA, RIAA or any other issues for which Lesig is notable.
Thats exactly right. I vote for the party with core beliefs closest to mine and prepare to be disappointed with the compromises they make.
As someone else pointed out, what we need is a more responsible press and a more informed voting public.
The most dangerous thing we face right now is a voting population graduated (or not) from our horrible education system. If we could count on the fact that idiots would not bother to vote we would be fine, but some politicians (need I say who?) will keep pushing to make it easier and easier for clueless people to vote. This has nothing to do with democracy, this has everything to do with demagoguery.
It's not *my* site, I'm just a user there. They plan support for both Linux and OS X later this year. The servers for the system run Linux already (of course!). The way this systems works, MOST of the work is done on the server side and your PC is more like a TV set viewport into the world. So, theory is that the various client parts will be easy to convert. I've talked to several of the developers there and they are all really into Linux and Open Source in general. So I have high hopes for this. The only reason I still have a Windows machine at all is to run this program. I look forward to re-formatting the hard drive later in the year and then I'll be an "all Linux" shop. :)
I have never seen any Open Source document claim that money is evil. In fact, the notion that Open Source has something to do with Communism, Socialism, or any other form of economic theory is a leap of reason no less mystifying to me than Cantor's dealings with infinity (as discussed on your web page).
I happen to be a proponent of capitalism. The two deadliest things for capitalism are excessive government control of the flow of goods and services and excessive control of that flow by a few arbitrarily large businesses. having Standard oil control the flow of all oil in the United States was not good for capitalism, nor is it good to have one company corner the market on operating system and office automation software. That is particularly true (as the article points out) when that results in the creation of numerous closed standard formats for data.
The money that should be spent on computers is for R&D in new technologies, including software. That R&D on the software side is happening at (a few) universities here, within companies using Open Source, and to a large extent in Europe. For the most part Microsoft is milking a cash cow and trying to figure out how to keep it giving milk. Examples of research on NEW technologies which you could at one time find at research.Microsoft.com seem to have been abandoned for the most part.
AMD and the PowerPC give Intel enough competition to keep things healthy as far as hardware goes. Between the two monopolies, Intel and Microsoft I have a lot more respect for Intel, even though I wish competition were hotter sooner.
Finally, having one company dominate software, and another company dominate hardware is not in the long term best interest of this country. As the article accurately states, Open Source represents not only an opportunity for poorer countries to catch up technologically without the need for large sums of money, but it will also result in the education of substantial numbers of their population in the computer sciences. Today we turn people out of grad schools with computer science degrees who think that installing Windows and compiling a C program is the pinnacle of their university experience. We have dumbed-down our curriculums drastically thanks to Microsoft and Windows and we are going to get (actually it is happening now) the crap kicked out of us by countries that did not become so obsessed with a single operating system.
We will deserve it too. I just hope there are enough people here who will wake up so that we can get back in the race before WE become the third world nation of computing.
"and from what I saw the biggest problem wasn't that the work was done by the lowest bidder, it was that the requirements were often created by people other than those that know the situation the best."
I agree... you just hit the ball out of the park with bases loaded.
Someone earlier pointed out that private businesses have projects that are mismanaged too. Thats true, but government projects by comparison have MUCH more money to spend.
I have no reason to doubt the veracity of the fellow from the USAF, but things don't work that way at the two civilian agencies I've worked with.
For one thing, it sounds like the USAF still uses it's own personnel, as opposed to contractors to do some of the work. Where I have been, government people were all acting as "middle managers". Their job (if you had to characterize it as such) was to funnel requirements between the part of the agency being serviced and the IT contractor(s) actually doing the work. These mid-level people are not qualified to be programmers, nor are they trained in management... yes they go to internal classes on how to do the government paperwork, and they attend classes on process engineering, but as far as actually managing a project they have NO hands on experience.
As to the MCSE process: being an MCSE government employee has about as much significance as being an AMWAY representative. The last agency I worked with offered a salary incentive to these same middle managers referenced above. Not only did the government pay to send these people to classes and take the tests, but they agreed to bump their salaries too. So many government people pursued this and got their certificates that they had to withdraw the program. I'm quite sure that MS sales reps gave the government incentives in this direction. In so doing, they have locked themselves in and anything else out for many years to come. These newly minted MCSEs who for the most part learned not much more than the Microsoft lexicon for data processing will never feel quite as comfortable with anything else, be it open source or not.
What it will take to change this is time, unfortunately a lot of it. Monumental infrastructure failures (which we are already experiencing in case you haven't noticed) followed by a lot of finger pointing and finally followed by the discovery of those one or two percent of government projects that actually are done properly (with real requirements definition for example). I declare total BS on anyone working in the government who thinks they are operating with limited budgets. I defy you to compare any government agency or department with a private company that has similar requirements and not find that the government expenditures are an order of magnitude higher.
This is not laziness or stupidity on the part of the people involved, be they government or contractor, it's just a bad system. The only way it will get fixed is if tax payers learn just how bad it is and then get totally pissed off about it. Of course this will never happen if you listen to entrenched people in the system (I don't care how many hours they work). They are looking through the wrong end of the telescope and just don't know it.
Either that or they are running on a copy of server where you type all 1s for the registration code, I heard once that it has the same effect.
From the article:
"We all know that Debian is technically one of the most advanced operating systems on the planet, but is it ready to ride the coming shockwave of the desktop Linux juggernaught?"
Juggernaut? I had to look that up (and correct the spelling in the process). Nothing about the word implies SPEED, so in that sense the Linux juggernaut is a reality. It will move so slowly though that many don't notice it coming. Industry pundits are for the most part still pronouncing Windows and Microsoft as invincible.
I think either Windows or Microsoft will transmogrify into something else as the irresistible goo that is Open Source begins to overwhelm it. I don't know what that something else will be, but they for sure won't just sit there and do nothing. They will try to "embrace and extend" but this time they won't be able to get their arms around the foe and will instead BECOME an extension. I think there will be multiple distributions for a long long time, and ultimately, that which is Windows will become just another distro, lost in a crowd.
Debian will become more like Knoppix, one way or another. All the other distros will get better device detection too and better dependency resolution. Why wouldn't they? Why shouldn't they? If you a part of the Open Source movement, you had better not be the type to form emotional attachments to old ways of doing things. You'll die of a broken heart.
Open source allows progress to flow around obstacles, whether the obstacle is a mediocre software company or a pack-rat hacker who longs for the good old days. That is it's beauty, and what makes it unstoppable.
Good news!
At the levels that public funds are spent on either cancer research or space exploration having a space race of any kind will make no difference. An engineer or scientists with all of his training and work experience in aerospace sciences does not quit his job one day and go into cancer research the next. Furthermore, cancer research will continue to a greater or lesser extent independent of public funding. Space exploration, at this point probably still needs some artificial support in the form of military funding, or commercial incentives.
For the company that finds a cancer cure (or even a cure for a particular form) there is a jackpot to be had. Hard to find any similar short term jackpots in space exploration (tang anyone?)
I was in high school during the original space race. Federal funding to get us caught up to the Soviet lead in the sciences caused a room full of small white boxes to show up at our school. Inside: Slinkies! and other such toys designed (I suppose) to facilitate demonstrations of principles of physics. Whoop dee doo. They were stored permanently in the back room of the chemistry lab (where us lab assistants played with them after cleaning test tubes). Our physics classes were taught in an ordinary classroom on a blackboard, probably much the same as they were in the Soviet Union.
Psychologically it might be a good jolt for the Chinese to come up with a cure for cancer, or for someone in Spain to come up with a cold fusion process. In a big modern world, the US can't do everything and we shouldn't feel either entitled to that position, or burdened by it. Not only the US, but even more so the world can walk and chew gum at the same time. There are very few things which we do that keeps some other things from taking place to any great extent as well.
I too support the exploration of other planets, but I find it amusing that we would escape off this "death trap" to planets where it is so cold that the carbon dioxide is in solid form.
If ultimately we learn to terraform planets such as Mars, then we will have much sooner than that developed technologies to bring our own ecosystem back into balance (assuming you believe that it is significantly out of balance as it is).
If on the other hand the "death trap" refers to interactions between people, then maybe it would make more sense as was done in Hitchhiker's Guide to send the trouble makers on ahead.
Exactly right!
While the up-front development for a gadget such as this are high, I doubt they are much higher than a new motherboard, maybe less. Essentially these are tiny motherboards with some I/O devices screwed onto them. From keypads, to LCD screens there is nothing all that innovative about them.
I'm not just talking about the Zaurus though, the Palm and Windows CE devices are even worse.
I can hardly wait for the comoditization of these devices. Basically someone like Sharp, or Casio (it sure won't be Palm or HP) needs to start stamping these things out by the millions and let users supply their own OS (Linux based makes the most sense). Only then will we start to see the prices come down anywhere near the manufacturing cost. (Which I bet is under $50).