I'm supposed to write software in a world where software can be patented?
Then every piece of code anyone writes is a ticking patent time-bomb.
So lets pretend we can have a patent office thoroughly staffed with geniuses gifted with eidetic memories and a sublime sense of of what is original and patent-worthy.
I'm supposed to read the entire patent database (hundreds of thousands of records)? And then once I finish that I only have to keep current with new grants (let alone new applications) - that's probably only dozens or hundreds a day...
Yeah, right. But then if someone comes along and wants a ransom for their patent on dereferencing pointers on Tuesdays or whatever seemed original and innovative 18 months ago, I'll either have to pay up or spend a few million to take on the fight in civil court...
I'm sorry - software patents are ridiculous. Your steel mill will invest in R&D to lower its energy costs, or it won't. But software patents don't create an incentive to do anything other than run for the hills. It's legitimizing barratry - the only winners are the lawyers, for the steel mill, the companies the steel mill sues, and for the other companies that will sue the steel mill for violating their patents, and so on and so forth, forever and ever...
Software patents are thought of by their proponents as a weapon against free software, and a cudgel against less wealthy competitors. And if they accrue enough legitimacy, within our lifetimes the software engineering discipline will be so clogged with them that practically no one can write software except in secret, no matter well you think the patent office can run. It's sadly ironic, really, that you think they spur any kind of innovation, when all they do is insure that no two good ideas are ever likely to be used together without a legal negotiation first...
It's true. While the Stephenson Diamond Age was an interesting idea, I think the William Gibson conception of these devices is far more likely - that nanotech becomes the next Weapon of Mass Destruction. The technology will be closely guarded, used only by the wealthy and elite, and (as long as we can prevent it), never, even for one fatal instant, let out into the world.
I predict, 20 years from now, if we have nanotechnology as these authors envision it, you'll have a better chance of seeing a consumer hydrogen bomb than seeing consumer nanotech.
Which is not to say you won't have nanotech-manufactured things... just that you won't be manufacturing them.
Fascinating that this movie should become so topical again.
Dr. Edward Morbius: In times long past, this planet was the home of a mighty, noble race of beings who called themselves the Krel. Ethically and technologically they were a million years ahead of humankind, for in unlocking the meaning of nature they had conquered even their baser selves, and when in the course of eons they had abolished sickness and insanity, crime and all injustice, they turned, still in high benevolence, upwards towards space. Then, having reached the heights, this all-but-divine race disappeared in a single night, and nothing was preserved above ground.
(I'd hate to give away the ending, but it's extremely relevant to this story! Rent it and see for yourself!)
Better to throw them in "court" based on a few million pieces of prima-facie evidence called "their spam."
Let's stop trying to make excuses; the government has utterly failed in its duty to prosecute blatant, obvious cases of egregious fraud (and many other kinds of criminal activity; pump & dump, illegal drugs, younameit) - that were broadcast to millions of Americans and reached more people than many TV shows.
And if they proceed in prosecuting people at this puny rate, I would say they are continuing to fail.
Yeah, sure, if we lock up all the domestic spammers, we'll still get spam from Africa and China, but let's actually get to that point first, and deal with it then.
I don't know about anyone else, but for many orgs I know spam is reaching a kind of crisis point, where anyone who has to publish their address is, within a matter of months, getting hundreds of spam for every few legitimate messages. It is rendering email useless.
A minor economic setback, I guess? Too trivial for the feds to bestir themselves?
CAN SPAM is a sad joke, but the punch line is that someone may have actually waited for it to go after these guys...
Interesting, but what about the paranoid ranting?
on
The War Of The Word
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· Score: 4, Insightful
I quote the article, as the author describes his......fear of being inundated by what are as far as I can tell a gang of "net thugs" who roam the net making outrageous claims about Microsoft and its behavior, motives, etc in every public forum they find (none of which information they are privy to, little of which they have evidence for, and basically all of which I find personally offensive, not to mention incorrect - since they often are implicitly about me and therefore I for one know them to be incorrect). But enough about that - let's just dive in and see what happens. Hopefully the net-dwelling paranoid delusional conspiracy theorists won't descend upon me...:-)
With respect, there are certainly plenty of lower-than-the-common-denominator internet users willing to throw an egg for no particularly good reason, but this writer is strikingly dishonest in his defense of his employer.
Microsoft is a monopolist who has profited tremendously from shipping user-antaganostic code under cover of standards-lock-in. This is hardly an "outrageous" accusation; rather, it's been established in the courts, but far more, it's common knowledge and indeed, a running joke.
The company's story is interesting because, when they see their monopoly threatened, they are capable of rising to the occasion and doing good work. But they are a classic victim of their success, indeed, at many times a classic monopolist, and they often have acted it. When there was no incentive for them to do a good job, they did a terrible one, smirking all the way to the bank.
And they are crystal clear in their mission - not to "provide better products faster" or whatever the PR materials say this week, but to enrich themselves. And if there is a choice between enriching themselves and providing better software faster, they make the "right" choice every time. But should Chris suggest I am a "thug" for saying so, I hope he will include the U.S. Department of Justice - who advanced the same idea, and prevailed in court.
Chris wants to breathlessly paint his company's critics with the straw-man tar brush - as he does so, he is being dishonest.
I did find his writing on his work to be fascinating, and I'd say he expresses himself well, and it's no surprise he's found the success he has within the company. But he curiously glosses over the role that OEM bundling played in the success of the Office franchise.
You see, as Microsoft sat on the backs of the computer manufacturers and twisted arms, it had an excellent position to "entice" bundling deals that would choke off a 3rd party software market like, say, office softawre, by making sure that their own products were conveniently already included on new computers for a reasonable price.
This is hardly as clear cut as what they did to control the browser or media player landscape, but does anyone (outside of a Microsoft manager with a certain proprietary interest in it being more about his own skill) have the audacity to suggest Word won the format war purely on its merits?
This is a perfect case of inventing a mountain where there isn't even a molehill.
Linuxant makes binary-only drivers. Well, there is disdain for these in the Linux community; fine. I respect that. But for people stuck with unsupported hardware (like me, on occasion) I don't see anyone rushing to my aid from the FSF/Gnu world. Hello, welcome to FS/OS, and goodbye. You're on your own, kid.
Yeah, in theory maybe without binary modules someone might be more motivated to do a whole open source driver from scratch. Except, in real life, where lots of hardware is so complex and software-driven these days that nobody is really suggesting any such thing will ever happen.
You're seeing devices now where proprietary software running the hardware is a significant portion of the total work that went into the product! This is not like supporting a new ethernet chip. Supporting some of these devices, from scracth, with no references, is half a career! For some wireless cards it's even a can of worms with the FCC - you could get into "trouble" for writing an OSS driver. Check out madwifi and their notes on the binary HAL.
So you've got what hardware you've got. The militant FS/OS people just told you to kiss off.
LinuxAnt, on the other hand, is there for you. Their prices are reasonable, their work is good (IMO), they support their customers better than most small software companies (I can say from experience), and they are supporting Linux by helping more people have a positive experience with it.
Some people complained about multiple taint messages, since because of the particular way this driver was organized there might be a lot of them. So they wrote a simple workaround to limit the number of taint messages. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think the (proper) "tainted" status of a kernel using the driver is even eliminated. It's just to stop redundant messages.
People can't seem to be bothered to even read up on this, and are trying to make it out as if they're pretending they're GPL, or they're trying to fool the kernel into not being "tainted." It's got little to do with the facts.
What's wrong with everybody? Yes, I agree if someone was trying to pass closed binary code as GPL, and foist it into the kernel while keeping it untainted that's a support nightmare. But this was no conspiracy. Do we enjoy an imaginary controversy? Is it fun to be persecuted? Can we at least do 60 seconds of homework before writing nasty screeds and "ban linuxant" kernel patches?
By the way, I had reasonably good luck getting my (G520) D-Link wireless working under Debian (w/ the 2.6.5 kernel) with the driver emulation package from LinuxAnt called DriverLoader. Commercial, sadly, but between that and madwifi (no Super G, etc etc)... Anyway, I _think_ it works for the PC Card as well.
Not perfect, and I had trouble until I went to the 2.6.5 kernel, but it does work (I was playing CounterStrike on it last night with a 20 ping).:)
What if I sneak into a Big Company's computers without their knowledge, using a hacking tool masquerading as a harmless program, or perhaps piggy-backing on a "legitimate" application, and then hide there, secretly reporting traffic and even keystrokes back to a central server? Let alone if I do it sloppily, slowing them down, crashing them, popping up distracting windows all the time?
I think I'd go to prison, don't you?
Why, I think there are some laws against doing that.
Now, switch Big Company with some anonymous little guy. And we debate about whether or not it should even be specifically against the law... Hah.
I think you're right and I kind of like the way you expressed that. But I feel compelled to add that this "fight" as you put it, this process of revising laws and working out new moral codes and legal fine tuning will be "reasonable" and beneficial to the extent that our democracy represents the interests of its citizens fairly and equally.
...unless you really know what you're in for, and are ready to talk about reforming our laws.
Our intellectual property laws, when interpreted strictly, are a bit of a farce. Especially when it comes to thinks like patents, work for hire, the nebulous concept of derived works, "clean rooms..." all the way down to the embattled idea of fair use, backups, lending versus copying, onerous and unenforcable NDAs and employment contracts, and the end fact that, as a society, we have never ever, even for a day, played by the basic copyright rules "100%."
Our whole industry functions by ignoring the rules most of the time. I have never worked anyplace where all the rules (licenses, for instance) were followed. I always follow them myself to the best of my abilities - but it's impossible. I've probably unintentionally violated a license by now, and I've almost certainly infringed thousands of patents. I have never brought code from one client to another without permission or license, not even once, not even when it would have saved untold time and money and was simply the most obvious, easy thing to do... but over the years I received quite a bit of pressure under various circumstances to do it, and I'm certain that quite a few other people do.
That said, because the SCO issue (or non-issue, to be frank) is raised, let me say that it's a different thought process when you're going between the commercial and the free software world - both because the pressures to cheat don't exist (or hardly to any similar extent) in OSS, and because it is almost certain in OSS you'll be caught out. It's like parking a stolen car on the street in front of your house.
But commercial project to commercial project, yes, I bet it happens quite often. And also from OSS to commercial - I would be shocked if there were many large commercial projects that don't have stolen OSS code in them...
Would someone in the know please, for the benefit of the crowd, enlighten us as to whether this entire exercise was, as much as anything else, to rid the mainstream "free software X" development of David Dawes?
From reading the coverage on slashdot so far and following the source material (including specific comments by major players that name his name), that's kind of the sense I get.
Of course, the process created more openness - you can say the openness is the primary reason, but again, from following the list archives, I got the sense he was a big part of why it wasn't so open in the first place...
The Content Trust(tm) has decreed that "the analog hole must be plugged." They must somehow enjoy this quixotic quest, chasing all over the countryside playing whack-a-mole with the work of so many individuals (and the products of so many companies so much bigger than they). And they've even showed up at nvidia's doorstep. "Look, you want to be in the video card business, not the lawsuit business. Are you sure you want to endanger your relationship with Mr. Capone?"
Meet our friend Mr. Macrovision. Phew, another glorious victory for the Content Trust(tm) over the Stupid/Evil Consumer(tm)!
What's positively hilarious about this is that no one gives a shit about copying content back to analog. Hello - it's 2004, people. This perfectly exemplifies the stuck-in-the-distantly-receeding-past mentality these guys have. Analog hole? What about the gaping digital hole? People who bother are copying straight to their computer! Fully 3/4 of the people reading this probably haven't used their VCRs since they last dusted off the video store's copy of Capricorn One.
Yet the Trust still races around showing everyone who's boss. That Macrovision protection is important! Ignore it at your peril! Hah.
All this will accomplish is that more people who use their computer with their TV are going to have a problem.
And those people will get angry. Who wouldn't? What an insult! They will soon learn about the foreign, boring field of intellectual property law - it's neither so foreign nor so boring anymore. They'll also learn about the messy campaign the Content Trust(tm) is running to hijack it.
They will find that, to watch their own videos, they need to go into the back alley, to meet the Dread Pirates(tm)... only, look how friendly and helpful they are. "I think I'll remember them - I'll probably be back again soon."
What you describe as a "standard of living" should not be glossed over so easily. Consider, what makes the 1st world more expensive than the 3rd?
I doubt anyone in the U.S. is really expecting a house and two cars these days, and eating out every night? Let's be realistic. But 3 weeks of vacation isn't such a lot to ask. Perhaps you think a person should only expect 2 weeks, or one. Maybe 15 days off a year is a luxury you think worthy of ridicule. I wonder about your opinion of a $12k a year minimum wage, or an 8 hour workday. But this is all just scratching the surface.
When you say "standard of living" - let's look at the differences. Functioning police and criminal justice, firemen, building codes and inspectors to enforce them, a real medical infrastructure, schools that can have the resources to do any kind of a decent job, about, yes, workplace safety regulations, insurance so that an injury on the job isn't a one-way trip to begging in the street, or death from starvation. Yes, all of these things cost money. They also make money - because when you do them, you evolve past the medieval caste system and create a functioning middle class. It turns out this is very good for your economy. One of the simplest reasons is that aristocrats may not spend all that they earn - some portion of their hoard can be, is often static, but middle and lower classes can, indeed often must spend their income.
We used to be like the 3rd world here, and we reformed. We didn't do it by getting rich first, as you will undoubtedly suggest. We got rich by reforming. And by saying that national borders can contain arbitrary laws, but they don't contain trade, we abandon these reforms - and through sleight of hand, no less.
Now lets look at how you help the 3rd world get out of poverty. Do you say - let's trade with them, and then maybe they'll modernize? And hey, whether they do or not... it's their affair. Wink wink.
Or do you say, modernize, and we'll trade more freely with you. Start with the stuff that doesn't cost you money. Eliminate those jail-without-trial practices. Get a little more democratic. Release those political prisoners. How about mandating an 8-hour workday? Stop "disappearing" those "troublemakers." OK, cut the tarrifs a little more, and a little more.
But it seems what is different between your approach and mine is that you advocate trading freely whether they reform or not. And this trade is arbitrated by the companies that have a vested interested in making sure they do not - because profits depend on it.
Good luck. This is like psychotherapy. Very profitable for the shrink, and it will be a long, hard road etc. for the patient and after so many years, strangely, the patient is basically still where they started, but with a bit more jargon to show for it.
Would you admit that Burma or Guatemala are good examples of how your policy works out? And we are not without examples of what I am advocating. Look at the hoops Turkey is willing to jump through to join the EU! Turkish prisons are already losing their old-world charm.
At this point I believe that I have now thoroughly and amply rebutted every point in your two additional posts, but if you like, write back, and I will reiterate.
The too-ruthless pursuit of efficiency led us, through hard, painful, repeptitive experience, to the very reforms free trade is designed to destroy. Business owners have always, through history, found the local maxima of Laissez Faire... ironically, it's as bad for them as it is for the massive underclass it both creates and requires. And this has been well demonstrated - so well that Laissez Faire enjoys its current disrepute...
After all, no one would actually advocate running a Burmese factory here, it would be wrong. At least, wrong as long as we might drive past it.
What legal hurdles? There's no law against it, or even regulating it. Worse, any such law would be nearly unenforceable. There is no port, no customs desk on the internet.
What tax hurdles? I've hired foreign works and contractors (not from India, from Western Europe - but to our gov't, it's the same thing). There's no tax problem.
What language barrier? They all speak english.
They manage themselves, or you don't hire them - you hire their better competition. Still 1/4 of American prices.
Nonetheless, 3rd party services doing the outsouring will indeed be a big part of how it happens.
CATO's advertised philosophy isn't supposed to make it "less silly." Its to contrast it with modern academia that does have a perspective though it likes to advertise itself as sactified,un-silly, and unbiased.
Manipulators love to talk about "bias" - because they cannot imagine anyone who doesn't think like them. They really can't get their heads around the fact that, often (though hardly always) academic consensus forms around the truth - frequently because the truth is obvious.
They merely stand on the fringes and say: it is in my interests (so I believe) to convince people otherwise. So I will call all of "modern academia" biased. As if you could forget that proponents of your own ideas had plenty of shots at making their case to their peers, but were always, in the end, laughed out of the room.
As they will always be, in any room where the occupants you argue with are relatively non-credulous and moderately educated, and you can't intimidate them with threats, violence or other elaborate conspiracies.
Realize the parallel of your statement is that a country that enslaves its population, makes them work for no money but houses and feeds them will have a more efficient economy than a country that allows its labor to earn and spend their own money. Do you really agree with this?
That is not a parallel of my statement, so I do not agree with it.
You're amusing - trying to conflate slavery with a command economy.
I am sure, despite your best efforts, people will continue to understand that what is most economically efficient != what is best for the people in the economy.
The South used to produce cotton so efficiently, you'd think it was picked by slaves.
Show me where Cato has advocated using force or fraud to acquire workers.
You want me to repeat myself? They advocate Laissez Faire. In other words, if I can "find a way" for something to be cheaper, then it should win in the marketplace. By definition, they care less about how I "find a way" than is generally acceptable American in society.
Force and fraud are the bare minimum standard of entry in today's Free Trading global economy.
Let me be crystal clear on this, so I don't have to explain it a third time. You advocate for force or fraud when you spout nonsense made to sound like economics justifying how workers in the 3rd world should abused every day making our sneakers, our plastic lawn ornaments, our campaign T-shirts... all while you look the other way. Smirking as Americans try compete with 4 cents a day.
You have some audacity to ask that question, sir.
Oh, you wanted me to show you where they bluntly admit this? Hah. Good one. You're like someone asking for proof that they got in a fight... from their hospital bed.
I don't know. I see your point, but I think in the long run there really isn't that big a difference hiring a contractor here or in another country. I guess I don't believe the overhead of overseas outsourcing is that big a factor. Especially given the price differential, we are still talking about, for the small business, paying less or paying more.
There will always be companies who want to (or need to) sit right on top of the development process for various reasons - and however many of those companies there will be in the U.S., that will be what's left of the domestic job market. But I don't know if I'd bet that's small businesses in general.
"Preaching interventionism" is a very deceptive way to descrive teaching the economic history of the wealthiest nation on earth.
You knew what kind of a view you were getting from the Soviets, too. A Soviet-Communist view. As if that kind of thinking makes Cato any less silly.
Laissez Faire is exactly about worker exploitation. Because it is the most ruthless pursuit of efficiency - and if you can, through deceit or violence, convince people to work for free, slaves are, after all, more efficient than paid labor. Laissez Faire is a clever code for saying that profit is more important to you than democracy or human rights.
There are many barriers to "progress" in this modern world. Laissez Faire advocates are reduced to conflating those that are necessary (like weekends off, for instance) with those that are pernicious (like the RIAA, for instance)...
But if you really want to see Cato's theories in action, you can visit anywhere in our planet's generous 3rd world, where Laissez Faire indeed reigns supreme, just as it did here, before we finally, inch by painful inch, evolved.
As a warning to readers, the Cato Institute is hardly a respected academic or politically neutral source for information. In general, I consider their positions on the issue convoluted enough that I guess they are actually intended to deceive.
Cato advocates what could be called classic Laissez Faire capitalism, and since they oppose the worker reforms that have made America rich over the last 50 years, they are naturally proponents of Free Trade, a political sleight-of-hand for eliminating those progressive reforms.
Free trade is about benefiting from illegal corporate practices (such as worker abuse) by simply allowing American companies to do it overseas, and letting the market do the rest.
If you're interested in some actual straight views on the subject, read more here.
University costs a lot of money, so much now that you really have little choice but to make your investment count.
Sad as it is, if I am objective about it, I would have to discourage young people I know from going into the discipline myself. Even if computer science has a future in this country at all, young people today can only look forward to the long, painful and endless contraction of the domestic market for these jobs.
Software engineering is especially vulnerable to offshoring - much more so than previously decimated domestic industries. There are no tarrifs and no transportation costs. This is freer trade than most had previously dreamed of.
It's satisfying, isn't it, to watch these hapless politicians snared by metadata.
But take a moment to remember what metadata is for. What it represents.
The Soviets, I'm told, used to put serial numbers on xerox machines (and think about the fact that we are now planning on putting them on CPUs - but I digress). In a totalitarian society, information technology is a dangerous weapon.
Metadata, while it has many prosaic uses, is the tip of the surveillance iceberg in Microsoft's Office suite. In addition to parroting whatever you typed when you installed Office or changed Word's preferences, documents are tagged with GUIDs designed to uniquely identify your computer.
All of these features would never see the light of day in any office software I had anything to do with. Because, despite whatever benefits they may have, they are Soviet. They violate our privacy. They are part of an expanding constellation of invasive technologies that are rapidly eroding our very expectation of privacy - and, while not many know it yet, you don't want to live in a world without privacy.
We have only one consolation prize for what seems like the public's powerful apathy when it comes to their privacy. It exposed the pathetic government functionary, Bill Lockyer, for the weasel that he is - and there have been other, humorously similar revelations.
Here is the silver lining of the surveillance society. The hope, or perhaps the dream, that we can at least surveil those in power.
There are, of course, times where national security or respect for its citizens will require that our elected leaders keep secrets. But those times are far, and few between, in the whole scope of the government's business. And there are even ways to put checks and balances on the decisions about what should be secret and what shouldn't.
If you think about it, a real Democracy practically requires it. The Big Brother Show should be in Washington - and our politicians, and their pet bureaucrats, should be the stars. They shouldn't have a moment off camera. It's the public life, after all.
I just know I'm going to get every partisan in the place foamed up by saying this, but the Clinton DOJ was actually pursuing the MS antitrust case, and the Bush people dropped it like a hot rock.
IANAL but I know the industry, and so do most of you. Let's be realistic. MS basically got off with a "please don't do it again, OK?"
And then they immediately started doing it again.
The only way in the long run to stop this "compete with anything but quality and price" attitude is for the government to finally enforce the antitrust law. And that may only happen if you all vote.
The Bush people seem perfectly happy with the Microsoft status quo. So, process of elimination...
Slashdot Mirror
I'm supposed to write software in a world where software can be patented?
Then every piece of code anyone writes is a ticking patent time-bomb.
So lets pretend we can have a patent office thoroughly staffed with geniuses gifted with eidetic memories and a sublime sense of of what is original and patent-worthy.
I'm supposed to read the entire patent database (hundreds of thousands of records)? And then once I finish that I only have to keep current with new grants (let alone new applications) - that's probably only dozens or hundreds a day...
Yeah, right. But then if someone comes along and wants a ransom for their patent on dereferencing pointers on Tuesdays or whatever seemed original and innovative 18 months ago, I'll either have to pay up or spend a few million to take on the fight in civil court...
I'm sorry - software patents are ridiculous. Your steel mill will invest in R&D to lower its energy costs, or it won't. But software patents don't create an incentive to do anything other than run for the hills. It's legitimizing barratry - the only winners are the lawyers, for the steel mill, the companies the steel mill sues, and for the other companies that will sue the steel mill for violating their patents, and so on and so forth, forever and ever...
Software patents are thought of by their proponents as a weapon against free software, and a cudgel against less wealthy competitors. And if they accrue enough legitimacy, within our lifetimes the software engineering discipline will be so clogged with them that practically no one can write software except in secret, no matter well you think the patent office can run. It's sadly ironic, really, that you think they spur any kind of innovation, when all they do is insure that no two good ideas are ever likely to be used together without a legal negotiation first...
It's true. While the Stephenson Diamond Age was an interesting idea, I think the William Gibson conception of these devices is far more likely - that nanotech becomes the next Weapon of Mass Destruction. The technology will be closely guarded, used only by the wealthy and elite, and (as long as we can prevent it), never, even for one fatal instant, let out into the world.
I predict, 20 years from now, if we have nanotechnology as these authors envision it, you'll have a better chance of seeing a consumer hydrogen bomb than seeing consumer nanotech.
Which is not to say you won't have nanotech-manufactured things... just that you won't be manufacturing them.
Fascinating that this movie should become so topical again.
Dr. Edward Morbius: In times long past, this planet was the home of a mighty, noble race of beings who called themselves the Krel. Ethically and technologically they were a million years ahead of humankind, for in unlocking the meaning of nature they had conquered even their baser selves, and when in the course of eons they had abolished sickness and insanity, crime and all injustice, they turned, still in high benevolence, upwards towards space. Then, having reached the heights, this all-but-divine race disappeared in a single night, and nothing was preserved above ground.
(I'd hate to give away the ending, but it's extremely relevant to this story! Rent it and see for yourself!)
Better to throw them in "court" based on a few million pieces of prima-facie evidence called "their spam."
Let's stop trying to make excuses; the government has utterly failed in its duty to prosecute blatant, obvious cases of egregious fraud (and many other kinds of criminal activity; pump & dump, illegal drugs, younameit) - that were broadcast to millions of Americans and reached more people than many TV shows.
And if they proceed in prosecuting people at this puny rate, I would say they are continuing to fail.
Yeah, sure, if we lock up all the domestic spammers, we'll still get spam from Africa and China, but let's actually get to that point first, and deal with it then.
I don't know about anyone else, but for many orgs I know spam is reaching a kind of crisis point, where anyone who has to publish their address is, within a matter of months, getting hundreds of spam for every few legitimate messages. It is rendering email useless.
A minor economic setback, I guess? Too trivial for the feds to bestir themselves?
CAN SPAM is a sad joke, but the punch line is that someone may have actually waited for it to go after these guys...
I quote the article, as the author describes his... ...fear of being inundated by what are as far as I can tell a gang of "net thugs" who roam the net making outrageous claims about Microsoft and its behavior, motives, etc in every public forum they find (none of which information they are privy to, little of which they have evidence for, and basically all of which I find personally offensive, not to mention incorrect - since they often are implicitly about me and therefore I for one know them to be incorrect). But enough about that - let's just dive in and see what happens. Hopefully the net-dwelling paranoid delusional conspiracy theorists won't descend upon me... :-)
With respect, there are certainly plenty of lower-than-the-common-denominator internet users willing to throw an egg for no particularly good reason, but this writer is strikingly dishonest in his defense of his employer.
Microsoft is a monopolist who has profited tremendously from shipping user-antaganostic code under cover of standards-lock-in. This is hardly an "outrageous" accusation; rather, it's been established in the courts, but far more, it's common knowledge and indeed, a running joke.
The company's story is interesting because, when they see their monopoly threatened, they are capable of rising to the occasion and doing good work. But they are a classic victim of their success, indeed, at many times a classic monopolist, and they often have acted it. When there was no incentive for them to do a good job, they did a terrible one, smirking all the way to the bank.
And they are crystal clear in their mission - not to "provide better products faster" or whatever the PR materials say this week, but to enrich themselves. And if there is a choice between enriching themselves and providing better software faster, they make the "right" choice every time. But should Chris suggest I am a "thug" for saying so, I hope he will include the U.S. Department of Justice - who advanced the same idea, and prevailed in court.
Chris wants to breathlessly paint his company's critics with the straw-man tar brush - as he does so, he is being dishonest.
I did find his writing on his work to be fascinating, and I'd say he expresses himself well, and it's no surprise he's found the success he has within the company. But he curiously glosses over the role that OEM bundling played in the success of the Office franchise.
You see, as Microsoft sat on the backs of the computer manufacturers and twisted arms, it had an excellent position to "entice" bundling deals that would choke off a 3rd party software market like, say, office softawre, by making sure that their own products were conveniently already included on new computers for a reasonable price.
This is hardly as clear cut as what they did to control the browser or media player landscape, but does anyone (outside of a Microsoft manager with a certain proprietary interest in it being more about his own skill) have the audacity to suggest Word won the format war purely on its merits?
This is a perfect case of inventing a mountain where there isn't even a molehill.
Linuxant makes binary-only drivers. Well, there is disdain for these in the Linux community; fine. I respect that. But for people stuck with unsupported hardware (like me, on occasion) I don't see anyone rushing to my aid from the FSF/Gnu world. Hello, welcome to FS/OS, and goodbye. You're on your own, kid.
Yeah, in theory maybe without binary modules someone might be more motivated to do a whole open source driver from scratch. Except, in real life, where lots of hardware is so complex and software-driven these days that nobody is really suggesting any such thing will ever happen.
You're seeing devices now where proprietary software running the hardware is a significant portion of the total work that went into the product! This is not like supporting a new ethernet chip. Supporting some of these devices, from scracth, with no references, is half a career! For some wireless cards it's even a can of worms with the FCC - you could get into "trouble" for writing an OSS driver. Check out madwifi and their notes on the binary HAL.
So you've got what hardware you've got. The militant FS/OS people just told you to kiss off.
LinuxAnt, on the other hand, is there for you. Their prices are reasonable, their work is good (IMO), they support their customers better than most small software companies (I can say from experience), and they are supporting Linux by helping more people have a positive experience with it.
Some people complained about multiple taint messages, since because of the particular way this driver was organized there might be a lot of them. So they wrote a simple workaround to limit the number of taint messages. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think the (proper) "tainted" status of a kernel using the driver is even eliminated. It's just to stop redundant messages.
People can't seem to be bothered to even read up on this, and are trying to make it out as if they're pretending they're GPL, or they're trying to fool the kernel into not being "tainted." It's got little to do with the facts.
What's wrong with everybody? Yes, I agree if someone was trying to pass closed binary code as GPL, and foist it into the kernel while keeping it untainted that's a support nightmare. But this was no conspiracy. Do we enjoy an imaginary controversy? Is it fun to be persecuted? Can we at least do 60 seconds of homework before writing nasty screeds and "ban linuxant" kernel patches?
By the way, I had reasonably good luck getting my (G520) D-Link wireless working under Debian (w/ the 2.6.5 kernel) with the driver emulation package from LinuxAnt called DriverLoader. Commercial, sadly, but between that and madwifi (no Super G, etc etc)... Anyway, I _think_ it works for the PC Card as well.
:)
Not perfect, and I had trouble until I went to the 2.6.5 kernel, but it does work (I was playing CounterStrike on it last night with a 20 ping).
What if I sneak into a Big Company's computers without their knowledge, using a hacking tool masquerading as a harmless program, or perhaps piggy-backing on a "legitimate" application, and then hide there, secretly reporting traffic and even keystrokes back to a central server? Let alone if I do it sloppily, slowing them down, crashing them, popping up distracting windows all the time?
I think I'd go to prison, don't you?
Why, I think there are some laws against doing that.
Now, switch Big Company with some anonymous little guy. And we debate about whether or not it should even be specifically against the law... Hah.
I think you're right and I kind of like the way you expressed that. But I feel compelled to add that this "fight" as you put it, this process of revising laws and working out new moral codes and legal fine tuning will be "reasonable" and beneficial to the extent that our democracy represents the interests of its citizens fairly and equally.
You can draw your own conclusions from there.
...unless you really know what you're in for, and are ready to talk about reforming our laws.
Our intellectual property laws, when interpreted strictly, are a bit of a farce. Especially when it comes to thinks like patents, work for hire, the nebulous concept of derived works, "clean rooms..." all the way down to the embattled idea of fair use, backups, lending versus copying, onerous and unenforcable NDAs and employment contracts, and the end fact that, as a society, we have never ever, even for a day, played by the basic copyright rules "100%."
Our whole industry functions by ignoring the rules most of the time. I have never worked anyplace where all the rules (licenses, for instance) were followed. I always follow them myself to the best of my abilities - but it's impossible. I've probably unintentionally violated a license by now, and I've almost certainly infringed thousands of patents. I have never brought code from one client to another without permission or license, not even once, not even when it would have saved untold time and money and was simply the most obvious, easy thing to do... but over the years I received quite a bit of pressure under various circumstances to do it, and I'm certain that quite a few other people do.
That said, because the SCO issue (or non-issue, to be frank) is raised, let me say that it's a different thought process when you're going between the commercial and the free software world - both because the pressures to cheat don't exist (or hardly to any similar extent) in OSS, and because it is almost certain in OSS you'll be caught out. It's like parking a stolen car on the street in front of your house.
But commercial project to commercial project, yes, I bet it happens quite often. And also from OSS to commercial - I would be shocked if there were many large commercial projects that don't have stolen OSS code in them...
Would someone in the know please, for the benefit of the crowd, enlighten us as to whether this entire exercise was, as much as anything else, to rid the mainstream "free software X" development of David Dawes?
From reading the coverage on slashdot so far and following the source material (including specific comments by major players that name his name), that's kind of the sense I get.
Of course, the process created more openness - you can say the openness is the primary reason, but again, from following the list archives, I got the sense he was a big part of why it wasn't so open in the first place...
If you have sarge or sid, why wait? It's too easy!
I was able to apt-get the 2.6.3 release, and it "just worked."
Basically you can blast away at the disk and the system feels as solid as a rock - barely hesitates at anything.
It made windows seem so annoying by comparison that I finally switched.
The Content Trust(tm) has decreed that "the analog hole must be plugged." They must somehow enjoy this quixotic quest, chasing all over the countryside playing whack-a-mole with the work of so many individuals (and the products of so many companies so much bigger than they). And they've even showed up at nvidia's doorstep. "Look, you want to be in the video card business, not the lawsuit business. Are you sure you want to endanger your relationship with Mr. Capone?"
Meet our friend Mr. Macrovision. Phew, another glorious victory for the Content Trust(tm) over the Stupid/Evil Consumer(tm)!
What's positively hilarious about this is that no one gives a shit about copying content back to analog. Hello - it's 2004, people. This perfectly exemplifies the stuck-in-the-distantly-receeding-past mentality these guys have. Analog hole? What about the gaping digital hole? People who bother are copying straight to their computer! Fully 3/4 of the people reading this probably haven't used their VCRs since they last dusted off the video store's copy of Capricorn One.
Yet the Trust still races around showing everyone who's boss. That Macrovision protection is important! Ignore it at your peril! Hah.
All this will accomplish is that more people who use their computer with their TV are going to have a problem.
And those people will get angry. Who wouldn't? What an insult! They will soon learn about the foreign, boring field of intellectual property law - it's neither so foreign nor so boring anymore. They'll also learn about the messy campaign the Content Trust(tm) is running to hijack it.
They will find that, to watch their own videos, they need to go into the back alley, to meet the Dread Pirates(tm)... only, look how friendly and helpful they are. "I think I'll remember them - I'll probably be back again soon."
What you describe as a "standard of living" should not be glossed over so easily. Consider, what makes the 1st world more expensive than the 3rd?
I doubt anyone in the U.S. is really expecting a house and two cars these days, and eating out every night? Let's be realistic. But 3 weeks of vacation isn't such a lot to ask. Perhaps you think a person should only expect 2 weeks, or one. Maybe 15 days off a year is a luxury you think worthy of ridicule. I wonder about your opinion of a $12k a year minimum wage, or an 8 hour workday. But this is all just scratching the surface.
When you say "standard of living" - let's look at the differences. Functioning police and criminal justice, firemen, building codes and inspectors to enforce them, a real medical infrastructure, schools that can have the resources to do any kind of a decent job, about, yes, workplace safety regulations, insurance so that an injury on the job isn't a one-way trip to begging in the street, or death from starvation. Yes, all of these things cost money. They also make money - because when you do them, you evolve past the medieval caste system and create a functioning middle class. It turns out this is very good for your economy. One of the simplest reasons is that aristocrats may not spend all that they earn - some portion of their hoard can be, is often static, but middle and lower classes can, indeed often must spend their income.
We used to be like the 3rd world here, and we reformed. We didn't do it by getting rich first, as you will undoubtedly suggest. We got rich by reforming. And by saying that national borders can contain arbitrary laws, but they don't contain trade, we abandon these reforms - and through sleight of hand, no less.
Now lets look at how you help the 3rd world get out of poverty. Do you say - let's trade with them, and then maybe they'll modernize? And hey, whether they do or not... it's their affair. Wink wink.
Or do you say, modernize, and we'll trade more freely with you. Start with the stuff that doesn't cost you money. Eliminate those jail-without-trial practices. Get a little more democratic. Release those political prisoners. How about mandating an 8-hour workday? Stop "disappearing" those "troublemakers." OK, cut the tarrifs a little more, and a little more.
But it seems what is different between your approach and mine is that you advocate trading freely whether they reform or not. And this trade is arbitrated by the companies that have a vested interested in making sure they do not - because profits depend on it.
Good luck. This is like psychotherapy. Very profitable for the shrink, and it will be a long, hard road etc. for the patient and after so many years, strangely, the patient is basically still where they started, but with a bit more jargon to show for it.
Would you admit that Burma or Guatemala are good examples of how your policy works out? And we are not without examples of what I am advocating. Look at the hoops Turkey is willing to jump through to join the EU! Turkish prisons are already losing their old-world charm.
At this point I believe that I have now thoroughly and amply rebutted every point in your two additional posts, but if you like, write back, and I will reiterate.
The too-ruthless pursuit of efficiency led us, through hard, painful, repeptitive experience, to the very reforms free trade is designed to destroy. Business owners have always, through history, found the local maxima of Laissez Faire... ironically, it's as bad for them as it is for the massive underclass it both creates and requires. And this has been well demonstrated - so well that Laissez Faire enjoys its current disrepute...
After all, no one would actually advocate running a Burmese factory here, it would be wrong. At least, wrong as long as we might drive past it.
What legal hurdles? There's no law against it, or even regulating it. Worse, any such law would be nearly unenforceable. There is no port, no customs desk on the internet.
What tax hurdles? I've hired foreign works and contractors (not from India, from Western Europe - but to our gov't, it's the same thing). There's no tax problem.
What language barrier? They all speak english.
They manage themselves, or you don't hire them - you hire their better competition. Still 1/4 of American prices.
Nonetheless, 3rd party services doing the outsouring will indeed be a big part of how it happens.
CATO's advertised philosophy isn't supposed to make it "less silly." Its to contrast it with modern academia that does have a perspective though it likes to advertise itself as sactified,un-silly, and unbiased.
Manipulators love to talk about "bias" - because they cannot imagine anyone who doesn't think like them. They really can't get their heads around the fact that, often (though hardly always) academic consensus forms around the truth - frequently because the truth is obvious.
They merely stand on the fringes and say: it is in my interests (so I believe) to convince people otherwise. So I will call all of "modern academia" biased. As if you could forget that proponents of your own ideas had plenty of shots at making their case to their peers, but were always, in the end, laughed out of the room.
As they will always be, in any room where the occupants you argue with are relatively non-credulous and moderately educated, and you can't intimidate them with threats, violence or other elaborate conspiracies.
Realize the parallel of your statement is that a country that enslaves its population, makes them work for no money but houses and feeds them will have a more efficient economy than a country that allows its labor to earn and spend their own money. Do you really agree with this?
That is not a parallel of my statement, so I do not agree with it.
You're amusing - trying to conflate slavery with a command economy.
I am sure, despite your best efforts, people will continue to understand that what is most economically efficient != what is best for the people in the economy.
The South used to produce cotton so efficiently, you'd think it was picked by slaves.
Show me where Cato has advocated using force or fraud to acquire workers.
You want me to repeat myself? They advocate Laissez Faire. In other words, if I can "find a way" for something to be cheaper, then it should win in the marketplace. By definition, they care less about how I "find a way" than is generally acceptable American in society.
Force and fraud are the bare minimum standard of entry in today's Free Trading global economy.
Let me be crystal clear on this, so I don't have to explain it a third time. You advocate for force or fraud when you spout nonsense made to sound like economics justifying how workers in the 3rd world should abused every day making our sneakers, our plastic lawn ornaments, our campaign T-shirts... all while you look the other way. Smirking as Americans try compete with 4 cents a day.
You have some audacity to ask that question, sir.
Oh, you wanted me to show you where they bluntly admit this? Hah. Good one. You're like someone asking for proof that they got in a fight... from their hospital bed.
I don't know. I see your point, but I think in the long run there really isn't that big a difference hiring a contractor here or in another country. I guess I don't believe the overhead of overseas outsourcing is that big a factor. Especially given the price differential, we are still talking about, for the small business, paying less or paying more.
There will always be companies who want to (or need to) sit right on top of the development process for various reasons - and however many of those companies there will be in the U.S., that will be what's left of the domestic job market. But I don't know if I'd bet that's small businesses in general.
"Preaching interventionism" is a very deceptive way to descrive teaching the economic history of the wealthiest nation on earth.
You knew what kind of a view you were getting from the Soviets, too. A Soviet-Communist view. As if that kind of thinking makes Cato any less silly.
Laissez Faire is exactly about worker exploitation. Because it is the most ruthless pursuit of efficiency - and if you can, through deceit or violence, convince people to work for free, slaves are, after all, more efficient than paid labor. Laissez Faire is a clever code for saying that profit is more important to you than democracy or human rights.
There are many barriers to "progress" in this modern world. Laissez Faire advocates are reduced to conflating those that are necessary (like weekends off, for instance) with those that are pernicious (like the RIAA, for instance)...
But if you really want to see Cato's theories in action, you can visit anywhere in our planet's generous 3rd world, where Laissez Faire indeed reigns supreme, just as it did here, before we finally, inch by painful inch, evolved.
Why do you think a small business is less able or likely to outsource?
I submit that, in fact, they are, if anything, only more motivated to do so.
As a warning to readers, the Cato Institute is hardly a respected academic or politically neutral source for information. In general, I consider their positions on the issue convoluted enough that I guess they are actually intended to deceive.
Cato advocates what could be called classic Laissez Faire capitalism, and since they oppose the worker reforms that have made America rich over the last 50 years, they are naturally proponents of Free Trade, a political sleight-of-hand for eliminating those progressive reforms.
Free trade is about benefiting from illegal corporate practices (such as worker abuse) by simply allowing American companies to do it overseas, and letting the market do the rest.
If you're interested in some actual straight views on the subject, read more here.
University costs a lot of money, so much now that you really have little choice but to make your investment count.
Sad as it is, if I am objective about it, I would have to discourage young people I know from going into the discipline myself. Even if computer science has a future in this country at all, young people today can only look forward to the long, painful and endless contraction of the domestic market for these jobs.
Software engineering is especially vulnerable to offshoring - much more so than previously decimated domestic industries. There are no tarrifs and no transportation costs. This is freer trade than most had previously dreamed of.
It's satisfying, isn't it, to watch these hapless politicians snared by metadata.
But take a moment to remember what metadata is for. What it represents.
The Soviets, I'm told, used to put serial numbers on xerox machines (and think about the fact that we are now planning on putting them on CPUs - but I digress). In a totalitarian society, information technology is a dangerous weapon.
Metadata, while it has many prosaic uses, is the tip of the surveillance iceberg in Microsoft's Office suite. In addition to parroting whatever you typed when you installed Office or changed Word's preferences, documents are tagged with GUIDs designed to uniquely identify your computer.
All of these features would never see the light of day in any office software I had anything to do with. Because, despite whatever benefits they may have, they are Soviet. They violate our privacy. They are part of an expanding constellation of invasive technologies that are rapidly eroding our very expectation of privacy - and, while not many know it yet, you don't want to live in a world without privacy.
We have only one consolation prize for what seems like the public's powerful apathy when it comes to their privacy. It exposed the pathetic government functionary, Bill Lockyer, for the weasel that he is - and there have been other, humorously similar revelations.
Here is the silver lining of the surveillance society. The hope, or perhaps the dream, that we can at least surveil those in power.
There are, of course, times where national security or respect for its citizens will require that our elected leaders keep secrets. But those times are far, and few between, in the whole scope of the government's business. And there are even ways to put checks and balances on the decisions about what should be secret and what shouldn't.
If you think about it, a real Democracy practically requires it. The Big Brother Show should be in Washington - and our politicians, and their pet bureaucrats, should be the stars. They shouldn't have a moment off camera. It's the public life, after all.
What an asshole.
I just know I'm going to get every partisan in the place foamed up by saying this, but the Clinton DOJ was actually pursuing the MS antitrust case, and the Bush people dropped it like a hot rock.
.
IANAL but I know the industry, and so do most of you. Let's be realistic. MS basically got off with a "please don't do it again, OK?"
And then they immediately started doing it again.
The only way in the long run to stop this "compete with anything but quality and price" attitude is for the government to finally enforce the antitrust law. And that may only happen if you all vote
The Bush people seem perfectly happy with the Microsoft status quo. So, process of elimination...