A friend of mine, a Rwandese educated at Harvard, worked for a US legal firm. One day he was asked to go on a long-term mission to Nigeria for an oil firm client. He balked, quoting Nigeria's reputation for danger. He was offered a nice bonus, travel costs, and so he went. When I visited him in Lagos, he had installed himself in a nice house, with a cook, driver, security guards. He played golf twice a week, spent the weekends at the beach, and too many evenings at the clubs in Victoria Island.
Every few months he would return to head office, and make a report. His report would inevitably end with remarks about the insecurity in Lagos, the need for constant armed protection, the power cuts and the lack of facilities. Since his work was bringing in lots of money, his firm inevitably gave him a pay rise and extended his mission.
Expatriates tend to suffer from diseases of luxury. They don't pay taxes, their savings go 10-100 times further, they get privileged positions, and if good, they are valued for their expertise and cultural baggage.
The only problem: they tend to die divorced and alcoholic. Decadence is too cheap in some places!
We are looking at something to replace our ageing CVS system. We have large OSS projects, worked on by teams of 3-10 people. CVS is very good for what it does but we are feeling its limitations. The biggest problems are that forks are too delicate to use, so we don't use them, and that in order to work you need access to the central archive.
Darcs looked like the best choice. We converted and imported some of our archives. Then we tried checking them out. With CVS, 2-3 minutes. With darcs, 30 minutes.
Our conclusion: darcs is not scalable. Admittedly our code base is large and has a huge history, but in order to use darcs we would have had to break our projects into many small pieces, each with their own repository.
Darcs looks good. But it needs to be made much, much faster if it's to work with large projects.
The irony of your comment - which is probably accurate - is that a majority of the companies you mention are highly dependent on OSS in different ways, at the very least in their R&D labs but also in their infrastructure, and quite often in their products.
The problem with software patents is very simple and it is this: software is not a traditional industry in which invention is expensive and needs protection. In software invention is the process itself. When a vague notion of patents is applied to the software development process it rapidly becomes a land-grab in which a few wealthy groups control access to primary technologies.
The sheer volume and complexity of software inventions makes patents almost impossible to assign in a fair manner. Thus the small developer - from whom most innovation comes - is penalized in favour of larger, richer ones. Note the cost of a patent application: EUR 10,000 and more.
The discussion is in fact moot. Software patents will come about thanks to the skillful lobbying of a few concerned companies, the willful ignorance of many others, and the compliant corruption of our politicians. Software patents will, inevitably, turn into a major source of income for some companies whose existing markets are shrinking, and software patents will become a tax on innovation that will eventually be as intolerable as the telecoms monopolies once were.
The only downside? This scenario will take at least 20 and perhaps more years to play out. In the meantime, independent software developers will be forced to base themselves in patent-free nations, or go out of business.
We are in for a very sad and turbulent era, in which the inevitable forces of technology commoditization (which OSS is an expression of) are being fought tooth and nail by the firms threatened. Technology commoditization is the only real route to productivity, to better living standards, and to increases in overall wealth. Patents - and especially software patents - are a clear and present threat to that.
You don't need to live there, so long as your company is registered there and you conform to its IP laws. When someone decides to sue you for infringement, they have to file suit in Freetown. At which point the fun begins.
Liberia is just an example. There are lots of places where this would work... Congo, Angola, Nigeria... heck. The only issue would be to convince your clients that your business is legitimate. That's easier if you are part of a crowd.
This is why most of the world's commercial ships are registered in such places.
The use of alarms has a definite impact on ease of use. In our building, the number of people coming and going at different times makes it impossible to secure the entire building. There are alarms but they don't get used.
So here, usability and security are in conflict, and usability wins.
However, we've created a secure zone which has our real offices (as compared to the large insecure garage space which is basically a place for parties and such), and here we have very secure windows, and a nice secure door with keypad and ID badges.
In the case of the offices, the keypad / ID badges are actually simpler than anything else. Swipe your badge, door opens, system registers you.
So security and usability can go together, but it has to be realistic and probably, appropriate. Trying to secure a large perimeter with too much traffic is an uphill struggle. Securing a well-defined perimeter with just one or two entry points is much more realistic.
Security is about making choices and one of the most important is: what not to secure.
It's the difference between the garden and the house.
It will burst but the timescales are not the same as for most other bubbles.
The difference is this: other bubbles work by inflating the prospects of future returns on investment, creating a pyramid scheme in which new investors are lured by the prospect of huge rewards while old investors sell out and actually make the rewards. When the pool of new investors runs out, bubble bursts and granny loses her savings.
The patents bubble is not based on this model at all. Rather, it's a scheme by which a small group of people have turned the law into a tool for extortion. As long as they don't extort more from the system than it can bear, the business of patents will continue. At a certain moment the tax that this creates on normal business activity will cause those economies which allow it to become uncompetitive and thus die.
The end-game for the patent players is to get a global hegemony because then uncompetitiveness does not matter any more. But this is highly unlikely: the advantages to small countries of having unfettered technology will outweigh any advantages of being compatible with the USA's "policies".
So we'll see about 5 more years of fighting for positions, then 10-15 years of ruthless extortion during which technology advancement suffers and stagnates, and then revolt by either government as they start to see the impact on economic growth and tax income, or by smaller to middle-sized businesses as they find themselves unable to operate normally.
A better parallel would be the monopolised telecoms industries in the west, which lasted for 50 years or so, and which caused serious hinderence to technological progress until they were dismantled by regulators.
The patent business will be dismantled around 2025, at the earliest. From 2010 to 2025, if you are a small independent technology producer you will have three choices:
1. illegality, black-market.
2. join a patent club and pay the costs (equivalent to merging with a larger business).
3. relocate to a patent haven such as Liberia.
Options 1 and 3 are pretty similar since any business using foreign software which violates patents will be subject to penalties.
And it won't be sufficient to say "this software does not violate patents", you will need a certificate of conformity, period. Like selling a car.
It's a sad prognosis for OSS, which is my main business, but I think it's inevitable. Money talks, and we are seeing a true gold rush here.
"Have I taught you nothing? The patent lawyers will always be with us. Every time you lend a hand to knock a vicious patent lawyer on the head, another rises, snarling and red-eyed, to take its place. Our survival depends not on fighting them but on understanding them, and possibly eating them if we run out of other edibles. Be the patent lawyer. Feel his greed, his hot calculations, his unerring vampire-like lust for the aortal blood of business... We cannot fight, only survive. When all the blood is gone, when the corpses are white and dry, then the patent lawyers will turn on each other. Finally, if we are lucky and able to hide, we will see the last of the species stumble down to the dark valley and die, alone. Until then, avoid dark alleys and wear this IBM badge."
-- Exerpt from "Chronicles of a PatentAttyrny Hunter"
To be precise: I helped build a tour operating system used to provide travel agents with tools to book voyages. Now, this is an example from 1993 but we all know that similar systems (SABRE, AMADEUS) are old and go back to at least the 1980s.
The system we built conforms pretty much to the criteria of the patent. Note that the patent does not say this is a "self-service system", it describes only the mechanisms for conducting an international transaction.
I'd add that in 1995 this was perhaps not obvious, even if today it's laughably so. However, there is most definitely prior art.
Big difference. VMWare is about virtualising a foreign OS. Since VMWare abstracts at the BIOS and hardware level it can run almost all OSes the CPU will support but it takes a large performance hit.
Xen is a VM platform, i.e. it lets you set up multiple virtual machines that run with very little extra overhead. A lot like User Mode Linux, except easier to configure and install.
Here's a typical use case: you want to make a network "security box" that includes firewall, proxy, web server, email, wiki, irc. Now, conventionally you put all these services in the same Linux system (or whatever OS you use). Using Xen you run all of the services in their own virtual machine, so that if the firewall gets compromised, for instance, an attacker cannot get access to other parts of your system.
It's a very useful tool.
Oh, another use case I just thought of too: how about a 'hidden' Linux OS on your Windows box that does all your email, browsing, and other Internet work that you want to keep secure. Click the icon, up pops Mozilla, except it's running in a different virtual OS.
Over-clean houses, lack of breast-feeding and creches that stuff young susceptible infants together so they can all get sick is bad enough, but the killer is antibiotics, which basically wipe out a large chunk of the immune system.
Use of antibiotics correlates strongly with allergic reactions later in life, including asthma and possibly some much worse things.
You imply that companies have a choice in the matter: stay private, go public. Google had given out share options and reached the maximum number of shareholders that a private company can have (500, iirc). The IPO was a legal requirement. I don't think, but I may be wrong, that boards are legally obliged to increase shareholder value; they are obliged to answer to their shareholders, but this can mean many things. For instance, taking a long-term view to value can often mean being less pushy in the short-term.
You really want to see a thousand Microsoft ads in your games? Yeuch. Worse... you're going to get games that target ads directly to you, knowing loads about your tastes and intelligence thanks to your game profiles.
"I see you're still struggling on level 1. How about a new car? You can get really great payment plans..."
And just wait until the other characters in the game start to sell you stuff. BLAM! BOOM! STAB!!!! Yeah... cool. It starts to feel a lot more realistic./obvious
In this case, the grass roots are doing the marketing...
It's quite ironic, actually incredibly ironic, that a process that is almost entirely driven by word of mouth would aim for promotion using above the line advertising.
Personally, and this is just an opinion, I reckon that money would be better spent on wining and dining journalists and trying to get Firefox on the cover of Times Magazine.
Or, alternatively, try to get Firefox banned for violating obscenity laws. That is usually excellent for publicity.
It's quite amazing the hysterical reaction people have to clones when natural clones - also known under the technical term "same-egg twins" - are neither freaky nor the harbingers of a brave new world.
Anyone who is against cloning has to come up with better arguments than "it's unnatural".
Personally, I feel the discussion about cloning is largely provoked by people with political agendas, as are many divisive arguments around the world. People who have true feelings about the value of human life should better try to help the victims of war and famine, man-made disasters that kill millions.
But, I guess one clone is more of a danger to our claims of moral superiority than a million dead Sudanese or Congolese.
The problem with the terminology (and attempts to use it as a model) is that it implies that human diseases and computer viruses are somehow based on the same mechanisms and can be fought in similar ways. This is obviously untrue. Human and computer viruses may spread in similar patterns, that's not related to how they work, rather the way they are transmitted. A forest fire also spreads by contact.
A better analogy for computer viruses (and trojans and spyware and worms) is the "parasite", since this is a general form that is found at many, many levels: parasites in our blood, in our cells, in our societies, even in our genes. (The bulk of genetic material appears to consist of parasitic DNA).
Looking at computer malware as a disease misses the point. Actually, looking at human viruses as "diseases" also misses the point.
The thing about parasites is that they are inevitable but that there is an implicit balance between a parasite and its host population that generally ensures that the parasite adapts to becoming less harmful and eventually passive or even cooperative. (Which is why there are ten bacterial cells for every human cell in your body).
Parasites only get out of control when the host population has insufficient variation. It's not a troll to say that the Windows monoculture is the fundamental cause of the current plague of malware.
Variation is the basic solution to parasitic behaviour. Given that, parasites will move only slowly, will adapt to causing less harm (or they will kill their hosts and die as well), and will eventually form the basis for an immune system (fighting off other parasites).
It's inevitable that 60-70% of all software running on all computers will, eventually, be parasitic.
Since computer hardware improves rapidly and continually, it's impossible to tag a particular specification with a level. Today's level 10 is a level 5 in six months and a level 2 in a year.
The only meaningful "levels" are price tags, and people already do that: cheap home PC, low-cost business, high-cost business, top-end gaming and video editing, server.
I suspect this is just a ploy to justify releasing a new pricing system for MS software. Obviously Windows for a level 10 system is going to cost more than Windows for a level 4 system. It would allow them to make Windows _very_ cheap for $399 PCs while making fatter profit margins on $1999 game monsters.
Microsoft make money from exactly TWO products. Windows, and MSOffice.
Windows is under fierce attack from internet malware on the consumer desktop, and Linux in the enterprise. MSOffice is being eroded by the unbreakable OOo.
I said this a while ago when Microsoft and Sun announced their happy settlement: the goal is to squash OOo. SCO and Lindows demonstrated that lawsuits are not just about recovering damages: the mere threat of litigation is enough to kill a product.
OOo will not survive a SCO. It's not got enough grip yet. Microsoft must realize this.
So: they will use a stick and a carrot. The stick: lawsuits against prominent OOo developers for patent infringement. The carrot: MSOffice for Linux. I predict within the next 6 months, since every day that OOo is free makes it harder for MS to squash it.
And then... patents to make sure no-one can ever write a free office application again.
"Illegal software" is going to take on a whole new meaning by this time next year.
- Victorian telephone (wireless version) - Mac G5 embedded in an IBM S/36 case (to give that authentic Computer feel) - email, delivered by the postman - the LowCost cruise liner ($25 across the Atlantic) - not rose-coloured glasses, but B&W glasses... gives you that good ol' monochrome feeling - the e-Quill, looks like a quill, writes like a quill, drops ink like a quill, but runs Windows XP for Quills - the iQuill (similar, but stores 150 hours of music) - ye old Coffee Shoppe: double espresso machiatto served in antique copper cups, by surly wenches
Slashdot Mirror
You mean all these sites are indexed under "phish"? Google has a magic way of recognising a fake site? Somehow, I don't think so.
These are the number of distinct phish sites found by people investigating and tracking phishers. It has nothing to do with Google at all.
The increase is extremely real and extremely significant.
Here's how I see it:
Expatriate = rich person living in poor country.
Immigrant = poor person living in rich country.
Foreigner = person living in country matching their own standard of living.
An American coming to work in Europe would be an expatriate for 1-2 years (until their tax free status ran out), and then becomes a simple foreigner.
Hey, I _know_ an expat when I see one. In Brussels, they're the people paying 4-6 times the normal rate for appartments.
Actually, with the sliding US Dollar, I hope you're paid in Euro or you risk becoming an immigrant!
The story was, anyhow, about India. Thusly the context for the word "expatriate". Gin and tonics and polo, old chap.
True story:
A friend of mine, a Rwandese educated at Harvard, worked for a US legal firm. One day he was asked to go on a long-term mission to Nigeria for an oil firm client. He balked, quoting Nigeria's reputation for danger. He was offered a nice bonus, travel costs, and so he went. When I visited him in Lagos, he had installed himself in a nice house, with a cook, driver, security guards. He played golf twice a week, spent the weekends at the beach, and too many evenings at the clubs in Victoria Island.
Every few months he would return to head office, and make a report. His report would inevitably end with remarks about the insecurity in Lagos, the need for constant armed protection, the power cuts and the lack of facilities. Since his work was bringing in lots of money, his firm inevitably gave him a pay rise and extended his mission.
Expatriates tend to suffer from diseases of luxury. They don't pay taxes, their savings go 10-100 times further, they get privileged positions, and if good, they are valued for their expertise and cultural baggage.
The only problem: they tend to die divorced and alcoholic. Decadence is too cheap in some places!
We are looking at something to replace our ageing CVS system. We have large OSS projects, worked on by teams of 3-10 people. CVS is very good for what it does but we are feeling its limitations. The biggest problems are that forks are too delicate to use, so we don't use them, and that in order to work you need access to the central archive.
Darcs looked like the best choice. We converted and imported some of our archives. Then we tried checking them out. With CVS, 2-3 minutes. With darcs, 30 minutes.
Our conclusion: darcs is not scalable. Admittedly our code base is large and has a huge history, but in order to use darcs we would have had to break our projects into many small pieces, each with their own repository.
Darcs looks good. But it needs to be made much, much faster if it's to work with large projects.
The irony of your comment - which is probably accurate - is that a majority of the companies you mention are highly dependent on OSS in different ways, at the very least in their R&D labs but also in their infrastructure, and quite often in their products.
The problem with software patents is very simple and it is this: software is not a traditional industry in which invention is expensive and needs protection. In software invention is the process itself. When a vague notion of patents is applied to the software development process it rapidly becomes a land-grab in which a few wealthy groups control access to primary technologies.
The sheer volume and complexity of software inventions makes patents almost impossible to assign in a fair manner. Thus the small developer - from whom most innovation comes - is penalized in favour of larger, richer ones. Note the cost of a patent application: EUR 10,000 and more.
The discussion is in fact moot. Software patents will come about thanks to the skillful lobbying of a few concerned companies, the willful ignorance of many others, and the compliant corruption of our politicians. Software patents will, inevitably, turn into a major source of income for some companies whose existing markets are shrinking, and software patents will become a tax on innovation that will eventually be as intolerable as the telecoms monopolies once were.
The only downside? This scenario will take at least 20 and perhaps more years to play out. In the meantime, independent software developers will be forced to base themselves in patent-free nations, or go out of business.
We are in for a very sad and turbulent era, in which the inevitable forces of technology commoditization (which OSS is an expression of) are being fought tooth and nail by the firms threatened. Technology commoditization is the only real route to productivity, to better living standards, and to increases in overall wealth. Patents - and especially software patents - are a clear and present threat to that.
How do you compromise on such things?
Presumably this refers to the kernel itself and not the horde (hoard?) of packages and applications that sit around it.
"Linux" as most people understand the term is the 2-5 CDs full of software that makes a PC do interesting things.
And it's about as bazaar as it can be.
You don't need to live there, so long as your company is registered there and you conform to its IP laws. When someone decides to sue you for infringement, they have to file suit in Freetown. At which point the fun begins.
Liberia is just an example. There are lots of places where this would work... Congo, Angola, Nigeria... heck. The only issue would be to convince your clients that your business is legitimate. That's easier if you are part of a crowd.
This is why most of the world's commercial ships are registered in such places.
Like burglar alarms in a building.
The use of alarms has a definite impact on ease of use. In our building, the number of people coming and going at different times makes it impossible to secure the entire building. There are alarms but they don't get used.
So here, usability and security are in conflict, and usability wins.
However, we've created a secure zone which has our real offices (as compared to the large insecure garage space which is basically a place for parties and such), and here we have very secure windows, and a nice secure door with keypad and ID badges.
In the case of the offices, the keypad / ID badges are actually simpler than anything else. Swipe your badge, door opens, system registers you.
So security and usability can go together, but it has to be realistic and probably, appropriate. Trying to secure a large perimeter with too much traffic is an uphill struggle. Securing a well-defined perimeter with just one or two entry points is much more realistic.
Security is about making choices and one of the most important is: what not to secure.
It's the difference between the garden and the house.
It will burst but the timescales are not the same as for most other bubbles.
The difference is this: other bubbles work by inflating the prospects of future returns on investment, creating a pyramid scheme in which new investors are lured by the prospect of huge rewards while old investors sell out and actually make the rewards. When the pool of new investors runs out, bubble bursts and granny loses her savings.
The patents bubble is not based on this model at all. Rather, it's a scheme by which a small group of people have turned the law into a tool for extortion. As long as they don't extort more from the system than it can bear, the business of patents will continue. At a certain moment the tax that this creates on normal business activity will cause those economies which allow it to become uncompetitive and thus die.
The end-game for the patent players is to get a global hegemony because then uncompetitiveness does not matter any more. But this is highly unlikely: the advantages to small countries of having unfettered technology will outweigh any advantages of being compatible with the USA's "policies".
So we'll see about 5 more years of fighting for positions, then 10-15 years of ruthless extortion during which technology advancement suffers and stagnates, and then revolt by either government as they start to see the impact on economic growth and tax income, or by smaller to middle-sized businesses as they find themselves unable to operate normally.
A better parallel would be the monopolised telecoms industries in the west, which lasted for 50 years or so, and which caused serious hinderence to technological progress until they were dismantled by regulators.
The patent business will be dismantled around 2025, at the earliest. From 2010 to 2025, if you are a small independent technology producer you will have three choices:
1. illegality, black-market.
2. join a patent club and pay the costs (equivalent to merging with a larger business).
3. relocate to a patent haven such as Liberia.
Options 1 and 3 are pretty similar since any business using foreign software which violates patents will be subject to penalties.
And it won't be sufficient to say "this software does not violate patents", you will need a certificate of conformity, period. Like selling a car.
It's a sad prognosis for OSS, which is my main business, but I think it's inevitable. Money talks, and we are seeing a true gold rush here.
"Have I taught you nothing? The patent lawyers will always be with us. Every time you lend a hand to knock a vicious patent lawyer on the head, another rises, snarling and red-eyed, to take its place. Our survival depends not on fighting them but on understanding them, and possibly eating them if we run out of other edibles. Be the patent lawyer. Feel his greed, his hot calculations, his unerring vampire-like lust for the aortal blood of business... We cannot fight, only survive. When all the blood is gone, when the corpses are white and dry, then the patent lawyers will turn on each other. Finally, if we are lucky and able to hide, we will see the last of the species stumble down to the dark valley and die, alone. Until then, avoid dark alleys and wear this IBM badge."
-- Exerpt from "Chronicles of a PatentAttyrny Hunter"
To be precise: I helped build a tour operating system used to provide travel agents with tools to book voyages. Now, this is an example from 1993 but we all know that similar systems (SABRE, AMADEUS) are old and go back to at least the 1980s.
The system we built conforms pretty much to the criteria of the patent. Note that the patent does not say this is a "self-service system", it describes only the mechanisms for conducting an international transaction.
I'd add that in 1995 this was perhaps not obvious, even if today it's laughably so. However, there is most definitely prior art.
Big difference. VMWare is about virtualising a foreign OS. Since VMWare abstracts at the BIOS and hardware level it can run almost all OSes the CPU will support but it takes a large performance hit.
Xen is a VM platform, i.e. it lets you set up multiple virtual machines that run with very little extra overhead. A lot like User Mode Linux, except easier to configure and install.
Here's a typical use case: you want to make a network "security box" that includes firewall, proxy, web server, email, wiki, irc. Now, conventionally you put all these services in the same Linux system (or whatever OS you use). Using Xen you run all of the services in their own virtual machine, so that if the firewall gets compromised, for instance, an attacker cannot get access to other parts of your system.
It's a very useful tool.
Oh, another use case I just thought of too: how about a 'hidden' Linux OS on your Windows box that does all your email, browsing, and other Internet work that you want to keep secure. Click the icon, up pops Mozilla, except it's running in a different virtual OS.
Yup, definitely very useful.
Over-clean houses, lack of breast-feeding and creches that stuff young susceptible infants together so they can all get sick is bad enough, but the killer is antibiotics, which basically wipe out a large chunk of the immune system.
Use of antibiotics correlates strongly with allergic reactions later in life, including asthma and possibly some much worse things.
All moderately-complex projects have to be built around:
1. change
2. error
You imply that companies have a choice in the matter: stay private, go public. Google had given out share options and reached the maximum number of shareholders that a private company can have (500, iirc). The IPO was a legal requirement. I don't think, but I may be wrong, that boards are legally obliged to increase shareholder value; they are obliged to answer to their shareholders, but this can mean many things. For instance, taking a long-term view to value can often mean being less pushy in the short-term.
You really want to see a thousand Microsoft ads in your games? Yeuch. Worse... you're going to get games that target ads directly to you, knowing loads about your tastes and intelligence thanks to your game profiles.
/obvious
"I see you're still struggling on level 1. How about a new car? You can get really great payment plans..."
And just wait until the other characters in the game start to sell you stuff. BLAM! BOOM! STAB!!!! Yeah... cool. It starts to feel a lot more realistic.
In this case, the grass roots are doing the marketing...
It's quite ironic, actually incredibly ironic, that a process that is almost entirely driven by word of mouth would aim for promotion using above the line advertising.
Personally, and this is just an opinion, I reckon that money would be better spent on wining and dining journalists and trying to get Firefox on the cover of Times Magazine.
Or, alternatively, try to get Firefox banned for violating obscenity laws. That is usually excellent for publicity.
But a full-page advert? Seems kind of boring.
It's quite amazing the hysterical reaction people have to clones when natural clones - also known under the technical term "same-egg twins" - are neither freaky nor the harbingers of a brave new world.
Anyone who is against cloning has to come up with better arguments than "it's unnatural".
Personally, I feel the discussion about cloning is largely provoked by people with political agendas, as are many divisive arguments around the world. People who have true feelings about the value of human life should better try to help the victims of war and famine, man-made disasters that kill millions.
But, I guess one clone is more of a danger to our claims of moral superiority than a million dead Sudanese or Congolese.
Call me a cynic but this debate is full of shit.
The problem with the terminology (and attempts to use it as a model) is that it implies that human diseases and computer viruses are somehow based on the same mechanisms and can be fought in similar ways. This is obviously untrue. Human and computer viruses may spread in similar patterns, that's not related to how they work, rather the way they are transmitted. A forest fire also spreads by contact.
A better analogy for computer viruses (and trojans and spyware and worms) is the "parasite", since this is a general form that is found at many, many levels: parasites in our blood, in our cells, in our societies, even in our genes. (The bulk of genetic material appears to consist of parasitic DNA).
Looking at computer malware as a disease misses the point. Actually, looking at human viruses as "diseases" also misses the point.
The thing about parasites is that they are inevitable but that there is an implicit balance between a parasite and its host population that generally ensures that the parasite adapts to becoming less harmful and eventually passive or even cooperative. (Which is why there are ten bacterial cells for every human cell in your body).
Parasites only get out of control when the host population has insufficient variation. It's not a troll to say that the Windows monoculture is the fundamental cause of the current plague of malware.
Variation is the basic solution to parasitic behaviour. Given that, parasites will move only slowly, will adapt to causing less harm (or they will kill their hosts and die as well), and will eventually form the basis for an immune system (fighting off other parasites).
It's inevitable that 60-70% of all software running on all computers will, eventually, be parasitic.
This topic was explored in some detail by HeironymousCoward on Slashdot, about a year ago.
Since computer hardware improves rapidly and continually, it's impossible to tag a particular specification with a level. Today's level 10 is a level 5 in six months and a level 2 in a year.
The only meaningful "levels" are price tags, and people already do that: cheap home PC, low-cost business, high-cost business, top-end gaming and video editing, server.
I suspect this is just a ploy to justify releasing a new pricing system for MS software. Obviously Windows for a level 10 system is going to cost more than Windows for a level 4 system. It would allow them to make Windows _very_ cheap for $399 PCs while making fatter profit margins on $1999 game monsters.
From the Journal of HeironymousCoward
I guess the $19.95 per month is also in $ Palmyra. It's very cheap: two cowries and a handful of sand.
The web site is either a joke or a hoax.
There is no product called "Open office".
The agreement refers to 'the product developed by Sun and commonly known as "Open Office"' and this most certainly refers to Openoffice.org.
The name "openoffice.org" was chosen because "open office" was trademarked by some other company, but not for software.
Insightful, yes.
Microsoft make money from exactly TWO products. Windows, and MSOffice.
Windows is under fierce attack from internet malware on the consumer desktop, and Linux in the enterprise. MSOffice is being eroded by the unbreakable OOo.
I said this a while ago when Microsoft and Sun announced their happy settlement: the goal is to squash OOo. SCO and Lindows demonstrated that lawsuits are not just about recovering damages: the mere threat of litigation is enough to kill a product.
OOo will not survive a SCO. It's not got enough grip yet. Microsoft must realize this.
So: they will use a stick and a carrot. The stick: lawsuits against prominent OOo developers for patent infringement. The carrot: MSOffice for Linux. I predict within the next 6 months, since every day that OOo is free makes it harder for MS to squash it.
And then... patents to make sure no-one can ever write a free office application again.
"Illegal software" is going to take on a whole new meaning by this time next year.
- Victorian telephone (wireless version)
- Mac G5 embedded in an IBM S/36 case (to give that authentic Computer feel)
- email, delivered by the postman
- the LowCost cruise liner ($25 across the Atlantic)
- not rose-coloured glasses, but B&W glasses... gives you that good ol' monochrome feeling
- the e-Quill, looks like a quill, writes like a quill, drops ink like a quill, but runs Windows XP for Quills
- the iQuill (similar, but stores 150 hours of music)
- ye old Coffee Shoppe: double espresso machiatto served in antique copper cups, by surly wenches