To use Fark terminology. The political scene is so polarised between the capitalism-is-the-greatest-gimmick-ever and the are-we-really-run-by-the-mob sides. Any discussion on political issues is guaranteed to descend into zealot vs. zealot faster than a speeding swift boat.
Still, perhaps this is a great troll trap and the rest of us can return to discussing the latest gadgets while the world turns into a global protection racket.
Oh, sorry, perhaps I should move this to politics.slashdot.org?
It's easy to forget history. But Windows NT was running on DEC Alpha PCs almost from its first release. These machines were perhaps not "popular", but at that time very few PCs were. This is pre-DELL, largely.
The DEC Alpha workstations were personal computers in form factor running a quintessential PC operating system (Windows), and sold as high-performance workstations and cheap servers.
Claiming that these were not "mass-market 64-bit PCs" is just twisting the facts. Apple are a great innovator but the honour of bringing 64-bit computing to the desktop lies with the gifted engineers of DEC, who made almost the whole stack of their Alpha/NT workstations, from the silicon to the operating system (The VMS people - Dave Custer and his team wrote - most of NT).
History is actually important. DEC were lousy salesmen but they were fantastic engineers. Apple are great salesmen but they have borrowed many of their key concepts.
Apart from the fact that Microsoft are an incredibly wealthy and successful company, they deserve a moment's silent respect for their utter failure to understand the way the IT market is evolving.
The attempt to inject patents into anti-SPAM tools is well-founded for a company that wants to find new business models, but it's incredibly offensive to the Internet community. Not just "nerds" and "fanatics" exposing some radical political viewpoint, but the hundreds of thousands of hard-working people who actually built the servers that run the web.
Technology gets ever cheaper and this inevitably destroys old markets. For the world's largest software company to _still_ earn the bulk of its money from operating systems and office suites is quite amazing. These are commodity products and only sell through brute-force tactics that are eventually self-defeating.
Microsoft should step back from trying to control essential domains such as email, and focus on what they are really good at: providing the unwashed masses with easy-to-use, pretty front-ends. It's a market with huge potential but its success depends on a reliable and expanding back-end infrastructure, exactly the domain that Microsoft is incapable of delivering.
A message to Microsoft: please understand that open source is the key to your long term survival. Embrace it, or die. Open source is the cornucopia of software technology: it will create a hundred million new software consumers, and most of these will be potential new clients.
Just produce software they actually want, not software they are forced into buying by your devious political games.
When the Internet first became popular, Bill Gates announced that the Microsoft Network would be better. He was wrong, and after a couple of years, forced Microsoft to embrace the net rather than fight it.
The same is true of open source. It's only a conflict because Microsoft is refusing to face the inevitability of the situation.
A moment's pity, therefore. They may be rich. That does not make them either smart, or right.
RMS's comments to the MARID list are very pertinent and to accuse him of "politics" is to make the mistake (deliberate or otherwise) of relativism. Open source/free software is not a subjective political opinion. The effects of adopting a petent-encumbered standard go far beyond mere politics. They affect the quality and cost of what issues.
RMS is entirely accurate when he says that Microsoft's is probably aiming to control anti-spam tools by controlling who can develop to the standards.
You may or may not support Microsoft's right to attempt to control a market. What you should not do is ignore the impact such control would have.
Open source and free software has proven to be a significant balancing force in the push for better and cheaper IT. Microsoft have done an excellent job in lowering the cost of certain kinds of software, mainly the user front-ends. Open source and free software have handled the back-ends - the servers - better than anything produced by any company, anywhere.
Spam is not a front-end issue. Locking anti-spam standards into a Microsoft-dominated front-end will make much money for some people but will ultimately end in a monopoly control of email, almost certainly built to the usual Microsoft standards: pretty, charming, and totally insecure.
The IETF is composed of individuals, each with their agendas. Many IETF members work from principle, but many others are paid for their work, and paid by companies with serious commercial interests in the outcome.
It's easy to mock RMS: he is sincere and outspoken. But it is misplaced. RMS is a prophet in the true sense of the word: he has had a vision of the way software should be made, and he has defined a way for this to happen.
Naturally some commercial interests detest him. But it's wrong: cheaper software means opportunity for everyone, especially commercial software firms. The world has an endless appetite for pretty, seductive front-ends.
They just should not be doing anything really, vitally important.
The irony is this: games are generally fun because they are escapist. Few people get the chance to fly a F16 for real, so a simulator is a rare and valuable thing. Even a simply video game is escape because it lets you pretend you're three again, where little moving blobs are fun.
But this game... take it to its ultimate conclusion. It simply becomes a more and more accurate rendition of real life.
It's ironic because people play games to escape real life and here we are with something that actually teaches you to cooperate, to invest, to create alliances and to plan. All those things are great fun, yes, but you can go outside and do them with real people and make real money and meet real girls, and eat real carrots.
All for $0.00 per month excluding taxes and death.
Compare this to Slashdot, which is also a game for some people. There is a difference: smart people can use Slashdot (and games like it) to actually reinforce their real life. For instance, I've met a few very interesting people through Slashdot. I've learnt many useful things. I've even learned more about the difference between "flame" and "insightful". Not obvious at first.
See... my karma is not just a pretty face. I can be insightful if sufficiently provoked.
More and more realistic games, imitating life in so many subtle ways. Yes, to grow carrots you need water and jugs to carry water and soil to plant the seeds in...
I wonder why one doesn't just go outside and experience that free-for-ever massive online game called REAL LIFE!
I assure you: it has far more surprises, and is far more difficult than anything you ever tried on your computer.
It is a license to distribute a copyrighted work, not a contract.
You either accept the license and get the right to distribute the work under its conditions.
Or you refuse the license and you do not distribute the work.
The courts have nothing to do with it, until the moment the copyright holder decides that his rights have been infringed, and sues. SCO cannot (and of course they know this, but they are playing stupid buggers) claim that "the license is invalid". WTF does that mean?
If I write a license that says: "you can distribute my copyrighted work if you dance the makossa twice a day", that's perfectly valid. Up to you to accept it or not.
Terrorists kill 4000 in order to launch a war that they can feed off. If Western civil society had simply condemned the act, given the Taliban 30 days to deliver the criminals and been very careful to not kill a single innocent civilian, Al Quaeda would have been ostracised by their own support base. By launching two wars against "terror", Western civil society has guaranteed Al Quaeda a place in history and guaranteed a generation or two of on-going fighting that will cause the deaths of many, many more people.
I think every country faced with local terrorists has learnt through bitter experience that force does not solve this kind of problem. Dialogue and negotiation are always, finally, the only way to end the cycle of violence.
This lesson has been learnt by the British in Northern Ireland, by the Spanish in the Basque Country, by the French in Sardinia, the Sri Lankans... it does not matter how "evil" the men with guns are. Nothing short of genocide - and even that is not certain - will stop more embittered and manipulated youths growing up to fill the gaps left by arrest, detention, assassination./me expects to be burnt for saying this but it must be said.
1. Every generation of software architects fights to find a way to build a software "factory". I've seen this go through at least 4 full cycles: mainframe toolkits (first CASE tools 1980-1990); client-server (early-Windows, PowerBuilder et al, 1990-1995); OO (VB, VC++, Delphi, 1994-1999), web applications (1999-present).
2. Every model relies on pre-built components being glued together by programmers who understand a business issue (how to calculate a bank balance) but have no idea of the technology behind their work (CICS, VSAM, WIN32, HTTP, whatever).
3. What MSDN is describing is "their way", a model that surely works very well indeed.
4. Every software factory includes its own obselescense, since it fixes onto a specific technological platform, and these platforms have a lifespan of 5, maybe 10 years.
Conclusions: (a) for any given technological platform it takes about 5 years to get to the factory stage. We are just getting there with web development. (b) the factory stage lasts for about 5 more years before it's wiped out by the next big thing.
It's worthy, and banal all at the same time. I remember looking for work in 1994, having 10 years' experience as a top-class technical architect, and getting offered only work for AS/400 RPG development. That was also a software factory, the ASP of the mid-1990's. Today I'm working on new programming languages (based on XML) which will, in 5 years' time, completely replace today's way of working. (or probably not, but the point is that IT goes through permanent fundamental change).
There is space in such a schema for all kinds of programmers. But I certainly don't see "hackers" as working in software factories except as toolsmiths.
The reputation of Lindows/Spire is undeserved. They have always made the source code for their modifications to Linux packages freely available.
Phonegaim was paid for by Linspire and they have made the source code available as required by the GPL. This was mentioned in one of Michael Robertson's emails a few days ago.
You should stop speaking ill of people who do nothing wrong.
Elvis found his inspiration and many of his melodies in a common musical culture created by (ironically) generations of the poorest black American musicians. Creativity comes from many sources, but corporate profits are not one of them. This was true in the early part of the 20th century, where the sheet-music publishers tried to dominate the music industry (and failed). It is as true today.
For every "major" work copyrighted and kept out of the cultural blender, a hundred unknown artists pour their talent into creating something new.
Let them have their copyrights. It means young artists will have to search harder for their inspirations, but the results will be better for it.
Highly damaging viruses don't spread far. Today's virus/work/trojan writers want to capture large numbers of zombie PCs and resell these networks. They aim for control, not damage. It's about money, not vandalism.
One or the other... devious or sloppy... but surely not both.
Maybe it's just a sign that malware is evolving along the same rules as organic life: accidental errors get selected for survival value and passed along to following generations.
Malware that detects and disables attempts to reverse engineer it... ?
Or perhaps we can read the anti-virus researcher's comments in a totally different light:/tinfoil on
"Most viruses [which we develop ourselves to stimulate sale of our products and services] have a function to let us easily identify and sandbox them. In this example, the function is broken. So sloppy it's devious [and perhaps intended as a warning that we're not paying our freelance coders enough]."/tinfoil off
What's really missing is a tiny standardized robust plugable hard-disk that provides the 20+Gb needed for a personal workspace. For the rest: any PC running a standard suite of applications (Mozilla, OpenOffice). In extremis, a bootable CD.
I almost do this today but USB flash disks are too slow for the purpose.
It should also be possible to package a complete OS, applications, and data onto a portable storage device, then load the OS, applications, and data through an emulation layer on the host system.
That is how long I give Microsoft before they find themselves confronted by a revolution from their users due the their inability to deliver secure products.
Instead of spending their effort trying to destroy their competitors (which, today, means open source software), Microsoft should be closing the gap.
Yes, all software has potential insecurities. Yes, Microsoft is targetted because they are the dominant monoculture.
But no, this changes nothing. A burglar will always go for the easiest target, and Microsoft users will always be the target so long as Windows et al. is even just slightly less secure than the alternatives.
Microsoft should release a service pack to Windows that sets the security settings on MSIE to their highest levels, even at the risk of breaking many web sites. They should sponsor anti-spyware software developers with large prizes for the best anti-spyware software. They should be talking to major ISPs for ways to detect and disable zombies.
Redmond, listen: Make Windows Secure.
Otherwise you will be tarred and feathered by your long-suffering users who will prefer any viable alternative to one more "surf at your own risk" experience.
Anyone else bored with designers trying to sell us their "visions"? What happened to asking people what they want and then making that cheaply and well?
(I guess this would eliminate 75% of the mobile phone industry at a stroke, no more 3G, WAP, MMS, UMTS,... just free SMS and cheap voice)
Mobile phones...? OK, here is what _I_ would like to see:
1. Cheap, cheap, cheap. The damn things get lost and stolen too easily. If they cost $25 that'd be OK.
2. Pretty in pink. Make them colored, even better, make it possible to print phone sheaths on an inkjet. Why the boring grey?
3. Standardised: one single battery standard for all phones. One single micro plug for all phones. One single power supply for all phones. One single range of car kits, etc. Let's see Nokia and Sony-Ericsson and Siemens define a new standard "base" that frees us from having to keep separate chargers for each and every phone we buy. (Nokia has done this for its own phones, but that's not enough)
4. Extensible rather than overpackaged. If I want a digital camera, MP3 player, PDA, let me add this to the phone. It'd be a lot easier if mobile phones had standard connections and some kind of docking system.
Let me propose a new, radical design for mobile phones. First replace SIM cards with "core" modules that are the size of a phone battery pack. These cores conform to an industry standard and have the SIM card embedded in them, along with the bulk of the GSM electronics.
The core can then be "sheathed" with anything from a $2.50 cover that provides just a keypad and headset jack, to a $2500 cover covered with diamonds.
The development of a standard core will allow the cost to come way down and spawn an entire industry of add-on manufacturers, which is where the mobuile phone industry will make money again.
Now if I, a simple Slashdotter, can come up with a plan to revolutionize the mobile phone industry, either I'm a genius, or the experts reviewed in this article are bumbling idiots, or both.
My theory is this: someone is selling a massive network of zombies and is demonstrating the power they wield. The idea being, if you can bring down Akamai, you can bring down anyone.
Every country has its criminals and scamsters, and the US is no exception.
This is a serious story about how to get information to people who desperately need it but who are disconnected from the world in a way most of you can't even start to imagine.
The Internet has ignored most of Africa, with several attempts to lay fibre-optic cable around the continent abandoned due to politics and war. For most people, "internet" means shared access to a VSAT link, which is a $50,000 investment and expensive charges. If you're lucky you live in a city like Lagos that has cybercafes where you can check email so a little surfing.
No p2p, no streaming, no downloads except of trivially small packages, no ISOs, no online updates,...
I've spent lots of time in Nigeria and the truth is this: most Nigerians, like most people anywhere, are hard-working, ambitious, honest, dedicated. The tragedy of their country is partly due to that "oil wealth", which does not make life better for anyone except an elite, and turns politics into a scramble for power and the money that brings.
Like much of Africa, Nigeria is saddled with political classes that throttle attempts at growth and stability. It is almost impossible, for instance, to get an education or start a business unless you are prepared to bribe your way through. Fraud and 419 crime is big business in Nigeria largely because there is so little opportunity for honesty.
One of the keys to resolving the poverty of the mind that keeps Nigerians handicapped is access to information and education. People accept situations only because they know of nothing better.
Now, some of the better suggestions here were to ship CDs and DVDs instead of disk drives. This seems an excellent idea: recordable DVDs are cheap and can be mailed cheaply, and can be distributed and copied locally.
The ideal package to send should be: a DVD, plus a DVD writer, plus 20 recordable DVDs. I don't think this would cost any more than the hard drive, and it would be a lot more useful.
C is an ANSI standard language and has been implemented by hundreds of groups and companies, including all the major OS vendors.
Unix was largely standardised as POSIX long before Linux existed.
Both these (and many other technologies, such as parser generators, editors, networking) form basic layers of what has become a huge and sophisticated pyramid of applications.
Layers like.NET and this implementation are attempts to define, control, and open (or close) these basic layers. So if you take.NET seriously (which I do not, but that's a personal opinion), an open source equivalent is obvious and necesssary. Proprietary platforms extract a huge tax on their developers and customers: the lesson of Bell Labs' inventions and how they ended-up changing the world shows that gcc, Linux, and the thousands of other "clones" represent heroic and vital investments in reducing the cost of IT so that its benefits can reach beyond the elite.
If you are still using the same applications as in 1983, then you have some catching up to do. In 1983 I was using vi and assembler and some C, and seriously, things have changed a little bit since then...
You don't need to use the cd burning facilities from the Xandros file manager (which is not hackable, and not open source, developed entirely by Xandros).
But it's simple to install k3b and burn CDs at full speed _and_ DVDs.
that there is a firm and long-term strategy in place by certain groups to find ways of outlawing the act of writing code for public consumption without a license. the end goal being simply to create or perpetuate existing monopolies by the creation of artificial barriers to entry into what has become an incredibly open market.
i think the first real attempt (or mockup) was certification of code which found its extreme in palladium. This principally technical solution has since been abandoned.
the current wave is based around so-called intellectual property rights. the term is a joke, but has many proponents, from the media industries through to the software business. you do not own that idea, it belongs to someone already. the space in your head has a 75-year lease.
this will also fail imho. it is - like palladium - too ludicrous a proposition and fails the basic darwin test: any society that allows its common technological culture to be partitioned into 'property' will suffer competitive disadvantage and eventually either change or die.
i expect the next phases to be based on security, but only after the current market leader is long dead and gone, its laughably insecure products being replaced with "professional" ones from other, older players.
who will, i think, be in the fore-front of the lobby to license software programming.
i've been programming for 20 years but i am very sure that my children will not be allowed to do this freely, any more than i can distill liquor and sell it to my neighbours.
software is just too fundamental, too valuable to be left in the hands of the common people.
Apart from the discomfort of wearing headphones over long periods, the noise-reduction works well in office environments. Cuts out more than just noisy PCs: also airco, neighbours, and fire sirens.
Slashdot Mirror
To use Fark terminology. The political scene is so polarised between the capitalism-is-the-greatest-gimmick-ever and the are-we-really-run-by-the-mob sides. Any discussion on political issues is guaranteed to descend into zealot vs. zealot faster than a speeding swift boat.
Still, perhaps this is a great troll trap and the rest of us can return to discussing the latest gadgets while the world turns into a global protection racket.
Oh, sorry, perhaps I should move this to politics.slashdot.org?
It's easy to forget history. But Windows NT was running on DEC Alpha PCs almost from its first release. These machines were perhaps not "popular", but at that time very few PCs were. This is pre-DELL, largely.
The DEC Alpha workstations were personal computers in form factor running a quintessential PC operating system (Windows), and sold as high-performance workstations and cheap servers.
Claiming that these were not "mass-market 64-bit PCs" is just twisting the facts. Apple are a great innovator but the honour of bringing 64-bit computing to the desktop lies with the gifted engineers of DEC, who made almost the whole stack of their Alpha/NT workstations, from the silicon to the operating system (The VMS people - Dave Custer and his team wrote - most of NT).
History is actually important. DEC were lousy salesmen but they were fantastic engineers. Apple are great salesmen but they have borrowed many of their key concepts.
Apart from the fact that Microsoft are an incredibly wealthy and successful company, they deserve a moment's silent respect for their utter failure to understand the way the IT market is evolving.
The attempt to inject patents into anti-SPAM tools is well-founded for a company that wants to find new business models, but it's incredibly offensive to the Internet community. Not just "nerds" and "fanatics" exposing some radical political viewpoint, but the hundreds of thousands of hard-working people who actually built the servers that run the web.
Technology gets ever cheaper and this inevitably destroys old markets. For the world's largest software company to _still_ earn the bulk of its money from operating systems and office suites is quite amazing. These are commodity products and only sell through brute-force tactics that are eventually self-defeating.
Microsoft should step back from trying to control essential domains such as email, and focus on what they are really good at: providing the unwashed masses with easy-to-use, pretty front-ends. It's a market with huge potential but its success depends on a reliable and expanding back-end infrastructure, exactly the domain that Microsoft is incapable of delivering.
A message to Microsoft: please understand that open source is the key to your long term survival. Embrace it, or die. Open source is the cornucopia of software technology: it will create a hundred million new software consumers, and most of these will be potential new clients.
Just produce software they actually want, not software they are forced into buying by your devious political games.
When the Internet first became popular, Bill Gates announced that the Microsoft Network would be better. He was wrong, and after a couple of years, forced Microsoft to embrace the net rather than fight it.
The same is true of open source. It's only a conflict because Microsoft is refusing to face the inevitability of the situation.
A moment's pity, therefore. They may be rich. That does not make them either smart, or right.
RMS's comments to the MARID list are very pertinent and to accuse him of "politics" is to make the mistake (deliberate or otherwise) of relativism. Open source/free software is not a subjective political opinion. The effects of adopting a petent-encumbered standard go far beyond mere politics. They affect the quality and cost of what issues.
RMS is entirely accurate when he says that Microsoft's is probably aiming to control anti-spam tools by controlling who can develop to the standards.
You may or may not support Microsoft's right to attempt to control a market. What you should not do is ignore the impact such control would have.
Open source and free software has proven to be a significant balancing force in the push for better and cheaper IT. Microsoft have done an excellent job in lowering the cost of certain kinds of software, mainly the user front-ends. Open source and free software have handled the back-ends - the servers - better than anything produced by any company, anywhere.
Spam is not a front-end issue. Locking anti-spam standards into a Microsoft-dominated front-end will make much money for some people but will ultimately end in a monopoly control of email, almost certainly built to the usual Microsoft standards: pretty, charming, and totally insecure.
The IETF is composed of individuals, each with their agendas. Many IETF members work from principle, but many others are paid for their work, and paid by companies with serious commercial interests in the outcome.
It's easy to mock RMS: he is sincere and outspoken. But it is misplaced. RMS is a prophet in the true sense of the word: he has had a vision of the way software should be made, and he has defined a way for this to happen.
Naturally some commercial interests detest him. But it's wrong: cheaper software means opportunity for everyone, especially commercial software firms. The world has an endless appetite for pretty, seductive front-ends.
They just should not be doing anything really, vitally important.
And that includes filtering spam.
The irony is this: games are generally fun because they are escapist. Few people get the chance to fly a F16 for real, so a simulator is a rare and valuable thing. Even a simply video game is escape because it lets you pretend you're three again, where little moving blobs are fun.
But this game... take it to its ultimate conclusion. It simply becomes a more and more accurate rendition of real life.
It's ironic because people play games to escape real life and here we are with something that actually teaches you to cooperate, to invest, to create alliances and to plan. All those things are great fun, yes, but you can go outside and do them with real people and make real money and meet real girls, and eat real carrots.
All for $0.00 per month excluding taxes and death.
Compare this to Slashdot, which is also a game for some people. There is a difference: smart people can use Slashdot (and games like it) to actually reinforce their real life. For instance, I've met a few very interesting people through Slashdot. I've learnt many useful things. I've even learned more about the difference between "flame" and "insightful". Not obvious at first.
See... my karma is not just a pretty face. I can be insightful if sufficiently provoked.
Thank you and have an excellent day!
More and more realistic games, imitating life in so many subtle ways. Yes, to grow carrots you need water and jugs to carry water and soil to plant the seeds in...
I wonder why one doesn't just go outside and experience that free-for-ever massive online game called REAL LIFE!
I assure you: it has far more surprises, and is far more difficult than anything you ever tried on your computer.
It is a license to distribute a copyrighted work, not a contract.
You either accept the license and get the right to distribute the work under its conditions.
Or you refuse the license and you do not distribute the work.
The courts have nothing to do with it, until the moment the copyright holder decides that his rights have been infringed, and sues. SCO cannot (and of course they know this, but they are playing stupid buggers) claim that "the license is invalid". WTF does that mean?
If I write a license that says: "you can distribute my copyrighted work if you dance the makossa twice a day", that's perfectly valid. Up to you to accept it or not.
Terrorists kill 4000 in order to launch a war that they can feed off. If Western civil society had simply condemned the act, given the Taliban 30 days to deliver the criminals and been very careful to not kill a single innocent civilian, Al Quaeda would have been ostracised by their own support base. By launching two wars against "terror", Western civil society has guaranteed Al Quaeda a place in history and guaranteed a generation or two of on-going fighting that will cause the deaths of many, many more people.
/me expects to be burnt for saying this but it must be said.
I think every country faced with local terrorists has learnt through bitter experience that force does not solve this kind of problem. Dialogue and negotiation are always, finally, the only way to end the cycle of violence.
This lesson has been learnt by the British in Northern Ireland, by the Spanish in the Basque Country, by the French in Sardinia, the Sri Lankans... it does not matter how "evil" the men with guns are. Nothing short of genocide - and even that is not certain - will stop more embittered and manipulated youths growing up to fill the gaps left by arrest, detention, assassination.
1. Every generation of software architects fights to find a way to build a software "factory". I've seen this go through at least 4 full cycles: mainframe toolkits (first CASE tools 1980-1990); client-server (early-Windows, PowerBuilder et al, 1990-1995); OO (VB, VC++, Delphi, 1994-1999), web applications (1999-present).
2. Every model relies on pre-built components being glued together by programmers who understand a business issue (how to calculate a bank balance) but have no idea of the technology behind their work (CICS, VSAM, WIN32, HTTP, whatever).
3. What MSDN is describing is "their way", a model that surely works very well indeed.
4. Every software factory includes its own obselescense, since it fixes onto a specific technological platform, and these platforms have a lifespan of 5, maybe 10 years.
Conclusions: (a) for any given technological platform it takes about 5 years to get to the factory stage. We are just getting there with web development. (b) the factory stage lasts for about 5 more years before it's wiped out by the next big thing.
It's worthy, and banal all at the same time. I remember looking for work in 1994, having 10 years' experience as a top-class technical architect, and getting offered only work for AS/400 RPG development. That was also a software factory, the ASP of the mid-1990's. Today I'm working on new programming languages (based on XML) which will, in 5 years' time, completely replace today's way of working. (or probably not, but the point is that IT goes through permanent fundamental change).
There is space in such a schema for all kinds of programmers. But I certainly don't see "hackers" as working in software factories except as toolsmiths.
The reputation of Lindows/Spire is undeserved. They have always made the source code for their modifications to Linux packages freely available.
Phonegaim was paid for by Linspire and they have made the source code available as required by the GPL. This was mentioned in one of Michael Robertson's emails a few days ago.
You should stop speaking ill of people who do nothing wrong.
It's an attempt to colonise the creative commons.
It will fail.
Elvis found his inspiration and many of his melodies in a common musical culture created by (ironically) generations of the poorest black American musicians. Creativity comes from many sources, but corporate profits are not one of them. This was true in the early part of the 20th century, where the sheet-music publishers tried to dominate the music industry (and failed). It is as true today.
For every "major" work copyrighted and kept out of the cultural blender, a hundred unknown artists pour their talent into creating something new.
Let them have their copyrights. It means young artists will have to search harder for their inspirations, but the results will be better for it.
Read about the mechanics of disease spread with respect to viruses and you'll see why this does not happen.
Highly damaging viruses don't spread far. Today's virus/work/trojan writers want to capture large numbers of zombie PCs and resell these networks. They aim for control, not damage. It's about money, not vandalism.
One or the other... devious or sloppy... but surely not both.
/tinfoil on
/tinfoil off
Maybe it's just a sign that malware is evolving along the same rules as organic life: accidental errors get selected for survival value and passed along to following generations.
Malware that detects and disables attempts to reverse engineer it... ?
Or perhaps we can read the anti-virus researcher's comments in a totally different light:
"Most viruses [which we develop ourselves to stimulate sale of our products and services] have a function to let us easily identify and sandbox them. In this example, the function is broken. So sloppy it's devious [and perhaps intended as a warning that we're not paying our freelance coders enough]."
Nah.
What's really missing is a tiny standardized robust plugable hard-disk that provides the 20+Gb needed for a personal workspace. For the rest: any PC running a standard suite of applications (Mozilla, OpenOffice). In extremis, a bootable CD.
I almost do this today but USB flash disks are too slow for the purpose.
It should also be possible to package a complete OS, applications, and data onto a portable storage device, then load the OS, applications, and data through an emulation layer on the host system.
...the successors to the Matrix were not some of the most disappointing films I've ever seen, I'd run out and buy tomorrow.
That is how long I give Microsoft before they find themselves confronted by a revolution from their users due the their inability to deliver secure products.
Instead of spending their effort trying to destroy their competitors (which, today, means open source software), Microsoft should be closing the gap.
Yes, all software has potential insecurities. Yes, Microsoft is targetted because they are the dominant monoculture.
But no, this changes nothing. A burglar will always go for the easiest target, and Microsoft users will always be the target so long as Windows et al. is even just slightly less secure than the alternatives.
Microsoft should release a service pack to Windows that sets the security settings on MSIE to their highest levels, even at the risk of breaking many web sites. They should sponsor anti-spyware software developers with large prizes for the best anti-spyware software. They should be talking to major ISPs for ways to detect and disable zombies.
Redmond, listen: Make Windows Secure.
Otherwise you will be tarred and feathered by your long-suffering users who will prefer any viable alternative to one more "surf at your own risk" experience.
Thank you, mfh.
Anyone else bored with designers trying to sell us their "visions"? What happened to asking people what they want and then making that cheaply and well?
(I guess this would eliminate 75% of the mobile phone industry at a stroke, no more 3G, WAP, MMS, UMTS,... just free SMS and cheap voice)
Mobile phones...? OK, here is what _I_ would like to see:
1. Cheap, cheap, cheap. The damn things get lost and stolen too easily. If they cost $25 that'd be OK.
2. Pretty in pink. Make them colored, even better, make it possible to print phone sheaths on an inkjet. Why the boring grey?
3. Standardised: one single battery standard for all phones. One single micro plug for all phones. One single power supply for all phones. One single range of car kits, etc. Let's see Nokia and Sony-Ericsson and Siemens define a new standard "base" that frees us from having to keep separate chargers for each and every phone we buy. (Nokia has done this for its own phones, but that's not enough)
4. Extensible rather than overpackaged. If I want a digital camera, MP3 player, PDA, let me add this to the phone. It'd be a lot easier if mobile phones had standard connections and some kind of docking system.
Let me propose a new, radical design for mobile phones. First replace SIM cards with "core" modules that are the size of a phone battery pack. These cores conform to an industry standard and have the SIM card embedded in them, along with the bulk of the GSM electronics.
The core can then be "sheathed" with anything from a $2.50 cover that provides just a keypad and headset jack, to a $2500 cover covered with diamonds.
The development of a standard core will allow the cost to come way down and spawn an entire industry of add-on manufacturers, which is where the mobuile phone industry will make money again.
Now if I, a simple Slashdotter, can come up with a plan to revolutionize the mobile phone industry, either I'm a genius, or the experts reviewed in this article are bumbling idiots, or both.
Now I need another coffee. Make way!
I commented in a previous article that the Akamai collapse was a DDoS.
My theory is this: someone is selling a massive network of zombies and is demonstrating the power they wield. The idea being, if you can bring down Akamai, you can bring down anyone.
Every country has its criminals and scamsters, and the US is no exception.
This is a serious story about how to get information to people who desperately need it but who are disconnected from the world in a way most of you can't even start to imagine.
The Internet has ignored most of Africa, with several attempts to lay fibre-optic cable around the continent abandoned due to politics and war. For most people, "internet" means shared access to a VSAT link, which is a $50,000 investment and expensive charges. If you're lucky you live in a city like Lagos that has cybercafes where you can check email so a little surfing.
No p2p, no streaming, no downloads except of trivially small packages, no ISOs, no online updates,...
I've spent lots of time in Nigeria and the truth is this: most Nigerians, like most people anywhere, are hard-working, ambitious, honest, dedicated. The tragedy of their country is partly due to that "oil wealth", which does not make life better for anyone except an elite, and turns politics into a scramble for power and the money that brings.
Like much of Africa, Nigeria is saddled with political classes that throttle attempts at growth and stability. It is almost impossible, for instance, to get an education or start a business unless you are prepared to bribe your way through. Fraud and 419 crime is big business in Nigeria largely because there is so little opportunity for honesty.
One of the keys to resolving the poverty of the mind that keeps Nigerians handicapped is access to information and education. People accept situations only because they know of nothing better.
Now, some of the better suggestions here were to ship CDs and DVDs instead of disk drives. This seems an excellent idea: recordable DVDs are cheap and can be mailed cheaply, and can be distributed and copied locally.
The ideal package to send should be: a DVD, plus a DVD writer, plus 20 recordable DVDs. I don't think this would cost any more than the hard drive, and it would be a lot more useful.
C is an ANSI standard language and has been implemented by hundreds of groups and companies, including all the major OS vendors.
.NET and this implementation are attempts to define, control, and open (or close) these basic layers. So if you take .NET seriously (which I do not, but that's a personal opinion), an open source equivalent is obvious and necesssary. Proprietary platforms extract a huge tax on their developers and customers: the lesson of Bell Labs' inventions and how they ended-up changing the world shows that gcc, Linux, and the thousands of other "clones" represent heroic and vital investments in reducing the cost of IT so that its benefits can reach beyond the elite.
Unix was largely standardised as POSIX long before Linux existed.
Both these (and many other technologies, such as parser generators, editors, networking) form basic layers of what has become a huge and sophisticated pyramid of applications.
Layers like
If you are still using the same applications as in 1983, then you have some catching up to do. In 1983 I was using vi and assembler and some C, and seriously, things have changed a little bit since then...
You don't need to use the cd burning facilities from the Xandros file manager (which is not hackable, and not open source, developed entirely by Xandros).
But it's simple to install k3b and burn CDs at full speed _and_ DVDs.
that there is a firm and long-term strategy in place by certain groups to find ways of outlawing the act of writing code for public consumption without a license. the end goal being simply to create or perpetuate existing monopolies by the creation of artificial barriers to entry into what has become an incredibly open market.
i think the first real attempt (or mockup) was certification of code which found its extreme in palladium. This principally technical solution has since been abandoned.
the current wave is based around so-called intellectual property rights. the term is a joke, but has many proponents, from the media industries through to the software business. you do not own that idea, it belongs to someone already. the space in your head has a 75-year lease.
this will also fail imho. it is - like palladium - too ludicrous a proposition and fails the basic darwin test: any society that allows its common technological culture to be partitioned into 'property' will suffer competitive disadvantage and eventually either change or die.
i expect the next phases to be based on security, but only after the current market leader is long dead and gone, its laughably insecure products being replaced with "professional" ones from other, older players.
who will, i think, be in the fore-front of the lobby to license software programming.
i've been programming for 20 years but i am very sure that my children will not be allowed to do this freely, any more than i can distill liquor and sell it to my neighbours.
software is just too fundamental, too valuable to be left in the hands of the common people.
The signs of it are EVERYWHERE, if you know what to look for!
Apart from the discomfort of wearing headphones over long periods, the noise-reduction works well in office environments. Cuts out more than just noisy PCs: also airco, neighbours, and fire sirens.