I think the whole Windows Refund Day saga is worth mentioning, because it speaks not to an overly restrictive element of the license, but of the insane runaround you're subjected to if you find the EULA's terms unacceptable. In the beginning, neither Toshiba nor Microsoft would honor the refund clause of a Toshiba laptop's Windows95 EULA:
If you do not agree to the terms of this EULA, PC manufacturer and Microsoft are unwilling to license the software product to you. In such an event... you should promptly contact PC manufacturer for instructions on a return of the unused product(s) for a refund.
So the scary thing about these isn't just what it holds the user to, but what it fails to hold the issuer to.
More like easy-to-use IA's have already ruined the Internet for us Geeks.
There's no point in preaching or ranting; it's all been said and heard before. The Great Unclued are a mixed blessing. The more of them there are, the cheaper the pipes get, and the more bandwidth I have to myself from 2am to 5am. Or would have, if I didn't have a day job.
Chances are it is a one-time pad, but not necessarily one you do XOR math on, or indeed one where you do any math at all. It is a code book, and a short one at that.
Spies have to conceal stuff; you can't have a book called How To Decrypt Your CIA Messages in your backpack all the time. So the codes would be simple and there would only be a handful of them. So few, in fact, that you could memorize them.
If I had to guess (and this is Slashdot so rampant speculation is practically a mandate), I would say that 99.999% of what's transmitted from numbers stations is steganographic white noise and that each agent has only three or four codes of five or so digits to memorize, and that there are rules like "if your message contains a number that begins and ends in sevens, this message is bogus, unless the inner three digits sum up even". The three or four messages to pay attention to would be "pick up instructions at dead drop one/two/three", "meet your handler in person at rendezvous point one/two/three", "suspend all spy activities until further notice", and "get out now." And when they pick up a new set of instructions, there may be an update to the code list, to keep transmissions as unrepeating as possible.
A technique like this has a lot of advantages. First, the list of messages is short enough to memorize, so there is one less piece of damning evidence lying around the house. Second, it delegates the important, detailed spy stuff to more conventional field communication techniques.
Finally, it dramatically reduces the risk of having real messages discovered. One of the greatest risks of spying is discovery when picking up or retreiving messages from handlers. Now, instead of sitting waiting on a park bench every Tuesday at noon to see if a man with a red shopping bag goes by, you just put a tiny radio in your ear while you take your Tuesday shower and keep your ear cocked for a couple of memorized key codes.
Spy work is often rather slow-paced; except for emergencies, field agents' instructions probably don't need updating more than every couple of months. Picking a meaningful single five-digit string out of two months worth of meaningless five-digit strings is probably well beyond the capabilities of mere mortals.
You only need to build one quantum computer on which to run the quantum search engine. All the rest of us will have a chip that contains two particles, the matching antiparticles of which are resting in QSE1's memory banks. You use quantum entanglement between your particle and QSE1s for communication, using one pair to send and one pair to receive. It is instant, secure, and reliable. It's a serial line whose bandwidth depends solely on how rapidly one can vibrate a particle.
As long as you have the ultimate search engine, you should let QSE1 serve as the ultimate network switch as well. Nice target for terrorists, or government confiscation at the very least.
Is this some sort of event horizon, or am I talking out my butt?
The Lord of the Rings was first published in 1954-1955; The Hobbit was first published in 1937. The series did not enter common popularity until around 1970. Under your rules, Tolkien could not have afforded to keep his work long enough to see any profit off of it.
Your scheme is interesting, but it needs some tuning to accommodate authors whose work is not appreciated five hours after it is published. Perhaps if we reverted to the conventional 14 year renewable scheme for personally held copyrights and applied your rules to copyrights held by corporations.
Then, of course, Windows would be copyright Bill Gates instead of Microsoft and we really would have to kill him to see the source code. Hmmm. Maybe your idea is pretty good after all...
No, it just means that the original thieves can't be prosecuted. If you steal a copy tomorrow, you're still a thief. For that matter, you could be prosecuted if you still possess something you stole, even if the statute of limitations has expired on the original act of theft.
The article provided good insight into the consequences of internal infighting among suits, the discord caused when management pretends its job is to rule its employees rather than facilitate their work as revenue generators, and the damage that can be done when a company spends money it doesn't have and may never get.
And right now the V.C.s are getting cold feet. It could be a bad time for LinuxCare to get a boost from outside. On the other hand, they've been around for a couple of years--hardly a random startup.
My subject question about lack of focus has to do with the increasing market visibility of particular brands of Linux versus that of generic Linux. I think that potential buyers now think of things not in terms of Linux--Linux itself is a given--but in terms of Red Hat vs. Caldera vs. SuSE vs. Turbo vs. Debian blah blee blah bloe. Saying you support Linux anymore is like saying you repair cars, when what cautious car owners want is to go to their manufacturer or dealership and get their service done there. Car is the commodity; Lincoln is the brand.
I don't know much about who LinuxCare sells its services to; would it be possible for LinuxCare to improve its revenue stream by becoming a support subcontractor to the companies who have the brand names and market presence? Say they started handling Red Hat's support calls. Red Hat is a known and trusted name at far as Linux goes; companies seeking support for their Red Hat systems would probably want to get support from Red Hat than a third party. Even if they knew the support call was transparently being re-routed somewhere else, there is a certain sense of security when the phone is answered "Red Hat Support Services, can I help you?"
Both companies could win big on an arrangement like this: LinuxCare could handle 99% of all calls themselves, and only bring Red Hat into the situation when things have gotten really obscure.
You're not going to make a cent unless your process stands up to scientific review!)
With due respect to your otherwise insightful post, I must disagree with this assertion: while affirmative scientific review may gain you credibility, it does not affect profits. What determines whether you're going to make a cent is (a) whether you can sell it, and (b) whether it works. Edison sold an awful lot of lightbulbs before photon emission from Bohr shell level transitions was understood.
Has Slashdot's collective memory become so short that nobody here can remember the pending DeCSS lawsuits?
Having a licensed, approved, certified and authorized DVD player for Linux is only a victory for people who like to watch movies on their computer monitor. For open source, free-speech, and freedom of expression, it is a defeat. The licensing scheme itself and the lawsuits against reverse engineering are reprehensible, and all we're being offered here is an opportunity to buy in to--and help underwrite--corporate thuggery.
So if you really feel the need to subsidize the MPAA's lawsuits against freedom and innovation, go ahead and support these guys, or anybody else that sucks up to the consortium/cartel. In the meantime, though, I'm reluctant to sell my soul just so I can hear director's commentary for Battlefield Earth.
Actually, this is a rather elegant hack, using existing tools in new and unexpected ways. Who would have thought of reusing a mailing address as a mission statement?
One of the biggest ways OSS is changing this industry is by making the contents and quality of software known to outsiders. By exposing themselves to external code reviews, and creating what amounts to a highly interactive beta test, a company's marketing must remain honest, because they can be caught in a lie very quickly.
Once a product is feature-complete, all that's left is bug hunting. If the bug list is driving the coding effort, the Whole World (tm) gets to see it, gets to knock things off it, gets to verify for itself whether and how bugs have been eliminated.
The only thing that's to a company's disadvantage is that it's harder to make money supporting a high-quality product than by patching up the bugs and selling the fixes as an "upgrade." Nevertheless, the old model is disappearing. Just as Detroit had to abandon planned vehicle obsolescence in the face of high-quality, reliable imports, closed-source companies are being forced to meet the challenge of open, provable-quality software. Some of them will do this by lobbying for absurd laws (see George Will's May 15 Newsweekcolumn for a fascinating mundane example). Some will do this by suing us. The ones that survive, though, are the ones that prove they can adapt. They always are.
The capital investment in hardware development is far too great to go and reveal all the inner workings of older models when there is still competition against your newer ones. Even if a product line has been discontinued, individual components or concepts from that line may be reused in newer product lines. Here's a hypothetical situation:
Say for example your company produced the Foonmatix 1/10, a 100 port 10-baseT Ethernet switch. Buried deep within the switch is a rather elegant circuit, the Foontek 3842 that knows how to efficiently redirect a packet to, for example, port 32 if port 33 has a collision on it.
Five years later, you've discontinued the entire 10-baseT line. Now you're producing the Foonmatix 4/100, a 400 port 100-baseT switch, which is selling like hotcakes, because it has an incredible new chip buried in there that does predictive packet routing so efficiently that you can handle nearly 50% more traffic than equivalently priced switches. So why aren't you open-sourcing the Foonmatix 1/10?
Turns out that the only way to do predictive packet routing efficiently is if you have a good way of handling wrongly predicted packets. For everybody else in the business, a misrouted packet is a nightmare that grinds the entire switch to a halt for nearly 15ms, an eternity on a heavily loaded network and one that until now has been handled by putting a buffer on every port and redesigning the switch so that it can handle the datastorm that happens when all the buffers are freed at once. An expensive, complex mess. Enter the Foontek 3842's 100mbit descendent, the 3842A. When hooked up to the predictive routing circuit (PRC), it (a) quickly sends the bogus packet where it is supposed to go and (b) tells the PRC that it's misrouting packets from port X. Slicker than goose poop, and it wouldn't work without the Foontek 3842A.
So: when you open-source the 1/10 switch, you end up open-sourcing, or at least describing, the Foontek 3842, which has since become a critical part of the switches you've bet your company's future on.
It's too easy to give away trade secrets indirectly. In a field as competitive as computer and networking hardware, the risk of giving a competitor the edge by effectively giving them all your old ideas is just too great. What if the design you toss out the window is the magic bullet your competitor has been looking for?
Personally, I would rather see this happen on the software end of things. I can think of a half dozen old software packages that were excellent in their old environment and could become portable wonders if open-sourced. Borland's Sprint editor and Microsoft Word for DOS version 5.0, to name two. I have my doubts as to whether either of these products contain super secret algorithms that matter now, eight to ten years after they were dropped.
My question is, couldn't you build something like that for less?!
Probably. But since the only people who "should" have one are the gubment, no matter how cheaply I can make them, I'm still gonna paint 'em olive green and sell them for ninety thousand dollars...
I got to be a Nielsen family one time. They gave me a diary and a fin and I wrote down what I watched and when. I did put one lie--I told them I had watched Homicide that week when in fact I had not. What I actually watched that night was porno, but anything to help keep good television alive and available for when I do want to watch it. That was such a good show. I'm glad it's in syndication now.
Anyhoo--product placement, formerly just big business on the big screen, is rapidly encroaching on a small screen near you. Did you notice how all those snazzy flat screen monitors behind the nurses station on E.R. suddenly became Gateway brand snazzy flat screen monitors?
For the most part, Nielsen currently only looks at what whole shows you watch. If Nielsen starts observing your viewing habits that closely, there's nothing to prevent them from knowing what scenes you watch most closely, pause, rewind, FFF on through, that sort of thing. After analyzing that data, Buffy will eventually consist entirely of vampires dying to reveal Pepsi machines right behind them, Buffy holding a Pepsi can right next to her breasts, and Buffy giving that redhead a long, meaningful sip out of her Pepsi.
If we keep this up long enough, all we'll ever see on Buffy is the redhead licking Pepsi out of Buffy's navel.
I have to say I have mixed feelings about this. I'll save a bundle on porno, to be sure, but I can pretty much kiss quality television goodbye.
Creepy possibility #2: combine blue-screen technology, a huge demographics database, product placement, broadband and pointcasting all together to make sure that viewers from seven to thirteen see the redhead licking Kool-Aide out of the navel; from fourteen to twenty see Pepsi; from twenty-one to thirty it's Budweiser; from thirty to forty it's Guinness for men, or Amstel Light for women and all households which have purchased diet products in the last year; and from forty to fifty it's Scotch for households making over $100k/year, gin for $50k to $99k, and Bud for everything else. On pay-per view, you can watch the same show and instead of a flavored beverage, it's semen.
Slashdot Mirror
And stop calling me Shirley!
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No, but we are, which cats seem to understand all too well...
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So the scary thing about these isn't just what it holds the user to, but what it fails to hold the issuer to.
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That's something I've always wondered about sex ed--if you flunk the written, can you make it up on the oral?
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There's no point in preaching or ranting; it's all been said and heard before. The Great Unclued are a mixed blessing. The more of them there are, the cheaper the pipes get, and the more bandwidth I have to myself from 2am to 5am. Or would have, if I didn't have a day job.
--
The September That Never Ended rolls on.
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Spies have to conceal stuff; you can't have a book called How To Decrypt Your CIA Messages in your backpack all the time. So the codes would be simple and there would only be a handful of them. So few, in fact, that you could memorize them.
If I had to guess (and this is Slashdot so rampant speculation is practically a mandate), I would say that 99.999% of what's transmitted from numbers stations is steganographic white noise and that each agent has only three or four codes of five or so digits to memorize, and that there are rules like "if your message contains a number that begins and ends in sevens, this message is bogus, unless the inner three digits sum up even". The three or four messages to pay attention to would be "pick up instructions at dead drop one/two/three", "meet your handler in person at rendezvous point one/two/three", "suspend all spy activities until further notice", and "get out now." And when they pick up a new set of instructions, there may be an update to the code list, to keep transmissions as unrepeating as possible.
A technique like this has a lot of advantages. First, the list of messages is short enough to memorize, so there is one less piece of damning evidence lying around the house. Second, it delegates the important, detailed spy stuff to more conventional field communication techniques.
Finally, it dramatically reduces the risk of having real messages discovered. One of the greatest risks of spying is discovery when picking up or retreiving messages from handlers. Now, instead of sitting waiting on a park bench every Tuesday at noon to see if a man with a red shopping bag goes by, you just put a tiny radio in your ear while you take your Tuesday shower and keep your ear cocked for a couple of memorized key codes.
Spy work is often rather slow-paced; except for emergencies, field agents' instructions probably don't need updating more than every couple of months. Picking a meaningful single five-digit string out of two months worth of meaningless five-digit strings is probably well beyond the capabilities of mere mortals.
--
Now we see the downside of OSS--all us geeks doing cool things to impress each other has produced an open source WebTV.
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Just doing my part for science.
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I've solved the Karma Maximization problem! Unfortunately my proof is too large to fit in this Internet...
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As long as you have the ultimate search engine, you should let QSE1 serve as the ultimate network switch as well. Nice target for terrorists, or government confiscation at the very least.
Is this some sort of event horizon, or am I talking out my butt?
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Your scheme is interesting, but it needs some tuning to accommodate authors whose work is not appreciated five hours after it is published. Perhaps if we reverted to the conventional 14 year renewable scheme for personally held copyrights and applied your rules to copyrights held by corporations.
Then, of course, Windows would be copyright Bill Gates instead of Microsoft and we really would have to kill him to see the source code. Hmmm. Maybe your idea is pretty good after all...
--
No, it just means that the original thieves can't be prosecuted. If you steal a copy tomorrow, you're still a thief. For that matter, you could be prosecuted if you still possess something you stole, even if the statute of limitations has expired on the original act of theft.
--
And right now the V.C.s are getting cold feet. It could be a bad time for LinuxCare to get a boost from outside. On the other hand, they've been around for a couple of years--hardly a random startup.
My subject question about lack of focus has to do with the increasing market visibility of particular brands of Linux versus that of generic Linux. I think that potential buyers now think of things not in terms of Linux--Linux itself is a given--but in terms of Red Hat vs. Caldera vs. SuSE vs. Turbo vs. Debian blah blee blah bloe. Saying you support Linux anymore is like saying you repair cars, when what cautious car owners want is to go to their manufacturer or dealership and get their service done there. Car is the commodity; Lincoln is the brand.
I don't know much about who LinuxCare sells its services to; would it be possible for LinuxCare to improve its revenue stream by becoming a support subcontractor to the companies who have the brand names and market presence? Say they started handling Red Hat's support calls. Red Hat is a known and trusted name at far as Linux goes; companies seeking support for their Red Hat systems would probably want to get support from Red Hat than a third party. Even if they knew the support call was transparently being re-routed somewhere else, there is a certain sense of security when the phone is answered "Red Hat Support Services, can I help you?"
Both companies could win big on an arrangement like this: LinuxCare could handle 99% of all calls themselves, and only bring Red Hat into the situation when things have gotten really obscure.
--
With due respect to your otherwise insightful post, I must disagree with this assertion: while affirmative scientific review may gain you credibility, it does not affect profits. What determines whether you're going to make a cent is (a) whether you can sell it, and (b) whether it works. Edison sold an awful lot of lightbulbs before photon emission from Bohr shell level transitions was understood.
--
Having a licensed, approved, certified and authorized DVD player for Linux is only a victory for people who like to watch movies on their computer monitor. For open source, free-speech, and freedom of expression, it is a defeat. The licensing scheme itself and the lawsuits against reverse engineering are reprehensible, and all we're being offered here is an opportunity to buy in to--and help underwrite--corporate thuggery.
So if you really feel the need to subsidize the MPAA's lawsuits against freedom and innovation, go ahead and support these guys, or anybody else that sucks up to the consortium/cartel. In the meantime, though, I'm reluctant to sell my soul just so I can hear director's commentary for Battlefield Earth.
--
Ah, but this is object oriented Perl. It's not just line noise, it's encapsulated line noise!
--
Actually, this is a rather elegant hack, using existing tools in new and unexpected ways. Who would have thought of reusing a mailing address as a mission statement?
--
Once a product is feature-complete, all that's left is bug hunting. If the bug list is driving the coding effort, the Whole World (tm) gets to see it, gets to knock things off it, gets to verify for itself whether and how bugs have been eliminated.
The only thing that's to a company's disadvantage is that it's harder to make money supporting a high-quality product than by patching up the bugs and selling the fixes as an "upgrade." Nevertheless, the old model is disappearing. Just as Detroit had to abandon planned vehicle obsolescence in the face of high-quality, reliable imports, closed-source companies are being forced to meet the challenge of open, provable-quality software. Some of them will do this by lobbying for absurd laws (see George Will's May 15 Newsweek column for a fascinating mundane example). Some will do this by suing us. The ones that survive, though, are the ones that prove they can adapt. They always are.
--
The capital investment in hardware development is far too great to go and reveal all the inner workings of older models when there is still competition against your newer ones. Even if a product line has been discontinued, individual components or concepts from that line may be reused in newer product lines. Here's a hypothetical situation:
Say for example your company produced the Foonmatix 1/10, a 100 port 10-baseT Ethernet switch. Buried deep within the switch is a rather elegant circuit, the Foontek 3842 that knows how to efficiently redirect a packet to, for example, port 32 if port 33 has a collision on it.
Five years later, you've discontinued the entire 10-baseT line. Now you're producing the Foonmatix 4/100, a 400 port 100-baseT switch, which is selling like hotcakes, because it has an incredible new chip buried in there that does predictive packet routing so efficiently that you can handle nearly 50% more traffic than equivalently priced switches. So why aren't you open-sourcing the Foonmatix 1/10?
Turns out that the only way to do predictive packet routing efficiently is if you have a good way of handling wrongly predicted packets. For everybody else in the business, a misrouted packet is a nightmare that grinds the entire switch to a halt for nearly 15ms, an eternity on a heavily loaded network and one that until now has been handled by putting a buffer on every port and redesigning the switch so that it can handle the datastorm that happens when all the buffers are freed at once. An expensive, complex mess. Enter the Foontek 3842's 100mbit descendent, the 3842A. When hooked up to the predictive routing circuit (PRC), it (a) quickly sends the bogus packet where it is supposed to go and (b) tells the PRC that it's misrouting packets from port X. Slicker than goose poop, and it wouldn't work without the Foontek 3842A.
So: when you open-source the 1/10 switch, you end up open-sourcing, or at least describing, the Foontek 3842, which has since become a critical part of the switches you've bet your company's future on.
It's too easy to give away trade secrets indirectly. In a field as competitive as computer and networking hardware, the risk of giving a competitor the edge by effectively giving them all your old ideas is just too great. What if the design you toss out the window is the magic bullet your competitor has been looking for?
Personally, I would rather see this happen on the software end of things. I can think of a half dozen old software packages that were excellent in their old environment and could become portable wonders if open-sourced. Borland's Sprint editor and Microsoft Word for DOS version 5.0, to name two. I have my doubts as to whether either of these products contain super secret algorithms that matter now, eight to ten years after they were dropped.
--
Six months? Yeah, it might have loaded by then...
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Probably. But since the only people who "should" have one are the gubment, no matter how cheaply I can make them, I'm still gonna paint 'em olive green and sell them for ninety thousand dollars...
--
Are there inertial navigation systems that accurate?
--
--
Anyhoo--product placement, formerly just big business on the big screen, is rapidly encroaching on a small screen near you. Did you notice how all those snazzy flat screen monitors behind the nurses station on E.R. suddenly became Gateway brand snazzy flat screen monitors?
For the most part, Nielsen currently only looks at what whole shows you watch. If Nielsen starts observing your viewing habits that closely, there's nothing to prevent them from knowing what scenes you watch most closely, pause, rewind, FFF on through, that sort of thing. After analyzing that data, Buffy will eventually consist entirely of vampires dying to reveal Pepsi machines right behind them, Buffy holding a Pepsi can right next to her breasts, and Buffy giving that redhead a long, meaningful sip out of her Pepsi.
If we keep this up long enough, all we'll ever see on Buffy is the redhead licking Pepsi out of Buffy's navel.
I have to say I have mixed feelings about this. I'll save a bundle on porno, to be sure, but I can pretty much kiss quality television goodbye.
Creepy possibility #2: combine blue-screen technology, a huge demographics database, product placement, broadband and pointcasting all together to make sure that viewers from seven to thirteen see the redhead licking Kool-Aide out of the navel; from fourteen to twenty see Pepsi; from twenty-one to thirty it's Budweiser; from thirty to forty it's Guinness for men, or Amstel Light for women and all households which have purchased diet products in the last year; and from forty to fifty it's Scotch for households making over $100k/year, gin for $50k to $99k, and Bud for everything else. On pay-per view, you can watch the same show and instead of a flavored beverage, it's semen.
Maybe I won't save on pornography after all.
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