Gain market share? Yeah. Microsoft is **REALLY** after the 1% linux users who hate them already. WOW. Brilliant.
I suspect I'm feeding a troll here, but the market share they're trying to gain is that of
Adobe, who have pretty much 100% for the market when it comes to rich web interfaces.
Partly it's that whenever Microsoft sees a company making money, they wonder how they can
claim that market for themselves. But I suspect the main reason is that they hate to see popular cross platform interfaces. Because then people might not need MS so much, and then they might see Linux and Mac adoption rise rather faster than they'd like.
This is nothing they haven't done before. In particular, Netscape spring to mind, who were destroyed by MS because of the browser's potential to become a desktop environment in its own right. Netscape ran on Linux, but that wasn't why Netscape had to die, either.
It's not always about more energy to produce than it makes over its lifetime but rather delivering power to remote locations of the planet. I'd say a solar panel array would be far better than running a generator just so a few houses etc can have some lighting.
I entirely agree with you. The point I wanted to make was that even considered purely in terms of energy in/energy out, the idea can still have a lot going for it.
1. "even if you loose power on the deal". "Loose power"? I like that phrase; I can picture a mad scientist saying it. "Now, I shall loose power on my enemies!" (I assume you meant "lose power"?)
You mean as in even though I set loose my mighty spell checker upon this missive,
yet shall errors remain undetected, should they also form the correct spellings of other,
less appropriate, words.
To respond to your other point.. do you mean functional lifetime or projected lifetime? I can easily see them in their projected lifetime compensating for the energy used to bake them. However, their functional lifetime may be significantly lower than projected, either due to natural disasters or the onset of Armageddon.
Let's say projected lifetime. The end of the world is going to cancel out most economic strategies, green or otherwise,
so to that extent it probably cancels out across all the options. (I'm deliberately ignoring the contentious issue of
whether or not certain strategies are more like than others to bring about catastrophe).
How many solar cells do you need to power a pizza oven, anyway?
It's not so much the number of cells you'd need to power the oven, that's important. It's whether or not one oven load of cells could produce more energy over the entire lifetime of the cells than the energy it took to bake them.
I have no idea oft he numbers involved myself, but put like that, it doesn't seem nearly so ridiculous. Hell, the cells might still be worth making, even if you loose power on the deal; just think of them as very long life batteries.
What I was saying was that [Moore's]position was uninformed and that the real situation in the world is vastly more complex and indeed does contain people who are eager to see the world burn.
To be fair, I don't think Alan Moore ever intended to say "no one wants to see the world burn" in Watchmen. I think his point was more along the lines of "morality in real life is more complicated than it is in most superhero stories".
He was turning comics cliches on their head at every possible opportunity. The criminal mastermind turns out to be an
old fart dying of cancer, who doesn't seem like a bad guy, all things considered. The biggest, and most successful villain in the book is ostensibly one of the good guys. The most principled of the heroes, the one most dedicated to the idea of justice, is also an out and out sociopath.
And all of that pales into insignificance against the threat of a global nuclear holocaust, one that's being brought about not by evil men, but by people trying do their jobs, and finding themselves out of their depth. And the one super human on the planet, the one who could conceivably stop a nuclear war from happening... well all of a sudden, he's not interested any more.
It's also worth pointing out that Moore doesn't seem to have had many problems with the notion of evil people in positions of power. Sir James Jaspers is probably the best example - the mad mutant prime minister who was quite happy to destroy the world on a whim. And, from the same storyline, Opal Luna Saturnine, who did destroy an entire universe to try and contain Jaspers' threat. Kid Miracleman probably also merits a mention here - all of them predating Watchmen.
Getting back to Watchmen, it's hard to pin down any single message from a such a complex work, but I think if Moore had one
thing to say about people's motivations in the real world, it was that they are complicated.
At the time Watchment was written, morality in superhero comics had become almost as stylised as the art
illustrating them. Doctor Doom was might have sometimes paused to consider what was best for subjects in
Latveria, but in most cases he was iconic Evil, while the heroes might be occasionally
tormented, but they were almost always unambiguously Good. The morality in Watchmen was, I think,
far more of a reaction against those conventions, than it was an attempt describe the real world.
Yeah, because they're likely to sell $120 million in merchandise to a bunch of torrenters.
Yeah! Why would anyone pay good money for an action figure when they could just download one
over bittorrent... Hang on a sec, that doesn't quite work, does it?
See, this is one of those interesting ways in which intellectual property is not the same
thing as actual property.
My point is that "respected" bodies like ISO aren't falling. They've hit the lowest ground years (and in some cases, decades) ago.
Then maybe it's time we started demanding standards that were truly fit for purpose. That could be the one
true thing to come out of this mess. It it raises general in the technical
community of how badly broken ISO is, then maybe we're seeing the first steps
on the road to a workable standards process.
In any event, there's nothing to be gained by accepting the status quo,
and everything to gain from making a fuss. Good standards are important. If
ISO can't deliver them we need a standards body that can.
The whole idea of "independant standard bodies" is about as flawed as the idea behind software patents.
I think you're conflating two ideas there. Firstly, there's the notion of a standard is a technical
specification that (I expect and demand) everyone can implement and conform to. Secondly, there's the
notion of a sort of government monopoly - in the sense that if YoYoDyne Inc control Standard X and
the govt mandates that all frobnitz conform to Standard X, then only YoYoDyne can practically
market frobnitz.
The point I think you're missing is that if a standard is a standard in the first sense, then
the abuse implicit in the second scenario is impossible. It's not that standards are inherently
broken, it's that closed, proprietary standards are broken. And so the problem comes back to
IP rather than standards, per se.
The geek risks becoming hermetically sealed within a tight little world of his own ---perennially disappointed - and confused - when everyone else moves off in an entirely different direction.
Sounds good to me, Westly old boy.
Why don't you set off now? You can send us a postcard when you get there.
Adapt implies "behind the curve." Something has to change before a thing can adapt.
That only really works if you're considering a data space with exactly two variables. It's sometimes useful to reduce the market two variables - which is
basically where all those nice graphs come from. The trouble is that there
are millions, possibly billions of inputs into the global marketplace, and no
company can be ahead of the curve on all of them.
The big companies tend to assume they can set the rules - and to a limited extent that's true, but only to a limited extent. Otherwise we'd be using MS proprietary networking protocols rather than TCP/IP.
Windows programmers hoard their creations and try to make money from them, and no one programmer can really benefit much from the work of any other. Linux hackers release their creations freely, and every hacker can improve and build upon the work of any other
And it's not just the software. Do a bit of googling to find out how to apply an emerging technology or methodology. If your target platform is Windows, chances are you'll find a couple of dozen teaser blogs by MS MVPs all pimping their latest book.
Do the same thing for a linux deployment, and you'll get a handful of Howtos.
But again, if every one and their brother starts doing this, how will you go about finding the best acts in a see of mediocrity. It will still take marketing for people to find them, which takes money that a start up band won't have.
I can't see why it should be any harder than finding a blogger worth reading. There are a great many bad blogs out there, but some of them emerge as head and shoulders above the rest. I read Bruce Schneier, PJ and Cory Doctorow among others. I don't recall needing marketing to find any of them.
For that matter, it shouldn't be harder than finding a decent online community to participate in. I didn't find Slashdot because I was bombarded with marketing - I came here because I came across references to a popular geek news forum, and thought I'd check it out.
Can a band sustain itself without a record label, while still releasing music in an album format digitally?
Which band? If you're talking about Radiohead, then yes. However, if you're talking about your buddy Joe's local garage band, no
On the other hand, it's worth pointing out that Buddy Joe and his Local Garage Band probably can't make enough to sustain themselves with the help of a record label, either.
The reason a lot of garage bands can't support themselves is that a lot of them aren't very good. This isn't to say they lack talent, or can't get good by working at it. On the other hand, if they get good enough to have got an advance from a label, there's a fair chance they'll be able to gather a following on the Internet too.
Really though, that's not anything either of us will be able to say with any certainty for some years to come. This seems to be an emerging trend - how far it develops remains to be seen.
No. Common sense would say it's a bug. Tin-foil-hat sense would say, "it is there for the purpose of limiting consumer choice."
I think when a software vendor introduces a bug which has the major effect of limiting consumer choice,
we have to at least consider that this may, in fact, have been a deliberate act.
It's a bit like if someone has a handgun that accidentally discharges and shoots his next door neighbour dead.
You have to consider the possibility of murder.
Otherwise, you can expect a lot people to start having awfully convenient accidents. No tin foil hat required.
So, the question is not one of whether or not the Internet will be regulated. It seems it's going to be regulated,
wither by the govt. or the ISPs. The question then is who do we trust to look out for our interests as
users or the internet?
We can expect the free-market libertarians to take the position that market forces will force the ISP to do a good
job, while any government control is bound to be co-opted and subverted. Those who broadly favour government intervention
will largely disagree.
Personally I don't think the free market can help here. The underlying issue isn't with the big ISPs throttling their customers. The issue lies with ISPs throttling other ISPs customers. Walking out on your service provider because some third party is traffic shaping you into oblivion is not a rational response, and is unlikely to help/
So I think if regulation coming anyway, it has to be government regulation. At least then the people who use the internet have some hope of bring pressure to bear in defence of their interests. I can't see how that's going to happen if the ISPs self-regulate.
Any benefit to you is strictly incidental, and will be canceled out the moment you invent something.
Of course, that rather assumes there is any benefit to me as inventor under the current system. If I
invent something as things stand, those corporations with established patent thickets can tie me up in
legislation until I run out of money. To compete on even terms there, I don't just need to invent something,
I need to patent tens of thousands of somethings. That's probably not going to happen,
no matter how hard I work.
On the other hand, if software patents are forbidden, then at least I can't be prevented from trying to
exploit on my own idea, even if I do have to allow the big boys to compete.
I disagree with this... I think that Apple's intent is to control their stuff to get that "seamless, just works" experience for users. The fact that this creates "lock in" is secondary.
mmmm... possibly. Or maybe they learned from Microsoft. Interoperate when you're trying to break in; lock everyone else out
when you own the market. . So the iPod got soft DRM and could play MP3s as the dominant format. But the iPhone
got locked to one service provider, and people trying to customise their phones got them bricked.
I mean, I take your point. It's just that the fact of what they're doing counts more for me than the
reasons behind it. I'm not particularly anti-apple, but I don't like vendor lock-in from anyone.
As an example, imagine any competitor selling a product when the monopoly can temporarily drop their price to near zero.
I don't think that works. Microsoft have always undercut Apple on price, but Apple remain in business.
As far as I can see, Apple compete on style, and on good design and ease of use. Those seem to be the motivating factors for most of the apple fans I know.
I don't believe Apple's attempts at locking buyers into their product are a factor in their success.
Playing by the same rules is nice on paper, but when you get into reality you have to see that the big players have more clout than the little ones, so unless their hands are tied in some manner, they'll kill the little players stone dead. It is in their interest to kill competition off as quickly as possible.
Indeed. And hence anti-monopoly laws. And I'm not about to suggest that we shouldn't guard against the big players abusing their market power. On the other hand, I don't see that as justifying dubious tactics by the smaller players, either.
Bottom line, Windows Registry was a huge step forward compared to the piles of.ini files in Windows
I'm not sure I agree with you. I rememeber Win 3.11 and the.ini files were great. You could open them up in notepad,
see what was going on, change a value here and there and see what happened. I learned a lot, poking around.init files.
I can't imagine myself doing that in the registry, somehow. The files are hidden, messing with the registry is discouraged, and personally, I've always found the heirarchy to be confusing and oddly redundant. Also,.ini files never fill up, and you can't corrupt all of them in one go by messing up an edit of notepad.ini. I can sympathise with the intention behind the registry, but I can't help but think the execution was flawed.
My point is that now it's time to move forward to a new setup, while retaining the ideas of standardization and organization.
I think the problem may be that configuration data is essentially messy. The/etc file system was initially the place to put files that didn't fit anywhere else in the heirarchy, and I think any OS is going to need something like that.
But if we have to have such a place, I'd prefer it plain text, human friendly and XML free.
Although it is understandable why this "fundamental truths about the universe" is an argument against monopolizing great scientific works by their authors, that reason may apply to natural sciences in general, but not necessarily to mathematics, at least not in all cases.
Interesting, but I don't think it works when you look closely at the problem. Let's try a thought experiment
Let's say that you spend 10 years of your life working on an applied mathematical model - a compression algorithm, say
or maybe a codec. And you successfully bring that to market.
Now let's further suppose that I had a paper published in an obscure journal, a couple of years before that. And let's say that I look at your work one day and realise that there is a trivial mapping onto my prior published work.
Does that mean I "own" your discovery now?
If you take the position that the idea is protected, then you have to concede that I thought of it first, so it belongs to me. If you take the view that only the expression of the idea is protected, then I can't stop you from profiting from our work, but you can no longer
protect the idea - only the specific expression - and you had that protection anyway.
You can claim copyright on the thesis, certainly. And probably on the formula as well. But it's going to be hard to stop people representing the same idea with other symbols, without getting in to the territory where your ten years of research infringes my abstract doodling from 12 years ago.
That's not to say the mathematicians shouldn't be able to make money. It's just hard to see how to extend IP laws in their favour without
making the whole thing more broken than it is already.
Why is the LGPL not sufficient to achieve the FSF's goals?
I have no idea about the FSF's goals, beyond the fact that they're broadly in
favour of free software.
The point I'm making is that I don't believe that fact that the GPL depends upon copyright to be a good argument against the abolition of copyright itself. If you want to get
into the politics of Stallman and the FSF, that's a discussion for another day.
Slashdot Mirror
I suspect I'm feeding a troll here, but the market share they're trying to gain is that of Adobe, who have pretty much 100% for the market when it comes to rich web interfaces.
Partly it's that whenever Microsoft sees a company making money, they wonder how they can claim that market for themselves. But I suspect the main reason is that they hate to see popular cross platform interfaces. Because then people might not need MS so much, and then they might see Linux and Mac adoption rise rather faster than they'd like.
This is nothing they haven't done before. In particular, Netscape spring to mind, who were destroyed by MS because of the browser's potential to become a desktop environment in its own right. Netscape ran on Linux, but that wasn't why Netscape had to die, either.
I entirely agree with you. The point I wanted to make was that even considered purely in terms of energy in/energy out, the idea can still have a lot going for it.
You mean as in even though I set loose my mighty spell checker upon this missive, yet shall errors remain undetected, should they also form the correct spellings of other, less appropriate, words.
Let's say projected lifetime. The end of the world is going to cancel out most economic strategies, green or otherwise, so to that extent it probably cancels out across all the options. (I'm deliberately ignoring the contentious issue of whether or not certain strategies are more like than others to bring about catastrophe).
It's not so much the number of cells you'd need to power the oven, that's important. It's whether or not one oven load of cells could produce more energy over the entire lifetime of the cells than the energy it took to bake them.
I have no idea oft he numbers involved myself, but put like that, it doesn't seem nearly so ridiculous. Hell, the cells might still be worth making, even if you loose power on the deal; just think of them as very long life batteries.
To be fair, I don't think Alan Moore ever intended to say "no one wants to see the world burn" in Watchmen. I think his point was more along the lines of "morality in real life is more complicated than it is in most superhero stories".
He was turning comics cliches on their head at every possible opportunity. The criminal mastermind turns out to be an old fart dying of cancer, who doesn't seem like a bad guy, all things considered. The biggest, and most successful villain in the book is ostensibly one of the good guys. The most principled of the heroes, the one most dedicated to the idea of justice, is also an out and out sociopath.
And all of that pales into insignificance against the threat of a global nuclear holocaust, one that's being brought about not by evil men, but by people trying do their jobs, and finding themselves out of their depth. And the one super human on the planet, the one who could conceivably stop a nuclear war from happening... well all of a sudden, he's not interested any more.
It's also worth pointing out that Moore doesn't seem to have had many problems with the notion of evil people in positions of power. Sir James Jaspers is probably the best example - the mad mutant prime minister who was quite happy to destroy the world on a whim. And, from the same storyline, Opal Luna Saturnine, who did destroy an entire universe to try and contain Jaspers' threat. Kid Miracleman probably also merits a mention here - all of them predating Watchmen.
Getting back to Watchmen, it's hard to pin down any single message from a such a complex work, but I think if Moore had one thing to say about people's motivations in the real world, it was that they are complicated. At the time Watchment was written, morality in superhero comics had become almost as stylised as the art illustrating them. Doctor Doom was might have sometimes paused to consider what was best for subjects in Latveria, but in most cases he was iconic Evil, while the heroes might be occasionally tormented, but they were almost always unambiguously Good. The morality in Watchmen was, I think, far more of a reaction against those conventions, than it was an attempt describe the real world.
Yeah! Why would anyone pay good money for an action figure when they could just download one over bittorrent... Hang on a sec, that doesn't quite work, does it?
See, this is one of those interesting ways in which intellectual property is not the same thing as actual property.
Then maybe it's time we started demanding standards that were truly fit for purpose. That could be the one true thing to come out of this mess. It it raises general in the technical community of how badly broken ISO is, then maybe we're seeing the first steps on the road to a workable standards process.
In any event, there's nothing to be gained by accepting the status quo, and everything to gain from making a fuss. Good standards are important. If ISO can't deliver them we need a standards body that can.
I think you're conflating two ideas there. Firstly, there's the notion of a standard is a technical specification that (I expect and demand) everyone can implement and conform to. Secondly, there's the notion of a sort of government monopoly - in the sense that if YoYoDyne Inc control Standard X and the govt mandates that all frobnitz conform to Standard X, then only YoYoDyne can practically market frobnitz.
The point I think you're missing is that if a standard is a standard in the first sense, then the abuse implicit in the second scenario is impossible. It's not that standards are inherently broken, it's that closed, proprietary standards are broken. And so the problem comes back to IP rather than standards, per se.
Sounds good to me, Westly old boy.
Why don't you set off now? You can send us a postcard when you get there.
Hmm...
How odd. I find myself agreeing with what you said, even though I'm sure it isn't what you meant.
As Larry Niven once pointed out, there is no cause so right that you can't find a fool fighting for it somewhere.
What you say about human is probably entirely accurate, and I have no doubt it describes many people on both sides of the debate.
Still, I can't help feeling that it's drifting away from the point. The issue is climate, not psychology.
That only really works if you're considering a data space with exactly two variables. It's sometimes useful to reduce the market two variables - which is basically where all those nice graphs come from. The trouble is that there are millions, possibly billions of inputs into the global marketplace, and no company can be ahead of the curve on all of them.
The big companies tend to assume they can set the rules - and to a limited extent that's true, but only to a limited extent. Otherwise we'd be using MS proprietary networking protocols rather than TCP/IP.
And it's not just the software. Do a bit of googling to find out how to apply an emerging technology or methodology. If your target platform is Windows, chances are you'll find a couple of dozen teaser blogs by MS MVPs all pimping their latest book.
Do the same thing for a linux deployment, and you'll get a handful of Howtos.
I can't see why it should be any harder than finding a blogger worth reading. There are a great many bad blogs out there, but some of them emerge as head and shoulders above the rest. I read Bruce Schneier, PJ and Cory Doctorow among others. I don't recall needing marketing to find any of them.
For that matter, it shouldn't be harder than finding a decent online community to participate in. I didn't find Slashdot because I was bombarded with marketing - I came here because I came across references to a popular geek news forum, and thought I'd check it out.
On the other hand, it's worth pointing out that Buddy Joe and his Local Garage Band probably can't make enough to sustain themselves with the help of a record label, either.
The reason a lot of garage bands can't support themselves is that a lot of them aren't very good. This isn't to say they lack talent, or can't get good by working at it. On the other hand, if they get good enough to have got an advance from a label, there's a fair chance they'll be able to gather a following on the Internet too.
Really though, that's not anything either of us will be able to say with any certainty for some years to come. This seems to be an emerging trend - how far it develops remains to be seen.
I think when a software vendor introduces a bug which has the major effect of limiting consumer choice, we have to at least consider that this may, in fact, have been a deliberate act.
It's a bit like if someone has a handgun that accidentally discharges and shoots his next door neighbour dead. You have to consider the possibility of murder.
Otherwise, you can expect a lot people to start having awfully convenient accidents. No tin foil hat required.
So, the question is not one of whether or not the Internet will be regulated. It seems it's going to be regulated, wither by the govt. or the ISPs. The question then is who do we trust to look out for our interests as users or the internet?
We can expect the free-market libertarians to take the position that market forces will force the ISP to do a good job, while any government control is bound to be co-opted and subverted. Those who broadly favour government intervention will largely disagree.
Personally I don't think the free market can help here. The underlying issue isn't with the big ISPs throttling their customers. The issue lies with ISPs throttling other ISPs customers. Walking out on your service provider because some third party is traffic shaping you into oblivion is not a rational response, and is unlikely to help/
So I think if regulation coming anyway, it has to be government regulation. At least then the people who use the internet have some hope of bring pressure to bear in defence of their interests. I can't see how that's going to happen if the ISPs self-regulate.
s/legislation/litigation/
I'm sure everyone knew what I meant :)
Of course, that rather assumes there is any benefit to me as inventor under the current system. If I invent something as things stand, those corporations with established patent thickets can tie me up in legislation until I run out of money. To compete on even terms there, I don't just need to invent something, I need to patent tens of thousands of somethings. That's probably not going to happen, no matter how hard I work.
On the other hand, if software patents are forbidden, then at least I can't be prevented from trying to exploit on my own idea, even if I do have to allow the big boys to compete.
As I see it, that has to be an improvement.
mmmm... possibly. Or maybe they learned from Microsoft. Interoperate when you're trying to break in; lock everyone else out when you own the market. . So the iPod got soft DRM and could play MP3s as the dominant format. But the iPhone got locked to one service provider, and people trying to customise their phones got them bricked.
I mean, I take your point. It's just that the fact of what they're doing counts more for me than the reasons behind it. I'm not particularly anti-apple, but I don't like vendor lock-in from anyone.
I don't think that works. Microsoft have always undercut Apple on price, but Apple remain in business.
As far as I can see, Apple compete on style, and on good design and ease of use. Those seem to be the motivating factors for most of the apple fans I know. I don't believe Apple's attempts at locking buyers into their product are a factor in their success.
Indeed. And hence anti-monopoly laws. And I'm not about to suggest that we shouldn't guard against the big players abusing their market power. On the other hand, I don't see that as justifying dubious tactics by the smaller players, either.
I'm not sure I agree with you. I rememeber Win 3.11 and the .ini files were great. You could open them up in notepad,
see what was going on, change a value here and there and see what happened. I learned a lot, poking around .init files.
I can't imagine myself doing that in the registry, somehow. The files are hidden, messing with the registry is discouraged, and personally, I've always found the heirarchy to be confusing and oddly redundant. Also, .ini files never fill up, and you can't corrupt all of them in one go by messing up an edit of notepad.ini. I can sympathise with the intention behind the registry, but I can't help but think the execution was flawed.
I think the problem may be that configuration data is essentially messy. The /etc file system was initially the place to put files that didn't fit anywhere else in the heirarchy, and I think any OS is going to need something like that.
But if we have to have such a place, I'd prefer it plain text, human friendly and XML free.
Miguel has a vision? Don't tell me, let me guess: A computer on every desk, Microsoft software on every computer.
Would that be the one you were thinking of?
Interesting, but I don't think it works when you look closely at the problem. Let's try a thought experiment
Let's say that you spend 10 years of your life working on an applied mathematical model - a compression algorithm, say or maybe a codec. And you successfully bring that to market.
Now let's further suppose that I had a paper published in an obscure journal, a couple of years before that. And let's say that I look at your work one day and realise that there is a trivial mapping onto my prior published work.
Does that mean I "own" your discovery now?
If you take the position that the idea is protected, then you have to concede that I thought of it first, so it belongs to me. If you take the view that only the expression of the idea is protected, then I can't stop you from profiting from our work, but you can no longer protect the idea - only the specific expression - and you had that protection anyway.
You can claim copyright on the thesis, certainly. And probably on the formula as well. But it's going to be hard to stop people representing the same idea with other symbols, without getting in to the territory where your ten years of research infringes my abstract doodling from 12 years ago.
That's not to say the mathematicians shouldn't be able to make money. It's just hard to see how to extend IP laws in their favour without making the whole thing more broken than it is already.
I have no idea about the FSF's goals, beyond the fact that they're broadly in favour of free software.
The point I'm making is that I don't believe that fact that the GPL depends upon copyright to be a good argument against the abolition of copyright itself. If you want to get into the politics of Stallman and the FSF, that's a discussion for another day.