This shows that any number of Closed Source companies, working in concert / collusion / tandem... have lost to one single man - Richard Stallman, and his GPL.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And Ben Franklin was solely responsible for the US victories in WWII.
Really, if we have to credit a single person for saving the universe, my nomination would go to PJ over on Groklaw. And I'm sure she'd be the first to say that she couldn't have done it alone.
All credit to Stallman for the GPL, for the foresight he showed, and for sticking to his guns over the years. But that doesn't mean we have to credit him as being solely responsible for every victory of open source movement.
I've never used windows live - how intrusive is it?
I have visions of my desktop wallpaper resetting itself to show adverts, and that damnned paperlcip popping up saying "You appear to be loggin into an internet banking service. Did you know MagaCard offers interest free finance for one year to all customers who transfer their accounts..."
Right now, they make a set amount from each sale. An ad supported OS will not only lower that intake, it will not have long term gains from all the people who will patch their OS to fix it from the "crippled" version to the good version. Total loss for MS.
If it's an either/or deal then you're right. But suppose they're just testing the water looking to make ads ubiquitous on the windows platform.
Then they'd probably market Vista with a ridiculous mark up - even by Microsoft standards, that is - and then offer an entry level version with full functionality, but supported by adverts. Of course, the ad-supported version costs as much as they think the market will bear, but everyone is so relieved at not being charged One Beeeelion Dollars that they think "phew, what a relief". Likewise when the OEMs start bundling the ad enhanced version by default.
MS already have the infrastructure to serve the ads via their acquisition of Massive. They'd need to make sure no one turned the adverts off - which sounds like a job for WGA.
Suddenly the spyware like elements of WGA make sense.
MS can mine user activity patterns to serve targetted ads, beat Google at their own game, and get an ongoing revenue stream against the likelihood that the next windows released gets delayed until the Twenty-Second Century. Huzzah! The company is saved!
You know, I think this might actually be The Plan...
it's still an industry ripe for a new enry Ford to invent the digital equivalent of a production line.
Part of the problem, and one I don't think is widely appreciated, is that the we already do these things. When a problem gets well-understood enough to be automated, someone writes a code-generator for it. Hey presto, job done. All the programmers move on to more interesting tasks.
The trouble is that this rarely gives the PHB his trouble free revenue stream. After all, his competitors are writing codegen solutions too.
This makes applying Ford's insight rather unexciting as applied to computers, and that has led to people trying to duplicate his methodology by splitting up the task into lots of nearly trivially small operations to be performed by relatively unskilled programmers. The trouble here is that it just bumps the hard part upwards into the lap of whoever specs all the little tasks, while making it harder to comprehend the system overall.
You're right in one sense though - the industry is ripe for production line programming, in as much as the world is ripe for a perpetual motion machine. People would certainly buy one, and there's no shortage of people willing to sell you something in that regard. In practice though, there are good reasons why it isn't going to happen. The sooner IT middle management get used to the idea and come to terms with the fact that software is difficult to write, the happier we'll all be
No, actually he's arguing that the market won't allow telecoms to make tiered bandwidth a viable economic model.
Amazing the difference a good night's sleep can make. I've just re-read the article, and I think I' being rather too hard on Mr. Lee. I still don't necessarily agree with him, but it looks like I went into knee-jerk response mode there.
mmm... he's still saying, in effect, that the best deal for the consumer can only be had by giving the ISPs exactly what they want right now, as opposed to making them work for years in order to subvert the intent of any regulation. Seems to me that the man is either dishonest, hasn't thought his position through, or else is a total idiot. Given that he can frame a coherent argument, the first option would seem to be the front runner.
Meybe he's just arguing that the consumer is going to shafted whatever happens, and the sooner they drop their pants, the sooner they'll get used to it. That would at least be internally consistent.
Then if we want to get picky, there's the whole false dichotomy of presenting the choice as either economic darwinism or death-by-regulation, when there is surely a spectrum of options in between.
government regulation has a history of supporting the interests of big business
Big business has a history of supporting bug business, too. All that says to me is that "money talks".
If the citizens of this country refuse to look at the historical performance of government regulation we deserve exactly what we will get.
You could say the same about total deregulation. That doesn't always work to the customer's advantage either.
Personally, I think both extremes are stupid and harmful. Maybe we all need to re-learn the concept of a happy medium
What I'm getting at is the author of the original article seems to be trying to imply tbat a laisser faire approach is some kind of clever compromise that will resolve the situation to the satisfaction of both camps, when in actual fact it's exactly what Net Neutrality opponents have been campaiging for from day one.
This chap is not an honest pony. He's a shill, and he's offering propaganda dressed up as sweet reason.
A business simply "doing what they like" is constrained by competition and other market pressures.
Call me a communist, but I never really bought into this concept of a Holy Sacred Market with all these mystical powers or self regulation. It seems to me that a cartel can raise as effective a barrier to competition as a regulator.
legislation specifically guaranteeing Net Neutrality would in fact be less effective than just allowing the status quo.
Right, gotcha. So regulation is evil because regulation can be subverted, and that would end up with ISPs free to do as they liked. While legislating against Net Neutrality would mean that ISPs got to do whatever they wanted too. Only sooner.
So TFA cleverly recommends a middle road of preserving the status quo, which would leave the ISPs... erm.. free to do whatever they want. Which is better. Apparently.
You want to run that one past me again, Timothy B?
Example: a self-sensing firewall like ZoneAlarm, which pops up and tells you that application Foo is trying to connect to the Internet. The closest thing I've seen is FireStarter, which has a panel (no popup) which shows blocked connections [fs-security.com] (but not per application).
mmm... how useful would that functionality be, anyway?
I mean Zone Alarm is great at scaring its users into thinking really they need it - all those popups saying how many intrusion attempts you're getting and which programs are trying to get online. Really though, it's principle value was as a packet-dropper; and that only really worked well in the days of dial-up when you could be sure that ZA would be loaded before you connected. It was reassuring to have to stop programs getting out, but frankly, all you need to do bypass that is to write your malware as a dll and use rundll.exe to make your connection.
There's no reason you couldn't make such a beast for Linux; iptables already does a better job at dropping unsolicited packets. For outgoing stuff there's an iptables module that can be used to catch the path of the executable trying to originate off-platform connections. Trouble is, I had a play with this a year or two back and it's subject to similar limitations as ZA, in that some programs can be used for weal or woe here; Perl, Python and Wine, for example. ALthough I did find it useful to have a scipt that could toggle Wine's network access.
Really though, the best solution to that problem with a Linux dsktop is not to get rooted in the first place - which is rather more of a viable strategy than it is under windows.
I can't really comment on the traffic shaping, but nice as it might be to have a ZA style popup, I still don't think we're missing anything important here.
Agreed. The whole thing reminds me of how I felt in my first couple of months using linux, when I really, really wanted Linux versions of GetRight and ZoneAlarm. Shows how much I knew then, really.
He's on firmer ground with flash - as in the browser plugin, anyway. Even then, I'm not too worried. All those flash ads out there provide therir own pressure on Adobe to keep Flash as cross platform as possible.
If they want to win the browser wars (to use an old term) then securing 2 million installs is a good step.
One of the reasons I use 'fox is because I trust the browser. Commercial pressures encourage Microsoft to leave open a number of avenues of attack simply because they are potentially useful for commercial purposes. Firefox, up until recently at least, has felt none of thsose pressures, and has been a better program as a result. IMO, obviously.
Now I don't know how many of Firefox' users share my criteria when selecting a browser, but time they do a deal like this, it weakens that trust. The google search box, when combined with prefetching, worried a lot of people, but they got away with that one, mainly because Google have this nice-guy rep. People are inclined to trust Google, so Firefox wasn't really tarnished by associate. I doubt that will be the case with Real.
Mozilla is in the business of getting their software used by as many people as possible
Sez who? Wwho says Mozilla is in the business of anything? The only remotely commercial part of the operation is the Mozilla Corporation, and (if memory serves) that's a non-profit. If Mozilla are in the business of anything, it should be managing one of the worlds flagship open-source projects. Anything else opens the door to a conflict of interest, and that brings us back to questions of trust.
They don't need to win the browser wars. There's no shareholders to answer to here. The usual shallow excuses for shady corporate behaviour do not apply in this case.
They don't need to win the browser wars, and frankly - they were doing just fine without Real.
I really wonder if they've thought this one all the way through.
Ah, my apologies then. I shouldn't be allowed to post before my first cup of coffee in the morning.
Still, it does seem a little pssimistic. I mean, much as 419 scams are asociated with Nigeria, there's no reason to beleive that they'll be any less responsible net citizens in aggregate than anyone else. After all the same currency difference also means that an honest site that might barely cover bandwidth in the US could make someone a living, honestly just a much as dishonestly.
(And that's not even considering Thailand, Argentina or Brazil).
Me, I can't wait to see the ideas some of these kids are going to come up with. Mesh wireless networking, zero preconceptions about how a computer system ought to work, or what it has to do, and a platform designed to be hackable.
I think the ideas they return to the world community are going to be the most significant result from this project.
I suppose by that argument, we could also reduce spam by outlawing it education and training in the US.
It's a radical plan, but as long as we're agreed that widespread ignorance is an acceptable price to pay for a reduction in computer related crime, why not take it all the way?
Now this would be a nice toy for my own daughters (says father, who wouldn't mind taking this thing apart). Too bad they don't take orders below one million pieces.
I seem to recall reading that they do. It's just that it'll cost you three hundred bucks. (That's 100 for the laptop, plus the cost of two more which will be used to send laptops to families that couldn't afford one).
My guess is that for 99% of the children in these countries the laptops will be totally useless, because what those kids really need is food, a clean source of water
Gosh, I wasn't aware that poverty was endemic in Argentina and Brazil. I know it's too much to expect people to RTFA, but you could at least finish the summary before going into knee-jerk response mode.
But, let's assume that by 99% you mean 25% and we're just discussing Nigeria. It still doesn't make the OLPC program "totally useless". The thing to understand here is that just because the news channels only show you pictures from Africa when there's a drought or a famine, that doesn't mean that the entire continent is in a permenant, continuou state of starvation.
And yes, clean water and better educational facilities are sadly lacking in many parts of Africa. But that doesn't mean that clean water should be the only problem anyone is allowed to address. We can do things in parallel.
Four million kids, some of whom might never get a chance to see a computer, are going to grow up with marketable skills for the 21st century. They're going to get a chance to bring some money into their countries, and maybe get a chance to fix some of the other problems themselves.
There's an SF novel - I think it's David Brin's Earth - which has an interesting take on privacy. It's set in a near future where people have given up on ever having any sort of privacy and have gone to the opposite extreme - that of demaning that all information be open to everyone, without restriction
At times like this I wonder if Brin saw the shape of things to come with that one.
Don't get me wrong, I'm in favour of individual privacy. I just wonder if the concept is going to feasible, Part of me wonders if trying to safeguard privacy isn't like trying censor the internet, where some other channel always seems to pop up for the information flow. Similarly it seems that for every snoop or spy measure we stop,
three more open up where no one is looking. It makes me wonder if the same principle is at work. Information may not "want to be free", but it certainly seems to seek wider dissemination in much the same way as water seems to seek sea level.
So, for those reasons, I think there is a chance that the battle for invidual privacy is unwinnable over the long term. And if that turns out to be the case, then we need to start thinking about how we can structure society to function in a world without privacy.
I think Brin's solution may turn out to be the way forward. Perhaps the harm lies not in other people and organisations knowing all your of business, but rather in that the information flow is one way only. Perhaps politicians and corporations and the like would be less likely to abuse such information if we could scrutinise their activities with the same clarity with which they seek to scrutinise our own.
Whatever happened to "eternal vigilance is the price of freedom?" I understand that's the way the system is designed to work, and that that's
the way it ought to work.
I just think, especially in the current political climate, that it's dangerous to
assume that such is the way things did work.
Well, you'd certainly hope so. One the other hand, historically speaking, law enforcement officials
haven't always done so. That's why we have limitations on their powers, and require things like evidence.
See, the laws restraining the law enforcement officials were only passed because in the past law enforcement officials abused the trust placed in them. This makes it dangerous to infer evidence from an arrest, or to argue a suspension of rights in the event of an arrest.
Because once you countenance someone else losing those protections we all take for granted
then nothing stops you from losing that same protection. And if it all hinges on reliabiliyt of witenesses,
then it all comes down to who is considered reliable, and by whom.
But if you really believe that, hey go for it - inform the FBI I was impersonating them.
No worries - I expect they monitor Slasdot anyway.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And Ben Franklin was solely responsible for the US victories in WWII.
Really, if we have to credit a single person for saving the universe, my nomination would go to PJ over on Groklaw. And I'm sure she'd be the first to say that she couldn't have done it alone.
All credit to Stallman for the GPL, for the foresight he showed, and for sticking to his guns over the years. But that doesn't mean we have to credit him as being solely responsible for every victory of open source movement.
I have visions of my desktop wallpaper resetting itself to show adverts, and that damnned paperlcip popping up saying "You appear to be loggin into an internet banking service. Did you know MagaCard offers interest free finance for one year to all customers who transfer their accounts..."
If it's an either/or deal then you're right. But suppose they're just testing the water looking to make ads ubiquitous on the windows platform.
Then they'd probably market Vista with a ridiculous mark up - even by Microsoft standards, that is - and then offer an entry level version with full functionality, but supported by adverts. Of course, the ad-supported version costs as much as they think the market will bear, but everyone is so relieved at not being charged One Beeeelion Dollars that they think "phew, what a relief". Likewise when the OEMs start bundling the ad enhanced version by default.
MS already have the infrastructure to serve the ads via their acquisition of Massive. They'd need to make sure no one turned the adverts off - which sounds like a job for WGA.
Suddenly the spyware like elements of WGA make sense. MS can mine user activity patterns to serve targetted ads, beat Google at their own game, and get an ongoing revenue stream against the likelihood that the next windows released gets delayed until the Twenty-Second Century. Huzzah! The company is saved!
You know, I think this might actually be The Plan...
Part of the problem, and one I don't think is widely appreciated, is that the we already do these things. When a problem gets well-understood enough to be automated, someone writes a code-generator for it. Hey presto, job done. All the programmers move on to more interesting tasks.
The trouble is that this rarely gives the PHB his trouble free revenue stream. After all, his competitors are writing codegen solutions too.
This makes applying Ford's insight rather unexciting as applied to computers, and that has led to people trying to duplicate his methodology by splitting up the task into lots of nearly trivially small operations to be performed by relatively unskilled programmers. The trouble here is that it just bumps the hard part upwards into the lap of whoever specs all the little tasks, while making it harder to comprehend the system overall.
You're right in one sense though - the industry is ripe for production line programming, in as much as the world is ripe for a perpetual motion machine. People would certainly buy one, and there's no shortage of people willing to sell you something in that regard. In practice though, there are good reasons why it isn't going to happen. The sooner IT middle management get used to the idea and come to terms with the fact that software is difficult to write, the happier we'll all be
Amazing the difference a good night's sleep can make. I've just re-read the article, and I think I' being rather too hard on Mr. Lee. I still don't necessarily agree with him, but it looks like I went into knee-jerk response mode there.
mmm... he's still saying, in effect, that the best deal for the consumer can only be had by giving the ISPs exactly what they want right now, as opposed to making them work for years in order to subvert the intent of any regulation. Seems to me that the man is either dishonest, hasn't thought his position through, or else is a total idiot. Given that he can frame a coherent argument, the first option would seem to be the front runner.
Meybe he's just arguing that the consumer is going to shafted whatever happens, and the sooner they drop their pants, the sooner they'll get used to it. That would at least be internally consistent.
Then if we want to get picky, there's the whole false dichotomy of presenting the choice as either economic darwinism or death-by-regulation, when there is surely a spectrum of options in between.
Big business has a history of supporting bug business, too. All that says to me is that "money talks".
You could say the same about total deregulation. That doesn't always work to the customer's advantage either.
Personally, I think both extremes are stupid and harmful. Maybe we all need to re-learn the concept of a happy medium
This chap is not an honest pony. He's a shill, and he's offering propaganda dressed up as sweet reason.
Call me a communist, but I never really bought into this concept of a Holy Sacred Market with all these mystical powers or self regulation. It seems to me that a cartel can raise as effective a barrier to competition as a regulator.
And did TFA have any ideas on how this was to be achieved, sans legislation?
I seem to have missed that bit.
Right, gotcha. So regulation is evil because regulation can be subverted, and that would end up with ISPs free to do as they liked. While legislating against Net Neutrality would mean that ISPs got to do whatever they wanted too. Only sooner.
So TFA cleverly recommends a middle road of preserving the status quo, which would leave the ISPs... erm.. free to do whatever they want. Which is better. Apparently.
You want to run that one past me again, Timothy B?
mmm... how useful would that functionality be, anyway?
I mean Zone Alarm is great at scaring its users into thinking really they need it - all those popups saying how many intrusion attempts you're getting and which programs are trying to get online. Really though, it's principle value was as a packet-dropper; and that only really worked well in the days of dial-up when you could be sure that ZA would be loaded before you connected. It was reassuring to have to stop programs getting out, but frankly, all you need to do bypass that is to write your malware as a dll and use rundll.exe to make your connection.
There's no reason you couldn't make such a beast for Linux; iptables already does a better job at dropping unsolicited packets. For outgoing stuff there's an iptables module that can be used to catch the path of the executable trying to originate off-platform connections. Trouble is, I had a play with this a year or two back and it's subject to similar limitations as ZA, in that some programs can be used for weal or woe here; Perl, Python and Wine, for example. ALthough I did find it useful to have a scipt that could toggle Wine's network access.
Really though, the best solution to that problem with a Linux dsktop is not to get rooted in the first place - which is rather more of a viable strategy than it is under windows.
I can't really comment on the traffic shaping, but nice as it might be to have a ZA style popup, I still don't think we're missing anything important here.
He's on firmer ground with flash - as in the browser plugin, anyway. Even then, I'm not too worried. All those flash ads out there provide therir own pressure on Adobe to keep Flash as cross platform as possible.
What the GP actually said was:
I can't see anything there that says "open source code" or "share ip", can you?One of the reasons I use 'fox is because I trust the browser. Commercial pressures encourage Microsoft to leave open a number of avenues of attack simply because they are potentially useful for commercial purposes. Firefox, up until recently at least, has felt none of thsose pressures, and has been a better program as a result. IMO, obviously.
Now I don't know how many of Firefox' users share my criteria when selecting a browser, but time they do a deal like this, it weakens that trust. The google search box, when combined with prefetching, worried a lot of people, but they got away with that one, mainly because Google have this nice-guy rep. People are inclined to trust Google, so Firefox wasn't really tarnished by associate. I doubt that will be the case with Real.
Sez who? Wwho says Mozilla is in the business of anything? The only remotely commercial part of the operation is the Mozilla Corporation, and (if memory serves) that's a non-profit. If Mozilla are in the business of anything, it should be managing one of the worlds flagship open-source projects. Anything else opens the door to a conflict of interest, and that brings us back to questions of trust.
They don't need to win the browser wars. There's no shareholders to answer to here. The usual shallow excuses for shady corporate behaviour do not apply in this case.
They don't need to win the browser wars, and frankly - they were doing just fine without Real.
I really wonder if they've thought this one all the way through.
Still, it does seem a little pssimistic. I mean, much as 419 scams are asociated with Nigeria, there's no reason to beleive that they'll be any less responsible net citizens in aggregate than anyone else. After all the same currency difference also means that an honest site that might barely cover bandwidth in the US could make someone a living, honestly just a much as dishonestly.
(And that's not even considering Thailand, Argentina or Brazil).
Me, I can't wait to see the ideas some of these kids are going to come up with. Mesh wireless networking, zero preconceptions about how a computer system ought to work, or what it has to do, and a platform designed to be hackable.
I think the ideas they return to the world community are going to be the most significant result from this project.
I suppose by that argument, we could also reduce spam by outlawing it education and training in the US.
It's a radical plan, but as long as we're agreed that widespread ignorance is an acceptable price to pay for a reduction in computer related crime, why not take it all the way?
I'm actually quite glad that the $300 price point isn't official. I think they could shift a ton of these things at 200 bucks per unit.
I seem to recall reading that they do. It's just that it'll cost you three hundred bucks. (That's 100 for the laptop, plus the cost of two more which will be used to send laptops to families that couldn't afford one).
Second thoughts, I think they way they're doing it might work better.
Gosh, I wasn't aware that poverty was endemic in Argentina and Brazil. I know it's too much to expect people to RTFA, but you could at least finish the summary before going into knee-jerk response mode.
But, let's assume that by 99% you mean 25% and we're just discussing Nigeria. It still doesn't make the OLPC program "totally useless". The thing to understand here is that just because the news channels only show you pictures from Africa when there's a drought or a famine, that doesn't mean that the entire continent is in a permenant, continuou state of starvation.
And yes, clean water and better educational facilities are sadly lacking in many parts of Africa. But that doesn't mean that clean water should be the only problem anyone is allowed to address. We can do things in parallel.
Four million kids, some of whom might never get a chance to see a computer, are going to grow up with marketable skills for the 21st century. They're going to get a chance to bring some money into their countries, and maybe get a chance to fix some of the other problems themselves.
And that can't be a bad thing
I believe the object to be none other than Tony Blair's Sense Of His Own Importance.
I'm just happy that they've finally settled on a realistic price point for office.
At times like this I wonder if Brin saw the shape of things to come with that one.
Don't get me wrong, I'm in favour of individual privacy. I just wonder if the concept is going to feasible, Part of me wonders if trying to safeguard privacy isn't like trying censor the internet, where some other channel always seems to pop up for the information flow. Similarly it seems that for every snoop or spy measure we stop, three more open up where no one is looking. It makes me wonder if the same principle is at work. Information may not "want to be free", but it certainly seems to seek wider dissemination in much the same way as water seems to seek sea level.
So, for those reasons, I think there is a chance that the battle for invidual privacy is unwinnable over the long term. And if that turns out to be the case, then we need to start thinking about how we can structure society to function in a world without privacy.
I think Brin's solution may turn out to be the way forward. Perhaps the harm lies not in other people and organisations knowing all your of business, but rather in that the information flow is one way only. Perhaps politicians and corporations and the like would be less likely to abuse such information if we could scrutinise their activities with the same clarity with which they seek to scrutinise our own.
Just a weird thought for the weekend.
I just think, especially in the current political climate, that it's dangerous to assume that such is the way things did work.
Well, you'd certainly hope so. One the other hand, historically speaking, law enforcement officials haven't always done so. That's why we have limitations on their powers, and require things like evidence.
See, the laws restraining the law enforcement officials were only passed because in the past law enforcement officials abused the trust placed in them. This makes it dangerous to infer evidence from an arrest, or to argue a suspension of rights in the event of an arrest.
Because once you countenance someone else losing those protections we all take for granted then nothing stops you from losing that same protection. And if it all hinges on reliabiliyt of witenesses, then it all comes down to who is considered reliable, and by whom.
No worries - I expect they monitor Slasdot anyway.
Good Luck! :D