C|Net, by their own admission, got almost every pertinent detail of the story wrong. The only way they could have have been further off target would be if they assigned the flaw to Internet Explorer. Personally, I'm not going to hold my breath waiting for that mistake to see print.
As a side note: I'm not normally one to slag off Slashdot's editors,
but might I ask for a
little more investigation before parrotting the lastest MS anti-Firefox propaganda?
This is the third story this quarter portraying a browser crash as a security exploit.
Given that the last IE flaw involved the execution of arbitary code,
some evidence of editorial perspective would be nice.
Ajax,
Only for webapps. And even then it's not necessarily going to be cross-browser, depending on what you're doing with it.
Stick to standards compliant browsers. That gets you something that works on firefox and safari. You can even
distribute a custom XUL app as a front end. That gets you around the browser issue neatly.
You don't write cross-platform applications by making a web site.
And then there's a little known crowd called Google. GMail and Google
maps are both ajax based.
Oh, and you don't need a web site, just a locally running back end that uses http over the port of your choice. It's no worse than running a database where the DBMS runs in its own process or thead.
Java applications still suck, even on modern systems with scads of RAM.
"Appeal To Suckage". Isn't that a logical fallacy?
Functionality you get for free with native applications is either missing
or doesn't behave properly.
I belive that's called "writing buggy software". Its not java's fault if you can't
use it correctly. It's not my favourite language either, but I don't blame the language
if my programs don't work.
As a developer, when my choice is between "Application for one platform
that works beautifully on one platform" and "Application for all platforms
that falls short on all of them," I know what my choice will be.
So? No one is going to force you to write cross platform apps.
Just because it may increasingly yeild market advantage, that doesn't
make it compulsory.
You DID have a better argument here than "I like what I like
and everything else sucks" didn't you?
You probably mean C# here... "dotNet" is an incredibly nebulous term,
Um... no. dotNet (or more properly.NET) refers to MS answer to Java. More
specifically to the CIL and the.NET runtime. There are a dozen or so
langauges that can generate executables for the dotNet runtime. C#, granted,
but also C++, Java, VB.NET... even Perl.
If you want to see how elegant cross-platform can be and has
been for years, open up Notepad, MSN Messenger, Word, and Internet
Explorer. There's not a UI commonality between the lot of them. Notepad
is still stuck in the 80s. But they're all supposedly part of the
same system.
So you're saying that because MS can't keep a consistent look and feel
across multiple apps on a single platform,
it therefore follows that no-onecan keep a consistent look-and-feel for
a single app across multiple
platforms?
What were you saying about crack pipes?
Do you really want every application on your system to be that divergent
in terms of UI? That's invariably what happens.
-Hello boss, you know that deadline... Well, we'll have to push it back 6 months because our windows application needs to be able to run on every platform under the sun according to the/. crowd. Why are you laughing boss?
Yes, why is he laughing? He can deliver software that doesn't work on schedule, or he can make the time to do it right. If he routinely chooses the former, then you already have serious support issues and I doubt that unbundling MSN Messenger is going to materially add to them.
Of course, there are cross platform solutions: Ajax, OpenGL, Java... even dotNet once mono gets up to speed. I expect most developers have heard of at least one of these. Maybe you could explain the idea to your boss and save some future pain?
But at the end of the day, The ignorance of your manager is not our problem, and the fact that many of us, (myself included), have at some time been in that situation is not a compelling argument for supporting a broken and abusive monopoly.
Then there's the cost of developing a solution (doubtless IBM has one to sell) to allow access to archived materials at the same time as accessing the new format.
If they do, they're going to have to be fairly competitive. Sun has a grid
based service for bulk translation of documents at what sound like reasonable
rates. And then, for ad-hoc access, we have the likes of OpenOffice.org
which doesn't leave much room for price gouging.
So they can't make it too expensive, and there are certainly alternatives,
some of them are free (as in speech and as in beer).
On the other hand, staying with MS doesn't really avoid these costs, since
MS are retiring current office formats. Whether you move or stay, there are
going to be migration costs. The question is do you want an open market
with lots of options and a competitive base price, or do you prefer to
pay whatever Microsoft decde you can afford.
So really, I don't see why the 20m shouldn't have been saved. After all, TFA specifically mentions an open source deployment rather than an IBM proprietory solution. I'd be inclined to believe that: after all, we can be fairly sure that the anti Open Document lobby are checking the facts very carefully.
I advocate and use open standards whereever possible
Full marks for presenting both sides of the argument, but I think your advocacy could use a little work.
Actually, the rootkit was part of the DRM, in as much as it was there to conceal the DRM mechanism and prevent purchasers from trivially circumventing Sony's restrictions software.
At the moment, I get the bus into work. The bus company are doing one of
their periodic company surveys where they send a bunch of people round
in company livery and ask where you're going. Most people mistake them
for ticket inspectors and answer the question. Then they want to know
where you're going after that, if you use any other form of travel,
how often you make the journey... that sort of thing.
This happened to be the other day. The conversation went like this:
Marketdroid
Can I ask where you're going please?
Me
Are you an inspector?
Marketdroid
No. I ask where you're going please?
Me
Are you an inspector?
Marketdroid
No.
Me
Then that's my business.
Marketdroid
Fair enough, sorry to bother you.
Now there are a couple of things (other than the fact that I can be
an obstreperous bastard) I'd like you to note from this.
Firstly, I wasn't up to no good. I didn't have any sinsiter motive for
concealing my travel habits. All I was doing was going to work. A couple
of days later I had the same conversation on the way back. No sinister motive
then, either.
Secondly, I have no reason to believe that the bus company are up to
anything sinister. They may try and tweak a little extra profit perhaps,
but on the whole I expect all they want is to know where they need to
run more busses.
Thirdly, and taking the above points into account, where I choose to travel and when
is still my business,
and none of theirs unless I choose to make it so. I have the option
of sharing that information. And that's the way I damn well want to keep
it. Being grumpy first thing in the morning is not yet a ciminal offense.
So really, the question is not "why should we keep it?" The question is why should we relinquish our hard won rights to privacy. I'm going to need a better argument than "what would be the harm" for that.
Not that *I'm* bitter or anything, but would you mind elaborating on what exactly you perceive this hole to be?
umm... the fact that Microsoft get criticised whatever they do? Even when what they do isn't actually a bad thing? MS have something of a PR nightmare on their hands these days. On slashdot they could probably care less, but increasingly, it isn't just on Slashdot. That's got to hurt sales. And that's something Bill probably does care about.
I doubt Gates wakes up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat wondering if the/. community found the latest microsoft announcement appealing.
I don't suppose he does either. Then again, he probably didn't post here saying "oh why can't we all just get along?" Which is, of course, why I replied to the GP rather than addressing muy comments to Bill personally. Not that he reads/. I'm sure, but I expect you get my drift.
Who cares if Unix did this first?
That depends on whether you're going to argue, as Microsoft do, that Bill and Steve need 75% profit margins or else Microsoft will not be able to innovate, and that therefore the world of computing will grind to a standstill. As long as that silly argument is still being taken seriously in some circles then it behooves us to point out those (surprisingly frequent) occasions when MS "innovates" using someone else's ideas.
We could discuss software patents in the same context, but profit margins is enough to make my case.
So, to summarise, it's not that fixing the reboot annnoyance is a bad thing, but Microsoft's double standard with regard to linux is, particularly since it so erodes their justification for their grossly inflated margins on Windows and MS Office.
Because, you know, *nix is so hopelessly old fashioned that there's nothing good about it,
and because Windows is so advanced and innovative that it's always perfect, and because nothing good
ever comes out of Unix, and because if Microsoft couldn't charge their 75% profit margins then all
innovation stops forever because only people at MS are allowed to have brains.
Not that I'm bitter or anything, you understand.
So yeah, if Microsoft finally adopt a feature UNix has had since 1970, then yes they can expect to
get some stick over it. An if they decide to do things different from the rest of the world, they'll
get criticised for being different just for the sake of it. And if they just ignore the problem,
I'm afraid that, yes, they can expect criticism for that as well.
If they hadn't been so high handed and holier-than-thou in their marketing, I might even have
some sympathy for them. As it is, they dug this hole for themselves.
mmm... the letter from Otto's mum at the start should have been a dead giveaway. Especially given the gloating about the New York Times having taken him at face value.
That said, El Reg prints enough play-for-play corporate propaganda these days that I can
understand how someone could have jumped to conclusions here.
mmm... but this doesn't seem useful unless you have some hypothetical massive outbreak, which is what Bruce Schneier would describe as a movie plot security threat - on the grounds that you can invent a hollywood plot to justify any security measures you might happen to want.
On the other hand I can think of a lot of abuses of the measure that wouldn't any new circumstance to make them happen.
I mean SARS didn't kill anymore than the usual winter flu outbreak would have done, and
the current avian flu scare seems a little orchestrated. I suspect someone of doing a pump-and-dump on Roche shares, but even that's not the case, it gives a nice piece of theatre to distract popular attention from unpopular foreign wars and the like.
And it might even be useful in justifying increased surveillance measures that would never be accepted without a climate of fear...
I don't think it's so much that Google are innovative. I think Google's appeal lies in
dong things well, doing them honestly, and in not subjecting their users to pointless
annoyances and power games.
On the other hand, Microsoft who rarely seem to fulfill any of the above criteria are always screaming about innovation to justify their 75% percent profit margins. Which wouldn't be quite so irritating if so much of their innovation didn't seem to be copying someone.
Not that the GP mentioned innvoation at all, you understand...
Quite true. But even before brute force had chess computers beating the Grandmasters, researchers were dismissing chess as an AI problem (or so I was told at uni) just as soon as the basics were sorted out.
It wasn't just chess, either. Look at Eliza, for instance, which was designed as a turing test candidate (and still fools people to this day).
The original Zork adventure was an exercise in AI but no one ever regarded Infocom as an AI house. It seems like knowing how the trick is done takes away the magic.
Things changed a bit with the advent of Neural Networks, since they are so reluctant to yeild rules that the results never quite seem mechanical. Solutions based on emergent phenomena or cellular automata also seem to keep their mystique, probably for the same reason that it's harder to look inside the box and see how the trick is done.
But in the early days, the goalposts were on roller skates...
In some ways the linux-on-the-desktop debate reminds me of the early days of AI. People used to think up realy hard problems for computers saying "if a computer can perform task X then it will be intelligent". The trouble is that every time we find out how to make a computer do task X, people say "oh, that's not intelligence - that's just an algorithm" and start devising harder problems to crack. Computer chess was once regarded as an AI Milestone, for example.
Similarly, I think that what Linux needs to be considered desktop ready is being likewise constantly redefined. I mean the guys who were interested in Linux when Slackware was frst released saw "desktop readiness" happen years ago. The trouble is that each such milestone brings Linux to the attention of a larger, less technically adept group who look at the OS and say "Nice ideas, but it's not ready for the desktop..."
Before someone trolls along about privacy rights bear in mind CALEA, DCS1000, ECHELON, CAPPS, and TIA. Nothing will really stop them from doing what they want to do
Well, if they already have the information, they don't need this latest measure then, do they? So if they do have the information, I'd have to oppose gathering it twice.
And if they don't, then there's still something for opposing the encroachment of the Surveillance State.
PJ and Marbux do a fine job of demolishing this particular feat of
verbal legerdemain over on
Groklaw
Not only do MS not promise to extend the covenant past Office 11, but they limit the
covenant to "patent claims necessary to conform" without defining what constitures
conformance or necessity in this context.
This means that they can still sue if they allege that there was another way you could
have implemented the spec without infringing on their patents (since it wasn't
necessary) or they can sue if you don't implement every last detail on the spec
(since your implementation isn't conformant).
Between those two, and the fact that MS have not committed not to change the spec at some future
time, they can sue just about anyone they like.
PJ also points out that the EMCA doesn't require a free licence, just Reasonable And Non-Discriminatory (RAND). However they explicity decline to offer a definition of RAND and simply presume that all submissions will be offered under RAND terms. Which means MS can pretty much do as they see fit.
I guess we're just no pro-active enough to leak our propaganda direct to the media like Microsoft does. Of course, if we had their maketing budget.
Seriously, while I can't speak for the other million plus firefox users, I do get irritated when I see the shills contorting logic out of all recognition in a folorn attempt to make a browser crash (firefox)sound worse than arbitary code execution (IE).
I mean who cares if SymantecAV catches it? It shouldn't need to be caught in the first place!
Probably I shouldn't feed so many trolls.
could it possibly be that the "browser wars" are fought by the users far more than the developers?
Ummm... you missed out "marketing departments" as an option.
MS at any rate has a vested interest in retaining cntrol of the browser market and an history of deception and of dubious marketing practices. The Mozilla corporation doesn't have quite the same incentive being a non-profit, and certainly doesn't have the budget. Or the history either.
Impressive. I suddenly find myself feeling jealous because my old laptop isn't crappy enough to compete. That's a very odd sensation:)
I distcc'd the workload over three other machines myself, but I still nearly melted the casing trying to link glibc. I had to prop the little sod up on blocks to get enough airflow to cool it down or it would slow down and eventually hang. In reterospect, I'm amazed the machine survived.
I also had to cross-mount/var/tmp/portage and/usr/portage over nfs to get enough disk space, which didn't help. Good fun though.
Run a trimmed down kernel, a lightweight window manager and trim the services back to the bone - you'd be amazed what'd run
Personal best - Gentoo compiled and running on a 166MHz laptop with 32MB ram, a 2Gb disk and a broken CDROM drive. Admittedly compilation was an exercise that was 50/50 cussedness and masochism, but it runs well with either a 2.4 or 2.6 kernel.
Which doesn't necessarily mean that the situation will improve however. If there was no property there would be nothing to steal; that doesn't make communism the best way to reduce crime.
I can accept the idea that a lack of TLDs will make it easier for a corporation to monopolise use of its name across all geographical regions and areas of discourse. I do not necessarily accept that this is a good thing. Certainly it would make it easier to try and stifle discourse by grabbing as many TLDs as possible.
So apples to black holes or otherwise, I rather feel you have yet to make your case.
Slashdot Mirror
Let me be amongst the first[1] to say "yeah, yeah, yeah, like we haven't all heard that before!"
[1] The first million or so, that is. Obviously.
Think about it.
C|Net, by their own admission, got almost every pertinent detail of the story wrong. The only way they could have have been further off target would be if they assigned the flaw to Internet Explorer. Personally, I'm not going to hold my breath waiting for that mistake to see print.
As a side note: I'm not normally one to slag off Slashdot's editors, but might I ask for a little more investigation before parrotting the lastest MS anti-Firefox propaganda? This is the third story this quarter portraying a browser crash as a security exploit. Given that the last IE flaw involved the execution of arbitary code, some evidence of editorial perspective would be nice.
Only for webapps. And even then it's not necessarily going to be cross-browser, depending on what you're doing with it.
Stick to standards compliant browsers. That gets you something that works on firefox and safari. You can even distribute a custom XUL app as a front end. That gets you around the browser issue neatly.
You don't write cross-platform applications by making a web site.
You better tell these folks.
And these
And then there are this lot
And then there's a little known crowd called Google. GMail and Google maps are both ajax based.
Oh, and you don't need a web site, just a locally running back end that uses http over the port of your choice. It's no worse than running a database where the DBMS runs in its own process or thead.
Java applications still suck, even on modern systems with scads of RAM.
"Appeal To Suckage". Isn't that a logical fallacy?
Functionality you get for free with native applications is either missing or doesn't behave properly.
I belive that's called "writing buggy software". Its not java's fault if you can't use it correctly. It's not my favourite language either, but I don't blame the language if my programs don't work.
As a developer, when my choice is between "Application for one platform that works beautifully on one platform" and "Application for all platforms that falls short on all of them," I know what my choice will be.
So? No one is going to force you to write cross platform apps. Just because it may increasingly yeild market advantage, that doesn't make it compulsory.
You DID have a better argument here than "I like what I like and everything else sucks" didn't you?
You probably mean C# here... "dotNet" is an incredibly nebulous term,
Um... no. dotNet (or more properly .NET) refers to MS answer to Java. More
specifically to the CIL and the .NET runtime. There are a dozen or so
langauges that can generate executables for the dotNet runtime. C#, granted,
but also C++, Java, VB.NET... even Perl.
If you want to see how elegant cross-platform can be and has been for years, open up Notepad, MSN Messenger, Word, and Internet Explorer. There's not a UI commonality between the lot of them. Notepad is still stuck in the 80s. But they're all supposedly part of the same system.
So you're saying that because MS can't keep a consistent look and feel across multiple apps on a single platform, it therefore follows that no-onecan keep a consistent look-and-feel for a single app across multiple platforms?
What were you saying about crack pipes?
Do you really want every application on your system to be that divergent in terms of UI? That's invariably what happens.
Counter examples: gmail, gaim, firefox.
Yes, why is he laughing? He can deliver software that doesn't work on schedule, or he can make the time to do it right. If he routinely chooses the former, then you already have serious support issues and I doubt that unbundling MSN Messenger is going to materially add to them.
Of course, there are cross platform solutions: Ajax, OpenGL, Java... even dotNet once mono gets up to speed. I expect most developers have heard of at least one of these. Maybe you could explain the idea to your boss and save some future pain?
But at the end of the day, The ignorance of your manager is not our problem, and the fact that many of us, (myself included), have at some time been in that situation is not a compelling argument for supporting a broken and abusive monopoly.
If they do, they're going to have to be fairly competitive. Sun has a grid based service for bulk translation of documents at what sound like reasonable rates. And then, for ad-hoc access, we have the likes of OpenOffice.org which doesn't leave much room for price gouging.
So they can't make it too expensive, and there are certainly alternatives, some of them are free (as in speech and as in beer).
On the other hand, staying with MS doesn't really avoid these costs, since MS are retiring current office formats. Whether you move or stay, there are going to be migration costs. The question is do you want an open market with lots of options and a competitive base price, or do you prefer to pay whatever Microsoft decde you can afford.
So really, I don't see why the 20m shouldn't have been saved. After all, TFA specifically mentions an open source deployment rather than an IBM proprietory solution. I'd be inclined to believe that: after all, we can be fairly sure that the anti Open Document lobby are checking the facts very carefully.
I advocate and use open standards whereever possible
Full marks for presenting both sides of the argument, but I think your advocacy could use a little work.
Actually, the rootkit was part of the DRM, in as much as it was there to conceal the DRM mechanism and prevent purchasers from trivially circumventing Sony's restrictions software.
This happened to be the other day. The conversation went like this:
Now there are a couple of things (other than the fact that I can be an obstreperous bastard) I'd like you to note from this.
Firstly, I wasn't up to no good. I didn't have any sinsiter motive for concealing my travel habits. All I was doing was going to work. A couple of days later I had the same conversation on the way back. No sinister motive then, either.
Secondly, I have no reason to believe that the bus company are up to anything sinister. They may try and tweak a little extra profit perhaps, but on the whole I expect all they want is to know where they need to run more busses.
Thirdly, and taking the above points into account, where I choose to travel and when is still my business, and none of theirs unless I choose to make it so. I have the option of sharing that information. And that's the way I damn well want to keep it. Being grumpy first thing in the morning is not yet a ciminal offense.
So really, the question is not "why should we keep it?" The question is why should we relinquish our hard won rights to privacy. I'm going to need a better argument than "what would be the harm" for that.
umm... the fact that Microsoft get criticised whatever they do? Even when what they do isn't actually a bad thing? MS have something of a PR nightmare on their hands these days. On slashdot they could probably care less, but increasingly, it isn't just on Slashdot. That's got to hurt sales. And that's something Bill probably does care about.
I doubt Gates wakes up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat wondering if the /. community found the latest microsoft announcement appealing.
I don't suppose he does either. Then again, he probably didn't post here saying "oh why can't we all just get along?" Which is, of course, why I replied to the GP rather than addressing muy comments to Bill personally. Not that he reads /. I'm sure, but I expect you get my drift.
Who cares if Unix did this first?
That depends on whether you're going to argue, as Microsoft do, that Bill and Steve need 75% profit margins or else Microsoft will not be able to innovate, and that therefore the world of computing will grind to a standstill. As long as that silly argument is still being taken seriously in some circles then it behooves us to point out those (surprisingly frequent) occasions when MS "innovates" using someone else's ideas. We could discuss software patents in the same context, but profit margins is enough to make my case.
So, to summarise, it's not that fixing the reboot annnoyance is a bad thing, but Microsoft's double standard with regard to linux is, particularly since it so erodes their justification for their grossly inflated margins on Windows and MS Office.
Because, you know, *nix is so hopelessly old fashioned that there's nothing good about it, and because Windows is so advanced and innovative that it's always perfect, and because nothing good ever comes out of Unix, and because if Microsoft couldn't charge their 75% profit margins then all innovation stops forever because only people at MS are allowed to have brains.
Not that I'm bitter or anything, you understand.
So yeah, if Microsoft finally adopt a feature UNix has had since 1970, then yes they can expect to get some stick over it. An if they decide to do things different from the rest of the world, they'll get criticised for being different just for the sake of it. And if they just ignore the problem, I'm afraid that, yes, they can expect criticism for that as well.
If they hadn't been so high handed and holier-than-thou in their marketing, I might even have some sympathy for them. As it is, they dug this hole for themselves.
That said, El Reg prints enough play-for-play corporate propaganda these days that I can understand how someone could have jumped to conclusions here.
It's not that the scheme couldn't work - the point is that it's a bad trade-off.
Quite. Which, getting back to my point, casts the desktop readiness issue in an interesting light, I feel.
On the other hand I can think of a lot of abuses of the measure that wouldn't any new circumstance to make them happen.
I mean SARS didn't kill anymore than the usual winter flu outbreak would have done, and the current avian flu scare seems a little orchestrated. I suspect someone of doing a pump-and-dump on Roche shares, but even that's not the case, it gives a nice piece of theatre to distract popular attention from unpopular foreign wars and the like.
And it might even be useful in justifying increased surveillance measures that would never be accepted without a climate of fear...
So, sorry, but still not convinced.
On the other hand, Microsoft who rarely seem to fulfill any of the above criteria are always screaming about innovation to justify their 75% percent profit margins. Which wouldn't be quite so irritating if so much of their innovation didn't seem to be copying someone.
Not that the GP mentioned innvoation at all, you understand...
It wasn't just chess, either. Look at Eliza, for instance, which was designed as a turing test candidate (and still fools people to this day). The original Zork adventure was an exercise in AI but no one ever regarded Infocom as an AI house. It seems like knowing how the trick is done takes away the magic.
Things changed a bit with the advent of Neural Networks, since they are so reluctant to yeild rules that the results never quite seem mechanical. Solutions based on emergent phenomena or cellular automata also seem to keep their mystique, probably for the same reason that it's harder to look inside the box and see how the trick is done.
But in the early days, the goalposts were on roller skates...
Similarly, I think that what Linux needs to be considered desktop ready is being likewise constantly redefined. I mean the guys who were interested in Linux when Slackware was frst released saw "desktop readiness" happen years ago. The trouble is that each such milestone brings Linux to the attention of a larger, less technically adept group who look at the OS and say "Nice ideas, but it's not ready for the desktop..."
Just a random passing thought
Well, if they already have the information, they don't need this latest measure then, do they? So if they do have the information, I'd have to oppose gathering it twice.
And if they don't, then there's still something for opposing the encroachment of the Surveillance State.
Not only do MS not promise to extend the covenant past Office 11, but they limit the covenant to "patent claims necessary to conform" without defining what constitures conformance or necessity in this context.
This means that they can still sue if they allege that there was another way you could have implemented the spec without infringing on their patents (since it wasn't necessary) or they can sue if you don't implement every last detail on the spec (since your implementation isn't conformant).
Between those two, and the fact that MS have not committed not to change the spec at some future time, they can sue just about anyone they like.
PJ also points out that the EMCA doesn't require a free licence, just Reasonable And Non-Discriminatory (RAND). However they explicity decline to offer a definition of RAND and simply presume that all submissions will be offered under RAND terms. Which means MS can pretty much do as they see fit.
All in all, typical Microsoft smoke and mirrors.
Seriously, while I can't speak for the other million plus firefox users, I do get irritated when I see the shills contorting logic out of all recognition in a folorn attempt to make a browser crash (firefox)sound worse than arbitary code execution (IE). I mean who cares if SymantecAV catches it? It shouldn't need to be caught in the first place!
Probably I shouldn't feed so many trolls.
could it possibly be that the "browser wars" are fought by the users far more than the developers?
Ummm... you missed out "marketing departments" as an option.
MS at any rate has a vested interest in retaining cntrol of the browser market and an history of deception and of dubious marketing practices. The Mozilla corporation doesn't have quite the same incentive being a non-profit, and certainly doesn't have the budget. Or the history either.
I distcc'd the workload over three other machines myself, but I still nearly melted the casing trying to link glibc. I had to prop the little sod up on blocks to get enough airflow to cool it down or it would slow down and eventually hang. In reterospect, I'm amazed the machine survived.
I also had to cross-mount /var/tmp/portage and /usr/portage over nfs to get enough disk space, which didn't help. Good fun though.
Personal best - Gentoo compiled and running on a 166MHz laptop with 32MB ram, a 2Gb disk and a broken CDROM drive. Admittedly compilation was an exercise that was 50/50 cussedness and masochism, but it runs well with either a 2.4 or 2.6 kernel.
Makes you wonder why they don't go and read something they enjoy, really.
Which doesn't necessarily mean that the situation will improve however. If there was no property there would be nothing to steal; that doesn't make communism the best way to reduce crime.
I can accept the idea that a lack of TLDs will make it easier for a corporation to monopolise use of its name across all geographical regions and areas of discourse. I do not necessarily accept that this is a good thing. Certainly it would make it easier to try and stifle discourse by grabbing as many TLDs as possible.
So apples to black holes or otherwise, I rather feel you have yet to make your case.