You may be right about "subversion" among college students being expected and traditional. I think the amount of attention paid you depends greatly on the amount of effectiveness the powers that be perceive. I know that back in the 60's and 70's it was quite real that members of the SDS would have files with the FBI. But the early civil rights movement and the Vietnam war with draft were more intense issues perhaps, and Hoover's FBI was different.
I agree this is not the target of Echelon (if it exists.) What I've read on it suggests that the target, if any, is commercial espionage. Do you think that it wouldn't be advantageous, say, to do keyword searches on a Japanese or European company's e-mail for what they're working on, and possible difficulties and solutions? To a greater and greater degree war is about economics these days.
Not to rain on your parade, but there are a few problems:)
One is that with DoomOS you can only see the directory you're currently in. A GUI tree manager provides a better overview, spanning multiple directories. Still, map mode, if done creatively, might be able to make up for this. The lack of map mode in Quake might even be a reason to choose DOOM for this.
If you want to go somewhere that is six directories up then seven more down, it takes quite a while, assuming you don't get lost. It would be easier to pull up the map and click the directory you want to end up at.
You only have three verbs to interact with objects in DOOM, run over/against, shoot, and use/push. Run over/against and use/push are actions that are hard to modify. Shoot could be altered by which weapon, and where you aimed, but it's still a somewhat limited set of actions. Vertical aiming would allow you to shoot specific spots and the metaphor might have sufficient power. It would be more natural if you could move your arm and touch a specific spot on an object.
I think it has some definite applications as a super-intuitive interface to a limited environment for people with no computer experience. It would be a lot of fun to build a Doom development environment along these lines perhaps, and that would give it a good test.
It's very easy to make all monsters that are not too close fail to attack by blinding them with a reject map for the level that is all ones.
Monster and player states are stored in a mobj_s structure that includes pointers to other mobj_s structures: target, tracer, (and lastenemy if derived from BOOM.) These store the last monster that attacked, and by keeping these NULL, or ignoring them, monsters would not attack at all, so you wouldn't need degreelessness or a funny reject.
There were some strange bugs with these pointers in some versions of the original DOOM that allowed fireball throwing monsters to attack themselves or others of the same kind.
The killall command is a little tricky in DOOM 2. When you kill a pain elemental you have to remember it will spawn heads a few seconds later, and kill those too. Throwing in a pain elemental that spawned pain elementals (and processes) on being killed might be a memory virus:)
Typically though, wouldn't this be a civil case? I agree that there should be accountability, but do we want people being arrested because they *may* have published false information thru the internet? Should we lock up the staff of the National Enquirer too? How bout Rush? He's malicious and wrong quite often.
"I can guarantee that I will be releasing the Quake source code, the only question is the timing. I don't intend to release it until all of the initial licensee projects have shipped. Anachronox looks to be the last one out, so pull for their completion..." - John Carmack
The only link I could find quickly was to a cached Google page and it's towards the bottom, but it matches what I've read other places.
Quake levels have to be designed to play well. If you have more than about ten complex models in view rendering slows down a lot. DOOM allows a hundred or more sprites in view without much impact. Not saying you're wrong, just that there *are* tradeoffs.:)
Everything but the lowlevel sound/music code and the game artwork. There are available substitutes for both, but clearly this program requires you to have purchased DOOM.WAD or DOOM2.WAD previously.
IIRC, Quake 1 is supposed to be released this Christmas or so. However, you *still* might want to use DOOM, just because not everyone has supported 3D acceleration yet, and frame rates are an issue. DOOM is also far more compact, and requires much less memory and time to develop levels.
I've got an ATI Rage 128 chip set, and it works very well for a desktop under the beta XFCom driver by Suse. 1600X1200X16M resolution works fast and well.
I can't run 3D games on it in Linux yet, but it runs Half Life with noticeably better framerate than my Nvidia TNT in Win'98 used to. I've also upgraded from K6/300 to P3/450, but I don't think that's the whole story.
I've had trouble with ATI in the distant past, and am not a big supporter of theirs. But it seems like they are improving and maybe I'll give 'em one more chance after this news.
Well, I don't know if we'll get relaxed regulations out of this, but the very fact that a U.S. president acknowledged Linux, and considers it important, is major progress for acceptance of the OS and OSS. Maybe he just realized that throwing over 10M voters away wasn't smart:), but it means the same anyway - Linux is on the radar screen in mainstream America, and considered either a political or economic force by politicians.
OSS sheds light on the encryption debate in a useful way. Clearly the development model itself requires the ability to publish sources, and any OS that wants to be used widely must support encryption. Very dangerous for a government to try to shutdown or harass a volunteer movement, the press can have too much fun portraying Big Government vs. Altruistic Volunteers. This plays even better than Big Government vs Evil Microsoft I suspect.
As I recall the dim days of highschool it occurs to me that we were taught the first amendment in an overpoweringly political context. While this is undoubtedly the area of most concern, perhaps more attention should be paid to it's role in protecting unpopular speech.
There is a real disconnect here between the poll results for the first amendment vs. the poll results about suppression of porn, vulgar language, and violence. Either Americans know what they're saying and think we need to regulate the internet like TV, or they don't fully understand the first amendment. I'm really hoping it's the latter.
According to the internet.com site, they already did in June 1999, symbol INTM.
It also mentions that they are 20% of Mecklermedia, which was acquired by Penton Media in Nov. '98. Anyone know anything about those corporations?
The copyright notice at the bottom seems to me (IANAL) to gobble up all rights to posted comments as well, but that may be typical of sites other than Slashdot.
And of course, Microsoft is listed as a major sponsor. But that probably applies to over half the web as well.
I'd like to hear confirmation from LT and their slant on this.
I don't agree the "mount thing" is useless. I really like being able to mount a Win98 VFAT partition, or mount it read-only, or not mount it all. It's a slight hassle with floppies and CDs I'll grant you. But the system really needs to know when, where, and how a removable device is available. Several good options for more transparency are available and being developed it seems. I don't want to lose the detailed control over mounting file systems Linux provides though.
If Caldera automounts floppies and CD's from the desktop that suits me about perfectly.
Re:Slashdot model great for tech, but that's about
on
The Slashdot Interval
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· Score: 3
I agree that Slashdot would be very inappropriate to apply generally. If you're doing a story on someone being a criminal, I don't suggest you solicit public opinions on the subject.:) You might weasel and ask for interesting stories instead, but you're potentially exposing respondents to libel, and the story's subject to defamation. This is best investigated privately until you actually have facts. You can't get a scoop by using public review either, obviously.
But assuming slashdot-like sites covering diverse subjects were in existence, it might be valuable for a fairly large class of stories. Don't think of it as publishing exactly, but discussion of a first draft outline -- more likely if this had been planned from the start. New ideas will be proposed, misconceptions punctured, hoaxes exposed, logic tightened, all to the good if the reporter is open to criticism and suggestions. The forum provides data, the reporter provides information in the story.
The data on the wire services are shared pretty well, so it's not inconceivable that this kind of data could be too (it's posted publically, so it kinda has to be.) Product will still be differentiated by the sources that only the reporter has access to, and their insight and writing ability.
Prior review isn't really censorship here because there is no threat to prevent Jane's from publishing whatever they like, including the original story (which they did.) Newspapers usually call politicians before breaking a negative story on them, right? It's not because they won't print the story if the politician doesn't like it, they want more data, and to ensure they're not making a mistake. Prior review is only a problem if you can't ignore it when you choose to.
It often happens that when a new idea arises, it is applied to other fields, sometimes with success. If open source works for some reasons with general applicability, for one possibility chaos theory -- the way order naturally arises in complex systems, then it is entirely possible it will have far reaching effects.
It's even possible we'll understand older ideas like capitalism better under the new light shed. Given open information about products, consumer peer review will select the best products and companies without excessive top-down control. Sound a little familiar?
I think we've seen enough to know it's longer lasting than a hula-hoop. Whether it has consequences for decades afterwards like the civil rights movement remains to be seen.
It could be like the anti-War movement too, a single issue horse. No Microsoft, no impetus for open source. I doubt that personally, free software preceded Microsoft's monopoly by quite a piece. It has too much intrinsic value to be dismissed as purely a reaction against something.
There are quite a few possibilities for organizing such a game.
Direct democracy - count votes for each move.
Experts suggest, majority vote as MSN did.
Irina Krush as benevolent dictator, with a slashdot-like BBS infrastructure.
Irina Krush as benevolent dictator, with move trees assigned to sub-teams (maybe farm out further moves to sub-sub-teams recursively) who report their analysis of each position upward until it ends up in a database Irina inspects and selects from.
Same as above except position analyses are weighted numerically to choose the move.
There are some very interesting experiments in the management of distributed activities waiting to happen here.
One good step to avoid corporate anthropomorphism would be to remove their status as individuals with rights under the law. I think this encourages the anthropomorphic tendency.
What you say about RedHat's obligation to shareholders is true, but it needs to be tempered a little. If you read their SEC filing you'll see that they know they depend on the goodwill of the free development community for their very existence. Thus a move that makes economic sense in the short term, but pisses off developers, is not really in the shareholder's interest. Likewise acts of goodwill could actually improve their position in the longer term, even if it makes for a short term loss. How else could Microsoft have justified giving away IE to it's shareholders? Anyone with a share of stock want to try suing Microsoft over this? In the long term it wasn't so stupid, was it?
BTW, I think this legal pressure for short term gain is very harmful. Corporations make products that frequently have hidden costs. For example cars entail a high rate of accidents, expensive road maintenance, and environmental degradation. These must be paid by society, but they don't show up on the balance sheet of the corporation. Naturally, there is a tendency by corporations to do their accounting in such a way that maximizes how good the balance sheet looks, and as a result products actually become *more expensive* to society as a whole in the interests of making the corporation look more profitable to it's shareholders.
We don't need to force corporations to act in the public interest, but it would be very nice if we could give them an exception under the shareholder laws that made moves in the general public interest defensible.
I've been out of University for 25 years now. How about you?
You accurately describe the state of business today. I'm incredulous you consider that state of affairs ideal. Look around you, there are six billion people and more on the way. There aren't enough resources for everyone to have the lifestyle we currently enjoy in the U.S. Either you better get used to war, reduced life style, or a more efficient style of production. One that maximizes quality and quantity of output, not personal wealth and corporate power.
"It is mankinds nature to compete until the compitition is extinct."
And there you stand on a planet swept clean of life. What a vision. You won! Congratulations.
I'm not a fan of World Domination by anyone, Linux included. Yes, products that no one uses will die. That's quite different from sabotoging them and muscling them away from the distributors.
Microsoft is more like a mass extinction than a competing predator anyway. And it didn't claw its way to the top for survival. I imagine Bill could somehow limp along if he only had a few billion instead of hundreds.
While that behavior may be tolerable in animals, I find it a little short of what I expect from humans. Businesses are *NOT* creatures with desires, goals, and instincts of their own and with a right to survival at any cost. They are supposed to be voluntary organizations of humans for their and society's mutual benefit. Their genes do not force them to dominate by screwing customers, they *choose* to do that. It sure *ain't* pretty when major world corporations act like 14 yr old males showing off.
If you want to think that the prisoner's dilemna means cooperation in business is impossible, you may. I don't wish to view the world that darkly. We haven't learned the trick yet, but the cooperation stemming from open source is the best hope I see today.
Life isn't about smashing everyone around you down so you can stand on top. There doesn't *have* to *be* just *one* top. It doesn't have to be a rat race.
Yeah, ok, Bill G got PC's on everyone's desktop and Mussolini made the trains run on time.
No one has a problem with *what* Bill did. It's with the *way* he did it.
How many small companies died so that Microsoft could grow fatter? How many programmers had to either work with the Win32 API or find another job? How many better technologies did he strangle?
The PC revolution happened for two reasons. One was the hardware clone industry. Everyone and their stepsister was grinding them out, and inventing new peripherals for them. The other reason was the thriving software ecology when DOS was king. I remember when the OS was what Microsoft made and there were lots of utilities, spreadsheets, word processors, and programs made by *other* companies. Even competing desktops.
Until the 90's it seemed that Microsoft was a player in this space. The user installable device drivers in DOS actually helped it widen significantly. But then software competitors started running into compatibility problems and vanishing for one reason or another, only to be replaced by a Microsoft product. Until we are left with today's market where "your system will crash a lot unless you use Microsoft apps and approved drivers." And nearly every system comes shipped with the Window's OS like it was a required piece of hardware.
You can admire Bill for his rapaciousness and greed if you like, but try to realize it wasn't without cost to many of us. Windows is to the software industry as the space shuttle is to the space industry, bad technology that displaced possibly more worthy choices.
I agree, I think being rich would likely be not much fun at all. Those I know who have become rich did so by holding down two jobs, being politically and socially correct, and saving every penny for twenty years. That's an investment I can do without.
Then, once you've got the money, everyone is your friend. Not. The demands to invest it in hare-brained schemes, or to help out shiftless relatives and friends have got to be irritating after that kind of take-no-prisoners effort.
Acquisition of wealth also seems to make some people hard and cynical, and intolerant of those without blinding ambition. When wealth becomes its own goal it's an addiction like any other.
Acquiring wealth by birth, or in a sudden flash like the lottery, or a brilliant idea might be fun. Pulling a Horatio is just too much work. Having money for a few modest toys is enough for me, I'd rather have a life, thanks.
Governments make the laws. You didn't expect them to *follow* them did you? Sorry, they rarely do, laws are for the little people. You can't even sue them without their permission.
It really says it all when they have to order government employees not to break the law. I shudder to think of all the things there is no executive order covering if this is required.
Clearly gambling is a mental disease in cases like this. Can anyone really fail to understand that casinos, electronic or otherwise, are not in the business of giving away money to the persistent? You have to deny reality very powerfully to invest $70k in an effort to show otherwise.
Letting this woman off without at least mandatory therapy is no service to her or to society. I hope she gets help.
I blame the CC company for settling. And not it specifically, but corporations in general. If you wonder why everyone and their brother is suing, the answer is simple -- because it works. As long as court will cost the corporation more than you are asking they'll settle. Principle is not a word in their vocabulary without a bottom line to back it up.
I'm amazed they didn't require non-disclosure in the settlement, that's usually part of the deal. Especially when problems are found in a product that might cause a recall if generally known. Here I expect a lot of copycats trying the same trick, so I wonder if they will continue to settle further cases?
Apparently they are putting the responsibility to check origin of customers on the offshore gambling sites. This seems equivalent to telling them to close their doors. Certainly the credit card companies are more likely to know where the customer lives and what credit law is like there.
This doesn't seem to add much of anything to the SCSL/GPL debate.
Just more excuses about product warranties being threatened when the hoi polloi get their dirty hands on the code. What if *stolen* code ends up in the product! That is more likely under GPL than SCSL for some reason?
They can't give away StarOffice because it's too hard to track down all the IP owners? Didn't they just buy it? Doesn't that require tracking down the owners too?
If Sun doesn't want to be an open source player it's fine with me. But I wish they'd quit wasting time trying to justify the SCSL license as an improvement over existing open source licenses. Show me some SCSL project successes first, please.
For example in the add-on levels written for DOOM it could be extremely useful to reuse texture art from the game with small modifications, to fit it to a corner, flip it, change it's color, or make it tile better in some direction.
In fact this was frowned upon and creating totally new textures was considered better. Similar things were going on with levels, sounds and music, plus a whole different controversy from using copyrighted sources like movies and TV for new level ideas, sounds, music, and textures.
I've always felt that ultimately it's id's right to decide what can be done and can't, but there are certainly issues aplenty with respect to being able to modify and reuse portions of the game other than code. It makes those with only smaller artistic talents able to have fun customizing their levels more completely, and widens the base of art available to the community. But it does violate copyright as things stand now.
One of the more disappointing things about the DOOM level community was that new art wasn't shared as much as might be expected. Many authors disallowed reuse. If they had gotten that act together there might have been a better basis for complaining that id wasn't sharing those too.
Slashdot Mirror
You may be right about "subversion" among college students being expected and traditional. I think the amount of attention paid you depends greatly on the amount of effectiveness the powers that be perceive. I know that back in the 60's and 70's it was quite real that members of the SDS would have files with the FBI. But the early civil rights movement and the Vietnam war with draft were more intense issues perhaps, and Hoover's FBI was different.
I agree this is not the target of Echelon (if it exists.) What I've read on it suggests that the target, if any, is commercial espionage. Do you think that it wouldn't be advantageous, say, to do keyword searches on a Japanese or European company's e-mail for what they're working on, and possible difficulties and solutions? To a greater and greater degree war is about economics these days.
Not to rain on your parade, but there are a few problems :)
One is that with DoomOS you can only see the directory you're currently in. A GUI tree manager provides a better overview, spanning multiple directories. Still, map mode, if done creatively, might be able to make up for this. The lack of map mode in Quake might even be a reason to choose DOOM for this.
If you want to go somewhere that is six directories up then seven more down, it takes quite a while, assuming you don't get lost. It would be easier to pull up the map and click the directory you want to end up at.
You only have three verbs to interact with objects in DOOM, run over/against, shoot, and use/push. Run over/against and use/push are actions that are hard to modify. Shoot could be altered by which weapon, and where you aimed, but it's still a somewhat limited set of actions. Vertical aiming would allow you to shoot specific spots and the metaphor might have sufficient power. It would be more natural if you could move your arm and touch a specific spot on an object.
I think it has some definite applications as a super-intuitive interface to a limited environment for people with no computer experience. It would be a lot of fun to build a Doom development environment along these lines perhaps, and that would give it a good test.
It's very easy to make all monsters that are not too close fail to attack by blinding them with a reject map for the level that is all ones.
:)
Monster and player states are stored in a mobj_s structure that includes pointers to other mobj_s structures: target, tracer, (and lastenemy if derived from BOOM.) These store the last monster that attacked, and by keeping these NULL, or ignoring them, monsters would not attack at all, so you wouldn't need degreelessness or a funny reject.
There were some strange bugs with these pointers in some versions of the original DOOM that allowed fireball throwing monsters to attack themselves or others of the same kind.
The killall command is a little tricky in DOOM 2. When you kill a pain elemental you have to remember it will spawn heads a few seconds later, and kill those too. Throwing in a pain elemental that spawned pain elementals (and processes) on being killed might be a memory virus
Typically though, wouldn't this be a civil case? I agree that there should be accountability, but do we want people being arrested because they *may* have published false information thru the internet? Should we lock up the staff of the National Enquirer too? How bout Rush? He's malicious and wrong quite often.
Cool program! :)
Just a question. Is XDoom open sourced yet, i.e. GPL license? I heard the announcment for LxDOOM, but must have missed the one for XDoom.
"I can guarantee that I will be releasing the Quake source code, the only question is the timing. I don't intend to release it until all of the initial licensee projects have shipped. Anachronox looks to be the last one out, so pull for their completion..." - John Carmack
The only link I could find quickly was to a cached Google page and it's towards the bottom, but it matches what I've read other places.
Quake levels have to be designed to play well. If you have more than about ten complex models in view rendering slows down a lot. DOOM allows a hundred or more sprites in view without much impact. Not saying you're wrong, just that there *are* tradeoffs. :)
Everything but the lowlevel sound/music code and the game artwork. There are available substitutes for both, but clearly this program requires you to have purchased DOOM.WAD or DOOM2.WAD previously.
IIRC, Quake 1 is supposed to be released this Christmas or so. However, you *still* might want to use DOOM, just because not everyone has supported 3D acceleration yet, and frame rates are an issue. DOOM is also far more compact, and requires much less memory and time to develop levels.
I've got an ATI Rage 128 chip set, and it works very well for a desktop under the beta XFCom driver by Suse. 1600X1200X16M resolution works fast and well.
I can't run 3D games on it in Linux yet, but it runs Half Life with noticeably better framerate than my Nvidia TNT in Win'98 used to. I've also upgraded from K6/300 to P3/450, but I don't think that's the whole story.
I've had trouble with ATI in the distant past, and am not a big supporter of theirs. But it seems like they are improving and maybe I'll give 'em one more chance after this news.
Well, I don't know if we'll get relaxed regulations out of this, but the very fact that a U.S. president acknowledged Linux, and considers it important, is major progress for acceptance of the OS and OSS. Maybe he just realized that throwing over 10M voters away wasn't smart :), but it means the same anyway - Linux is on the radar screen in mainstream America, and considered either a political or economic force by politicians.
OSS sheds light on the encryption debate in a useful way. Clearly the development model itself requires the ability to publish sources, and any OS that wants to be used widely must support encryption. Very dangerous for a government to try to shutdown or harass a volunteer movement, the press can have too much fun portraying Big Government vs. Altruistic Volunteers. This plays even better than Big Government vs Evil Microsoft I suspect.
As I recall the dim days of highschool it occurs to me that we were taught the first amendment in an overpoweringly political context. While this is undoubtedly the area of most concern, perhaps more attention should be paid to it's role in protecting unpopular speech.
There is a real disconnect here between the poll results for the first amendment vs. the poll results about suppression of porn, vulgar language, and violence. Either Americans know what they're saying and think we need to regulate the internet like TV, or they don't fully understand the first amendment. I'm really hoping it's the latter.
It also mentions that they are 20% of Mecklermedia, which was acquired by Penton Media in Nov. '98. Anyone know anything about those corporations?
The copyright notice at the bottom seems to me (IANAL) to gobble up all rights to posted comments as well, but that may be typical of sites other than Slashdot.
And of course, Microsoft is listed as a major sponsor. But that probably applies to over half the web as well.
I'd like to hear confirmation from LT and their slant on this.
I don't agree the "mount thing" is useless. I really like being able to mount a Win98 VFAT partition, or mount it read-only, or not mount it all. It's a slight hassle with floppies and CDs I'll grant you. But the system really needs to know when, where, and how a removable device is available. Several good options for more transparency are available and being developed it seems. I don't want to lose the detailed control over mounting file systems Linux provides though.
If Caldera automounts floppies and CD's from the desktop that suits me about perfectly.
I agree that Slashdot would be very inappropriate to apply generally. If you're doing a story on someone being a criminal, I don't suggest you solicit public opinions on the subject. :) You might weasel and ask for interesting stories instead, but you're potentially exposing respondents to libel, and the story's subject to defamation. This is best investigated privately until you actually have facts. You can't get a scoop by using public review either, obviously.
But assuming slashdot-like sites covering diverse subjects were in existence, it might be valuable for a fairly large class of stories. Don't think of it as publishing exactly, but discussion of a first draft outline -- more likely if this had been planned from the start. New ideas will be proposed, misconceptions punctured, hoaxes exposed, logic tightened, all to the good if the reporter is open to criticism and suggestions. The forum provides data, the reporter provides information in the story.
The data on the wire services are shared pretty well, so it's not inconceivable that this kind of data could be too (it's posted publically, so it kinda has to be.) Product will still be differentiated by the sources that only the reporter has access to, and their insight and writing ability.
Prior review isn't really censorship here because there is no threat to prevent Jane's from publishing whatever they like, including the original story (which they did.) Newspapers usually call politicians before breaking a negative story on them, right? It's not because they won't print the story if the politician doesn't like it, they want more data, and to ensure they're not making a mistake. Prior review is only a problem if you can't ignore it when you choose to.
It often happens that when a new idea arises, it is applied to other fields, sometimes with success. If open source works for some reasons with general applicability, for one possibility chaos theory -- the way order naturally arises in complex systems, then it is entirely possible it will have far reaching effects.
It's even possible we'll understand older ideas like capitalism better under the new light shed. Given open information about products, consumer peer review will select the best products and companies without excessive top-down control. Sound a little familiar?
I think we've seen enough to know it's longer lasting than a hula-hoop. Whether it has consequences for decades afterwards like the civil rights movement remains to be seen.
It could be like the anti-War movement too, a single issue horse. No Microsoft, no impetus for open source. I doubt that personally, free software preceded Microsoft's monopoly by quite a piece. It has too much intrinsic value to be dismissed as purely a reaction against something.
Interesting idea.
There are quite a few possibilities for organizing such a game.
Direct democracy - count votes for each move.
Experts suggest, majority vote as MSN did.
Irina Krush as benevolent dictator, with a slashdot-like BBS infrastructure.
Irina Krush as benevolent dictator, with move trees assigned to sub-teams (maybe farm out further moves to sub-sub-teams recursively) who report their analysis of each position upward until it ends up in a database Irina inspects and selects from.
Same as above except position analyses are weighted numerically to choose the move.
There are some very interesting experiments in the management of distributed activities waiting to happen here.
One good step to avoid corporate anthropomorphism would be to remove their status as individuals with rights under the law. I think this encourages the anthropomorphic tendency.
What you say about RedHat's obligation to shareholders is true, but it needs to be tempered a little. If you read their SEC filing you'll see that they know they depend on the goodwill of the free development community for their very existence. Thus a move that makes economic sense in the short term, but pisses off developers, is not really in the shareholder's interest. Likewise acts of goodwill could actually improve their position in the longer term, even if it makes for a short term loss. How else could Microsoft have justified giving away IE to it's shareholders? Anyone with a share of stock want to try suing Microsoft over this? In the long term it wasn't so stupid, was it?
BTW, I think this legal pressure for short term gain is very harmful. Corporations make products that frequently have hidden costs. For example cars entail a high rate of accidents, expensive road maintenance, and environmental degradation. These must be paid by society, but they don't show up on the balance sheet of the corporation. Naturally, there is a tendency by corporations to do their accounting in such a way that maximizes how good the balance sheet looks, and as a result products actually become *more expensive* to society as a whole in the interests of making the corporation look more profitable to it's shareholders.
We don't need to force corporations to act in the public interest, but it would be very nice if we could give them an exception under the shareholder laws that made moves in the general public interest defensible.
I've been out of University for 25 years now. How about you?
You accurately describe the state of business today. I'm incredulous you consider that state of affairs ideal. Look around you, there are six billion people and more on the way. There aren't enough resources for everyone to have the lifestyle we currently enjoy in the U.S. Either you better get used to war, reduced life style, or a more efficient style of production. One that maximizes quality and quantity of output, not personal wealth and corporate power.
"It is mankinds nature to compete until the compitition is extinct."
And there you stand on a planet swept clean of life. What a vision. You won! Congratulations.
I'm not a fan of World Domination by anyone, Linux included. Yes, products that no one uses will die. That's quite different from sabotoging them and muscling them away from the distributors.
Microsoft is more like a mass extinction than a competing predator anyway. And it didn't claw its way to the top for survival. I imagine Bill could somehow limp along if he only had a few billion instead of hundreds.
While that behavior may be tolerable in animals, I find it a little short of what I expect from humans. Businesses are *NOT* creatures with desires, goals, and instincts of their own and with a right to survival at any cost. They are supposed to be voluntary organizations of humans for their and society's mutual benefit. Their genes do not force them to dominate by screwing customers, they *choose* to do that. It sure *ain't* pretty when major world corporations act like 14 yr old males showing off.
If you want to think that the prisoner's dilemna means cooperation in business is impossible, you may. I don't wish to view the world that darkly. We haven't learned the trick yet, but the cooperation stemming from open source is the best hope I see today.
Life isn't about smashing everyone around you down so you can stand on top. There doesn't *have* to *be* just *one* top. It doesn't have to be a rat race.
Hmmm, do I detect a Republican?
Yeah, ok, Bill G got PC's on everyone's desktop and Mussolini made the trains run on time.
No one has a problem with *what* Bill did. It's with the *way* he did it.
How many small companies died so that Microsoft could grow fatter? How many programmers had to either work with the Win32 API or find another job? How many better technologies did he strangle?
The PC revolution happened for two reasons. One was the hardware clone industry. Everyone and their stepsister was grinding them out, and inventing new peripherals for them. The other reason was the thriving software ecology when DOS was king. I remember when the OS was what Microsoft made and there were lots of utilities, spreadsheets, word processors, and programs made by *other* companies. Even competing desktops.
Until the 90's it seemed that Microsoft was a player in this space. The user installable device drivers in DOS actually helped it widen significantly. But then software competitors started running into compatibility problems and vanishing for one reason or another, only to be replaced by a Microsoft product. Until we are left with today's market where "your system will crash a lot unless you use Microsoft apps and approved drivers." And nearly every system comes shipped with the Window's OS like it was a required piece of hardware.
You can admire Bill for his rapaciousness and greed if you like, but try to realize it wasn't without cost to many of us. Windows is to the software industry as the space shuttle is to the space industry, bad technology that displaced possibly more worthy choices.
Well said. :)
I agree, I think being rich would likely be not much fun at all. Those I know who have become rich did so by holding down two jobs, being politically and socially correct, and saving every penny for twenty years. That's an investment I can do without.
Then, once you've got the money, everyone is your friend. Not. The demands to invest it in hare-brained schemes, or to help out shiftless relatives and friends have got to be irritating after that kind of take-no-prisoners effort.
Acquisition of wealth also seems to make some people hard and cynical, and intolerant of those without blinding ambition. When wealth becomes its own goal it's an addiction like any other.
Acquiring wealth by birth, or in a sudden flash like the lottery, or a brilliant idea might be fun. Pulling a Horatio is just too much work. Having money for a few modest toys is enough for me, I'd rather have a life, thanks.
Governments make the laws. You didn't expect them to *follow* them did you? Sorry, they rarely do, laws are for the little people. You can't even sue them without their permission.
It really says it all when they have to order government employees not to break the law. I shudder to think of all the things there is no executive order covering if this is required.
Clearly gambling is a mental disease in cases like this. Can anyone really fail to understand that casinos, electronic or otherwise, are not in the business of giving away money to the persistent? You have to deny reality very powerfully to invest $70k in an effort to show otherwise.
Letting this woman off without at least mandatory therapy is no service to her or to society. I hope she gets help.
I blame the CC company for settling. And not it specifically, but corporations in general. If you wonder why everyone and their brother is suing, the answer is simple -- because it works. As long as court will cost the corporation more than you are asking they'll settle. Principle is not a word in their vocabulary without a bottom line to back it up.
I'm amazed they didn't require non-disclosure in the settlement, that's usually part of the deal. Especially when problems are found in a product that might cause a recall if generally known. Here I expect a lot of copycats trying the same trick, so I wonder if they will continue to settle further cases?
Apparently they are putting the responsibility to check origin of customers on the offshore gambling sites. This seems equivalent to telling them to close their doors. Certainly the credit card companies are more likely to know where the customer lives and what credit law is like there.
This doesn't seem to add much of anything to the SCSL/GPL debate.
Just more excuses about product warranties being threatened when the hoi polloi get their dirty hands on the code. What if *stolen* code ends up in the product! That is more likely under GPL than SCSL for some reason?
They can't give away StarOffice because it's too hard to track down all the IP owners? Didn't they just buy it? Doesn't that require tracking down the owners too?
If Sun doesn't want to be an open source player it's fine with me. But I wish they'd quit wasting time trying to justify the SCSL license as an improvement over existing open source licenses. Show me some SCSL project successes first, please.
It's a nice theory but in practice wrong.
For example in the add-on levels written for DOOM it could be extremely useful to reuse texture art from the game with small modifications, to fit it to a corner, flip it, change it's color, or make it tile better in some direction.
In fact this was frowned upon and creating totally new textures was considered better. Similar things were going on with levels, sounds and music, plus a whole different controversy from using copyrighted sources like movies and TV for new level ideas, sounds, music, and textures.
I've always felt that ultimately it's id's right to decide what can be done and can't, but there are certainly issues aplenty with respect to being able to modify and reuse portions of the game other than code. It makes those with only smaller artistic talents able to have fun customizing their levels more completely, and widens the base of art available to the community. But it does violate copyright as things stand now.
One of the more disappointing things about the DOOM level community was that new art wasn't shared as much as might be expected. Many authors disallowed reuse. If they had gotten that act together there might have been a better basis for complaining that id wasn't sharing those too.