The trouble with M$'s dominance is that too many people are unable to make choices about the software they use. In many cases, they are required by their employer or university to use Windows, Office, Explorer or whatever, whether they want to or not. Many others simply never get the opportunity to learn or use anything else; some people never find out in the first place that are other OS's besides Windows, other office suites besides Office, other browers besides Explorer. This is bad enough in the world of business and personal computer use; it is unconscionable when it happens in universities and schools, where learning and diversity are what it's all about.
That is the problem that your grandfather and his potential donor need to solve. But by forbidding M$ altogether, the university is deprived of choices, so the solution is not much better than the problem. Hate to say it, because I loathe M$ and everything about it from the very depths of my soul. But that's all the more reason not to want to be similar to Bill Gates and his gangsters.
Tell your grandfather to make this suggestion to the donor: The money that the donor puts up will be used to ensure that the university will always have a choice about the software used there. If someone wants to use non-M$ software, they can use the funds to make the purchases, migrate their systems, re-train the staff, whatever they need to do. But if, after evaluating all possibilities, M$ seems to be the best way to go, then they can use it for that as well. Maybe they just need some Windows licenses, because the undergrads will need to know how to use it and develop for it when they graduate. Surely that's reasonable enough. Just as long as the university doesn't have to go with M$ because they're locked in somehow. That would be a very kind gift, and everyone at the university will be grateful for it.
... SCO has hired David Boies to prosecute their case. Nice choice. Lost the DOJ case against Microsoft. Lost the Gore case for the White House.
No, David Boies didn't lose the DOJ case. He worked the trial before Judge Jackson, and won decisively -- most observers said that he beat the crap out of M$'s team. Then Bush got elected, and they certainly weren't about to keep working with Boies. Instead, it was the new administration who decided to let M$ walk.
As for Bush v. Gore, I think even if God Himself had been Gore's lawyer, He wouldn't have had a chance against the Rehnquist Five.
But at any rate, I was rooting for him in both of those cases, and I'm very dismayed to see him join the wrong side now.
I agree with a number of things that have already been mentioned, and would like to add that Solaris has a few more tools for monitoring system activity and performance which I really miss in Linux.
Linux has vmstat, netstat, top and strace. Solaris has truss instead of strace (and I like truss better), the other three that Linux has, and also sar, mpstat, iostat and prstat. At least out of the box, anyway. Linux being what it is, I'm sure nothing prevents someone from writing these tools as open source projects, and maybe they're out there somewhere. But in Solaris they're right there, I don't have to go looking for them.
Surprised I haven't seen this one so far (at least not while browsing at threshhold 2), since I'm guessing that a lot of Slashdotters have had to chase down performance bottlenecks. It's hard to overstate the importance of good monitoring tools for such a job, and right now Solaris has the clear advantage in this area.
... those issues were addressed in the remedy accepted by Judge Kotelly.
In a pig's eye.
She also made it a point to mention that anti-trust law is intended to protect the market for the interest of consumers. It's purpose is not to protect competitors.
This is the poor man's all-purpose response to anything and everything regarding the M$ case, and generally everything regarding anti-trust law.
The law is designed to protect consumers by forbidding anti-competitive practices. Such practices eliminate the benefits that competition is supposed to provide in a functioning market, because competitors don't get a chance to market products that are better by quality or price. Competitors suffer, to be sure, but consumers suffer because of it.
So to prevent such practices in the future, and to redress the damage done by such practices in the past, remedies are needed to restore competition. This will happen by giving competitors a better chance, and consumers will benefit from a wider range of choices.
But anyone who doesn't like it can cry out, "It's protecting competitors!"
Say, are you entirely free of any clue about Amnesty International? Why don't you provide yourself with a minimum information before you start blasting off? You can start with the Amnesty site, and especially its mandate.
As you are evidently unaware, Amnesty is restricted by its mandate to work on behalf of prisoners of conscience provided that they have not used or advocated violence. This is true even for prisoners who, in addition to their use or advocacy of violence, also advocate views that a government finds unpopular, and even if the violence advocated might be viewed as legitimate resistance against an oppressive regime.
For many years, Amnesty would not work on behalf of Nelson Mandela for precisely this reason, even though he was arguably the most celebrated political prisoner in the world. Mandela advocated "armed struggle" against the apartheid regime, and the ANC was partially organized for this purpose. So Amnesty never "sponsored" him while he was in prison, as they did with numerous other prisoners around the world. (IIRC, Mandela eventually renounced "armed struggle" after he had been released.)
MoThugz, or whatever your name is, slow down, take a deep breath, and avail yourself of a little bit of information. Presenting an argument from a position of ignorance is like trying to box with your hands tied. You'll get beat up badly and look foolish in the process.
Strange that so many posts so far are talking about whether it's legal to sell the stuff to China, and whether it should be illegal.
Who cares about the law? Why don't we just hold these companies up to an ethical standard, and consider them accountable for their actions? Why don't we shine the harsh light of publicity on them for the things that they do? Why don't we let them know that, regardless of the law, they should choose not to do things that contribute to the repression that the Chinese people suffer from their government? And if they don't stop, why don't we tell them that we will continue to expose their behavior to the public, encourage boycotts of their products, and lobby governments not to buy their products & services with taxpayer money?
"Follow the money" was Deep Throat's advice to Bob Woodward, and that's what will define the conflict that is yet to unfold in the music industry. The record companies have been making gazillions for doing little of value for a long time, and now technology is tearing away the means by which that has been possible. They are going to fight ruthlessly to maintain the status quo. Look for lots of cash flowing to politicians, who in turn will try to prop up a doomed industry with draconian law. It's going to be a long, nasty, high-stakes battle.
Although the RIAA loves to squawk about the artists losing money due to file-swapping, the fact is that the artists get nearly nothing in the present system, and the corporations keep almost all of the moolah. This despite the fact that they contribute literally none of the value that consumers pay for when they buy music. You can't just replace Alicia Keys with Madonna; but it is completely irrelevant whether a CD is published by Warner, Universal or my cousin Vinnie.
They've been able to do this because they have had control over three elements of the music business:
Production (studios, CD manufacturing)
Marketing (promotion, concert tours & control of most of mainstream radio)
Distribution (ownership of most of mainstream record stores, control over CD rack space in the stores)
Now, technology has loosened their grip on all three of these areas, especially the last. Neither the corporations nor anyone else can control how music is distributed any more -- it is, or could be, entirely in the hands of consumers. And distribution networks have a "word-of-mouth" effect on spreading knowledge about new music, so that corporate marketing is a little bit less important. And although they still run the studios, and probably always will, manufacturing CDs is almost obsolete now. All you need is a file; the costs of replication are nil, and consumers can do it all themselves.
I believe that most consumers would be willing to go along with schemes by which they pay for copied music, as long as the music costs significantly less than it does now (say, $1 for a CD), and if most of it goes to the artist (say 90%). The record companies will get much, much less than they do now, because we hardly need them any more. Of course, they do some work that is necessary and should be compensated, but it will end up being much closer to their true economic worth -- and that means a very small fraction of their current income.
But before that happens, they are going to bite and scratch and scream, and it's going to be ugly. They have a multibillion-dollar cash cow, and they will do everything in their power to save it.
Halon DO NOT replace oxygen in the room to extinguish the fire. It breaks the chain reaction of fire, basically stop the elements of fire to react with each other.
Most scenario would only require a less than 8% of concentration to take out the fire. Under 10% and you can still breath.
Really? Well, I worked in a server room with a Halon system back in the 80's, and the big scary warning signs said that you wouldn't be able to breathe within n seconds after the stuff fell. So always be prepared to dash for the door.
It was pretty ominous, looking at those two big ol' red buttons on opposite walls with the all-caps, white-on-red warnings next to them, imagining that you could just go wham!, and maybe kill a few people, if they couldn't think & run fast enough. And imagining that in case of a catastrophe, you just might have to do it, and then scream at everybody to get the hell out, wondering whether you saved some lives or ended a few.
I remember watching C-SPAN years ago when some bill or other about federal funding for scientific research was being debated. Some typical Congresscritter was on, the worst kind of clueless politician, way in over his head. He supported the bill, which put him on the right side in my view, but one could easily see that he was trying to profile himself as being "friendly to science", although he in fact understood very little of it.
To illustrate his views, he introduced a quotation of Newton's by saying something like, "As the Great Scientist Isaac Newton once said,...", with a bit of rhetorical flourish on the man's name.
I was depressed. One would hope that anyone could speak of Isaac Newton without any further introduction, but clearly, this Congresscreature felt compelled to tell us that he was the "the Great Scientist". Otherwise, he ran the risk that his audience wouldn't know who in the world he was talking about.
Why isn't there more interest in this story, you ask? Well, because quite a few people haven't the slightest clue who Newton is or what the Principia is all about. Not unless you mention "the Great Scientist".
I rejoiced when Judge Jackson's Findings of Facts were handed down. I had been convinced that no judge, no lawyer could possibly understand the technical and business issues related to M$'s misconduct, and the Judge slam-dunked me.
But by now, the Court of Appeals, Judge CKK and now Larry Rosen have convinced me that I was right all along, and Thomas Penfield Jackson was a rare anomaly (who sadly shot his mouth off too much). However much you may resent it, Larry, the fact is that judges and lawyers just don't know jack about software -- the technology, the business or even the law.
Here's the problem: Again and again, Larry Rosen says that we will have to be "vigilant" and so on about enforcing the terms of this behavioral remedy. But all the vigilance in the world is doomed to fail because Microsoft is an incorrigible scofflaw. And this was well-known when the anti-trust case began.
The case concerning the Netscape and Explorer browsers began because M$ was violating a consent decree of 1995. Then, as now, a judge told them to stop doing what they were doing. They went ahead and did it anyway, and after seven years, and after the nearly total elimination of Netscape from the browser market, the court system is still struggling to decide what to do about it, still telling them to never never, by golly never ever ever do that stuff again.
Here's a vision of the future: M$ exploits Palladium to completely destroy Linux and all GPL'd software. I'm not talking about thwarting growth and limiting market share; I'm talking about "cutting off the air supply" and achieving nearly total destruction, as they did with Netscape. And if need be, they will violate the terms of Judge CKK's ruling to make it happen. What the hell?, cackle Bill & Steve! Back in the day we didn't let that consent decree stop us either, now did we?
"Zounds!", cries Larry Rosen! "Why, don't you dare!", bellows Judge CKK! "But we're innocent!", retorts Bill Gates, while rocking back & forth in his chair! And back we go to the courtroom.
Fast forward 10 years. Linux has been dead for five years, now a curiosity that is only used by about five die-hards. (Linus Torvalds is slinging Windows code for Loudcloud.) Slashdot apologists for M$ are insisting that only Linux was to blame ("That stuff was so hard to install!"). The case has been up to the Supreme Court and back, and wouldn't you know, M$ is eventually found guilty of violating Judge CKK's rules -- just like they violated that pesky old consent decree of 1995. But hey, tech markets move so fast, don't ya know, and Linux is already dead, after all (just like Netscape was way back in 2002). So look, let's not do anything drastic, let's just give M$ a behavioral remedy, and by God, we will enforce it vigilantly this time.
Larry Rosen argues for behavioral remedies as the proper means of restoring benefits to consumers, and I can see the sense of doing this after a company has been found guilty the first time. But we are looking at a recidivist, a crook that is guaranteed to look for loopholes in behavioral remedies wherever they can be found. They ignored the 1995 ruling; isn't that enough?
Seriously, is there any doubt in anyone's mind that M$ will circumvent, cut corners, and if possible violate the terms of CKK's judgment, no matter how "vigilant" anyone professes to be? Come on, Larry, who are you kidding?
Behavioral restrictions and "vigilance" are useless against a proven incorrigible such as M$. The only solution can be a destructive, structural remedy that simply eliminates the recidivist altogether: Breakup.
Re: New voting method being tested in Europe
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Indecision 2002
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· Score: 2
Nice that this was modded up as funny, but I think it should be taken as a serious suggestion.
This may be hard for Americans and especially Slashdotters to swallow, but try to wrap your head around it: Not all of life has to be high-tech! Sometimes, low-tech is the better solution. I think this is undoubtedly true of elections.
Here in Germany, voters are handed a piece of paper with great big circles next to the candidates' names. To vote, you put a big X in the big circle. Then you fold up your ballot and stick it through a slot in a locked wooden box. After the polls close, election officials unlock the box, dump out the ballots, and count them by hand. It's a piece o' cake.
Of course, it is possible to run into problems with spoiled ballots and so on, and sometimes the count doesn't check, so they have to count all over again. But the system has far fewer points of failure than one that relies critically on computers and machinery.
One of the differences between Americans and Europeans is that Americans tend to be intensely fascinated with gadgets and gizmos, and instinctively look to technology to solve nearly any problem. That can be kind of cool, but sometimes it's just gratuitous, and makes the problem worse rather than better.
In 2004, I say we should pitch the touch screens, punch card readers and all of the other election gadgetry into the dumpster, and just let people draw X's into circles.
I heard recently in a talk (by Craig Larman) that it was Kent Beck of Extreme Programming fame, and not the Gang of Four, who originally came up with the idea of applying Christopher Alexander's "pattern" concept to software engineering.
Can anyone confirm or deny that?
Of course even if that is the case, the G4 deserve very much credit for taking the idea into so much depth. But in fact like many other people, I had believed that it was Erich Gamma of the Gang in particular who had developed the concept.
Re:ya, I couldn't talk till I saw that book
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Design Patterns
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· Score: 3, Informative
Holy mackerel, you have completely misunderstood.
Anyone who does real development was using these patterns years before the book came out.
Books like these are catelogs of other people's ideas and put into a standard format.
Exactly right. That's what the whole idea of documenting patterns is about. A pattern is always something that has been done before, never an experiment. People who document patterns are not inventing them (because an invention cannot be a pattern); they are identifying and naming successful structures and ideas that were not well recognized until then.
The advantage is simply that we often don't see these things until they are named and described. We use them unconsciously, but may not recognize when there is an opportunity to re-use them, may not have thought carefully about when it is and is not advantageous to use them, and don't have the vocabulary to communicate them to other programmers.
It is like saying that noone could breath oxygen before the perodic table of the elements came out.
No, it's like saying we always had oxygen all around us, but it didn't have a name and no one really understood its properties until Lavoisier discovered it.
But when it comes right down to it JAVA or C++ classes do a much better job of documenting good design patterns for programming.
Uh, are you aware that some of the Java library classes were specifically built to implement Gang of Four patterns? Look, for example, at the Observer class and Observable interface from java.util.*; does that remind you of anything?
This outrage results directly from the "regime change" in 2000, after a Democratic administration left that had opened and pursued the case against Microsoft, and at the time was smashingly successful. Then a Republican administration came to power -- in a hotly contested election, and thanks to one of the most widely condemned Supreme Court rulings in all of history. This administration never met a big business it didn't like, and one of its first decisions was to let Microsoft walk, even though the courts had nailed them to the wall.
George W. Bush has been deeply embarassed this past year when a number of Big Businesses turned about to be so outrageously criminal that there can no be conceivable excuse for them. The most notorious example, Enron, had been previously very cozy with the Texas oilman; but in statements that must have given him profound cognitive dissonance, W. has had to admit can the big companies can be just as criminal as a thug on a street who knocks over a liquor store.
But this idea just won't really sink in with the Republicans in charge. Microsoft has been a corporate crook all along, long before the Enron and Worldcom scandals, but Bush & Ashcroft just can't get it through their heads.
Politicians need to understand that they will be punished at the polls for this kind of sell-out. And in American politics, this means that the party in power that is responsible for the transgression has to take it in the chops on Election Day.
The midterm elections are taken as a referendum on the party that owns the White House. So American voters have the opportunity, this coming Tuesday, to send a message to Bush & Ashcroft that letting the big companies get away with everything and anything will not be tolerated.
You're not helpless against this ruling; your power is your vote. It might not be much, but it's the power you have, and no one can stop you from using it. On Tuesday, vote for a Democrat and give the Republicans the bitch-slap that they richly deserve.
Ballmer:... it may be necessary to "weed out" employees who did not live up to Microsoft's code of behaviour.
Hi Steve! (I know you're reading.)
What does Microsoft's code of behavior have to say about employee conduct that gets the company convicted in the Federal court system for multiple violations of the Sherman Act?
What does the code say about executives who lie under oath in videotaped depositions?
What does the code say about manufacturing evidence in a trial?
What does the code say about attempting to intimidate potentially hostile witnesses?
Will you be "weeding out" any of the Microsoft employees who are known to have done all of these things?
I think we should all be working on the technology that allows us to shove a socket into the back of our heads, like Keanu Reeves, and then make the computer Do What I Want.
The issues discussed in the patch notice are pretty mundane, and it took me quite some time to figure out what the hell the problem with the DMCA might be. I'm still not sure.
The reasoning, apparently, is that by documenting the security weaknesses that were fixed, they reveal ways to hack unpatched versions of the kernel. And that would be circumvention, and hence violations of the DMCA. All of the holes were found in code audits, and there are no known exploits, so this announcement documents these problems for the first time. (Maybe it's less of an issue if you announce fixes to holes that someone else already found.)
But if that is really taken as a violation of the DMCA, then almost all public notices of security issues may be illegal, even if the author did not write an exploit, and indeed even if no exploit is known to exist. The entire CERT site is at risk. Bruce Schneier may be one of the rampant criminals on Earth.
I dunno, it certainly would be crazy if the DMCA really has that implication, but are Cox and Co. certain that the law really means that? I'll bet there is no case law suggesting such a thing -- and after all, it's the courts' interpretations that really matter in the end. Has any legal scholar ever suggested that the DMCA can be interpreted this way?
I certainly don't like the DMCA, and I think it's unconstitutional (First Amendment, you know), but I wonder if this stunt will backfire. If it turns out that they're making a big deal out of something that the DMCA doesn't actually forbid, then opponents of the law will end up looking a bit hysterical.
Thomas Penfield Jackson is still one of my heroes, but giving interviews that were critical of Microsoft while the trial was still pending was foolish, and significantly undermined the otherwise good work he did in the trial. His rebuttal has not convinced me otherwise.
I'm still amazed by his Findings of Fact. Until they were published, I just couldn't believe that any judge could understand the technical and business issues related to MS's anti-competitive practices. But he Got It, right on the money, better than my wildest dreams. The Findings of Fact are still the best statement of MS's wrongdoing, and as everybody always mentions, the Appeals Court did not overrule any part of those conclusions.
I also frankly can't blame him for his dim view of Microsoft. They behaved like the worst kind of gangsters in his courtroom, lying under oath, intimidating witness, and manufacturing evidence, all of it shockingly brazen. To this day, they have not shown the slightest sign of insight, remorse or willingness to compromise, even after being convicted in the Federal courts. Judges do not look kindly on attempts to deceive them, for understandable reasons.
Jackson probably just couldn't stop himself from saying what he thought of the defendant, and many of us might have succumbed to the same temptation. If he had given his interviews after the conclusion of the case (including all of the appeals and settlement negotiations), it might have gone a long way toward educating the public about this company -- ruthless corporate crooks long before Enron and WorldCom came along and made it fashionable.
But by coming out with that kind of criticism during the trial, he undermined the message. It leaves the public (not to mention the appeals courts) wondering whether the conviction and punishment were the work of an overzealous judge. Certainly MS can dismiss his Findings of Fact that way. Despite what Jackson says in his rebuttal, the "appearance of impartiality" is essential and indispensible. Otherwise, a public that, for the most part, isn't familiar with the technical and economic issues cannot be sure whether a company like MS is really as bad as they say, and really got what they deserve.
Are you smarter than RMS? Ok, this one here's subjective; but I doubt most of the people criticizing RMS have an IQ of 170.
I strongly suggest that you read Stephen Jay Gould's "The Mismeasure of Man", especially the second part. Then you might share my conclusion that IQ testing is pure bunk. It may well be the best example of a "scientific" concept that is widely believed and has a significant societal impact, but in fact has no legitimate scientific basis whatsoever.
The fallacy of IQ lies in "reification", the assumption that when something can be measured and talked about, then it actually corresponds to a real causal phenomenon in nature. But this is not always the case. IQ is supposed to measure something called "general intelligence", but no sound theoretical argument for the existence of such a thing has ever been advanced.
Factor analysis, now a standard statistical procedure, was invented (especially by Charles Spearman) specifically to analyze results of intelligence testing. Factor analysis reveals correlations in data, and as is well known by now, correlations may indicate the presence of causal phenomena, but do not necessarily (my age always increases, and so does the distance between Europe and North America, so the two phenomena correlate perfectly, but one does not cause the other). But in their excitement about the new technique, the original researchers believed that factor analysis had established the existence of general intelligence. This is the fallacy of reification about IQ, and no legitimate theoretical account has ever come along to replace it.
For the record, my IQ was measured when I was little, and although I never found out what the exact figure was, they told me it was very high. Might even have beat Stallman. Since IQ is supposedly constant throughout a lifetime, it should still be up there; but I'm only smart enough to know that this fact means nothing at all about me, or about how I compare to RMS or anybody else.
I see some sense in what you're saying, but I'm troubled by the implication that those of us without an extensive education must necessarily have little to say about matters of law. If we were talking about some obscure science that is hardly relevant to our daily lives, the idea would be less troubling. But this is stuff that impacts everybody in essential ways, and in a democracy, we have an obligation to form opinions about law, and especially about whether laws should be changed, and whether courts rule properly in their cases.
I also have a family connection to law, since my father is a lawyer. And when I've spoken to him about his cases, ever since I was a little kid, he has always taken the time to explain as much as he could about the facts, the law, the Constitution, and of course all of the coutroom politicking and dynamics that go on. It required a lot of long conversations, but he always encouraged me to develop my own understanding and opinions about what the law is, what it should be, and what the courts did and did not do correctly. I think it can only be in the lawyers' interests if all citizens try to do this as well as they can.
Slashdot Mirror
The trouble with M$'s dominance is that too many people are unable to make choices about the software they use. In many cases, they are required by their employer or university to use Windows, Office, Explorer or whatever, whether they want to or not. Many others simply never get the opportunity to learn or use anything else; some people never find out in the first place that are other OS's besides Windows, other office suites besides Office, other browers besides Explorer. This is bad enough in the world of business and personal computer use; it is unconscionable when it happens in universities and schools, where learning and diversity are what it's all about.
That is the problem that your grandfather and his potential donor need to solve. But by forbidding M$ altogether, the university is deprived of choices, so the solution is not much better than the problem. Hate to say it, because I loathe M$ and everything about it from the very depths of my soul. But that's all the more reason not to want to be similar to Bill Gates and his gangsters.
Tell your grandfather to make this suggestion to the donor: The money that the donor puts up will be used to ensure that the university will always have a choice about the software used there. If someone wants to use non-M$ software, they can use the funds to make the purchases, migrate their systems, re-train the staff, whatever they need to do. But if, after evaluating all possibilities, M$ seems to be the best way to go, then they can use it for that as well. Maybe they just need some Windows licenses, because the undergrads will need to know how to use it and develop for it when they graduate. Surely that's reasonable enough. Just as long as the university doesn't have to go with M$ because they're locked in somehow. That would be a very kind gift, and everyone at the university will be grateful for it.
No, David Boies didn't lose the DOJ case. He worked the trial before Judge Jackson, and won decisively -- most observers said that he beat the crap out of M$'s team. Then Bush got elected, and they certainly weren't about to keep working with Boies. Instead, it was the new administration who decided to let M$ walk.
As for Bush v. Gore, I think even if God Himself had been Gore's lawyer, He wouldn't have had a chance against the Rehnquist Five.
But at any rate, I was rooting for him in both of those cases, and I'm very dismayed to see him join the wrong side now.
I agree with a number of things that have already been mentioned, and would like to add that Solaris has a few more tools for monitoring system activity and performance which I really miss in Linux.
Linux has vmstat, netstat, top and strace. Solaris has truss instead of strace (and I like truss better), the other three that Linux has, and also sar, mpstat, iostat and prstat. At least out of the box, anyway. Linux being what it is, I'm sure nothing prevents someone from writing these tools as open source projects, and maybe they're out there somewhere. But in Solaris they're right there, I don't have to go looking for them.
Surprised I haven't seen this one so far (at least not while browsing at threshhold 2), since I'm guessing that a lot of Slashdotters have had to chase down performance bottlenecks. It's hard to overstate the importance of good monitoring tools for such a job, and right now Solaris has the clear advantage in this area.
MasterSLATE is the Slashdot pseudonym of William Shatner.
Sorry that my post got so long.
In a pig's eye.
This is the poor man's all-purpose response to anything and everything regarding the M$ case, and generally everything regarding anti-trust law.
The law is designed to protect consumers by forbidding anti-competitive practices. Such practices eliminate the benefits that competition is supposed to provide in a functioning market, because competitors don't get a chance to market products that are better by quality or price. Competitors suffer, to be sure, but consumers suffer because of it.
So to prevent such practices in the future, and to redress the damage done by such practices in the past, remedies are needed to restore competition. This will happen by giving competitors a better chance, and consumers will benefit from a wider range of choices.
But anyone who doesn't like it can cry out, "It's protecting competitors!"
Say, are you entirely free of any clue about Amnesty International? Why don't you provide yourself with a minimum information before you start blasting off? You can start with the Amnesty site, and especially its mandate.
As you are evidently unaware, Amnesty is restricted by its mandate to work on behalf of prisoners of conscience provided that they have not used or advocated violence. This is true even for prisoners who, in addition to their use or advocacy of violence, also advocate views that a government finds unpopular, and even if the violence advocated might be viewed as legitimate resistance against an oppressive regime.
For many years, Amnesty would not work on behalf of Nelson Mandela for precisely this reason, even though he was arguably the most celebrated political prisoner in the world. Mandela advocated "armed struggle" against the apartheid regime, and the ANC was partially organized for this purpose. So Amnesty never "sponsored" him while he was in prison, as they did with numerous other prisoners around the world. (IIRC, Mandela eventually renounced "armed struggle" after he had been released.)
MoThugz, or whatever your name is, slow down, take a deep breath, and avail yourself of a little bit of information. Presenting an argument from a position of ignorance is like trying to box with your hands tied. You'll get beat up badly and look foolish in the process.
Strange that so many posts so far are talking about whether it's legal to sell the stuff to China, and whether it should be illegal.
Who cares about the law? Why don't we just hold these companies up to an ethical standard, and consider them accountable for their actions? Why don't we shine the harsh light of publicity on them for the things that they do? Why don't we let them know that, regardless of the law, they should choose not to do things that contribute to the repression that the Chinese people suffer from their government? And if they don't stop, why don't we tell them that we will continue to expose their behavior to the public, encourage boycotts of their products, and lobby governments not to buy their products & services with taxpayer money?
Try telling that to the political prisoners around the world whose lives have been saved by Amnesty's activism.
Although the RIAA loves to squawk about the artists losing money due to file-swapping, the fact is that the artists get nearly nothing in the present system, and the corporations keep almost all of the moolah. This despite the fact that they contribute literally none of the value that consumers pay for when they buy music. You can't just replace Alicia Keys with Madonna; but it is completely irrelevant whether a CD is published by Warner, Universal or my cousin Vinnie.
They've been able to do this because they have had control over three elements of the music business:
Now, technology has loosened their grip on all three of these areas, especially the last. Neither the corporations nor anyone else can control how music is distributed any more -- it is, or could be, entirely in the hands of consumers. And distribution networks have a "word-of-mouth" effect on spreading knowledge about new music, so that corporate marketing is a little bit less important. And although they still run the studios, and probably always will, manufacturing CDs is almost obsolete now. All you need is a file; the costs of replication are nil, and consumers can do it all themselves.
I believe that most consumers would be willing to go along with schemes by which they pay for copied music, as long as the music costs significantly less than it does now (say, $1 for a CD), and if most of it goes to the artist (say 90%). The record companies will get much, much less than they do now, because we hardly need them any more. Of course, they do some work that is necessary and should be compensated, but it will end up being much closer to their true economic worth -- and that means a very small fraction of their current income.
But before that happens, they are going to bite and scratch and scream, and it's going to be ugly. They have a multibillion-dollar cash cow, and they will do everything in their power to save it.
Really? Well, I worked in a server room with a Halon system back in the 80's, and the big scary warning signs said that you wouldn't be able to breathe within n seconds after the stuff fell. So always be prepared to dash for the door.
It was pretty ominous, looking at those two big ol' red buttons on opposite walls with the all-caps, white-on-red warnings next to them, imagining that you could just go wham!, and maybe kill a few people, if they couldn't think & run fast enough. And imagining that in case of a catastrophe, you just might have to do it, and then scream at everybody to get the hell out, wondering whether you saved some lives or ended a few.
Offtopic? It's a quotation from the review! And I happen to find it thoroughly incomprehensible. (That's the meaning of "huh?".)
If you understood it, Mr. Moderator, you could have replied with an explanation. Ya know?
Huh?
I remember watching C-SPAN years ago when some bill or other about federal funding for scientific research was being debated. Some typical Congresscritter was on, the worst kind of clueless politician, way in over his head. He supported the bill, which put him on the right side in my view, but one could easily see that he was trying to profile himself as being "friendly to science", although he in fact understood very little of it.
...", with a bit of rhetorical flourish on the man's name.
To illustrate his views, he introduced a quotation of Newton's by saying something like, "As the Great Scientist Isaac Newton once said,
I was depressed. One would hope that anyone could speak of Isaac Newton without any further introduction, but clearly, this Congresscreature felt compelled to tell us that he was the "the Great Scientist". Otherwise, he ran the risk that his audience wouldn't know who in the world he was talking about.
Why isn't there more interest in this story, you ask? Well, because quite a few people haven't the slightest clue who Newton is or what the Principia is all about. Not unless you mention "the Great Scientist".
I rejoiced when Judge Jackson's Findings of Facts were handed down. I had been convinced that no judge, no lawyer could possibly understand the technical and business issues related to M$'s misconduct, and the Judge slam-dunked me.
But by now, the Court of Appeals, Judge CKK and now Larry Rosen have convinced me that I was right all along, and Thomas Penfield Jackson was a rare anomaly (who sadly shot his mouth off too much). However much you may resent it, Larry, the fact is that judges and lawyers just don't know jack about software -- the technology, the business or even the law.
Here's the problem: Again and again, Larry Rosen says that we will have to be "vigilant" and so on about enforcing the terms of this behavioral remedy. But all the vigilance in the world is doomed to fail because Microsoft is an incorrigible scofflaw. And this was well-known when the anti-trust case began.
The case concerning the Netscape and Explorer browsers began because M$ was violating a consent decree of 1995. Then, as now, a judge told them to stop doing what they were doing. They went ahead and did it anyway, and after seven years, and after the nearly total elimination of Netscape from the browser market, the court system is still
struggling to decide what to do about it, still telling them to never never, by golly never ever ever do that stuff again.
Here's a vision of the future: M$ exploits Palladium to completely destroy Linux and all GPL'd software. I'm not talking about thwarting growth and limiting market share; I'm talking about "cutting off the air supply" and achieving nearly total destruction, as they did with Netscape. And if need be, they will violate the terms of Judge CKK's ruling to make it happen. What the hell?, cackle Bill & Steve! Back in the day we didn't let that consent decree stop us either, now did we?
"Zounds!", cries Larry Rosen! "Why, don't you dare!", bellows Judge CKK! "But we're innocent!", retorts Bill Gates, while rocking back & forth in his chair! And back we go to the courtroom.
Fast forward 10 years. Linux has been dead for five years, now a curiosity that is only used by about five die-hards. (Linus Torvalds is slinging Windows code for Loudcloud.) Slashdot apologists for M$ are insisting that only Linux was to blame ("That stuff was so hard to install!"). The case has been up to the Supreme Court and back, and wouldn't you know, M$ is eventually found guilty of violating Judge CKK's rules -- just like they violated that pesky old consent decree of 1995. But hey, tech markets move so fast, don't ya know, and Linux is already dead, after all (just like Netscape was way back in 2002). So look, let's not do anything drastic, let's just give M$ a behavioral remedy, and by God, we will enforce it vigilantly this time.
Larry Rosen argues for behavioral remedies as the proper means of restoring benefits to consumers, and I can see the sense of doing this after a company has been found guilty the first time. But we are looking at a recidivist, a crook that is guaranteed to look for loopholes in behavioral remedies wherever they can be found. They ignored the 1995 ruling; isn't that enough?
Seriously, is there any doubt in anyone's mind that M$ will circumvent, cut corners, and if possible violate the terms of CKK's judgment, no matter how "vigilant" anyone professes to be? Come on, Larry, who are you kidding?
Behavioral restrictions and "vigilance" are useless against a proven incorrigible such as M$. The only solution can be a destructive, structural remedy that simply eliminates the recidivist altogether: Breakup.
Nice that this was modded up as funny, but I think it should be taken as a serious suggestion.
This may be hard for Americans and especially Slashdotters to swallow, but try to wrap your head around it: Not all of life has to be high-tech! Sometimes, low-tech is the better solution. I think this is undoubtedly true of elections.
Here in Germany, voters are handed a piece of paper with great big circles next to the candidates' names. To vote, you put a big X in the big circle. Then you fold up your ballot and stick it through a slot in a locked wooden box. After the polls close, election officials unlock the box, dump out the ballots, and count them by hand. It's a piece o' cake.
Of course, it is possible to run into problems with spoiled ballots and so on, and sometimes the count doesn't check, so they have to count all over again. But the system has far fewer points of failure than one that relies critically on computers and machinery.
One of the differences between Americans and Europeans is that Americans tend to be intensely fascinated with gadgets and gizmos, and instinctively look to technology to solve nearly any problem. That can be kind of cool, but sometimes it's just gratuitous, and makes the problem worse rather than better.
In 2004, I say we should pitch the touch screens, punch card readers and all of the other election gadgetry into the dumpster, and just let people draw X's into circles.
I heard recently in a talk (by Craig Larman) that it was Kent Beck of Extreme Programming fame, and not the Gang of Four, who originally came up with the idea of applying Christopher Alexander's "pattern" concept to software engineering.
Can anyone confirm or deny that?
Of course even if that is the case, the G4 deserve very much credit for taking the idea into so much depth. But in fact like many other people, I had believed that it was Erich Gamma of the Gang in particular who had developed the concept.
Exactly right. That's what the whole idea of documenting patterns is about. A pattern is always something that has been done before, never an experiment. People who document patterns are not inventing them (because an invention cannot be a pattern); they are identifying and naming successful structures and ideas that were not well recognized until then.
The advantage is simply that we often don't see these things until they are named and described. We use them unconsciously, but may not recognize when there is an opportunity to re-use them, may not have thought carefully about when it is and is not advantageous to use them, and don't have the vocabulary to communicate them to other programmers.
No, it's like saying we always had oxygen all around us, but it didn't have a name and no one really understood its properties until Lavoisier discovered it.
Uh, are you aware that some of the Java library classes were specifically built to implement Gang of Four patterns? Look, for example, at the Observer class and Observable interface from java.util.*; does that remind you of anything?
This outrage results directly from the "regime change" in 2000, after a Democratic administration left that had opened and pursued the case against Microsoft, and at the time was smashingly successful. Then a Republican administration came to power -- in a hotly contested election, and thanks to one of the most widely condemned Supreme Court rulings in all of history. This administration never met a big business it didn't like, and one of its first decisions was to let Microsoft walk, even though the courts had nailed them to the wall.
George W. Bush has been deeply embarassed this past year when a number of Big Businesses turned about to be so outrageously criminal that there can no be conceivable excuse for them. The most notorious example, Enron, had been previously very cozy with the Texas oilman; but in statements that must have given him profound cognitive dissonance, W. has had to admit can the big companies can be just as criminal as a thug on a street who knocks over a liquor store.
But this idea just won't really sink in with the Republicans in charge. Microsoft has been a corporate crook all along, long before the Enron and Worldcom scandals, but Bush & Ashcroft just can't get it through their heads.
Politicians need to understand that they will be punished at the polls for this kind of sell-out. And in American politics, this means that the party in power that is responsible for the transgression has to take it in the chops on Election Day.
The midterm elections are taken as a referendum on the party that owns the White House. So American voters have the opportunity, this coming Tuesday, to send a message to Bush & Ashcroft that letting the big companies get away with everything and anything will not be tolerated.
You're not helpless against this ruling; your power is your vote. It might not be much, but it's the power you have, and no one can stop you from using it. On Tuesday, vote for a Democrat and give the Republicans the bitch-slap that they richly deserve.
Hi Steve! (I know you're reading.)
What does Microsoft's code of behavior have to say about employee conduct that gets the company convicted in the Federal court system for multiple violations of the Sherman Act?
What does the code say about executives who lie under oath in videotaped depositions?
What does the code say about manufacturing evidence in a trial?
What does the code say about attempting to intimidate potentially hostile witnesses?
Will you be "weeding out" any of the Microsoft employees who are known to have done all of these things?
I think we should all be working on the technology that allows us to shove a socket into the back of our heads, like Keanu Reeves, and then make the computer Do What I Want.
The issues discussed in the patch notice are pretty mundane, and it took me quite some time to figure out what the hell the problem with the DMCA might be. I'm still not sure.
The reasoning, apparently, is that by documenting the security weaknesses that were fixed, they reveal ways to hack unpatched versions of the kernel. And that would be circumvention, and hence violations of the DMCA. All of the holes were found in code audits, and there are no known exploits, so this announcement documents these problems for the first time. (Maybe it's less of an issue if you announce fixes to holes that someone else already found.)
But if that is really taken as a violation of the DMCA, then almost all public notices of security issues may be illegal, even if the author did not write an exploit, and indeed even if no exploit is known to exist. The entire CERT site is at risk. Bruce Schneier may be one of the rampant criminals on Earth.
I dunno, it certainly would be crazy if the DMCA really has that implication, but are Cox and Co. certain that the law really means that? I'll bet there is no case law suggesting such a thing -- and after all, it's the courts' interpretations that really matter in the end. Has any legal scholar ever suggested that the DMCA can be interpreted this way?
I certainly don't like the DMCA, and I think it's unconstitutional (First Amendment, you know), but I wonder if this stunt will backfire. If it turns out that they're making a big deal out of something that the DMCA doesn't actually forbid, then opponents of the law will end up looking a bit hysterical.
... not to mention violation of Valerie Mallinson's privacy.
Has M$ broken a law or two here?
Thomas Penfield Jackson is still one of my heroes, but giving interviews that were critical of Microsoft while the trial was still pending was foolish, and significantly undermined the otherwise good work he did in the trial. His rebuttal has not convinced me otherwise.
I'm still amazed by his Findings of Fact. Until they were published, I just couldn't believe that any judge could understand the technical and business issues related to MS's anti-competitive practices. But he Got It, right on the money, better than my wildest dreams. The Findings of Fact are still the best statement of MS's wrongdoing, and as everybody always mentions, the Appeals Court did not overrule any part of those conclusions.
I also frankly can't blame him for his dim view of Microsoft. They behaved like the worst kind of gangsters in his courtroom, lying under oath, intimidating witness, and manufacturing evidence, all of it shockingly brazen. To this day, they have not shown the slightest sign of insight, remorse or willingness to compromise, even after being convicted in the Federal courts. Judges do not look kindly on attempts to deceive them, for understandable reasons.
Jackson probably just couldn't stop himself from saying what he thought of the defendant, and many of us might have succumbed to the same temptation. If he had given his interviews after the conclusion of the case (including all of the appeals and settlement negotiations), it might have gone a long way toward educating the public about this company -- ruthless corporate crooks long before Enron and WorldCom came along and made it fashionable.
But by coming out with that kind of criticism during the trial, he undermined the message. It leaves the public (not to mention the appeals courts) wondering whether the conviction and punishment were the work of an overzealous judge. Certainly MS can dismiss his Findings of Fact that way. Despite what Jackson says in his rebuttal, the "appearance of impartiality" is essential and indispensible. Otherwise, a public that, for the most part, isn't familiar with the technical and economic issues cannot be sure whether a company like MS is really as bad as they say, and really got what they deserve.
I strongly suggest that you read Stephen Jay Gould's "The Mismeasure of Man", especially the second part. Then you might share my conclusion that IQ testing is pure bunk. It may well be the best example of a "scientific" concept that is widely believed and has a significant societal impact, but in fact has no legitimate scientific basis whatsoever.
The fallacy of IQ lies in "reification", the assumption that when something can be measured and talked about, then it actually corresponds to a real causal phenomenon in nature. But this is not always the case. IQ is supposed to measure something called "general intelligence", but no sound theoretical argument for the existence of such a thing has ever been advanced.
Factor analysis, now a standard statistical procedure, was invented (especially by Charles Spearman) specifically to analyze results of intelligence testing. Factor analysis reveals correlations in data, and as is well known by now, correlations may indicate the presence of causal phenomena, but do not necessarily (my age always increases, and so does the distance between Europe and North America, so the two phenomena correlate perfectly, but one does not cause the other). But in their excitement about the new technique, the original researchers believed that factor analysis had established the existence of general intelligence. This is the fallacy of reification about IQ, and no legitimate theoretical account has ever come along to replace it.
For the record, my IQ was measured when I was little, and although I never found out what the exact figure was, they told me it was very high. Might even have beat Stallman. Since IQ is supposedly constant throughout a lifetime, it should still be up there; but I'm only smart enough to know that this fact means nothing at all about me, or about how I compare to RMS or anybody else.
I see some sense in what you're saying, but I'm troubled by the implication that those of us without an extensive education must necessarily have little to say about matters of law. If we were talking about some obscure science that is hardly relevant to our daily lives, the idea would be less troubling. But this is stuff that impacts everybody in essential ways, and in a democracy, we have an obligation to form opinions about law, and especially about whether laws should be changed, and whether courts rule properly in their cases.
I also have a family connection to law, since my father is a lawyer. And when I've spoken to him about his cases, ever since I was a little kid, he has always taken the time to explain as much as he could about the facts, the law, the Constitution, and of course all of the coutroom politicking and dynamics that go on. It required a lot of long conversations, but he always encouraged me to develop my own understanding and opinions about what the law is, what it should be, and what the courts did and did not do correctly. I think it can only be in the lawyers' interests if all citizens try to do this as well as they can.