If the lawyers felt that settling was the best legal decision, then I'd guess that they know better then me. The lawyers probably spent hundreds of hours studying the case, and the merits of it. Who are you to claim that they are idiots?
If they are the same individuals that tried to defraud the Hon. Jackson with that falsified videotape, they certainly seem like idiots to me. but regardless, I believe the reason we settled was to end the litigation as a gesture towards our stockholders. The lawyers probably were taken off guard when the motions to dismiss were denied - they hadn't expected a real, protracted lawsuit, I"m guessing.
If you think that that "dialog" was the only thing the case was about, then no wonder you are confused. Is that what the internal memo told you to believe the case was about?
There was no such memo. They don't encourage us to worry about the trials here; we're repeatedly told to behave just as we always have and let the lawyers take care of it. Of course, many of us also do our own investigation on the side. The dialog message I quoted above was extracted from the AARD Dr. Dobbs article, actually.
You might rage over this little dialog box, but you're missing the evil hiding underneath it. Microsoft CRIPPLED DrDos! What the hell is an 'error' doing where none should exist? There's no reason for this so-called 'non fatal error' other than to give DRDOS a black eye. Why was the code that generated this 'harmless' little error hidden and ENCRYPTED?
I feel sorry for you if you can't see WHY this is a bad thing, I really do.
Perhaps it's because I'm a tester. After my long and tortuous travels through gigs of alpha debug code, I no longer consider an ignorable assert (which essentially this is) as any sort of real barrier to anything. Hit ENTER and live your life.
I can't argue with the gentleman who wrote the Dr.Dobbs article because I simply am not qualified. It certainly looks as though somebody tried to hide the testing code, doesn't it? But that really seems like a peripheral issue to me, considering that this dialog was (as I said) enabled only for a single beta build, and doesn't even mention the OS.
You hate them for their motives. But I don't think you have an argument when it comes to their actions.
Yes and No. I have Linux on my home computer, but only for the purposes of teaching my girlfriend a little more about computers. I happen to think a command line interface is a good immersion tactic.
However, I don't use Linux for anything serious. I prefer Microsoft products, which, as you know, don't run on Linux, and I like the interface better.
Aside: I think it's awful you would pose this question as a sort of litmus test. I read slashdot for the science articles, not the Linux articles.
A) major Caldera investments from sun, sco, and venture capitalists - 1/10/00 B) major Caldera settlement news - 1/10/00 C) Caldera files for IPO 1/10/00
Coincidence? Aye think not!:)
Warm up those E*TRADE accounts boys, Caldera really knows how to rile up the market!
I'm going to blow my cover, such as it is, and state flat-out that I'm a Microsoft employee. And as a worker at MS, let me say that I am feel than a little pissed and betrayed by this settlement.
Now, before you say anything, let me quell your paranoid delusions. I'm not paid to troll slashdot or anything like that (in fact, don't tell my boss my karma is in triple digits:) I just so happen to work at Microsoft and be kind of geeky. Imagine that.
Back to the topic at hand, just today I was examining the "evidence" Caldera was presenting in its suit against us in relation to the article posted earlier about the company. BTW, I consider Caldera's earlier post a rather cynical manipulation of the slashdot machine to drum up hype. They obviously wanted as many Linux eyes as possible watching their site before they changed the DNS redirection to www.drdos.org.
Having read the evil error dialog in question I simply cannot believe we would settle for even a penny in damages. In fact, I'm outraged that we let Caldera bully us into any money whatsoever. I personally think they should pay us for wasting our time.
Here's the dialog you're all gloating over without having read:
My response is, what the HELL? we settled over that!!! Especially when I ruminate over the fact that it only appears in a single beta, never saw a shipping customer, doesn't mention DR-DOS, AND allows you to continue unhindered. I wasn't with the company in 92 or whenever win3x was in beta, but no matter how evil they may have been and no matter how much they may have tried to kill DR-DOS, that dialog contributed exactly nothing to the process. To submit it as "evidence" is a farce!
And then when I think about Caldera coldly calculating on this extortion as they bought DR-DOS. God damn I feel betrayed by the American legal system! Not to mention my own company, which I had thought would stand up against something so patently unjust!
Whatever you might think of my company, I love the work I do. It gets more exciting every year, and I know that Office, where I work, produces the highest quality productivity software in the world, bar none. So when a thug like Caldera takes advantage of our obviously compromised legal situation to levy this blackmail on us, it makes me livid.
There are some people at the company who seem relieved by this. Those are the people who only care about stock options. Yes, I imagine our stock will go up as a result. But I'm not in it for the money because god knows they don't pay me enough. I'm in it for the ideals, just like many of you who work in the Linux world. The difference is, you get to be smug and superior and I have to spend 20% of my online time proving I'm not a devil simply because I have @microsoft.com behind my alias. Yes I'm resentful!
But hell, what can I do? Guess I'll just go drown my misery in another free Coke and wait for Steve Ballmer to rain some platitudes down on us in a live simulcast...
Live it up while you can, guys. The suits will eat you sooner or later.
"What the guy is supposed to do is feel uncomfortable and, when he has bugs, suspect the problem is DR-DOS and then go out to buy MS-DOS, or decide not to take the risk for the other machines he has to buy for in the office."
I agree with you. Brad Silverberg definitely is not a nice man.
However, bad intentions, or even naughty actions, do not constitute a breach of law unless those actions actually accomplish the destruction of a competitor.
A tiny, obscure, and nonspecific erro box in a BETA of a release that doesn't even prevent you from continuing and NEVER metions DR-DOS could not possibly do any such thing.
Maybe Microsoft wanted to destroy DR-DOS with this dialog, but if so they were being remarkably incompetent about it. Mentioning DR-DOS in the text, for example, might have helped.
DR-DOS failed because it lacked 1) mindshare and 2) marketing. This dialog didn't even modify the pace of its march to the gallows.
Essentially, the DOE provided my university's CS department with extravagant funding in return for "scientific" research that the administration knew perfectly well would be turned to purposes of war. Certainly I can understand why the pursuit of knowledge might diminish ethical considerations in the eyes of a researcher, but when research so plainly leads to death doesn't the scientist bear some culpability?
As I've stated before, this is a very weak foundation upon which to build an anti-monopoly case. The message does not even mention the OS, let alone DR-DOS. Secondly as the dialog says, you can always foil Microsoft's evil plan by hitting ENTER to Continue.
In addition, suggesting that Microsoft encrypted their source code seems pretty weak. At the time this beta was written, the notion of open source review was inconceivable, and naturally they would realize that attempts to obscure the code would be perceived as a tacit admission of guilt. I'd say the Dr. Dobbs article that started this theory probably was reading too much into somebody's poor coding style. How much of the rest of Win3.1 is "encrypted" in this way?:-)
I won't speak about the licensing issues since I don't know much about it. But the error message (in a beta no less) is just silly.
But many customers (like me) couldn't get windows to install on top of dr-dos, strange coincidence... Add to that the fact the windows was the _only_ software incompatible to dr-dos.
Caldera is not alleging that DR-DOS doesn't run under windows. It does. If you can't get it to work, then I'd respectfully suggest that is your problem, and not the result of a global conspiracy.
I think a lot of the anti-Microsoft hype is silly, but this statement is seriously misinformed. The code which generated that dialog box was obfuscated, encrypted & self-modifying - definitely not a "simple" test to warn people that they weren't using a Microsoft DOS.
I found this in a Dr Dobbs archived article. As you can see, this message, regardless of how bizarre the implementation or how evil the motives, has about zero impact on anyone considering DR-DOS. It doesn't mention the OS at all, let alone the version. And furthermore, MS states on its presspass page that very few customers actually called in to find out what the error meant anyway. And, as the message states, they can always hit ENTER to continue.
Furthermore, as was shown in various e-mail evidence produced in the trial, the point was not to make the CUSTOMERS nervous about DR-DOS - it was to discourage DEVELOPERS from writing their applications with DR-DOS in mind
Since DR-DOS was %100 compatible, no developer would had to design their apps "with DR-DOS in mind". Any app developed for MS-DOS would also run on DR-DOS. Therefore, I don't see that Caldera has much of an argument along that line.
(at that moment in time, it was a better "DOS" than MS-DOS
It's so easy to make quality judgements in retrospect when nobody is running either OS any longer. I don't recall ever noticing much difference between them when I ran them back in the day. Personally, I very much doubt Joe User would notice the differences either.
Product pre-announcements that have no basis in fact by a known monopolist are also illegal.
The Caldera case is deeper than Windows beta stunt MS pulled.
I respectfully disagree.
Caldera's case accuses Microsoft of unfairly achieving a monopoly. But as evidence of this unfair action, they point to pre-release announcements Microsoft made after they were a monopoly. That, my friend, is circular reasoning.
Furthermore, if you do a quick websearch, you will see that the judge in the case is highly skeptical of Caldera's chances. So am I.
And as I stated in the post to which you are replying, I don't believe MS "pulled" any "stunts" either.
Clearly, just from looking at this text, they never intended this dialog to ship with the product - otherwise it wouldn't mention Beta support. Secondly, not only doesn't it mention DR-DOS, it doesn't even mention the OS. On their "presspass" website, Microsoft comments that very few user comments were generated during the Beta process by this dialog.
Whatver the motives behind the dialog, the notion that this is the reason Novell/Caldera doesn't rule the world is ludicrous. I hope this case gets thrown out of court.
Yes, Caldera has a valid case. No, I don't think Microsoft should get away with with this kind of aggressive behavior.
And exactly what kind of "aggressive behavior" are you referring to? In the Caldera case, Microsoft is accused of putting a DIALOG BOX into a BETA of windows 3 that SUGGESTED some functions MIGHT behave abnormally if you were running a non-Microsoft DOS. They took it out for the final release. No customer saw that dialog in any shipping copy of windows That doesn't sound like aggressive behavior to me at all. It sounds like a company covering its ass while experimenting with a new OS shell. It's common practice to make disclaimers of that kind if you can't control some crucial component of a system.
Some of the lawsuits against Microsoft seem to have merit, but prima facie the Caldera case is pure smoke and mirrors.
but the company's getting $30 million dollars from SCO, Sun, Citrix, Novell, Egan-Managed Capital and Chicago Venture Partners. In other news, their case against Microsoft continues to progress.
Are you sure it's strictly "other news"? Sun, Novell, and SCO have a history of teaming up with companies that are going toe-to-toe with Microsoft. Can't have Caldera going bankrupt while the case progresses. Can't have it falling off the media scope either.
Hey, what a marvellous career path for a computer science major - the US. Army!
It has all the qualities that suit a hackor best: *rigid command hierarchy *formalized attire *shitty pay *no respect from the public *9-5 workday *guns! (thrown in for ESR, I'm guessing - that clever clinton!)
And on top of all this, you get to work against your ideals by squashing online insurgency! Wonderful! Where can I sign up?
Keep in mind it IS their site (content control anyway) and they can do whatever they want with it
That's a bit like the guy who built the Statue of Liberty saying, "It's my statue. I'll sculpt a giant clown nose on her if I want to". Sure, that's technically true, but it would be so much more impressive if the original creator would recognize that his creation has grown beyond the original scope and that it's time to let go.
This is in the FAQ dammit! I don't wanna answer it again! Thats what the FAQ is FOR! AAAAGGHHH!
Seriously, there are a lot of reasons that it would make sense to do this. Unfortunately there are a lot of reasons not to do this too. The reason is abuse. If you saw some of the crap that gets submitted, you'd understand. Besides that, I don't want the submissions bin to be littered with noise like "First Post" and "Meept". We're already really busy sifting through 300 odd submissions each day, and we don't need it to be a game.
Sorry Rob, but that is a weak excuse at best, and I think the incessant clamoring for this feature from slashdotters suggests there is a consensus on the user side that you should at least respect, even if Robert Malda doesn't agree.
A story queue would be a form of Moderation extended to the posted topics. Now, moderation has its critics. There are people who evidently are lashed into a fury by the notion that Linux Rulez! is prominent at +5 and their comment about FreeBSD or whatever is buried at -3. But all in all, I can't think of another method that allows me to browse both the Insightful cream of the crop when I want something somber AND Naked and Petrified when I want something funny, but also allows each user to hide those posts if they find them uninteresting.
Story moderation would have a major effect upon the slashdot model, one I think that you and probably Andover fear in your secret heart of hearts. It would remove you from editorial control of your baby. C'mon Rob, admit that this prospect makes you uneasy.
But hell, you say yourself that you are drowned in submissions. And we all know that your team of five (or two or six or whatever) can never produce news that is as timely as the dozens of staffers at CNN. So why not distribute the process of filtering? Why not live up to the inspiration you had when designing post moderation?
You argue, essentially, that we "don't really know what we want". That, if we were to see the garbage posts that make it into your box, we woudl be horrified and/or disgusted with slashdot. So fine, delete the ones that are obvious SPAM or clearly misdirected. But let us have the helm. Post the rest of them to the submission queue.
If I don't want to see Hot Grits, I browse at 2. If I didn't want to see SPAM that makes it into the submission queue, I would do the same thing. But the fact is, while you retain control of this site editorially, you are stifling its full potential. We will always have the uneasy fear that you or Andover is pulling strings and filtering out stories that don't fit your personal biases. In fact, I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that I'm sure you're doing this.
Yes, story moderation might mean that Slashdot drifts away from its obvious pandering to Linux "revolutionaries" that I'm sure brings in a great deal of advertising revunue. Yes, you might not be able to recognize it in a few years. But this is bigger than Rob Malda now. If that is the path of/.'s evolution, then it will only be because its users want it so.
I mean, that moron at the Sci-Fi convention who insists that the X-Wings in Star Wars shouldn't have made noise is correct in that sound doesn't conduct in space. However, there's a *reason* that Lucas had the space fighters make noise: it would have been lousy without it. Experience tells us that explosions and fighters and war make noise. It'll look odd without it, technically correct or not. These are the sorts of concessions you make for a decent film.
Pet Peeve: I would like to point out that there is no good reason why starships, etc cannot make roaring noises in outer space. This is one of those transparently obvious "facts" that "everybody knows" but is also wrong.
Sound is not the experience of air particles bombarding your ear drums. It the experience of your eardrums vibrating in response to an applied force. If the force can be conducted to your eardrums without the intervening air, you will still hear a noise.
Since we have no knowledge of what kind of physics would power an interstellar ship, we cannot logically exclude the possibility that the ship is propelled by a mechanism other than compressed explosions (the combution engine). If a starship were pushed or pulled by a force that could transmit through a vacuum, like gravity, then you could potentially hear a resulting noise.
But I agree Star Trek would suck without the sounds:)
But *isn't* DVD encryption a form of piracy protection if you think about it.
We all know that piracy protections cannot be implemented at the content level. Content is always subject to ripping and re-recording. Therefore, effective piracy counter-measures must be implemented at the player level.
If all commercially viable players require their content to be encrypted, and if that encryption cannot be duplicated by ripping, then effectively the schema has rendered ripped copies useless.
I won't disagree that it's evil, but I would have to argue that they are indeed trying to prevent piracy.
It astounds me how a forward-thinking crowd like slashdot can be so persistently retro when it comes to piracy issues.
When the DeCSS furor was raging, I read many comments dismissing DeCSS as an enhancement to piracy, on the grounds that 1) it is possible to make physical copies regardless and 2) DVD movies are far too large to transfer over the Internet. Nowadays Katz and others rush to the defense of Napster/Gnutella by citing the increased CD purchases they generate.
In both cases, it is only the stody old recording insdustries that seem to understand where technology is going!
Sure, it is impractical to transfer 3Gigabits of film to your friend today, but with the spread of broadband and improvements in compression, in two years it will be conceivable, and in five practical or even common. Similarly, people may buy CD's today for their high quality and ubiquity of playback mechanisms, but MP3 won't last forever, and its successor will surely have higher fidelity and broader support.
Maybe these technologies don't mean the (much deserved) death of the MPAA and RIAA today, but these industries didn't make it to where they are by only responding to immediate threats to their monopolies. They see where technology is heading, when remarkably the slashdot crowd doesn't seem to. And they're hedging their bets.
Yes, they both suck, boo-yaa, etc. But they certainly seem to be several years ahead of the resistance on pure philosophical terms.
So here we have another victory for flame, one of seemingly dozens that I've seen since I began trawling Slashdot. CmdrTaco posts an "outrage" story, thousands of screaming techno monkeys are released from their cages, and the "evildoer" is inundated with everything that the more sanctimonious Slashdotters hate: brainless insults, threats, aimless fury, severance of business relations, and (presumably) a little rational argument thrown in for seasoning.
And the result? WE WIN!
Let me spell that out again for you sourpusses who can't abide being represented by puerile mudslingers.
W E W I N E V E R Y T I M E
Now I'm sure some of the aforementioned are already warming up their typing fingers to explain how we don't really win, that this sort of victory is phyrric, that we can only reduce our influence and tarnish our credibility by proceeding in this way, and that eventually we will be ignored.
I disagree. Oh, how much I disagree! I say, it's time we stop shunning natural righteous anger. How long will we claim that human emotion is a bastard of which we should be ashamed? Forget it, no, if the actions of another anger me, then I won't suppress that anger in pursuit of the ideal Spock-like discourse that the Slashdot ethics police endorse.
Rational argument is fundamental, I disagree. But not all atrocities or moral infractions have their roots in reason. Some are emotional, or even legitimately evil. Those cannot be address by reason; emotion must be an allowable tool in our arsenal.
The power to license doctors and regulate the distribution of medicines is absolutely the realm of the Federal government. Moreover, only the Federal government can reglate this area effectively and without bias.
Let's look at the alternatives:
THE CONSUMERS: which is to say, the marketing divisions of the drug companies that stand behind these products. Whatever confidence I may have had in the wisdom of the Average Joe, is now lost in the haze of happy-feely "all natural" and "herbal" labels I see on potent chemicals like St John's Wort and various binge pills^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hweight loss supplements. It's clear that the noble consumer can be won over by smooth talk and obfuscation, all of which is fostered by large corporations that consider 10 or 20 deaths acceptable in the name of profits. "After all, nearly 90% of EZ-Thin Herbal All-Natual Weight Loss Dietary SupplementTM live for five years or more after taking our pill with only minor complications!!!! Proven at the University of Nairobi to make you smarter and more attractive!!!!!! All Natural!!!*"
*(some test subjects experienced heart failure and testicular shrinkage)
THE PHARMACEUTICALS: Don't make me laugh. History is replete with examples of powerful companies that will ignore or downplay the lethal or detrimental effects of their products in the quest for that extra $1M.
THE STATES: Essentially this is the pharmaceuticals all over again. Congressional representatives are effectively owned by Big Money, and there are few institutions with more of that than the pharmaceuticals. Why would a representative prevent a drug manufacturer, that brings perhaps hundreds of jobs to the state, from producing a dangerous drug that might not even have a very large market in the host state? The wonderful thing about the internet is that you can base your operations in Kansas and sell primarily to people in Idaho, or Washington, or vice versa.
With regards to the contention that will undoubtedly be made by some righteous libertarian or other, the Federal government enjoys this power because it is a matter of interstate commerce. Offering products for sale on the internet constitutes a nation-wide purchasing opportunity, unless the host company is unwilling to ship out of state. But in the case of prescription drugs, which carry a high profit margin, I don't think that will be the case.
Now, I do lament the loss of personal discretion that comes with the Feds assuming power in this matter. Informed individuals should have the right to choose. The trouble is that many people believe they are informed when in reality they are sadly, or even dangerously misinformed. That kills people. And it's why we have an FDA to begin with.
The wife ordering the robot to unplug her... It violates the first law of robotics.... No robot with those three standard laws would of ever unplugged her...
Not necessarily. They could be making a statement about assisted suicide. The first law doesn't say "do not kill". It says "do not harm".
I haven't seen Bicentennial Man, so I'm probably going to put my foot in my mouth, but what I object to about the premise of this movie (and also with the similar quest of Data in Star Trek TNG) is the sheer arrogance of the notion that robots and cyborgs would want to become human!
This is a very common theme in Sci-Fi. Man creates robots. Robots develop self awareness, introspection, and thought. Robots (for some reason) lack "emotion" and "sensation". Robot seeks to become more human.
In my mind this is insufferable anthrocentrism. Humans, completely without proof, cling to the idea that they are unique and special in some vague and undefinable way. Even as we push the boundaries of self-definition through such methods as philosophy, natural science, and hi-tech, we continue to relish a feeling of superiority over the rest of the universe, that, as far as I can tell, is completely foundless in any empirical fact.
Mark my words: some day there will be programs that can write stories as well as humans. Programs that can put that delicate twist on Chopin as well has humans. Programs that can paint marvellous painting that express deep meaning as well as humans. You know this is true - we already have mechanisms that can translate like a third-grader and write stories like a fourth-grader. How much longer can it be before our marvellous intellects are mimicked by an algorithm.
I adhere in some ways to the Behaviorist notion that what matters about intelligence is a) what goes into the machine and b) what comes out. There is nothing else. If you feel that there is more going on inside you than what can be summarized by your external stimuli and your external reactions, then you are mistaken. You are only observing an internalized output to external stimuli. The feedback you would normally express in the outside world is instead being piped directly to your brain's input valve.
Please tell me why machines cannot do this.
Sooner or later we will be confronted by the fact that everything we do is completely replicable, from the works of great geniuses to the droolings of cretins. (Hey - we already have the latter down:) What will humans do when confronted by irrefutable evidence that they are not special.
My guess is, they will ignore it. They will continue to posit superiority over their made mechanisms, even if those mechanisms can produce beauty and song superior to those of the most spiritual human. We're like that - intolerably arrogant and blind.
So, remind me again why a self-aware machine would crave to be human?
Ok, that's my rant. Now I have to get some real work done:)
Slashdot Mirror
If the lawyers felt that settling was the best legal decision, then I'd guess that they know better then me. The lawyers probably spent hundreds of hours studying the case, and the merits of it. Who are you to claim that they are idiots?
If they are the same individuals that tried to defraud the Hon. Jackson with that falsified videotape, they certainly seem like idiots to me. but regardless, I believe the reason we settled was to end the litigation as a gesture towards our stockholders. The lawyers probably were taken off guard when the motions to dismiss were denied - they hadn't expected a real, protracted lawsuit, I"m guessing.
If you think that that "dialog" was the only thing the case was about, then no wonder you are confused. Is that what the internal memo told you to believe the case was about?
There was no such memo. They don't encourage us to worry about the trials here; we're repeatedly told to behave just as we always have and let the lawyers take care of it. Of course, many of us also do our own investigation on the side. The dialog message I quoted above was extracted from the AARD Dr. Dobbs article, actually.
-konstant
Yes! We are all individuals! I'm not!
You might rage over this little dialog box, but you're missing the evil hiding underneath it. Microsoft CRIPPLED DrDos! What the hell is an 'error' doing where none should exist? There's no reason for this so-called 'non fatal error' other than to give DRDOS a black eye. Why was the code that generated this 'harmless' little error hidden and ENCRYPTED?
:)
I feel sorry for you if you can't see WHY this is a bad thing, I really do.
Perhaps it's because I'm a tester. After my long and tortuous travels through gigs of alpha debug code, I no longer consider an ignorable assert (which essentially this is) as any sort of real barrier to anything. Hit ENTER and live your life.
I can't argue with the gentleman who wrote the Dr.Dobbs article because I simply am not qualified. It certainly looks as though somebody tried to hide the testing code, doesn't it? But that really seems like a peripheral issue to me, considering that this dialog was (as I said) enabled only for a single beta build, and doesn't even mention the OS.
You hate them for their motives. But I don't think you have an argument when it comes to their actions.
And yes, I'm considerably calmer now...
-konstant
Yes! We are all individuals! I'm not!
Yes and No. I have Linux on my home computer, but only for the purposes of teaching my girlfriend a little more about computers. I happen to think a command line interface is a good immersion tactic.
However, I don't use Linux for anything serious. I prefer Microsoft products, which, as you know, don't run on Linux, and I like the interface better.
Aside: I think it's awful you would pose this question as a sort of litmus test. I read slashdot for the science articles, not the Linux articles.
-konstant
Yes! We are all individuals! I'm not!
A) major Caldera investments from sun, sco, and venture capitalists - 1/10/00
:)
B) major Caldera settlement news - 1/10/00
C) Caldera files for IPO 1/10/00
Coincidence? Aye think not!
Warm up those E*TRADE accounts boys, Caldera really knows how to rile up the market!
-konstant
Yes! We are all individuals! I'm not!
I'm going to blow my cover, such as it is, and state flat-out that I'm a Microsoft employee. And as a worker at MS, let me say that I am feel than a little pissed and betrayed by this settlement.
:) I just so happen to work at Microsoft and be kind of geeky. Imagine that.
Now, before you say anything, let me quell your paranoid delusions. I'm not paid to troll slashdot or anything like that (in fact, don't tell my boss my karma is in triple digits
Back to the topic at hand, just today I was examining the "evidence" Caldera was presenting in its suit against us in relation to the article posted earlier about the company. BTW, I consider Caldera's earlier post a rather cynical manipulation of the slashdot machine to drum up hype. They obviously wanted as many Linux eyes as possible watching their site before they changed the DNS redirection to www.drdos.org.
Having read the evil error dialog in question I simply cannot believe we would settle for even a penny in damages. In fact, I'm outraged that we let Caldera bully us into any money whatsoever. I personally think they should pay us for wasting our time.
Here's the dialog you're all gloating over without having read:
-----------------------------
Non-fatal error detected: error #4D53
(Please contact Windows 3.1 beta support.)
* Press ENTER to continue.
ENTER=Continue.
-----------------------------
My response is, what the HELL? we settled over that!!! Especially when I ruminate over the fact that it only appears in a single beta, never saw a shipping customer, doesn't mention DR-DOS, AND allows you to continue unhindered. I wasn't with the company in 92 or whenever win3x was in beta, but no matter how evil they may have been and no matter how much they may have tried to kill DR-DOS, that dialog contributed exactly nothing to the process. To submit it as "evidence" is a farce!
And then when I think about Caldera coldly calculating on this extortion as they bought DR-DOS. God damn I feel betrayed by the American legal system! Not to mention my own company, which I had thought would stand up against something so patently unjust!
Whatever you might think of my company, I love the work I do. It gets more exciting every year, and I know that Office, where I work, produces the highest quality productivity software in the world, bar none. So when a thug like Caldera takes advantage of our obviously compromised legal situation to levy this blackmail on us, it makes me livid.
There are some people at the company who seem relieved by this. Those are the people who only care about stock options. Yes, I imagine our stock will go up as a result. But I'm not in it for the money because god knows they don't pay me enough. I'm in it for the ideals, just like many of you who work in the Linux world. The difference is, you get to be smug and superior and I have to spend 20% of my online time proving I'm not a devil simply because I have @microsoft.com behind my alias. Yes I'm resentful!
But hell, what can I do? Guess I'll just go drown my misery in another free Coke and wait for Steve Ballmer to rain some platitudes down on us in a live simulcast...
Live it up while you can, guys. The suits will eat you sooner or later.
-konstant
Yes! We are all individuals! I'm not!
"What the guy is supposed to do is feel uncomfortable and, when he has bugs, suspect the problem is DR-DOS and then go out to buy MS-DOS, or decide not to take the risk for the other machines he has to buy for in the office."
I agree with you. Brad Silverberg definitely is not a nice man.
However, bad intentions, or even naughty actions, do not constitute a breach of law unless those actions actually accomplish the destruction of a competitor.
A tiny, obscure, and nonspecific erro box in a BETA of a release that doesn't even prevent you from continuing and NEVER metions DR-DOS could not possibly do any such thing.
Maybe Microsoft wanted to destroy DR-DOS with this dialog, but if so they were being remarkably incompetent about it. Mentioning DR-DOS in the text, for example, might have helped.
DR-DOS failed because it lacked 1) mindshare and 2) marketing. This dialog didn't even modify the pace of its march to the gallows.
-konstant
Yes! We are all individuals! I'm not!
On a related note, consider this article I wrote for my school newspaper when I was in college
/ 27/p07_matthewcol.txt.html
htt p://www.illinimedia.com/di/archives/1998/February
Essentially, the DOE provided my university's CS department with extravagant funding in return for "scientific" research that the administration knew perfectly well would be turned to purposes of war. Certainly I can understand why the pursuit of knowledge might diminish ethical considerations in the eyes of a researcher, but when research so plainly leads to death doesn't the scientist bear some culpability?
-konstant
Yes! We are all individuals! I'm not!
Here is the text of the evil error message under debate:
:-)
-----------------------------
Non-fatal error detected: error #4D53
(Please contact Windows 3.1 beta support.)
* Press ENTER to continue.
ENTER=Continue.
-----------------------------
As I've stated before, this is a very weak foundation upon which to build an anti-monopoly case. The message does not even mention the OS, let alone DR-DOS. Secondly as the dialog says, you can always foil Microsoft's evil plan by hitting ENTER to Continue.
In addition, suggesting that Microsoft encrypted their source code seems pretty weak. At the time this beta was written, the notion of open source review was inconceivable, and naturally they would realize that attempts to obscure the code would be perceived as a tacit admission of guilt. I'd say the Dr. Dobbs article that started this theory probably was reading too much into somebody's poor coding style. How much of the rest of Win3.1 is "encrypted" in this way?
I won't speak about the licensing issues since I don't know much about it. But the error message (in a beta no less) is just silly.
-konstant
Yes! We are all individuals! I'm not!
But many customers (like me) couldn't get windows to install on top of dr-dos, strange coincidence...
Add to that the fact the windows was the _only_ software incompatible to dr-dos.
Caldera is not alleging that DR-DOS doesn't run under windows. It does. If you can't get it to work, then I'd respectfully suggest that is your problem, and not the result of a global conspiracy.
-konstant
Yes! We are all individuals! I'm not!
I think a lot of the anti-Microsoft hype is silly, but this statement is seriously misinformed. The code which generated that dialog box was obfuscated, encrypted & self-modifying - definitely not a "simple" test to warn people that they weren't using a Microsoft DOS.
I'll post the horrifying message a second time:
-----------------------------
Non-fatal error detected: error #4D53
(Please contact Windows 3.1 beta support.)
* Press ENTER to continue.
ENTER=Continue.
-----------------------------
I found this in a Dr Dobbs archived article. As you can see, this message, regardless of how bizarre the implementation or how evil the motives, has about zero impact on anyone considering DR-DOS. It doesn't mention the OS at all, let alone the version. And furthermore, MS states on its presspass page that very few customers actually called in to find out what the error meant anyway. And, as the message states, they can always hit ENTER to continue.
Furthermore, as was shown in various e-mail evidence produced in the trial, the point was not to make the CUSTOMERS nervous about DR-DOS - it was to discourage DEVELOPERS from writing their applications with DR-DOS in mind
Since DR-DOS was %100 compatible, no developer would had to design their apps "with DR-DOS in mind". Any app developed for MS-DOS would also run on DR-DOS. Therefore, I don't see that Caldera has much of an argument along that line.
(at that moment in time, it was a better "DOS" than MS-DOS
It's so easy to make quality judgements in retrospect when nobody is running either OS any longer. I don't recall ever noticing much difference between them when I ran them back in the day. Personally, I very much doubt Joe User would notice the differences either.
-konstant
Yes! We are all individuals! I'm not!
Product pre-announcements that have no basis in fact by a known monopolist are also illegal.
The Caldera case is deeper than Windows beta stunt MS pulled.
I respectfully disagree.
Caldera's case accuses Microsoft of unfairly achieving a monopoly. But as evidence of this unfair action, they point to pre-release announcements Microsoft made after they were a monopoly. That, my friend, is circular reasoning.
Furthermore, if you do a quick websearch, you will see that the judge in the case is highly skeptical of Caldera's chances. So am I.
And as I stated in the post to which you are replying, I don't believe MS "pulled" any "stunts" either.
-konstant
Yes! We are all individuals! I'm not!
Watch me disagree. Here is the "threatening" message:
-----------------------------
Non-fatal error detected: error #4D53
(Please contact Windows 3.1 beta support.)
* Press ENTER to continue.
ENTER=Continue.
-----------------------------
Clearly, just from looking at this text, they never intended this dialog to ship with the product - otherwise it wouldn't mention Beta support. Secondly, not only doesn't it mention DR-DOS, it doesn't even mention the OS. On their "presspass" website, Microsoft comments that very few user comments were generated during the Beta process by this dialog.
Whatver the motives behind the dialog, the notion that this is the reason Novell/Caldera doesn't rule the world is ludicrous. I hope this case gets thrown out of court.
-konstant
Yes! We are all individuals! I'm not!
Yes, Caldera has a valid case.
No, I don't think Microsoft should get away with with this kind of aggressive behavior.
And exactly what kind of "aggressive behavior" are you referring to? In the Caldera case, Microsoft is accused of putting a DIALOG BOX into a BETA of windows 3 that SUGGESTED some functions MIGHT behave abnormally if you were running a non-Microsoft DOS. They took it out for the final release. No customer saw that dialog in any shipping copy of windows That doesn't sound like aggressive behavior to me at all. It sounds like a company covering its ass while experimenting with a new OS shell. It's common practice to make disclaimers of that kind if you can't control some crucial component of a system.
Some of the lawsuits against Microsoft seem to have merit, but prima facie the Caldera case is pure smoke and mirrors.
-konstant
Yes! We are all individuals! I'm not!
From the story header...
but the company's getting $30 million dollars from SCO, Sun, Citrix, Novell, Egan-Managed Capital and Chicago Venture Partners. In other news, their case against Microsoft continues to progress.
Are you sure it's strictly "other news"? Sun, Novell, and SCO have a history of teaming up with companies that are going toe-to-toe with Microsoft. Can't have Caldera going bankrupt while the case progresses. Can't have it falling off the media scope either.
-konstant
Yes! We are all individuals! I'm not!
Hey, what a marvellous career path for a computer science major - the US. Army!
It has all the qualities that suit a hackor best:
*rigid command hierarchy
*formalized attire
*shitty pay
*no respect from the public
*9-5 workday
*guns! (thrown in for ESR, I'm guessing - that clever clinton!)
And on top of all this, you get to work against your ideals by squashing online insurgency! Wonderful! Where can I sign up?
-konstant
Yes! We are all individuals! I'm not!
Keep in mind it IS their site (content control anyway) and they can do whatever they want with it
That's a bit like the guy who built the Statue of Liberty saying, "It's my statue. I'll sculpt a giant clown nose on her if I want to". Sure, that's technically true, but it would be so much more impressive if the original creator would recognize that his creation has grown beyond the original scope and that it's time to let go.
-konstant
Yes! We are all individuals! I'm not!
Rob on the issue of a "Story Submission Queue":
/.'s evolution, then it will only be because its users want it so.
This is in the FAQ dammit! I don't wanna answer it again! Thats what the FAQ is FOR! AAAAGGHHH!
Seriously, there are a lot of reasons that it would make sense to do this. Unfortunately there are a lot of reasons not to do this too. The reason is abuse. If you saw some of the crap that gets submitted, you'd understand. Besides that, I don't want the submissions bin to be littered with noise like "First Post" and "Meept". We're already really busy sifting through 300 odd submissions each day, and we don't need it to be a game.
Sorry Rob, but that is a weak excuse at best, and I think the incessant clamoring for this feature from slashdotters suggests there is a consensus on the user side that you should at least respect, even if Robert Malda doesn't agree.
A story queue would be a form of Moderation extended to the posted topics. Now, moderation has its critics. There are people who evidently are lashed into a fury by the notion that Linux Rulez! is prominent at +5 and their comment about FreeBSD or whatever is buried at -3. But all in all, I can't think of another method that allows me to browse both the Insightful cream of the crop when I want something somber AND Naked and Petrified when I want something funny, but also allows each user to hide those posts if they find them uninteresting.
Story moderation would have a major effect upon the slashdot model, one I think that you and probably Andover fear in your secret heart of hearts. It would remove you from editorial control of your baby. C'mon Rob, admit that this prospect makes you uneasy.
But hell, you say yourself that you are drowned in submissions. And we all know that your team of five (or two or six or whatever) can never produce news that is as timely as the dozens of staffers at CNN. So why not distribute the process of filtering? Why not live up to the inspiration you had when designing post moderation?
You argue, essentially, that we "don't really know what we want". That, if we were to see the garbage posts that make it into your box, we woudl be horrified and/or disgusted with slashdot. So fine, delete the ones that are obvious SPAM or clearly misdirected. But let us have the helm. Post the rest of them to the submission queue.
If I don't want to see Hot Grits, I browse at 2. If I didn't want to see SPAM that makes it into the submission queue, I would do the same thing. But the fact is, while you retain control of this site editorially, you are stifling its full potential. We will always have the uneasy fear that you or Andover is pulling strings and filtering out stories that don't fit your personal biases. In fact, I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that I'm sure you're doing this.
Yes, story moderation might mean that Slashdot drifts away from its obvious pandering to Linux "revolutionaries" that I'm sure brings in a great deal of advertising revunue. Yes, you might not be able to recognize it in a few years. But this is bigger than Rob Malda now. If that is the path of
It's time to let go, Rob...
-konstant
Yes! We are all individuals! I'm not!
I mean, that moron at the Sci-Fi convention who insists that the X-Wings in Star Wars shouldn't have made noise is correct in that sound doesn't conduct in space. However, there's a *reason* that Lucas had the space fighters make noise: it would have been lousy without it. Experience tells us that explosions and fighters and war make noise. It'll look odd without it, technically correct or not. These are the sorts of concessions you make for a decent film.
:)
Pet Peeve: I would like to point out that there is no good reason why starships, etc cannot make roaring noises in outer space. This is one of those transparently obvious "facts" that "everybody knows" but is also wrong.
Sound is not the experience of air particles bombarding your ear drums. It the experience of your eardrums vibrating in response to an applied force. If the force can be conducted to your eardrums without the intervening air, you will still hear a noise.
Since we have no knowledge of what kind of physics would power an interstellar ship, we cannot logically exclude the possibility that the ship is propelled by a mechanism other than compressed explosions (the combution engine). If a starship were pushed or pulled by a force that could transmit through a vacuum, like gravity, then you could potentially hear a resulting noise.
But I agree Star Trek would suck without the sounds
-konstant
Yes! We are all individuals! I'm not!
But *isn't* DVD encryption a form of piracy protection if you think about it.
We all know that piracy protections cannot be implemented at the content level. Content is always subject to ripping and re-recording. Therefore, effective piracy counter-measures must be implemented at the player level.
If all commercially viable players require their content to be encrypted, and if that encryption cannot be duplicated by ripping, then effectively the schema has rendered ripped copies useless.
I won't disagree that it's evil, but I would have to argue that they are indeed trying to prevent piracy.
-konstant
Yes! We are all individuals! I'm not!
It astounds me how a forward-thinking crowd like slashdot can be so persistently retro when it comes to piracy issues.
When the DeCSS furor was raging, I read many comments dismissing DeCSS as an enhancement to piracy, on the grounds that 1) it is possible to make physical copies regardless and 2) DVD movies are far too large to transfer over the Internet. Nowadays Katz and others rush to the defense of Napster/Gnutella by citing the increased CD purchases they generate.
In both cases, it is only the stody old recording insdustries that seem to understand where technology is going!
Sure, it is impractical to transfer 3Gigabits of film to your friend today, but with the spread of broadband and improvements in compression, in two years it will be conceivable, and in five practical or even common. Similarly, people may buy CD's today for their high quality and ubiquity of playback mechanisms, but MP3 won't last forever, and its successor will surely have higher fidelity and broader support.
Maybe these technologies don't mean the (much deserved) death of the MPAA and RIAA today, but these industries didn't make it to where they are by only responding to immediate threats to their monopolies. They see where technology is heading, when remarkably the slashdot crowd doesn't seem to. And they're hedging their bets.
Yes, they both suck, boo-yaa, etc. But they certainly seem to be several years ahead of the resistance on pure philosophical terms.
-konstant
Yes! We are all individuals! I'm not!
So here we have another victory for flame, one of seemingly dozens that I've seen since I began trawling Slashdot. CmdrTaco posts an "outrage" story, thousands of screaming techno monkeys are released from their cages, and the "evildoer" is inundated with everything that the more sanctimonious Slashdotters hate: brainless insults, threats, aimless fury, severance of business relations, and (presumably) a little rational argument thrown in for seasoning.
And the result? WE WIN!
Let me spell that out again for you sourpusses who can't abide being represented by puerile mudslingers.
W E W I N E V E R Y T I M E
Now I'm sure some of the aforementioned are already warming up their typing fingers to explain how we don't really win, that this sort of victory is phyrric, that we can only reduce our influence and tarnish our credibility by proceeding in this way, and that eventually we will be ignored.
I disagree. Oh, how much I disagree! I say, it's time we stop shunning natural righteous anger. How long will we claim that human emotion is a bastard of which we should be ashamed? Forget it, no, if the actions of another anger me, then I won't suppress that anger in pursuit of the ideal Spock-like discourse that the Slashdot ethics police endorse.
Rational argument is fundamental, I disagree. But not all atrocities or moral infractions have their roots in reason. Some are emotional, or even legitimately evil. Those cannot be address by reason; emotion must be an allowable tool in our arsenal.
My two cents.
-konstant
Yes! We are all individuals! I'm not!
I'm not very familiar with IP spoofing, but isn't this possible with every system everywhere all the time?
If I sent ping packets with spoofed IPs to three hundred machines running any OS, wouldn't they respond with packets to the target machine?
-konstant
Yes! We are all individuals! I'm not!
The power to license doctors and regulate the distribution of medicines is absolutely the realm of the Federal government. Moreover, only the Federal government can reglate this area effectively and without bias.
Let's look at the alternatives:
THE CONSUMERS: which is to say, the marketing divisions of the drug companies that stand behind these products. Whatever confidence I may have had in the wisdom of the Average Joe, is now lost in the haze of happy-feely "all natural" and "herbal" labels I see on potent chemicals like St John's Wort and various binge pills^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hweight loss supplements. It's clear that the noble consumer can be won over by smooth talk and obfuscation, all of which is fostered by large corporations that consider 10 or 20 deaths acceptable in the name of profits. "After all, nearly 90% of EZ-Thin Herbal All-Natual Weight Loss Dietary SupplementTM live for five years or more after taking our pill with only minor complications!!!! Proven at the University of Nairobi to make you smarter and more attractive!!!!!! All Natural!!!*"
*(some test subjects experienced heart failure and testicular shrinkage)
THE PHARMACEUTICALS: Don't make me laugh. History is replete with examples of powerful companies that will ignore or downplay the lethal or detrimental effects of their products in the quest for that extra $1M.
THE STATES: Essentially this is the pharmaceuticals all over again. Congressional representatives are effectively owned by Big Money, and there are few institutions with more of that than the pharmaceuticals. Why would a representative prevent a drug manufacturer, that brings perhaps hundreds of jobs to the state, from producing a dangerous drug that might not even have a very large market in the host state? The wonderful thing about the internet is that you can base your operations in Kansas and sell primarily to people in Idaho, or Washington, or vice versa.
With regards to the contention that will undoubtedly be made by some righteous libertarian or other, the Federal government enjoys this power because it is a matter of interstate commerce. Offering products for sale on the internet constitutes a nation-wide purchasing opportunity, unless the host company is unwilling to ship out of state. But in the case of prescription drugs, which carry a high profit margin, I don't think that will be the case.
Now, I do lament the loss of personal discretion that comes with the Feds assuming power in this matter. Informed individuals should have the right to choose. The trouble is that many people believe they are informed when in reality they are sadly, or even dangerously misinformed. That kills people. And it's why we have an FDA to begin with.
-konstant
Yes! We are all individuals! I'm not!
The wife ordering the robot to unplug her... It violates the first law of robotics.... No robot with those three standard laws would of ever unplugged her...
Not necessarily. They could be making a statement about assisted suicide. The first law doesn't say "do not kill". It says "do not harm".
-konstant
I haven't seen Bicentennial Man, so I'm probably going to put my foot in my mouth, but what I object to about the premise of this movie (and also with the similar quest of Data in Star Trek TNG) is the sheer arrogance of the notion that robots and cyborgs would want to become human!
:) What will humans do when confronted by irrefutable evidence that they are not special.
:)
This is a very common theme in Sci-Fi. Man creates robots. Robots develop self awareness, introspection, and thought. Robots (for some reason) lack "emotion" and "sensation". Robot seeks to become more human.
In my mind this is insufferable anthrocentrism. Humans, completely without proof, cling to the idea that they are unique and special in some vague and undefinable way. Even as we push the boundaries of self-definition through such methods as philosophy, natural science, and hi-tech, we continue to relish a feeling of superiority over the rest of the universe, that, as far as I can tell, is completely foundless in any empirical fact.
Mark my words: some day there will be programs that can write stories as well as humans. Programs that can put that delicate twist on Chopin as well has humans. Programs that can paint marvellous painting that express deep meaning as well as humans. You know this is true - we already have mechanisms that can translate like a third-grader and write stories like a fourth-grader. How much longer can it be before our marvellous intellects are mimicked by an algorithm.
I adhere in some ways to the Behaviorist notion that what matters about intelligence is a) what goes into the machine and b) what comes out. There is nothing else. If you feel that there is more going on inside you than what can be summarized by your external stimuli and your external reactions, then you are mistaken. You are only observing an internalized output to external stimuli. The feedback you would normally express in the outside world is instead being piped directly to your brain's input valve.
Please tell me why machines cannot do this.
Sooner or later we will be confronted by the fact that everything we do is completely replicable, from the works of great geniuses to the droolings of cretins. (Hey - we already have the latter down
My guess is, they will ignore it. They will continue to posit superiority over their made mechanisms, even if those mechanisms can produce beauty and song superior to those of the most spiritual human. We're like that - intolerably arrogant and blind.
So, remind me again why a self-aware machine would crave to be human?
Ok, that's my rant. Now I have to get some real work done
-konstant