This is really kind of an simpleton's argument. Consider how easily you can apply it to murder: "Laws against murder are only going to stop the law-abiding people." Um, yeah.
Locks, laws against murder, and DRM unfortunately do have some other purposes. One simple one is that they let people know that what they're doing is wrong - they force people to make a conscious effort to do the wrong thing. This is one reason why many DRM schemes may seem pointless to the techno-crowd when they don't stop every attack. Generally, a DRM scheme is good if you have to write a driver or the like to get around it... because when they sue you, it's pretty obvious that you knew what you were doing wasn't within the rules.
We can argue about what's morally right and such, and I completely agree that they're pursuing the wrong tact, but to say that DRM and locks are useless is just disingenuous.
Re:Joel Sposky's preface makes me puke
on
In Search of Stupidity
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Sposky and Chapman appear to believe that market domination defines correct decisionmaking. Criticize people for not understanding the business they're running, but don't criticize them for having integrity.
I think some of the other replies are looking at this the wrong way - it is *not* always the right decision to keep bolting on new functionality to an old and broken infrastructure. Even when the alternative is not shipping anything for X years, that may be a better decision.
*However*, in the case of the internet browser business, this was a bad decision. Why? Because the goodness of a browser isn't based solely on the features it supports, it's based on how widely it's programmed to. In some other situation, it might have made sense to release nothing... you let the competitor have the market for a few years, then show up with the super-powered new version and everyone switches back. If you've got the capital, make the investment. (Note that this seems to be what MS is doing with Longhorn - check back in 5 years to see how it worked out)
With the browser, however, once Netscape stopped shipping product people stopped using it, and the web went to supporting just IE. The point is just that in the particular case of the browser, because it's not a stand-alone technology but a platform, and so its "goodness" is a function not just of the platform but of what supports it, the rewrite decision was, well, ill-advised. In short, they didn't understand their business.
This was not a problem with McDonalds but a problem with people who have no consept of the idea that you are responsible for your own actions.
IIRC, the issue wasn't just that the coffee was too hot. The coffee *was* too hot (as other replies have posted here, you don't actually keep the water at 212 to make coffee, so it should be cooler), but beyond that McDonald's had received similar complaints about the same issue and (roughly) paid them off via settlements. Unsurprisingly, their records of those settlements made it much harder to argue that they didn't know the coffee was too damn hot.
The damages weren't recompense, they were punitive. McDonald's had a documented history of ignoring this issue and people being burned, so the courts encouraged them more formally to fix the problem.
The courts are screwed up in many ways, as I think anyone will agree. However, the perception of how screwed up they are is affected also by the sound-byte culture that's reporting these cases and the 15-second attention spans that're listening. The less information you have, the easier it is to argue that it's stupid/wrong.
there's a webdesigner at work that codes html by hand and sticks as close as possible to HTML 3.0 unless what he is trying to do needs CSS or 4.0 features. his pages look better than the dreamweaver drivers and are always 40-70% smaller so they load faster.
Thanks for proving his point. The argument was that folks like your friend the web designer have raised the bar on expected quality to the point where the average person cannot afford the time/ energy/ expertise to put up a site which looks respectable. It's not that you need too many tools, it's that it's too complicated to make a site which meets the expectations of today's viewer.
"You should just learn all the hardcore tricks of the HTML 3.0 spec and avoid those WYSIWYG utilities" doesn't disprove this. The issue is that the bar has been raised... and you're telling him he shouldn't use the pole to try to vault the bar, he should just work on his leg muscles until he can jump over it without that sissy pole.
This has spurred a hot legal debate raising an interesting question: which is more important, tourist dollars or the truth?
Whatever happened to the whole "rest in peace" notion? Let me get this in writing right now: if someone comes diggin' me up in a century or so, I am *so* gonna haunt that guy!
What the author is overlooking is that this rule gives exclusive control over production to the studios that are in "the club", essentially denying private citizens the right to make their own HDTV format video.
From the parent post, modded +5 Insightful:
The article thinks that the only content is that provided by the big studios. I don't know about you, but most of my home video library is composed of home movies, short films I have created myself, and some classic material that you can't get on tape.
Original comment:
WHO THE HELL IS MODDING THESE REGURGITATIONS UP?!
I mean for the love of all that's holy, I appreciate that reading the actual article would be a bit much to expect, but could you at least read the SUMMARY? At least then you'd see the parent post is just a rephrase of the summary. Sheesh.
I love Slashdot. Seriously. It's the only place outside junior high where you can be considered insightful merely by comprehending the point of an article and regurgitating that point.
My favorite thing about the whole article is they give 5 reasons that the iPod isn't the best and then each reason shows different music players that could replace the iPod. Notice however that there is no player that will fill all 5 roles by itself, in order to get all these "features" you would need to buy 5 different players.
The fact is that the iPod does a pretty good job at filling all these roles, but it can be beat by a specialized player in a particular function. If you want an overall good player then the iPod is a great choice.
This was *precisely* the point of the article: that the iPod is a great overall player, but that it can be beaten in particular niche areas by more specialized tools. The parent isn't "insightful" - all he did was understand the point the author was making. Congratulations.
Apple's Steve jobs had previously mentioned that the tablet market was non-existant.
Interesting notion. Let's look at the numbers. According to the article (which you all read), tablets are expected to make up a bit less than 5% of the worldwide laptop market. Pretty small, and not much of a success in the x86 world.
But does anyone remember what Apple's market share looks like? That's right, about 5%. In effect, they're both about the same size niche. Pot, meet kettle.
On the other hand, Sec. 105 (b) (1) (A) (i) and (ii) make it illegal to use address harvesters or dictionary attacks to send spam.
Hopefully they'll use this law to protect the Do Not Spam list itself. The Fed just needs to bury some innocuous-looking email address in there which goes to a federal mail-server and isn't published anywhere else; if anyone ever emails it, send in the FBI;)
He doesn't call zealots terrorists. He says that the nutcases are dangerous to the OSS cause, just as islamic terrorists are dangerous to moderate Islam - the nutcases get the press coverage and we all get tarred with the same brush. Take the DoS attack on SCO, for example. That didn't do anyone any good and gave the other side ammunition to use against the Linux community.
This is a really good point. The initial response here has been to assume he's talking about every Linux user, and ignore him. Rather, we need to recognize that there are legitimate, crazy zealots out there "supporting" OSS, and that they're undermining the entire movement. If as a community we choose to defend the people who DOS'd SCO, it paints the entire OSS community with the same brush. Instead, we need to be distancing ourselves from them in the same way that moderate Islam distances itself from Al Quaeda - you recognize that those people are a detriment to the movement and either encourage them to return to the (law-abiding and rational) fold, or make clear they don't represent you.
The short response is "don't you think they would have thought of that?"
Of course, they undoubtedly did think of it, so why do they believe that this is the better way to go?
What you're saying is all true, to a point. Adding additional resources to a single logical processor is extremely effective, but only up to a point. The distinction is between instruction-level parallelism (ILP) and thread-level parallelism (TLP). The key observation is that in "normal" code (meaning we're ignoring the high-performance scientific stuff because that's a different workload to optimize for), there are only so many instructions within a basic block (the instructions between two branches, like if or while statements), before you hit a branch or a jump or the like. You can add resources until you can execute all those instructions within a single block at once, but doubling the chip resources beyond that doesn't help as much.
Now, you add in branch prediction. When we hit a branch, we execute one side of the branch in the hope that that'll be the taken one; that gives you more instructions to have in-flight at once. But note that the resources added there are less effecient, because there's always some probability that the branch will go the other way and the chip will have to discard all that work.
Anyway, you can continue this until you're executing many basic blocks at once, but with diminishing returns - if you mis-predict a branch, you've lost work (sure, you can execute both sides of the branch simultaneously, but there you're just guaranteeing yourself a max of 50% efficiency overall).
The point is just that at some point the benefits of adding additional resources to the chip starts to tail off, and it becomes more beneficial to add ways to run multiple threads at once, either through hyperthreading (which arises out of this same realization, because usually one thread won't use all the chip resources of a physical processor) or multi-core.
Microsoft's abundance of patches indicates poor design and methodology, period.
Red Hat 9 had 43 security vulnerabilities reported and patched in the first 150 days after it shipped.
Ok, so rather than design the apps safely out of the box, we need to handcuff the users and do the dirty work ourselves.
No, but admins need to do their *jobs*. The apps are designed for consumers, businesses, everybody - the admins' role is to recognize that and protect themselves accordingly.
Wow! What a concept! I never thought of this! Now I know where all my problems are coming from! It's not from the software, it's my fault for actually allowing connectivity!
Nice sensationalism. The underlying point is that admins have to be aware of the security issues in their deployments and respond accordingly. Do you think having an even mix of Windows, Linux and Apple OS's is going to make that easier for the admins?
Ok, since we can't make our product stable, buy 2 copies and hope one works.
The point was that you have to have backups of the *key* elements of the infrastructure. The "diversity" folks have this same issue, because the assumption is that parts will break, and the goal is limiting the damage. Note that having the same functionality replicated by MS, Linux, and OSX is not going to be any cheaper.
Key word is, develop. Why does an end user, paying hundreds of dollars per seat need to 'develop' something as common as this.
It's a build or buy decision - of course you can purchase this as well (and it may be part of the new storage bits in Win2k3). Do you think the diversified solution from Veritas and IBM and EMC is going to be cheaper?
The monoculture risk is real when you're looking at the 64,000 view -- the entire population. They're not really all that much of a risk when you're dealing with, say, an enterprise's systems, and there's not that much benefit to them in that kind of environment (disregarding things like security devices for the moment).
Two issues: First off, the security papers to which he's responding did in fact advocate diversity within a single enterprise. They were claiming that diversity was the right way to secure an enterprise, he's responding to that assertion.
Second, to some extent his arguments apply even when you extend it to inter-organizational security. Many businesses find it necessary to trust other systems from other businesses, and this will only become more true as web services start to make real the early promises of the internet changing the face of commerce (IBM, MS, SUN, whichever flavor of web services you like, they're all predicting something like this). When these systems become interdependent even across organizations, this guy's argument becomes relevant even there.
So don't just dismiss it, find a way to refute it.
Monthly security updates? Good grief!! How about getting it right the first time!
"Getting it right the first time" is extraordinarily difficult... I'd say conservatively that the difficulty varies with the square of the size of the product. WinXP was 50 million lines. You simply cannot build something that large, with no bugs in it, within the lifetime of any single programmer.
Security is a feature, not something built-in that you can assume will be there. The auto industry's done a good job of educating users in this regard with the issue of reliability. Users appreciate that some cars are safer/more reliable than others, that there's a trade-off involved, and value the vehicle appropriately. Compare a Volvo coupe and a Ford mustang to understand what I mean - the Ford is sexier, faster, cheaper, less reliable, and less safe (even without Firestone tires). But _more drivers buy the Mustang than the C70_ (or whatever).
Somebody's undoubtedly going to respond "well, linux can." Bullshit. As Ballmer pointed out, Red Hat 9 had 43 security vulnerabilities in the first 150 days after release - Win Server 2k3 had 4. Yes, they're less serious, etc... my point is that you can't "just fix all the bugs."
Now what if we point to OpenBSD? Even assuming that there aren't any bugs (and there have been, albeit not remote roots), that's a different sort of product, one with a much longer incubation time and less "new stuff" in each release. You can argue that Windows should do that, pare down the amount of "new stuff" (avoiding the term "innovation") to where it can be fixed... but the reality is that that's not what customers pay for.
Sadly, that's what it ultimately comes back to - this is a system designed for customers, based on what customers want. Red Hat is a useful comparison in that regard because it's aimed at something closer to the "normal" (in the statistical sense) user.
Something interesting to think about that comes out of this whole issue is that, to some extent, we're hitting a turning point in computing. Users (the "normal" kind) are finally recognizing that they want security. They're pissed, because they hadn't realized that for all these years they've been trading security for features, but nonetheless *that's what the market has supported*.
We're hitting this very interesting inflection point where users are demanding security (and privacy, which is an interesting related point), but it's unclear the extent to which the market will pay for that security. The simplistic counter-argument would suggest that because of the outcry, customers are willing to pay for it... but that's not really true if you drill down. OpenBSD, as we've discussed, is an option: if customers placed a sufficiently high value on security, they could migrate to OpenBSD. It would be extremely expensive, in hardware and software and (especially) retraining, but it could be done - and it isn't.
It's akin to privacy, where users say they want it, but if you offer them $0.15 back on a gallon of milk they'll gladly sell you that very data. Users say that it's important, but they're not necessarily willing to pay for either privacy or security - they want them both, free, now, without giving up anything. (Yeah, they're "entitled" to them, but you can't retrain your IT staff with entitlements).
Anyway, the point is just that the issue is an order of magnitude more complicated than "just get it right the first time." The sentiment is correct, but the issue itself is too complex for that kind of thinking. I don't mean to give MS a free pass or anything of the kind - the point is to elevate our thinking about the issue, not just fire off our sentiments.
What I'd love to see come out of this is Kazaa sue the RIAA for breaking their "security" system for ensuring the privacy of Kazaa users in tracking their downloads, etc.
"Your honor, we employed the well-documented 'double-ROT13' encryption algorithm to encode our users' personal information and usage data. The RIAA has willfully and maliciously hacked that encryption scheme, in violation of the DMCA."
And in the battle of public opinion, you can't beat the 500 pound elephant willing to lie.
So this is a bit offtopic, but you really don't have much sense of scale, do you? A 500 pound elephant? Most elephants weigh north of 5 tons - that is, roughly 20 times the size of your DRM-enforcing behemoth.
Check out the Oakland zoo's little blurb for the size (it was the first reference off a google for "weight african elephant"): http://www.oaklandzoo.org/atoz/azeleph.html
A bit from the abstract:
Method and system for reporting program failures. The system extracts information about a failure in a program module, such as the location of the failure, and establishes communication with a repository, such as a server.
Don't you just love how vague this is?
Bud, you're reading the ABSTRACT. Of course it's vague... that's what "abstract" means.
RTFP ("patent") before complaining that it's too vague.
I agree with you that the premise of the article, as stated, is somewhat backwards: if the cause of "the unemployment problem" is increasing productivity, then the suggestions he makes for developing software to increase productivity aren't likely to fix the problem.
Maybe a better way to look at the article, however, is that that's not really what he's trying to say. That is, it's not that productivity->unemployment. Rather, it's that this productivity widens the gap between those with money and those without. So perhaps his issue is that the big corps are getting bigger, and are able to better leverage the increased productivity gains, thus locking out those under-capitalized firms which cannot afford the same productivity enhancements.
I think that's a much better way of understanding what the guy's arguing; thus, the moral directive he's issuing to the OSS community is not "stop increasing productivity," but "start helping the little guys, as well as just the big guys."
They will say that it is "lost" revenue. Something cannot be lost if it never existed in the first place!
Before there was this "Intarweb" thing, you purchased products from local stores, right? If you couldn't buy things online, you'd probably have to buy them from those same local stores, no?
Unless you believe that consumers are magicking up the extra money they're spending on goods online, it seems reasonable to believe that the money now spent online used to be spent at local stores. Consumers are buying the same amount of stuff, but now instead of having 100% of those items taxed, now only 80% of them are taxed (or whatever your number is). That revenue used to exist for the state, and now because of the internet it does not. Sounds suspiciously like "lost" revenue to me...
This is a legitimate issue for the states. We can go into incredible depth discussing the merits of creating an internet sales tax versus increasing the brick/mortar sales tax versus increasing other state taxes (for example, note that making online purchases tax-free is effectively regressive taxation, since by and large it's the rich who have the technology to avoid the tax by shopping online), but the point is that sales tax is supposed to be a tax on consumption. It's not unreasonable for them to want to enforce that.
I think we all need to stop whining and realize that just because we used to get something for free doesn't mean that we're entitled to get it for free forever (which favorite/. discussion does this remind you of?).
Makes you wonder how stupidity seems to get such a grip on corporate entities. Talk to them individually and they're pretty smart, but group up and the collective intelligence takes a nose dive.
Sorry to sound like such a conspiracy theorist, but maybe they really aren't as stupid as they seem. That is, it's fairly obvious to *us* that this strategy isn't going to stop music swapping... so why wouldn't they have figured this out as well?
After all, when this does inevitably fail, doesn't it make their story that much stronger when they go to their congressmen and senators explaining how the only way to fight this fire that technology started is with another technology fire? Say, Palladium, et al?
Throw some challenges to the free software community at slashdot and watch thousands of brilliant minds load-balanced working like a huge beowulf processing information online.
Yeah... although I think the "infinite monkeys at infinite typewriters" metaphor may be a bit more apt.
You're aware that there's a difference between advertising and marketing, aren't you? Advertising includes all the pretty pictures and TV ads and such. Marketing is the positioning of the product: for whom is it being built, what user scenarios is it intended to fix, who's going to pay for the product.
As an example, look at the marketing and advertising of Mountain Dew Code Red. The advertising shows a bunch of scenes of the inner city, basketball, various "cool" scenes of black pop culture. Do you think they're really expecting those inner city blacks to drink Mt. Dew Code Red? No - it's not being marketed at them at all. It's being marketed at nerdy white kids who want to think they're "cool" like the inner city blacks depicted. Same thing with beer ads - they don't think it's going to be 95 lb super-models drinking the product, they know that's how to get the 250 lb couch potatoes interested.
Slashdot Mirror
This is really kind of an simpleton's argument. Consider how easily you can apply it to murder: "Laws against murder are only going to stop the law-abiding people." Um, yeah.
Locks, laws against murder, and DRM unfortunately do have some other purposes. One simple one is that they let people know that what they're doing is wrong - they force people to make a conscious effort to do the wrong thing. This is one reason why many DRM schemes may seem pointless to the techno-crowd when they don't stop every attack. Generally, a DRM scheme is good if you have to write a driver or the like to get around it ... because when they sue you, it's pretty obvious that you knew what you were doing wasn't within the rules.
We can argue about what's morally right and such, and I completely agree that they're pursuing the wrong tact, but to say that DRM and locks are useless is just disingenuous.
I think some of the other replies are looking at this the wrong way - it is *not* always the right decision to keep bolting on new functionality to an old and broken infrastructure. Even when the alternative is not shipping anything for X years, that may be a better decision.
*However*, in the case of the internet browser business, this was a bad decision. Why? Because the goodness of a browser isn't based solely on the features it supports, it's based on how widely it's programmed to. In some other situation, it might have made sense to release nothing ... you let the competitor have the market for a few years, then show up with the super-powered new version and everyone switches back. If you've got the capital, make the investment. (Note that this seems to be what MS is doing with Longhorn - check back in 5 years to see how it worked out)
With the browser, however, once Netscape stopped shipping product people stopped using it, and the web went to supporting just IE. The point is just that in the particular case of the browser, because it's not a stand-alone technology but a platform, and so its "goodness" is a function not just of the platform but of what supports it, the rewrite decision was, well, ill-advised. In short, they didn't understand their business.
IIRC, the issue wasn't just that the coffee was too hot. The coffee *was* too hot (as other replies have posted here, you don't actually keep the water at 212 to make coffee, so it should be cooler), but beyond that McDonald's had received similar complaints about the same issue and (roughly) paid them off via settlements. Unsurprisingly, their records of those settlements made it much harder to argue that they didn't know the coffee was too damn hot.
The damages weren't recompense, they were punitive. McDonald's had a documented history of ignoring this issue and people being burned, so the courts encouraged them more formally to fix the problem.
The courts are screwed up in many ways, as I think anyone will agree. However, the perception of how screwed up they are is affected also by the sound-byte culture that's reporting these cases and the 15-second attention spans that're listening. The less information you have, the easier it is to argue that it's stupid/wrong.
True that. Moreover, I loved this quote from the /. blurb:
Talk about writing a pandering review of the book. Isn't this the same guy who hired a PI to dig through the garbage at MS?
Whatever happened to the whole "rest in peace" notion? Let me get this in writing right now: if someone comes diggin' me up in a century or so, I am *so* gonna haunt that guy!
From the parent post, modded +5 Insightful:
Original comment:
WHO THE HELL IS MODDING THESE REGURGITATIONS UP?!
I mean for the love of all that's holy, I appreciate that reading the actual article would be a bit much to expect, but could you at least read the SUMMARY? At least then you'd see the parent post is just a rephrase of the summary. Sheesh.
This was *precisely* the point of the article: that the iPod is a great overall player, but that it can be beaten in particular niche areas by more specialized tools. The parent isn't "insightful" - all he did was understand the point the author was making. Congratulations.
Interesting notion. Let's look at the numbers. According to the article (which you all read), tablets are expected to make up a bit less than 5% of the worldwide laptop market. Pretty small, and not much of a success in the x86 world.
But does anyone remember what Apple's market share looks like? That's right, about 5%. In effect, they're both about the same size niche. Pot, meet kettle.
Hopefully they'll use this law to protect the Do Not Spam list itself. The Fed just needs to bury some innocuous-looking email address in there which goes to a federal mail-server and isn't published anywhere else; if anyone ever emails it, send in the FBI ;)
"We may be terrorists, but our cause is *right*, so it's ok."
Of course, they undoubtedly did think of it, so why do they believe that this is the better way to go?
What you're saying is all true, to a point. Adding additional resources to a single logical processor is extremely effective, but only up to a point. The distinction is between instruction-level parallelism (ILP) and thread-level parallelism (TLP). The key observation is that in "normal" code (meaning we're ignoring the high-performance scientific stuff because that's a different workload to optimize for), there are only so many instructions within a basic block (the instructions between two branches, like if or while statements), before you hit a branch or a jump or the like. You can add resources until you can execute all those instructions within a single block at once, but doubling the chip resources beyond that doesn't help as much.
Now, you add in branch prediction. When we hit a branch, we execute one side of the branch in the hope that that'll be the taken one; that gives you more instructions to have in-flight at once. But note that the resources added there are less effecient, because there's always some probability that the branch will go the other way and the chip will have to discard all that work.
Anyway, you can continue this until you're executing many basic blocks at once, but with diminishing returns - if you mis-predict a branch, you've lost work (sure, you can execute both sides of the branch simultaneously, but there you're just guaranteeing yourself a max of 50% efficiency overall).
The point is just that at some point the benefits of adding additional resources to the chip starts to tail off, and it becomes more beneficial to add ways to run multiple threads at once, either through hyperthreading (which arises out of this same realization, because usually one thread won't use all the chip resources of a physical processor) or multi-core.
Red Hat 9 had 43 security vulnerabilities reported and patched in the first 150 days after it shipped.
No, but admins need to do their *jobs*. The apps are designed for consumers, businesses, everybody - the admins' role is to recognize that and protect themselves accordingly.
Nice sensationalism. The underlying point is that admins have to be aware of the security issues in their deployments and respond accordingly. Do you think having an even mix of Windows, Linux and Apple OS's is going to make that easier for the admins?
The point was that you have to have backups of the *key* elements of the infrastructure. The "diversity" folks have this same issue, because the assumption is that parts will break, and the goal is limiting the damage. Note that having the same functionality replicated by MS, Linux, and OSX is not going to be any cheaper.
It's a build or buy decision - of course you can purchase this as well (and it may be part of the new storage bits in Win2k3). Do you think the diversified solution from Veritas and IBM and EMC is going to be cheaper?
Two issues: First off, the security papers to which he's responding did in fact advocate diversity within a single enterprise. They were claiming that diversity was the right way to secure an enterprise, he's responding to that assertion.
Second, to some extent his arguments apply even when you extend it to inter-organizational security. Many businesses find it necessary to trust other systems from other businesses, and this will only become more true as web services start to make real the early promises of the internet changing the face of commerce (IBM, MS, SUN, whichever flavor of web services you like, they're all predicting something like this). When these systems become interdependent even across organizations, this guy's argument becomes relevant even there.
So don't just dismiss it, find a way to refute it.
Security is a feature, not something built-in that you can assume will be there. The auto industry's done a good job of educating users in this regard with the issue of reliability. Users appreciate that some cars are safer/more reliable than others, that there's a trade-off involved, and value the vehicle appropriately. Compare a Volvo coupe and a Ford mustang to understand what I mean - the Ford is sexier, faster, cheaper, less reliable, and less safe (even without Firestone tires). But _more drivers buy the Mustang than the C70_ (or whatever).
Somebody's undoubtedly going to respond "well, linux can." Bullshit. As Ballmer pointed out, Red Hat 9 had 43 security vulnerabilities in the first 150 days after release - Win Server 2k3 had 4. Yes, they're less serious, etc ... my point is that you can't "just fix all the bugs."
Now what if we point to OpenBSD? Even assuming that there aren't any bugs (and there have been, albeit not remote roots), that's a different sort of product, one with a much longer incubation time and less "new stuff" in each release. You can argue that Windows should do that, pare down the amount of "new stuff" (avoiding the term "innovation") to where it can be fixed ... but the reality is that that's not what customers pay for.
Sadly, that's what it ultimately comes back to - this is a system designed for customers, based on what customers want. Red Hat is a useful comparison in that regard because it's aimed at something closer to the "normal" (in the statistical sense) user.
Something interesting to think about that comes out of this whole issue is that, to some extent, we're hitting a turning point in computing. Users (the "normal" kind) are finally recognizing that they want security. They're pissed, because they hadn't realized that for all these years they've been trading security for features, but nonetheless *that's what the market has supported*.
We're hitting this very interesting inflection point where users are demanding security (and privacy, which is an interesting related point), but it's unclear the extent to which the market will pay for that security. The simplistic counter-argument would suggest that because of the outcry, customers are willing to pay for it ... but that's not really true if you drill down. OpenBSD, as we've discussed, is an option: if customers placed a sufficiently high value on security, they could migrate to OpenBSD. It would be extremely expensive, in hardware and software and (especially) retraining, but it could be done - and it isn't.
It's akin to privacy, where users say they want it, but if you offer them $0.15 back on a gallon of milk they'll gladly sell you that very data. Users say that it's important, but they're not necessarily willing to pay for either privacy or security - they want them both, free, now, without giving up anything. (Yeah, they're "entitled" to them, but you can't retrain your IT staff with entitlements).
Anyway, the point is just that the issue is an order of magnitude more complicated than "just get it right the first time." The sentiment is correct, but the issue itself is too complex for that kind of thinking. I don't mean to give MS a free pass or anything of the kind - the point is to elevate our thinking about the issue, not just fire off our sentiments.
"Your honor, we employed the well-documented 'double-ROT13' encryption algorithm to encode our users' personal information and usage data. The RIAA has willfully and maliciously hacked that encryption scheme, in violation of the DMCA."
Check out the Oakland zoo's little blurb for the size (it was the first reference off a google for "weight african elephant"): http://www.oaklandzoo.org/atoz/azeleph.html
RTFP ("patent") before complaining that it's too vague.
Maybe a better way to look at the article, however, is that that's not really what he's trying to say. That is, it's not that productivity->unemployment. Rather, it's that this productivity widens the gap between those with money and those without. So perhaps his issue is that the big corps are getting bigger, and are able to better leverage the increased productivity gains, thus locking out those under-capitalized firms which cannot afford the same productivity enhancements.
I think that's a much better way of understanding what the guy's arguing; thus, the moral directive he's issuing to the OSS community is not "stop increasing productivity," but "start helping the little guys, as well as just the big guys."
Unless you believe that consumers are magicking up the extra money they're spending on goods online, it seems reasonable to believe that the money now spent online used to be spent at local stores. Consumers are buying the same amount of stuff, but now instead of having 100% of those items taxed, now only 80% of them are taxed (or whatever your number is). That revenue used to exist for the state, and now because of the internet it does not. Sounds suspiciously like "lost" revenue to me ...
This is a legitimate issue for the states. We can go into incredible depth discussing the merits of creating an internet sales tax versus increasing the brick/mortar sales tax versus increasing other state taxes (for example, note that making online purchases tax-free is effectively regressive taxation, since by and large it's the rich who have the technology to avoid the tax by shopping online), but the point is that sales tax is supposed to be a tax on consumption. It's not unreasonable for them to want to enforce that.
I think we all need to stop whining and realize that just because we used to get something for free doesn't mean that we're entitled to get it for free forever (which favorite /. discussion does this remind you of?).
After all, when this does inevitably fail, doesn't it make their story that much stronger when they go to their congressmen and senators explaining how the only way to fight this fire that technology started is with another technology fire? Say, Palladium, et al?
Yeah ... although I think the "infinite monkeys at infinite typewriters" metaphor may be a bit more apt.
As an example, look at the marketing and advertising of Mountain Dew Code Red. The advertising shows a bunch of scenes of the inner city, basketball, various "cool" scenes of black pop culture. Do you think they're really expecting those inner city blacks to drink Mt. Dew Code Red? No - it's not being marketed at them at all. It's being marketed at nerdy white kids who want to think they're "cool" like the inner city blacks depicted. Same thing with beer ads - they don't think it's going to be 95 lb super-models drinking the product, they know that's how to get the 250 lb couch potatoes interested.
This is my first time moderating ... where's the selection for "Paranoid"?
More tellingly, would that be "-1: Paranoid", or "+1: Paranoid"?