MS is not currently a monopoly in the server arena. Further, it is not an absolute monopoly on the desktop. If it bought SCO and won the point of law, it would have a complete monopoly in the desktop and server OS kernel markets. Further, it would be in the position of competing (as the largest player) with those who license its kernel (Sun, IBM, HP, etc.). Suits and countersuits would be flying constantly; I'm not sure that even MS is stupid enough to want that.
Anyway, my main point is that the FTC would never allow MS to purchase SCO, since the combined company would obviously have a monopoly (MS and SCO compete currently). Similarly, they wouldn't allow GM to buy Ford (and they probably would not have allowed GM or Ford to buy Chrysler), because it would create a monopoly in domestic cars. Daimler Benz buying Chrysler was not nearly as much of an issue, since Daimler is a German company and did not have that large a presence in the American car market.
Perhaps, but this kind of test won't measure that. What you are talking about is someone who will come up with a great answer over time. This kind of an interview is too short to allow that. Instead, it rewards those who arrive at a good answer *quickly*. In other words, it values speed over quality.
Your problem solvers will be arriving at a beautiful solution right around the time that they get their "We'll keep your resume on file" letter.
Personally, I think that MS has about as much chance of getting FTC approval to buy SCO as I have of seeing pigs flying down the street. If MS did do so and won the lawsuit, it would prove that it is a monopoly, since it would then own the base patents for all current OSes (the Linuxes, the Unixes, Mac OSX, Windows).
It seems obvious to me (YMMV) why this kind of interview technique would lead to buggy code. These kind of questions attract people who like to solve odd thought puzzles in intriguing ways. The people who will show up best are those who will come up with novel solutions, because a new solution is inherently more interesting than a correct solution. This means that the kind of people who will perform best on this are those who come up with new ideas for existing problems.
New ideas for existing problems can be good. However, proven ideas that are known to solve existing problems are better. Why reinvent the wheel if you don't have to do so?
Perhaps what MS really needs is to come up with an interview process that finds people who can handle the boring and mundane, rather than the new and exciting. The kind of people who can slog through acres of code to find errors and inconsistencies.
In the article it mentions that the main effect of these kind of questions is to get a lot of people with the same mindset. Perhaps MS needs more people with different mindsets who complement each other rather than supplement each other.
The Spamhaus link already doesn't work (at least not for me, YMMV).
What's really amazing isn't that spammers continue to spam but that they continue to find people who are willing to pay them to do so. Have you ever read what an email marketer considers fair results? 2% of the emails you buy will be viewed (viewed meaning that someone actually generated an http request based on the HTML inside). How do they guarantee this? If they fall short, they will.... send more emails.
This is an amazing comment on the ineffectiveness of spam. More than 98% of all spam messages are deleted unseen (or bounced). Of the remaining 2%, some of those were only "viewed" in the sense that they had active focus when the receiver hit delete. Of those that generate actual click-through, how many generate sales?
How stupid does someone have to be to buy an "email marketing campaign?" One could get better results by sending your $1000 to a local charity and putting out a press release.
Look at what record companies are producing now: $17 or $18 CDs of bands that wouldn't have been allowed out of the garage in the 80s. Who is the best guitarist in alternative music? Who knows? Who cares? Alternative music doesn't require technical virtuosity to play. It's all about small acts. The record companies like this because it doesn't lock them in to paying prima donnas like Eddie Van Halen or David Lee Roth the big bucks, but it also means that alternative bands are far more interchangeable and can't demand as much of a premium over other bands.
Eventually, a record company will realize that it would be better off releasing a higher quality product at a lower price, its sales will go through the roof, and everyone else will follow. Until then, we will just have to listen to them whine about file sharing. File sharing is not the problem, price and quality are.
The people who really have something to lose are radio stations. They are a free music delivery mechanism, but why listen to a radio station that only plays music you like some of the time when you can download MP3s and listen to your favorites.
Perhaps the future weakness of the radio station is what really bothers the record companies. Radio stations are their promotion mechanism. Without them, they might have to actually produce a quality product to get people to buy it (instead of just playing it to the point that people feel vaguely uncomfortable when the radio is off because they are so accustomed to the sound of the song).
I think that it would be better to focus on server side protocol changes. The author of qmail hosts this site that talks about on alternate protocol to SMTP. Note that this would be entirely a server side change (it would affect relations between mail servers, while leaving existing protocols for client/server communication).
I sent you (Larry Seltzer) an email. Instead of using expensive certificates, I propose that we add a new type of record to DNS (call it an smtp record for now, someone can always come up with a better name later). The new record would tell what IPs (or FQDNs) are allowed to send email with a certain domain. For example, if an email address is me@slashdot.org, then only mail servers with SMTP records for slashdot.org would be allowed to send an email from me@slashdot.org. If a different mail server tries to send it, the receiving server can refuse the email.
Also check out tmda.net. It uses a number of methods to prevent spam, including temporary addresses and whitelists built by challenges (and client actions). Unlike the previous two proposals, this requires client changes (on the receiver's side), but it does not require others to change the protocols they use. Except for the challenges, senders and intermediary servers do not even need to know it exists.
All three of these proposals could be started more simply and with less additional infrastructure than the certificate idea. The first two require changes to the way things are currently done, but only on the server side. The third is even simpler, only the receiver has to make changes (btw, these are both client and server changes).
It's harder to compromise the machine and access your data. However, if you are a basic home user, then you probably aren't running any services (web server, email server, DNS server, etc.) that would cause you to be vulnerable to attack. This kind of initiative makes it harder to use a connection to a computer to compromise it. If your computer doesn't have any services that answer connections, then it can't be compromised. Thus, for a home user, this probably doesn't do much for you.
You might want to look at the Debian Desktop project or check out LindowsOS or Xandros. They are more targeted towards home users than this (or than straight Debian for that matter). The stable versions of Debian are primarily aimed at servers. Unstable and testing are geared towards techies and developers.
There are also several other distros that are not based on Debian that are aimed more towards home users. Debian has an advantage here, however, since they have apt-get to manage package dependencies, downloads, and installs.
They are not complaining because the software license cannot be altered. The complaint is that the *content* cannot be altered (under certain circumstances). In particular, one cannot excerpt documentation covered by the offending provisions to use in summaries, etc. This is actually more restrictive than most commercial copyrights, which specifically allow for excerpts in "fair use."
If they applied the same terms to the GPL that they apply to the documentation license, modified code would have to include the *complete* original source code in original form in the *same* file (not in a different file and definitely not in a separate directory). Contrast that with what Debian normally does: they put the modified code in one place, the original code in a different place, and the diff file as well.
Traditionally, the important part is to make sure that the original code and the license are available. This license would mandate that the code be *integrated*. An example of what can happen:
---begin first file--- vi has a steep learning curve but is very powerful and works on almost any *nix system. emacs is very flexible, allowing users to add elisp snippets that modify behavior in small or large ways. ---end first file; begin second file--- vi has a steep learning curve but is very powerful and works on almost any *nix system. Original file said: vi has a steep learning curve but is very powerful and works on almost any *nix system. emacs is very flexible, allowing users to add elisp snippets that modify behavior in small or large ways. ---end second file---
Note that the second file has to include the entire section about emacs, even though its discussion might be limited to vi (where the first might have been contrasting vi and emacs). One can derive even more annoying cases when creating GUI front ends to multi-featured command line programs. Say you made a GUI frontend for DVD burning for a program that could do both CD and DVD burning. If the documentation used the offending provisions in the GFDL, one would have to discuss CD burning in a program that does not support it.
This is not to say that there is nothing good that can be said about the GFDL. It is trying to avoid the problem of people misquoting others. Unfortunately, IMO, it goes too far and renders documentation using it considerably less than freely reusable. Particularly in its limitations on excerpting, which can be an important tool.
Is it just me, or did everyone wonder if the best way to "fight bad guys" with TRS-80s would be to give them the stupid things. Oh, the joys of booting off floppy that was actually, well, floppy.
Those were the days, you could make your disk double sided by cutting out the write protect area with a pair of scissors.
Buying out your competitors because you can't compete may be immoral, but there is nothing wrong with it from a public relations standpoint (obviously, you are a thriving business; otherwise, you could not afford to buy out your competitors; if anything, it reinforces your brand name). In regards to abuse of monopoly power, obviously that occurs *after* widespread acceptance (a monopoly is pretty widespread).
SPAMming is harassment and runs right along the line of being illegal. Not to mention that it is immature. Stupid, criminal, and backbiting is not the kind of image that the open source movement needs. These kind of things reinforce the image that outsiders have of open source as a bunch of immature kids who will give up all this stuff when they grow up and get real jobs.
Why are these mutually exclusive? Why can't they add support for more memory and improve Graffiti at the same time? It's not like you can take an engineer who can change the hardware and OS to support more memory and just have them start coding a heavily AI based app like writing recognition.
Real companies work at improving all their products at the same time.
These PDA phones really need an earpiece/microphone attachment. Leave the PDA hooked to your belt or in your purse; just hook the earpiece to your ear and yak away. This would also allow you to look at the PDA while talking, which can be convenient if you keep your appointments in it...
just not in money. All these projects were bought with code. It's nice of the people who bought them to make them freely available to others, but they weren't free. Unfortunately, you'll never see the open source model extend to the desktop.
One problem is that developers don't need the same kind of tools that users do. A developer skilled enough to write an interface that correctly configures the X server will probably find it *easier* to do so with vi, rather than accept the limitations of a GUI interface (remember, one advantage of a GUI is that it restricts your choices so that you don't have to avoid the unworkable alternatives--it just won't let you choose them). Why would someone develop a product that they will never use?
Another problem is that properly written GUI tools eliminate the need for support. Since GPLed software is free (like we wish beer was), there is no profit in making GUI tools. Fortunately, some hobbyists are nice enough to contribute, so there are some tools. However, the GUI tool supply for the clueless is woefully inadequate at this point.
I'm not familiar with Zope, so I won't try to discuss it. Knoppix is simply an example linux distro; it's an excellent product because linux is. The GIMP is software made by developers to accomplish tasks that they could not do otherwise. It is one of the great open source achievements, particularly since there is not a great support market for it, AFAIK. OpenOffice (my addition to your list) is great, but it primarily exists because Sun needs for people to be able to migrate from MS products (java exists for the same reason). Similarly, Python is a tool to make it easier for developers to create code. Unsurprisingly, it gets developer support. The remaining three (Linux, Apache, and MySQL) are all server software and they make their money from configuration and support. Developers have to keep them supplied with code in order to be able to bill for configuration and support.
The server side is great for open source because the main cost of a server is the support. The free version (without support) acts as a demo for the pay version with support. Sufficient users choose to pay and get the support (or pay simply to support the software), that they don't have to worry about freeloaders. Unfortunately, this is not working on the desktop side.
Red Hat and other server distros do not make a great effort to get installed at the desktop level. A major reason for this is that it's not profitable. Xandros and Lindows.com are both losing money (insufficient volume to support their staffs). Lycoris is making enough money to support its four people but is struggling to stay current (now that KDE 3.2 is out, they are almost ready to release a new version with KDE 3.0).
This could also help when the 1% (actually, I think that figure might be high) who want to run their own mail server try to talk to AOL, since AOL blocks port 25 packets from residential ISP customers.
If you can show them that only responsible people will be allowed to use mail servers, then they may not find it necessary to block any of your IPs. I think that will also require giving the mail server people static IPs, but that's probably better anyway (saves playing with dynamic DNS).
If they can only use their own servers, we can blacklist those servers. If they can switch servers at will, there is no point in blacklisting servers. This is why they don't use their own servers now. Not to reduce resources (using proxies takes more resources than not using proxies) but to hide their identity.
He needs to file because he is a C-corp. For his individual taxes, he can do them himself with little fear of liability (so long as he doesn't try any iffy deductions). However, with the C-corp, he needs to file (and is late unless he can use a different calendar year, yet another reason to hire an accountant). The accountant fees are another cost that he can carryover as a loss against revenue in future years.
That says that he is incorporated as a C-corporation, and everything your parent said was relevant. Unlike your post, which should be modded down for failure to RTFP.
Slashdot Mirror
MS is not currently a monopoly in the server arena. Further, it is not an absolute monopoly on the desktop. If it bought SCO and won the point of law, it would have a complete monopoly in the desktop and server OS kernel markets. Further, it would be in the position of competing (as the largest player) with those who license its kernel (Sun, IBM, HP, etc.). Suits and countersuits would be flying constantly; I'm not sure that even MS is stupid enough to want that.
Anyway, my main point is that the FTC would never allow MS to purchase SCO, since the combined company would obviously have a monopoly (MS and SCO compete currently). Similarly, they wouldn't allow GM to buy Ford (and they probably would not have allowed GM or Ford to buy Chrysler), because it would create a monopoly in domestic cars. Daimler Benz buying Chrysler was not nearly as much of an issue, since Daimler is a German company and did not have that large a presence in the American car market.
Perhaps, but this kind of test won't measure that. What you are talking about is someone who will come up with a great answer over time. This kind of an interview is too short to allow that. Instead, it rewards those who arrive at a good answer *quickly*. In other words, it values speed over quality.
Your problem solvers will be arriving at a beautiful solution right around the time that they get their "We'll keep your resume on file" letter.
Personally, I think that MS has about as much chance of getting FTC approval to buy SCO as I have of seeing pigs flying down the street. If MS did do so and won the lawsuit, it would prove that it is a monopoly, since it would then own the base patents for all current OSes (the Linuxes, the Unixes, Mac OSX, Windows).
It would be like GM trying to buy Ford.
It seems obvious to me (YMMV) why this kind of interview technique would lead to buggy code. These kind of questions attract people who like to solve odd thought puzzles in intriguing ways. The people who will show up best are those who will come up with novel solutions, because a new solution is inherently more interesting than a correct solution. This means that the kind of people who will perform best on this are those who come up with new ideas for existing problems.
New ideas for existing problems can be good. However, proven ideas that are known to solve existing problems are better. Why reinvent the wheel if you don't have to do so?
Perhaps what MS really needs is to come up with an interview process that finds people who can handle the boring and mundane, rather than the new and exciting. The kind of people who can slog through acres of code to find errors and inconsistencies.
In the article it mentions that the main effect of these kind of questions is to get a lot of people with the same mindset. Perhaps MS needs more people with different mindsets who complement each other rather than supplement each other.
The Spamhaus link already doesn't work (at least not for me, YMMV).
.... send more emails.
What's really amazing isn't that spammers continue to spam but that they continue to find people who are willing to pay them to do so. Have you ever read what an email marketer considers fair results? 2% of the emails you buy will be viewed (viewed meaning that someone actually generated an http request based on the HTML inside). How do they guarantee this? If they fall short, they will
This is an amazing comment on the ineffectiveness of spam. More than 98% of all spam messages are deleted unseen (or bounced). Of the remaining 2%, some of those were only "viewed" in the sense that they had active focus when the receiver hit delete. Of those that generate actual click-through, how many generate sales?
How stupid does someone have to be to buy an "email marketing campaign?" One could get better results by sending your $1000 to a local charity and putting out a press release.
Spam --- built on ignorance and stupidity.
Look at what record companies are producing now: $17 or $18 CDs of bands that wouldn't have been allowed out of the garage in the 80s. Who is the best guitarist in alternative music? Who knows? Who cares? Alternative music doesn't require technical virtuosity to play. It's all about small acts. The record companies like this because it doesn't lock them in to paying prima donnas like Eddie Van Halen or David Lee Roth the big bucks, but it also means that alternative bands are far more interchangeable and can't demand as much of a premium over other bands.
Eventually, a record company will realize that it would be better off releasing a higher quality product at a lower price, its sales will go through the roof, and everyone else will follow. Until then, we will just have to listen to them whine about file sharing. File sharing is not the problem, price and quality are.
The people who really have something to lose are radio stations. They are a free music delivery mechanism, but why listen to a radio station that only plays music you like some of the time when you can download MP3s and listen to your favorites.
Perhaps the future weakness of the radio station is what really bothers the record companies. Radio stations are their promotion mechanism. Without them, they might have to actually produce a quality product to get people to buy it (instead of just playing it to the point that people feel vaguely uncomfortable when the radio is off because they are so accustomed to the sound of the song).
I think that it would be better to focus on server side protocol changes. The author of qmail hosts this site that talks about on alternate protocol to SMTP. Note that this would be entirely a server side change (it would affect relations between mail servers, while leaving existing protocols for client/server communication).
I sent you (Larry Seltzer) an email. Instead of using expensive certificates, I propose that we add a new type of record to DNS (call it an smtp record for now, someone can always come up with a better name later). The new record would tell what IPs (or FQDNs) are allowed to send email with a certain domain. For example, if an email address is me@slashdot.org, then only mail servers with SMTP records for slashdot.org would be allowed to send an email from me@slashdot.org. If a different mail server tries to send it, the receiving server can refuse the email.
Also check out tmda.net. It uses a number of methods to prevent spam, including temporary addresses and whitelists built by challenges (and client actions). Unlike the previous two proposals, this requires client changes (on the receiver's side), but it does not require others to change the protocols they use. Except for the challenges, senders and intermediary servers do not even need to know it exists.
All three of these proposals could be started more simply and with less additional infrastructure than the certificate idea. The first two require changes to the way things are currently done, but only on the server side. The third is even simpler, only the receiver has to make changes (btw, these are both client and server changes).
It's harder to compromise the machine and access your data. However, if you are a basic home user, then you probably aren't running any services (web server, email server, DNS server, etc.) that would cause you to be vulnerable to attack. This kind of initiative makes it harder to use a connection to a computer to compromise it. If your computer doesn't have any services that answer connections, then it can't be compromised. Thus, for a home user, this probably doesn't do much for you.
You might want to look at the Debian Desktop project or check out LindowsOS or Xandros. They are more targeted towards home users than this (or than straight Debian for that matter). The stable versions of Debian are primarily aimed at servers. Unstable and testing are geared towards techies and developers.
There are also several other distros that are not based on Debian that are aimed more towards home users. Debian has an advantage here, however, since they have apt-get to manage package dependencies, downloads, and installs.
They are not complaining because the software license cannot be altered. The complaint is that the *content* cannot be altered (under certain circumstances). In particular, one cannot excerpt documentation covered by the offending provisions to use in summaries, etc. This is actually more restrictive than most commercial copyrights, which specifically allow for excerpts in "fair use."
If they applied the same terms to the GPL that they apply to the documentation license, modified code would have to include the *complete* original source code in original form in the *same* file (not in a different file and definitely not in a separate directory). Contrast that with what Debian normally does: they put the modified code in one place, the original code in a different place, and the diff file as well.
Traditionally, the important part is to make sure that the original code and the license are available. This license would mandate that the code be *integrated*. An example of what can happen:
---begin first file---
vi has a steep learning curve but is very powerful and works on almost any *nix system.
emacs is very flexible, allowing users to add elisp snippets that modify behavior in small or large ways.
---end first file; begin second file---
vi has a steep learning curve but is very powerful and works on almost any *nix system.
Original file said:
vi has a steep learning curve but is very powerful and works on almost any *nix system.
emacs is very flexible, allowing users to add elisp snippets that modify behavior in small or large ways.
---end second file---
Note that the second file has to include the entire section about emacs, even though its discussion might be limited to vi (where the first might have been contrasting vi and emacs). One can derive even more annoying cases when creating GUI front ends to multi-featured command line programs. Say you made a GUI frontend for DVD burning for a program that could do both CD and DVD burning. If the documentation used the offending provisions in the GFDL, one would have to discuss CD burning in a program that does not support it.
This is not to say that there is nothing good that can be said about the GFDL. It is trying to avoid the problem of people misquoting others. Unfortunately, IMO, it goes too far and renders documentation using it considerably less than freely reusable. Particularly in its limitations on excerpting, which can be an important tool.
Is it just me, or did everyone wonder if the best way to "fight bad guys" with TRS-80s would be to give them the stupid things. Oh, the joys of booting off floppy that was actually, well, floppy.
Those were the days, you could make your disk double sided by cutting out the write protect area with a pair of scissors.
Buying out your competitors because you can't compete may be immoral, but there is nothing wrong with it from a public relations standpoint (obviously, you are a thriving business; otherwise, you could not afford to buy out your competitors; if anything, it reinforces your brand name). In regards to abuse of monopoly power, obviously that occurs *after* widespread acceptance (a monopoly is pretty widespread).
SPAMming is harassment and runs right along the line of being illegal. Not to mention that it is immature. Stupid, criminal, and backbiting is not the kind of image that the open source movement needs. These kind of things reinforce the image that outsiders have of open source as a bunch of immature kids who will give up all this stuff when they grow up and get real jobs.
--Matt
Why are these mutually exclusive? Why can't they add support for more memory and improve Graffiti at the same time? It's not like you can take an engineer who can change the hardware and OS to support more memory and just have them start coding a heavily AI based app like writing recognition.
Real companies work at improving all their products at the same time.
These PDA phones really need an earpiece/microphone attachment. Leave the PDA hooked to your belt or in your purse; just hook the earpiece to your ear and yak away. This would also allow you to look at the PDA while talking, which can be convenient if you keep your appointments in it...
just not in money. All these projects were bought with code. It's nice of the people who bought them to make them freely available to others, but they weren't free. Unfortunately, you'll never see the open source model extend to the desktop. One problem is that developers don't need the same kind of tools that users do. A developer skilled enough to write an interface that correctly configures the X server will probably find it *easier* to do so with vi, rather than accept the limitations of a GUI interface (remember, one advantage of a GUI is that it restricts your choices so that you don't have to avoid the unworkable alternatives--it just won't let you choose them). Why would someone develop a product that they will never use? Another problem is that properly written GUI tools eliminate the need for support. Since GPLed software is free (like we wish beer was), there is no profit in making GUI tools. Fortunately, some hobbyists are nice enough to contribute, so there are some tools. However, the GUI tool supply for the clueless is woefully inadequate at this point. I'm not familiar with Zope, so I won't try to discuss it. Knoppix is simply an example linux distro; it's an excellent product because linux is. The GIMP is software made by developers to accomplish tasks that they could not do otherwise. It is one of the great open source achievements, particularly since there is not a great support market for it, AFAIK. OpenOffice (my addition to your list) is great, but it primarily exists because Sun needs for people to be able to migrate from MS products (java exists for the same reason). Similarly, Python is a tool to make it easier for developers to create code. Unsurprisingly, it gets developer support. The remaining three (Linux, Apache, and MySQL) are all server software and they make their money from configuration and support. Developers have to keep them supplied with code in order to be able to bill for configuration and support. The server side is great for open source because the main cost of a server is the support. The free version (without support) acts as a demo for the pay version with support. Sufficient users choose to pay and get the support (or pay simply to support the software), that they don't have to worry about freeloaders. Unfortunately, this is not working on the desktop side. Red Hat and other server distros do not make a great effort to get installed at the desktop level. A major reason for this is that it's not profitable. Xandros and Lindows.com are both losing money (insufficient volume to support their staffs). Lycoris is making enough money to support its four people but is struggling to stay current (now that KDE 3.2 is out, they are almost ready to release a new version with KDE 3.0).
This could also help when the 1% (actually, I think that figure might be high) who want to run their own mail server try to talk to AOL, since AOL blocks port 25 packets from residential ISP customers.
If you can show them that only responsible people will be allowed to use mail servers, then they may not find it necessary to block any of your IPs. I think that will also require giving the mail server people static IPs, but that's probably better anyway (saves playing with dynamic DNS).
If they can only use their own servers, we can blacklist those servers. If they can switch servers at will, there is no point in blacklisting servers. This is why they don't use their own servers now. Not to reduce resources (using proxies takes more resources than not using proxies) but to hide their identity.
He needs to file because he is a C-corp. For his individual taxes, he can do them himself with little fear of liability (so long as he doesn't try any iffy deductions). However, with the C-corp, he needs to file (and is late unless he can use a different calendar year, yet another reason to hire an accountant). The accountant fees are another cost that he can carryover as a loss against revenue in future years.
RTFP: "(C-corp, don't ask why...)"
That says that he is incorporated as a C-corporation, and everything your parent said was relevant. Unlike your post, which should be modded down for failure to RTFP.