We've had neutrality for a long time with no regulatory body enforcing it.
Not so, not at all. In the early days of the internet, the "backbone" of the internet was provided by the Department of Defense and the various non-profits (mostly universities and non-profits) who ran the internet day-to-day embedded "net neutrality" into the basic protocols of the internet.
When the government decided to turn the backbone over to be run by private firms, the FCC explicitly required net neutrality as a condition of that decision. Only very recently did the FCC change that rule (2005, I believe). When the rule changed, telecomms started to float the idea of creating different "tiers" of service, where content-providers would bid to have traffic on the "good" tier.
It is that suggestion that has led to an attempt to restore the old (original) rules; this time via legislation.
I might add that no current electronic system lets folks walk away with their paper ballot (the ballot is instead kept at the polling place in a "ballot box.") In some cases the voter doesn't even touch the paper ballot, but sees it behind plastic and approves it before it drops into a box.
So I agree with you, but the issue isn't on the table. (Yeah, you probably knew that.)
You are arguing that the existance of a paper record would result in all elections being recounted. This is false. The point of an electronic system with paper ballots is to provide very quick results in most cases while still allowing for recounts and audits in special cases. At least one state requires electronic machines with paper ballots, and it works well, so your concern is misplaced. There are rules for recounts and audits, they don't just happen.
But without paper ballots, a significant fraction of the population will lose confidence in election results. (Go over to the dailykos blog if you don't believe me.)
With paper ballots, false concerns about elections can be rejected as false and this increases confidence in our democracy. What is do bad about that?
The article makes the point that Tivo's software is much better than the competitors. Even if the standalone box business dies (and it probably will), the company will do well as a supplier of software to integrated cable/satelite boxes.
I recently read that this was the original idea of the company: the standalone boxes were supposed to tide the company over until the emergence of the all-in-one set-top box market.
They have something like 3.5 million subscribers who are loyal and will stick around for awhile. At $12.95 a month, that is some real cash-flow to keep the software improvements coming.
Folks are giving you way too simplistic answers about debt versus equity. The only correct, simple answer is that there is no simple answer.
Some are saying that debt is better than equity because interest rates are lower on debt. If this were true, all companies would issue only debt, no equity. In fact, shareholders share the risk of the company much more than debtholders and this compensates for the higher (on average) rates of return. The comparison is not obvious at all.
In the end, I don't think that SCO is going to try to invalidate the entire GPL license; they know (or will quickly realize) that would leave them in a bad spot.
I think they are going to try to restrict the interpretations of some sections. For example, they want to invalidate IBM's counter-claim that they gave up any right to sue when they continued to distribute the GPL'd code. IANAL, but courts in the past have restricted the interpretation of licenses (such as ruling against certain parts of EULAs). On very narrow grounds, SCO might have some chance to "clarify" the GPL in their own direction.
Yes, the lesson is: don't buy a propriatary app without a 3rd party source-code escrow agreement. That was figured out around 1965.
So, you have a contract that specifies software escrow. And when the company goes bankrupt and you find the source is not in escrow (or not all of the source is in escrow, or there is third-party IP in the escrowed source, or...):
who are you going to sue?
An escrow agreement is likely to be enforceable right up until the moment you need it.
The difference with open source is that you have the source in hand now and so if the company disappears you don't have to sue a non-existant entity to get the code.
>> "13$ a month is more than fair to watch tv on their own schedule, as opposed to having to sit down at prime time"
Gee, I've been doing that with my VCR since 1984.
Well, it is $13/month versus your time. Your time to keep track of which show is on which tape, to rewind/FF to the beginning of the right show, to figure out how to tape over shows you watch and so forth. Your comment is like an really old-time PC user saying "why would I want a disk drive when I can save to cassette tape?" It is true you can save to tape, but disk drives are a lot more convenient.
You say the "Hulk" must be making money because of a $131 million gross to date and record (for June) first weekend sales?
Well, check the website you link to. Production costs alone were $120 million. Add to that tens of millions in marketing costs and the movie is still in the red. Also, your site says that it brought in $62 million dollars the first weekend, which means it dropped very quickly after that. It is quite possible that bad word-of-mouth during and after the first weekend helped to kill the profits of that movie. Not so incredible!
I think most of the discussion is missing the main points of the article. One point is that linux only has to get to 3 or 4% of the market to surpass Apple -- and to do that, it doesn't have to be better than Apple at what Apple does best.
The second point is that you can't get an Apple PC for $300. Yeah, I know that *you* and all the current Apple fanatics are willing to pay for the Apple experience, but if only 4% of the total market disagrees, then Linux "pulls ahead".
Who will that market be? Tech-savy cheapshakes. Extremely poor folks who only want e-mail on Netscape. Engineers working at home. A (few) corporations with simple and standard software requirements that just happen, in their case, to run on Linux.
Now, do these folks add up to 4% of the market? I don't know, but arguments like "current Apple users won't switch" or "my grandma won't switch" don't have much to do with it.
Our cage is next to theirs.. then [they] moved to a newer, more elegant system from [rackable.com]
This is rated "5" at the moment. Now think for moment:
Our CAGE is next to theirs? The remote "cage" where Google keeps 54,000 machines ??!! (As opposed to the 4 Google-owned buildings in the text of the original post?)
I don't know, but I suspect that the title of the high-rated post to which I am replying ought to be "AstroTurf Ad from the folks at Rackable.Com"
Most of the discussion here is about how Linux won't be "ready for the desktop until my favorite App(s) are running on Linux."
Think about the way linux has grown as a server. From very specialized applications (five years or so ago: "did you hear XX company runs Linux as a print server??? wow!") to more and more general applications.
Right now Linux on the desktop is great for some fairly specialized folks. On one side, if you are an engineer/scientist who has always run a Unix workstation (hey, my "wordprocessor" has always been LaTex edited by Xemacs), then desktop Linux has been great for years. On the other end, if you want a locked-down machine that only browses and checks for e-mail, Linux is currently great.
The trick is to broaden the appeal of desktop Linux out in incremental steps. Get the administrative assistants at the engineering firm running Star Office on Linux and get rid of windows at an otherwise Unix shop. Some departments need only browser, e-mail and an decent Excel clone. Done. Some departments need to set up meetings on a firm-level Exchange server. Not 100% done yet, but already good enough for some and as it gets better a few more will switch.
The point is, think incrementally, think about heterogenous users and don't fall into the all or nothing trap. If Linus had listened to "it isn't ready until it runs on 64 processor machines", he never would have started.
Wired had an article [wired.com] last year about British Telephone's lawsuit against Prodigy for violating their patent on hyperlinks. So who really owns this patent?
No, they tried to patent the very concept of hyperlinking (they failed). This patent is an attempt to patent a particular kind of link. So the prior art needed is more specific. Others on the page seem to have some good examples, but a reference, for example, to "Hypercard" is not enough until you discuss the specific elements of the prior that match up to the earlier patent.
I'm still worried about the whole idea that the law applies in Russia, though.
I see this comment a lot and it is not fair. No one claims that the law applies "in Russia". The prosecution argument was, first, that the software was offered for sale to US customers. They could have put on a button on their website that said, "I certify I am not a resident of the US", or even "I certify that this sofware is legal in my place of residence," but they didn't. Second, they supposedly used a US payment clearing firm for their web transactions. This alone is probably enough for them to come under US law. But even the prosecution didn't claim that the law applies "in Russia."
As an analogy, imagine a firm that operated in Russia, but shipped illegal drugs into the US. They clearly violate US law.
Now, under the judges instructions, perhaps the jury found it sufficient that they didn't specifically intend to sell the software to folks in the US, but more likely the jury was impressed that they didn't specifically intend for it to be used to violate copyright.
IANAL and none of this is intended as a defense of the DMCA, which is a horrible law.
If it's free, then why does anyone care what Microsoft does?
The problem is Monopoly plus network effects. And the argument doesn't rely on consumers being dumb. (I have a Ph.D. in Economics, by the way.)
Here is why I care what MS does with file formats, including possible competitors to PDF. Many folks want to use Office. Fine. MS bundles a new file format with office. OK. Now they send the files to me. Uh-oh. I am now either a jerk who makes them send files in a different format or else I just give in and buy Office myself (this is the network effect.) I pay $800 not because I like the software, but because I need to work with those who use Office.
Now I am one less customer for Adobe and the network effect is bigger (because of the folks who now have to share files with me.)
And the kicker: with demand dropping, Adobe goes out of business, the PDF file format is no longer improved. Demand for Office increases and MS, not being stupid, raises the price of Office.
Almost everyone, except MS, is now worse off as compared to the situation where we had a "open" file format.
So, do you understand the argument now? No consumer was being stupid, as you claim and yet all the consumers are worse off. This is standard graduate-level network economics, it is not like I am making it up as I go along.
It would be burdensome to expect a mail order operation, doing business across the country, to be familiar with the hundreds, if not thousands, of local tax jurisdictions and which apply to any given transaction.
Or rather, it would be a good argument if the states were not offering to provide, for free, a simple piece of computer code that would translate a customer's address into an appropriate tax rate. I am sure they are also willing to provide a clearing house to collect the payments and then redistribute them to the states.
Your argument was a good one in the days before computers, which is why out-of-state catalog sales did not have to withhold taxes. Now, the complexity argument is easily overcome.
It is a fundamental notion of economics that taxes ought to distort behavior as little as possible. The current tax regime favors catalog sales over on-site retail sales, for no good reason, and that ought to change.
This is being touted as an Exchange killer, yet it costs $1249 for 10 licenses?
You are comparing, I think, a discounted web price for an Exchange upgrade with a list price for Suse. Suse will also discount, everybody does. Also, others have posted that Suse is charging per connected user, rather than the total number of users who ever connect (if I understand the other posts.) This will make a difference. Further, if you need to upgrade other software (MS OS, Office) and the only thing holding you up from going to Linux / OpenOffice is Exchange, then Suse's OpenExchange prices might not have to be far below the MS price.
However, if Suse really undercuts pricing, MS could always increase its discounts until SuSe's commercial offering goes away. This is a big advantage of true open source -- it can't be priced out of the market.
The problem here really is the definition of open. The MS-Office file formats could be called "open" because: [i] there is a published spec and [ii] there are multiple software packages that claim to both read and write them (WordPerfect Suite, OpenOffice, etc.)
Now slashdotters will claim, correctly, that the spec is incomplete and constantly changing and that the other software packages aren't 100% compatible. But MS has mucho lobbying muscle and the "State Commission on Open File Formats" will approve MS-Office formats, trust me.
"Sincere Choice" will become the "Sincere Status-Quo" pretty quickly.
"So Wal-Mart figures they can save $100-$200 on each computer sale by putting on Mandrake and probably Open Office"
Thats a complete and utter load of bull crap. $200? Hardly. Hardly. Hardly. Assuming that Mandrake is giving them the OS for free (and I dont know that we can do that, but lets go with it anyways), they'd probably be saving between $40 and $80 a unit . . . YOU'VE ALWAYS BEEN ABLE TO GET CHEAP HARDWARE. why this whole crap about the "Windows Tax". Its a lie, a myth!
Wow, you are a little worked up, huh?
You imply that a $40-$80 dollars savings is approximately nothing, but at this price level that is hardly true, it is 10-20% of the cost of the whole bundle. Walmart won't do this if Windows was close enough to free so as not to matter.
Also, while you, Mr. Sophisticated Computer Guy, may have known how to buy a bare computer, the average Joe hasn't and having these computers at WalMart is a way (perhaps the first way) for Mr. Joe to avoid the cost of MS software (i.e. the colorfully named "Windows Tax").
Credit cards are not the major problem. If you get scammed online, you can get a refund from Visa. A bit of work, but not a huge deal, and it is not very common. (Visa kicks out merchants who scam.)
The real problem is not going to go away: will the merchant ship my order in a correct and timely fashion? This is the *exact* same problem faced by the old "mail-order catalog" business. That business is over a hundred years old and the problem still persists, reputation matters a lot.
How to fulfill orders promptly and correctly is a *huge* difficult problem, involving massive automation, computerization, use of bar codes, etc.
When you buy a new car, you know that it will have a resale value when you are done with it. You are more likely to buy a car with a good resale value.
(This is often given as a reason to buy a Honda, for example.)
If I know that I can resell my newly purchased book when I am done, then that new book is cheaper for me to buy. Once folks get used to it, this may help to increase new book sales.
Also, publishers may start charging more for new books, to help reflect their increased resale value.
It is actually pretty hard to predict how this all turns out in the long run.
Most comments here, following the title of the orginal post, are focusing on the "license" to the tech specs, which is a minor problem.
The real problem is that MS is claiming a patent on the underlying technology. They are offering a royalty-free license to non-GPL software. This is hard for GPL software to get around.
Does anyone understand what is being patented? Does it look like a valid patent -- I never got the feeling that this technology was particularly innovative.
Slashdot Mirror
Evidence that we probably shouldn't put the FCC in charge again, since they already dropped the ball once.
Well, you are in luck, since the net neutrality legislation doesn't leave the decision in the hands of the FCC in again!
We've had neutrality for a long time with no regulatory body enforcing it.
Not so, not at all. In the early days of the internet, the "backbone" of the internet was provided by the Department of Defense and the various non-profits (mostly universities and non-profits) who ran the internet day-to-day embedded "net neutrality" into the basic protocols of the internet.
When the government decided to turn the backbone over to be run by private firms, the FCC explicitly required net neutrality as a condition of that decision. Only very recently did the FCC change that rule (2005, I believe). When the rule changed, telecomms started to float the idea of creating different "tiers" of service, where content-providers would bid to have traffic on the "good" tier.
It is that suggestion that has led to an attempt to restore the old (original) rules; this time via legislation.
Susan Estrich refers to herself as a "token liberal" on Fox; I think that makes the status of liberals on Fox pretty clear.
I might add that no current electronic system lets folks walk away with their paper ballot (the ballot is instead kept at the polling place in a "ballot box.") In some cases the voter doesn't even touch the paper ballot, but sees it behind plastic and approves it before it drops into a box.
So I agree with you, but the issue isn't on the table. (Yeah, you probably knew that.)
You are arguing that the existance of a paper record would result in all elections being recounted. This is false. The point of an electronic system with paper ballots is to provide very quick results in most cases while still allowing for recounts and audits in special cases. At least one state requires electronic machines with paper ballots, and it works well, so your concern is misplaced. There are rules for recounts and audits, they don't just happen.
But without paper ballots, a significant fraction of the population will lose confidence in election results. (Go over to the dailykos blog if you don't believe me.)
With paper ballots, false concerns about elections can be rejected as false and this increases confidence in our democracy. What is do bad about that?
The article makes the point that Tivo's software is much better than the competitors. Even if the standalone box business dies (and it probably will), the company will do well as a supplier of software to integrated cable/satelite boxes.
I recently read that this was the original idea of the company: the standalone boxes were supposed to tide the company over until the emergence of the all-in-one set-top box market.
They have something like 3.5 million subscribers who are loyal and will stick around for awhile. At $12.95 a month, that is some real cash-flow to keep the software improvements coming.
Folks are giving you way too simplistic answers about debt versus equity. The only correct, simple answer is that there is no simple answer. Some are saying that debt is better than equity because interest rates are lower on debt. If this were true, all companies would issue only debt, no equity. In fact, shareholders share the risk of the company much more than debtholders and this compensates for the higher (on average) rates of return. The comparison is not obvious at all.
I think they are going to try to restrict the interpretations of some sections. For example, they want to invalidate IBM's counter-claim that they gave up any right to sue when they continued to distribute the GPL'd code. IANAL, but courts in the past have restricted the interpretation of licenses (such as ruling against certain parts of EULAs). On very narrow grounds, SCO might have some chance to "clarify" the GPL in their own direction.
Yes, the lesson is: don't buy a propriatary app without a 3rd party source-code escrow agreement. That was figured out around 1965.
So, you have a contract that specifies software escrow. And when the company goes bankrupt and you find the source is not in escrow (or not all of the source is in escrow, or there is third-party IP in the escrowed source, or ...):
who are you going to sue?
An escrow agreement is likely to be enforceable right up until the moment you need it.
The difference with open source is that you have the source in hand now and so if the company disappears you don't have to sue a non-existant entity to get the code.
Well, it is $13/month versus your time. Your time to keep track of which show is on which tape, to rewind/FF to the beginning of the right show, to figure out how to tape over shows you watch and so forth. Your comment is like an really old-time PC user saying "why would I want a disk drive when I can save to cassette tape?" It is true you can save to tape, but disk drives are a lot more convenient.
Your choice.
Well, check the website you link to. Production costs alone were $120 million. Add to that tens of millions in marketing costs and the movie is still in the red. Also, your site says that it brought in $62 million dollars the first weekend, which means it dropped very quickly after that. It is quite possible that bad word-of-mouth during and after the first weekend helped to kill the profits of that movie. Not so incredible!
I think most of the discussion is missing the main points of the article. One point is that linux only has to get to 3 or 4% of the market to surpass Apple -- and to do that, it doesn't have to be better than Apple at what Apple does best.
The second point is that you can't get an Apple PC for $300. Yeah, I know that *you* and all the current Apple fanatics are willing to pay for the Apple experience, but if only 4% of the total market disagrees, then Linux "pulls ahead".
Who will that market be? Tech-savy cheapshakes. Extremely poor folks who only want e-mail on Netscape. Engineers working at home. A (few) corporations with simple and standard software requirements that just happen, in their case, to run on Linux.
Now, do these folks add up to 4% of the market? I don't know, but arguments like "current Apple users won't switch" or "my grandma won't switch" don't have much to do with it.
This is rated "5" at the moment. Now think for moment:
Our CAGE is next to theirs? The remote "cage" where Google keeps 54,000 machines ??!! (As opposed to the 4 Google-owned buildings in the text of the original post?)
I don't know, but I suspect that the title of the high-rated post to which I am replying ought to be "AstroTurf Ad from the folks at Rackable.Com"
Think about the way linux has grown as a server. From very specialized applications (five years or so ago: "did you hear XX company runs Linux as a print server??? wow!") to more and more general applications.
Right now Linux on the desktop is great for some fairly specialized folks. On one side, if you are an engineer/scientist who has always run a Unix workstation (hey, my "wordprocessor" has always been LaTex edited by Xemacs), then desktop Linux has been great for years. On the other end, if you want a locked-down machine that only browses and checks for e-mail, Linux is currently great.
The trick is to broaden the appeal of desktop Linux out in incremental steps. Get the administrative assistants at the engineering firm running Star Office on Linux and get rid of windows at an otherwise Unix shop. Some departments need only browser, e-mail and an decent Excel clone. Done. Some departments need to set up meetings on a firm-level Exchange server. Not 100% done yet, but already good enough for some and as it gets better a few more will switch.
The point is, think incrementally, think about heterogenous users and don't fall into the all or nothing trap. If Linus had listened to "it isn't ready until it runs on 64 processor machines", he never would have started.
Wired had an article [wired.com] last year about British Telephone's lawsuit against Prodigy for violating their patent on hyperlinks. So who really owns this patent?
No, they tried to patent the very concept of hyperlinking (they failed). This patent is an attempt to patent a particular kind of link. So the prior art needed is more specific. Others on the page seem to have some good examples, but a reference, for example, to "Hypercard" is not enough until you discuss the specific elements of the prior that match up to the earlier patent.
I see this comment a lot and it is not fair. No one claims that the law applies "in Russia". The prosecution argument was, first, that the software was offered for sale to US customers. They could have put on a button on their website that said, "I certify I am not a resident of the US", or even "I certify that this sofware is legal in my place of residence," but they didn't. Second, they supposedly used a US payment clearing firm for their web transactions. This alone is probably enough for them to come under US law. But even the prosecution didn't claim that the law applies "in Russia."
As an analogy, imagine a firm that operated in Russia, but shipped illegal drugs into the US. They clearly violate US law.
Now, under the judges instructions, perhaps the jury found it sufficient that they didn't specifically intend to sell the software to folks in the US, but more likely the jury was impressed that they didn't specifically intend for it to be used to violate copyright.
IANAL and none of this is intended as a defense of the DMCA, which is a horrible law.
The problem is Monopoly plus network effects. And the argument doesn't rely on consumers being dumb. (I have a Ph.D. in Economics, by the way.)
Here is why I care what MS does with file formats, including possible competitors to PDF. Many folks want to use Office. Fine. MS bundles a new file format with office. OK. Now they send the files to me. Uh-oh. I am now either a jerk who makes them send files in a different format or else I just give in and buy Office myself (this is the network effect.) I pay $800 not because I like the software, but because I need to work with those who use Office.
Now I am one less customer for Adobe and the network effect is bigger (because of the folks who now have to share files with me.) And the kicker: with demand dropping, Adobe goes out of business, the PDF file format is no longer improved. Demand for Office increases and MS, not being stupid, raises the price of Office.
Almost everyone, except MS, is now worse off as compared to the situation where we had a "open" file format.
So, do you understand the argument now? No consumer was being stupid, as you claim and yet all the consumers are worse off. This is standard graduate-level network economics, it is not like I am making it up as I go along.
Or rather, it would be a good argument if the states were not offering to provide, for free, a simple piece of computer code that would translate a customer's address into an appropriate tax rate. I am sure they are also willing to provide a clearing house to collect the payments and then redistribute them to the states.
Your argument was a good one in the days before computers, which is why out-of-state catalog sales did not have to withhold taxes. Now, the complexity argument is easily overcome.
It is a fundamental notion of economics that taxes ought to distort behavior as little as possible. The current tax regime favors catalog sales over on-site retail sales, for no good reason, and that ought to change.
You are comparing, I think, a discounted web price for an Exchange upgrade with a list price for Suse. Suse will also discount, everybody does. Also, others have posted that Suse is charging per connected user, rather than the total number of users who ever connect (if I understand the other posts.) This will make a difference. Further, if you need to upgrade other software (MS OS, Office) and the only thing holding you up from going to Linux / OpenOffice is Exchange, then Suse's OpenExchange prices might not have to be far below the MS price.
However, if Suse really undercuts pricing, MS could always increase its discounts until SuSe's commercial offering goes away. This is a big advantage of true open source -- it can't be priced out of the market.
The problem here really is the definition of open. The MS-Office file formats could be called "open" because: [i] there is a published spec and [ii] there are multiple software packages that claim to both read and write them (WordPerfect Suite, OpenOffice, etc.)
Now slashdotters will claim, correctly, that the spec is incomplete and constantly changing and that the other software packages aren't 100% compatible. But MS has mucho lobbying muscle and the "State Commission on Open File Formats" will approve MS-Office formats, trust me.
"Sincere Choice" will become the "Sincere Status-Quo" pretty quickly.
"So Wal-Mart figures they can save $100-$200 on each computer sale by putting on Mandrake and probably Open Office" Thats a complete and utter load of bull crap. $200? Hardly. Hardly. Hardly. Assuming that Mandrake is giving them the OS for free (and I dont know that we can do that, but lets go with it anyways), they'd probably be saving between $40 and $80 a unit . . . YOU'VE ALWAYS BEEN ABLE TO GET CHEAP HARDWARE. why this whole crap about the "Windows Tax". Its a lie, a myth!
Wow, you are a little worked up, huh?
You imply that a $40-$80 dollars savings is approximately nothing, but at this price level that is hardly true, it is 10-20% of the cost of the whole bundle. Walmart won't do this if Windows was close enough to free so as not to matter.
Also, while you, Mr. Sophisticated Computer Guy, may have known how to buy a bare computer, the average Joe hasn't and having these computers at WalMart is a way (perhaps the first way) for Mr. Joe to avoid the cost of MS software (i.e. the colorfully named "Windows Tax").
Credit cards are not the major problem. If you get scammed online, you can get a refund from Visa. A bit of work, but not a huge deal, and it is not very common. (Visa kicks out merchants who scam.)
The real problem is not going to go away: will the merchant ship my order in a correct and timely fashion? This is the *exact* same problem faced by the old "mail-order catalog" business. That business is over a hundred years old and the problem still persists, reputation matters a lot.
How to fulfill orders promptly and correctly is a *huge* difficult problem, involving massive automation, computerization, use of bar codes, etc.
When you buy a new car, you know that it will have a resale value when you are done with it. You are more likely to buy a car with a good resale value. (This is often given as a reason to buy a Honda, for example.)
If I know that I can resell my newly purchased book when I am done, then that new book is cheaper for me to buy. Once folks get used to it, this may help to increase new book sales.
Also, publishers may start charging more for new books, to help reflect their increased resale value.
It is actually pretty hard to predict how this all turns out in the long run.
The real problem is that MS is claiming a patent on the underlying technology. They are offering a royalty-free license to non-GPL software. This is hard for GPL software to get around.
Does anyone understand what is being patented? Does it look like a valid patent -- I never got the feeling that this technology was particularly innovative.
I am posting from it now. Unlike the current trunk builds mentioned in the story, the 0.9.8 branch doesn't seem crashy at all. Very quick and nice.