This link should work better than the one
at the top of the page.
It's a good brief, and it's especially worth
reading if you think no lawyer can write anything
except impenetrable jargon.
One of its great strengths is the way in which
it tries to connect the subject of the case,
First Amendment protection for source code, with
things judges know about. Judges (and lawyers)
for that matter tend to resist learning about
technology. Even if they're willing, they have
little opportunity. So you have to talk about it
in the way they understand.
Early in the brief, we get a couple of lines of
Visual Basic. They wouldn't do much in real life,
but they illustrate the point. My favorite part
of the brief is footnote 4, which compares source
code to legal citation: each is impenetrable to
outsiders, but each is a clean, compact, and
efficient representation, which is transparent
to people who speak the language.
The only thing that makes me sad is that I doubt
the court will recognize the weight attached to
the names on the brief. We all recognize names
like Kernighan, Minsky, and Stallman but there's
really no way to communicate that weight to an
outsider. It's like those newspaper ads demanding
that Mumia be released from jail and appointed
dictator-for-life--there's lots of names
signed at the bottom, and some of them are
connected to impressive institutions, but I
suspect that they're adjuncts, or junior assistant
professors, or leaders of impressively-named
organizations that don't do anything because
these people invented them.
The FCC does have lawmaking power, practically speaking. Although administrative agencies cannot make laws as such, Congress may pass laws authorizing agencies to make regulations. There are certain procedures that agencies must follow, but these administrative regulations have the force of law.
If you ever get a chance to visit a law library, check out the Code of Federal Regulations. The volumes will fill a good-sized bookcase (I may be misremembering--maybe they'll only half fill it), and every one is full of rules that no legislature ever voted on and no elected official ever reviewed. Everything in there is legally binding on you and me, though.
MkLinux uses the Mach microkernel as the core of a Linux-compatible operating system. It was originally developed in cooperation with Apple, so it runs mostly on Macintoshim. Still, I remember either hearing or hallucinating that an IA-32 version existed somewhere.
In any case, with MkLinux, you have an operating system that's based on Mach and, to applications, looks like Linux. What does Hurd have that MkLinux doesn't? For that matter, what does MkLinux have that Hurd doesn't?
I suppose phrasing it this way is an invitation to a flame war, but, well, I'm ignorant of the details. Thus, Hurd looks to me like a duplication of the MkLinux effort. If I'm wrong in that conclusion, I'd appreciate it if someone would exlain why.
I'm sure Apple's engineers will be surprised to hear that Mach runs only on IA-32 and PA-RISC, especially since Mach is the core of Mac OS X. Ditto for the MkLinux people.
The Commerce Clause does not prevent the states from making laws that affect interstate commerce. Rather, it authorizes the federal government to make laws regulating things that affect interstate commerce. It also forbids the states to unduly burden interstate commerce or to make laws that discriminate against commerce from outside the state. (This is the way courts currently read the Clause. Whether this reading is correct is a separate question.)
When someone browses a site, that person may be in any state, or even, as hard as that may be to believe, outside the United States. There's no practical way to tell what state that is. But a state law forbidding web sites to send certain material into that state would subject providers to penalties because of the browsers' hitting the sites. The only way to avoid those penalties would be to take the material down.
Of course, the only way a site operator could protect himself would be to take the material down altogether, even though it may be perfectly legal in the other 49 states. A single state's law would thus prevent commerce, even though the transaction lacked any connection to it. This is a substantial burden on interstate commerce, and I suppose the plaintiffs argued that it was an unconstitutional one.
In contrast, the states make contract law, even though those laws dramatically affect interstate commerce. The reason is that a contract is usually treated as subject to the law of a single state. The parties can usually even choose the state law to apply, so long as that state has some connection to the transaction. If that state makes a law that makes some kind of contract illegal, well, the state's residents can't make them, but the rest of us can do as we please.
The downside is that spammers have argued (successfully, IIRC) that state anti-spam laws also contravene the Commerce Clause. It's not a perfect world.
The basic thing to keep in mind is that (so far as I can tell) no contract or U.S. statute gives ICANN authority to impose anything on anyone. DNS uses a hierarchical database. ICANN had a contract to run the top-level servers that everyone was using. But nothing forbids you to set up your own top-level server and populating it as you please. And nothing forbids others to use your alternaDNS for name resolution.
ICANN more or less recognizes this one their web site. They point out that they set standards based on voluntary cooperation, adding that their authority does not come from statute or contract.
An organization that exists on those terms can continue only so long as it is backed by at least a rough consensus. The Register article makes it look as though that consensus could plausibly implode. I'm sure that most people would rather that didn't happen--the balkanization of DNS would be a pain in the ass of biblical proportions. But the only way to avoid it will be for ICANN to rebuild the consensus that lets it survive.
(Caveat: IAAL, but I don't practice in this area. My assertions here are based on about half an hour of legal research. If any of those assertions about the law are mistaken, I'd be grateful if someone would tell me.)
Hey, if you're willing to accept a 500 MHz CPU clock, you can have a dual-processor Intel box, too.
As for me, I'm just wondering why those doofuses at Motorola can't get the G4 to go any faster.
Anyone who says MOVE was nonviolent is either ignorant or a liar. Just ask the family of James Ramp, the Philadelphia police office who was murdered by a MOVE member.
For those of you who are not experts on the history of Philadelphia, MOVE was a radical black group, with a back-to-nature philosophy. As expressions of this philosophy, they ate only raw vegetables, and (I believe) women bit off the umbilical cords of their children after giving birth. They did not seem to follow modern notions of sanitation, so their neighbors had problems with roaches and rats.
MOVE's hatred of technology did not seem to extend to public address equipment. They used PA systems to loudly harangue the neighborhood with their speeches. Nor did their hatred of technology extend to firearms, which they appear to have stockpiled.
Yes, the City of Philadelphia did bomb another building occupied by MOVE, and yes, several city blocks burned before the fire department did anything about it. But that was after a standoff between MOVE and police. MOVE had built a fortified bunker on the roof of their house and had a history of stockpiling automatic weapons.
Dropping a bomb in the middle of a residential neighborhood is manifestly a bad thing. But the events related to the MOVE bombing merely demonstrate the gross incompetence of then-mayor W. Wilson Goode. While Philadelphia's police have attacked peaceful black people in the past, the MOVE confrontations are not examples of that.
There is a reasonable argument that racism did play a significant part in these events, but not in the way the poster suggested. The neighborhood where MOVE built its bunker, and which was destroyed by fire, was a black neighborhood. Many commentators asserted that there's no way the City would have allowed a radical group to have built a bunker in the first place if the neighborhood had been white, and that's probably true.
It's not so much that eBay never has the objects in their possession, but rather that eBay is more like a bulletin board for hire than like a traditional auction house, such as Christie's or Sotheby's.
The big difference is that a traditional auction house doesn't just list merchandise, it actively sells it. That is, auction houses do their own promotion, printing up glossy catalogues of items for bid. They have PR departments who try to drum up interest in particular items or collections. They will appraise items to help set opening bids and to help the seller gauge the eventually hammer price. For works of art, they even investigate the history of the item to make sure it's what the seller claims it is. In short, a traditional auction house acts like an agent for the seller, and thus is implicated if the sale is illegal or improper.
(I should add, as a hedge, that to be an "agent" has very specific legal meaning, and I don't know that the law really treats auction houses as sellers' agents. All I'm saying is auction houses seem to act a lot like agents, and this justifies treating them one way.)
eBay, in contrast, doesn't get involved in the individual items it lists. The seller can list just about anything. The seller chooses how to present and describe the items. eBay doesn't vouch for anything. If memory serves, eBay does get involved in arranging payment, but even that is merely holding money in escrow, and has nothing to do with the item being sold.
If people at eBay know that someone is using their service for an illegal or improper purpose, they have certain responsibilities, and I'm under the impression that eBay tries to live up to them. But since they don't have the same relationship with the seller, and don't act the same with regard to individual sales, there is reason to treat eBay differently from an auction house.
What's an Operating System, anyway?
on
Is UNIX An OS?
·
· Score: 2
On the one hand, I have to say I'm sympathetic to professor Alan Perlis's statement that when a professor says that computer science is X and not Y, have pity on his graduate students. On the other hand, the fact is that human cognition works by dividing the world up into chunks, and that some things obviously belong in a chunk, and some things equally obviously do not.
So, what goes into the chunk we call "operating systems"?
Well, I doubt I would have passed my OS class if I'd used the definition the writer of this article chose. And, further, that definition seems very desktop-PC-centric. I mean, embedded systems have OSes, too, and they are just as much OSes as Mac OS X, even if they lack graphical interfaces, or even grep, for that matter.
People built OSes because they needed to regulate use of system resources and to give each program an environment that was richer than that provided by the hardware. A collection of software that does this, and that programs running on a machine have to use, is an Operating System. And Unix certainly qualifies.
The Atlantic doesn't generally write about technology, it writes about politics and policy. Naturally, by the time computer-related technological issues appear on the political radar, they're already obsolete. Most of the rest of the world doesn't move this fast.
I haven't seen any technical information about C#, but, based solely on the history of new Microsoft products, I suspect that it's probably worthless and that in a few years our employers will probably require all of us to use it exclusively.
Let's remember that Microsoft is primarily a marketing company. They convince managers to buy their products, then the managers make their subordinates use them. Microsoft succeeds because the people who decide to buy their technical tools are not the people who have to use them.
What can we expect? Well, note first that we don't know when C# is coming out, and it probably won't ship any time soon. This is standard industry practice (not limited to Microsoft, but particularly useful to them): announce vaporware so people don't commit to a competing platform.
Then they make key parts of Office and Windows that work best with C#, and that may not work at all with anything else (except VB, of course). All the while, they sow FUD about Java and everything else that might compete with C#. There will probably be lots of advertising with simple bullet points for the PHBs.
And eventually we're all stuck with it, regardless of whether it's any good. It's happened before.
Now, the above notwithstanding, I want to stress that I don't really think Microsoft's doing anything particularly immoral by doing any of this. As far as I'm concerned, they have an absolute right to make their software work any way they want, and if their business model involves closed standards and secret APIs, well, that's up to them. But it infuriates me endlessly that IS managers insist on wading ever deeper into the Microsoft tar pit, happily promoting Microsoft's business model over the needs of their own businesses.
I haven't read this book yet, although the review makes me want to pick up a copy.
OTOH, if you're not familiar with how operating systems work, I think you'd do better to start with John Lions's Lions' Commentary on Unix: With Source Code, (Peer to Peer Communications 1996), ISBN 1573980137.
This book, usually called "The Lions Book," has the full source code for an early version of Unix, followed by Professor Lions's annotations. The source and commentary are comparatively short (about 300 pages, compared to 400 pages for the Linux source alone), largely because the kernel it describes is a good deal smaller than the current linux kernel. This means it's also a lot simpler than the linux kernel.
If you're already comfortable with reading complex sources, and you know a lot about operating systems, then give Maxwell's book a try. But I suspect a lot of people would be overwhelmed by it, and the Lions Book is a better place for them to start.
The article is important because it's not for us.
on
Why Do Open Source?
·
· Score: 5
Both the New York Times article and the paper it describes are important precisely because they're not written for nerds. They're written for business people, and they're the ones who decide what gets installed and used. Even if tech people at your company have ultimate decision-making authority, they have it because the business people have delegated it to them, and the tech people are responsible to the business people for their decisions.
So the article and paper are useful because they help explain what is counter-intuitive: how software written by geeks in their spare time can be any good. Not only does it explain their motivation, it also points out that the people who are most likely to contribute to open-source are the top programmers, the ones the business people are desperate to hire.
The point is that articles and papers like these make using open-source an easier decision.
(And personally, I like Postrel's other point, which is that people acting primarily for their own benefit, whether psychological or pecuniary, can also confer substantial benefits on the rest of the world. Too many people ignore the invisible hand these days.)
Second, though, the statement that life on Earth should survive the collision isn't really meaningful, since (according to the article) the collision will take place in 3 billion years, but (I am told) many scientists believe that in 500 million to 1 billion years, our sun will have become so hot that it destroys all life on Earth.
The buzzing sound you hear is the sound of thousands of pedophiles worldwide saying to themselves, "Hey, I gotta get this Gnutella thing! Thanks, MSNBC!"
As I recall, there was a line in Dune that went something like: "We cannot blame them for it, we can only despise them." Pinkerton exists to turn a profit. They see this as profiting their employees and shareholders. Therefore they will do it.
But the real root of this problem is not that corporations are amoral. Corporations, as such, are a legal fiction. They do not exist apart from the individuals who make them up. They do not act apart from their employees.
And that leads us to the real problem: most people are unwilling or unable to think in terms of principles, and corporate employees are no different from most people.
Right and wrong are abstractions. They can (and should) be derived from reality, but instead are usually given to us as a list of "thou shalts" and "thou shalt nots" that someone just drew up and posted on a wall. There is no connection to life, reason, or reality.
So people don't take things like freedom and privacy and morally important. They just become something we like a whole lot, but can be sacrificed for "important" things, like keeping our children from being different from their peers. And when you talk about these being important priciples worth fighting for, people don't disagree with you, they simply have no way to understand what you're talking about.
Pinkerton's employees are thus complicit in slitting their own throats. The problem is not that they don't believe that. The problem is that their minds, like most people's, make them incapable of understanding it.
The only really troubling (to me) point in the analysis is that a site's terms and conditions can prohibit deep linking. The article suggested that sites might then require you to agree explicitly to those terms as a condition of letting you use the sites. Those terms would then become part of an enforceable contract.
The first troubling thing is how much more cluttered web browsing would become if sites got serious about that. It's tedious enough with a 56k modem; they don't need to make it worse by making you download extra Javascript and legalese before letting you use the site. I don't think anyone wants to see it become harder to get good stuff out of the net.
The second troubling thing, though, is the attitude that some/. readers seem to have, which is that these restrictions don't bind us if they annoy us, or frustrate us, or make no sense from any perspective we can see. You don't have to justify a contract in terms of public policy or the common good.
Site publishers have some information you want. They don't owe it to you. In an ostensibly-free society, they are entitled to decide under what conditions they're willing to share what they've created. You, in turn are free to decide to accept the conditions and access the information, or reject them and do without.
This works both ways: no one needs to convince Mattel that the GPL attached to cp4break (I think that's the software I mean) is a socially beneficial way to distribute software--they're stuck with it. But a site doesn't have to justify a contractual prohibition on deep linking. If you accept it by visiting the site, you're stuck with it.
MacOS X, Apple's next OS, is basically Apple's APIs and GUI on top of BSD Unix, with a Mach microkernel. Apple has already released as open course the Mach and BSD core of OS X, calling it Darwin. You can start here for more information.
The "consultants" asserted (paraphrased here) that only an operating system designed from first principles to be secure could offer acceptable security. Isn't the phrase they use almost a quote of Microsoft's marketing points about NT?
And considering how notoriously insecure NT is, doesn't this prove how silly their assertion is?
The disclaimer is not *required* so far as I know, but just about every release from a tech company includes it. They are trying to take advantage of a "safe harbor" created by the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act for predictions (in securities law jargon, predictions are called "forward looking statements").
See, what used to happen was, executives at tech companies would make their best guess about what their companies would do or achieve in the future. Prediction is an inexact science, though, and so they were often wrong, sometimes badly wrong. Some investors lost money and sued, and the plaintiffs' lawyers claimed that the false predictions were really fraud. (Yes, that's ridiculous, but being ridiculous doesn't bother the typical plaintiffs' lawyer.)
Congress changed the law to state the obvious, that a prediction that later fails to come true is not necessarily fraud. But to take advantage of the new law, companies need to identify the predictions as such and accompany the predictions with a list of the risks that could keep the predictions from coming true. The disclaimer in the press release is a legal incantation meant to invoke these new legal protections.
Now, this disclaimer does *not* mean that LinuxOne now has some kind of blanket immunity from criminal or civil liability for fraud, so please don't post irate follow-ups about how this is an example of corporatations escaping responsibility for their actions. All it means is that you can't sue them for fraud just because some predictions that they make don't come true. The disclaimer in no way protects LinuxOne from liability if they lied about anything material to get people to buy their stock.
Slashdot Mirror
This link should work better than the one at the top of the page.
It's a good brief, and it's especially worth reading if you think no lawyer can write anything except impenetrable jargon.
One of its great strengths is the way in which it tries to connect the subject of the case, First Amendment protection for source code, with things judges know about. Judges (and lawyers) for that matter tend to resist learning about technology. Even if they're willing, they have little opportunity. So you have to talk about it in the way they understand.
Early in the brief, we get a couple of lines of Visual Basic. They wouldn't do much in real life, but they illustrate the point. My favorite part of the brief is footnote 4, which compares source code to legal citation: each is impenetrable to outsiders, but each is a clean, compact, and efficient representation, which is transparent to people who speak the language.
The only thing that makes me sad is that I doubt the court will recognize the weight attached to the names on the brief. We all recognize names like Kernighan, Minsky, and Stallman but there's really no way to communicate that weight to an outsider. It's like those newspaper ads demanding that Mumia be released from jail and appointed dictator-for-life--there's lots of names signed at the bottom, and some of them are connected to impressive institutions, but I suspect that they're adjuncts, or junior assistant professors, or leaders of impressively-named organizations that don't do anything because these people invented them.
The FCC does have lawmaking power, practically speaking. Although administrative agencies cannot make laws as such, Congress may pass laws authorizing agencies to make regulations. There are certain procedures that agencies must follow, but these administrative regulations have the force of law.
If you ever get a chance to visit a law library, check out the Code of Federal Regulations. The volumes will fill a good-sized bookcase (I may be misremembering--maybe they'll only half fill it), and every one is full of rules that no legislature ever voted on and no elected official ever reviewed. Everything in there is legally binding on you and me, though.
Have a nice day.
MkLinux uses the Mach microkernel as the core of a Linux-compatible operating system. It was originally developed in cooperation with Apple, so it runs mostly on Macintoshim. Still, I remember either hearing or hallucinating that an IA-32 version existed somewhere.
In any case, with MkLinux, you have an operating system that's based on Mach and, to applications, looks like Linux. What does Hurd have that MkLinux doesn't? For that matter, what does MkLinux have that Hurd doesn't?
I suppose phrasing it this way is an invitation to a flame war, but, well, I'm ignorant of the details. Thus, Hurd looks to me like a duplication of the MkLinux effort. If I'm wrong in that conclusion, I'd appreciate it if someone would exlain why.
I'm sure Apple's engineers will be surprised to hear that Mach runs only on IA-32 and PA-RISC, especially since Mach is the core of Mac OS X. Ditto for the MkLinux people.
The Commerce Clause does not prevent the states from making laws that affect interstate commerce. Rather, it authorizes the federal government to make laws regulating things that affect interstate commerce. It also forbids the states to unduly burden interstate commerce or to make laws that discriminate against commerce from outside the state. (This is the way courts currently read the Clause. Whether this reading is correct is a separate question.)
When someone browses a site, that person may be in any state, or even, as hard as that may be to believe, outside the United States. There's no practical way to tell what state that is. But a state law forbidding web sites to send certain material into that state would subject providers to penalties because of the browsers' hitting the sites. The only way to avoid those penalties would be to take the material down.
Of course, the only way a site operator could protect himself would be to take the material down altogether, even though it may be perfectly legal in the other 49 states. A single state's law would thus prevent commerce, even though the transaction lacked any connection to it. This is a substantial burden on interstate commerce, and I suppose the plaintiffs argued that it was an unconstitutional one.
In contrast, the states make contract law, even though those laws dramatically affect interstate commerce. The reason is that a contract is usually treated as subject to the law of a single state. The parties can usually even choose the state law to apply, so long as that state has some connection to the transaction. If that state makes a law that makes some kind of contract illegal, well, the state's residents can't make them, but the rest of us can do as we please.
The downside is that spammers have argued (successfully, IIRC) that state anti-spam laws also contravene the Commerce Clause. It's not a perfect world.
The basic thing to keep in mind is that (so far as I can tell) no contract or U.S. statute gives ICANN authority to impose anything on anyone. DNS uses a hierarchical database. ICANN had a contract to run the top-level servers that everyone was using. But nothing forbids you to set up your own top-level server and populating it as you please. And nothing forbids others to use your alternaDNS for name resolution.
ICANN more or less recognizes this one their web site. They point out that they set standards based on voluntary cooperation, adding that their authority does not come from statute or contract.
An organization that exists on those terms can continue only so long as it is backed by at least a rough consensus. The Register article makes it look as though that consensus could plausibly implode. I'm sure that most people would rather that didn't happen--the balkanization of DNS would be a pain in the ass of biblical proportions. But the only way to avoid it will be for ICANN to rebuild the consensus that lets it survive.
(Caveat: IAAL, but I don't practice in this area. My assertions here are based on about half an hour of legal research. If any of those assertions about the law are mistaken, I'd be grateful if someone would tell me.)
Hey, if you're willing to accept a 500 MHz CPU clock, you can have a dual-processor Intel box, too.
As for me, I'm just wondering why those doofuses at Motorola can't get the G4 to go any faster.
Anyone who says MOVE was nonviolent is either ignorant or a liar. Just ask the family of James Ramp, the Philadelphia police office who was murdered by a MOVE member.
For those of you who are not experts on the history of Philadelphia, MOVE was a radical black group, with a back-to-nature philosophy. As expressions of this philosophy, they ate only raw vegetables, and (I believe) women bit off the umbilical cords of their children after giving birth. They did not seem to follow modern notions of sanitation, so their neighbors had problems with roaches and rats.
MOVE's hatred of technology did not seem to extend to public address equipment. They used PA systems to loudly harangue the neighborhood with their speeches. Nor did their hatred of technology extend to firearms, which they appear to have stockpiled.
Yes, the City of Philadelphia did bomb another building occupied by MOVE, and yes, several city blocks burned before the fire department did anything about it. But that was after a standoff between MOVE and police. MOVE had built a fortified bunker on the roof of their house and had a history of stockpiling automatic weapons.
Dropping a bomb in the middle of a residential neighborhood is manifestly a bad thing. But the events related to the MOVE bombing merely demonstrate the gross incompetence of then-mayor W. Wilson Goode. While Philadelphia's police have attacked peaceful black people in the past, the MOVE confrontations are not examples of that.
There is a reasonable argument that racism did play a significant part in these events, but not in the way the poster suggested. The neighborhood where MOVE built its bunker, and which was destroyed by fire, was a black neighborhood. Many commentators asserted that there's no way the City would have allowed a radical group to have built a bunker in the first place if the neighborhood had been white, and that's probably true.
The big difference is that a traditional auction house doesn't just list merchandise, it actively sells it. That is, auction houses do their own promotion, printing up glossy catalogues of items for bid. They have PR departments who try to drum up interest in particular items or collections. They will appraise items to help set opening bids and to help the seller gauge the eventually hammer price. For works of art, they even investigate the history of the item to make sure it's what the seller claims it is. In short, a traditional auction house acts like an agent for the seller, and thus is implicated if the sale is illegal or improper.
(I should add, as a hedge, that to be an "agent" has very specific legal meaning, and I don't know that the law really treats auction houses as sellers' agents. All I'm saying is auction houses seem to act a lot like agents, and this justifies treating them one way.)
eBay, in contrast, doesn't get involved in the individual items it lists. The seller can list just about anything. The seller chooses how to present and describe the items. eBay doesn't vouch for anything. If memory serves, eBay does get involved in arranging payment, but even that is merely holding money in escrow, and has nothing to do with the item being sold.
If people at eBay know that someone is using their service for an illegal or improper purpose, they have certain responsibilities, and I'm under the impression that eBay tries to live up to them. But since they don't have the same relationship with the seller, and don't act the same with regard to individual sales, there is reason to treat eBay differently from an auction house.
On the one hand, I have to say I'm sympathetic to professor Alan Perlis's statement that when a professor says that computer science is X and not Y, have pity on his graduate students. On the other hand, the fact is that human cognition works by dividing the world up into chunks, and that some things obviously belong in a chunk, and some things equally obviously do not.
So, what goes into the chunk we call "operating systems"?
Well, I doubt I would have passed my OS class if I'd used the definition the writer of this article chose. And, further, that definition seems very desktop-PC-centric. I mean, embedded systems have OSes, too, and they are just as much OSes as Mac OS X, even if they lack graphical interfaces, or even grep, for that matter.
People built OSes because they needed to regulate use of system resources and to give each program an environment that was richer than that provided by the hardware. A collection of software that does this, and that programs running on a machine have to use, is an Operating System. And Unix certainly qualifies.
The Atlantic doesn't generally write about technology, it writes about politics and policy. Naturally, by the time computer-related technological issues appear on the political radar, they're already obsolete. Most of the rest of the world doesn't move this fast.
(See, e.g., http://www.stokely.com/lighter. side/unix.prank.html.)
Let's remember that Microsoft is primarily a marketing company. They convince managers to buy their products, then the managers make their subordinates use them. Microsoft succeeds because the people who decide to buy their technical tools are not the people who have to use them.
What can we expect? Well, note first that we don't know when C# is coming out, and it probably won't ship any time soon. This is standard industry practice (not limited to Microsoft, but particularly useful to them): announce vaporware so people don't commit to a competing platform.
Then they make key parts of Office and Windows that work best with C#, and that may not work at all with anything else (except VB, of course). All the while, they sow FUD about Java and everything else that might compete with C#. There will probably be lots of advertising with simple bullet points for the PHBs.
And eventually we're all stuck with it, regardless of whether it's any good. It's happened before.
Now, the above notwithstanding, I want to stress that I don't really think Microsoft's doing anything particularly immoral by doing any of this. As far as I'm concerned, they have an absolute right to make their software work any way they want, and if their business model involves closed standards and secret APIs, well, that's up to them. But it infuriates me endlessly that IS managers insist on wading ever deeper into the Microsoft tar pit, happily promoting Microsoft's business model over the needs of their own businesses.
OTOH, if you're not familiar with how operating systems work, I think you'd do better to start with John Lions's Lions' Commentary on Unix: With Source Code, (Peer to Peer Communications 1996), ISBN 1573980137.
This book, usually called "The Lions Book," has the full source code for an early version of Unix, followed by Professor Lions's annotations. The source and commentary are comparatively short (about 300 pages, compared to 400 pages for the Linux source alone), largely because the kernel it describes is a good deal smaller than the current linux kernel. This means it's also a lot simpler than the linux kernel.
If you're already comfortable with reading complex sources, and you know a lot about operating systems, then give Maxwell's book a try. But I suspect a lot of people would be overwhelmed by it, and the Lions Book is a better place for them to start.
So the article and paper are useful because they help explain what is counter-intuitive: how software written by geeks in their spare time can be any good. Not only does it explain their motivation, it also points out that the people who are most likely to contribute to open-source are the top programmers, the ones the business people are desperate to hire.
The point is that articles and papers like these make using open-source an easier decision.
(And personally, I like Postrel's other point, which is that people acting primarily for their own benefit, whether psychological or pecuniary, can also confer substantial benefits on the rest of the world. Too many people ignore the invisible hand these days.)
Second, though, the statement that life on Earth should survive the collision isn't really meaningful, since (according to the article) the collision will take place in 3 billion years, but (I am told) many scientists believe that in 500 million to 1 billion years, our sun will have become so hot that it destroys all life on Earth.
Have a nice day.
The buzzing sound you hear is the sound of thousands of pedophiles worldwide saying to themselves, "Hey, I gotta get this Gnutella thing! Thanks, MSNBC!"
But the real root of this problem is not that corporations are amoral. Corporations, as such, are a legal fiction. They do not exist apart from the individuals who make them up. They do not act apart from their employees.
And that leads us to the real problem: most people are unwilling or unable to think in terms of principles, and corporate employees are no different from most people.
Right and wrong are abstractions. They can (and should) be derived from reality, but instead are usually given to us as a list of "thou shalts" and "thou shalt nots" that someone just drew up and posted on a wall. There is no connection to life, reason, or reality.
So people don't take things like freedom and privacy and morally important. They just become something we like a whole lot, but can be sacrificed for "important" things, like keeping our children from being different from their peers. And when you talk about these being important priciples worth fighting for, people don't disagree with you, they simply have no way to understand what you're talking about.
Pinkerton's employees are thus complicit in slitting their own throats. The problem is not that they don't believe that. The problem is that their minds, like most people's, make them incapable of understanding it.
The first troubling thing is how much more cluttered web browsing would become if sites got serious about that. It's tedious enough with a 56k modem; they don't need to make it worse by making you download extra Javascript and legalese before letting you use the site. I don't think anyone wants to see it become harder to get good stuff out of the net.
The second troubling thing, though, is the attitude that some /. readers seem to have, which is that these restrictions don't bind us if they annoy us, or frustrate us, or make no sense from any perspective we can see. You don't have to justify a contract in terms of public policy or the common good.
Site publishers have some information you want. They don't owe it to you. In an ostensibly-free society, they are entitled to decide under what conditions they're willing to share what they've created. You, in turn are free to decide to accept the conditions and access the information, or reject them and do without.
This works both ways: no one needs to convince Mattel that the GPL attached to cp4break (I think that's the software I mean) is a socially beneficial way to distribute software--they're stuck with it. But a site doesn't have to justify a contractual prohibition on deep linking. If you accept it by visiting the site, you're stuck with it.
MacOS X, Apple's next OS, is basically Apple's APIs and GUI on top of BSD Unix, with a Mach microkernel. Apple has already released as open course the Mach and BSD core of OS X, calling it Darwin. You can start here for more information.
The "consultants" asserted (paraphrased here) that only an operating system designed from first principles to be secure could offer acceptable security. Isn't the phrase they use almost a quote of Microsoft's marketing points about NT?
And considering how notoriously insecure NT is, doesn't this prove how silly their assertion is?
The disclaimer is not *required* so far as I know, but just about every release from a tech company includes it. They are trying to take advantage of a "safe harbor" created by the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act for predictions (in securities law jargon, predictions are called "forward looking statements").
See, what used to happen was, executives at tech companies would make their best guess about what their companies would do or achieve in the future. Prediction is an inexact science, though, and so they were often wrong, sometimes badly wrong. Some investors lost money and sued, and the plaintiffs' lawyers claimed that the false predictions were really fraud. (Yes, that's ridiculous, but being ridiculous doesn't bother the typical plaintiffs' lawyer.)
Congress changed the law to state the obvious, that a prediction that later fails to come true is not necessarily fraud. But to take advantage of the new law, companies need to identify the predictions as such and accompany the predictions with a list of the risks that could keep the predictions from coming true. The disclaimer in the press release is a legal incantation meant to invoke these new legal protections.
Now, this disclaimer does *not* mean that LinuxOne now has some kind of blanket immunity from criminal or civil liability for fraud, so please don't post irate follow-ups about how this is an example of corporatations escaping responsibility for their actions. All it means is that you can't sue them for fraud just because some predictions that they make don't come true. The disclaimer in no way protects LinuxOne from liability if they lied about anything material to get people to buy their stock.