In 1992 Bill Gates deserved the medal. His vision of computing was much more coherant than the visions of other industry leaders of that time. Take into account some of these factors:
1. This was before the Internet. Sure, some people in universities and some large corporations had Internet access... but mostly it didn't exist. If we wanted to communicate we used bulletin boards (like FidoNet) and 300bps modems;
2. This was before Linux and in the infancy of the GPL;
3. Unix was fragmented into dozens of incompatible versions each of which was priced out of the reach of mortal users (over $1,000 for SCO Xenix, as an example);
4. Novell owned the small business network environment and charged over $1,000 for their operating system;
5. Virtually no one had any idea what email was or why they'd need it.
In this period of time Gates appeared to be leading us out of the wilderness of Big Computing Iron and giving us what we wanted (and needed). Who could have seen then the course MS would take in the years after this award?
I'm a former intelligence officer and I started using Linux in 1993. It's my office desktop and my home desktop and I'm not interested in MS helping make my life more secure.
I liked the opening, I liked the middle, and I liked the end (mostly). When I went in to this movie I wasn't expecting to see anything deep... just fun. And it was fun as hell. Frank "singing" along with "Who let the dogs out" was a riot. I don't care about plot in these movies, just entertainment. And it delivered full measure on that judging from the reaction of the audience at my showing. For those of you reading these reviews go see it and judge for yourself. At least you'll keep cool in the a/c.
They don't need to GPL their own work...
on
DishPVR 721 Review
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· Score: 5, Insightful
as long as their work doesn't modify the existing GPL code. So they just add some scripting to do what they want using a standard kernel (not an unlikely scenario). They can copyright their code or keep it secret; it's their choice. They need not release any of it as long as it does not incorporate any code that is already under GPL copyright. It would, in effect, simply be an application that runs on the Linux OS (like an accounting application or a database application).
A letter like this would certainly work much better now that people know that the FBI is likely to visit if you don't comply. So it's not necessarily a waste of time and resources to be able to point to what DID happen under noncompliance.
Will the market put out a competitor....
on
Analyzing Palladium
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· Score: 2
to Palladium-enabled (cough) devices? What if AMD or Cyrix decided to maintain the status quo and keep on manufacturing x86 chips. Or even migrate the x86 onwards and upwards but in a non-Palladium way?
The downside of this would be that the incompatibility issues between MS and GPL would be magnified. However there are upside issues too. The consumer, when informed that their CDs won't let them make mp3s of the music they just bought would be more likely to move to a GPL solution. The CDs which are incompatible with GPL might become less desirable. EU companies, outside the authority of US legal issues could mine out a larger niche in the market.
In fact, I see a much larger role for EU in open source projects as a result of the short-sighted efforts of US legislation (patents, etc.).
Does no one else notice the irony in having the company responsible for 90% of the viruses, worms, back doors, and trojans - all due to poor planning on the part of MS executives and programmers - suggest that now they can fix it for all of us?
If I were a conspiracy buff I'd think that MS created the security problems so that they could point to the "insecure internet" and offer some solution that benefits only them.
That anyone, much less some "internet guru" takes this at face value illustrates that P.T. Barnum was right about suckers.
We had a similar problem....
on
Ethical Obligations
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· Score: 3, Interesting
One of our clients uses a proprietary system which, among other things, keeps records of customers paying by credit card. Unbeknownst to them (or us) this system has an "undocumented feature": a back door. Probably coded to allow easy access to systems by help-desk techies, there was no mention of it in any documentation we could find.
The client received an email from someone who told them about the back-door and provided clips of actual credit card information taken from the system! Luckily enough, this person disclaimed any intent to do harm and provided the information for us to eliminate the problem.
Of course, our dilemma was whether to advise the client to tell his customers about a possible theft of information. We decided that, since the email sender performed a service and had only used the credit card information to illustrate the problem, that the client was safe in not telling customers that their data might have been compromised.
Yup... that's the one. And I'm old enough to have read it on its first publication (when I was 13). In one of the SciFi mags as I recall (obviously imperfectly since I misremembered some of the details of this story).
It certainly shouldn't come as a surprise that Asimov correctly predicted the future.
that dealt with this subject perhaps 20-odd years ago. The setting was a party where a showoff was demonstrating that he could add, subtract and mulitply without his calculator . "Of course, these are merely cheap parlour tricks," the other characters complained to each other.
"There is simply no way he'd ever be able to divide or extract square roots without his calculator!"
Yet another SF author accurately predicting the future.
I can't see why they can't give me a full tcp/ip stack and an ethernet connection on a PDA. This would make the cradle unnecessary (just plug it into the network), it would make it possible to write nifty network analysis tools (the poor-man's fluke network assistant), and you could use it from any network connection. This plus a kb combined with on-line office applications and who needs a laptop?
Two (or more) radio transmitters on the same frequency within range of the same receiver will interfere with each other to the extent that usually one of them will not be heard well (or at all). The idea of "software radio" changes nothing unless every transmitter conforms to the same sets of rules and knows exactly where all the other transmitters are and what they are doing.
Even at microwave frequencies someone with a baby monitor on all the time at 2.4gHz will likely cause you problems with your WiFi network if it's close enough; or between you and the main antenna. One unmanaged device would be enough to create problems for everyone in its vicinity even using the software radio methods.
Government regulation of radio frequency spectrum was designed to minimize interference and create "bands" where users could reasonably expect the service they want to be located. Otherwise you would have to search through 10gHz of spectrum to find NBC news. Their concept of "software radio" only works if these radios know every source of possible interference in a geographical area and moves in the right way to avoid it. Who determines which way is the right way seems to me to be important and I'd much rather have a government entity do it.
In addition, the implementation of this system would pretty much require that all the other transmitters be confiscated and destroyed to keep them from mucking up the works.
One of our clients is a real estate appraisal firm and they routinely include color photos of the property along with their appraisal report. Like many new businesses, they started with two computers networked together with one inkjet printer between them. As they grew they just added workstations and printers until, by the time they asked us to fix things, they had files everywhere in various stages of completion and a $300 per month cartridge bill!
We did two things. First, we installed a Dell server running Linux to be their file server and mapped all their "my documents" subdirectories to a directory on this box.
The second thing we did was install an HP color laser printer with a network interface and point to it for default from every machine in the place.
Savings? Everything paid for in just over one year!
It seems strange that the distros the European Commission (presumably based in Europe) aren't utilizing the major European Linux distribution. Namely, SuSE.
This posting is one of those insightful jewels that bring me back to Slashdot. It cuts to the heart of why Linux is so difficult to measure on almost any basis. How many servers can we sell with the single copy of SuSE 8.0? How many desktops do I install for friends? Why should I buy a NAT box from Lineo when I can configure one easier myself (and make more money from it).
I think that your real insight revolves around the issue of knowlege. Rather than simply buying off-the-shelf boxen to do specific jobs (and paying through the nose for them), many in the Linux community are skillful enough to do all this on their own on an ad hoc basis. It seems that no one in the mainstream media has noticed this; and if they have, it must scare the living shit out of them. Where would their ad revenue go if there were no "products" but just tools?
I find companies selling Linux-based "firewall software" which are restricted to 20 users for $995 (software only). Now for that price I can buy a box, load SuSE onto it, configure the firewall, install the system and make $400 for about 2 hours of work. AND have unlimited users, multiple subnets, snort, tripwire, and on and on.
Our company supports Linux to a larger extent than most but we cannot justify spending money on products that we can simply do ourselves for less... while gaining functionality. This does not bode well for magazines that depend upon niche markets in Linux because as the numbers of Linux techies grow the smaller the market for these "enhanced" Linux products will become. Most of us will just do it ourselves.
The market for devices which can accept Linux and be configurable (like tiny PCs, for instance) will grow. Something that has the potential of becoming a ubiquitous appliance but not specific to a niche will have the potential for attractiing partners as long as it's at the right price. And that price has to be inside a window which makes it cheaper than just buying a cheap PC and doing it ourselves.
If I use Napster or Kazaa or any other file-trading software to download digital versions of music I already own on CDs it's not theft. It's no different than making an audio tape from a CD to play in my car. This is the legally established doctrine of "fair use" and the more people, like you, who continue to describe it as "theft" the sooner we'll be paying each time we listen to a piece of digital music. Not for each piece of music mind you, but each time we listen to it.
Erosion of fair use rights is a seriously dangerous thing. Try to at least modify your remarks to take this into account.
Now *that* comes as no big surprise. We tried to use the Moreton Bay (I guess they're called "Snap" now) line of NAT gateways but the prices kept going UP. When we could buy NAT gateways for less than $100 and these things were going past $250 we could no longer justify recommending them even though their use of Linux made them easier to admin (from our standpoint).
What do we do now? We use freeSCO on salvaged 486 boxes with no hard drives unless we need a full blown firewall... then we install SuSE 8.0 and use their firewall and/or netfilter. We've also not fallen for the $1,000 linux-based "firewall" distributions which license 10 or 20 internal IP addresses... hell, we can build the entire firewall for less than that and have unlimited internal IPs.
In my opinion (which is worth every nickel you've paid for it) the Linux-based companies are still struggling to find a profitable niche. Except for companies like ours, which simply design and build working solutions using open-source tools on an individual basis. We don't have "products", we just go in, solve their problems and leave. Oddly enough, they're happy to pay us to do that.
is that they are no longer set to keep traffic moving but, in fact, set to keep traffic stopped. This is a theory that a stopped car can't get into an accident (seriously!). Drivers know this, at least subconsciously, and are more apt to run yellow/red lights because they will surely be stopped at the next one anyway.
It's my own belief that the best way to stop drivers from running traffic lights is to synchronize them by speed so that drivers know that if they don't stop they will get out of synch and be stopped at the next one. But if they stop they will get back in synch and can make it through the rest (albeit at a slower speed).
This is also an excellent way to enforce speed limits. Set the lights on a main thoroughfare to be all green if a driver maintains 29mph in a 35mph zone and you will find far fewer drivers going 40.
and he has to have a proprietary driver package running on a Windows box in order to access the system. Otherwise we would have put a Linux box in for him. This could have changed in the past year, however.
As far as speed is concerned, his downloads are pretty fast but getting a download started is laggy. He does not do any gaming either.
Jerry Pournelle (www.byte.com) has a satellite connection and writes frequently about his experiences in a column. I recommend that you check the archives to see whether he has some advice that fits your situation.
I agree completely. It's a fundamentally different way of looking at operating systems and changing someone who is as entrenched as an MSCE would be in W32 is damned difficult.
On the other hand, moving a *nix guru over to W32 isn't difficult at all... they already know the details of how things should work, so it's just a matter of learning which buttons to push and which concepts have been redefined ("domains" to name just one).
and after the surgery replaced my lenses with implants I found that seeing small fonts on the monitor got more difficult. I had a 17" Viewsonic which I traded for a 15" LCD panel and the difference was amazing right off the bat. I would never recommend anyone with any vision problem buy anything but an LCD screen and preferably one with the best contrast ration you can find. In my opinion a 15" LCD is better than a 17" CRT.
Is it merely a change in dexterity caused by practice? Does the Game Boy really cause, in less than one generation, a mutation in "young people"? Or is this more evidence that journalists cannot seem to grasp even the barest essentials of science?
Slashdot Mirror
Damn! This should have been modded up!!! And it would hardly be "settling".
I take gingko biloba... I'd forgotten the reason.
In 1992 Bill Gates deserved the medal. His vision of computing was much more coherant than the visions of other industry leaders of that time. Take into account some of these factors:
1. This was before the Internet. Sure, some people in universities and some large corporations had Internet access... but mostly it didn't exist. If we wanted to communicate we used bulletin boards (like FidoNet) and 300bps modems;
2. This was before Linux and in the infancy of the GPL;
3. Unix was fragmented into dozens of incompatible versions each of which was priced out of the reach of mortal users (over $1,000 for SCO Xenix, as an example);
4. Novell owned the small business network environment and charged over $1,000 for their operating system;
5. Virtually no one had any idea what email was or why they'd need it.
In this period of time Gates appeared to be leading us out of the wilderness of Big Computing Iron and giving us what we wanted (and needed). Who could have seen then the course MS would take in the years after this award?
I'm a former intelligence officer and I started using Linux in 1993. It's my office desktop and my home desktop and I'm not interested in MS helping make my life more secure.
I liked the opening, I liked the middle, and I liked the end (mostly). When I went in to this movie I wasn't expecting to see anything deep... just fun. And it was fun as hell. Frank "singing" along with "Who let the dogs out" was a riot. I don't care about plot in these movies, just entertainment. And it delivered full measure on that judging from the reaction of the audience at my showing. For those of you reading these reviews go see it and judge for yourself. At least you'll keep cool in the a/c.
as long as their work doesn't modify the existing GPL code. So they just add some scripting to do what they want using a standard kernel (not an unlikely scenario). They can copyright their code or keep it secret; it's their choice. They need not release any of it as long as it does not incorporate any code that is already under GPL copyright. It would, in effect, simply be an application that runs on the Linux OS (like an accounting application or a database application).
A letter like this would certainly work much better now that people know that the FBI is likely to visit if you don't comply. So it's not necessarily a waste of time and resources to be able to point to what DID happen under noncompliance.
to Palladium-enabled (cough) devices? What if AMD or Cyrix decided to maintain the status quo and keep on manufacturing x86 chips. Or even migrate the x86 onwards and upwards but in a non-Palladium way?
The downside of this would be that the incompatibility issues between MS and GPL would be magnified. However there are upside issues too. The consumer, when informed that their CDs won't let them make mp3s of the music they just bought would be more likely to move to a GPL solution. The CDs which are incompatible with GPL might become less desirable. EU companies, outside the authority of US legal issues could mine out a larger niche in the market.
In fact, I see a much larger role for EU in open source projects as a result of the short-sighted efforts of US legislation (patents, etc.).
Does no one else notice the irony in having the company responsible for 90% of the viruses, worms, back doors, and trojans - all due to poor planning on the part of MS executives and programmers - suggest that now they can fix it for all of us?
If I were a conspiracy buff I'd think that MS created the security problems so that they could point to the "insecure internet" and offer some solution that benefits only them.
That anyone, much less some "internet guru" takes this at face value illustrates that P.T. Barnum was right about suckers.
One of our clients uses a proprietary system which, among other things, keeps records of customers paying by credit card. Unbeknownst to them (or us) this system has an "undocumented feature": a back door. Probably coded to allow easy access to systems by help-desk techies, there was no mention of it in any documentation we could find.
The client received an email from someone who told them about the back-door and provided clips of actual credit card information taken from the system! Luckily enough, this person disclaimed any intent to do harm and provided the information for us to eliminate the problem.
Of course, our dilemma was whether to advise the client to tell his customers about a possible theft of information. We decided that, since the email sender performed a service and had only used the credit card information to illustrate the problem, that the client was safe in not telling customers that their data might have been compromised.
Yup... that's the one. And I'm old enough to have read it on its first publication (when I was 13). In one of the SciFi mags as I recall (obviously imperfectly since I misremembered some of the details of this story).
:)
It certainly shouldn't come as a surprise that Asimov correctly predicted the future.
Thanks for the link.
that dealt with this subject perhaps 20-odd years ago. The setting was a party where a showoff was demonstrating that he could add, subtract and mulitply without his calculator . "Of course, these are merely cheap parlour tricks," the other characters complained to each other.
"There is simply no way he'd ever be able to divide or extract square roots without his calculator!"
Yet another SF author accurately predicting the future.
I can't see why they can't give me a full tcp/ip stack and an ethernet connection on a PDA. This would make the cradle unnecessary (just plug it into the network), it would make it possible to write nifty network analysis tools (the poor-man's fluke network assistant), and you could use it from any network connection. This plus a kb combined with on-line office applications and who needs a laptop?
Two (or more) radio transmitters on the same frequency within range of the same receiver will interfere with each other to the extent that usually one of them will not be heard well (or at all). The idea of "software radio" changes nothing unless every transmitter conforms to the same sets of rules and knows exactly where all the other transmitters are and what they are doing.
Even at microwave frequencies someone with a baby monitor on all the time at 2.4gHz will likely cause you problems with your WiFi network if it's close enough; or between you and the main antenna. One unmanaged device would be enough to create problems for everyone in its vicinity even using the software radio methods.
Government regulation of radio frequency spectrum was designed to minimize interference and create "bands" where users could reasonably expect the service they want to be located. Otherwise you would have to search through 10gHz of spectrum to find NBC news. Their concept of "software radio" only works if these radios know every source of possible interference in a geographical area and moves in the right way to avoid it. Who determines which way is the right way seems to me to be important and I'd much rather have a government entity do it.
In addition, the implementation of this system would pretty much require that all the other transmitters be confiscated and destroyed to keep them from mucking up the works.
One of our clients is a real estate appraisal firm and they routinely include color photos of the property along with their appraisal report. Like many new businesses, they started with two computers networked together with one inkjet printer between them. As they grew they just added workstations and printers until, by the time they asked us to fix things, they had files everywhere in various stages of completion and a $300 per month cartridge bill!
We did two things. First, we installed a Dell server running Linux to be their file server and mapped all their "my documents" subdirectories to a directory on this box.
The second thing we did was install an HP color laser printer with a network interface and point to it for default from every machine in the place.
Savings? Everything paid for in just over one year!
It seems strange that the distros the European Commission (presumably based in Europe) aren't utilizing the major European Linux distribution. Namely, SuSE.
This posting is one of those insightful jewels that bring me back to Slashdot. It cuts to the heart of why Linux is so difficult to measure on almost any basis. How many servers can we sell with the single copy of SuSE 8.0? How many desktops do I install for friends? Why should I buy a NAT box from Lineo when I can configure one easier myself (and make more money from it).
I think that your real insight revolves around the issue of knowlege. Rather than simply buying off-the-shelf boxen to do specific jobs (and paying through the nose for them), many in the Linux community are skillful enough to do all this on their own on an ad hoc basis. It seems that no one in the mainstream media has noticed this; and if they have, it must scare the living shit out of them. Where would their ad revenue go if there were no "products" but just tools?
I find companies selling Linux-based "firewall software" which are restricted to 20 users for $995 (software only). Now for that price I can buy a box, load SuSE onto it, configure the firewall, install the system and make $400 for about 2 hours of work. AND have unlimited users, multiple subnets, snort, tripwire, and on and on.
Our company supports Linux to a larger extent than most but we cannot justify spending money on products that we can simply do ourselves for less... while gaining functionality. This does not bode well for magazines that depend upon niche markets in Linux because as the numbers of Linux techies grow the smaller the market for these "enhanced" Linux products will become. Most of us will just do it ourselves.
The market for devices which can accept Linux and be configurable (like tiny PCs, for instance) will grow. Something that has the potential of becoming a ubiquitous appliance but not specific to a niche will have the potential for attractiing partners as long as it's at the right price. And that price has to be inside a window which makes it cheaper than just buying a cheap PC and doing it ourselves.
"If you already own the CD, why not make the MP3 yourself? People trade music for music they don't already own, plain and simple."
Because it's a 2 minute download and it's already in mp3 format and that makes it easier. So not all people trade music that they don't already own.
If I use Napster or Kazaa or any other file-trading software to download digital versions of music I already own on CDs it's not theft. It's no different than making an audio tape from a CD to play in my car. This is the legally established doctrine of "fair use" and the more people, like you, who continue to describe it as "theft" the sooner we'll be paying each time we listen to a piece of digital music. Not for each piece of music mind you, but each time we listen to it.
Erosion of fair use rights is a seriously dangerous thing. Try to at least modify your remarks to take this into account.
Now *that* comes as no big surprise. We tried to use the Moreton Bay (I guess they're called "Snap" now) line of NAT gateways but the prices kept going UP. When we could buy NAT gateways for less than $100 and these things were going past $250 we could no longer justify recommending them even though their use of Linux made them easier to admin (from our standpoint).
What do we do now? We use freeSCO on salvaged 486 boxes with no hard drives unless we need a full blown firewall... then we install SuSE 8.0 and use their firewall and/or netfilter. We've also not fallen for the $1,000 linux-based "firewall" distributions which license 10 or 20 internal IP addresses... hell, we can build the entire firewall for less than that and have unlimited internal IPs.
In my opinion (which is worth every nickel you've paid for it) the Linux-based companies are still struggling to find a profitable niche. Except for companies like ours, which simply design and build working solutions using open-source tools on an individual basis. We don't have "products", we just go in, solve their problems and leave. Oddly enough, they're happy to pay us to do that.
is that they are no longer set to keep traffic moving but, in fact, set to keep traffic stopped. This is a theory that a stopped car can't get into an accident (seriously!). Drivers know this, at least subconsciously, and are more apt to run yellow/red lights because they will surely be stopped at the next one anyway.
It's my own belief that the best way to stop drivers from running traffic lights is to synchronize them by speed so that drivers know that if they don't stop they will get out of synch and be stopped at the next one. But if they stop they will get back in synch and can make it through the rest (albeit at a slower speed).
This is also an excellent way to enforce speed limits. Set the lights on a main thoroughfare to be all green if a driver maintains 29mph in a 35mph zone and you will find far fewer drivers going 40.
and he has to have a proprietary driver package running on a Windows box in order to access the system. Otherwise we would have put a Linux box in for him. This could have changed in the past year, however.
As far as speed is concerned, his downloads are pretty fast but getting a download started is laggy. He does not do any gaming either.
Jerry Pournelle (www.byte.com) has a satellite connection and writes frequently about his experiences in a column. I recommend that you check the archives to see whether he has some advice that fits your situation.
I agree completely. It's a fundamentally different way of looking at operating systems and changing someone who is as entrenched as an MSCE would be in W32 is damned difficult.
On the other hand, moving a *nix guru over to W32 isn't difficult at all... they already know the details of how things should work, so it's just a matter of learning which buttons to push and which concepts have been redefined ("domains" to name just one).
and after the surgery replaced my lenses with implants I found that seeing small fonts on the monitor got more difficult. I had a 17" Viewsonic which I traded for a 15" LCD panel and the difference was amazing right off the bat. I would never recommend anyone with any vision problem buy anything but an LCD screen and preferably one with the best contrast ration you can find. In my opinion a 15" LCD is better than a 17" CRT.
Is it merely a change in dexterity caused by practice? Does the Game Boy really cause, in less than one generation, a mutation in "young people"? Or is this more evidence that journalists cannot seem to grasp even the barest essentials of science?