It has come to mean good things (not trying to reinvent the wheel, but building a car around it), and bad things (trying to force down the use of the de facto microsoft-owned standards incompatible with de jure ones), but it's the key idea in Microsoft's business decisions. And it's what's behind trying to separate more clearly the Windows kernel from it's GUI and it's shell. Perhaps we'll be seeing plenty of third-party GUIs or shells (I know there's litestep) to Windows.
It was at one point clear (DOS/Win3.1), but then the GUI started to "own" many features (net support, and even CD-ROM access!) from 95 on - and they finally did away with the separated "core system" from ME on.
Perhaps they're starting to see it's a bad idea, or that it's losing them customers. The first thing that attracted me to Linux is how I could have internet access without ever booting the GUI. And while XP is not the nightmare ME was, it's pretty hard to fix when broken in a deeper level.
On an off note, Billy Gates' "Road to the future" is actually an insightful book, you know. You just need to remember he's a businessman, not an actual geek. To him, it's better to admit to having been wrong than losing money or market share. Welcome to the world!
Standard microeconomic theory. It's a second grade discriminatory monopoly. I'll try to explain it in steps.
Every studio has a monopoly over its own movie. Yeah-yeah-yeah, theres a degree of substitution-ability between them, but let's just assume we want "The Matrix" and nothing else.
In a common monopoly, the monopolist faces a demand function, relating the price he sets to the ammount he manages to sell. There are a number of techniques economists learn in order to estimate demand functiond, and the Cobb-Douglas General Function Form tends to be the most adequate simple continuous algebraic function for that, but you can use a linear function if you feel like doing some numeric exercises.
So, the profit function of the monopolist is
PROFIT = PRICE * QUANTITY - COST
As we've seen, the quantity the monopolist manages to seel is a function of the price - as is the cost, but we said it'd be constant.
To simplify the calculus involved, and since there's always one and only one quantity for each price in a common (linear or Cobb-Douglas) demand function, we tend to write price as a function of quantity - that is, the price the monopolist must charge in order to sell a certain quantity. It can be easily done the other way around using the chain rule, but the notation'd get really confusing. So,
The dc/dq argument depends on the production structure of the firm and we won't use it here. The central thing here is how sensitive is the quantity purchased to how price changes, or equivalently, how much must one lower the price to sell one more unit.
The form of the p(q) function depends mainly on consumer preferences and their budget restriction. Assuming that preferences for The Matrix (versus alternative uses of the money) are the same all over the world, let's just focus on budget restrictions.
If budget restriction determines the demand function for a specific country, you can as well sum all the q(p) demand functions and get an international qi(p) demand function. You can then invert it to pi(q) form to fit it in our profit-maximizing criterium.
You can easily see that, if you can charge only one price worldwide, the fact that if Argentina is affected by a crisis, and they start buying less DVD's, you face the trade-off between charging less in Argentina (and elsewhere!) and selling less worlwide, or charge the same and sell less in Argentina. The importance of Argentina in the worldwide DVD market will end up determining how much lower your optimal price will go.
So, yes, region encoding puts the producer in an advantage regarding the consumer. It's a market failure, and it happens because of the monopoly.
On the other hand, if you can charge different prices in different countries, you can squeeze Denmark more than Argentina, since they will be willing to pay more for the same product. The extreme case is the third degree monopoly, where the seller can charge a different price for each consumer, and squeeze all their willingness to pay to the end, not facing any trade-off at all.
It's complicated enough there, but add exchange rates deviation from Purchasing Power Parity. In fact, it's how much the current exchange deviates from PPP that (mostly) determines how much international trade is done, and in which direction. In fact, foreign currency traders are the True Illuminati of the early-2000's.
And yes, it makes much more sense to try to regulate DVD coding than to try to regulate currency traders away from pushing exchange rates back to PPP. Ideally, monopoly regulations should make monopolistic firms as if there was no monopoly, that is, as if there was such a large market
It just cheapens the Netscape name, one for which many of us still have fond memories. I would guess some of the key original Netscape programmers are pretty sad too.
I already posted a comment about this once, but I'll never forget how sad jwz's resignation letters were.
This one predates the recently slashdotted article about myths in open source by many years, and probably was the first one to call attention to the fact that (his own words) "you cannot just take a project, sprinkle it with the magic pixie dust of 'open source' and make it magically work".
And this one made me so sad when it came out I threw away all plans of making a career in computer engineering. Again his own words, "sometimes the only way to win is to not play".
Yes, he's kinda dramatic in a mexican soap opera way, but then I was 17, and was deeply struck.
Is it just me or world-class third-world poorhole dictator mr. Sat^Hddam looks really simmilar to world-class purist-annoying camera-loving tenor singer Luciano Pavarotti?
I don't know if I really understand you. What you're saying is that being easily reproduced, software has zero marginal cost. Is that what you're saying?
I apologize if I'm misrepresenting your point, but even if the marginal cost in reproducing the bare metal software the kernel people wrote is very small (these days, basically the bandwidth or the storage medium), there's a huge fixed cost involved in the making of even simple software like a window manager or a text editor.
Just start with the education of a programmer. Programmers and financial speculators deal with a mix of high abstraction and real-world constraints that are nowhere to be found either in the academia or in the rest of the corporate world. It's just not simple.
If I'm a somewhat experienced user who can tweak Gentoo a bit and package it in easily installable form using shell scripting, why oh why would I bother hiring coders when starting my very own Hypocrite Computer Inc. to release my HypOS X?
People respond to incentives. And while I can understand a programmer enjoying programming, why would he even be hired?
It's not a matter of greed, but of long term factibility. This sounds like a modified version of the Tragedy of the Commons that hasn't (afaik) been subject to serious economic consideration. I should do some researching in the academic papers in economics to see if someone's already said something.
How much is IBM really giving you in this whole open source business?
See, the problem is that these "contributions to the community" are not quantifiable. Hypocrite Computers Inc. can write the coolest screen saver for X, and get the whole bare metal interface, not to mention dozens of end-user apps.
And in the end, call it Hypocrite Computer OS, powered by linux (or, what, bsd) technlogy.
Sheeeesh. Looks like some fruit-named company has done it already. I should get in this OSS business. Proper marketing and a good Gentoo-like solution (with transparent installation, of course).
And if I want to get some cred with the community, I can always write a screen saver.
See, thats what really bothers me. "Giving back to the community" is subjective. A donation system based on the warm-fuzzy-community feeling will generate quite objective cash-cow revenue.
You could always buy Microsoft products because Bill G donates huge loads of money to African and South American stuck-in-poverty countries.
In the end, the open source system has many of the flaws in the larger political system. People are not only giving money, but contributing with valuable and knowledgeable time in programming, and get back fuzzy "support for the community".
I definitely see some people getting rich here, and some people not.
Much like companies behind commercial P2P software are getting rich off mr. underpaid indie artist. Hell.
While its nice that they always _mention_ there's a corporate slant in giving space to Sourceforge stories, it's still a bit disturbing that a whole community is serving the interests of the likes of VA - not to mention IBM, Novell, and whatever big company becomes Linux/GNU/Open Source vendors.
Nah, I don't really know if there's a solution. While the compromise seems to be working okay (at least in the server market), for how long will be people willing to work for free for IBM?
Really, I like Media Player Classic, er, um, conceptually, but its performance is whack on my underpowered computer. Same goes for gxine on this same box running Debian. The official XP mplayer2 still cuts it better in my own experience.
Note the conditional: if people scream in denial and curve in fetal position everytime a flaw in Linux comes up, then it'll fade away as push technology.
I'd hope Slashdot isn't representative of the people doing the actual coding.
and rouge ftpd/httpd services which serve different stuff to different people are not unheared of eithe
Christ, if people keep ignoring issues in open source software, the whole thing is gonna sink in a couple of years, and people will remember Linux as yet another stupid thing they invested money on, much like push technology.
If you want a quote to startle your appetite, here it goes:
Five years ago it would have been Windows versus OS/2. A few years before, it would have been Windows versus Macintosh. Before, maybe it would have been C/PM 86, and before that, maybe CP/M 80. There's always been some challenger to the operating system. Linux--which is only a kernel--is not where the interesting stuff is going on nowadays.
I should really have submitted this as a main page story, as my karma really needs some help since I've started being realistic on the LG business.
For the average person that needs to be able to plug in their digital camera without going into the terminal window, we think that the user's experience with any brand of Linux will be sub-par.
At last someone inside the Linux industry says it!
Simple as this: the naming wars are over. In the minds of the overwhelming majority of the population in the entire world hackers are script kiddies who break into computers.
Just drop the damn name and pick up "geek" or "wizard" or "opensourcester" or "sourceforger" or whatever. The whole problem disappears. Everyone realizes there are good people with magic-like computer skills - you don't need to waste time by calling yourself a 'hacker' and explaining the whole semantics of the thing.
Just imagine if the now-called libertarians would bitch that much about the world "liberal" (which anywhere else in the world means "libertarian"). They don't.
Let's hypothetically assume that this compromise is the result of a malicious attack by either an immature script-kiddie/cracker or an evil conspiracy from the corporate software world.
How does this change the fact that Debian is just not good enough, and has compromised thousands of machines across the globe? Sheesh, the denial...
This is just like the Mandrake frying standard PC hardware story. Yes, the LG drives weren't compliant to the de jure standards, but in the real world, standards are de facto, not de jure.
Open Source has gone a long way and produced a lot of software that's up there with its commercial counterparts (Latex, The GIMP, Audacity, Firebird, Miranda/GAIM/SIM, Gretl, Python) but the Linux distros available are still not industrial-strength. And denial isn't really gonna help making it work.
Screaming denial, hissy fits or throwing protocols and RFC's across the room aren't gonna convince the nonhacker world. Walk a mile in their shoes, and then rethink the way you deal with events.
The core OpenDarwin group has quite a few Apple employees, including their leader Rob Braun.
Interestingly enough, I tried to open the website to remind myself in which network their IRC channel is (so I could have a chat with Rob Braun on how he feels about it), but the opendarwin.org is down.
.. and the voting machines (Linux-based, IIRC) are being exported to a bunch of countries now. The voting machines have a numeric keyboard so you have to know the number of your candidates, but there's visual feedback (pictures) before confirmation.
Costs associated with paper backups can be greatly minimized arbitraging a significance level and using common undergrad mathematical statistics. The significance level is the probability that the whole population's parameter (say, W's total votes) will be within a certain error margin from the sample's parameter.
Error margin = (t * s) / sqrt(n), where t is Student's t number (calculated from sample size and the significance level you arbitraged using a common computer or a table), s is the standard deviation of the sample and n the sample size.
It's a demonstrable mathematical fact. The proof can be found in any basic statistics book lying around in a college library and understood by anyone who knows high school calculus.
Slashdot Mirror
Man, I actually used "it's" when I meant "its". I'm so humiliated!
Embrace and extend.
It has come to mean good things (not trying to reinvent the wheel, but building a car around it), and bad things (trying to force down the use of the de facto microsoft-owned standards incompatible with de jure ones), but it's the key idea in Microsoft's business decisions. And it's what's behind trying to separate more clearly the Windows kernel from it's GUI and it's shell. Perhaps we'll be seeing plenty of third-party GUIs or shells (I know there's litestep) to Windows.
It was at one point clear (DOS/Win3.1), but then the GUI started to "own" many features (net support, and even CD-ROM access!) from 95 on - and they finally did away with the separated "core system" from ME on.
Perhaps they're starting to see it's a bad idea, or that it's losing them customers. The first thing that attracted me to Linux is how I could have internet access without ever booting the GUI. And while XP is not the nightmare ME was, it's pretty hard to fix when broken in a deeper level.
On an off note, Billy Gates' "Road to the future" is actually an insightful book, you know. You just need to remember he's a businessman, not an actual geek. To him, it's better to admit to having been wrong than losing money or market share. Welcome to the world!
Standard microeconomic theory. It's a second grade discriminatory monopoly. I'll try to explain it in steps.
Every studio has a monopoly over its own movie. Yeah-yeah-yeah, theres a degree of substitution-ability between them, but let's just assume we want "The Matrix" and nothing else.
In a common monopoly, the monopolist faces a demand function, relating the price he sets to the ammount he manages to sell. There are a number of techniques economists learn in order to estimate demand functiond, and the Cobb-Douglas General Function Form tends to be the most adequate simple continuous algebraic function for that, but you can use a linear function if you feel like doing some numeric exercises.
So, the profit function of the monopolist is
PROFIT = PRICE * QUANTITY - COST
As we've seen, the quantity the monopolist manages to seel is a function of the price - as is the cost, but we said it'd be constant.
PROFIT (price) = PRICE * QUANTITY(PRICE) - COST (QUANTITY(PRICE))
To simplify the calculus involved, and since there's always one and only one quantity for each price in a common (linear or Cobb-Douglas) demand function, we tend to write price as a function of quantity - that is, the price the monopolist must charge in order to sell a certain quantity. It can be easily done the other way around using the chain rule, but the notation'd get really confusing. So,
profit(quantity) = price (quantity) * quantity - cost (quantity)
By common calculus, profit is at its maximum when
d(profit)/d(quantity) = 0
So, by the product rule,
dp/dq + p - dc/dq = 0
Thus,
dp/dq + p = dc/dq
The dc/dq argument depends on the production structure of the firm and we won't use it here. The central thing here is how sensitive is the quantity purchased to how price changes, or equivalently, how much must one lower the price to sell one more unit.
The form of the p(q) function depends mainly on consumer preferences and their budget restriction. Assuming that preferences for The Matrix (versus alternative uses of the money) are the same all over the world, let's just focus on budget restrictions.
If budget restriction determines the demand function for a specific country, you can as well sum all the q(p) demand functions and get an international qi(p) demand function. You can then invert it to pi(q) form to fit it in our profit-maximizing criterium.
You can easily see that, if you can charge only one price worldwide, the fact that if Argentina is affected by a crisis, and they start buying less DVD's, you face the trade-off between charging less in Argentina (and elsewhere!) and selling less worlwide, or charge the same and sell less in Argentina. The importance of Argentina in the worldwide DVD market will end up determining how much lower your optimal price will go.
So, yes, region encoding puts the producer in an advantage regarding the consumer. It's a market failure, and it happens because of the monopoly.
On the other hand, if you can charge different prices in different countries, you can squeeze Denmark more than Argentina, since they will be willing to pay more for the same product. The extreme case is the third degree monopoly, where the seller can charge a different price for each consumer, and squeeze all their willingness to pay to the end, not facing any trade-off at all.
It's complicated enough there, but add exchange rates deviation from Purchasing Power Parity. In fact, it's how much the current exchange deviates from PPP that (mostly) determines how much international trade is done, and in which direction. In fact, foreign currency traders are the True Illuminati of the early-2000's.
And yes, it makes much more sense to try to regulate DVD coding than to try to regulate currency traders away from pushing exchange rates back to PPP. Ideally, monopoly regulations should make monopolistic firms as if there was no monopoly, that is, as if there was such a large market
I just found a journal entry by an ex-Netscape programmer claiming this makes him "want to cry".
It just cheapens the Netscape name, one for which many of us still have fond memories. I would guess some of the key original Netscape programmers are pretty sad too.
I already posted a comment about this once, but I'll never forget how sad jwz's resignation letters were.
This one predates the recently slashdotted article about myths in open source by many years, and probably was the first one to call attention to the fact that (his own words) "you cannot just take a project, sprinkle it with the magic pixie dust of 'open source' and make it magically work".
And this one made me so sad when it came out I threw away all plans of making a career in computer engineering. Again his own words, "sometimes the only way to win is to not play".
Yes, he's kinda dramatic in a mexican soap opera way, but then I was 17, and was deeply struck.
Someone actually built a Windows XP box.
Jesus, what a great time to be alive.
Is it just me or world-class third-world poorhole dictator mr. Sat^Hddam looks really simmilar to world-class purist-annoying camera-loving tenor singer Luciano Pavarotti?
See here and here.
Really, couldn't this have been set up by an orthodox italian opera singer?
A message to the German audience: Soilent Green ist Popel!
As you can hear on german goth-rockers Wumpscut's "Soylent Grun",
"Soylent grun ist menschenfleisch! Es ist Menschenfleisch! Soylent Grun ist ein Produkt aus Menschenfleisch!".
Sorry, this is a huge off-topic, but I just couldn't resist. There goes my karma down with my smegma.
I don't know if I really understand you. What you're saying is that being easily reproduced, software has zero marginal cost. Is that what you're saying?
I apologize if I'm misrepresenting your point, but even if the marginal cost in reproducing the bare metal software the kernel people wrote is very small (these days, basically the bandwidth or the storage medium), there's a huge fixed cost involved in the making of even simple software like a window manager or a text editor.
Just start with the education of a programmer. Programmers and financial speculators deal with a mix of high abstraction and real-world constraints that are nowhere to be found either in the academia or in the rest of the corporate world. It's just not simple.
If I'm a somewhat experienced user who can tweak Gentoo a bit and package it in easily installable form using shell scripting, why oh why would I bother hiring coders when starting my very own Hypocrite Computer Inc. to release my HypOS X?
People respond to incentives. And while I can understand a programmer enjoying programming, why would he even be hired?
It's not a matter of greed, but of long term factibility. This sounds like a modified version of the Tragedy of the Commons that hasn't (afaik) been subject to serious economic consideration. I should do some researching in the academic papers in economics to see if someone's already said something.
But in any case, it's. Not. That. Simple.
How much is IBM really giving you in this whole open source business?
See, the problem is that these "contributions to the community" are not quantifiable. Hypocrite Computers Inc. can write the coolest screen saver for X, and get the whole bare metal interface, not to mention dozens of end-user apps.
And in the end, call it Hypocrite Computer OS, powered by linux (or, what, bsd) technlogy.
Sheeeesh. Looks like some fruit-named company has done it already. I should get in this OSS business. Proper marketing and a good Gentoo-like solution (with transparent installation, of course).
And if I want to get some cred with the community, I can always write a screen saver.
Paypal does not contribute back.
See, thats what really bothers me. "Giving back to the community" is subjective. A donation system based on the warm-fuzzy-community feeling will generate quite objective cash-cow revenue.
You could always buy Microsoft products because Bill G donates huge loads of money to African and South American stuck-in-poverty countries.
In the end, the open source system has many of the flaws in the larger political system. People are not only giving money, but contributing with valuable and knowledgeable time in programming, and get back fuzzy "support for the community".
I definitely see some people getting rich here, and some people not.
Much like companies behind commercial P2P software are getting rich off mr. underpaid indie artist. Hell.
While its nice that they always _mention_ there's a corporate slant in giving space to Sourceforge stories, it's still a bit disturbing that a whole community is serving the interests of the likes of VA - not to mention IBM, Novell, and whatever big company becomes Linux/GNU/Open Source vendors.
Nah, I don't really know if there's a solution. While the compromise seems to be working okay (at least in the server market), for how long will be people willing to work for free for IBM?
How much is hacker reputation really worth?
Really, I like Media Player Classic, er, um, conceptually, but its performance is whack on my underpowered computer. Same goes for gxine on this same box running Debian. The official XP mplayer2 still cuts it better in my own experience.
You could always block access to your website where the "linked from" http header contains Slashdot.
Note the conditional: if people scream in denial and curve in fetal position everytime a flaw in Linux comes up, then it'll fade away as push technology.
I'd hope Slashdot isn't representative of the people doing the actual coding.
Christ, if people keep ignoring issues in open source software, the whole thing is gonna sink in a couple of years, and people will remember Linux as yet another stupid thing they invested money on, much like push technology.
Um, who even mentioned Microsoft? I thought we were discussing Debian security.
If you want a quote to startle your appetite, here it goes:
I should really have submitted this as a main page story, as my karma really needs some help since I've started being realistic on the LG business.
At last someone inside the Linux industry says it!
Um, in security, a potential compromise is a compromise.
Just drop the damn name and pick up "geek" or "wizard" or "opensourcester" or "sourceforger" or whatever. The whole problem disappears. Everyone realizes there are good people with magic-like computer skills - you don't need to waste time by calling yourself a 'hacker' and explaining the whole semantics of the thing.
Just imagine if the now-called libertarians would bitch that much about the world "liberal" (which anywhere else in the world means "libertarian"). They don't.
How does this change the fact that Debian is just not good enough, and has compromised thousands of machines across the globe? Sheesh, the denial... This is just like the Mandrake frying standard PC hardware story. Yes, the LG drives weren't compliant to the de jure standards, but in the real world, standards are de facto, not de jure.
Open Source has gone a long way and produced a lot of software that's up there with its commercial counterparts (Latex, The GIMP, Audacity, Firebird, Miranda/GAIM/SIM, Gretl, Python) but the Linux distros available are still not industrial-strength. And denial isn't really gonna help making it work.
Screaming denial, hissy fits or throwing protocols and RFC's across the room aren't gonna convince the nonhacker world. Walk a mile in their shoes, and then rethink the way you deal with events.
Interestingly enough, I tried to open the website to remind myself in which network their IRC channel is (so I could have a chat with Rob Braun on how he feels about it), but the opendarwin.org is down.
Apparently, he's thrown all away to become a club owner.
.. and the voting machines (Linux-based, IIRC) are being exported to a bunch of countries now. The voting machines have a numeric keyboard so you have to know the number of your candidates, but there's visual feedback (pictures) before confirmation.
Costs associated with paper backups can be greatly minimized arbitraging a significance level and using common undergrad mathematical statistics. The significance level is the probability that the whole population's parameter (say, W's total votes) will be within a certain error margin from the sample's parameter.
Error margin = (t * s) / sqrt(n), where t is Student's t number (calculated from sample size and the significance level you arbitraged using a common computer or a table), s is the standard deviation of the sample and n the sample size.
It's a demonstrable mathematical fact. The proof can be found in any basic statistics book lying around in a college library and understood by anyone who knows high school calculus.