I have been grumbling about setup and configuration issues for months, often on Slashdot, and I am delighted that someone as prominent as ESR has become aware of this type of problem.
If we get some top-grade developers motivated to work in this area, it will all get fixed. I actually think that it will happen quite soon. XFree86 configuration is another place that comes to mind, just try even an advanced distro like SuSE, with a popular Nvidia card, and a 1600*1200 monitor, and you will see what I mean! it ends up in a black screen of death every time, because the stupid configuration program runs in X, misconfigures to the point that the monitor gives up (or goes bang?), and dies. The bit which is without excuse is that if you get it working with a manual edit of the config file, and later run Sax, it blows away all your hard work.
SuSE is no worse than the others, in fact it is better than most, but like a lot of excrement found in the Redmond sewage system, it tries to be too clever without knowing all the facts.
Samba is another thing that needs attention, same sort of reason. I have full sympathy with the Samba developers, there are only so many hours in a day, and they have to interwork with bug-infested, undocumented protocols that change as often as Sir Bill changes his underwear. So, it needs more people, working on the user and administrator interface. It does not help that every distro does its own thing, needlessly duplicating effort. In the case of Samba, almost all of the work could be common across all Linux distros, BSD, BeOS, Solaris, even the hated SCO.
I hope these issues get serious action soon, it will enormously help in the process of getting OSS established on the desktop. It is even far more important than developing the next version of the kernel, after all we have reliable kernels now, thanks to the hard work of Linus and many others.
Good. That may cause BSD to rise in popularity, so we might have a better balance. Linux is good, so is BSD, but at the moment only Linux is widely known. Diversity is a good thing, having two similar OSs with much in common as far as the user or administrator are concerned, but with entirely different kernels, is an excellent thing, because it allows freedom of choice, helps prevent the spread of virii, etc.
OF course we should include recent MAC varaints as BSD. I don't think we need worry about a stranglehold on the desktop, the choice of distros is likely to remain, maybe even diversify. The thing that may become a near-monopoly is not the OS, but what may become the most important applications, and I would rate OpenOffice.org/Star Office, Mozilla, and Ximian Evolution as the first three which are likely to become dominant. But in no case will these achieve the supposed universality of Outlook ond M$ Office, because Koffice and the next version of Word Perfect will remain, and will have compatability, same for browsers, where people who actually care about performance and standards compliance will still pay money for Opera, and Konqueror is not bad either, likewise for email clients etc.
I actually think that we are in for a set of diverse applications which will interoperate properly, and the Convicted Monopolist, who deliberately breaks compatability with everything else, will be the incompatible minority.
When it is taken as normal for programs to be standards-compliant, there will be no room ever again for a Sir Bill, not in software at least, diversity will see to that. Sadly, the next predatory monopolist like Sir Bill is likely to arise in the field of plant genetics, or maybe human cloning.........
It would be best if someone creative (there are plenty of you out there) was to use the RFC process to make a public standard which will do the job. Given that free and open source things can happen very quickly when people are motivated, a free solution to this problem could be in place sufficiently quickly to prevent the vile Convicted Monopoly getting a grip on the email system with another of their half-baked ideas.
The first phase of any program to prevent email abuse should of course be to enact laws to ban Outlook and its Express mutant. After all, that is where almost all the security holes exploited by spammers to create zombie servers are to be found. I can't see why any sane person would want to use it anyway, most of the alternatives are actually better as far as internet mail is concerned, and why would any business waste huge amounts of money on an Exchange server?
Sadly you are right. Almost all the trouble I get now is from zombies (not sure if I mean the PCs or their owners!). Of course most of it happens because the stupid morons are continuing to use Outlook, which is a singularly pathetic program apart from its major security holes.
As an aside, I set up a firewall, and the equivalent of Internet Connection Sharing (i.e. forwarding) on a Linux box the other day, IIRC it needed 4 lines of commands to iptables in one of the startup scripts, which being lazy I got out of a book. I went to grc.com for a test, and it was every bit as good as Zone Alarm, a product I use successfully on the inferior OS.
The point is that in an open OS, useful and essential things tend to be fully documented, visible, and easy to set up. I fear that in this case, Sir Bill's anti-spamming system will be obfuscated, needlessly difficult to configure, and will at the slightest provocation automatically default to doing it Sir Bill's way, even if that is not what you want. There is a precedent in every previous M$ application, the world's most unpopular Word processor being the prime example.....
It is of course another con trick to move us towards Longhorn, which on its own would get no acceptance whatsoever, because its drastically cut-down API set will break compatability with virtually everything. of course, if the Convicted Monopolist was competent, they would have had a much smaller, more manageable and properly documented API set in the first place, and we would not have nearly as many bugs, crashes or security holes.
It seems to me that someone needs start the RFC process right now, describing a properly working, non-proprietary system. Otherwise, the Convicted Monopolist will once again do as described in the Halloween Documents.....
Probably true, but most of it would be stopped if people stopped being stupid and got rid of Outlook, as well as taking all the other appropriate precautions. Theives take advantage of open doors, and Sir Bill has left so many openings..... Especially with new viruses, where it is going to take at best hours, more likely days, to get the countermeasures in place, the simple removal of Outlook and its malignant Express mutant gives far more benefit in terms of cost and time than any other single action. Yes, you do still need a stealth-mode firewall, even better a hardware firewall, and one or more virus scanners, but close the biggest hole first!
I saw a book in the shop the other day called "Writing Secure Code" or something similar. When I saw the publisher, I did not even bother to pick it up for a look, as the company concerned (Guess who?) has a solidly demonstrated long-term track record of gross incompetence in that area.
Sadly, it tends to be as you say, although P2P is not inherently illegal, it is only when you share someone else's property that it becomes so.
I used a P2P network once, to get an unavailable piece of music. Had it been on sale in the shops I would have bought it.
Lesson for the RIAA - keep everything available for ever, and find a sensible way of charging for odd copies of one track, then honest people would not need to do this. Of course that might need some understanding of technology, which no-one in your organisation apparently has any more, because you can't distinguish between someone who only wants to play the DVD he has paid for on his non-Microsoft PC and a gangster.
It is about time that something like this happened, and I hope the courts deal with them severely.
It would be very useful if the police forces had well-publicised points of contact for reporting computer and internet crime. At the moment, the local police station is unlikely to know anything at all, unless you are lucky to meet one of the few policemen who is really into computers, likely as a hobby. The expertise seems mainly to be in Scotland Yard, the department there could do with more funding, more staff, and more publicity, such as a simple means to contact them by email or web. My systems get beseiged by attacks from a handful of IP addresses, and if there was a central point for reporting all these easily, it would not be hard to spot the patterns and take appropriate action. For example, a warning letter from the police might be sufficient to get open mail relays closed, and cable modem users who have been trojaned might pay heed and take proper precautions. This could be largely automated, only where the parties concerned were deliberately committing criminal acts, or who failed to react to a warning, would the full powers of the Computer Misuse Act need to be applied.
Not so long ago there was an idiot on the NTL cable network who was causing continual problems to others because his machine was running continually and had been trojaned, and was being used by hackers elsewhere. Something like that, after a few independent reports, should automatically trigger a "cease and desist" letter, together with some good advice on cleaning up the problem.
It seems to me that it should be quite simple to gather and collate information from the public, which with the ISP's logs would enable the causes of problems to be located and dealt with. I for one don't mind my ISP's files being available automatically to a law-enforcement robot, I rather would get a warning letter or email if something was amiss.
Of course the way to deal with the most recent round of severe problems is to simply ban Outlook. I wonder if the Convicted Monopolist could gain another conviction for deliberately producing software which facilitates contravening the Computer Misuse Act? BTW it would help if other countries enacted similar legislation instead of being misled by fascists like the RIAA into stupidly focussing on those who might want to play a DVD on their Linux computer, for example. In the UK, the CMA has real teeth, sadly it does not get exercised as often as it should, because it provides a means to outlaw certain vile practices. For example, if an installer deliberately cripples another application (we all know some that do, and most come from the Redmond area), that is a criminal offence, and rightly so, yet I have not seen any prosecutions. The wording of the Act would suggest that if installing Windoze as the second OS blows away the ability of Linux/BSD/OS-2 (or whatever) to boot, then an offence is committed. The only defence seems to be that it was done in ignorance. Can you imagine Bill standing in the dock in the Old Bailey, pathetically whining that he was not guilty, he was only ignorant? Justice would be admirably served by that admission.
Careful, don't give the copyright schysters ideas..... It has happened before.
I am old enough to remember when the Zilog Z80 microprocessor, a superset of Intel's 8080, had to have substantially different instruction mnemonics, apparently for copyright reasons. It made my job a misery because our C compiler, Whitesmiths IIRC, on a Plexus P35 (6MHz 68000, 1MB RAM, 71MB HDD, 16 serial ports with about 8 terminals) running Unix System 3 (I wonder if McBride claims ownership of that buggy version...), was for an 8080, our embedded target system was an improved CMOS Z80, not Zilog (IIRC it had a few extra instructions) and my programming books were all Z80, as was one of the available assemblers.) It was said at the time that the cause of the problem was that some key people had left Intel to found Zilog, and Intel got their revenge....
I don't know if copyright restrictions applied to programmers or only to Zilog and their data books, but it had about as much credibility as far as end users were concerned as the battle betweem McBride and the civilised world.
The sad thing is that Zilog had by far the better product, and their next one, the 16-bit Z8000, was way ahead of the 8086, but where are Zilog now? I know their Z80 outsold everything else for a long time, and they still have products for niche markets. No doubt their lack of major success was due to the same idiot within IBM whose folly led to an obnoxious spoilt brat forming what would become the biggest ever Convicted Monopoly, and whose dysfunctional products have inflicted massive economic damage on the civilised world.
No, he can't make that claim about Apache, but he has a vaild point about the typical Linux distro, which contains more GNU than Linux, and possibly more BSD and other derived material also. You usually get OpenOffice.org nowadays, that is a fair bit bigger than the Linux part, the kernel. The whole thing needs a fairly neutral brand identity to avoid these problems. A typical distro is not Linux, nor is it GNU, and certainly not Apache, but those are major parts of it. Marketing experts, please come up with something....
It is not a case of Licence Holy Wars either, it is simply an area where clarification is needed, for example the new GPL might need to define methods of interworking with other licences to avoid such problems. There are potentially serious legal issues, and McBride, Gates and Ballmer would just love to see some open-source going out with the licences in a muddle, especially McBride right now, so it is really important that people scrupulously stick to what the licenses actually say, until they have negotiated appropriate changes.
This does not matter at all to end users, and only slightly to developers right now, but the issues must be faced and dealt with in a professional manner. I noticed that on the other, and far worse issue, the X problem, the various competing distros seemed to be collaborating very closely with each other, whereas in the closed source world they would be fighting and squabbling among themselves, and would likely end up in court. If they do the same here, the image of open source will be greatly enhanced. It does not matter if RMS has deeply held opinions, to which he is fully entitled, and with some of which I disagree. What matters is that at the end of the day a professional attitude prevails (professionals have their major disagreements, they differ from the cowboys in the way they resolve them).
Either Apache will give way (probable), the GPL will be revised to better interoperate with other licences (also probable) or someone will, within a few days, fork Apache, to make a derived work (Sioux?) and the GPLed fork will continue while the other version will die (improbable). Any one or more of these will keep the legal situation tidy, and although the last one, forking, will upset a lot of people because of the principle, none would be damaging to open source in general. The only damage would be done by bitter recriminations, ending up invoking copyright law in court, which would only benefit Gates, Ballmer and McBride, but this issue is not headed that way. It is not a war, only a minor difficulty.
You may have a point, although in the case of X I think some people were being obnoxious. However, you did provoke some thought (very unusual!) on my part, and my tiny little mind connected the fact that X wanted some credit with the frequent comments from a certain person re GNU/Linux. Seems to me that as it is feasible to make non-Linux based distros (BSD and maybe others) of similar functionality to a typical Linux distro, with and without GNU bits and/or X or Apache, there maybe should be a new overall brand name, emphasising the word "open" or "free" or similar. Under that general heading it would say on the box, in quite big letters: "Contains Linux, GNU/FSF, X, Apache..." so that the emphaiss was not entirely on the kernel, or indeed on any one other major component. Maybe the FSF need some marketing men to work out the branding.....(joking of course, they even need a lawyer, and have a very good one, but marketing men?)
As to modifications to the GPL, my favourite would be to find some way of limiting it to ethical uses only, but how would people agree on what was ethical? It is a bit like censorship, a very good thing indeed in some areas, to protect people from the malice of others (banning child pornography from the net for a start), but as soon as you go down that road you get problems in the implementation, and the possibility of unfair use of the restrictions. The GPL basically restricts you from restricting anyone else's rights, because freedom is valuable and should be protected, but it would be nice to combine that with a ban on immoral use. Monsanto come to mind as a company I would not want to use any of my code to assist in making potentially dangerous mutants, because that is what products of their genetic modifications are, or perhaps the Taliban doing simulation work on nuclear explosions, or Bill Gates and his Convicted Monopoly for any purpose at all, to give three possible examples. Even limiting commercial use is problematic, after all most of us appreciate the distros, or the Sharp Zaurus (don't have one yet), or our set-top box based on Linux, or whatever. But, maybe the GPL could be re-worded to allow the original program's authors to add some limited conditions, which would like the GPL be perpetual. It could work in other ways too, the author could set a limit on the selling price to stop someone down the line overcharging (but can't of course set a minimum price, which is invariably zero).
Exactly. Do a trivial change to make it a dervied work, problem solved. In the same way you can take a BSD program, do something to it, and release it as GPL (good) or closed source (very bad...).
Personally I prefer the GPL, it ensures that freedom will continue in perpetuity. I don't like any licenece where the Convicted Monopolist, or McBride, or anyone obnoxious can take a free program and make it non-free, benefiting from the usually free work of others. That is not fair. If you take the source, improve it and have to give the improved source back, that is fair. It would be best if the various slightly problematic licemces went away, and we had only the new improved GPL.
I think this one will be resolved amicably, if not, Apache will be forked, which will upset more people than it should.
I am seriously wondering if, with XFree86 and now Apache, there is some Malevolent Monopolist (probably already convicted) behind this, trying to divide and discredit Open Source. Don't let it happen!
Hopefully this will force a fork or a complete change of direction. XFree86 and its non-free predecessor are very old now, and a major re-write would be a very good thing.
XFree86 is an absolute pig to configure in some circumstances, the broken configuration tools supplied by certain distros don't help, and a complete re-write could be a very good thing indeed. Never mind the politics, or the fact that the distros are all rejecting the new licence for good reasons. In fact it is impressive to see the diverse distros sticking together on this. Software that has been maintained and modified for so many years invariably becomes a mess, and it is good to throw it away from time to time and start again.
An orderly move to new technology will do a lot to advance Linux and the several BSDs (any more OSs I have forgotten?) on the desktop, meanwhile the distros should stay as they are with the current version, and work towards maintaining compatability. SCO can of course go down the dead end road of the new version, as long as they don't try to sue those who went a better way and so allegedly damaged SCO's failing business. (Note to McBride: that idea of suing the FSF etc for damaging your business by doing something better is copyrighted by me under a very restrictive licence that does not allow its use by you.)
No, there will hopefully be at least 4 in total, including OpenBSD, FreeBSD and NetBSD, in the fullness of time. Some people really need one or other of the BSDs, I need OpenBSD on my firewall for example, and although I don't have a bandwidth issue yet, some people do and would relish the performance. Linux is not so good in that particular application, but better for a workstation. There may also be the commercial BSD (BSDi?) which I have not seen advertised lately but is likely still around. There would have been SCO, but Darl will be in jail before the OS is ported to 64-bit, even if SCO has the funds. Their paymaster does, but he hates *nix, his only funding of SCO is for the purposes of fighting a battle he dare not enter for legal reasons, being the Chief Architect of a Convicted Monopolist.
I would not be surprised if OS-2 suddenly got a new lease of life in 64-bit form, as there is a window of opportunity while Bill's pathetic product is, as is always the case, late and buggy. Another outsider, which would really be fast on 64 bit, would be BeOS. I am not up to date on developments there, but an OSS equivalent was in development last time I looked.
But, whatever happens, I expect there will be a choice of *nixes before Bill has anything working reliably. It could be the beginning of the end for M$, after all if the 64 bit market is mainly servers, then the actual OS is of no importance, only the stability, security and cost. A server serves files, it does not usually need to run anything OS specific, it is (simplistically) only the protocol on the network that matters, hence the failure of IIS in the web server market. It failed on all 3, stability, security and cost.
I personally don't need high performance servers, but when they are affordable I will want a 64-bit machine for circuit simulation because I am (usually) an analogue designer, and transient (time domain) simulation of certain types of circuits is an enormous computational load. Hopefully SPICE will be ported to 64-bit, and I will at a guess be using SuSE. My network is unusual, it only supports me, so the oldest, slowest machine (K6-II/500) is the main server. I predict that there will be a strong minority interest in 64-bit desktops for similar reasons, a fair number of people also do difficult digital simulation work and other tasks which really need the speed, so I am guessing that 20% will be workstations, 80% servers. The chances are that Bill will lose money heavily, he would likely get the greatest share of the workstations, but why would he expect to sell many copies of a server OS, if current trends continue? Servers are becomming commodity items (SAN, NAS....) and the OS cost really needs to be negligible.
Well, put it on a CD and pass it round your friends. I sometimes do that at work, it is amazing how many people (hardware design engineers in my case) have never heard of OOo and are pleasantly surprised that it will do everything a fairly sophisticated user needs.
The place where it triumphs is when Word or Excel has corrupted a file and will not open it again. OOo usually does, and when re-saved is usable in the buggy product of teh Convicted Monopolist again. It is worth keeping OOo on any PC for its value as a repair tool alone.
Ideally they would create a non-monopolistic policy on EU software, by using xBSD and Linux in roughly equal proportions. After all, in some applications one is clearly better than the other. Clearly OpenBSD has its place where security is paramount, probably FreeBSD on a large proportion of servers, and Linux on the desktop would be about right at the moment. That is simply because there are no FreeBSD distros which give you the feature set of the latest Linux distros, but BSD is much the same (in terms of difficulty) as Linux to configure on servers and is quite possibly faster in a typical server application.
Most of the experience support staff would gain on one *nix would be easily transferable to another *nix in any case. FreeBSD and Linux are more closely related than NT and Win 98 for instance. Diversity is a good thing.
Is it not time for a court judgment to recognise the difference between exercising your right to play the DVD on any computer, running any OS, anywhere, and attempting to make illegal copies? The two are not the same, yet in every one of these vile cases, they are made to seem as if they are.
Next they will try to enforce reading books only in approved places such as libraries. It will be illegal to use an unapproved magnifying glass to see the text more clearly. You may read only under an approved light source.....
None of that will stop you using the photocopier, an entirely separate issue.
As you seem to be well-informed, how about setting up a web site which explains all of that in detail? I don't know that all of that info can be easily found, certainly not in one place, and the whole story on how various recording schemes work would be useful to many people.
Re:Jammers and Dampers
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Cell-Phone Wars
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Damping as you describe is basically screening, and is never entirely effective. A door or window is much bigger than the cellphone wavelength, the best you can expect is some attenuation, if the whole building is screened, which only makes the mobile and the base station turn up the power level, increasing the health hazard......
True damping using absorbtion of the signal is well-nigh impossible, even stealth aircraft don't work very well and the process is expensive. It also needs quite a thickness of material at cellphone frequencies. AFAIK, on certain aircraft (where use of a cellphone, even switching it on, is a major safety hazard, and is illegal) there have been experiments with simulated base stations which transmit inside the aircraft (very minimal power required) and will command the phone to turn its transmit power down to minimum. That will of course prevent it frokm accessing any base station outside. A jammer based on that principle could be justified in certain circumstances, but would no doubt need the agreement of the cellular companies and the regulatory authorities. It would also be difficult to accurately control the boundary of its effective area.
The vast majority of areas where cellphones are banned rely on people being fooled by the signs, and switching them off, because they imagine that they will not work. Still, it seems to work (usually). Fortunately, most of us who know about the probable limitations behave ourselves and switch off anyway.
Re:Jammers and Dampers
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Cell-Phone Wars
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· Score: 4, Interesting
The guy is an idiot, you don't need a 40 fooot antenna!
Two things you can do, corrupt the signal from the base station near the mobile, or corrupt the signal from the mobiles (all of them!) near the base station, in both cases by swamping with in-band spurious signals. The power required in each case is quite minimal, except when a mobile is near the base station. The only difficulty is that you would have to jam every channel. Placing a jammer close to each base station would likely as not be regarded as an act of terrorism by the Unelected Imbecile.
Not that you should do such things of course, but cellphones can be very annoying. They are also an unreliable means of communication, which has its own nuisance value, and they are generally used to make people work harder, or "be more productive". IMHO they simply add to the pressures of life, and are a bad thing generally, especially in the hands of children or teenagers.
The way they are sold in some countries is partly to blame, you get a phone for nearly nothing, which deceives many into thinking they are getting a bargain. I only know of UK practice, it may not be the same everywhere, but if it was made illegal to subsidise the phone from line rental and call charges, a lot of people would think again, if they had to pay the actual cost.
This has no effect on consumers or investors. What M$ with their obsessive secrecy have failed to comprehend is that although many of us would like to look at the source code (it should be amusing), there is no way that anyone can use it. There are already plenty of ways of making illicit copies of Windoze or any other software, the source code is not required.
The only thing M$ have to lose is that their competitors might be able to see the hidden APIs which the Convicted Monopolist have still kept secret for their own use. If security holes are exposed, they would have been anyway, it would just have taken a bit longer, and if they are visible in the source, why has the Monopolist not fixed them anyway?
The fact is that obsessive secrecy of source code achieves nothing, if it were published (it presumably bears proper copyright notices) it could still not be used, and would haveno effect whatsoever on the M$ business model. However, the bugs would be visible so workarounds in other people's software might be better engineered, so everything would work better. It waould also be easy to spot any code which had been illegally coipied.
There is no reason at all why proprietary commercial software needs to have its source kept secret. The cost of a Windoze licence could well include a copy of the source, it would still only be a licence to use it on one machine, so Bill would not lose income.
The corporate mindset seems to equate visible source with open source, and open source with free (monetarily). It is not necessarily so. That is why we have copyright. After all, books are open source insofar as the entire text is visible, yet you still have to pay for them, and rightly so. You do not need to sign an NDA to be bound by copyright law. The copyright is the thing that makes a commercial business model viable, not visibility or otherwise of source, but I doubt that Gates and Ballmer between them have enough comprehension to see that.
M$ investors should beware because the company has run out of creative ideas long ago (in fact they only ever had one idea, and it was not creative except insofar as illegal monopolies are concerned), and are continuing to deliver products of abysmal quality, not because of exposure of the source.
It was said to be a threat to national security because of 1 (or was it 3) insecure APIs which could not be fixed, and would be exposed. It has now been exposed to enemies of the US. Does that not mean that the Convicted Monopolist is a traitor?
I think the 1 problem was raw sockets, which is pretty well exposed by Mr. Gibson at www.grc.com, but I may be wrong.
Even the Frogs have seen the Windoze source, and we know how much thay hate the US, and the UK for that matter, and I mean at government level, most individual French are very nice people indeed. It is certain that some of the countries which have seen the source, or some of the employees concerned, who may have their own little axe to grind, will do something like this sooner or later. Of course it may be in retaliation for having suffrered vast economic damage due to Windoze/Outlook virii in the last few weeks, a bit of revenge.....
They can't demand anything. WINE developers are innocent until proved guilty, under tha laws of most of the English-speaking world at least.The Convicted Monopolist would have to show places where code had been copied, as will McBride when his case comes to court.
A smart move by WINE developers would be to set up a clean-room environment where if anyone sees the code, he may analyse it and write a specification about how it works, which is then passed over to a developer to code a new module of equivalent functionality. That is how Compaq and others were able to clone PCs originally, the BIOS source was in te IBM Advanced Reference Manual or book of similar title, they did a clean room implementation where the coders had no knowledge whatsoever of the code, and it has stood the test of time legally.
Now, anyone writing code to a spec is acting legally, the grey area is that it "may" be illegal to read the code which has leaked. I think that the actual illegal act is the publishing, not the reading, under copyright law, and there need be no, and must be, no subsequent disclosure of what was read, especially in the clean room.
With a bit of care and intelligence, this leak may well be of enormouis assistance to WINE, as it may help them exactly reproduce undocumented bugs which others have worked around, so that the workarounds don't break on a clean OS.
If they are smart (which is not in doubt) they will do the analysis of the leaked code in a country which is not signatory to the Berne convention, then they would be untouchable (except that the Monopolist might pressure the unelected imbecile who poses as president into going to war against "terrorism".)
Of course the code is most likely such a heap of rubbish that it is of no use to anyone, but that could easily be deduced from observing the behaviour of the end product, without needing access to the source.
Why? It is as if someone knocked over a rubbish bin in the street, and every passing Slashdotter spent the next week talking about its contents, all the cockroaches in the kitchen waste for example.
It is only garbage that has leaked, after all. It has no real value to anyone, although it may have a perceived value to the Convicted Monopolist and those unfortunates who have been misled by his marketing machine. In fact, like garbage, its real value, based on its cost less the cost of cleaning up after each problem with it, is negative. It has a negative environmental impact, just like what goes to incinerators and landfill sites. No doubt people are picking over it as I type, laughing at certain features, as they might find amusement in the contents of some rubbish bins.... The difference between this code and garbage is that garbage is the unusable left-overs from something inherently useful, or an unwanted byproduct of a useful process, unfortunately the Monopolist has not come up with the good part of which the garbage is the remnant......... (Unless of course it is the left-over garbage from Wordpad, which is of tolerable quality, but in that case the garbage outweighs the wanted product at least 10000:1, which must be the lowest yield in history.)
Surely, even SCO is more profitable to discuss that the trash of Redmond. At least SCO's OS (or what they claim is their's...) is fairly stable and secure.
Seriously though, I might even have a look myself when I find out where it is. Then I might go out and rummage in some bins....
Slashdot Mirror
If we get some top-grade developers motivated to work in this area, it will all get fixed. I actually think that it will happen quite soon. XFree86 configuration is another place that comes to mind, just try even an advanced distro like SuSE, with a popular Nvidia card, and a 1600*1200 monitor, and you will see what I mean! it ends up in a black screen of death every time, because the stupid configuration program runs in X, misconfigures to the point that the monitor gives up (or goes bang?), and dies. The bit which is without excuse is that if you get it working with a manual edit of the config file, and later run Sax, it blows away all your hard work.
SuSE is no worse than the others, in fact it is better than most, but like a lot of excrement found in the Redmond sewage system, it tries to be too clever without knowing all the facts.
Samba is another thing that needs attention, same sort of reason. I have full sympathy with the Samba developers, there are only so many hours in a day, and they have to interwork with bug-infested, undocumented protocols that change as often as Sir Bill changes his underwear. So, it needs more people, working on the user and administrator interface. It does not help that every distro does its own thing, needlessly duplicating effort. In the case of Samba, almost all of the work could be common across all Linux distros, BSD, BeOS, Solaris, even the hated SCO.
I hope these issues get serious action soon, it will enormously help in the process of getting OSS established on the desktop. It is even far more important than developing the next version of the kernel, after all we have reliable kernels now, thanks to the hard work of Linus and many others.
OF course we should include recent MAC varaints as BSD. I don't think we need worry about a stranglehold on the desktop, the choice of distros is likely to remain, maybe even diversify. The thing that may become a near-monopoly is not the OS, but what may become the most important applications, and I would rate OpenOffice.org/Star Office, Mozilla, and Ximian Evolution as the first three which are likely to become dominant. But in no case will these achieve the supposed universality of Outlook ond M$ Office, because Koffice and the next version of Word Perfect will remain, and will have compatability, same for browsers, where people who actually care about performance and standards compliance will still pay money for Opera, and Konqueror is not bad either, likewise for email clients etc.
I actually think that we are in for a set of diverse applications which will interoperate properly, and the Convicted Monopolist, who deliberately breaks compatability with everything else, will be the incompatible minority.
When it is taken as normal for programs to be standards-compliant, there will be no room ever again for a Sir Bill, not in software at least, diversity will see to that. Sadly, the next predatory monopolist like Sir Bill is likely to arise in the field of plant genetics, or maybe human cloning.........
The first phase of any program to prevent email abuse should of course be to enact laws to ban Outlook and its Express mutant. After all, that is where almost all the security holes exploited by spammers to create zombie servers are to be found. I can't see why any sane person would want to use it anyway, most of the alternatives are actually better as far as internet mail is concerned, and why would any business waste huge amounts of money on an Exchange server?
As an aside, I set up a firewall, and the equivalent of Internet Connection Sharing (i.e. forwarding) on a Linux box the other day, IIRC it needed 4 lines of commands to iptables in one of the startup scripts, which being lazy I got out of a book. I went to grc.com for a test, and it was every bit as good as Zone Alarm, a product I use successfully on the inferior OS.
The point is that in an open OS, useful and essential things tend to be fully documented, visible, and easy to set up. I fear that in this case, Sir Bill's anti-spamming system will be obfuscated, needlessly difficult to configure, and will at the slightest provocation automatically default to doing it Sir Bill's way, even if that is not what you want. There is a precedent in every previous M$ application, the world's most unpopular Word processor being the prime example.....
It is of course another con trick to move us towards Longhorn, which on its own would get no acceptance whatsoever, because its drastically cut-down API set will break compatability with virtually everything. of course, if the Convicted Monopolist was competent, they would have had a much smaller, more manageable and properly documented API set in the first place, and we would not have nearly as many bugs, crashes or security holes.
It seems to me that someone needs start the RFC process right now, describing a properly working, non-proprietary system. Otherwise, the Convicted Monopolist will once again do as described in the Halloween Documents.....
I saw a book in the shop the other day called "Writing Secure Code" or something similar. When I saw the publisher, I did not even bother to pick it up for a look, as the company concerned (Guess who?) has a solidly demonstrated long-term track record of gross incompetence in that area.
I used a P2P network once, to get an unavailable piece of music. Had it been on sale in the shops I would have bought it.
Lesson for the RIAA - keep everything available for ever, and find a sensible way of charging for odd copies of one track, then honest people would not need to do this. Of course that might need some understanding of technology, which no-one in your organisation apparently has any more, because you can't distinguish between someone who only wants to play the DVD he has paid for on his non-Microsoft PC and a gangster.
It would be very useful if the police forces had well-publicised points of contact for reporting computer and internet crime. At the moment, the local police station is unlikely to know anything at all, unless you are lucky to meet one of the few policemen who is really into computers, likely as a hobby. The expertise seems mainly to be in Scotland Yard, the department there could do with more funding, more staff, and more publicity, such as a simple means to contact them by email or web. My systems get beseiged by attacks from a handful of IP addresses, and if there was a central point for reporting all these easily, it would not be hard to spot the patterns and take appropriate action. For example, a warning letter from the police might be sufficient to get open mail relays closed, and cable modem users who have been trojaned might pay heed and take proper precautions. This could be largely automated, only where the parties concerned were deliberately committing criminal acts, or who failed to react to a warning, would the full powers of the Computer Misuse Act need to be applied.
Not so long ago there was an idiot on the NTL cable network who was causing continual problems to others because his machine was running continually and had been trojaned, and was being used by hackers elsewhere. Something like that, after a few independent reports, should automatically trigger a "cease and desist" letter, together with some good advice on cleaning up the problem.
It seems to me that it should be quite simple to gather and collate information from the public, which with the ISP's logs would enable the causes of problems to be located and dealt with. I for one don't mind my ISP's files being available automatically to a law-enforcement robot, I rather would get a warning letter or email if something was amiss.
Of course the way to deal with the most recent round of severe problems is to simply ban Outlook. I wonder if the Convicted Monopolist could gain another conviction for deliberately producing software which facilitates contravening the Computer Misuse Act? BTW it would help if other countries enacted similar legislation instead of being misled by fascists like the RIAA into stupidly focussing on those who might want to play a DVD on their Linux computer, for example. In the UK, the CMA has real teeth, sadly it does not get exercised as often as it should, because it provides a means to outlaw certain vile practices. For example, if an installer deliberately cripples another application (we all know some that do, and most come from the Redmond area), that is a criminal offence, and rightly so, yet I have not seen any prosecutions. The wording of the Act would suggest that if installing Windoze as the second OS blows away the ability of Linux/BSD/OS-2 (or whatever) to boot, then an offence is committed. The only defence seems to be that it was done in ignorance. Can you imagine Bill standing in the dock in the Old Bailey, pathetically whining that he was not guilty, he was only ignorant? Justice would be admirably served by that admission.
Careful, don't give the copyright schysters ideas..... It has happened before.
I am old enough to remember when the Zilog Z80 microprocessor, a superset of Intel's 8080, had to have substantially different instruction mnemonics, apparently for copyright reasons. It made my job a misery because our C compiler, Whitesmiths IIRC, on a Plexus P35 (6MHz 68000, 1MB RAM, 71MB HDD, 16 serial ports with about 8 terminals) running Unix System 3 (I wonder if McBride claims ownership of that buggy version...), was for an 8080, our embedded target system was an improved CMOS Z80, not Zilog (IIRC it had a few extra instructions) and my programming books were all Z80, as was one of the available assemblers.) It was said at the time that the cause of the problem was that some key people had left Intel to found Zilog, and Intel got their revenge....
I don't know if copyright restrictions applied to programmers or only to Zilog and their data books, but it had about as much credibility as far as end users were concerned as the battle betweem McBride and the civilised world.
The sad thing is that Zilog had by far the better product, and their next one, the 16-bit Z8000, was way ahead of the 8086, but where are Zilog now? I know their Z80 outsold everything else for a long time, and they still have products for niche markets. No doubt their lack of major success was due to the same idiot within IBM whose folly led to an obnoxious spoilt brat forming what would become the biggest ever Convicted Monopoly, and whose dysfunctional products have inflicted massive economic damage on the civilised world.
It is not a case of Licence Holy Wars either, it is simply an area where clarification is needed, for example the new GPL might need to define methods of interworking with other licences to avoid such problems. There are potentially serious legal issues, and McBride, Gates and Ballmer would just love to see some open-source going out with the licences in a muddle, especially McBride right now, so it is really important that people scrupulously stick to what the licenses actually say, until they have negotiated appropriate changes.
This does not matter at all to end users, and only slightly to developers right now, but the issues must be faced and dealt with in a professional manner. I noticed that on the other, and far worse issue, the X problem, the various competing distros seemed to be collaborating very closely with each other, whereas in the closed source world they would be fighting and squabbling among themselves, and would likely end up in court. If they do the same here, the image of open source will be greatly enhanced. It does not matter if RMS has deeply held opinions, to which he is fully entitled, and with some of which I disagree. What matters is that at the end of the day a professional attitude prevails (professionals have their major disagreements, they differ from the cowboys in the way they resolve them).
Either Apache will give way (probable), the GPL will be revised to better interoperate with other licences (also probable) or someone will, within a few days, fork Apache, to make a derived work (Sioux?) and the GPLed fork will continue while the other version will die (improbable). Any one or more of these will keep the legal situation tidy, and although the last one, forking, will upset a lot of people because of the principle, none would be damaging to open source in general. The only damage would be done by bitter recriminations, ending up invoking copyright law in court, which would only benefit Gates, Ballmer and McBride, but this issue is not headed that way. It is not a war, only a minor difficulty.
As to modifications to the GPL, my favourite would be to find some way of limiting it to ethical uses only, but how would people agree on what was ethical? It is a bit like censorship, a very good thing indeed in some areas, to protect people from the malice of others (banning child pornography from the net for a start), but as soon as you go down that road you get problems in the implementation, and the possibility of unfair use of the restrictions. The GPL basically restricts you from restricting anyone else's rights, because freedom is valuable and should be protected, but it would be nice to combine that with a ban on immoral use. Monsanto come to mind as a company I would not want to use any of my code to assist in making potentially dangerous mutants, because that is what products of their genetic modifications are, or perhaps the Taliban doing simulation work on nuclear explosions, or Bill Gates and his Convicted Monopoly for any purpose at all, to give three possible examples. Even limiting commercial use is problematic, after all most of us appreciate the distros, or the Sharp Zaurus (don't have one yet), or our set-top box based on Linux, or whatever. But, maybe the GPL could be re-worded to allow the original program's authors to add some limited conditions, which would like the GPL be perpetual. It could work in other ways too, the author could set a limit on the selling price to stop someone down the line overcharging (but can't of course set a minimum price, which is invariably zero).
Personally I prefer the GPL, it ensures that freedom will continue in perpetuity. I don't like any licenece where the Convicted Monopolist, or McBride, or anyone obnoxious can take a free program and make it non-free, benefiting from the usually free work of others. That is not fair. If you take the source, improve it and have to give the improved source back, that is fair. It would be best if the various slightly problematic licemces went away, and we had only the new improved GPL.
I think this one will be resolved amicably, if not, Apache will be forked, which will upset more people than it should.
I am seriously wondering if, with XFree86 and now Apache, there is some Malevolent Monopolist (probably already convicted) behind this, trying to divide and discredit Open Source. Don't let it happen!
XFree86 is an absolute pig to configure in some circumstances, the broken configuration tools supplied by certain distros don't help, and a complete re-write could be a very good thing indeed. Never mind the politics, or the fact that the distros are all rejecting the new licence for good reasons. In fact it is impressive to see the diverse distros sticking together on this. Software that has been maintained and modified for so many years invariably becomes a mess, and it is good to throw it away from time to time and start again.
An orderly move to new technology will do a lot to advance Linux and the several BSDs (any more OSs I have forgotten?) on the desktop, meanwhile the distros should stay as they are with the current version, and work towards maintaining compatability. SCO can of course go down the dead end road of the new version, as long as they don't try to sue those who went a better way and so allegedly damaged SCO's failing business. (Note to McBride: that idea of suing the FSF etc for damaging your business by doing something better is copyrighted by me under a very restrictive licence that does not allow its use by you.)
I would not be surprised if OS-2 suddenly got a new lease of life in 64-bit form, as there is a window of opportunity while Bill's pathetic product is, as is always the case, late and buggy. Another outsider, which would really be fast on 64 bit, would be BeOS. I am not up to date on developments there, but an OSS equivalent was in development last time I looked.
But, whatever happens, I expect there will be a choice of *nixes before Bill has anything working reliably. It could be the beginning of the end for M$, after all if the 64 bit market is mainly servers, then the actual OS is of no importance, only the stability, security and cost. A server serves files, it does not usually need to run anything OS specific, it is (simplistically) only the protocol on the network that matters, hence the failure of IIS in the web server market. It failed on all 3, stability, security and cost.
I personally don't need high performance servers, but when they are affordable I will want a 64-bit machine for circuit simulation because I am (usually) an analogue designer, and transient (time domain) simulation of certain types of circuits is an enormous computational load. Hopefully SPICE will be ported to 64-bit, and I will at a guess be using SuSE. My network is unusual, it only supports me, so the oldest, slowest machine (K6-II/500) is the main server. I predict that there will be a strong minority interest in 64-bit desktops for similar reasons, a fair number of people also do difficult digital simulation work and other tasks which really need the speed, so I am guessing that 20% will be workstations, 80% servers. The chances are that Bill will lose money heavily, he would likely get the greatest share of the workstations, but why would he expect to sell many copies of a server OS, if current trends continue? Servers are becomming commodity items (SAN, NAS....) and the OS cost really needs to be negligible.
The place where it triumphs is when Word or Excel has corrupted a file and will not open it again. OOo usually does, and when re-saved is usable in the buggy product of teh Convicted Monopolist again. It is worth keeping OOo on any PC for its value as a repair tool alone.
If you know esperanto, why not volunteer to do it?
Ideally they would create a non-monopolistic policy on EU software, by using xBSD and Linux in roughly equal proportions. After all, in some applications one is clearly better than the other. Clearly OpenBSD has its place where security is paramount, probably FreeBSD on a large proportion of servers, and Linux on the desktop would be about right at the moment. That is simply because there are no FreeBSD distros which give you the feature set of the latest Linux distros, but BSD is much the same (in terms of difficulty) as Linux to configure on servers and is quite possibly faster in a typical server application.
Most of the experience support staff would gain on one *nix would be easily transferable to another *nix in any case. FreeBSD and Linux are more closely related than NT and Win 98 for instance. Diversity is a good thing.
Next they will try to enforce reading books only in approved places such as libraries. It will be illegal to use an unapproved magnifying glass to see the text more clearly. You may read only under an approved light source.....
None of that will stop you using the photocopier, an entirely separate issue.
Anyway, not to worry about that one, there must be vast amounts of prior art.
As you seem to be well-informed, how about setting up a web site which explains all of that in detail? I don't know that all of that info can be easily found, certainly not in one place, and the whole story on how various recording schemes work would be useful to many people.
True damping using absorbtion of the signal is well-nigh impossible, even stealth aircraft don't work very well and the process is expensive. It also needs quite a thickness of material at cellphone frequencies. AFAIK, on certain aircraft (where use of a cellphone, even switching it on, is a major safety hazard, and is illegal) there have been experiments with simulated base stations which transmit inside the aircraft (very minimal power required) and will command the phone to turn its transmit power down to minimum. That will of course prevent it frokm accessing any base station outside. A jammer based on that principle could be justified in certain circumstances, but would no doubt need the agreement of the cellular companies and the regulatory authorities. It would also be difficult to accurately control the boundary of its effective area.
The vast majority of areas where cellphones are banned rely on people being fooled by the signs, and switching them off, because they imagine that they will not work. Still, it seems to work (usually). Fortunately, most of us who know about the probable limitations behave ourselves and switch off anyway.
Two things you can do, corrupt the signal from the base station near the mobile, or corrupt the signal from the mobiles (all of them!) near the base station, in both cases by swamping with in-band spurious signals. The power required in each case is quite minimal, except when a mobile is near the base station. The only difficulty is that you would have to jam every channel. Placing a jammer close to each base station would likely as not be regarded as an act of terrorism by the Unelected Imbecile.
Not that you should do such things of course, but cellphones can be very annoying. They are also an unreliable means of communication, which has its own nuisance value, and they are generally used to make people work harder, or "be more productive". IMHO they simply add to the pressures of life, and are a bad thing generally, especially in the hands of children or teenagers.
The way they are sold in some countries is partly to blame, you get a phone for nearly nothing, which deceives many into thinking they are getting a bargain. I only know of UK practice, it may not be the same everywhere, but if it was made illegal to subsidise the phone from line rental and call charges, a lot of people would think again, if they had to pay the actual cost.
The only thing M$ have to lose is that their competitors might be able to see the hidden APIs which the Convicted Monopolist have still kept secret for their own use. If security holes are exposed, they would have been anyway, it would just have taken a bit longer, and if they are visible in the source, why has the Monopolist not fixed them anyway?
The fact is that obsessive secrecy of source code achieves nothing, if it were published (it presumably bears proper copyright notices) it could still not be used, and would haveno effect whatsoever on the M$ business model. However, the bugs would be visible so workarounds in other people's software might be better engineered, so everything would work better. It waould also be easy to spot any code which had been illegally coipied.
There is no reason at all why proprietary commercial software needs to have its source kept secret. The cost of a Windoze licence could well include a copy of the source, it would still only be a licence to use it on one machine, so Bill would not lose income.
The corporate mindset seems to equate visible source with open source, and open source with free (monetarily). It is not necessarily so. That is why we have copyright. After all, books are open source insofar as the entire text is visible, yet you still have to pay for them, and rightly so. You do not need to sign an NDA to be bound by copyright law. The copyright is the thing that makes a commercial business model viable, not visibility or otherwise of source, but I doubt that Gates and Ballmer between them have enough comprehension to see that.
M$ investors should beware because the company has run out of creative ideas long ago (in fact they only ever had one idea, and it was not creative except insofar as illegal monopolies are concerned), and are continuing to deliver products of abysmal quality, not because of exposure of the source.
I think the 1 problem was raw sockets, which is pretty well exposed by Mr. Gibson at www.grc.com, but I may be wrong.
Even the Frogs have seen the Windoze source, and we know how much thay hate the US, and the UK for that matter, and I mean at government level, most individual French are very nice people indeed. It is certain that some of the countries which have seen the source, or some of the employees concerned, who may have their own little axe to grind, will do something like this sooner or later. Of course it may be in retaliation for having suffrered vast economic damage due to Windoze/Outlook virii in the last few weeks, a bit of revenge.....
A smart move by WINE developers would be to set up a clean-room environment where if anyone sees the code, he may analyse it and write a specification about how it works, which is then passed over to a developer to code a new module of equivalent functionality. That is how Compaq and others were able to clone PCs originally, the BIOS source was in te IBM Advanced Reference Manual or book of similar title, they did a clean room implementation where the coders had no knowledge whatsoever of the code, and it has stood the test of time legally.
Now, anyone writing code to a spec is acting legally, the grey area is that it "may" be illegal to read the code which has leaked. I think that the actual illegal act is the publishing, not the reading, under copyright law, and there need be no, and must be, no subsequent disclosure of what was read, especially in the clean room.
With a bit of care and intelligence, this leak may well be of enormouis assistance to WINE, as it may help them exactly reproduce undocumented bugs which others have worked around, so that the workarounds don't break on a clean OS.
If they are smart (which is not in doubt) they will do the analysis of the leaked code in a country which is not signatory to the Berne convention, then they would be untouchable (except that the Monopolist might pressure the unelected imbecile who poses as president into going to war against "terrorism".)
Of course the code is most likely such a heap of rubbish that it is of no use to anyone, but that could easily be deduced from observing the behaviour of the end product, without needing access to the source.
It is only garbage that has leaked, after all. It has no real value to anyone, although it may have a perceived value to the Convicted Monopolist and those unfortunates who have been misled by his marketing machine. In fact, like garbage, its real value, based on its cost less the cost of cleaning up after each problem with it, is negative. It has a negative environmental impact, just like what goes to incinerators and landfill sites. No doubt people are picking over it as I type, laughing at certain features, as they might find amusement in the contents of some rubbish bins.... The difference between this code and garbage is that garbage is the unusable left-overs from something inherently useful, or an unwanted byproduct of a useful process, unfortunately the Monopolist has not come up with the good part of which the garbage is the remnant......... (Unless of course it is the left-over garbage from Wordpad, which is of tolerable quality, but in that case the garbage outweighs the wanted product at least 10000:1, which must be the lowest yield in history.)
Surely, even SCO is more profitable to discuss that the trash of Redmond. At least SCO's OS (or what they claim is their's...) is fairly stable and secure.
Seriously though, I might even have a look myself when I find out where it is. Then I might go out and rummage in some bins....