Let's leave aside any analysis of the quality of Katz's thinking and writing. I like it, you might not. Art is like that; you can't expect a unanimous consensus, there are even people out there who somehow enjoyed Battlefield Earth.
But here's an undeniable fact. Whenever Katz posts an article here, there are always hundreds of responses and along with them, surely there are thousands of lurkers reading. So he has the virtue of making his readers think, even if they disagree with his ideas. Of course a lot of people would rather not think. But besides that: my man Katz sure moves them banner ads, buddy. Do you think slashdot's bandwidth is free? or are you regularly mailing slashdot checks to pay for it?
As for your first-born, thanks a lot but no thanks, I've got my hands full with my own first-, second- and third-born.
The one good thing I've got to say about Battlefield Earth is that, in the process of transforming the book into the movie, the director did far less damage to the original idea - distorted and ruined the plot and atmosphere of the original book to a lesser extent - than anybody who's ever made a movie based on a Philip Dick story.
Of course the creators of the movie Battlefield Earth were starting with something far inferior so they couldn't have diminished its value so much. An analogy would be about that guy recently who sat down in a museum on a 400-year-old chair from the Ming Dynasty, valued at a half-million dollars, and broke it. You could do your worst to the $20 wrought iron chair I'm sitting on now but you couldn't ruin it half so bad because it wasn't worth as much to start with.
Similarly if the director of Battlefield Earth had utterly pulverized the story in the novel, who would care? In fact, any distortion would most likely have been an improvement, as L. Ron Hubbard was one of the worst science fiction writers ever to set hoof on typewriter. But it appears that the movie is "true" to the book, which is way more than you can say for "Total Recall" or "Blade Runner." Not that those were bad movies, far from it, but it is be hard to recognize in either of them any at all of the flavor of the original stories.
OK, that's it, the best praise for Battlefield Earth I could muster, and the last praise I ever shall issue for anything related to the work of that laughable old fraud L. Ron.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
Re:You've only got yourselves to blame
on
Copyrant
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· Score: 2
Hey space boy, just wtf do you mean by you? Despite the fact that I rather dislike Microsoft, over the last decade I have bought, out of my own personal income, legal copies of:
MS-DOS 3.2 (came with my first PC in 1989) MS-DOS 5.0 upgrade Windows 3.1 MS-DOS 6.2 (came with my first laptop) Win95 upgrade Win95 OSR2 (came with my second laptop) WinNT 3.51 server full package WinNT 4.0 server upgrade WinNT 4.0 workstation full package
not to mention Visual C++ 4, 5 and 6. And I've probably left out a few other Microsoft products for which I paid good money. That's well over $2000 out of mmy pocket. Not to mention, I also bought a fairly large number of commercial software products by Borland, Symantec, Metacreations, etc., etc.
I guess those greed-crazed psychopaths at Microsoft figure I haven't yet given them enough of my income. So now they intend to punish me for that by making me rent software from now on instead of buying it. Well, f*ck them! Judge Jackson should have ordered the death penalty.
How about "Microsoft" for the application software and "MicrOS" for the OS company? Hey BG, I invented that my own self, but I'll let you use it without even suing you.
For crying out loud, if Pablo Picasso had gone around stealing old ladies's purses or if James Jopyce had run around the streets of Dublin throwing rocks through shop windows, they'd have gone to jail like any of the rest of us.
Nobody's "persecuting" "innovation." (Let's leave to one side the word-grinding debate as to whether Microsoft was or wasn't really innovative, whatever that means, for right now.) Microsoft is being whacked because they broke the law - to be precise, after already having been warned once about their dubious tactics in 1994, they proceeded to stamp up and down on the law and feed the shreds through a tree chipper.
Keep in mind, though, that the DOJ isn't beating up Microsoft because Microsoft took unfair advantage of the general public. We mere citizens don't count shit to the government. Microsoft is being punished for screwing over a number of other multi-billion dollar corporations.
Capitalism couldn't be responsible for anything in society that's more than a couple hundred years old, because capitalism basically didn't exist until a couple hundred years ago.
Giving that devilish capitalism its due, it is real efficient at what Marx called primitive accumulation. Similarly gasoline is good for powering your car, but you might not want to gargle with it, bathe in it, or put it into your baby's bottle. But here in the U.S.A., where "socialism" is a dirty word, we Americans let capitalists control everything in this so-called society of ours. I mean, look at the presidential candidates this year: not one but two third or fourth generation trust-fund kids who never in their lives had to work for a living, both of them devoted heart-and-soul to capital uber alles.
Amidst this foul, miserable world, jam packed with fools and liars, how rare a relief it is to read someone with the sense, honesty and simple decency to defy convention and state the truth. Thank you.
> corporations could not use every last drop of water > or cut down every tree...
So what you're saying is that Georgia-Pacific and Weyerhauser don't clearcut the forest sites to which they have access? It's like reading someone who says "Theory proves that that brick wall can't possibly be in my path," whereupon he proceeds to walk straight into and face out upon said brick wall.
Face the facts: the economic imperatives of capitalism require all business owners to exploit every bit of the environment they can to the maximum degree possible. The only thing that can stop profiteering corporations from devastating the entire globe is government action, that is to say, socialism. I'll say it again: socialism, socialism, socialism!
Maybe, probably, you and the general voting public these days will find that awful word so offensive that you'd prefer instead to strangle on the pollution created by unrestrained capitalism. Well, there's really nothing I can do to change the public's minds about that. So my guess is that, current trends continuing unabated, it looks like all of us, the entire human race, are doomed.
Glad you asked. Here's the Greenspan definition. Higher prices for houses do not constitute inflation. Nor higher prices for cars, gasoline, medical bills, college tuition, pretty much anything that an ordinary citizen buys, none of these things constitute inflation. Vastly higher salaries, sky-high ones, for CEOs of big corporations do not constitute inflation in the least, heaven forbid you should even imagine such a thing. What then is inflation? How can we tell when it shows up? Easy! It's when the unemployment rate drops by two tenths of a percent, or when the guys at the fiftieth percentile of incomes get an aggregate raise in pay of, say, 0.7% - now that's inflation. And, in the service of that class which lives off dividends, inflation as thus defined must be stopped, stamped out, smashed flat, right now, this very instant, even if in the process we demolish the entire American economy- this being the scorched-earth tactic of fighting the class war. Far better we fire up a new recession than that the guy at the fiftieth percentile should ever, ever get a raise.
This is, as I said, openly discussed just about every day in the WSJ. One example: every month, regular like clockwork, the Bureau of Labor Statistics releases new figures on the American unemployment rate. This monthly event is very important breaking news to the investing class. The day before the BLS is due to publish their stuff, you will invariably find a panicky article in the WSJ where the author is sweating over the possibility that the rate has gone down last month. In order to forestall a wave of investor suicides, however, the author invariably reassures his readers that if disaster strikes and the unemployment rate goes down, Economic Despot Greenspan will yank his magic lever - the prime rate - to ensure that those workies who have the nerve to want to earn a living will be swiftly thrust back into the ranks of the jobless.
Then the next day, after the monthly unemployment rate is published, read the post-report commentary. There are three possibilities: the unemployment rate falls, or rises, or remains the same. Suppose it is the first - if more of us have jobs, then they either freak out and stock prices tumble, and the columnists calmly explain that this spasm of investor panic is directly due to the dreadful decrease in unemployment, or else if Wall Street doesn't bomb off, then commentators are bemused and conclude that speculators must believe there must be some countervailing force to hold working class wages down. When the unemployment rate rises, those same columnists can barely contain their glee, as more working-class people out of jobs translates directly into fatter dividends for the idle rich; the stock market surges and this is attributed to the happy news on the unemployment front. Yes, the econ columnists in the WSJ are quite naked about it: lower unemployment = bad news for the stock market, higher unemployment = happy days on Wall Street. There's your class war. Too bad the majority of the suckers in my class can't be bothered to pay any attention to it.
As for what keeps me out of the investing class, what a question! You know, I've got a petty little 401K fund, plus I own a few shares of stock in the company for which I work. Does that make me bourgeois, an investor, a capitalist? Absurd! Slingers of word hash would try to sell you that nonsense definition, liars would have you believe it; don't. My handful of stock shares do not make me a capitalist, nor do the more sizable investments owned by the striving UMC yuppies in their nasty little prefab gated communities up the road from my house, with their SUVs and their $120,000/year incomes. By any sensible definition, one should not be considered a capitalist unless the greatest part or all of one's income comes from investments. Neither I nor the co-opted haut-wage-slave with his $120K are truly members of the investing class; the fact is, cut off our wage incomes and we're both only a few short months away from the poorhouse.
Get real. To live entirely off investments in the style to which that class is accustomed, one must first have accumulated a mass of capital amounting to, at minimum, several million dollars. Now where do you suggest I acquire my millions of dollars, my "seed money," so that I too may give up productive work and relax into a luxurious new life of careless, effortless capitalist exploitation? There's your ceiling, not glass but green paper.
Capital, as used in economics, is money intended to be used and multiplied by investment. This money is owned by someone; ownership is the fundamental principle of capitalism. But the phrase "natural capital," as used by the author, apparently has nothing to do with the traditional meaning of "capital," nor do it have any relation to the processes of capitalism.
So what we have here boils down to word hash. There are a great number of readers to whom, for a variety of mostly either nonsensical or self-serving reasons, the word "capitalism" is beautiful and alluring. No doubt the author may want to imbue his pro-environment ideas, which seem to be wholesome or at least innocuous, with that allure. But to label these ideas as some form of "capitalism" is just obfuscatory nonsense.
This review has got me curious, and I'd like to read this book anyway. I suspect, however, that it misses the main point, and I'm cynical enough to believe this is no accident. For the central issue in political analysis for the last two centuries is the class war, and it will be for the foreseeable future. Any discussion of politics or economics which does not focus on the central importance of class war - and here I'm specifically referring to virtually the entire range of libertarian political theory - is at best logically defective, at worse deliberate, outright fraud.
That's the same class war that has been ruthlessly waged for at least two centuries now between the investing class and the rest of us. The contemporary news and entertainment media, wholly controlled, of course, by the investing class, go to enormous lengths to try to convince us down here in the lower class that no such thing is taking place. The investing class talk about it, privately amongst themselves, quite freely; if you'd like to spy on your betters, read the economic analyses in section C of any day's Wall Street Journal, and learn for yourself precisely what that malicious old Randite Alan Greenspan means by "inflation." But meanwhile the rest of us are supposed to believe that the class war simply does not exist.
"Natural capitalism"? I don't buy it. Go try to sell your word hash to some other sucker.
> When you make as much money as I do ($189K a year) > you will start to see that some people frankly do > not know what they are talking about.
Excuse me while I vomit on your shoes. Congratulations, with that one line you achieved the most disgusting post I've read here all year, makes the goatse.cx pic look inoffensive in comparison. "When you make as much money as I do," take your $189K, turn it into one-dollar bills, roll 'em up nice and tight, and stick 'em where the sun don't shine, moneyswine.
No they're not. I defy you to show me one statute that says they are. That's pure rubbish.
Jesus, I am ever glad I'm not a teenager these days, and I sure feel sorry for my kids. We thought we had a police state going in the late 60s and early 70s, but it was nothing compared to the damn universal police state they're running now, and everywhere you look it's just getting worse. It seems like everything is illegal these days - for example, bootlegging a couple of pop songs is now a God damned felony, that is, the same category as armed robbery, rape and murder, in Wisconsin - and if you're under 21 the assumption of all these curfews and searches and pisstests and assorted harassments is that you're guilty until proven innocent. And the police are completely out of control, as the Diallo and Dorismond cases in New York demonstrate. And while there were thugs in police uniforms back then too, at least there was also a principled opposition, whereas these days there's absolutely no one in public life who's willing even to consider reining them back.
As far as all you jackasses I've read here with your "bootlegging songs means you are a criminal" crap, you're all a bunch of illiterate idiots, and I use the word "idiot" in its original etymological sense. A guy who clubs you over the head, or who robs you at gunpoint, or who breaks into your house and steals all your possesions, or who knocks a woman down and rapes her, now that's a criminal. For you blockheads to make a moral equivalence between real crimes like those and these trivial nitpicky little misdemeanors that these disgusting money-bloated tonedeaf RIAA swine are making such a howling fuss over, that only demonstrates that you suffer from the same complete lack of moral sense and proportion that the RIAA lawyers do. Have a happy police state, fools; I hope and expect that your blindered legalistic idiocy turns on you all someday.
We'll meet again Don't know where Don't know when But I know we'll meet again Some sunny day
Keep smiling through Just like you Always do Till the blue skies Wipe the dark clouds away
So will you please say "Hello" To the folks that I know Tell them I won't be long They'll be happy to know That as you saw me go I was singing This song
We'll meet again Don't know where Don't know when But I know we'll meet again Some sunny day
You don't have to be actually dealing any drugs to be robbed at gunpoint by the cops. Just drive down I-10 through Louisiana with some cash in your car. Oh, yeah, and it helps - a lot - if you're black.
You think I'm kidding, don't you? God, I wish I were. Here, read this. Or, from the President of the ACLU, this. Or lest you fall for the anti-ACLU business that is so popular with demagogues in this country, and dismiss the above as just the ranting of some left-wing weirdos, here is a statement published by the office of conservative Republican congressman Henry Hyde. In fact, the appaling damage which the logic-twisting pro-police-state judicial activists of the Rehnquist Supreme Court have inflicted upon the Constitutional rights of American citizens has outraged many Congressmen of both the Democratic party and the Republican party, who have responded this year with legislation to undo their excesses and restore those Constitutional rights to the public. This bill has not yet been signed by President Clinton, who has a terrible record of siding with the law enforcement gang against the interests of mere citizens. Let us hope that FBI Director Freeh and Drug Tsar McCafferty (that war criminal) don't talk him into vetoing this bill.
> > Wouldn't sex without the intent to bear a child be wasting > > a "seed"? Isn't birth control a "sin"?
> Not as long as you have already fufilled the purpose and > created a child, no.
Dear me, dear me, dear me. I am shocked. Your words are ghastly. This is absolutely horrible. You mean to tell me that you think unlimited hedonistic fornication is not a sin just because you and that harlot of a wife of yours have already had a child once? Dare you to mouth such heresy before the open public? Do you suppose, in your vanity, that the fact that you are a parent bleaches out the black immorality of your pleasure-seeking lustful genital connections?
This is a lie and an abomination against all decency and sanctity, as you are well aware. Holy Church doctrine clearly states that the only excuse that is acceptable for any instance of sexual congress is the intent to create a child during that one particular act of copulation. The incidental fact that you might once have had a child doesn't free you from the indelible stain of lewdness, should you and your Hell-bent wife shamelessly indulge your gross appetites for the sheer pleasure of such indulgence, as you have already publicly confessed to so doing. In fact, even to merely contemplate so nightmarish an obscenity -
Ye have heard that it was said by them of old time, Thou shalt not commit adultery: But I say unto you, That whosoever looketh on a woman to lust after her hath committed adultery with her already in his heart.
is the very depth and nadir of mortal sin.
Hell yawns wide for such as you, sex fiend. Hell, Hell, Hell, Hell, Hell, inevitably awaits you. Doomed sinner! Lewd, proud fool! You are damned! You have fallen! And you can't get up.
> > Bob Metcalfe, in a recent InfoWorld column, did > > not hesitate to write that "Richard Stallman > > is a communist". I do not actually think such comments > > are particularly useful...
Then why the f*ck did you not hesitate to carefully quote such a "un-useful" comment, Meyer? Fact is, this f*cker Meyer is blatantly red-baiting Stallman, and what's worse, he did it in such a way as to deflect his own personal responsibility for red-baiting him by quoting another guy, and then wig-wagging his finger at him! Christ, tactics like that make Rush Limbaugh seem like an honorable debater.
Also note the obligatory slam in his article against the Soviet Union. Got to bring the old dead Soviet Union into any red-baiting discussion, just for background color (red), even if the subject is half the globe away from that nation and utterly unrelated to that regime. Yeah, yeah, you couldn't get a chicken in Brezhnev's Moscow, yeah, the GPU were bad bad bad, but I'm sick to death of this cliche, this one-sided story about how fanatically, consistently and irrationally awful the Russian Communists always were.
As long as some people are waving the word "Communist" around in the air like a slapjack, let's go ahead and talk about the old Soviet Union. For the entirety of the Soviet regime they had a total of maybe ten years max when they weren't either under active ground attack by merciless invading foreign armies or face-to-face with a coalition of enemy nations, devoted, in the fullest extent of their industrial capacity, to the literal genocide of the Russian race. I am using the words "literal" and "genocide" in their precise meanings. Hitler specifically intended to annihilate the entire Slavic race and he made no secret of his ambitions, instead published them worldwide in his 1924 book Mein Kampf. Go read it; it's online. You owe it to yourself to know history. Go read Toland "Rise and Fall"; the deliberate starvation of all Western Russia was a war goal acknowledged in the formal secret plans for Operation Barbarossa.
Then, no sooner did Russia practically singlehandedly cleanse this ungrateful world of that ultimate maniac Hitler, at a cost of a third of their adult population, than it faced a new enemy, their former ally, the U.S.A., in the person of Curtis LeMay and his "nation-killing," H-bomb-armed SAC. Did you know we buzzed Russian cities with strategic bombers on a regular basis throughout the fifties? Did you know that Kennedy put seven thousand megatons in the air during the Cuban Missile Crisis? Did you know Nixon did it again in the Six-Day War? Did anybody reading this pay any attention at all when Reagan joked on camera about having just ordered an all-out attack against the SU?
The Soviet Union was under seige for seventy years. Now my country, the U.S.A., is the richest nation in the history of mankind, with no military enemies anywhere worth considering, and we've got two million people behind bars today. Scratch the first, fourth, fifth and seventh amendments for the "drug war"; go ask ESR about what happened to that second one. What do you think would happen to what's left of our so-called "freedoms" if the U.S.A. were under seige for one year, much less seventy years?
Damn, I know this rant I just wrote might have got a bit off topic. Sorry. Mod me down if you feel you must. But this endless mindless f*cking red-baiting drives me nuts. You know, this is on-topic here at/. - anybody reading this, if you advocate or use open-source/free/GNU software, these f*cking guys, they're red-baiting you.
You know, the same thing occurred to me. I may not be a Nobel-winning physicist but I do know AC flows through a capacitor. So I went wading through my unbelievably cluttered bookshelves and found the book in question: "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman," Bantam Books, 1986. And here on page 261 (I looked up "talmud" in the index) is the quote itself:
I even proposed a practical solution for eliminating the spark. "If that's what's bothering you, you can pit a condenser actross the switch, so the electricity will go on and off without any spark whatsoever - anywhere." But for some reason, they didn't like that idea either.
Maybe he meant "in series with the switch" instead, and I'd guess that would work as intended too, but it is an unexpected pleasure for dumb old me to have caught the great Nobel Laureate in an error!
Mother Teresa and Dr. Kevorkian, what a hoot! A very nice post! Did you also notice that according to this Meyer character, not only Raymond's wacky gun fetish but also Stallman's table manners are telling arguments against open-source software? His f*cking table manners, for Christ's sake. That's really straining. Next thing we'll be hearing that Stallman's appaling singing voice demonstrates free software's moral inferiority, etc., etc. The nonsense level in Meyer's diatribe overwhelms any sensible point he might have made.
I remeber something from one of Richard Feynman's autobiographical books where some extremely devout Orthodox Jews wanted to know if there was a spark released when you flip on a light switch; this spark would constitute "work" and was therefore taboo, whereas if there was no spark it would be OK. Feynman suggested putting a capacitor across the switch to suppress the spark, I think. By that rigid definition you should very carefully relax and remember not to breathe deep on the Sabbath (which you take to be Sunday). In fact, as programming is mainly mental work, you should not even think about it on Sunday; perhaps you should start knocking back whiskey first thing at sunup, just to forestall any sinful random work-oriented cogitations.
But I think the intent of the prohibition against working on the Sabbath was a practical matter; first, it would help keep people from working themselves to exhaustion, and second, it was a higher authority you could invoke when your boss demanded that you work non-stop (thus making this the first recorded wage-and-hour law, yeah!). This is similar, I believe, to the Mosaic prohibition against eating pork or shellfish - no refrigeration and a middle-Eastern climate makes eating these a risky business. In that sense, my interpretation would be, "have fun, but don't knock yourself out." But of course this sort of interpretation is powered by practical, secular considerations, and you being a theist, I understand that you might find them lacking.
The relevant scripture, if I am not mistaken, is Numbers 15:32 through 36:
And while the children of Israel were in the wilderness, they found a man that gathered sticks upon the sabbath day. And they that found him gathering sticks brought him unto Moses and Aaron, and unto all the congregation. And they put him in ward, because it was not declared what should be done to him. And the LORD said unto Moses, The man shall be surely put to death: all the congregation shall stone him with stones without the camp. And all the congregation brought him without the camp, and stoned him with stones, and he died; as the LORD commanded Moses.
Now that, to me, despite the authority of Moses and the LORD, seems quite extreme. Insanely so. (I am an atheist, after all.) But the point here is that this poor guy was probably not gathering those sticks at his boss's command, nor did he intend to trade them for shekels; he was probably trying to gather some firewood for himself and his family. So are you writing this software for some practical use, or instead purely for your own regalement? If the former, and if you insist on following the Old Testament literally, then I'd have to suggest that for consistency's sake you should give it up.
It's not a knee-jerk anti-Microsoft reaction, this outcry over Microsoft's latest standards-smashing scam is well-founded. The whole idea of Kerberos was to have a publicly-documented, platform-independent authentication scheme, and Microsoft deliberately broke it. To make matters worse, they pull this disgusting legal razzmatazz with their EULA-protected "trade secrets," to forestall legitimate reverse engineering.
Cheat, cheat, cheat, and even in the midst of their antitrust suit they never stop - the Sid Vicious of software vendors. God knows, "business ethics" is something of an oxymoron, but even amidst the low, swinish company of capitalist businesses in general, Microsoft stands out; that damned gang is just plain pathological.
OK, you could say that "any company in their position in a capitalist market system would act as they do," and I suspect you'd be right - but that is only an indictment of capitalism in general.
You know, I've always wondered why open source software is always assumed to be free-gratuit, and why software sold for money has to be shipped bereft of source code. I suppose the argument is, if the developer ships his software with source code then users will be able to compile unauthorized copies. But obviously it is just as easy, no, far easier, to simply copy the binaries than to compile new binaries from source.
Conversely, suppose I am a software developer and I want to release an application with the usual license restricting the buyer, if he wants to install my application on N computers, to pay me for N licenses. If, like the great majority of commercial PC software, my program is not "protected" by some elaborate copy-protection scheme, then basically the only thing that prevents a buyer from distributing "bootleg" copies of my program is his respect for the license agreement, or at least his fear of being caught violating it. The U.S. software industry is doing quite well, despite such a flimsy protection for its products. Why couldn't I rely on the same thing to protect my copyright and my profits if I released programs with source code?
As a commercial product, software complete with source might, for some users at least, be a valuable convenience - one which might attract customers and win extra market share - if they had the ability to add site-specific hacks to my code, or if they could recompile it to work around bugs and security holes, or merely so they could see what is going on inside the program. In that last consideration, I'm thinking about end-users who generate data files in specific formats that are generated by proprietary programs, such as MS Word.DOC files or AutoCAD.DWG files. My employers have millions of dollars invested in AutoCAD.DWG files. Suppose Autodesk goes out of business five years from now, how are we supposed to get our information out of these files? As customers, we would be a lot happier if at least the.DWG format was specified somewhere, but it is not. So a competing CAD software vendor would have a selling point if he could say, "Our data format is openly documented, so your data can't be orphaned" - in fact, Bentley, which makes Microstation, does make such an argument in their sales pitch. And they'd have a yet better sales pitch if they could say, "Our software is open-source, so neither your data files nor your application itself can ever be completely orphaned. Even if the OS vendor somehow breaks something so our compiled code doesn't work any more," (but what OS vendor would ever do a screwed up thing like that? it's unthinkable, really;-)) "you could still port our source code to the new OS of your choice."
When you add something to a GPL program, the copyright holders retain their rights to your "derivative work." Similarly, if I were to sell a commercial, licensed application complete with source code, I shouldn't lose my copyright to my proprietary program just because an end-user has modified it and made his own "derivative work" from it. So why does everyone take it for granted that open source == zero cost?
Far be it from me to make a fuss over/. moderation, but the parent message to this, though it is marked down to -1 (troll), really wasn't. Since it may have fallen out of sight, I quote it:
(a) Outlook doesn't modify any files -- Windows does. On NT, no system files can be modified.
But Outlook is so tightly integrated that the distinction is moot, synergy, innovation, blah blah blah... Anyway so I heard you have to make \WINNT\SYSTEM32 accessible to all MS Office 97 users. If it is in a FAT partition you're screwed anyway, security-wise (on the otherb hand you can come up in MS-DOS and fix things), but even if your system drive is an NTFS partition, so you can lock down the \WINNT\SYSTEM32 directory for users, for some ungodly reason Office 97 must write data there so you can't. That's what I read somewhere, and if I'm wrong, please correct me.
(b1) No version of the ILOVEYOU virus executes from the preview pane.
At the instant our AC posted this, it may or may not have been true, and it may or may not be true at the present moment. But if it's possible at all to write vbs code which self-executes in the Outlook preview window, some funloving so-and-so somewhere is busy tonight shoehorning it into the framework of ILOVEYOU - an world-girdling open-source virus in plaintext, proudly signed by the author no less! Gotta love those Filipinos, you know Lynda Barry's candid like that too.
To tell you the truth, to make it automatically self-actuating would take something away from the complexity, elegance and depth of this worm. As curious as the technical details, all generously laid out for our inspection, may be to a casual aesthete appreciating the art of virus composition, the social-engineering aspects of worms like Melissa and ILOVEYOU is even more interesting; it adds an additional depth to the process of propagation if the virus must somehow inveigle or seduce a human user to play a part in its reproductive cycle. At least I think so.
(b2) With a policy file, an admin can force all workstations in a domain to show file extentions.
I'd be interested in you telling me how that's done. It's always been a minor irritation to me, that, and I've got a whole office-full of NT desktop machines and users who jump from one machine to the next.
Slashdot Mirror
Let's leave aside any analysis of the quality of Katz's thinking and writing. I like it, you might not. Art is like that; you can't expect a unanimous consensus, there are even people out there who somehow enjoyed Battlefield Earth.
But here's an undeniable fact. Whenever Katz posts an article here, there are always hundreds of responses and along with them, surely there are thousands of lurkers reading. So he has the virtue of making his readers think, even if they disagree with his ideas. Of course a lot of people would rather not think. But besides that: my man Katz sure moves them banner ads, buddy. Do you think slashdot's bandwidth is free? or are you regularly mailing slashdot checks to pay for it?
As for your first-born, thanks a lot but no thanks, I've got my hands full with my own first-, second- and third-born.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
The one good thing I've got to say about Battlefield Earth is that, in the process of transforming the book into the movie, the director did far less damage to the original idea - distorted and ruined the plot and atmosphere of the original book to a lesser extent - than anybody who's ever made a movie based on a Philip Dick story.
Of course the creators of the movie Battlefield Earth were starting with something far inferior so they couldn't have diminished its value so much. An analogy would be about that guy recently who sat down in a museum on a 400-year-old chair from the Ming Dynasty, valued at a half-million dollars, and broke it. You could do your worst to the $20 wrought iron chair I'm sitting on now but you couldn't ruin it half so bad because it wasn't worth as much to start with.
Similarly if the director of Battlefield Earth had utterly pulverized the story in the novel, who would care? In fact, any distortion would most likely have been an improvement, as L. Ron Hubbard was one of the worst science fiction writers ever to set hoof on typewriter. But it appears that the movie is "true" to the book, which is way more than you can say for "Total Recall" or "Blade Runner." Not that those were bad movies, far from it, but it is be hard to recognize in either of them any at all of the flavor of the original stories.
OK, that's it, the best praise for Battlefield Earth I could muster, and the last praise I ever shall issue for anything related to the work of that laughable old fraud L. Ron.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
Hey space boy, just wtf do you mean by you? Despite the fact that I rather dislike Microsoft, over the last decade I have bought, out of my own personal income, legal copies of:
MS-DOS 3.2 (came with my first PC in 1989)
MS-DOS 5.0 upgrade
Windows 3.1
MS-DOS 6.2 (came with my first laptop)
Win95 upgrade
Win95 OSR2 (came with my second laptop)
WinNT 3.51 server full package
WinNT 4.0 server upgrade
WinNT 4.0 workstation full package
not to mention Visual C++ 4, 5 and 6. And I've probably left out a few other Microsoft products for which I paid good money. That's well over $2000 out of mmy pocket. Not to mention, I also bought a fairly large number of commercial software products by Borland, Symantec, Metacreations, etc., etc.
I guess those greed-crazed psychopaths at Microsoft figure I haven't yet given them enough of my income. So now they intend to punish me for that by making me rent software from now on instead of buying it. Well, f*ck them! Judge Jackson should have ordered the death penalty.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
How about "Microsoft" for the application software and "MicrOS" for the OS company? Hey BG, I invented that my own self, but I'll let you use it without even suing you.
Yours WD "Generous" K - WKiernan@concentric.net
For crying out loud, if Pablo Picasso had gone around stealing old ladies's purses or if James Jopyce had run around the streets of Dublin throwing rocks through shop windows, they'd have gone to jail like any of the rest of us.
Nobody's "persecuting" "innovation." (Let's leave to one side the word-grinding debate as to whether Microsoft was or wasn't really innovative, whatever that means, for right now.) Microsoft is being whacked because they broke the law - to be precise, after already having been warned once about their dubious tactics in 1994, they proceeded to stamp up and down on the law and feed the shreds through a tree chipper.
Keep in mind, though, that the DOJ isn't beating up Microsoft because Microsoft took unfair advantage of the general public. We mere citizens don't count shit to the government. Microsoft is being punished for screwing over a number of other multi-billion dollar corporations.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
Capitalism couldn't be responsible for anything in society that's more than a couple hundred years old, because capitalism basically didn't exist until a couple hundred years ago.
Giving that devilish capitalism its due, it is real efficient at what Marx called primitive accumulation. Similarly gasoline is good for powering your car, but you might not want to gargle with it, bathe in it, or put it into your baby's bottle. But here in the U.S.A., where "socialism" is a dirty word, we Americans let capitalists control everything in this so-called society of ours. I mean, look at the presidential candidates this year: not one but two third or fourth generation trust-fund kids who never in their lives had to work for a living, both of them devoted heart-and-soul to capital uber alles.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
Amidst this foul, miserable world, jam packed with fools and liars, how rare a relief it is to read someone with the sense, honesty and simple decency to defy convention and state the truth. Thank you.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
> corporations could not use every last drop of water
> or cut down every tree...
So what you're saying is that Georgia-Pacific and Weyerhauser don't clearcut the forest sites to which they have access? It's like reading someone who says "Theory proves that that brick wall can't possibly be in my path," whereupon he proceeds to walk straight into and face out upon said brick wall.
Face the facts: the economic imperatives of capitalism require all business owners to exploit every bit of the environment they can to the maximum degree possible. The only thing that can stop profiteering corporations from devastating the entire globe is government action, that is to say, socialism. I'll say it again: socialism, socialism, socialism!
Maybe, probably, you and the general voting public these days will find that awful word so offensive that you'd prefer instead to strangle on the pollution created by unrestrained capitalism. Well, there's really nothing I can do to change the public's minds about that. So my guess is that, current trends continuing unabated, it looks like all of us, the entire human race, are doomed.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
Glad you asked. Here's the Greenspan definition. Higher prices for houses do not constitute inflation. Nor higher prices for cars, gasoline, medical bills, college tuition, pretty much anything that an ordinary citizen buys, none of these things constitute inflation. Vastly higher salaries, sky-high ones, for CEOs of big corporations do not constitute inflation in the least, heaven forbid you should even imagine such a thing. What then is inflation? How can we tell when it shows up? Easy! It's when the unemployment rate drops by two tenths of a percent, or when the guys at the fiftieth percentile of incomes get an aggregate raise in pay of, say, 0.7% - now that's inflation. And, in the service of that class which lives off dividends, inflation as thus defined must be stopped, stamped out, smashed flat, right now, this very instant, even if in the process we demolish the entire American economy- this being the scorched-earth tactic of fighting the class war. Far better we fire up a new recession than that the guy at the fiftieth percentile should ever, ever get a raise.
This is, as I said, openly discussed just about every day in the WSJ. One example: every month, regular like clockwork, the Bureau of Labor Statistics releases new figures on the American unemployment rate. This monthly event is very important breaking news to the investing class. The day before the BLS is due to publish their stuff, you will invariably find a panicky article in the WSJ where the author is sweating over the possibility that the rate has gone down last month. In order to forestall a wave of investor suicides, however, the author invariably reassures his readers that if disaster strikes and the unemployment rate goes down, Economic Despot Greenspan will yank his magic lever - the prime rate - to ensure that those workies who have the nerve to want to earn a living will be swiftly thrust back into the ranks of the jobless.
Then the next day, after the monthly unemployment rate is published, read the post-report commentary. There are three possibilities: the unemployment rate falls, or rises, or remains the same. Suppose it is the first - if more of us have jobs, then they either freak out and stock prices tumble, and the columnists calmly explain that this spasm of investor panic is directly due to the dreadful decrease in unemployment, or else if Wall Street doesn't bomb off, then commentators are bemused and conclude that speculators must believe there must be some countervailing force to hold working class wages down. When the unemployment rate rises, those same columnists can barely contain their glee, as more working-class people out of jobs translates directly into fatter dividends for the idle rich; the stock market surges and this is attributed to the happy news on the unemployment front. Yes, the econ columnists in the WSJ are quite naked about it: lower unemployment = bad news for the stock market, higher unemployment = happy days on Wall Street. There's your class war. Too bad the majority of the suckers in my class can't be bothered to pay any attention to it.
As for what keeps me out of the investing class, what a question! You know, I've got a petty little 401K fund, plus I own a few shares of stock in the company for which I work. Does that make me bourgeois, an investor, a capitalist? Absurd! Slingers of word hash would try to sell you that nonsense definition, liars would have you believe it; don't. My handful of stock shares do not make me a capitalist, nor do the more sizable investments owned by the striving UMC yuppies in their nasty little prefab gated communities up the road from my house, with their SUVs and their $120,000/year incomes. By any sensible definition, one should not be considered a capitalist unless the greatest part or all of one's income comes from investments. Neither I nor the co-opted haut-wage-slave with his $120K are truly members of the investing class; the fact is, cut off our wage incomes and we're both only a few short months away from the poorhouse.
Get real. To live entirely off investments in the style to which that class is accustomed, one must first have accumulated a mass of capital amounting to, at minimum, several million dollars. Now where do you suggest I acquire my millions of dollars, my "seed money," so that I too may give up productive work and relax into a luxurious new life of careless, effortless capitalist exploitation? There's your ceiling, not glass but green paper.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
Capital, as used in economics, is money intended to be used and multiplied by investment. This money is owned by someone; ownership is the fundamental principle of capitalism. But the phrase "natural capital," as used by the author, apparently has nothing to do with the traditional meaning of "capital," nor do it have any relation to the processes of capitalism.
So what we have here boils down to word hash. There are a great number of readers to whom, for a variety of mostly either nonsensical or self-serving reasons, the word "capitalism" is beautiful and alluring. No doubt the author may want to imbue his pro-environment ideas, which seem to be wholesome or at least innocuous, with that allure. But to label these ideas as some form of "capitalism" is just obfuscatory nonsense.
This review has got me curious, and I'd like to read this book anyway. I suspect, however, that it misses the main point, and I'm cynical enough to believe this is no accident. For the central issue in political analysis for the last two centuries is the class war, and it will be for the foreseeable future. Any discussion of politics or economics which does not focus on the central importance of class war - and here I'm specifically referring to virtually the entire range of libertarian political theory - is at best logically defective, at worse deliberate, outright fraud.
That's the same class war that has been ruthlessly waged for at least two centuries now between the investing class and the rest of us. The contemporary news and entertainment media, wholly controlled, of course, by the investing class, go to enormous lengths to try to convince us down here in the lower class that no such thing is taking place. The investing class talk about it, privately amongst themselves, quite freely; if you'd like to spy on your betters, read the economic analyses in section C of any day's Wall Street Journal, and learn for yourself precisely what that malicious old Randite Alan Greenspan means by "inflation." But meanwhile the rest of us are supposed to believe that the class war simply does not exist.
"Natural capitalism"? I don't buy it. Go try to sell your word hash to some other sucker.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
> When you make as much money as I do ($189K a year)
> you will start to see that some people frankly do
> not know what they are talking about.
Excuse me while I vomit on your shoes. Congratulations, with that one line you achieved the most disgusting post I've read here all year, makes the goatse.cx pic look inoffensive in comparison. "When you make as much money as I do," take your $189K, turn it into one-dollar bills, roll 'em up nice and tight, and stick 'em where the sun don't shine, moneyswine.
Sincerely WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
No they're not. I defy you to show me one statute that says they are. That's pure rubbish.
Jesus, I am ever glad I'm not a teenager these days, and I sure feel sorry for my kids. We thought we had a police state going in the late 60s and early 70s, but it was nothing compared to the damn universal police state they're running now, and everywhere you look it's just getting worse. It seems like everything is illegal these days - for example, bootlegging a couple of pop songs is now a God damned felony, that is, the same category as armed robbery, rape and murder, in Wisconsin - and if you're under 21 the assumption of all these curfews and searches and pisstests and assorted harassments is that you're guilty until proven innocent. And the police are completely out of control, as the Diallo and Dorismond cases in New York demonstrate. And while there were thugs in police uniforms back then too, at least there was also a principled opposition, whereas these days there's absolutely no one in public life who's willing even to consider reining them back.
As far as all you jackasses I've read here with your "bootlegging songs means you are a criminal" crap, you're all a bunch of illiterate idiots, and I use the word "idiot" in its original etymological sense. A guy who clubs you over the head, or who robs you at gunpoint, or who breaks into your house and steals all your possesions, or who knocks a woman down and rapes her, now that's a criminal. For you blockheads to make a moral equivalence between real crimes like those and these trivial nitpicky little misdemeanors that these disgusting money-bloated tonedeaf RIAA swine are making such a howling fuss over, that only demonstrates that you suffer from the same complete lack of moral sense and proportion that the RIAA lawyers do. Have a happy police state, fools; I hope and expect that your blindered legalistic idiocy turns on you all someday.
Sincerely WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
And as the curtain closes:
We'll meet again
Don't know where
Don't know when
But I know we'll meet again
Some sunny day
Keep smiling through
Just like you
Always do
Till the blue skies
Wipe the dark clouds away
So will you please say "Hello"
To the folks that I know
Tell them
I won't be long
They'll be happy to know
That as you saw me go
I was singing
This song
We'll meet again
Don't know where
Don't know when
But I know we'll meet again
Some sunny day
Your fan, WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
You don't have to be actually dealing any drugs to be robbed at gunpoint by the cops. Just drive down I-10 through Louisiana with some cash in your car. Oh, yeah, and it helps - a lot - if you're black.
You think I'm kidding, don't you? God, I wish I were. Here, read this. Or, from the President of the ACLU, this. Or lest you fall for the anti-ACLU business that is so popular with demagogues in this country, and dismiss the above as just the ranting of some left-wing weirdos, here is a statement published by the office of conservative Republican congressman Henry Hyde. In fact, the appaling damage which the logic-twisting pro-police-state judicial activists of the Rehnquist Supreme Court have inflicted upon the Constitutional rights of American citizens has outraged many Congressmen of both the Democratic party and the Republican party, who have responded this year with legislation to undo their excesses and restore those Constitutional rights to the public. This bill has not yet been signed by President Clinton, who has a terrible record of siding with the law enforcement gang against the interests of mere citizens. Let us hope that FBI Director Freeh and Drug Tsar McCafferty (that war criminal) don't talk him into vetoing this bill.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
> > Wouldn't sex without the intent to bear a child be wasting
> > a "seed"? Isn't birth control a "sin"?
> Not as long as you have already fufilled the purpose and
> created a child, no.
Dear me, dear me, dear me. I am shocked. Your words are ghastly. This is absolutely horrible. You mean to tell me that you think unlimited hedonistic fornication is not a sin just because you and that harlot of a wife of yours have already had a child once? Dare you to mouth such heresy before the open public? Do you suppose, in your vanity, that the fact that you are a parent bleaches out the black immorality of your pleasure-seeking lustful genital connections?
This is a lie and an abomination against all decency and sanctity, as you are well aware. Holy Church doctrine clearly states that the only excuse that is acceptable for any instance of sexual congress is the intent to create a child during that one particular act of copulation. The incidental fact that you might once have had a child doesn't free you from the indelible stain of lewdness, should you and your Hell-bent wife shamelessly indulge your gross appetites for the sheer pleasure of such indulgence, as you have already publicly confessed to so doing. In fact, even to merely contemplate so nightmarish an obscenity -
Ye have heard that it was said by them of old time, Thou shalt not commit adultery: But I say unto you, That whosoever looketh on a woman to lust after her hath committed adultery with her already in his heart.
is the very depth and nadir of mortal sin.
Hell yawns wide for such as you, sex fiend. Hell, Hell, Hell, Hell, Hell, inevitably awaits you. Doomed sinner! Lewd, proud fool! You are damned! You have fallen! And you can't get up.
Unmercifully yours, WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
> > Bob Metcalfe, in a recent InfoWorld column, did
> > not hesitate to write that "Richard Stallman
> > is a communist". I do not actually think such comments
> > are particularly useful...
Then why the f*ck did you not hesitate to carefully quote such a "un-useful" comment, Meyer? Fact is, this f*cker Meyer is blatantly red-baiting Stallman, and what's worse, he did it in such a way as to deflect his own personal responsibility for red-baiting him by quoting another guy, and then wig-wagging his finger at him! Christ, tactics like that make Rush Limbaugh seem like an honorable debater.
Also note the obligatory slam in his article against the Soviet Union. Got to bring the old dead Soviet Union into any red-baiting discussion, just for background color (red), even if the subject is half the globe away from that nation and utterly unrelated to that regime. Yeah, yeah, you couldn't get a chicken in Brezhnev's Moscow, yeah, the GPU were bad bad bad, but I'm sick to death of this cliche, this one-sided story about how fanatically, consistently and irrationally awful the Russian Communists always were.
As long as some people are waving the word "Communist" around in the air like a slapjack, let's go ahead and talk about the old Soviet Union. For the entirety of the Soviet regime they had a total of maybe ten years max when they weren't either under active ground attack by merciless invading foreign armies or face-to-face with a coalition of enemy nations, devoted, in the fullest extent of their industrial capacity, to the literal genocide of the Russian race. I am using the words "literal" and "genocide" in their precise meanings. Hitler specifically intended to annihilate the entire Slavic race and he made no secret of his ambitions, instead published them worldwide in his 1924 book Mein Kampf. Go read it; it's online. You owe it to yourself to know history. Go read Toland "Rise and Fall"; the deliberate starvation of all Western Russia was a war goal acknowledged in the formal secret plans for Operation Barbarossa.
Then, no sooner did Russia practically singlehandedly cleanse this ungrateful world of that ultimate maniac Hitler, at a cost of a third of their adult population, than it faced a new enemy, their former ally, the U.S.A., in the person of Curtis LeMay and his "nation-killing," H-bomb-armed SAC. Did you know we buzzed Russian cities with strategic bombers on a regular basis throughout the fifties? Did you know that Kennedy put seven thousand megatons in the air during the Cuban Missile Crisis? Did you know Nixon did it again in the Six-Day War? Did anybody reading this pay any attention at all when Reagan joked on camera about having just ordered an all-out attack against the SU?
The Soviet Union was under seige for seventy years. Now my country, the U.S.A., is the richest nation in the history of mankind, with no military enemies anywhere worth considering, and we've got two million people behind bars today. Scratch the first, fourth, fifth and seventh amendments for the "drug war"; go ask ESR about what happened to that second one. What do you think would happen to what's left of our so-called "freedoms" if the U.S.A. were under seige for one year, much less seventy years?
Damn, I know this rant I just wrote might have got a bit off topic. Sorry. Mod me down if you feel you must. But this endless mindless f*cking red-baiting drives me nuts. You know, this is on-topic here at /. - anybody reading this, if you advocate or use open-source/free/GNU software, these f*cking guys, they're red-baiting you.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
You know, the same thing occurred to me. I may not be a Nobel-winning physicist but I do know AC flows through a capacitor. So I went wading through my unbelievably cluttered bookshelves and found the book in question: "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman," Bantam Books, 1986. And here on page 261 (I looked up "talmud" in the index) is the quote itself:
I even proposed a practical solution for eliminating the spark. "If that's what's bothering you, you can pit a condenser actross the switch, so the electricity will go on and off without any spark whatsoever - anywhere." But for some reason, they didn't like that idea either.
Maybe he meant "in series with the switch" instead, and I'd guess that would work as intended too, but it is an unexpected pleasure for dumb old me to have caught the great Nobel Laureate in an error!
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
Mother Teresa and Dr. Kevorkian, what a hoot! A very nice post! Did you also notice that according to this Meyer character, not only Raymond's wacky gun fetish but also Stallman's table manners are telling arguments against open-source software? His f*cking table manners, for Christ's sake. That's really straining. Next thing we'll be hearing that Stallman's appaling singing voice demonstrates free software's moral inferiority, etc., etc. The nonsense level in Meyer's diatribe overwhelms any sensible point he might have made.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
IANAR (I am not a Rabbi) but...
I remeber something from one of Richard Feynman's autobiographical books where some extremely devout Orthodox Jews wanted to know if there was a spark released when you flip on a light switch; this spark would constitute "work" and was therefore taboo, whereas if there was no spark it would be OK. Feynman suggested putting a capacitor across the switch to suppress the spark, I think. By that rigid definition you should very carefully relax and remember not to breathe deep on the Sabbath (which you take to be Sunday). In fact, as programming is mainly mental work, you should not even think about it on Sunday; perhaps you should start knocking back whiskey first thing at sunup, just to forestall any sinful random work-oriented cogitations.
But I think the intent of the prohibition against working on the Sabbath was a practical matter; first, it would help keep people from working themselves to exhaustion, and second, it was a higher authority you could invoke when your boss demanded that you work non-stop (thus making this the first recorded wage-and-hour law, yeah!). This is similar, I believe, to the Mosaic prohibition against eating pork or shellfish - no refrigeration and a middle-Eastern climate makes eating these a risky business. In that sense, my interpretation would be, "have fun, but don't knock yourself out." But of course this sort of interpretation is powered by practical, secular considerations, and you being a theist, I understand that you might find them lacking.
The relevant scripture, if I am not mistaken, is Numbers 15:32 through 36:
And while the children of Israel were in the wilderness, they found a man that gathered sticks upon the sabbath day.
And they that found him gathering sticks brought him unto Moses and Aaron, and unto all the congregation.
And they put him in ward, because it was not declared what should be done to him.
And the LORD said unto Moses, The man shall be surely put to death: all the congregation shall stone him with stones without the camp.
And all the congregation brought him without the camp, and stoned him with stones, and he died; as the LORD commanded Moses.
Now that, to me, despite the authority of Moses and the LORD, seems quite extreme. Insanely so. (I am an atheist, after all.) But the point here is that this poor guy was probably not gathering those sticks at his boss's command, nor did he intend to trade them for shekels; he was probably trying to gather some firewood for himself and his family. So are you writing this software for some practical use, or instead purely for your own regalement? If the former, and if you insist on following the Old Testament literally, then I'd have to suggest that for consistency's sake you should give it up.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
> For the record I don't think it is fair for anyone
> to ask that you release your work as public domain.
Not even if they ask real nice and say "please"? Maybe you meant "demand" instead of "ask".
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
It's not a knee-jerk anti-Microsoft reaction, this outcry over Microsoft's latest standards-smashing scam is well-founded. The whole idea of Kerberos was to have a publicly-documented, platform-independent authentication scheme, and Microsoft deliberately broke it. To make matters worse, they pull this disgusting legal razzmatazz with their EULA-protected "trade secrets," to forestall legitimate reverse engineering.
Cheat, cheat, cheat, and even in the midst of their antitrust suit they never stop - the Sid Vicious of software vendors. God knows, "business ethics" is something of an oxymoron, but even amidst the low, swinish company of capitalist businesses in general, Microsoft stands out; that damned gang is just plain pathological.
OK, you could say that "any company in their position in a capitalist market system would act as they do," and I suspect you'd be right - but that is only an indictment of capitalism in general.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
Neither does it display right in Netscape 4.72 under NT4. But it displays correctly in my sentimental favorite of all browsers, Lynx.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
You know, I've always wondered why open source software is always assumed to be free-gratuit, and why software sold for money has to be shipped bereft of source code. I suppose the argument is, if the developer ships his software with source code then users will be able to compile unauthorized copies. But obviously it is just as easy, no, far easier, to simply copy the binaries than to compile new binaries from source.
Conversely, suppose I am a software developer and I want to release an application with the usual license restricting the buyer, if he wants to install my application on N computers, to pay me for N licenses. If, like the great majority of commercial PC software, my program is not "protected" by some elaborate copy-protection scheme, then basically the only thing that prevents a buyer from distributing "bootleg" copies of my program is his respect for the license agreement, or at least his fear of being caught violating it. The U.S. software industry is doing quite well, despite such a flimsy protection for its products. Why couldn't I rely on the same thing to protect my copyright and my profits if I released programs with source code?
As a commercial product, software complete with source might, for some users at least, be a valuable convenience - one which might attract customers and win extra market share - if they had the ability to add site-specific hacks to my code, or if they could recompile it to work around bugs and security holes, or merely so they could see what is going on inside the program. In that last consideration, I'm thinking about end-users who generate data files in specific formats that are generated by proprietary programs, such as MS Word .DOC files or AutoCAD .DWG files. My employers have millions of dollars invested in AutoCAD .DWG files. Suppose Autodesk goes out of business five years from now, how are we supposed to get our information out of these files? As customers, we would be a lot happier if at least the .DWG format was specified somewhere, but it is not. So a competing CAD software vendor would have a selling point if he could say, "Our data format is openly documented, so your data can't be orphaned" - in fact, Bentley, which makes Microstation, does make such an argument in their sales pitch. And they'd have a yet better sales pitch if they could say, "Our software is open-source, so neither your data files nor your application itself can ever be completely orphaned. Even if the OS vendor somehow breaks something so our compiled code doesn't work any more," (but what OS vendor would ever do a screwed up thing like that? it's unthinkable, really ;-)) "you could still port our source code to the new OS of your choice."
When you add something to a GPL program, the copyright holders retain their rights to your "derivative work." Similarly, if I were to sell a commercial, licensed application complete with source code, I shouldn't lose my copyright to my proprietary program just because an end-user has modified it and made his own "derivative work" from it. So why does everyone take it for granted that open source == zero cost?
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
Far be it from me to make a fuss over /. moderation, but the parent message to this, though it is marked down to -1 (troll), really wasn't. Since it may have fallen out of sight, I quote it:
(a) Outlook doesn't modify any files -- Windows does. On NT, no system files can be modified.
But Outlook is so tightly integrated that the distinction is moot, synergy, innovation, blah blah blah... Anyway so I heard you have to make \WINNT\SYSTEM32 accessible to all MS Office 97 users. If it is in a FAT partition you're screwed anyway, security-wise (on the otherb hand you can come up in MS-DOS and fix things), but even if your system drive is an NTFS partition, so you can lock down the \WINNT\SYSTEM32 directory for users, for some ungodly reason Office 97 must write data there so you can't. That's what I read somewhere, and if I'm wrong, please correct me.
(b1) No version of the ILOVEYOU virus executes from the preview pane.
At the instant our AC posted this, it may or may not have been true, and it may or may not be true at the present moment. But if it's possible at all to write vbs code which self-executes in the Outlook preview window, some funloving so-and-so somewhere is busy tonight shoehorning it into the framework of ILOVEYOU - an world-girdling open-source virus in plaintext, proudly signed by the author no less! Gotta love those Filipinos, you know Lynda Barry's candid like that too.
To tell you the truth, to make it automatically self-actuating would take something away from the complexity, elegance and depth of this worm. As curious as the technical details, all generously laid out for our inspection, may be to a casual aesthete appreciating the art of virus composition, the social-engineering aspects of worms like Melissa and ILOVEYOU is even more interesting; it adds an additional depth to the process of propagation if the virus must somehow inveigle or seduce a human user to play a part in its reproductive cycle. At least I think so.
(b2) With a policy file, an admin can force all workstations in a domain to show file extentions.
I'd be interested in you telling me how that's done. It's always been a minor irritation to me, that, and I've got a whole office-full of NT desktop machines and users who jump from one machine to the next.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
Next thing: Murder as art...
Raymond Chandler considered murder to be art, his art. This is a cool little book.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net