Have you looked at the EU's Value Added Tax? Now there's a ludicrously high sales tax: 40%! A colleague just tried to buy a laptop in Italy while at a trade show to replace his underpowered one. It's how Europe pays for a lot of their social programs, such as their various universal health coverages.
Have you ever tried to wade through corporate patent applications? I don't recommend it for the faint of heart or weak of stomach. The amount of brain-numbing nonsense in many if not most of them is stunning. Coupled with Microsoft's documented failures to reveal prior art, and pretty soon you're left with too much paranoia to actually do any related work.
This, of course, is the goal of many patent corporate holders: to prevent competition with groups unable or unwilling to amass a similarly effective patent portfolio.
Oh, let's be clear. He's going after both. Lindows and Ubunto and their like hurt Microsoft's desktop market, especially with OpenOffice draining their Office dominance. That desktop market is their bread and butter.
Microsoft's also been repeatedly caught stealing patentable ideas from competitors. Never go to a meeting with a Microsoft exec and discuss potential shared business plans and expect them not to steal your ideas, no matter what the non-disclosure agreeement says. I've seen far too many cases where they used their bulk to manipulate or block out possible competitors based on information from non-disclosure meetings.
You mean like they got caught stealing VMS code, techniques, and trade secrets to create NT? Or like they got caught prohibiting OEM vendors from bundling Netscape? Or like htey got caught pretending a hoplelessly scrambled and incomplete document of code descriptions is an API that developers can use to compete with Microsoft's products?
The list goes on and on: not only do they pull stunts this stupid, they get caught at it again and again. Getting busted is just a part of doing business for them.
Given their criminal history, I can certainly suspect it. But it's much easier to deal in innuendo and vague threats for this, or to use proxies to make your accusations. Look at how Microsoft's corporate sponsorship of SCO, by helping them stay in business through "business partnerships", has allowed Microsoft to damage Linux witha a fraudulent lawsuit, weaken SCO as owners of the AT&T UNIX code base, and keep their hands and deep pockets clear of the lawsuit.
It's like selling guns to the side you like in a civil wary: it keeps the warring nation weak and prevents their interference in your own plans.
DRM is based on copyrights. The first copyrights were on the Bible, to prevent its broad publication and availability to non-priests, and to prevent alternative versions of it from being printed.
Let's be very clear, the foundation of DRM and of copyright is to prevent free as in free speech use of things. The reasons can be good for it, such as to protect privacy or to reward creators. But the effect is to prevent access.
The marijuana prohibitions started because hemp competed with other rope and paper making trades. It continues because marijuana interacts in interesting ways with the cigarette market, the established pharmaceutical market, and the odd belief that it is a "gateway" drug to addictive narcotics.
OK, so maybe if weed was legal we'd have a lot fewer uptight Republicans, or at least their children would be unlikely to follow in their footsteps. Is this necessarily a bad thing?
We don't ignore that cost. Seriously. But we find it much faster, safer, and more effective to actually hire the artist than to go through the Screen Actor's Guild, the Producer's Guild, the Guild-Joining Guild, etc. to simply hire the artist and have work made.
I highly recommend you see the old Mike Jittlov movie, "The Wizard of Speed & Time", for a sense of how the production standards for movies and in turn video, and audio actually hinder creativity. What actually happened to Jittlov in the course of making and selling his movie is even worse than what happened in the plot of the movie, and remains a matter of movie-making legend. It's described at Wikipedia, for your historical review. It's an excellent parallel to the software industry.
Sir or madam, I understand your point. I can write in C far, far faster than most object-oriented programmers can write in C++ or Java, and get far better performance out of fewer lines of code. But to do that, I had to learn C. Expecting the many casual document authors to write in a programming language instead of being able to "click on this and click on that" to make a statement in bold text, or change its font, or even make a list of elements, is asking a lot from a casual user.
This stuff needs to work for casual users who are already pressed for time, or they won't use it.
From harsh expericce, closed source code is vastly more likely to be hacked and vulnerable to hacking. The crackers do steal the source and the developer's notes: the more honest people don't have access to it and can contribute nothing. And the crackers only have to be lucky once, the designer or programmers have to be right and cautious all the time. Couple that need with the extremely poor GUI-based programming and feature extension styles of a lot of "software engineers", and you have a disaster hiding behind that closed source license. IIS is a wonderful example of the uselessly insecure result.
And if you don't understand that last paragraph, please go ahdead and publish your personal details so we can show you how it works at your next job interview.
Publishing this sort of thing privately often doesn't work. I've had numerous security vulnerabilities ignored for years: the use of public FTP sites with user's private passwords is one of the most common. Publicly write-able home directories used by both bosses and their secretaries is another: so are password free SSH keys and software that stores passwords locally in clear text, then NFS export those directories.
In practice, nothing forces a change faster than an obvious break-in that discomfits the boss's secretary: the second fastest is something that affects the stock price. Even something that is being actively used for break-ins is often ignored due to recalcitrant developers and users who cannot be troubled to use secure practices, or to invest in keeping their software upgraded. The worst of them are those who think "we're inside a firewall, we trust the people we work with!". Then they sneak in a laptop from home and expect it to just work.
Indeed: LyX is extremely handy for providing to undergraduates or research assistants whose thesis advisors insist on using TeX or LaTeX, who lack the time to learn yet another language. LyX is the difference between having slightly more elegant.tex files, and getting an hour more of sleep a night when writing your thesis because you can edit in a GUI and don't have to debug your.tex files.
I am finding myself wishing that OpenOffice had pursued putting a vastly better interface on TeX and LaTeX, rather than writing their own standard. It would probably have been faster and certainly would have been a lot more stable. Microsoft couldn't have even thought about it: its clean, open standards would not have lent themselves to the proprietary "extend" part of Microsoft's "embrace and extend" approach, or Microsoft's software licensing models.
PDF would have been a candidate, but Adobe's licensing and that of ancestor, Postscript, are awkward to deal with. That's hindered their acceptance in other uses, such as Postscript display systems. (It could have been a superios display system to X, and much easier to display remotely.)
But it hardly takes a $350 tool to handle: PDFcreator, available over at sourceforge.net, and the old Ghostview viewer both rely on Ghostscript to process PDF and work more quickly and reliably than Adobe's conversion tools, especially with mixed language documents. And they're both freeware.
Before even that, it wsa controlled by the cost of hand-copying documents. The Gutenberg press, and similar printiing technologies, changed this and made duplication cheap. This led to the first copyrights, granted on the Christian Bible, to prevent its publication except with the permission of the Church and to appropriate personnel. This was because, if non-priests read the Bible, they could more easily argue with established doctrine and even create new churches and heresies, causing endless difficulties for both the major churches and the governments who were heavily tied to those churches. Also, if printing were general and too uncontrolled, lots of heavily modified versions of the Bible could also have been printed, causing even more schisms. Keeping the Bible uniform was a major goal of early publishers of it, for many excellent reasons as well as purely political ones.
So the history of copyright begins, not with aiding publishers and rewarding creativity, but with controlling access to already existing information. Keep this in mind when you discuss copyright law: controlling access is its primary purpose. There can be benefits to this, to protect trade secrets and to reward authors, but its fundamental nature is to prevent access to information.
I'm confident that Google is fairly drive agnostic: you just can't run distributed networks that large and stay locked into a single vendor. And given that even reliable vendors have disasters like the IBM Deskstar drives some years ago, and given the remarkable growth of drive sizes over time, there's just not much point for them in buying the extremely stable but vastly more expensive hardware. They've foubtless learned that hardware flexibility provides valuable software flexibility.
Yes, you can tell a lot about a distribution by how they deal with CUPS. People who care about their user experience and have some skill write a much better wrapper for it. RedHat has one, for example.
Oh, you got in trouble for that extensive modem usage, too? I remember getting hollered at for downloading gcc and new versions of gmake, and was lucky enough to have justified it by the time early versions of actual Linux were up and running, and had found a cheaper way to make the calls.
Well, putting BSD on top of the Linux kernel would have been tougher: the different licensing model of the different BSD's versus that of GPL would have made a huge difference in development and style. Let's just give credit where it's due: give Linus credit for the kernel, not for the whole OS.
SunOS and Solaris are an entirely different licensing story. Sun switched from a BSD style UNIX to an AT&T style UNIX way back with the release of Solaris, and they've been trying to live it down ever since.
OK, this is wildly off-topic. But there were numerous causes for the rise of Nazism. It promised national pride, and successfully blamed the poverty stricken state of Germany after the failure of World War I on groups like the Jews and Communists. This led to a powerful, centralized federal government there that *could* engage in iron control, and allowed them to engage in wars of conquest to grow their economy. But this has been going on in various cultures since the dawn of time. They're hardly unique in committing genocide, or demonizing some number of their own citizens with a different culture.
The extent and thoroughness was unusual. But the same forces exist in the Middle East today, and in other religious arguments in Czechoslovakia, India, Pakistan, Ireland, and even in conflicts in the US.
I'm sorry, but you've got a dangerous mistake. Richard Stallman really deserves the most credit for the Linux operating system environment, with his foundation of the GPL, the massive code base of gcc and glibc and other core open source projects, and the continuing work there. The Linux kernel is critical, but a similar project such as HURD coming out earlier could have filled the same spot.
Linus deserves a lot of credit, but let's credit him for what he did.
Everything old is new again. Something similar happened years ago with Eric Raymond and CUPS, where Eric pointed out a clear set of flaws in the CUPS configuration tools in http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cups-horror.html, "The Luxury of Ignorance". And his suggestions have been completely ignored.
You have some good points: I've found a lot of KDE "configurability" to be a lot feature-filled, unnecessary crap on top of tools that don't do the basic work, and Gnome tools to be lighter and cleaner to run. Flexibility is good: features are good: unreliable and inconsistently implemented features that no one but the original developer wants are the bane of user interfaces. I'd actually like to see the patches Linus wrote: does anyone have a pointer or access to them, so we can look at the code instead of articles about the argument?
There's actually a pretty good write-up about this from years ago by Eric Raymond, at http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cups-horror.html. It's called "The Luxury of Ignorance", and the Gnome "interface nazis" have been much better about avoiding the booby traps of developing options at the expense of usability.
With that in mind, there have been some very good tools out of the KDE world that do use such good standards of usefulness. Konqueror is one of them: it's a very useful tool for SMB, FTP, and WebDAV cutting and pasting and browsiing with a good consistent interface.
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Thank you, I'm delighted it's not quite as awful as I thought. But 19% is still pretty serious.
Have you looked at the EU's Value Added Tax? Now there's a ludicrously high sales tax: 40%! A colleague just tried to buy a laptop in Italy while at a trade show to replace his underpowered one. It's how Europe pays for a lot of their social programs, such as their various universal health coverages.
Have you ever tried to wade through corporate patent applications? I don't recommend it for the faint of heart or weak of stomach. The amount of brain-numbing nonsense in many if not most of them is stunning. Coupled with Microsoft's documented failures to reveal prior art, and pretty soon you're left with too much paranoia to actually do any related work.
This, of course, is the goal of many patent corporate holders: to prevent competition with groups unable or unwilling to amass a similarly effective patent portfolio.
Besides, Ballmer doesn't pick up small stools. He shireks wildly while preparing to hurl his really, really large ones.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wvsboPUjrGc
Oh, let's be clear. He's going after both. Lindows and Ubunto and their like hurt Microsoft's desktop market, especially with OpenOffice draining their Office dominance. That desktop market is their bread and butter.
Microsoft's also been repeatedly caught stealing patentable ideas from competitors. Never go to a meeting with a Microsoft exec and discuss potential shared business plans and expect them not to steal your ideas, no matter what the non-disclosure agreeement says. I've seen far too many cases where they used their bulk to manipulate or block out possible competitors based on information from non-disclosure meetings.
You mean like they got caught stealing VMS code, techniques, and trade secrets to create NT? Or like they got caught prohibiting OEM vendors from bundling Netscape? Or like htey got caught pretending a hoplelessly scrambled and incomplete document of code descriptions is an API that developers can use to compete with Microsoft's products?
The list goes on and on: not only do they pull stunts this stupid, they get caught at it again and again. Getting busted is just a part of doing business for them.
Given their criminal history, I can certainly suspect it. But it's much easier to deal in innuendo and vague threats for this, or to use proxies to make your accusations. Look at how Microsoft's corporate sponsorship of SCO, by helping them stay in business through "business partnerships", has allowed Microsoft to damage Linux witha a fraudulent lawsuit, weaken SCO as owners of the AT&T UNIX code base, and keep their hands and deep pockets clear of the lawsuit.
It's like selling guns to the side you like in a civil wary: it keeps the warring nation weak and prevents their interference in your own plans.
DRM is based on copyrights. The first copyrights were on the Bible, to prevent its broad publication and availability to non-priests, and to prevent alternative versions of it from being printed.
Let's be very clear, the foundation of DRM and of copyright is to prevent free as in free speech use of things. The reasons can be good for it, such as to protect privacy or to reward creators. But the effect is to prevent access.
The marijuana prohibitions started because hemp competed with other rope and paper making trades. It continues because marijuana interacts in interesting ways with the cigarette market, the established pharmaceutical market, and the odd belief that it is a "gateway" drug to addictive narcotics.
OK, so maybe if weed was legal we'd have a lot fewer uptight Republicans, or at least their children would be unlikely to follow in their footsteps. Is this necessarily a bad thing?
We don't ignore that cost. Seriously. But we find it much faster, safer, and more effective to actually hire the artist than to go through the Screen Actor's Guild, the Producer's Guild, the Guild-Joining Guild, etc. to simply hire the artist and have work made.
I highly recommend you see the old Mike Jittlov movie, "The Wizard of Speed & Time", for a sense of how the production standards for movies and in turn video, and audio actually hinder creativity. What actually happened to Jittlov in the course of making and selling his movie is even worse than what happened in the plot of the movie, and remains a matter of movie-making legend. It's described at Wikipedia, for your historical review. It's an excellent parallel to the software industry.
Sir or madam, I understand your point. I can write in C far, far faster than most object-oriented programmers can write in C++ or Java, and get far better performance out of fewer lines of code. But to do that, I had to learn C. Expecting the many casual document authors to write in a programming language instead of being able to "click on this and click on that" to make a statement in bold text, or change its font, or even make a list of elements, is asking a lot from a casual user.
This stuff needs to work for casual users who are already pressed for time, or they won't use it.
How interesting: does it have anything resembling the necessary performance for graphics to handle games?
From harsh expericce, closed source code is vastly more likely to be hacked and vulnerable to hacking. The crackers do steal the source and the developer's notes: the more honest people don't have access to it and can contribute nothing. And the crackers only have to be lucky once, the designer or programmers have to be right and cautious all the time. Couple that need with the extremely poor GUI-based programming and feature extension styles of a lot of "software engineers", and you have a disaster hiding behind that closed source license. IIS is a wonderful example of the uselessly insecure result.
And if you don't understand that last paragraph, please go ahdead and publish your personal details so we can show you how it works at your next job interview.
Publishing this sort of thing privately often doesn't work. I've had numerous security vulnerabilities ignored for years: the use of public FTP sites with user's private passwords is one of the most common. Publicly write-able home directories used by both bosses and their secretaries is another: so are password free SSH keys and software that stores passwords locally in clear text, then NFS export those directories.
In practice, nothing forces a change faster than an obvious break-in that discomfits the boss's secretary: the second fastest is something that affects the stock price. Even something that is being actively used for break-ins is often ignored due to recalcitrant developers and users who cannot be troubled to use secure practices, or to invest in keeping their software upgraded. The worst of them are those who think "we're inside a firewall, we trust the people we work with!". Then they sneak in a laptop from home and expect it to just work.
Indeed: LyX is extremely handy for providing to undergraduates or research assistants whose thesis advisors insist on using TeX or LaTeX, who lack the time to learn yet another language. LyX is the difference between having slightly more elegant .tex files, and getting an hour more of sleep a night when writing your thesis because you can edit in a GUI and don't have to debug your .tex files.
I am finding myself wishing that OpenOffice had pursued putting a vastly better interface on TeX and LaTeX, rather than writing their own standard. It would probably have been faster and certainly would have been a lot more stable. Microsoft couldn't have even thought about it: its clean, open standards would not have lent themselves to the proprietary "extend" part of Microsoft's "embrace and extend" approach, or Microsoft's software licensing models.
PDF would have been a candidate, but Adobe's licensing and that of ancestor, Postscript, are awkward to deal with. That's hindered their acceptance in other uses, such as Postscript display systems. (It could have been a superios display system to X, and much easier to display remotely.)
But it hardly takes a $350 tool to handle: PDFcreator, available over at sourceforge.net, and the old Ghostview viewer both rely on Ghostscript to process PDF and work more quickly and reliably than Adobe's conversion tools, especially with mixed language documents. And they're both freeware.
Before even that, it wsa controlled by the cost of hand-copying documents. The Gutenberg press, and similar printiing technologies, changed this and made duplication cheap. This led to the first copyrights, granted on the Christian Bible, to prevent its publication except with the permission of the Church and to appropriate personnel. This was because, if non-priests read the Bible, they could more easily argue with established doctrine and even create new churches and heresies, causing endless difficulties for both the major churches and the governments who were heavily tied to those churches. Also, if printing were general and too uncontrolled, lots of heavily modified versions of the Bible could also have been printed, causing even more schisms. Keeping the Bible uniform was a major goal of early publishers of it, for many excellent reasons as well as purely political ones.
So the history of copyright begins, not with aiding publishers and rewarding creativity, but with controlling access to already existing information. Keep this in mind when you discuss copyright law: controlling access is its primary purpose. There can be benefits to this, to protect trade secrets and to reward authors, but its fundamental nature is to prevent access to information.
I'm confident that Google is fairly drive agnostic: you just can't run distributed networks that large and stay locked into a single vendor. And given that even reliable vendors have disasters like the IBM Deskstar drives some years ago, and given the remarkable growth of drive sizes over time, there's just not much point for them in buying the extremely stable but vastly more expensive hardware. They've foubtless learned that hardware flexibility provides valuable software flexibility.
Yes, you can tell a lot about a distribution by how they deal with CUPS. People who care about their user experience and have some skill write a much better wrapper for it. RedHat has one, for example.
Oh, you got in trouble for that extensive modem usage, too? I remember getting hollered at for downloading gcc and new versions of gmake, and was lucky enough to have justified it by the time early versions of actual Linux were up and running, and had found a cheaper way to make the calls.
Well, putting BSD on top of the Linux kernel would have been tougher: the different licensing model of the different BSD's versus that of GPL would have made a huge difference in development and style. Let's just give credit where it's due: give Linus credit for the kernel, not for the whole OS.
SunOS and Solaris are an entirely different licensing story. Sun switched from a BSD style UNIX to an AT&T style UNIX way back with the release of Solaris, and they've been trying to live it down ever since.
OK, this is wildly off-topic. But there were numerous causes for the rise of Nazism. It promised national pride, and successfully blamed the poverty stricken state of Germany after the failure of World War I on groups like the Jews and Communists. This led to a powerful, centralized federal government there that *could* engage in iron control, and allowed them to engage in wars of conquest to grow their economy. But this has been going on in various cultures since the dawn of time. They're hardly unique in committing genocide, or demonizing some number of their own citizens with a different culture.
The extent and thoroughness was unusual. But the same forces exist in the Middle East today, and in other religious arguments in Czechoslovakia, India, Pakistan, Ireland, and even in conflicts in the US.
I'm sorry, but you've got a dangerous mistake. Richard Stallman really deserves the most credit for the Linux operating system environment, with his foundation of the GPL, the massive code base of gcc and glibc and other core open source projects, and the continuing work there. The Linux kernel is critical, but a similar project such as HURD coming out earlier could have filled the same spot.
Linus deserves a lot of credit, but let's credit him for what he did.
Everything old is new again. Something similar happened years ago with Eric Raymond and CUPS, where Eric pointed out a clear set of flaws in the CUPS configuration tools in http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cups-horror.html , "The Luxury of Ignorance". And his suggestions have been completely ignored.
You have some good points: I've found a lot of KDE "configurability" to be a lot feature-filled, unnecessary crap on top of tools that don't do the basic work, and Gnome tools to be lighter and cleaner to run. Flexibility is good: features are good: unreliable and inconsistently implemented features that no one but the original developer wants are the bane of user interfaces. I'd actually like to see the patches Linus wrote: does anyone have a pointer or access to them, so we can look at the code instead of articles about the argument?
l . It's called "The Luxury of Ignorance", and the Gnome "interface nazis" have been much better about avoiding the booby traps of developing options at the expense of usability.
There's actually a pretty good write-up about this from years ago by Eric Raymond, at http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cups-horror.htm
With that in mind, there have been some very good tools out of the KDE world that do use such good standards of usefulness. Konqueror is one of them: it's a very useful tool for SMB, FTP, and WebDAV cutting and pasting and browsiing with a good consistent interface.