I'm not a doctor, but it sounds to me that the treatments they're proposing would prevent the plaques from building up in the first place -- I'm not sure that they'd remove it once it was in place.
I doubt you're going to find what you're looking for. You'd need a proxy that would parse the HTML and strip out offending javascript. That sounds like it would be pretty tough, and that it would eat a lot of cycles on your end.
Another problem is that you need to keep some popups -- ones that are generated by clicks -- and toss out others, the ones that show up automatically.
I don't know how browsers solve the problem, but I'd be interested to know.
If I were going to try to implement it, I'd probably set things up so that a click event turns off pop up blocking for a short window of time, although that's probably kludgier than what the browsers actually do.
If it is what they're doing, though, it wouldn't be something you could implement in a proxy server.
I have a paid for version of office on my home windows computer. I like it.
But I see a lot of people in this situation. They go to wal-mart, and they buy a HP machine for $500. They're not comptuer people, they just want to go online, hit the web, send email, and type up some stuff from time to time.
Because they buy at wal-mart, they don't get a crack at the $234 OEM price on office professional. Something comes up, and they decide that they'd like to have office -- someone sends them a powerpoint file, or whatever. And they find out that office is $450. They're just not going to spend that.
In the old days, they would just bring the office cds home from work. I'm not saying it's a good thing, but it is what happened. But now they can't.
My point was that if people start running open office at home, there's going to be a userbase of people who run it. If a pointy headed boss runs open office at home, and says, "this is good enough," maybe he'll figure it's good enough for the people he manages.
I wonder how many people have scripted ms-office, or use it as part of a larger custom application. But you're right, that's the sort of situation, like the ones I mentioned (people using outlook for groupware, etc.) that will keep people in the ms-office camp.
I'm not saying that there won't be a huge market for ms-office. I run it myself, and I have scripted it myself. I like it. I just don't think it will remain as a monopoly. Almost everyone has to use it if it's going to remain as a monopoly.
I think we're on the brink of the collapse of Microsoft's office suite monopoly. There's a lot less lock-in with office than there is with windows, so it's much easier for people to switch to open office.
Microsoft's pricing and online activation system has already pretty much removed office from consumer pc's. People who used to take cds home from work are doing without, and it's only a matter of time until the word about open office gets out. I'm not claiming that open office is as good as microsoft office, but it's good enough, I think.
I think that microsoft is making one of the biggest mistakes in its history in the way it prices office. The strategy seems to be aimed, as near as I can tell, at keeping corporate revenues high while allowing MS to cut prices for low end consumer machines.
A corporate workstation with xp pro and office pro pays microsoft almost 3x what a consumer user with xp home and works pays. I don't think that reflects costs or utility to the customer.
The most useful part of what people pay microsoft for comes from xp home -- it gives you the ability to run the huge library of windows software, access to the huge array of hardware device drivers, and core networking tools. What you get, for the buck, from jumping to xp pro or adding office on to the back, provides a lot less utility for each dollar spent.
If you decide that the corporate market can bear substantially higher prices than the consumer market, and if you notice that the main differences between a corporate user and a home user is office, then loading up the costs on the office side makes sense. I think that's what they're doing, and I think it's a fundamentally unstable pricing scheme.
So I predict that we're going to see corporate workstation users going with xp home and open office. A lot of computers that have been sold with $375 worth of microsoft software on them will now be sold with $94 worth of microsoft software on them.
MS-Office still makes sense for a lot of people. If you run exchange server, and want to use outlook as a groupware client, it makes sense. Excel users who earn a lot are going to get the spreadsheet they know and want, no one's going to tell a $150k/year guy to learn a new spreadsheet. But those types of users don't add up to a monopoly.
If the office monopoly begins to crack, it will be a really big deal. It will be a decline in a core microsoft business, and will suggest that perhaps the best days are behind them. And it will be the result of an open source project.
Windows to linux is a very wrenching change, in a million little ways. But MS-Office to Open Office is a lot more doable.
I think that's where MS's empire will first start to crack.
It's a NAT device, not a real firewall, but it's in the same category as the products you've mentioned, and it's more secure.
I haven't used it, and can't vouch for it. But it's gotten some good press.
As I understand it, if you can sniff enough packets that use the same key, you can crack the crypto. This thing uses a better (and standard) protocol that keeps changing the keys, so no one can sniff enough packets to recover the key.
I'm not sure I understand why they've kept the weak algorithm and shored it up by changing keys. My guess is that the cyrpto is built into a lot of wireless card hardware, and you can still use the built in hardware by rotating keys. A new algorithm would offload all of the crypto to the processor. That's just a guess, though.
In any event, I think this is believed to be secure now. I think that recent patches to XP support the new protocol with most wireless net adapters -- if you run XP, you don't have to worry about vendor support on the client side.
This is an interesting idea -- I don't know how it works in a world where some people are running 133 Mhz computers and others are up at 3Ghz. But it's interesting.
I think that any postage scheme should be hybridized with a white list to avoid imposing burdens on people you want to talk to. The postage (economic or computational) should only apply to people who you don't know.
In other words, if I know you, you should be able to email me for free, but if I don't know you, it should cost something -- not much, but something.
With a hybrid system, most of the problems I would have with having to pay some small amount of real money evaporate.
People could pick charities -- if you want to email me and I don't know you, you have to give a nickel to the salvation army, or whatever. Or maybe just a tenth of a penny. Whatever number makes sense.
There was another explanation, something that some people believed in.
The idea was that the net worked because of shared protocols. You didn't have a cop enforcing thing in the center -- people followed the protocols because it was in their own interests to do so. If you didn't follow the protocols, then you'd be unable to communicate.
Protocols that allowed people to cheat were bad protocols. I used to hang around on the cypherpunks list, and that's where I picked up this world view. But the idea is that a good protocol will prevent people from cheating, usually cryptographically.
The idea was that if you were a solid net citizen, and pushed for strong, well designed protocols, and if you were responsible (ie., you applied your patches), then you would be safe.
Cypherpunks had actually extended their experiences on the net to a form of libertarian politics. They thought that by applying these ideas, the state could -- would inevitably -- shrink, and that people would become less dependent on central authorities enforcing rules.
DoS attacks tend to argue against that point of view, I think, as does the power of inertia that old protocols like SMTP have.
But on the other hand, you have to admit that the net is remarkably usable, remarkably complicated, and remarkably free of central administration.
I would be pretty surprised if the powers that be didn't break it over the next decade or so.
That's a great story... I don't use IM or chat very often, so I haven't thought much about them. So a lot of what was said was fairly relevatory for me.
The thing that interests me is the way that Ford talked about differences in accessibility (can people you don't know communicate with you?), and verifiability (do I know who you are?) in various systems, and how one system (say chat) might be used to allow rough and tumble anonymous communications with strangers, while another (IMing) might be limited to friends on a whitelist.
Another characteristic that's particularly important to me is real time vs. instant response. I *hate* systems that interrupt me in real time, which is why I use email instead of IMs. I've pretty much stopped answering my phone, too, because I can, and now I depend on my machine to queue up calls, so I can deal with them when it makes sense to do so.
The question that all of this raises, for me, is whether or not it's practical to have a comprehensive messaging service that will allow people to tweak all of these different parameters in combinations that they like. Is there any need for email and IMs to be distinct?
Maybe we need a messaging "account" to be open, and another to be whitelisted, or one to be real time, and another to be queued -- but can't they be the same general sort of accounts, configured differently?
(I'm not talking about trying to twist email itself into this shape... but about a new system that would cover much of the same ground.)
I never saw a PDP-1, but Heathkit used to sell PDP-11 clones, and the PDP-11 was one of the stars of Ted Nelson's book "Computer Lib."
I learned how to program on a PDP-10, which was sometimes called a DecSystems 10. I started in basic, and then jumped to algol.
From the old days a Kim-1 (? I think that's the name) single board computer taught a lot of people how to program in machine code, and I still remember flipping toggle switches on an IMSAI.
The IMSAI was kind of cool -- we had one in school. You'd turn the thing on, and enter a short program through the toggle switches. That program would load a BASIC interpreter through the casette drive.
I can see why these things aren't on the list, though -- they were hobbyist computers, which is different from home computers. They didn't do much that was useful -- mostly, they were for people who liked computers as computers, not to do real work.
Maybe this isn't part of a master plan -- maybe it's more random.
I could see a guy inside of AT&T working on something, and having to justify his time to his bosses. The lawyers who filed the patent probably work directly for AT&T, and so they gave it to them, and asked if it could be patented. The patent lawyers filed it, because they're patent lawyers, and that's what they do.
I tend to assume that this situation would fit right into a dilbert storyline. I don't think it's part of a grand strategy.
I can't imagine that AT&T would sell spam technology, because it would be a public relations nightmare. And I can't imagine that they'd try to sue spammers for patent infringment, because that would be expensive, and they wouldn't get anything out of it.
Many vendors have ignored security problems in the past. One result of that is that security activists have wrestled with the idea of whether or not it's ethical to publish exploits. If you publish the exploit, people will get hacked. But it usually forces the vendor to take responsibility.
Right now, these election commissioners are taking the same ostrich approach to security. They refuse to deal with a real problem, and they attack people who point out that the problem exists.
Would it be ethical to publish voting machine exploits? What if the machines haven't been deployed yet? Would it be ethical to publish exploits in order to prevent people from rolling out a flawed system?
The California recall election was almost derailed over problems with the butterfly ballot. These problems are a lot more serious.
Anyone who has been paying attention knows that we're enterting a period in which elections are being litigated as well as campaigned. These bad systems are going to open up all sorts of doors for claims. Most of them will probably be crazy, but all of which will have to be considered.
Worst of all, if bad systems aren't auditable, there won't be any way to tell if something happened.
What happens when someone goes to court with a plausible exploit, but no direct evidence that it occured, and a poll that suggests the election should have come out differently than it did? Do we really believe that some jury or judge won't overturn an election based on that kind of argument?
This technology represents thousands of disasters just waiting to happen.
If I would see a car lot called "Honest Al's Used Cars", I'd hold on to my wallet. Honest people don't usually point out their own honesty.
And when bunch of big companies try to figure out easy and effective ways to share information about me, and call it "the liberty alliance", I doubt that liberty is uppermost in their minds.
As everyone has pointed out, no one wants this stuff, and we'd all be better off if it just went away.
I don't understand why this seems to happen every time.
Why can't they use something like RSA to encrypt the photos so that only the Ritz people can read them?
Do these people shy away from proven algorithms because they don't have the processor power, because they don't want to pay licensing fees, etc? Do they use proven algorithms and implement them badly? Or do they just figure that they can make up something on their own, and that it will stand up to attack?
There's not really a good way for MS to kill open source. With commercial competitors, they can "cut off their air supply" (a favorite phrase of theirs). But anyone can pick up opens ource code and carry it forward. It's out there, and it's never going to go away.
I've been using linux for 11 or 12 years. The first distro I installed was called MCC. After that I used SLS. Then I went to Slackware. After that, I started to run RedHat. Then I switched to Debian and Linux From Scratch. Now I'm playing with Fedora.
When someone drops the ball (and everyone does, eventually), you can just switch over to someone else. SLS used to be the #1 distro -- it was the one that was used in the canonical "how to install linux" document. But they just stopped updating it. Maybe they got tired of doing it, I don't know. But they dropped the ball, and Slackware stepped in and picked up the slack, so to speak.
If Linux had been a commercial product, produced by SLS under the traditional model, it would have died then and there. But instead it came back, bigger and better than before.
Microsoft surives mistakes because they have a big pile of money and a fair amount of customer lock-in. They could keep coming after WordPerfect or 1-2-3, because they had the money to outspend those guys, even though MS's products were #2. Eventually, the other guys would screw up (WordPerfect's famous familure to make a decent windows port, for example), and MS would swoop in.
MS is used to competing with people who will roll over if or when they run out of money, or who will vanish if they make a mistake. Linux isn't like that. A given Linux company might do that, but Linux itself won't.
That's the rub for MS. They can't kill Linux, not ever, legislative and FUD driven fantasies aside. Instead, they will have to be able to justify the billions of dollars they pull out of the global economy in terms of they value they provide for their customers. And they can't slip up, because this time they have a voracious competitor who will never go away waiting in the wings.
Actually, I went to microsoft meetings and heard them talk about this stuff. I used to go to these things where they'd give you a free copy of back office if you sat through 8 hours of presentations. I'd still go, but I moved and am not on the list any more. (If any microserfs are reading this, sign me up.:) )
People in the crowd would press speakers on uptime problems with exchange server, with IIS, etc. I remember watching a guy get grilled because people said that backoffice required you to run everything on the same machine (an artificial license requirement, not a technical one), and exchange server would die if other stuff was running on the box at the same time.
I have to admit, though, that I was speaking imprecisely when I said "linux". It would have been more accurate, and more consistent with the original article, to say "open source".
I think that projects like apache and samba put a lot of pressure on them. And they talked about it.
It's just embarassing when your $800 server product can't serve files, running a proprietary protocol that you designed and control, as well as a free project (samba). But when NT used to crash all the time, that was the situation. If you want to know why Novell lingered on for so long, it was because people didn't trust NT to serve files reliably.
Playstation is putting another kind of pressure on them, and they talk about that too. They want to sell more licenses, and they see set top boxes and video game consoles as a rich market. But they don't talk much about reliability in that context.
I actually give MS a lot of credit for stepping up to the plate on the reliability issue. I love 2000/XP, and I'm not ashamed to say it here. A lot of monopolists wouldn't have bothered.
I like what Cringley said, but I don't think he goes far enough. The argument becomes more lopsided in linux's favor when you take into account the ways that linux has changed microsoft's products.
When I started to use linux, people who worked with windows pretty much accepted that you'd have to reboot several times a day. This wasn't just because of the need to preserve backward compatitibility with DOS. Even NT 4 was pretty buggy before sp4 or so.
I remember telling people that sun servers often stayed up for years without reboots -- no one believed it. Computers crashed, that's what computers do. Microsoft, and to a lesser extent apple, convinced most casual users that's the way computers worked.
But obviously, this wasn't something that was caused by an immature level of technological development, because other companies, like sun, were shipping machines that didn't crash all the time.
I believe that linux is responsible for a huge percentage of the core improvements that MS made to windows. They never felt it was a problem to ship OSs that crashed until they saw an alternative that didn't crash, on the edge of their radar screen. An alternative that people could install on their existing PCs, an alternative that people running ISPs could use to do server work.
Linux's quality, for the most part, doesn't come out of competition. There are efforts to make linux better at doing certain specific things, efforts that are driven by benchmarks. Most of the time, these little competitions seem to be waged with FreeBSD. But it's a historical fact that people wanted to make linux more reliable way before windows had any stability at all.
Microsoft *needs* linux to push it. If linux wasn't out there, does anyone think they'd be trying to tighten up security? Does anyone think that they would have delivered stable versions of windows without the pressure of competition.
My point is that even if you don't use linux, you benefit from it in a big way. In fact, I would say that most of the real benefit that linux brings to the world comes in the form of competitive pressure on microsoft, and those benefits are seen by windows users, not by linux users. Who knows how much they'd be charging, what the net would look like, how often windows would crash, etc., if it weren't for linux.
It's hard to get this across, but every discussion of open source vs. commercial development ignores the effect that open source exerts on commercial developers. The discussions are simplistic for that reason.
If you were going to compare open source development vs. monopolistic commercial development in a realistic way, you'd have to talk about what a horrible job commercial developers did before open source developers started to hold their feet to the fire.
My father had a Lexmark printer, and it ran out of ink. When I looked at the cost of new cartridges, I realized that it would be cheaper to buy a Canon printer than new Lexmark cartridges.
The entire Canon printer, with cartridges, was less than replacement cartridges for the Lexmark. So we bought a new Canon printer instead.
The market has a solution for this. Buy Canon printers instead of Lexmarks. Canon lets you refill their cartridges, and they let other people sell compatible cartridges. Consequently, even genuine Canon cartridges are cheap.
Everyone always says that the printers are sold at a subsidized price so the company can get the money back on cartridges, but my Canon i320 only cost me $40 at MicroCenter. I can buy black replacement cartridges for $6.50 at Wal-Mart. That's cool because Wal-Mart is open 24/7 - if I run out of ink at 2am, I can buy more, and buy it for a very reasonable price.
Lexmark's behavior would be a serious problem if we didn't have any options. But we do, and instead of trying to litigate them into submission, it probably makes more sense to encourage people to check out the prices of cartridges and to examine the policies on cartridges from various manufacturers, and to buy from the good guys (i.e., from Canon).
I'm always amazed that magazines don't talk about cartridge costs in their printer reviews, but I think that if everyone just got in the habit of including operating costs in any discussion of printers, the problem would go away on its own. For me personally, operating costs are more significant than print speed or even print quality. It's a huge aspect of printing that many reviews ignore completely. And stores have a vested interest in pushing the machines that are expensive to refill - they get a taste of that money as well.
My i320 was very cheap, although it's not super fast, the output does look very good. So I didn't have to trade off quality. The speed, I think, was sacrificed for the $40 printer cost and not for the low cartridge cost. I'm sure if I had spent more, I would have gotten a faster Canon that would allow me to use cheap ink.
The market really does tend to solve many of these problems. I'm not sure that litigation is necessary. Just remember, when you go to buy a printer, that Lexmark went to court for the ability to screw you on refill prices. Don't be a sucker, buy from somone else.
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I'm not a doctor, but it sounds to me that the treatments they're proposing would prevent the plaques from building up in the first place -- I'm not sure that they'd remove it once it was in place.
They're only selling a third of the company.
The current owners will have absolute control, and won't have to follow the whims of anyone else.
I doubt you're going to find what you're looking for. You'd need a proxy that would parse the HTML and strip out offending javascript. That sounds like it would be pretty tough, and that it would eat a lot of cycles on your end.
Another problem is that you need to keep some popups -- ones that are generated by clicks -- and toss out others, the ones that show up automatically.
I don't know how browsers solve the problem, but I'd be interested to know.
If I were going to try to implement it, I'd probably set things up so that a click event turns off pop up blocking for a short window of time, although that's probably kludgier than what the browsers actually do.
If it is what they're doing, though, it wouldn't be something you could implement in a proxy server.
I have a paid for version of office on my home windows computer. I like it.
But I see a lot of people in this situation. They go to wal-mart, and they buy a HP machine for $500. They're not comptuer people, they just want to go online, hit the web, send email, and type up some stuff from time to time.
Because they buy at wal-mart, they don't get a crack at the $234 OEM price on office professional. Something comes up, and they decide that they'd like to have office -- someone sends them a powerpoint file, or whatever. And they find out that office is $450. They're just not going to spend that.
In the old days, they would just bring the office cds home from work. I'm not saying it's a good thing, but it is what happened. But now they can't.
My point was that if people start running open office at home, there's going to be a userbase of people who run it. If a pointy headed boss runs open office at home, and says, "this is good enough," maybe he'll figure it's good enough for the people he manages.
I wonder how many people have scripted ms-office, or use it as part of a larger custom application. But you're right, that's the sort of situation, like the ones I mentioned (people using outlook for groupware, etc.) that will keep people in the ms-office camp.
I'm not saying that there won't be a huge market for ms-office. I run it myself, and I have scripted it myself. I like it. I just don't think it will remain as a monopoly. Almost everyone has to use it if it's going to remain as a monopoly.
You're right, it was a stupid mistake on my part. I don't think it affects my office argument, though.
I think we're on the brink of the collapse of Microsoft's office suite monopoly. There's a lot less lock-in with office than there is with windows, so it's much easier for people to switch to open office.
Microsoft's pricing and online activation system has already pretty much removed office from consumer pc's. People who used to take cds home from work are doing without, and it's only a matter of time until the word about open office gets out. I'm not claiming that open office is as good as microsoft office, but it's good enough, I think.
I think that microsoft is making one of the biggest mistakes in its history in the way it prices office. The strategy seems to be aimed, as near as I can tell, at keeping corporate revenues high while allowing MS to cut prices for low end consumer machines.
A corporate workstation with xp pro and office pro pays microsoft almost 3x what a consumer user with xp home and works pays. I don't think that reflects costs or utility to the customer.
The most useful part of what people pay microsoft for comes from xp home -- it gives you the ability to run the huge library of windows software, access to the huge array of hardware device drivers, and core networking tools. What you get, for the buck, from jumping to xp pro or adding office on to the back, provides a lot less utility for each dollar spent.
If you decide that the corporate market can bear substantially higher prices than the consumer market, and if you notice that the main differences between a corporate user and a home user is office, then loading up the costs on the office side makes sense. I think that's what they're doing, and I think it's a fundamentally unstable pricing scheme.
So I predict that we're going to see corporate workstation users going with xp home and open office. A lot of computers that have been sold with $375 worth of microsoft software on them will now be sold with $94 worth of microsoft software on them.
MS-Office still makes sense for a lot of people. If you run exchange server, and want to use outlook as a groupware client, it makes sense. Excel users who earn a lot are going to get the spreadsheet they know and want, no one's going to tell a $150k/year guy to learn a new spreadsheet. But those types of users don't add up to a monopoly.
If the office monopoly begins to crack, it will be a really big deal. It will be a decline in a core microsoft business, and will suggest that perhaps the best days are behind them. And it will be the result of an open source project.
Windows to linux is a very wrenching change, in a million little ways. But MS-Office to Open Office is a lot more doable.
I think that's where MS's empire will first start to crack.
Take a look at Zyxel.
It's a NAT device, not a real firewall, but it's in the same category as the products you've mentioned, and it's more secure.
I haven't used it, and can't vouch for it. But it's gotten some good press.
As I understand it, if you can sniff enough packets that use the same key, you can crack the crypto. This thing uses a better (and standard) protocol that keeps changing the keys, so no one can sniff enough packets to recover the key.
I'm not sure I understand why they've kept the weak algorithm and shored it up by changing keys. My guess is that the cyrpto is built into a lot of wireless card hardware, and you can still use the built in hardware by rotating keys. A new algorithm would offload all of the crypto to the processor. That's just a guess, though.
In any event, I think this is believed to be secure now. I think that recent patches to XP support the new protocol with most wireless net adapters -- if you run XP, you don't have to worry about vendor support on the client side.
You're exactly right -- I hadn't thought of that.
This is an interesting idea -- I don't know how it works in a world where some people are running 133 Mhz computers and others are up at 3Ghz. But it's interesting.
I think that any postage scheme should be hybridized with a white list to avoid imposing burdens on people you want to talk to. The postage (economic or computational) should only apply to people who you don't know.
In other words, if I know you, you should be able to email me for free, but if I don't know you, it should cost something -- not much, but something.
With a hybrid system, most of the problems I would have with having to pay some small amount of real money evaporate.
People could pick charities -- if you want to email me and I don't know you, you have to give a nickel to the salvation army, or whatever. Or maybe just a tenth of a penny. Whatever number makes sense.
There was another explanation, something that some people believed in.
The idea was that the net worked because of shared protocols. You didn't have a cop enforcing thing in the center -- people followed the protocols because it was in their own interests to do so. If you didn't follow the protocols, then you'd be unable to communicate.
Protocols that allowed people to cheat were bad protocols. I used to hang around on the cypherpunks list, and that's where I picked up this world view. But the idea is that a good protocol will prevent people from cheating, usually cryptographically.
The idea was that if you were a solid net citizen, and pushed for strong, well designed protocols, and if you were responsible (ie., you applied your patches), then you would be safe.
Cypherpunks had actually extended their experiences on the net to a form of libertarian politics. They thought that by applying these ideas, the state could -- would inevitably -- shrink, and that people would become less dependent on central authorities enforcing rules.
DoS attacks tend to argue against that point of view, I think, as does the power of inertia that old protocols like SMTP have.
But on the other hand, you have to admit that the net is remarkably usable, remarkably complicated, and remarkably free of central administration.
I would be pretty surprised if the powers that be didn't break it over the next decade or so.
Yeah, that's pretty much what happens. It's a bitch, but they started it.
I almost never call people -- I use email. People who know me, usually get in touch with me via email.
If someone wants to call me, they can deal with my machine.
That's a great story... I don't use IM or chat very often, so I haven't thought much about them. So a lot of what was said was fairly relevatory for me.
The thing that interests me is the way that Ford talked about differences in accessibility (can people you don't know communicate with you?), and verifiability (do I know who you are?) in various systems, and how one system (say chat) might be used to allow rough and tumble anonymous communications with strangers, while another (IMing) might be limited to friends on a whitelist.
Another characteristic that's particularly important to me is real time vs. instant response. I *hate* systems that interrupt me in real time, which is why I use email instead of IMs. I've pretty much stopped answering my phone, too, because I can, and now I depend on my machine to queue up calls, so I can deal with them when it makes sense to do so.
The question that all of this raises, for me, is whether or not it's practical to have a comprehensive messaging service that will allow people to tweak all of these different parameters in combinations that they like. Is there any need for email and IMs to be distinct?
Maybe we need a messaging "account" to be open, and another to be whitelisted, or one to be real time, and another to be queued -- but can't they be the same general sort of accounts, configured differently?
(I'm not talking about trying to twist email itself into this shape... but about a new system that would cover much of the same ground.)
I never saw a PDP-1, but Heathkit used to sell PDP-11 clones, and the PDP-11 was one of the stars of Ted Nelson's book "Computer Lib."
I learned how to program on a PDP-10, which was sometimes called a DecSystems 10. I started in basic, and then jumped to algol.
From the old days a Kim-1 (? I think that's the name) single board computer taught a lot of people how to program in machine code, and I still remember flipping toggle switches on an IMSAI.
The IMSAI was kind of cool -- we had one in school. You'd turn the thing on, and enter a short program through the toggle switches. That program would load a BASIC interpreter through the casette drive.
I can see why these things aren't on the list, though -- they were hobbyist computers, which is different from home computers. They didn't do much that was useful -- mostly, they were for people who liked computers as computers, not to do real work.
Maybe this isn't part of a master plan -- maybe it's more random.
I could see a guy inside of AT&T working on something, and having to justify his time to his bosses. The lawyers who filed the patent probably work directly for AT&T, and so they gave it to them, and asked if it could be patented. The patent lawyers filed it, because they're patent lawyers, and that's what they do.
I tend to assume that this situation would fit right into a dilbert storyline. I don't think it's part of a grand strategy.
I can't imagine that AT&T would sell spam technology, because it would be a public relations nightmare. And I can't imagine that they'd try to sue spammers for patent infringment, because that would be expensive, and they wouldn't get anything out of it.
Many vendors have ignored security problems in the past. One result of that is that security activists have wrestled with the idea of whether or not it's ethical to publish exploits. If you publish the exploit, people will get hacked. But it usually forces the vendor to take responsibility.
Right now, these election commissioners are taking the same ostrich approach to security. They refuse to deal with a real problem, and they attack people who point out that the problem exists.
Would it be ethical to publish voting machine exploits? What if the machines haven't been deployed yet? Would it be ethical to publish exploits in order to prevent people from rolling out a flawed system?
The California recall election was almost derailed over problems with the butterfly ballot. These problems are a lot more serious.
Anyone who has been paying attention knows that we're enterting a period in which elections are being litigated as well as campaigned. These bad systems are going to open up all sorts of doors for claims. Most of them will probably be crazy, but all of which will have to be considered.
Worst of all, if bad systems aren't auditable, there won't be any way to tell if something happened.
What happens when someone goes to court with a plausible exploit, but no direct evidence that it occured, and a poll that suggests the election should have come out differently than it did? Do we really believe that some jury or judge won't overturn an election based on that kind of argument?
This technology represents thousands of disasters just waiting to happen.
If I would see a car lot called "Honest Al's Used Cars", I'd hold on to my wallet. Honest people don't usually point out their own honesty.
And when bunch of big companies try to figure out easy and effective ways to share information about me, and call it "the liberty alliance", I doubt that liberty is uppermost in their minds.
As everyone has pointed out, no one wants this stuff, and we'd all be better off if it just went away.
I don't understand why this seems to happen every time.
Why can't they use something like RSA to encrypt the photos so that only the Ritz people can read them?
Do these people shy away from proven algorithms because they don't have the processor power, because they don't want to pay licensing fees, etc? Do they use proven algorithms and implement them badly? Or do they just figure that they can make up something on their own, and that it will stand up to attack?
There's not really a good way for MS to kill open source. With commercial competitors, they can "cut off their air supply" (a favorite phrase of theirs). But anyone can pick up opens ource code and carry it forward. It's out there, and it's never going to go away.
I've been using linux for 11 or 12 years. The first distro I installed was called MCC. After that I used SLS. Then I went to Slackware. After that, I started to run RedHat. Then I switched to Debian and Linux From Scratch. Now I'm playing with Fedora.
When someone drops the ball (and everyone does, eventually), you can just switch over to someone else. SLS used to be the #1 distro -- it was the one that was used in the canonical "how to install linux" document. But they just stopped updating it. Maybe they got tired of doing it, I don't know. But they dropped the ball, and Slackware stepped in and picked up the slack, so to speak.
If Linux had been a commercial product, produced by SLS under the traditional model, it would have died then and there. But instead it came back, bigger and better than before.
Microsoft surives mistakes because they have a big pile of money and a fair amount of customer lock-in. They could keep coming after WordPerfect or 1-2-3, because they had the money to outspend those guys, even though MS's products were #2. Eventually, the other guys would screw up (WordPerfect's famous familure to make a decent windows port, for example), and MS would swoop in.
MS is used to competing with people who will roll over if or when they run out of money, or who will vanish if they make a mistake. Linux isn't like that. A given Linux company might do that, but Linux itself won't.
That's the rub for MS. They can't kill Linux, not ever, legislative and FUD driven fantasies aside. Instead, they will have to be able to justify the billions of dollars they pull out of the global economy in terms of they value they provide for their customers. And they can't slip up, because this time they have a voracious competitor who will never go away waiting in the wings.
Actually, I went to microsoft meetings and heard them talk about this stuff. I used to go to these things where they'd give you a free copy of back office if you sat through 8 hours of presentations. I'd still go, but I moved and am not on the list any more. (If any microserfs are reading this, sign me up. :) )
People in the crowd would press speakers on uptime problems with exchange server, with IIS, etc. I remember watching a guy get grilled because people said that backoffice required you to run everything on the same machine (an artificial license requirement, not a technical one), and exchange server would die if other stuff was running on the box at the same time.
I have to admit, though, that I was speaking imprecisely when I said "linux". It would have been more accurate, and more consistent with the original article, to say "open source".
I think that projects like apache and samba put a lot of pressure on them. And they talked about it.
It's just embarassing when your $800 server product can't serve files, running a proprietary protocol that you designed and control, as well as a free project (samba). But when NT used to crash all the time, that was the situation. If you want to know why Novell lingered on for so long, it was because people didn't trust NT to serve files reliably.
Playstation is putting another kind of pressure on them, and they talk about that too. They want to sell more licenses, and they see set top boxes and video game consoles as a rich market. But they don't talk much about reliability in that context.
I actually give MS a lot of credit for stepping up to the plate on the reliability issue. I love 2000/XP, and I'm not ashamed to say it here. A lot of monopolists wouldn't have bothered.
I agree with you -- I think it's a fair point.
I would point out, though, that some of the pressure on Linux came from Apple, it wasn't all from MS.
Then why was NT unstable all the way through NT 4 sp 3?
I like what Cringley said, but I don't think he goes far enough. The argument becomes more lopsided in linux's favor when you take into account the ways that linux has changed microsoft's products.
When I started to use linux, people who worked with windows pretty much accepted that you'd have to reboot several times a day. This wasn't just because of the need to preserve backward compatitibility with DOS. Even NT 4 was pretty buggy before sp4 or so.
I remember telling people that sun servers often stayed up for years without reboots -- no one believed it. Computers crashed, that's what computers do. Microsoft, and to a lesser extent apple, convinced most casual users that's the way computers worked.
But obviously, this wasn't something that was caused by an immature level of technological development, because other companies, like sun, were shipping machines that didn't crash all the time.
I believe that linux is responsible for a huge percentage of the core improvements that MS made to windows. They never felt it was a problem to ship OSs that crashed until they saw an alternative that didn't crash, on the edge of their radar screen. An alternative that people could install on their existing PCs, an alternative that people running ISPs could use to do server work.
Linux's quality, for the most part, doesn't come out of competition. There are efforts to make linux better at doing certain specific things, efforts that are driven by benchmarks. Most of the time, these little competitions seem to be waged with FreeBSD. But it's a historical fact that people wanted to make linux more reliable way before windows had any stability at all.
Microsoft *needs* linux to push it. If linux wasn't out there, does anyone think they'd be trying to tighten up security? Does anyone think that they would have delivered stable versions of windows without the pressure of competition.
My point is that even if you don't use linux, you benefit from it in a big way. In fact, I would say that most of the real benefit that linux brings to the world comes in the form of competitive pressure on microsoft, and those benefits are seen by windows users, not by linux users. Who knows how much they'd be charging, what the net would look like, how often windows would crash, etc., if it weren't for linux.
It's hard to get this across, but every discussion of open source vs. commercial development ignores the effect that open source exerts on commercial developers. The discussions are simplistic for that reason.
If you were going to compare open source development vs. monopolistic commercial development in a realistic way, you'd have to talk about what a horrible job commercial developers did before open source developers started to hold their feet to the fire.
My father had a Lexmark printer, and it ran out of ink. When I looked at the cost of new cartridges, I realized that it would be cheaper to buy a Canon printer than new Lexmark cartridges.
The entire Canon printer, with cartridges, was less than replacement cartridges for the Lexmark. So we bought a new Canon printer instead.
The market has a solution for this. Buy Canon printers instead of Lexmarks. Canon lets you refill their cartridges, and they let other people sell compatible cartridges. Consequently, even genuine Canon cartridges are cheap.
Everyone always says that the printers are sold at a subsidized price so the company can get the money back on cartridges, but my Canon i320 only cost me $40 at MicroCenter. I can buy black replacement cartridges for $6.50 at Wal-Mart. That's cool because Wal-Mart is open 24/7 - if I run out of ink at 2am, I can buy more, and buy it for a very reasonable price.
Lexmark's behavior would be a serious problem if we didn't have any options. But we do, and instead of trying to litigate them into submission, it probably makes more sense to encourage people to check out the prices of cartridges and to examine the policies on cartridges from various manufacturers, and to buy from the good guys (i.e., from Canon).
I'm always amazed that magazines don't talk about cartridge costs in their printer reviews, but I think that if everyone just got in the habit of including operating costs in any discussion of printers, the problem would go away on its own. For me personally, operating costs are more significant than print speed or even print quality. It's a huge aspect of printing that many reviews ignore completely. And stores have a vested interest in pushing the machines that are expensive to refill - they get a taste of that money as well.
My i320 was very cheap, although it's not super fast, the output does look very good. So I didn't have to trade off quality. The speed, I think, was sacrificed for the $40 printer cost and not for the low cartridge cost. I'm sure if I had spent more, I would have gotten a faster Canon that would allow me to use cheap ink.
The market really does tend to solve many of these problems. I'm not sure that litigation is necessary. Just remember, when you go to buy a printer, that Lexmark went to court for the ability to screw you on refill prices. Don't be a sucker, buy from somone else.