Reminds me of a joke I heard was going around NCR when AT&T was buying them up.
I heard someone posted a corporate logo for the new combined NCR/AT&T as a joke at NCR Headquarters. The logo was a combination of the AT&T Deathstar and the NCR logo (which nobody here probably recognizes). Under it was written the new name for the company:
Imagine if something like this had hit near Washington DC without warning. We'd probably assume that the terrorists had a big boomer. We might have responded...
Imagine if this hit in Pakistan or India? They might assume that it was the first salvo in a Regional nuclear war and responded in kind. Tens of Millions could be dead.
Imagine if this hit in Israel...
I could go on. Best that we know when and where it's going to hit, even if we don't have any defense yet.
Better still to build up some sort of defense. I wouldn't think that a 70 Meter long rock would be that difficult to deal with. If we have sufficient warning, we might be able to alter the course of objects like these so they crash harmlessly on the Moon or into the Sun.
Monitoring would be the first step. If we had a really good handle on the objects crossing our orbit, we could then develop some plans to handle the smaller ones, working up to more elaborate plans for the larger ones. For the really big ones, perhaps we could just nudge them a little every so often so as to either greatly decrease their chances of intersection with the Earth.
Over 90% of Internet access from work is almost certainly "dicking around", as you say. But, that other 10% can be a big time saver.
I just subscribed to Safari (safari.oreilly.com) on my own dime the other day. It's already saved me a lot of time in pouring through manuals (or worse, a trip to the bookstore to get the manual).
Then too, there's a lot of applications that I access on the web.
I am sick of all the stupid video "humor", though. Big waste of bandwidth. I wouldn't mind a bit if all that was blocked.
If a Fire Marshall had raised the issue it wouldn't be news. If there had been comments here, it would have been "those stuck-up German bureaucrats ruining all the fun..."
Also, the Fire Marshall wouldn't have been denying that they brought the complaint.
Perhaps there are aspects to this that need to be reviewed.
With military systems, it's common to sell systems of varying degree of capability to various entities so as to maintain various strategic aims.
For example, we might keep tier 1 functionality for ourselves, offer tier 2 to the say, the Israelis, and tier 3 to other Mideast countries.
If this practice of sharing systems with various capability levels extends to software systems... Well, if you ship someone a device with binaries burned into the ROMs, don't you also have to provide the source? Could they then examine the source and add back in capabilities you've disabled? Don't you have to provide the same source to all who might have the binaries?
However, I don't believe there's anything magic about a signature. Verbal contracts are often enforceable, so why not email?
It doesn't appear that either side are disputing that these emails are not authentic. Seems like it would have at least the same force as a verbal contract.
This would all be subject to various local laws. I know that in Texas, only written contracts are enforceable for real property. Verbal contracts, even when witnessed, are not.
As I said, I am not a Lawyer and I'm not giving legal advice, just making observations.
Why is AOL cheered when they do what Microsoft supposedly did and is so incredibly hated for?
Uhhhhh... Because AOL isn't abusing a monopoly position to destroy potential competition? Next question.
With Microsoft I can say "stuff it!" and installed Debian with KDE. But here you will be forcefed AOLs vision of what they want,...
Oh yeah, that's right, you are required to use AOL and Gecko now... How silly of me. I thought you had any number of choices of ISPs and could still use IE or Opera if you wanted to.
But, that wouldn't be taking advantage of the "healthy eco-system of free and proprietary code" that Bill likes to tout so much.
Funny, MS is a big black hole, sucking in all the advantages of any Open Source they can find for their products, and, AFAIK, never producing any Open Source for the community and yet they have the nerve to whine about the "pac-man nature" of the GPL.
Having worked in the computer industry for over 20 years, I can tell you one thing that I think you don't understand.
Success has way more to do with attitude and perspective than it does with knowledge and ability. Sure, knowledge and ability are important, but without the proper success attitude, you're sunk.
People who want to make millions hoarding some little area of expertise lack the attitude for success. There may be some exceptions, but as a general rule, it's true.
If I was your management, I think I would be able to detect that you are all about keeping others down so you could succeed. I'd get make sure you were out or that you stayed on the lowest rung, because your attitude is poison to the success of the organization.
In the first paragraph above, I said I'd tell you something you don't understand. I doubt that you'll understand it still. At best, I think you'll try to devise strategies to make sure others don't detect your negative qualities. I do think what I've said might be valuable to some other people, however.
Without doing any real research, I couldn't say what the TCO issues really are. It's been my observation that sendmail is cheaper to maintain that Exchange, Apache cheaper than IIS, etc., but I don't really know, and I doubt that you do either.
I just notice that they're always doing maintenance on the Exchange server, but I rarely hear about problems with the sendmail gateways here. Same goes for Apache vs. IIS.
But, this is somewhat a distraction from Bruce's point. Actually, Bruce Perens in the article actually tries to avoid the economic issues and instead focuses on the control issue.
It was Bruce's thesis that the control issues, through people benefitting from competition in those to support and extend the products they use, will lead to lower prices.
I agree that the TCO issues are complex. In fact, they are too complex to really address naively. For example,
Is in-house development with VB cheaper to get the same results as Java on Linux?
Please tell me... How do you get the "same results" with VB/MS as Java on Linux when the Java solution can be deployed across platforms, giving you potentially huge advantages in deployment flexibility?
If, for example, you were able to deploy to near-zero administration Terminals based on Java/Linux and you needed to deploy tens of thousands of seats, who wins then?
Sure,.net may do similar things someday, but what if MS starts ratcheting up the licensing fees? Any guarantees against it? With Open Source you always have the option of competing support groups or self-maintenance if a product requires extension or maintenance. This is dicey with Closed Source products where you are often forced to upgrade or have to live with the problems if the vendor has decided to take the product in another direction.
You see, static analysis of what TCO is today is a secondary concern to the control you gain with using Open Source. I think that would be what Bruce might say, at least.
There are absolutely NO advantages to ANYBODY of GPL'd software over BSD license.
Except the poor consumer of software, who has seen, time and time again, BSD software expropriated by commercial vendors who then create their own incompatible lock-in extensions (MS with their TCP/IP implementation, SunOS => Solaris, Ultrix, BSDi, all commercial Unices with their BSD-derived tools, etc. etc. etc. etc.).
The hope of some is that GPL will break this proprietary lockin cycle and bring about a software economy where good common tools are widely available and the money is made from support and specific extensions to meet specific needs. The consumer wins by getting off the upgrady-goround.
Yeah. It's pretty silly to say "sure, they can get my data stream, but they'll never be able to tell if it's inverted or not".
Does anyone seriously think that anyone sophisticated enough to do this couldn't run an inversion on it? Even with run-length encoding and other schemes that you might have to account for, it doesn't seem like any of this is a seriously difficult decryption challenge.
This show should be on the Scifi channel. Not Showtime.
I disagree. If it's really good, maybe it'll bring in a wider Scifi audience. Looking at it another way, there may not be any room for another competing Scifi channel, but it's also unhealthy putting all the Science Fiction on one channel. The Scifi channel might take it's target audience for granted if they don't have more competition.
True, UPN and others put on Scifi, but the more Scifi the better, I think.
Now, if it's just the case that you won't be buying Showtime for this one program, that's understandable, but complaining because their putting Scifi on a general movie channel? That doesn't seem reasonable.
Last summer I was in Chicago, staying with a relative, and I saw first-hand some of these shenannigans between AT&T and Earthlink.
I'm thinking about getting Earthlink Cable instead of Road Runner. This is a similar situation where TW/AOL is required to give access to their cable to third party suppliers.
Any horror stories about TW screwing with Earthlink or their customers? Will this bill affect this relationship? (I know, I know, I should read the bill and get involved...)
Sounds like they need more experienced technology talent working for them... hopefully someone who speaks Arabic.
JonKatz, why not talk to your friend Junis in Afghanistan? I'll bet that the Iranian National Television broadcasters could really use him and his 'leet C64 skills in setting up receivers and monitoring stations around the middle east.
I know you meant this as a joke, but they don't speak Arabic in Iran or Afghanistan.
Think of what the CD industry was before Columbia House (and scamming their ass hard) It sucked, virtually nobody had cds - why? well, because the ability to play awesome quality music / not have to ff, etc, etc wasn't worth the cost...
Huh? I don't know what you are talking about here and I suspect that you don't either.
In the early/mid 80s, when CDs took off, they were the most quickly and widely adopted media of all time. In 1984, I was a young 20 something guy and I got a home CD player for something like $250. I also got a good tape deck and recorded my CDs for portability to a good Sony Walkman that cost >$125. I wasn't extravagent in my music habits and I wasn't unusual among my peers. Most 20 somethings and older who had jobs in those days I knew had CD players at home. Most College kids had CD players in their dorms by the late 80s, IIRC.
I remember well it was just about 1983-84 that albums, ALL mass market albums, still came out on vinyl first and then the CD would follow for popular titles in 2-4 weeks. I recall buying the vinyl for an album I just had to have and then getting the CD after awhile when the record started sounding trashed. Then sometime around late 1984/1985, you'd see the CDs at the same time or even before vinyl was available.
The record stores changed over to carrying as many CDs as vinyl or casette tapes by 1986-1987. By the end of the 80's vinyl was marginalized. The record stores had mostly CDs, with a healthy selection of casettes.
I don't know that Columbia House had anything to do with this at all. In fact, they were trailing the curve, selling excess production of CDs a year or two after these same CDs had been in the stores.
Sure, CDs became ubiquitous in the 90s when home players plunged below $100 and portable players became more common, but the wide acceptance of CDs had nothing to do with Columbia House.
I agree with your points about DRM, etc. One of the big wins of CDs for me was the fact that I could make a fairly good tape to carry with me and still have the CD to listen to at home. I probably wouldn't have bought CDs had I not been able to make them portable. I was never into trading tapes, either. The few times that I did get a tape to listen to from someone, I would go out and buy the CD to have a clean copy. I recall distinctly listening to Paul Simon's Graceland, with permission from my office mate, on a boom box I had in my office in 1987 from a tape I'd made of the CD at home. My office mate loved it and went out and bought the CD. This was a win for the Record Industry. Sad that they can't learn from their own history.
The Home Recording Act was a boon to them, just as the VCR was a boon to the movie industry. Their greed could be their ruin. If they insist on DRM and copy protection schemes, they'll lose me as a customer for new music. Today, I listen to music a lot on computers at work. I'm not going to buy media that might require me to buy another copy in the future when I change players. Forget it, no way. I'll just buy used CDs and become an oldies freak before I buy any kind of media that makes it more difficult for me to use.
Ironically, I recall liking Microsoft software years ago because it never required dongles and I could always make backup copies. And, I never "shared" my copy with anyone. Microsoft, with their "Product Activation" seems to have forgotten this lesson.
Let the media off the leash and you could have any number of things killed, such as local advertising as rates fly up, independant production companies as the distribution means are controlled, PVR manufacturing as the legislation is bought and the public is left uninformed or misinformed, democracy as the public is left without alternative information sources, etc.
Something is horribly, terribly wrong and fundamentally broken when we're seriously and with good reason talking about the media as one of our most serious societal problems.
The most important function of Media in a free society is to hold a mirror up to us. If it's that ugly, and I have reason to believe that it is, we're in serious trouble.
In the end, the rich really do rule the world, because they can make the poor their unwitting slaves. Think about it.
I don't know about "the world", but in the United States, at least, where the top 10% of the income earners pay nearly 70% of all income taxes, you get a different perspective on who makes who "their unwitting slaves".
If you were to ask most Windows developers if it was a good thing, they would unanimously argue yes.
Most would unanimously argue yes... There's weasle words for 'ya. Why don't you just say "most would argue yes". Oh, I see, you don't get to throw in the word "unanimously" which implies no dissent.
Of coure, most Windows developers I've met would argue that MS is an ethical company and all this fuss is from a few companies who can't compete and Governments, state and local, that want to tap into MS' huge cash pile to help fund pork.
Don't agree? Well KDE did the same sort of bundling of their web browser component.
There's a HUGE difference. The KDE integration is modular and well documented so that it could be completely replaced by a competing web browser component. Could Netscape/Mozilla completely replace the IE integration in Windows? Not without MS doing the integration. Fat chance of that!
Slashdot Mirror
I heard someone posted a corporate logo for the new combined NCR/AT&T as a joke at NCR Headquarters. The logo was a combination of the AT&T Deathstar and the NCR logo (which nobody here probably recognizes). Under it was written the new name for the company:
CRAP - Cash Registers And Phones
Imagine if this hit in Pakistan or India? They might assume that it was the first salvo in a Regional nuclear war and responded in kind. Tens of Millions could be dead.
Imagine if this hit in Israel...
I could go on. Best that we know when and where it's going to hit, even if we don't have any defense yet.
Better still to build up some sort of defense. I wouldn't think that a 70 Meter long rock would be that difficult to deal with. If we have sufficient warning, we might be able to alter the course of objects like these so they crash harmlessly on the Moon or into the Sun.
Monitoring would be the first step. If we had a really good handle on the objects crossing our orbit, we could then develop some plans to handle the smaller ones, working up to more elaborate plans for the larger ones. For the really big ones, perhaps we could just nudge them a little every so often so as to either greatly decrease their chances of intersection with the Earth.
I just subscribed to Safari (safari.oreilly.com) on my own dime the other day. It's already saved me a lot of time in pouring through manuals (or worse, a trip to the bookstore to get the manual).
Then too, there's a lot of applications that I access on the web.
I am sick of all the stupid video "humor", though. Big waste of bandwidth. I wouldn't mind a bit if all that was blocked.
Also, the Fire Marshall wouldn't have been denying that they brought the complaint.
Face it, the MS guys were weasels.
With military systems, it's common to sell systems of varying degree of capability to various entities so as to maintain various strategic aims.
For example, we might keep tier 1 functionality for ourselves, offer tier 2 to the say, the Israelis, and tier 3 to other Mideast countries.
If this practice of sharing systems with various capability levels extends to software systems... Well, if you ship someone a device with binaries burned into the ROMs, don't you also have to provide the source? Could they then examine the source and add back in capabilities you've disabled? Don't you have to provide the same source to all who might have the binaries?
However, I don't believe there's anything magic about a signature. Verbal contracts are often enforceable, so why not email?
It doesn't appear that either side are disputing that these emails are not authentic. Seems like it would have at least the same force as a verbal contract.
This would all be subject to various local laws. I know that in Texas, only written contracts are enforceable for real property. Verbal contracts, even when witnessed, are not.
As I said, I am not a Lawyer and I'm not giving legal advice, just making observations.
Uhhhhh... Because AOL isn't abusing a monopoly position to destroy potential competition? Next question.
Oh yeah, that's right, you are required to use AOL and Gecko now... How silly of me. I thought you had any number of choices of ISPs and could still use IE or Opera if you wanted to.
But, that wouldn't be taking advantage of the "healthy eco-system of free and proprietary code" that Bill likes to tout so much.
Funny, MS is a big black hole, sucking in all the advantages of any Open Source they can find for their products, and, AFAIK, never producing any Open Source for the community and yet they have the nerve to whine about the "pac-man nature" of the GPL.
Success has way more to do with attitude and perspective than it does with knowledge and ability. Sure, knowledge and ability are important, but without the proper success attitude, you're sunk.
People who want to make millions hoarding some little area of expertise lack the attitude for success. There may be some exceptions, but as a general rule, it's true.
If I was your management, I think I would be able to detect that you are all about keeping others down so you could succeed. I'd get make sure you were out or that you stayed on the lowest rung, because your attitude is poison to the success of the organization.
In the first paragraph above, I said I'd tell you something you don't understand. I doubt that you'll understand it still. At best, I think you'll try to devise strategies to make sure others don't detect your negative qualities. I do think what I've said might be valuable to some other people, however.
Without doing any real research, I couldn't say what the TCO issues really are. It's been my observation that sendmail is cheaper to maintain that Exchange, Apache cheaper than IIS, etc., but I don't really know, and I doubt that you do either.
I just notice that they're always doing maintenance on the Exchange server, but I rarely hear about problems with the sendmail gateways here. Same goes for Apache vs. IIS.
But, this is somewhat a distraction from Bruce's point. Actually, Bruce Perens in the article actually tries to avoid the economic issues and instead focuses on the control issue.
It was Bruce's thesis that the control issues, through people benefitting from competition in those to support and extend the products they use, will lead to lower prices.
I agree that the TCO issues are complex. In fact, they are too complex to really address naively. For example,
Please tell me... How do you get the "same results" with VB/MS as Java on Linux when the Java solution can be deployed across platforms, giving you potentially huge advantages in deployment flexibility?
If, for example, you were able to deploy to near-zero administration Terminals based on Java/Linux and you needed to deploy tens of thousands of seats, who wins then?
Sure, .net may do similar things someday, but what if MS starts ratcheting up the licensing fees? Any guarantees against it? With Open Source you always have the option of competing support groups or self-maintenance if a product requires extension or maintenance. This is dicey with Closed Source products where you are often forced to upgrade or have to live with the problems if the vendor has decided to take the product in another direction.
You see, static analysis of what TCO is today is a secondary concern to the control you gain with using Open Source. I think that would be what Bruce might say, at least.
Except the poor consumer of software, who has seen, time and time again, BSD software expropriated by commercial vendors who then create their own incompatible lock-in extensions (MS with their TCP/IP implementation, SunOS => Solaris, Ultrix, BSDi, all commercial Unices with their BSD-derived tools, etc. etc. etc. etc.).
The hope of some is that GPL will break this proprietary lockin cycle and bring about a software economy where good common tools are widely available and the money is made from support and specific extensions to meet specific needs. The consumer wins by getting off the upgrady-goround.
Maybe it's just a pipe dream.
Does anyone seriously think that anyone sophisticated enough to do this couldn't run an inversion on it? Even with run-length encoding and other schemes that you might have to account for, it doesn't seem like any of this is a seriously difficult decryption challenge.
I disagree. If it's really good, maybe it'll bring in a wider Scifi audience. Looking at it another way, there may not be any room for another competing Scifi channel, but it's also unhealthy putting all the Science Fiction on one channel. The Scifi channel might take it's target audience for granted if they don't have more competition.
True, UPN and others put on Scifi, but the more Scifi the better, I think.
Now, if it's just the case that you won't be buying Showtime for this one program, that's understandable, but complaining because their putting Scifi on a general movie channel? That doesn't seem reasonable.
Of course, that's exactly what Jon Katz would say if he were trying to post an Ask Slashdot under a nom de plume, isn't it?
You'll have to do better than THAT, Jon.
I'm thinking about getting Earthlink Cable instead of Road Runner. This is a similar situation where TW/AOL is required to give access to their cable to third party suppliers.
Any horror stories about TW screwing with Earthlink or their customers? Will this bill affect this relationship? (I know, I know, I should read the bill and get involved...)
JonKatz, why not talk to your friend Junis in Afghanistan? I'll bet that the Iranian National Television broadcasters could really use him and his 'leet C64 skills in setting up receivers and monitoring stations around the middle east.
I know you meant this as a joke, but they don't speak Arabic in Iran or Afghanistan.
There are some exceptions.
Huh? I don't know what you are talking about here and I suspect that you don't either.
In the early/mid 80s, when CDs took off, they were the most quickly and widely adopted media of all time. In 1984, I was a young 20 something guy and I got a home CD player for something like $250. I also got a good tape deck and recorded my CDs for portability to a good Sony Walkman that cost >$125. I wasn't extravagent in my music habits and I wasn't unusual among my peers. Most 20 somethings and older who had jobs in those days I knew had CD players at home. Most College kids had CD players in their dorms by the late 80s, IIRC.
I remember well it was just about 1983-84 that albums, ALL mass market albums, still came out on vinyl first and then the CD would follow for popular titles in 2-4 weeks. I recall buying the vinyl for an album I just had to have and then getting the CD after awhile when the record started sounding trashed. Then sometime around late 1984/1985, you'd see the CDs at the same time or even before vinyl was available.
The record stores changed over to carrying as many CDs as vinyl or casette tapes by 1986-1987. By the end of the 80's vinyl was marginalized. The record stores had mostly CDs, with a healthy selection of casettes.
I don't know that Columbia House had anything to do with this at all. In fact, they were trailing the curve, selling excess production of CDs a year or two after these same CDs had been in the stores.
Sure, CDs became ubiquitous in the 90s when home players plunged below $100 and portable players became more common, but the wide acceptance of CDs had nothing to do with Columbia House.
I agree with your points about DRM, etc. One of the big wins of CDs for me was the fact that I could make a fairly good tape to carry with me and still have the CD to listen to at home. I probably wouldn't have bought CDs had I not been able to make them portable. I was never into trading tapes, either. The few times that I did get a tape to listen to from someone, I would go out and buy the CD to have a clean copy. I recall distinctly listening to Paul Simon's Graceland, with permission from my office mate, on a boom box I had in my office in 1987 from a tape I'd made of the CD at home. My office mate loved it and went out and bought the CD. This was a win for the Record Industry. Sad that they can't learn from their own history.
The Home Recording Act was a boon to them, just as the VCR was a boon to the movie industry. Their greed could be their ruin. If they insist on DRM and copy protection schemes, they'll lose me as a customer for new music. Today, I listen to music a lot on computers at work. I'm not going to buy media that might require me to buy another copy in the future when I change players. Forget it, no way. I'll just buy used CDs and become an oldies freak before I buy any kind of media that makes it more difficult for me to use.
Ironically, I recall liking Microsoft software years ago because it never required dongles and I could always make backup copies. And, I never "shared" my copy with anyone. Microsoft, with their "Product Activation" seems to have forgotten this lesson.
Is there an MBA with a concentration in Competition?
Do you have to be veteran of an Olympic team?
Is a qualification for the chief competitive officer that he/she be loud and has to interrupt a lot?
Doing a quick Google Search, I see that Palm has one of these. The Sun guy didn't turn up there. Must be a new thing.
Something is horribly, terribly wrong and fundamentally broken when we're seriously and with good reason talking about the media as one of our most serious societal problems.
The most important function of Media in a free society is to hold a mirror up to us. If it's that ugly, and I have reason to believe that it is, we're in serious trouble.
Can you imagine a Beowolf cluster of these Beowolf clus...
Oh, never mind.
I don't know about "the world", but in the United States, at least, where the top 10% of the income earners pay nearly 70% of all income taxes, you get a different perspective on who makes who "their unwitting slaves".
Huh? Walmart wants to decide who lives and dies because they don't sell birth control?
I guess we can really tell who represents Big Brother by who uses new speak.
Most would unanimously argue yes... There's weasle words for 'ya. Why don't you just say "most would argue yes". Oh, I see, you don't get to throw in the word "unanimously" which implies no dissent.
Of coure, most Windows developers I've met would argue that MS is an ethical company and all this fuss is from a few companies who can't compete and Governments, state and local, that want to tap into MS' huge cash pile to help fund pork.
There's a HUGE difference. The KDE integration is modular and well documented so that it could be completely replaced by a competing web browser component. Could Netscape/Mozilla completely replace the IE integration in Windows? Not without MS doing the integration. Fat chance of that!