Say, this could be a great way to publish Open Source software. You could put it up as 'eMatter' (or in someplace similar) complete with extensive application notes, interesting historical notes (why was it written? What alternatives were explored?), etc. All the code could be GPL (or some similar Open Source licensing).
This way, authors of Open Source could get remunerated for their work up front a bit, which would encourage it. Nobody is held hostage here either. Once the article is downloaded, the source would be available to all (or it could even be made available in the usual net-download avenues at the same time the document is made available).
Why shouldn't this text be Open Sourced along with the source code?
I feel that source code should be Open Sourced wherever possible, but I'm less clear on the benefit for other texts. Source code is best Open Sourced because that's when it's value is maximized for everyone. Source code is a living document, it has the most value when it can be modified to meet your needs. This is one of the great things about Open Source software. It truly evolves to meet user needs rather than to meet some business goals of the producer. For example, with Open Source, the evolution of a body of source tends to become more stable and robust (or at least, if it becomes too instable, people generally start to use older revisions and update those). With commercial software the code often is as stable as is allowed by some arbitrary release deadline with some arbitrary set of release features.
I'm not opposed to Open Sourcing of texts, I just don't see as much benefit from it when compared to Open Sourcing code. I am opposed to efforts to extend copyrights, as you can read about here, as I don't see the benefit to doing this.
Open Source software that runs on Windows is no less open than its Unix counterparts...
There is one serious practical problem with Open Source on Windows.
What do you use to compile it?
Using Microsoft tools is problematic, as they don't support familiar makefiles, they change often and there are a number of grungy places that require even more #ifdefs than you would have with Unix-like systems.
Also, I think that Open Source is not advanced by requiring a pricey language platform purchase before you can get started. Open Source, in my observation, has greatly benefitted because people with few resources can really contribute, and contribute right away.
There is cygwin, but it's not entirely mature. Also, there is the issue of cygwin.dll licensing. I personally feel that releasing a library under GPL and selling another licensed version of the same library is against the spirit of Open Source. It is explicitly granting a license to one group of users that another group does not hold. This license issue probably frightens away a lot of potential workers to improving cygwin. Has RMS ever weighed in on this issue?
There is a call for people to help with the cygwin project, currently. If the tools were really mature, the split licensing wouldn't bother me so much as I believe that a ton of Linux software would be ported to Windows if cygwin could really do it. One really great benefit to this is that people would upgrade more often from Windows to Linux when they compared their poorly performing Open Source code running on Windows/cygwin to what they could be doing on Linux.
It might help if a commercial Linux distro, or perhaps a Power Tools CD, included the full cygwin package, complete with all the known ported releases of Open Source software. You could cross develop cygwin on Linux with a Windows target. Such a thing might be used to spread GPL software through the Windows community more. A good free X-Server might be handy here too.
I've got the August 23rd edition of PC Week right here.
How obliging! On page 48 there's an article where they are bragging about their getting some award or another and it features business cards from all of their writers and editors, or at least the more senior ones, and, look, here is Scott Berinato's card!
These look to be the real business cards with office phone numbers. Each primary phone number is different and many of the fax numbers are different too.
Scott Berinato
Senior Writer 10 Presidents Landing Medford, MA 02155 Tel: 781-393-3751 Fax: 781-393-3859
Does the/. effect extend to Office Telephone systems?
Re:Upgrading your kernel is an addiction
on
Kernel 2.2.12
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The vaunted Linux reliability is probably due, to some extent, to the Army of intelligent testers who bang away at the latest kernels the instant they become available.
If it's beneficial we usually call it something like 'a good habit' or 'insisting on excellence', rather than the negative 'addiction'.
Check out any newspaper that has a clearly partisan spin in it's 'news' articles. I've seen a lot of this in The New York Times and you also see it in places like The Wall Street Journal, etc.
They try to give you a flavor, make an impression in the headlines and the first couple of paragraphs.
If you read only the first few paragraphs of this article, you might think the Linux Revolution is over, that Linus himself is now out-of-touch and that all that's left is marketing and carefully managed press events.
It's not until further down in the article does the author admit that this is just to be expected and that you can't blame Linus. You can't criticize the article, after all it's balanced if you're careful to read it. It's also not news.
Know what? Journalists know that people are lazy and don't typically read past the first few paragraphs. And this is born out in the fact that most of the talkbackers didn't read the whole article as you pointed out.
Don't be deceived. ZD 'journalists' are all about creating a world that's optimized for their advertisers. It's often difficult to tell what is an ad and what is an article in these trade rags.
In fairness to the 'trade rags', it's a tough business and you don't succeed by upsetting your customers. The advertisers are the real customers here, subscribers pay a pittance of what it takes to produce this stuff. I read ZD and similar sources to know what it is that the big advertisers want me to believe this week.
Giving the impression that Linux is all big business these days and that Linus himself has sold out and bought into a corporate mentality complete with faux polite handlers is perfectly in line with what ZD would like to see happen to Linux. They'd like to see it become totally corporate so that there would be more need for their own brand of pricey marketing. This is hampered by the counter-culture, revolutionary image that Linux has and the easy availability of real Linux news from low-profile avenues like Slashdot.
Any positive press that Linux gets in these places are thanks to companies like Compaq, HP, IBM, RedHat, SGI, Sun, RedHat, and the rest selling Linux in a big way. The positive articles you've seen lately about Linux did not convince these big companies to support Linux, it's the other way around. The positive press has trailed after the big companies getting on the bandwagon.
If you believe, like some do, that the revolution is really about seriously examining and perhaps dramatically modifying or even abolishing Intellectual Property Rights, then the revolution has only begun.
In this scenario, Linux is just a pilot project, a proof-of-concept. It's being proven that innovation and value can be created in an environment where Intellectual Property is guaranteed to be owned by all. Now, we need to move on to the rest of society and tear down other examples of these 'false scarcities' and 'idea monopolies' that are stifling the free flow of information.
Now, do you agree that a journalist who writes a story about the relative inaccessibility of a popular figure, like Linus Torvalds, is whining. Especially when compared to the past when the figure was less popular?
Nobody guzzles down all the information. It is duplicated and copied to all, with no scarcity.
I like to believe that the one thing that Open Source has taught us is that Intellectual Property is the most artificial of all Property Rights.
In theory, Intellectual Property is supported by law to encourage the creation of new Property. This is thought to benefit society.
We see with Open Source that a creative resource that is artificially made scarce seems to inhibit creativity. It's my observation that the most inventive creations have come out of an innate desire to be creative.
The real value created in Intellectual Property has not been in it's creation, but in it's application. If there were no copyrights, we would still buy books and newspapers. If there were no patents, someone would still make inventions and try to capitalize on their production and use.
The abolition of property rights could lead to a much more competitive, vital economy than we have now. Businesses would be focused on making the best product at the best price and provide the best service rather than the inherent monopoly granted when someone builds a new widget that a bureaucrat says is 'patentable'.
The same is true in software. Why is it that the Indian Software Mills have not been more successful? You can get good programmers for a fraction of what you pay in the US...
I think it's because there's just not that much value in initial construction to specification. At least not in something so fluid as software. The real productive value in software comes in the revision cycles, the consulting on the best use, the integration of a software product with other systems. This is why the Linux software market is so vital. People get paid 'doing' Linux, but it's only when the software gets used in productive use, or is packaged in an easy-to-use form (the distributions). People are competing to provide value, not provide software licenses that may or may not be of value.
Maybe we shouldn't be abolishing all Intellectual Property rights overnight. I don't think the uncertainty would be good. But, I'm concerned we are going in the wrong direction on Intellectual Property, what with the UCITA and this interesting article about various proposals to extend copyrights.
It occurred to me recently that the Unix tool model has always been hindered by there being so many incompatible, competitive Unices out there.
Every vendor tries to differentiate their version of the tools. The vendors actually benefit by making you feel uncomfortable on a competitors version of Unix after having gotten used to their way of doing things.
Now, with Linux and Open Source in general, everyone can standardize on a set of very powerful tools. The Unix tool model, which is just so powerful, is unleashed at last with potentially the whole Unix community (and hopefully, eventually the whole World-Wide computing community) in harmony.
Who's moderating here? Forgive me if I'm wrong, but I don't see a shred of evidence to lead me to believe that this guy is collecting old machines for charitable organizations.
Sounds like this guy wants to have a big beowolf cluster because that would be kewl and thought he could populate it with excessed 486s.
The moderators gave this a 3? With "informative"? Give me a break...
With all of the server application vendors pushing Linux these days, and with the rather wonderful ability of Linux to make beachheads behind the risk-adverse managers' defensive lines (much in the same way that MS/PC infrastructures grew in corporate America 10 years ago), it's easy to see where Sun would be worried about future market share.
Sun wants to be thought of as the Computer Company for the Internet Age. Except for IBM's well heeled offerings, Linux is their only real competition for that title.
Sun doesn't have to kill the Linux versions of StarOffice to deemphasize them. Which will have better support? Linux or Solaris?
The Netscape Server example is cautionary. Who else is withdrawing software from the Linux market?
This could also explain Sun's insistence on pushing only Java. If Java succeeds, Sun could then make it increasingly hard for Java on Linux.
Aboslutely! I've become increasingly worried about the trend of moving applications to the web. While X is big, nasty and old, and Windows is big, unreliable and proprietary, they were at least
designed to run applications on.
Let's inject a little reality here. Most of the world's application seats are green screens. Think bank, think ATM, think fast-food. These work and work fine. Web applications using forms can replace these quite well.
Going up from there, there a whole slew of applications on the web that work fine for me. Mapquest is a bit clunky, but I'm glad I have it. Catalogs and ordering (you know, eCommerce?) from the web works.
The model of viewing everything meant to be read by humans as a document and then having the one ubiquitous client that does a good job of serving up documents is incredibly powerful.
When the help system does work, it's still miles worse than the Windows Help application MS have had since Windows 3. The contents list becomes unresizable. The search feature requires that you haven't messed up something in the configuration (which might, for example, be a reason why you'd be reading the help files? do you see? DO YOU SEE?). When you do a search and find something related to what you want to know, you can't pop up a level to see related documents, because there are no links. And if you go back to the contents pane, you ca't actually see where the document you are viewing is in the hierarchy.
So, a custom Help application has some advantages. It has some big disadvantages too. Like with Web-based Help systems, you can connect to updated, corrected documentation somewhere out there on the Web. A good indexing app like Ultraseek will give you all the keyword searching you're looking for, and it will work with ANY documentation base, not just Help files. No, we really NEED a Help File Indexer and a Indexing application for eBooks and...
The fact that the MS Web-based help files have these problems says more about Microsoft than about using Web Browsers for Help files. You have to use their VM and search/indexing app? Did it occur to you that this is to lock-out other VMs and search/indexing apps? Most people here will not be surprised to hear about problems trying to use MS software.
The web might not work well today in some applications, like CAD, or real-time process control, or even spreadsheets and word processing, but so what? This just shows that one interface isn't ideal for all applications, which is a point you are trying to make, I think. It doesn't really speak to the power of the web for applications.
What do you propose? Am I to wait for the eCommerce app and the Map app and the point-of-sale app and... that all use some new grand application platform? Or do I adapt the tools at hand to start using apps today.
Perhaps designed application platforms are a big resource waster. People spend all their time developing tools and never get around to developing applications. The application platform that's simple like the Web and CGI aren't designed by those with "vision", it just kind of sneaks up on you. While people in Redmond (and elsewhere) are off building more and more application infrastructure, people are doing productive things today with the web.
Those things that don't fit in a browser well may not fit within a general application platform well anyway. There's something to be said for a specialized interface for a specialized application.
Being negative about the web as a platform for applications is easy. Actually putting applications out there is harder and opens you up to criticism. It's more fun to endlessly speculate about and work on future application platforms because nobody can criticize the apps based on it that aren't here yet.
The web is not the future for document creation, processing or e-mail.
I find it ironic that you use all this HTML formatting in your post and then seem to imply that the web is not good for documentation creation and e-mail. What do you propose as the interchange format for email that has the features that you seem to want? RTF? Or is it not designed yet?
Saying things like "current technology A is not the future of B" is safe. Someday there will be a better technology that will be used for B that's not A and you'll finally be justified! The farther off that someday is, the more your prescience!
Web browsers win because they are simple. Exchanging information, which is what the Internet is all about means exchanging documents. The Web browser model works well for this.
Remember every program does one thing and does it well?
Sure, I remember that. I'd like to see a whole set of apps that work well together. No app should have to have printing built-in right? It should be drag and drop to the printer app? Oh, wait a minute what about the problems of page layout and media types? It seems that apps do need some knowledge of printing. Where do you draw the lines? There are some problems here that haven't really been overcome. At least, I've not seen the integrated desktop where every app does one thing and one thing well. Design that and I'll use that instead of what I use now.
Even in this integrated desktop of the future, what will be used for objects meant to be read by people, you know documents. Will it be a Web Browser? It sure seems to me that a lot of what I do is read documents and a Web Browser does this one thing well.
Programs are not documents either.
Programs most certainly are documents. At least, at the source code level they are. They are intended to be read by humans, thus they are documents.
What's happening with Broadway? Is anybody out there using it? Is it mature?
I thought Broadway sounded like the best thing since NeWS (grin), but I just don't see it in use much.
I saw a list of the most used plug-ins awhile back and Broadway was way down the list. I don't know how it fares on those lists now, I don't keep up with that stuff.
It still seems like a great idea, but it's orthogonal to Java/AWT that gets all the hype.
The problem I always saw with X was fragmentation. How many extensions and app developer suites and interface standards have we gone through? Are there X apps that work together well? If there are, what % of the market do they have?
The MS apps win because someone dictates standards. They aren't any good, but everybody's working to try and use one set of tools and one set of standards. It seems to be falling over under it's own weight as more and more things are bolted on to make it the universal standard.
The same thing could happen with Web standards too. The Web standards have simpler, and thus better, underpinnings, but these days a browser has to support a bunch of application/scripting languages, style sheets, plug-ins for audio, video and XML.
It seems to me that things are being pulled in too many directions in the application interface world.
Technology markets have been driven by change, even change without a compelling purpose. It seems to me that a lot of productive work can be done with perl (or other language) and forms (like this posting! uhhh... is this productivity?).
Reengineering gurus like to talk about recognizing the 80% solution and when it's good enough. In technology, it seems that we're only interested in the 110% solution that will be here tomorrow.
Maybe that's the real problem with X Windows these days. It's great, but for remote stuff the Web is seen as good enough.
Yes, you can make transmitters based on twin particles. HOWEVER, so far noone has been able to present any credible theories on how to use this for transmitting information...
It's easy to transmit information with these devices. First, build many many of them, then shoot them out of a giant cannon (finally a real use for all those quasars) at the intended recipient in a pattern that encodes your message.
OK, so the aliens out there are all more advanced than us and don't use Radio.
All of them? Did they all also just jump in a quantum fashion from pre-industrial to without using Radio at all?
Or perhaps the aliens sent out Radio waves at one time, but then used their advanced technology to recall all of that Electro-Magnetic Wave pollution. I suppose we will find that EMW pollution is a huge environmental problem when we're ready to join the community of sentient species?
Maybe the Earth is alone in having such backward creatures to ever play with magnetic fields for communication. All of the other sentient beings use telepathy, which operates on a plane that we cannot begin to comprehend. Well, except for Uri Geller and those beings who operate the Psychic Hotlines.
I agree about a back-out plan and a contingency plan, but testing for systems like this is often just not going to happen.
It's usually not practical to really test complex systems under anything that approaches the real-world. MCI-WorldComm can't maintain a test environment that anywhere near mirrors the significant portion of the Internet that they service. Anything less than a test under real-world loads will not be representative of what will happen when you put it into service.
And remember, testing only demonstrates the presence of defects, not their absence.
Who's to say that Lucent is at fault here? I would guess that the same equipment is running outside of MCI and we're not hearing about problems there. I don't actually know the situation with regard to the the Lucent hardware/software. It may be that this is something that only MCI has, or something that only MCI has put under such loads.
People need to get some perspective. With the growth of Internet and bandwidth demands in general, combined with the cut-throat cost competition environment for these carriers, it's really surprising to me that we don't have a lot more failures like this one. Get over it.
Sociologists have come up with "labelling theory". They've noticed that people tend to live up or down to expectations and to identify with labels.
The media has an interest in forwarding stereotypes to make up conflicts and trends that they can write about. Of course, this tends to support the conflicts and trends, which sells even more media.
For example, were Generation X-ers really more outwardly focussed, less selfish than "Yuppies" before the media wrote a bunch of stories about it? Did the stories cause Gen X-ers to take pride in their "difference" and move in the direction they were reading about while those who owned BMWs became defensive and came up with a lot of self-justifications for their lifestyles?
Political parties and advocacy groups like to do this to consolidate consituencies. The Left tell minority groups that they should feel this way or that and the Right drag around people with religious convictions.
It's destructive of real analysis, debate and progress.
I like to hope that the Internet can connect people to people without institutional filters. On the Internet, one has access a large range of viewpoints and has can find those sympathetic to specific views regardless of class or classification.
Maybe I'm being naive and the Internet is more about banner ads, porn and spam. I'm concerned that there are a lot of powerful interests trying to get a handle on the Internet. I'm afraid that their most powerful technique is numbing us, to make the Internet just more TV. One of the ways they do this is through labelling us and pigeon-holing.
I recommend more independent thought, force yourself to examine your own beliefs and read widely of those viewpoints with which you now disagree. Resist the temptation to identify groups as narrow-minded,hateful or only self-interested. If you must identify a label with a negative emotion remember that people have been victims of their labels and the polarized atmosphere we suffer today. If you find yourself hating a class of people (conservative, liberals, the poor, religious people, atheists, slackers, geeks, yuppies, CEOs), then consider that you might be part of the problem. Consider that those who wish to divide us for their entertainment and their own agenda may be winning.
These are examples of on-going grass roots organizations to recycle computers for the disabled and for education. Although, the focus may be on the economically disadvantaged.
I lived in Utah 10 years ago, and I know what you mean about it being conservative. With Utah spending dead last per student on education, you could say that all Utah students are economically disadvantaged...
That being said, if I were in Utah and I really wanted to see a project move forward to provide computers for kids in schools (or out), I might look into working with The Predominant Religion. You'd have donations of time, people and facilities for such an effort coming out of the woodwork. The issues of exposing kids to the nasty Internet would be handled by someone else.
If The Church were involved, the chances that someone would sue if somehow a child used a donated computer to access something blacklisted would be much decreased. And, if someone did sue, they would probably go after some of the gilding on the Moroni rather than some individual volunteer's pockets.
Anything powerful can be used for good or evil. Linux or bombs are no different in this.
Of course, the Military can be used to slaughter innocents or project narrow national interests. But, it's "purpose", "what the military is here for" is to protect us from those who would take our rights away.
We should attempt, through our democratic processes and through free speech, to keep the military on track and defend our liberties.
I think the track record in the western democracies has been, on balance, pretty good. I'm glad we were able to defeat Hitler and protect the people of Kuwait.
On occasion, the Military has been used for things that in retrospect we may disagree with. In general, these actions have been largely supported by the people at the time (Vietnam was a popular war in 1966). I'm not sure what to do about that problem except to encourage people to examine issues carefully and to generally raise consciousness.
I think the "ideology" of open-source is really to make sure that source code remains free and available to ALL. Including those who may use it for things we might not agree with. When you think of it, that's the basis of true freedom in any sense. Freedom of speech is to protect unpopular speech, freedom of source is to protect unpopular programmers.
Slashdot Mirror
This way, authors of Open Source could get remunerated for their work up front a bit, which would encourage it. Nobody is held hostage here either. Once the article is downloaded, the source would be available to all (or it could even be made available in the usual net-download avenues at the same time the document is made available).
Why shouldn't this text be Open Sourced along with the source code?
I feel that source code should be Open Sourced wherever possible, but I'm less clear on the benefit for other texts. Source code is best Open Sourced because that's when it's value is maximized for everyone. Source code is a living document, it has the most value when it can be modified to meet your needs. This is one of the great things about Open Source software. It truly evolves to meet user needs rather than to meet some business goals of the producer. For example, with Open Source, the evolution of a body of source tends to become more stable and robust (or at least, if it becomes too instable, people generally start to use older revisions and update those). With commercial software the code often is as stable as is allowed by some arbitrary release deadline with some arbitrary set of release features.
I'm not opposed to Open Sourcing of texts, I just don't see as much benefit from it when compared to Open Sourcing code. I am opposed to efforts to extend copyrights, as you can read about here, as I don't see the benefit to doing this.
There is one serious practical problem with Open Source on Windows.
What do you use to compile it?
Using Microsoft tools is problematic, as they don't support familiar makefiles, they change often and there are a number of grungy places that require even more #ifdefs than you would have with Unix-like systems.
Also, I think that Open Source is not advanced by requiring a pricey language platform purchase before you can get started. Open Source, in my observation, has greatly benefitted because people with few resources can really contribute, and contribute right away.
There is cygwin, but it's not entirely mature. Also, there is the issue of cygwin.dll licensing. I personally feel that releasing a library under GPL and selling another licensed version of the same library is against the spirit of Open Source. It is explicitly granting a license to one group of users that another group does not hold. This license issue probably frightens away a lot of potential workers to improving cygwin. Has RMS ever weighed in on this issue?
There is a call for people to help with the cygwin project, currently. If the tools were really mature, the split licensing wouldn't bother me so much as I believe that a ton of Linux software would be ported to Windows if cygwin could really do it. One really great benefit to this is that people would upgrade more often from Windows to Linux when they compared their poorly performing Open Source code running on Windows/cygwin to what they could be doing on Linux.
It might help if a commercial Linux distro, or perhaps a Power Tools CD, included the full cygwin package, complete with all the known ported releases of Open Source software. You could cross develop cygwin on Linux with a Windows target. Such a thing might be used to spread GPL software through the Windows community more. A good free X-Server might be handy here too.
What "other ideals" does hero worship conflict with?
One of the big rewards that notable Open Source contributors receive is the thanks and admiration of an adoring public. What's wrong with that?
This is Freedom, not Buddhism.
How obliging! On page 48 there's an article where they are bragging about their getting some award or another and it features business cards from all of their writers and editors, or at least the more senior ones, and, look, here is Scott Berinato's card!
These look to be the real business cards with office phone numbers. Each primary phone number is different and many of the fax numbers are different too.
Does the /. effect extend to Office Telephone systems?
If it's beneficial we usually call it something like 'a good habit' or 'insisting on excellence', rather than the negative 'addiction'.
Check out any newspaper that has a clearly partisan spin in it's 'news' articles. I've seen a lot of this in The New York Times and you also see it in places like The Wall Street Journal, etc.
They try to give you a flavor, make an impression in the headlines and the first couple of paragraphs.
If you read only the first few paragraphs of this article, you might think the Linux Revolution is over, that Linus himself is now out-of-touch and that all that's left is marketing and carefully managed press events.
It's not until further down in the article does the author admit that this is just to be expected and that you can't blame Linus. You can't criticize the article, after all it's balanced if you're careful to read it. It's also not news.
Know what? Journalists know that people are lazy and don't typically read past the first few paragraphs. And this is born out in the fact that most of the talkbackers didn't read the whole article as you pointed out.
Don't be deceived. ZD 'journalists' are all about creating a world that's optimized for their advertisers. It's often difficult to tell what is an ad and what is an article in these trade rags.
In fairness to the 'trade rags', it's a tough business and you don't succeed by upsetting your customers. The advertisers are the real customers here, subscribers pay a pittance of what it takes to produce this stuff. I read ZD and similar sources to know what it is that the big advertisers want me to believe this week.
Giving the impression that Linux is all big business these days and that Linus himself has sold out and bought into a corporate mentality complete with faux polite handlers is perfectly in line with what ZD would like to see happen to Linux. They'd like to see it become totally corporate so that there would be more need for their own brand of pricey marketing. This is hampered by the counter-culture, revolutionary image that Linux has and the easy availability of real Linux news from low-profile avenues like Slashdot.
Any positive press that Linux gets in these places are thanks to companies like Compaq, HP, IBM, RedHat, SGI, Sun, RedHat, and the rest selling Linux in a big way. The positive articles you've seen lately about Linux did not convince these big companies to support Linux, it's the other way around. The positive press has trailed after the big companies getting on the bandwagon.
In this scenario, Linux is just a pilot project, a proof-of-concept. It's being proven that innovation and value can be created in an environment where Intellectual Property is guaranteed to be owned by all. Now, we need to move on to the rest of society and tear down other examples of these 'false scarcities' and 'idea monopolies' that are stifling the free flow of information.
Now, do you agree that a journalist who writes a story about the relative inaccessibility of a popular figure, like Linus Torvalds, is whining. Especially when compared to the past when the figure was less popular?
Nobody guzzles down all the information. It is duplicated and copied to all, with no scarcity.
I like to believe that the one thing that Open Source has taught us is that Intellectual Property is the most artificial of all Property Rights.
In theory, Intellectual Property is supported by law to encourage the creation of new Property. This is thought to benefit society.
We see with Open Source that a creative resource that is artificially made scarce seems to inhibit creativity. It's my observation that the most inventive creations have come out of an innate desire to be creative.
The real value created in Intellectual Property has not been in it's creation, but in it's application. If there were no copyrights, we would still buy books and newspapers. If there were no patents, someone would still make inventions and try to capitalize on their production and use.
The abolition of property rights could lead to a much more competitive, vital economy than we have now. Businesses would be focused on making the best product at the best price and provide the best service rather than the inherent monopoly granted when someone builds a new widget that a bureaucrat says is 'patentable'.
The same is true in software. Why is it that the Indian Software Mills have not been more successful? You can get good programmers for a fraction of what you pay in the US...
I think it's because there's just not that much value in initial construction to specification. At least not in something so fluid as software. The real productive value in software comes in the revision cycles, the consulting on the best use, the integration of a software product with other systems. This is why the Linux software market is so vital. People get paid 'doing' Linux, but it's only when the software gets used in productive use, or is packaged in an easy-to-use form (the distributions). People are competing to provide value, not provide software licenses that may or may not be of value.
Maybe we shouldn't be abolishing all Intellectual Property rights overnight. I don't think the uncertainty would be good. But, I'm concerned we are going in the wrong direction on Intellectual Property, what with the UCITA and this interesting article about various proposals to extend copyrights.
It occurred to me recently that the Unix tool model has always been hindered by there being so many incompatible, competitive Unices out there.
Every vendor tries to differentiate their version of the tools. The vendors actually benefit by making you feel uncomfortable on a competitors version of Unix after having gotten used to their way of doing things.
Now, with Linux and Open Source in general, everyone can standardize on a set of very powerful tools. The Unix tool model, which is just so powerful, is unleashed at last with potentially the whole Unix community (and hopefully, eventually the whole World-Wide computing community) in harmony.
It's about time.
(Hey, can I be a "technology evangelist"?)
Sounds like this guy wants to have a big beowolf cluster because that would be kewl and thought he could populate it with excessed 486s.
The moderators gave this a 3? With "informative"? Give me a break...
I think that Sun is scared to death of Linux.
With all of the server application vendors pushing Linux these days, and with the rather wonderful ability of Linux to make beachheads behind the risk-adverse managers' defensive lines (much in the same way that MS/PC infrastructures grew in corporate America 10 years ago), it's easy to see where Sun would be worried about future market share.
Sun wants to be thought of as the Computer Company for the Internet Age. Except for IBM's well heeled offerings, Linux is their only real competition for that title.
Sun doesn't have to kill the Linux versions of StarOffice to deemphasize them. Which will have better support? Linux or Solaris?
The Netscape Server example is cautionary. Who else is withdrawing software from the Linux market?
This could also explain Sun's insistence on pushing only Java. If Java succeeds, Sun could then make it increasingly hard for Java on Linux.
Maybe I'm being paranoid.
Let's inject a little reality here. Most of the world's application seats are green screens. Think bank, think ATM, think fast-food. These work and work fine. Web applications using forms can replace these quite well.
Going up from there, there a whole slew of applications on the web that work fine for me. Mapquest is a bit clunky, but I'm glad I have it. Catalogs and ordering (you know, eCommerce?) from the web works.
The model of viewing everything meant to be read by humans as a document and then having the one ubiquitous client that does a good job of serving up documents is incredibly powerful.
So, a custom Help application has some advantages. It has some big disadvantages too. Like with Web-based Help systems, you can connect to updated, corrected documentation somewhere out there on the Web. A good indexing app like Ultraseek will give you all the keyword searching you're looking for, and it will work with ANY documentation base, not just Help files. No, we really NEED a Help File Indexer and a Indexing application for eBooks and...
The fact that the MS Web-based help files have these problems says more about Microsoft than about using Web Browsers for Help files. You have to use their VM and search/indexing app? Did it occur to you that this is to lock-out other VMs and search/indexing apps? Most people here will not be surprised to hear about problems trying to use MS software.
The web might not work well today in some applications, like CAD, or real-time process control, or even spreadsheets and word processing, but so what? This just shows that one interface isn't ideal for all applications, which is a point you are trying to make, I think. It doesn't really speak to the power of the web for applications.
What do you propose? Am I to wait for the eCommerce app and the Map app and the point-of-sale app and ... that all use some new grand application platform? Or do I adapt the tools at hand to start using apps today.
Perhaps designed application platforms are a big resource waster. People spend all their time developing tools and never get around to developing applications. The application platform that's simple like the Web and CGI aren't designed by those with "vision", it just kind of sneaks up on you. While people in Redmond (and elsewhere) are off building more and more application infrastructure, people are doing productive things today with the web.
Those things that don't fit in a browser well may not fit within a general application platform well anyway. There's something to be said for a specialized interface for a specialized application.
Being negative about the web as a platform for applications is easy. Actually putting applications out there is harder and opens you up to criticism. It's more fun to endlessly speculate about and work on future application platforms because nobody can criticize the apps based on it that aren't here yet.
I find it ironic that you use all this HTML formatting in your post and then seem to imply that the web is not good for documentation creation and e-mail. What do you propose as the interchange format for email that has the features that you seem to want? RTF? Or is it not designed yet?
Saying things like "current technology A is not the future of B" is safe. Someday there will be a better technology that will be used for B that's not A and you'll finally be justified! The farther off that someday is, the more your prescience!
Remember every program does one thing and does it well?
Sure, I remember that. I'd like to see a whole set of apps that work well together. No app should have to have printing built-in right? It should be drag and drop to the printer app? Oh, wait a minute what about the problems of page layout and media types? It seems that apps do need some knowledge of printing. Where do you draw the lines? There are some problems here that haven't really been overcome. At least, I've not seen the integrated desktop where every app does one thing and one thing well. Design that and I'll use that instead of what I use now.
Even in this integrated desktop of the future, what will be used for objects meant to be read by people, you know documents. Will it be a Web Browser? It sure seems to me that a lot of what I do is read documents and a Web Browser does this one thing well.
Programs are not documents either.
Programs most certainly are documents. At least, at the source code level they are. They are intended to be read by humans, thus they are documents.
What's happening with Broadway? Is anybody out there using it? Is it mature?
I thought Broadway sounded like the best thing since NeWS (grin), but I just don't see it in use much.
I saw a list of the most used plug-ins awhile back and Broadway was way down the list. I don't know how it fares on those lists now, I don't keep up with that stuff.
It still seems like a great idea, but it's orthogonal to Java/AWT that gets all the hype.
The problem I always saw with X was fragmentation. How many extensions and app developer suites and interface standards have we gone through? Are there X apps that work together well? If there are, what % of the market do they have?
The MS apps win because someone dictates standards. They aren't any good, but everybody's working to try and use one set of tools and one set of standards. It seems to be falling over under it's own weight as more and more things are bolted on to make it the universal standard.
The same thing could happen with Web standards too. The Web standards have simpler, and thus better, underpinnings, but these days a browser has to support a bunch of application/scripting languages, style sheets, plug-ins for audio, video and XML.
It seems to me that things are being pulled in too many directions in the application interface world.
Technology markets have been driven by change, even change without a compelling purpose. It seems to me that a lot of productive work can be done with perl (or other language) and forms (like this posting! uhhh... is this productivity?).
Reengineering gurus like to talk about recognizing the 80% solution and when it's good enough. In technology, it seems that we're only interested in the 110% solution that will be here tomorrow.
Maybe that's the real problem with X Windows these days. It's great, but for remote stuff the Web is seen as good enough.
Hopefully they have a tolerant policy towards newbies.
I'm sorry I spammed the electromagnetic spectrum. I didn't see the FAQ posted anywhere.
Yes, you can make transmitters based on twin particles. HOWEVER, so far noone has been able to present any credible theories on how to use this for transmitting information...
It's easy to transmit information with these devices. First, build many many of them, then shoot them out of a giant cannon (finally a real use for all those quasars) at the intended recipient in a pattern that encodes your message.
You sure lack imagination.
OK, so the aliens out there are all more advanced than us and don't use Radio.
All of them? Did they all also just jump in a quantum fashion from pre-industrial to without using Radio at all?
Or perhaps the aliens sent out Radio waves at one time, but then used their advanced technology to recall all of that Electro-Magnetic Wave pollution. I suppose we will find that EMW pollution is a huge environmental problem when we're ready to join the community of sentient species?
Maybe the Earth is alone in having such backward creatures to ever play with magnetic fields for communication. All of the other sentient beings use telepathy, which operates on a plane that we cannot begin to comprehend. Well, except for Uri Geller and those beings who operate the Psychic Hotlines.
The post I'm responding to is by Anonymous Coward. Not exactly the most credible of posters. I wonder if this is by a Microsoft employee?
I agree about a back-out plan and a contingency plan, but testing for systems like this is often just not going to happen.
It's usually not practical to really test complex systems under anything that approaches the real-world. MCI-WorldComm can't maintain a test environment that anywhere near mirrors the significant portion of the Internet that they service. Anything less than a test under real-world loads will not be representative of what will happen when you put it into service.
And remember, testing only demonstrates the presence of defects, not their absence.
Who's to say that Lucent is at fault here? I would guess that the same equipment is running outside of MCI and we're not hearing about problems there. I don't actually know the situation with regard to the the Lucent hardware/software. It may be that this is something that only MCI has, or something that only MCI has put under such loads.
People need to get some perspective. With the growth of Internet and bandwidth demands in general, combined with the cut-throat cost competition environment for these carriers, it's really surprising to me that we don't have a lot more failures like this one. Get over it.
I agree.
Sociologists have come up with "labelling theory". They've noticed that people tend to live up or down to expectations and to identify with labels.
The media has an interest in forwarding stereotypes to make up conflicts and trends that they can write about. Of course, this tends to support the conflicts and trends, which sells even more media.
For example, were Generation X-ers really more outwardly focussed, less selfish than "Yuppies" before the media wrote a bunch of stories about it? Did the stories cause Gen X-ers to take pride in their "difference" and move in the direction they were reading about while those who owned BMWs became defensive and came up with a lot of self-justifications for their lifestyles?
Political parties and advocacy groups like to do this to consolidate consituencies. The Left tell minority groups that they should feel this way or that and the Right drag around people with religious convictions.
It's destructive of real analysis, debate and progress.
I like to hope that the Internet can connect people to people without institutional filters. On the Internet, one has access a large range of viewpoints and has can find those sympathetic to specific views regardless of class or classification.
Maybe I'm being naive and the Internet is more about banner ads, porn and spam. I'm concerned that there are a lot of powerful interests trying to get a handle on the Internet. I'm afraid that their most powerful technique is numbing us, to make the Internet just more TV. One of the ways they do this is through labelling us and pigeon-holing.
I recommend more independent thought, force yourself to examine your own beliefs and read widely of those viewpoints with which you now disagree. Resist the temptation to identify groups as narrow-minded,hateful or only self-interested. If you must identify a label with a negative emotion remember that people have been victims of their labels and the polarized atmosphere we suffer today. If you find yourself hating a class of people (conservative, liberals, the poor, religious people, atheists, slackers, geeks, yuppies, CEOs), then consider that you might be part of the problem. Consider that those who wish to divide us for their entertainment and their own agenda may be winning.
Ignore what I've said and think for yourself.
These are examples of on-going grass roots organizations to recycle computers for the disabled and for education. Although, the focus may be on the economically disadvantaged.
I lived in Utah 10 years ago, and I know what you mean about it being conservative. With Utah spending dead last per student on education, you could say that all Utah students are economically disadvantaged...
That being said, if I were in Utah and I really wanted to see a project move forward to provide computers for kids in schools (or out), I might look into working with The Predominant Religion. You'd have donations of time, people and facilities for such an effort coming out of the woodwork. The issues of exposing kids to the nasty Internet would be handled by someone else.
If The Church were involved, the chances that someone would sue if somehow a child used a donated computer to access something blacklisted would be much decreased. And, if someone did sue, they would probably go after some of the gilding on the Moroni rather than some individual volunteer's pockets.
Anything powerful can be used for good or evil. Linux or bombs are no different in this.
Of course, the Military can be used to slaughter innocents or project narrow national interests.
But, it's "purpose", "what the military is here for" is to protect us from those who would take our rights away.
We should attempt, through our democratic processes and through free speech, to keep the military on track and defend our liberties.
I think the track record in the western democracies has been, on balance, pretty good. I'm glad we were able to defeat Hitler and protect the people of Kuwait.
On occasion, the Military has been used for things that in retrospect we may disagree with. In general, these actions have been largely supported by the people at the time (Vietnam was a popular war in 1966). I'm not sure what to do about that problem except to encourage people to examine issues carefully and to generally raise consciousness.
I think the "ideology" of open-source is really to make sure that source code remains free and available to ALL. Including those who may use it for things we might not agree with. When you think of it, that's the basis of true freedom in any sense. Freedom of speech is to protect unpopular speech, freedom of source is to protect unpopular programmers.