If the software sold with the box comes with solitaire or other stupid games, that probably enough for unsophisticated users.
A lot of people don't want to be bothered with installing anything -- that's one of M$'s advantages.
If you just want a box that allows you to surf, do some basic word processing and make free "phone calls", this looks barely good enough and quite convenient.
As I recall, OpenBSD 3.7 now supports the Zaurus. You can run X on it.
OpenBSD may not be your cup of tea, but if there is a port, it means they did it without signing any NDAs (they don't ever sign them). So the information required to do the port is freely available, implying that you'll probably also have good Linux support.
I've noticed that a lot of mobile hardware sellers will sell you a Linux SDK, but they charge a disgusting amount of money ($900 or so).
But if you go with the Zaurus (commodity HW), you've got all your free tools (well supported too).
I wouldn't even think of using Windows anything for any hobbyist stuff -- it costs money, and you strengthen MS's position without getting paid for it.
Bill Gates says Apple will lose out.
If Apple screws up once and Microsoft pounces (and wipes them out in this market), then yes, Gates is correct.
The only way for Apple to survive is to keep on holding Microsoft at bay. Microsoft is like a killer robot, pursuing them forever, until they mess up.
Charles Ferguson, in his book goes into this. Charles sold his company to Microsoft, figuring he didn't have a chance competing with them, and that Netscape, the other suitor, had their heads up their asses (and no future competing with Microsoft).
I heard that there are some fundamental problems applying otherwise useful research at MS. The problems have to do with how screwed up the codebase for Office and similar programs is.
Basically, they are stuck and not able to do anything powerfully transformative. They only want to improve their franchise, so the research just sits there, not getting applied.
E.g. your researcher comes up with a great program analysis tool -- but it just can't work on a program with a 5,000 line long main().
So you tell him to try it again, this time with feeling.
Political circumstances (fiefdoms) prevent the researcher from fixing the original code, even if he was so motivated.
Job Advertisements Tell The Truth
on
Gates on Google
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Did you notice that Google appeared on Gates's radar screen when he read their job ads, and saw they were looking for the same sorts of folks as him? That told him they were looking to compete.
I first saw Paul Graham mention this -- he would read the job ads of his competitors. If he saw C++, Oracle, etc. then he knew the people didn't matter (and wouldn't matter).
If he saw Perl, Python, etc. he took notice. [He never saw Common Lisp, of course]
Graham's said that no matter what Mar-Com (marketing communications) bozos have to say, the job ads tell the real story.
Exactly -- management didn't really "get" GPL. Had they understood anything at all about it, it would have been "oh, so they are total chumps..... NEXT!
It was a totally disgusting environment.
Will probably find many blatant violators.
on
The Open-Source Detector
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
I worked at a ruthless company. Part of the culture was to get results as fast as possible and completely ignore things like licenses, rules and laws, if it helped to make money.
We certainly would have violated the GPL in a second, given that one couldn't really prove damage to the other party (aging idealist hippies with beards who were naive enough to give away software with a silly "license").
The ripoff of commercial software was driving me nuts though -- it seemed quite wrong, esp. given that we were raking in the dough and were not paying just because we could easily avoid it through technical measures.
However, part of the "culture" was that we were so busy that we were sloppy about the misdeeds. We wouldn't have had time to cover our tracks.
Such tools would have caught us, so I'm guessing such tools will lead to finding many similar violators.
...
I speak from experience. Because I buy a new Powerbook every ten
months, and because I always order the new models the day they're
announced, I get a lot of lemons from Apple. That means that I
hit Apple's three-iTunes-authorized-computers limit pretty early
on and found myself unable to play the hundreds of dollars' worth
of iTunes songs I'd bought because one of my authorized machines
was a lemon that Apple had broken up for parts, one was in the
shop getting fixed by Apple, and one was my mom's computer, 3,000
miles away in Toronto.
If I had been a less good customer for Apple's hardware, I would
have been fine. If I had been a less enthusiastic evangelist for
Apple's products -- if I hadn't shown my mom how iTunes Music
Store worked -- I would have been fine. If I hadn't bought so
much iTunes music that burning it to CD and re-ripping it and
re-keying all my metadata was too daunting a task to consider, I
would have been fine.
As it was Apple rewarded my trust, evangelism and out-of-control
spending by treating me like a crook and locking me out of my own
music, at a time when my Powerbook was in the shop -- i.e., at a
time when I was hardly disposed to feel charitable to Apple.
I'm an edge case here, but I'm a *leading edge* case. If Apple
succeeds in its business plans, it will only be a matter of time
until even average customers have upgraded enough hardware and
bought enough music to end up where I am.
But it seems odd to me that if someone wants a one-trick secure browser solution, he'd use anything other than OpenBSD.
If you sit down and do the analysis (without regard to "religion" or fashion), and say, "I only need a secure browser," you'll likely pick a BSD and it will likely be either NetBSD (hw support) or OpenBSD (security).
I did a similar analysis, and came to this conclusion, after attempting to dispassionately evaluate the options.
Unless you ignore the whole Declarations of the Rights of Man thing. The French go through constitutions every two weeks or so, and it's easier for them to just attach that particular piece of boilerplate instead of cut-and-paste all the time. It's only mentioned in the very first sentence of the (current) French Constitution, after all...
I was referring to the source of the rights (not whether or not the are inalienable or not).
Please go back and read the French Constitution and the TDoRoM again, carefully. You'll see that although the rights are incorporated, the current constitution (article 34, as I mentioned), says they come from statute. TDoRoM lists some rights, but does't say the rights come from God. It just says they exist, and mentions God in passing.
Even if TDoRoM did say the rights come from God (which it doesn't), that would make Article 34 of the constitution nonsensical. You have to figure that the people who signed off on #34 wanted it that way.
..."So Civil Code countries don't have the concept of divine-enshrined or individual liberty."...
Yeah, those godless commies!
The divine-enshrined nature of things merely ensures that the rights can't be taken away by statute. That's my point, not how religious or communist the French (or Continental Europeans in general) are. The secular nature of the French constitution allows them to take away rights many different way. E.g. a statue could make French rites contingent on whatever the UN declared them to be. Such is impossible in the US.
Alternatively, there are no similar invokations of the Declaration of Indepence codified in the United States Constitution. The US Constitution only points to itself as the "supreme law of the land" and constitutional amendments can be ratified that violate the spirit or even the letter of the Declaration of Independence, and the only way to fix it would be another amendment repealing it, or 3/4 of the state legislatures getting together and writing a new federal constitution entirely.
Indeed the Declaration of Independence is not part of the Constitution. That's not so important when it is clear where the rights come from, and people believe that they have the rights no matter what the government says. The people Continental Europe have the mindset that this week they have certain rights, and depending on what the EU or their government says next week, they have different rights. E.g. one week a political party is legal, the next week its banned. So this week you've got your TDoRoM rights, but maybe not next week.
Also, the TDoRoM doesn't even include the right to life. That omission was on purpose; they clearly knew about our Declaration of Independence. But anyway, it doesn't really matter; TDoRoM is a relic of the early part of the French Revolution. Those guys lost in the end to Napoleon, who got rid of the rights in his 1799 constitution. So apparently those rights are not so inalienable after all (and apparently, for the French, the right to life was never in there anyway, so who cares).
The fact that Napoleon took away the rights of TDoRoM makes me think that Article 34 really is correct -- the rights come from statute, not some power outside the control of government.
I mean, have you seen the Eighteenth Amendment?
Yes, I have.
I'd say though, that at least back then, people understood that there needed to be an amendment to take away alcohol, and an amendment to tax income.
These days, in contrast, people accept the government banning/taking things under the commerce clause, or propose taxing things or otherwise regulating things out of existence. E.g. a $10 tax per bullet, whose effect would be to destroy the 2nd Amendment.
(I just ranted in defense of the French... I feel so dirty...)
I am not anti-French per se. E.g. the Germans have a similarly unfree system.
A constitution says where the laws come from. It does not decide, but rather describes. Otherwise the constitution would not be well-founded.
The French one (see article 34) says that rights come from statue. The American says the rights belong to the people. Our tradition says the rights come from natural law (God), not statue.
In France, it is more simple -- rights come from statute, only. The French state doesn't get them from anywhere, so the state is supreme.
That's far more autocratic.
My point about States Rights is that since the end of the Civil War, the federal government has increasingly intruded on matters that were previously decided by states. Hence, state law matters less and less -- you can't see the effects of Lousiana law as clearly as you could before.
here is an example, from Quebec: a slip of the pen by Quebec lawmakers and your only hope is relief from the feds. If that happened in California, you'd argue that your rights were being taken away, by the state -- no limited for some good purpose, but removed. If the court agrees you're home free.
So Civil Code countries don't have the concept of divine-enshrined or individual liberty. In the US, people consider it their God-given right to associate as they wish, speak their mind and so on. If the government chose to take it away (constitutional amendment), many would argue that that was illegal according to natural law. This would be "extra-judicial", but entirely in keeping with the spirit of Anlgo American law. You can't make that argument if you believe in Civil Law -- if the government takes it away, then that's the law.
So people from civil code countries have a more compliant mentality. When the Germans took away the right for a merchant to cut his prices, people accepted it. Here, people would talk about freedom of contract (which the state may limit, with good reason -- but the right still exists). The mere fact that you can argue about whether the law is legal or not means that Americans are a lot less compliant.
There is no conspiracy theory here, merely an attempt to explain the attitudes that inform the French actions.
I lived in those places for many years. I know what I'm talking about.
The fact that the cops didn't require you to produce ID is imamterial -- they had the right to, and you would have been required to. That's what the law says.
The card is the property of the state.
You must carry it.
You must present it if asked.
A foreigner is subject to similar requirements. It happened to my boss. They detained him on the street for an hour to check his passport.
Napoleonic code is more autocratic than Common Law. The basic idea of Civil Law (Napoleonic) is that the state is the source of all rights (Rousseau's theory). Common Law, oppositely, holds that individuals have rights, and they choose to give up some to the state, for certain limited purposes.
Lousiana's laws and Quebec's are mitigated by the fact that they are not supreme (e.g. US/Canada with Common Law are in the picture) -- the decline of States Rights implies that more and more for Louisiana.
AFP, being used to those rules, is used to using the courts to shut down insolent upstarts like Yahoo! and Google.
Here's an English language link for you on the German department store tempest in a teapot
Here are quotes:
The German Retail Association, which sided with the court in the case, said short-term sales were unjustified because temporary changes in prices confuse consumers and are unfair because they force shoppers to interrupt their schedules and rush to stores to take advantage of price cuts.
Continental Europe has a legal code derived from the Napoleonic code.
It is particularly irrational and inflexible, and nowhere near as abstract as English Common Law.
E.g. people in Continental Europe need to carry ID papers with them when in public. Cops can stop you and interrogate you -- because. The law says you are free, but you better carry ID. And watch your mouth (you might break the law).
Thanks Napoleon!
So it is entirely "reasonable", to the mind of a Continental European, that a respectable media company like AFP can sue to stop some upstart from doing something novel and innovative, just because technology allows it -- the law is inherently pro-status quo.
In Germany, a British retailer dared to have a sale. This was deemed illegal -- the state argued (on behalf of the German retailers) that the temporary nature of the sale would COMPEL Germans to buy more stuff. Really it was just that German retailers can't compete with Anglo-retailer Kung Fu, and the state was happy to do their bidding, with the result that the German consumer lost out.
Slashdot Mirror
When Billy hears about this, I bet he craps his pants.
There's the potential here for a chunk of the market (unsophisticated cheapos) to have their entire computer experience be non-Micro$oft.
It is really hard to compete with such a business -- MSN will have to start cannibalizing the main franchise, and that just won't happen.
Although I hate Earthlink and their goddman telemarketers, this really, really makes me happy today.
Do grandmas play games?
If the software sold with the box comes with solitaire or other stupid games, that probably enough for unsophisticated users.
A lot of people don't want to be bothered with installing anything -- that's one of M$'s advantages.
If you just want a box that allows you to surf, do some basic word processing and make free "phone calls", this looks barely good enough and quite convenient.
If they make it so simple that they send it to you, you plug it in, and it works, that's really great for unsophisticated computer users.
I wish them the best of luck.
There are different kinds of people in this world.
Some try to make sure that they don't say b.s. about things they don't understand. Others try to sound smart and then say something stupid.
It is a bit like a kid playing with nunchucks and hitting himself in the nuts. But at least then you know that you are not Bruce Lee.
This guy probably still thinks he understands cryptography.
Interesting. Here is his homepage.
I hope you learned more than you otherwise would have.
Is that just because of Olin Shivers?
Or are there other schemers there too?
As I recall, OpenBSD 3.7 now supports the Zaurus. You can run X on it.
OpenBSD may not be your cup of tea, but if there is a port, it means they did it without signing any NDAs (they don't ever sign them). So the information required to do the port is freely available, implying that you'll probably also have good Linux support.
I've noticed that a lot of mobile hardware sellers will sell you a Linux SDK, but they charge a disgusting amount of money ($900 or so).
But if you go with the Zaurus (commodity HW), you've got all your free tools (well supported too). I wouldn't even think of using Windows anything for any hobbyist stuff -- it costs money, and you strengthen MS's position without getting paid for it.
What do the libertarians/EFF have to say about this?
It seems against libertarian principles to require anything of VOIP providers (other than that they not defraud people).
E.g. they didn't say it had 911 service. Nor did they say it would work in a blackout.
Yet it is hard to argue with (cue violins) dead babies.
Bill Gates says Apple will lose out. If Apple screws up once and Microsoft pounces (and wipes them out in this market), then yes, Gates is correct.
The only way for Apple to survive is to keep on holding Microsoft at bay. Microsoft is like a killer robot, pursuing them forever, until they mess up.
Charles Ferguson, in his book goes into this. Charles sold his company to Microsoft, figuring he didn't have a chance competing with them, and that Netscape, the other suitor, had their heads up their asses (and no future competing with Microsoft).
I heard that there are some fundamental problems applying otherwise useful research at MS. The problems have to do with how screwed up the codebase for Office and similar programs is.
Basically, they are stuck and not able to do anything powerfully transformative. They only want to improve their franchise, so the research just sits there, not getting applied.
E.g. your researcher comes up with a great program analysis tool -- but it just can't work on a program with a 5,000 line long main().
So you tell him to try it again, this time with feeling.
Political circumstances (fiefdoms) prevent the researcher from fixing the original code, even if he was so motivated.
Did you notice that Google appeared on Gates's radar screen when he read their job ads, and saw they were looking for the same sorts of folks as him? That told him they were looking to compete.
I first saw Paul Graham mention this -- he would read the job ads of his competitors. If he saw C++, Oracle, etc. then he knew the people didn't matter (and wouldn't matter).
If he saw Perl, Python, etc. he took notice. [He never saw Common Lisp, of course]
Graham's said that no matter what Mar-Com (marketing communications) bozos have to say, the job ads tell the real story.
Exactly -- management didn't really "get" GPL. Had they understood anything at all about it, it would have been "oh, so they are total chumps. .... NEXT!
It was a totally disgusting environment.
I worked at a ruthless company. Part of the culture was to get results as fast as possible and completely ignore things like licenses, rules and laws, if it helped to make money.
We certainly would have violated the GPL in a second, given that one couldn't really prove damage to the other party (aging idealist hippies with beards who were naive enough to give away software with a silly "license").
The ripoff of commercial software was driving me nuts though -- it seemed quite wrong, esp. given that we were raking in the dough and were not paying just because we could easily avoid it through technical measures.
However, part of the "culture" was that we were so busy that we were sloppy about the misdeeds. We wouldn't have had time to cover our tracks.
Such tools would have caught us, so I'm guessing such tools will lead to finding many similar violators.
When you are dealing with expensive hardware, or a cluster, buying more hardware is likely a lot more expensive than optimizing the software.
E.g. buy 500 faster CPUs? Buy some more CPUs? If the CPUs cost enough and take time to order, optimizing the software might be the easy way out.
The author's description implies the guy could have saved money if he'd used free software.
When I read this, I thought, why would someone who is smart enough to build a PVR waste money unnecessarily on software?
From RTFA, it appears that because the software is bundled, he didn't pay the $70. It was "free as in beer".
Cory Doctorow (Speaking to MSFT about DRM)
...
I speak from experience. Because I buy a new Powerbook every ten
months, and because I always order the new models the day they're
announced, I get a lot of lemons from Apple. That means that I
hit Apple's three-iTunes-authorized-computers limit pretty early
on and found myself unable to play the hundreds of dollars' worth
of iTunes songs I'd bought because one of my authorized machines
was a lemon that Apple had broken up for parts, one was in the
shop getting fixed by Apple, and one was my mom's computer, 3,000
miles away in Toronto.
If I had been a less good customer for Apple's hardware, I would have been fine. If I had been a less enthusiastic evangelist for Apple's products -- if I hadn't shown my mom how iTunes Music Store worked -- I would have been fine. If I hadn't bought so much iTunes music that burning it to CD and re-ripping it and re-keying all my metadata was too daunting a task to consider, I would have been fine.
As it was Apple rewarded my trust, evangelism and out-of-control spending by treating me like a crook and locking me out of my own music, at a time when my Powerbook was in the shop -- i.e., at a time when I was hardly disposed to feel charitable to Apple.
I'm an edge case here, but I'm a *leading edge* case. If Apple succeeds in its business plans, it will only be a matter of time until even average customers have upgraded enough hardware and bought enough music to end up where I am.
I wish they'd make this useful software available for OpenBSD users like myself.
I miss out on such good stuff.
A step in the right direction.
But it seems odd to me that if someone wants a one-trick secure browser solution, he'd use anything other than OpenBSD.
If you sit down and do the analysis (without regard to "religion" or fashion), and say, "I only need a secure browser," you'll likely pick a BSD and it will likely be either NetBSD (hw support) or OpenBSD (security).
I did a similar analysis, and came to this conclusion, after attempting to dispassionately evaluate the options.
...rights from statute only ...
..."So Civil Code countries don't have the concept of divine-enshrined or individual liberty."...
Unless you ignore the whole Declarations of the Rights of Man thing. The French go through constitutions every two weeks or so, and it's easier for them to just attach that particular piece of boilerplate instead of cut-and-paste all the time. It's only mentioned in the very first sentence of the (current) French Constitution, after all...
I was referring to the source of the rights (not whether or not the are inalienable or not). Please go back and read the French Constitution and the TDoRoM again, carefully. You'll see that although the rights are incorporated, the current constitution (article 34, as I mentioned), says they come from statute. TDoRoM lists some rights, but does't say the rights come from God. It just says they exist, and mentions God in passing.
Even if TDoRoM did say the rights come from God (which it doesn't), that would make Article 34 of the constitution nonsensical. You have to figure that the people who signed off on #34 wanted it that way.
Yeah, those godless commies!
The divine-enshrined nature of things merely ensures that the rights can't be taken away by statute. That's my point, not how religious or communist the French (or Continental Europeans in general) are. The secular nature of the French constitution allows them to take away rights many different way. E.g. a statue could make French rites contingent on whatever the UN declared them to be. Such is impossible in the US.
Alternatively, there are no similar invokations of the Declaration of Indepence codified in the United States Constitution. The US Constitution only points to itself as the "supreme law of the land" and constitutional amendments can be ratified that violate the spirit or even the letter of the Declaration of Independence, and the only way to fix it would be another amendment repealing it, or 3/4 of the state legislatures getting together and writing a new federal constitution entirely.
Indeed the Declaration of Independence is not part of the Constitution. That's not so important when it is clear where the rights come from, and people believe that they have the rights no matter what the government says. The people Continental Europe have the mindset that this week they have certain rights, and depending on what the EU or their government says next week, they have different rights. E.g. one week a political party is legal, the next week its banned. So this week you've got your TDoRoM rights, but maybe not next week.
Also, the TDoRoM doesn't even include the right to life. That omission was on purpose; they clearly knew about our Declaration of Independence. But anyway, it doesn't really matter; TDoRoM is a relic of the early part of the French Revolution. Those guys lost in the end to Napoleon, who got rid of the rights in his 1799 constitution. So apparently those rights are not so inalienable after all (and apparently, for the French, the right to life was never in there anyway, so who cares).
The fact that Napoleon took away the rights of TDoRoM makes me think that Article 34 really is correct -- the rights come from statute, not some power outside the control of government.
I mean, have you seen the Eighteenth Amendment?
Yes, I have.
I'd say though, that at least back then, people understood that there needed to be an amendment to take away alcohol, and an amendment to tax income.
These days, in contrast, people accept the government banning/taking things under the commerce clause, or propose taxing things or otherwise regulating things out of existence. E.g. a $10 tax per bullet, whose effect would be to destroy the 2nd Amendment.
(I just ranted in defense of the French... I feel so dirty...)
I am not anti-French per se. E.g. the Germans have a similarly unfree system.
A constitution says where the laws come from. It does not decide, but rather describes. Otherwise the constitution would not be well-founded.
The French one (see article 34) says that rights come from statue. The American says the rights belong to the people. Our tradition says the rights come from natural law (God), not statue.
In France, it is more simple -- rights come from statute, only. The French state doesn't get them from anywhere, so the state is supreme.
That's far more autocratic.
My point about States Rights is that since the end of the Civil War, the federal government has increasingly intruded on matters that were previously decided by states. Hence, state law matters less and less -- you can't see the effects of Lousiana law as clearly as you could before.
here is an example, from Quebec: a slip of the pen by Quebec lawmakers and your only hope is relief from the feds. If that happened in California, you'd argue that your rights were being taken away, by the state -- no limited for some good purpose, but removed. If the court agrees you're home free.
So Civil Code countries don't have the concept of divine-enshrined or individual liberty. In the US, people consider it their God-given right to associate as they wish, speak their mind and so on. If the government chose to take it away (constitutional amendment), many would argue that that was illegal according to natural law. This would be "extra-judicial", but entirely in keeping with the spirit of Anlgo American law. You can't make that argument if you believe in Civil Law -- if the government takes it away, then that's the law.
So people from civil code countries have a more compliant mentality. When the Germans took away the right for a merchant to cut his prices, people accepted it. Here, people would talk about freedom of contract (which the state may limit, with good reason -- but the right still exists). The mere fact that you can argue about whether the law is legal or not means that Americans are a lot less compliant.
There is no conspiracy theory here, merely an attempt to explain the attitudes that inform the French actions.
I lived in those places for many years. I know what I'm talking about.
The fact that the cops didn't require you to produce ID is imamterial -- they had the right to, and you would have been required to. That's what the law says.
Check this out: Original in german translated
The card is the property of the state.
You must carry it.
You must present it if asked.
A foreigner is subject to similar requirements. It happened to my boss. They detained him on the street for an hour to check his passport.
Napoleonic code is more autocratic than Common Law. The basic idea of Civil Law (Napoleonic) is that the state is the source of all rights (Rousseau's theory). Common Law, oppositely, holds that individuals have rights, and they choose to give up some to the state, for certain limited purposes.
Lousiana's laws and Quebec's are mitigated by the fact that they are not supreme (e.g. US/Canada with Common Law are in the picture) -- the decline of States Rights implies that more and more for Louisiana.
AFP, being used to those rules, is used to using the courts to shut down insolent upstarts like Yahoo! and Google.
Here's an English language link for you on the German department store tempest in a teapot
Here are quotes:
The German Retail Association, which sided with the court in the case, said short-term sales were unjustified because temporary changes in prices confuse consumers and are unfair because they force shoppers to interrupt their schedules and rush to stores to take advantage of price cuts.
Germans do need to carry ID. Here's a nice site in German (auto translation explaining that if you are over 16, you need to carry.
If cops ask, you must present it. The ID is the property of the state! And you need to register where you live with the police.
Simply put, you are incorrect.
Napoleonic code doesn't obtain here. But it explains why the French think and act the way they do.
Continental Europe has a legal code derived from the Napoleonic code.
It is particularly irrational and inflexible, and nowhere near as abstract as English Common Law.
E.g. people in Continental Europe need to carry ID papers with them when in public. Cops can stop you and interrogate you -- because. The law says you are free, but you better carry ID. And watch your mouth (you might break the law).
Thanks Napoleon!
So it is entirely "reasonable", to the mind of a Continental European, that a respectable media company like AFP can sue to stop some upstart from doing something novel and innovative, just because technology allows it -- the law is inherently pro-status quo.
In Germany, a British retailer dared to have a sale. This was deemed illegal -- the state argued (on behalf of the German retailers) that the temporary nature of the sale would COMPEL Germans to buy more stuff. Really it was just that German retailers can't compete with Anglo-retailer Kung Fu, and the state was happy to do their bidding, with the result that the German consumer lost out.