I mean, the main assets are GPL. Aside from the value of existing contracts, goodwill of the Mandrake name, and maybe some boxen, the company could just do this:
1. Go out of business, 2. Apologise to schmucks holding bag, 3. Start new Mandrake business and pick up where they left off...
It would probably be cheaper than 4 million euros!
is to make a book that can be recycled indefinitely, unlike paper, which can only make it one or two times through the recycling process. See the Slashdot review of the book that started this idea: Cradle to Cradle.
The key to so much of this is: what goes in, comes out. Right now the issue is stretched between two opposing poles:
Company: Cut costs as much as possible People Affected: Be responsible from Cradle to Grave.
The best new approach I've seen to this conundrum is in the book Cradle to Cradle, which says that it's a design problem: Don't put it in if you don't want it back out. Instead, design it without toxic materials in the first place. This is a good approach to many different things. It remains to be seen if it can be done for computing, however...
Palladium and LeGrande will probably be embraced by businesses -- media, healthcare, banking -- anywhere that businesses need to ensure that media or data needs to be vaulted. Cisco is pushing it too -- they want to sell the equipment to stream video on demand. In effect, all three are seeking to building a data citadel within the Internet.
As no one else that I'm aware of is doing this in an open source fashion, they'll end up with a defacto monopoly in a protection racket. At that time, the argument could be made that Microsoft used its monopoly power to create another monopoly.
Any chance of using that against them to open up Palladium?
No, I'm not an evil genius -- just a paranoid engineer (having done way too much security work). This guy is an Evil Genius(tm). I especially like the Kindergarten Death Squad and the argon-filled mylar balloon stunts...
On Flying: It's not the fall I'm concerned about -- it's the impact.
On Worms: It's not the distribution method I'm concerned about -- it's the impact.
Oh sure, this method is similar to the old nuclear war strategy -- "time on target" -- where the missiles were all set to arrive at their targets at the same time, increasing the surprise factor and decreasing the defensive options. But it's the bombs going off that really ruined your day.
After running plenty of all-nighters flushing out assorted virii from corporate nets, I've come to the conclusion that the worst infections are the ones that look like some other kind of problem. Imagine a worm that changes the IP address of random hosts to the gateway address, or is intelligent enough to worm its way around innocuously until it snags an admin account and can begin 'remote registry' operations, or changes the nameserver addresses to trojans that redirect shopping sites to credit card collection impersonation sites. That kind of stuff is the hard stuff to defend against, because you don't know it's happening until way after it happens.
Oh, sure, they don't have flashy David Bowie television commercials, etc., but they do a decent amount of marketing. The problem isn't marketing -- the problem is lack of developers.
A couple of years ago, Novell held a developer contest for the best product integrated with NDS. This was at the height of the dotcom boom. The best integrated application award went to a contextless login client extension -- something to make their file system client work better. This was the best showing?
Novell needs developers. They've recently been trying to fix this -- they purchased Silverstream Software to add Java development and business logic to their directory service. Their DirXML and Account Management products are expected to benefit the most from it. Hopefully someone will notice...
Being labelled a "slacker" by the "me generation" is such a crock of shit. Their only concern seems to be that they're not screwing me enough by getting me to work 80 hours a week to fund their fat salaries and Lexus payments. The current generation always seeks to undo the excesses of the previous generation. Maybe we actually want to spend some time with friends and family and "live life like we mean it."
Gen X has the highest contribution to their 401(k) of any generation -- why? Because instead of fixing social security, money is getting doled out in a tax cut to benefit the "me generation" so that we can fund 14 retired people when we're at 50. And we have the highest rate of vounteerism. Slacker, my ass.
In a recent presentation with John Chambers of Cisco, he claimed that streaming media on demand, and therefore, digital rights protection was necessary to grow the Internet into the next phase. Many other people have the idea that the computer and the television should merge before the Internet will "advance."
Others take the Sony approach: the Internet will advance when we can use it as a facilitator -- such as being able to store photos or video from handheld cameras to servers, or access it from cell phones and PDAs for messaging and Bluetooth-type functionality.
Are there other approaches that you've seen (or considered!) for utilization of the Internet that don't head down these two widely-touted avenues?
Name industries where ecological improvements...
on
Cradle to Cradle
·
· Score: 2
Here's an example at Milliken Carpet. If you read it, you get the sense that each area that prevents having to dispose of something saves money.
Now, when you take the meta of that, you start to get into the areas of "How much regulation is necessary?" and "What is the maximum negative economic impact..." Here are a few sets to consider: pollution and health care costs; global warming and loss of farmland via desertification; gasoline usage and the cost of the military; clearing of the rainforests and the loss of novel medications. Greens are focused on areas that don't concern a particular company's balance sheet, but go beyond that to "total costs" that are often ignored to make that balance sheet better.
I've been mulling over the GPL and BSD licenses for some time, trying to think of a way that businesses can make money while the community still benefits. (Isn't everybody?) So where does this come together?
Perhaps the scientists have the right idea. There's currently a strong leaning in the scientific community about the free release of journaled articles six months after publication. The journal gets to make money, but the research makes it into the public domain after a short time period.
Perhaps the approach that WINE can take would be for contributions to go GPL after a certain time period, say, six months or a year. A business can make money during that time, but as commercial systems become 'abandonware' after a period of time, the code can return to the community. Licensees could always choose to forego the time delay, publishing immediately.
What do others think? Is this a good balancing point? It just occurred to me that this is what ID has been doing with Doom and Quake.
There was a very insightful (and long) article that I came across on the Atlantic Monthly's site a while back. Called 'Was Democracy Just a Moment', its central point was that economic development and a strong middle class needs to develop in a country before democracy can succeed. The article predicts that democracy, were it to 'break out' today in China, would at the very least cause a split of the country:
"Under its authoritarian system China has dramatically improved the quality of life for hundreds of millions of its people. My point, hard as it may be for Americans to accept, is that Russia may be failing in part because it is a democracy and China may be succeeding in part because it is not. Having traveled through much of western China, where Muslim Turkic Uighurs (who despise the Chinese) often predominate, I find it hard to imagine a truly democratic China without at least a partial breakup of the country. Such a breakup would lead to chaos in western China, because the Uighurs are poorer and less educated than most Chinese and have a terrible historical record of governing themselves. Had the student demonstrations in 1989 in Tiananmen Square led to democracy, would the astoundingly high economic growth rates of the 1990s still obtain? I am not certain, because democracy in China would have ignited turmoil not just in the Muslim west of the country but elsewhere, too; order would have decreased but corruption would not have. The social and economic breakdowns under democratic rule in Albania and Bulgaria, where the tradition of pre-communist bourgeois life is weak or nonexistent (as in China), contrasted with more-successful democratic venues like Hungary and the Czech Republic, which have had well-established bourgeoisie, constitute further proof that our belief in democracy regardless of local conditions amounts to cultural hubris."
Heady stuff, and something that really made my head spin -- wasn't democracy good in all situations and all cases? The author would probably assert that censorship will continue to occur in China until a stable economy and strong middle class break open China to democracy, at which point it will end.
When SETI@Home first started, they were having quite a difficult time with people resubmitting completed work units and forged results in order to skew their group statistics. To keep things honest, they resend the same work unit to more than one system and compare the results.
This has to be a difficult balancing act for them; while they don't give details about the exact nature of the doublechecking (so that people don't try to bypass it), this has to be eating the bandwidth for them.
Maybe a better solution is not to increase bandwidth but to encrypt the data to prevent tampering?
To go along with your foot-powered laptop, you might want to check out the Freecharge windup generator due out for Motorola cellphones this quarter. It won a Time Product of the Year citation.
It's a low-impact desktop that runs on top of a window manager. While KDE and Gnome might be the 'nuclear-powered' GUI, they do sap a workstation's resources. (This is a common complaint about distros.)
If you've got a lower-powered workstation sitting around -- an old Pentium 133, for example -- you can put ROX on top of XFree and a window manager like Windowmaker to keep the impact light. This is also good if you're running a Linux box for a special-purpose (such as a firewall) and don't need all of the bells and whistles.
When working for a past employer who sells its merchandise through Wal-Mart, I was exposed to its methods.
As a retailer with Wal-Mart, your product has to maintain a 98% sell-through rate, or you don't sell through Wal-Mart anymore. (This, by the way, says something to me about the Mandrake distro, which still sells at Wal-Mart.) You're required to keep track of the inventory using Retail Link.
Wal-Mart piloted Retail Link across the Internet via VPN in 1995 using Sun's Sunscreen product, prior to the standards even being accepted -- they're a bleeding edge company. Wal-Mart is always keeping an eye on ways to streamline its operation and cut costs. You can bet they've already checked out Linux. If it saves them on operating margins, they'll be ahead of the curve.
Apple has always been a hardware company. They are more like Sony than Microsoft -- the sleek industrial design is what distinguishes their computers. Jobs tried licensing their OS previously, and much as Cringely says that releasing OS X for Intel wouldn't be like the Mac Clones debacle, it is. Apple revenues would plummet -- they make their money on the hardware side, not the software side.
If anything, I'd rather see Apple release OS X as a GUI that rides on top of Linux, and help the Linux world fight the good fight. New OSes just divide so that others can conquer, and users know this -- that's why new ones like BeOS don't sell.
Any large corporation builds a standard image and ghosts it down to workstations anyway. Most places don't want the end-user to get their hands on the original install media due to the support issues that arise.
...or at least 80, according to an article at New Scientist.
However, there could be a slight problem with inbreeding. From the article:
"The decrease in genetic variation is actually quite small and less than found in some successful small populations on Earth," he says. "It would not be a significant factor as long as the space travellers come home or interact with other humans at the end of the 200 year period."
User: My mouse doesn't have any buttons? How do I click?
Helpdesk: Lean left.
User: What, the buttons are in the seat now?
Helpdesk: No, lean the mouse left.
User: But how do I move it around then?
Helpdesk: Er...put it back.
User: What if I have to click and drag?
Helpdesk: Hang on, let me just open up a hardware service ticket.
Slashdot Mirror
I mean, the main assets are GPL. Aside from the value of existing contracts, goodwill of the Mandrake name, and maybe some boxen, the company could just do this:
1. Go out of business,
2. Apologise to schmucks holding bag,
3. Start new Mandrake business and pick up where they left off...
It would probably be cheaper than 4 million euros!
is to make a book that can be recycled indefinitely, unlike paper, which can only make it one or two times through the recycling process. See the Slashdot review of the book that started this idea: Cradle to Cradle.
The key to so much of this is: what goes in, comes out. Right now the issue is stretched between two opposing poles:
Company: Cut costs as much as possible
People Affected: Be responsible from Cradle to Grave.
The best new approach I've seen to this conundrum is in the book Cradle to Cradle, which says that it's a design problem: Don't put it in if you don't want it back out. Instead, design it without toxic materials in the first place. This is a good approach to many different things. It remains to be seen if it can be done for computing, however...
Speech is conveniently located midway between thought and action, where it often substitutes for both.
Ignore the noise.
Keep coding.
Keep releasing.
That's what will win the battle.
Palladium and LeGrande will probably be embraced by businesses -- media, healthcare, banking -- anywhere that businesses need to ensure that media or data needs to be vaulted. Cisco is pushing it too -- they want to sell the equipment to stream video on demand. In effect, all three are seeking to building a data citadel within the Internet.
As no one else that I'm aware of is doing this in an open source fashion, they'll end up with a defacto monopoly in a protection racket. At that time, the argument could be made that Microsoft used its monopoly power to create another monopoly.
Any chance of using that against them to open up Palladium?
No, I'm not an evil genius -- just a paranoid engineer (having done way too much security work). This guy is an Evil Genius(tm). I especially like the Kindergarten Death Squad and the argon-filled mylar balloon stunts...
On Flying: It's not the fall I'm concerned about -- it's the impact.
On Worms: It's not the distribution method I'm concerned about -- it's the impact.
Oh sure, this method is similar to the old nuclear war strategy -- "time on target" -- where the missiles were all set to arrive at their targets at the same time, increasing the surprise factor and decreasing the defensive options. But it's the bombs going off that really ruined your day.
After running plenty of all-nighters flushing out assorted virii from corporate nets, I've come to the conclusion that the worst infections are the ones that look like some other kind of problem. Imagine a worm that changes the IP address of random hosts to the gateway address, or is intelligent enough to worm its way around innocuously until it snags an admin account and can begin 'remote registry' operations, or changes the nameserver addresses to trojans that redirect shopping sites to credit card collection impersonation sites. That kind of stuff is the hard stuff to defend against, because you don't know it's happening until way after it happens.
Oh, sure, they don't have flashy David Bowie television commercials, etc., but they do a decent amount of marketing. The problem isn't marketing -- the problem is lack of developers.
A couple of years ago, Novell held a developer contest for the best product integrated with NDS. This was at the height of the dotcom boom. The best integrated application award went to a contextless login client extension -- something to make their file system client work better. This was the best showing?
Novell needs developers. They've recently been trying to fix this -- they purchased Silverstream Software to add Java development and business logic to their directory service. Their DirXML and Account Management products are expected to benefit the most from it. Hopefully someone will notice...
Being labelled a "slacker" by the "me generation" is such a crock of shit. Their only concern seems to be that they're not screwing me enough by getting me to work 80 hours a week to fund their fat salaries and Lexus payments. The current generation always seeks to undo the excesses of the previous generation. Maybe we actually want to spend some time with friends and family and "live life like we mean it."
Gen X has the highest contribution to their 401(k) of any generation -- why? Because instead of fixing social security, money is getting doled out in a tax cut to benefit the "me generation" so that we can fund 14 retired people when we're at 50. And we have the highest rate of vounteerism. Slacker, my ass.
In a recent presentation with John Chambers of Cisco, he claimed that streaming media on demand, and therefore, digital rights protection was necessary to grow the Internet into the next phase. Many other people have the idea that the computer and the television should merge before the Internet will "advance."
Others take the Sony approach: the Internet will advance when we can use it as a facilitator -- such as being able to store photos or video from handheld cameras to servers, or access it from cell phones and PDAs for messaging and Bluetooth-type functionality.
Are there other approaches that you've seen (or considered!) for utilization of the Internet that don't head down these two widely-touted avenues?
Here's an example at Milliken Carpet. If you read it, you get the sense that each area that prevents having to dispose of something saves money.
Now, when you take the meta of that, you start to get into the areas of "How much regulation is necessary?" and "What is the maximum negative economic impact..." Here are a few sets to consider: pollution and health care costs; global warming and loss of farmland via desertification; gasoline usage and the cost of the military; clearing of the rainforests and the loss of novel medications. Greens are focused on areas that don't concern a particular company's balance sheet, but go beyond that to "total costs" that are often ignored to make that balance sheet better.
So, if the Justice department is making deals with a known felon, does that make them an accessory to the crime?
Not trying to be a troll...hear me out.
I've been mulling over the GPL and BSD licenses for some time, trying to think of a way that businesses can make money while the community still benefits. (Isn't everybody?) So where does this come together?
Perhaps the scientists have the right idea. There's currently a strong leaning in the scientific community about the free release of journaled articles six months after publication. The journal gets to make money, but the research makes it into the public domain after a short time period.
Perhaps the approach that WINE can take would be for contributions to go GPL after a certain time period, say, six months or a year. A business can make money during that time, but as commercial systems become 'abandonware' after a period of time, the code can return to the community. Licensees could always choose to forego the time delay, publishing immediately.
What do others think? Is this a good balancing point? It just occurred to me that this is what ID has been doing with Doom and Quake.
There was a very insightful (and long) article that I came across on the Atlantic Monthly's site a while back. Called 'Was Democracy Just a Moment', its central point was that economic development and a strong middle class needs to develop in a country before democracy can succeed. The article predicts that democracy, were it to 'break out' today in China, would at the very least cause a split of the country:
"Under its authoritarian system China has dramatically improved the quality of life for hundreds of millions of its people. My point, hard as it may be for Americans to accept, is that Russia may be failing in part because it is a democracy and China may be succeeding in part because it is not. Having traveled through much of western China, where Muslim Turkic Uighurs (who despise the Chinese) often predominate, I find it hard to imagine a truly democratic China without at least a partial breakup of the country. Such a breakup would lead to chaos in western China, because the Uighurs are poorer and less educated than most Chinese and have a terrible historical record of governing themselves. Had the student demonstrations in 1989 in Tiananmen Square led to democracy, would the astoundingly high economic growth rates of the 1990s still obtain? I am not certain, because democracy in China would have ignited turmoil not just in the Muslim west of the country but elsewhere, too; order would have decreased but corruption would not have. The social and economic breakdowns under democratic rule in Albania and Bulgaria, where the tradition of pre-communist bourgeois life is weak or nonexistent (as in China), contrasted with more-successful democratic venues like Hungary and the Czech Republic, which have had well-established bourgeoisie, constitute further proof that our belief in democracy regardless of local conditions amounts to cultural hubris."
Heady stuff, and something that really made my head spin -- wasn't democracy good in all situations and all cases? The author would probably assert that censorship will continue to occur in China until a stable economy and strong middle class break open China to democracy, at which point it will end.
When SETI@Home first started, they were having quite a difficult time with people resubmitting completed work units and forged results in order to skew their group statistics. To keep things honest, they resend the same work unit to more than one system and compare the results.
This has to be a difficult balancing act for them; while they don't give details about the exact nature of the doublechecking (so that people don't try to bypass it), this has to be eating the bandwidth for them.
Maybe a better solution is not to increase bandwidth but to encrypt the data to prevent tampering?
Here's a quick overview of Freenet, if you need to get up to speed.
To go along with your foot-powered laptop, you might want to check out the Freecharge windup generator due out for Motorola cellphones this quarter. It won a Time Product of the Year citation.
It's a low-impact desktop that runs on top of a window manager. While KDE and Gnome might be the 'nuclear-powered' GUI, they do sap a workstation's resources. (This is a common complaint about distros.)
If you've got a lower-powered workstation sitting around -- an old Pentium 133, for example -- you can put ROX on top of XFree and a window manager like Windowmaker to keep the impact light. This is also good if you're running a Linux box for a special-purpose (such as a firewall) and don't need all of the bells and whistles.
There was an on Slashdot in December on running a 'Lo-Fat' desktop that talks a lot about this.
See the CNN story about the Sony SDR-3.
One has to wonder about the social consequences of:
"He predicts that humanoid robots will fill factory jobs by 2007. By 2015, robots will be able to take on almost any job in hospitals or homes."
Talk about a rich-poor gap. Sounds like the perfect backdrop for a Butlerian Jihad.
When working for a past employer who sells its merchandise through Wal-Mart, I was exposed to its methods.
As a retailer with Wal-Mart, your product has to maintain a 98% sell-through rate, or you don't sell through Wal-Mart anymore. (This, by the way, says something to me about the Mandrake distro, which still sells at Wal-Mart.) You're required to keep track of the inventory using Retail Link.
Wal-Mart piloted Retail Link across the Internet via VPN in 1995 using Sun's Sunscreen product, prior to the standards even being accepted -- they're a bleeding edge company. Wal-Mart is always keeping an eye on ways to streamline its operation and cut costs. You can bet they've already checked out Linux. If it saves them on operating margins, they'll be ahead of the curve.
Apple has always been a hardware company. They are more like Sony than Microsoft -- the sleek industrial design is what distinguishes their computers. Jobs tried licensing their OS previously, and much as Cringely says that releasing OS X for Intel wouldn't be like the Mac Clones debacle, it is. Apple revenues would plummet -- they make their money on the hardware side, not the software side.
If anything, I'd rather see Apple release OS X as a GUI that rides on top of Linux, and help the Linux world fight the good fight. New OSes just divide so that others can conquer, and users know this -- that's why new ones like BeOS don't sell.
Any large corporation builds a standard image and ghosts it down to workstations anyway. Most places don't want the end-user to get their hands on the original install media due to the support issues that arise.
...or at least 80, according to an article at New Scientist.
However, there could be a slight problem with inbreeding. From the article:
"The decrease in genetic variation is actually quite small and less than found in some successful small populations on Earth," he says. "It would not be a significant factor as long as the space travellers come home or interact with other humans at the end of the 200 year period."
User: My mouse doesn't have any buttons? How do I click?
Helpdesk: Lean left.
User: What, the buttons are in the seat now?
Helpdesk: No, lean the mouse left.
User: But how do I move it around then?
Helpdesk: Er...put it back.
User: What if I have to click and drag?
Helpdesk: Hang on, let me just open up a hardware service ticket.