You do know that WMV is just a container right? And that it is not inherently DRM-locked right? Sounds like your gripe is with the DRM and not with the use of WMV. A lot of people seem to be mixing the two up. WMV files can be encoded in a lot of different ways and with free and open-source tools. What is the problem beyond DRM?
DRM is an issue, but the underlying problem is vendor lock-in. Microsoft has already decided not to support Windows Media Player on the Mac. I won't assume malice here; I honestly think they just made a business decision. But that's the danger right there. When the vendor decides something isn't profitable any more, they no longer have any incentive to support a product, file format, what have you.
The BBC's interests are elsewhere. They need to operate in a cost-effective manner, true, but their ultimate responsibility is to promote and make accessible all things good about British culture. So even when Microsoft has long since moved on to bigger and better things than WMV, the BBC will still have a responsibility to make episodes of Brideshead Revisited and Fawlty Towers accessible to the public.
It's true that in theory third parties might be able to create more public-friendly player software or codec implementations within the WMV framework, but ultimately they will be at the mercy of Microsoft. It can change the specs arbitrarily, and effectively dictate how this format gets used. Again, I'm not necessarily assuming malice here, but Microsoft and other vendors have consistently demonstrated their willingness to force customers to upgrade for commercial reasons. Again, this gives them unnecessary leverage over the BBC's viewers, who have already paid for this service.
DRM is a worry, because this is one way that Microsoft could make the business case for continued support of a file format. If they knew that they would be paid every time someone watched a show, they might be convinced to support WMV for much longer than they might otherwise do.
But that's just one example. The bottom line is that cultural and business interests should never be closely tied, as they often work at cross-purposes to one another. The BBC's mandate is to ensure that its vast library of material remains accessible to the British public in perpetuity. MS' mandate is simply to profit this quarter, the next and the one after that, ad infinitum.
Open, vendor-neutral standards are more immune to the vagaries of business and the passage of time. This is something that's evident to the majority of people posting on this site, and there is some surprise that the BBC could have overlooked something so fundamental as this. Either that, or they've done a very poor job explaining what reasons compelled them to choose something other than the obvious course.
There are over 800 million Windows machines out there, that sounds like a pretty good target to shoot for.
It's a fine target to shoot for, if you're a business. But the BBC has another target, mandated by Act of Parliament: Their target is the people of the UK and, to a lesser extent, the Commonwealth and English-speaking peoples around the world. Whether or how this coincide with the number of WMV users is coincidental and not fundamentally relevant.
So if I sit in Britain & buy an NTSC TV & pay for the TV license, then BBC
should be forced to broadcast in NTSC also for me.
Uh, no. PAL is a standard format mandated by the relevant bodies. People are only asking that the BBC choose one standard, not that they support the standard that I arbitrarily decide to use tomorrow.
WMV is not encoded using any formally recognised and platform-neutral codec, and it's DRM-locked. Whatever its benefits, the BBC should know better than to place their customers at the disposal of a single commercial entity, and their social/historical legacy at the mercy of a corporate body whose sole reason for existence is profit.
First off, the Constitution can only be altered through a clearly defined Amendment process. It has not been Ammended. Thusly, the rights guaranteed in the Constitution are valid. Any lawyer or judge with any sense of decency shouldn't have trouble upholding basic Constitutional rights.
I think I'm beginning to see where the problem might be.... 8^)
Secondly, both the office of the President and Congress under many different administrations have failed to uphold the liberties the Constitution is supposed to protect. The failures lie both with the President and Congress. These should be brought to light, but not as a means of partisan politics, but rather as a means of upholding civil liberties.
The latter is not possible. Politics is partisan, by its very nature. The moment you oppose a policy, a statute or a platform, you find yourself on the outside looking in. Once entrenched, vested interests are not interested in being divested of them simply because someone else has a better idea. It's so much easier to throw mud than to actually address matters of substance that the political battle quickly descends into a shin-kicking, name-calling contest, rather than a sober discussion of the merits of a particular idea.
Politics is ugly, stupid, dishonest and ultimately boring. Partisanship is a fundamental element of the only means by which large numbers of people can be moved to act, let alone care. We don't have to like it, and we don't have to stop striving for better manifestations of popular government, but we would be blind to discard anyone's political message simply because it's partisan.
It mentions foreign travelers inbound to the US, not US citizens outbound elsewhere. US Citizens travelling abroad (or internally, or etc) are obviously not affected by this. Also, it's not as if we'd be the first to implement such a plan in either case.
Well, i think we can safely draw a distinction between high technology like medicine and superfluous personal gadgets like camera phones, iPods, etc. I believe we're talking more about the latter in this thread
-matthew
That distinction is actually a little less clear than you think. The biggest issues affecting the quality of life on this island are poor (i.e. no) health care and very low educational standards. We've been working with members of two villages to try to improve conditions, and in the course of this work identified communications as one of the key criteria in enabling improvements in basic services. Those very devices that seem so superfluous in North America and Europe can actually save lives here.
Let me put it this way: That camera phone that's nothing but a toy for some can be used to save lives by allowing doctors to make remote diagnoses. An iPod can be used to store and easily transport multimedia files in areas where laptops just can't survive.
I'm not contending that this thread hasn't been about people's silly and time-wasting toys; rather I'm trying to put those toys into a broader context so that we can better understand just what technology means to humanity, and to try to save an otherwise useless thread from utter triviality. I'm sorry if you find that a distraction
Exactly. Without a whole bunch of super-modern technology, I'd be dead by now anyway, and I bet a lot of us can say the same. The ship has sailed -- may as well enjoy the trip!
What you say is quite true. I've been living in a developing country where there's little or no technology in the rural areas, and I too would be dead already if not for modern medicine. It's amazing what a little infection can do when it goes untreated.
That said, a tech-free lifestyle is extremely healthy, if you can survive it. As evidence, here is a photo of a man in his late fifties or early sixties, who has lived his entire life without any automation whatsoever. While I'm sure most of us want a physique like that, I don't know how many would be willing to pay the price....
I was writing geographically-based search functions (in a non-web context) in 1998. They were just another feature of the search applications we wrote. The products I was supporting had been in use since 1994.
Their plan? They know the power of open-source software. They know how well it works together, and with proprietary software (I think you can even use a Samba server to be a PDC in a Windows domain). They just want to keep people using their software in some form, rather than not at all.
You were doing great until that last sentence. Microsoft wants everyone to use Microsoft software, everywhere and all the time. This latest round of manoeuvres on the patent front is simply one aspect of a concerted attempt to de-commodify software, standards and protocols.
This is not news. We've known since the Halloween Documents first appeared in 1998 that they might do this:
"OSS projects have been able to gain a foothold in many server applications because of the wide utility of highly commoditized, simple protocols. By extending these protocols and developing new protocols, we can deny OSS projects entry into the market."
Protocols are by their nature immune to copyright protection, but not to patents. It seems clear that Microsoft sees patents as a necessary weapon in their fight against open standards. I think they're right. Software patents are anathema to open standards, and that's why software patents have to be stopped.
For my part I find it a little disturbing that people who've been in the FOSS game for this long should so easily forget this. Microsoft's take on the patent issue seems to be that they're big enough to cope with the madness of patent litigation. They'll take some hits in the short term, but ultimately, they'll end up holding enough of the patent pie that they'll be unassailable.
FOSS, however, suffers far more than Microsoft ever could. Even today, the presence of sharks in the patent waters might be enough to stop the next Linus Torvalds from sitting down and writing the Next Big Thing, or perhaps to convince the next Richard Stallman that the battle is already lost. The more they drive developers into the embrace of large corporations, the more they can influence - if not dictate - the directions software development takes.
In any case, are you trying to tell me that you seriously think no body told those guys they were fighting a lost cause. I'll take that bet.
Actually, I meant to suggest that anyone who suggested to Gandhi et alia that they should sit down and shut up would have sooner or later come to regret those words.
But that's not what I actually wrote. So: Good point, but no bet. 8^)
The whole patent rant is an assumed thing here on/. The whole list of possible solutions or fixes to the patent system has also been beaten to death, and requires no addressing. We don't need to name companies which use immoral tactics, we all know the names. We don't need to cry about all of the projects which have been destroyed. We all know it's commonplace and might as well get used to it.
All I can say in reply is that I hope nobody ever tried to tell that to Ghandi, Martin Luther King or Nelson Mandela.
The fact that an injustice persists, and that the abuses remain consistent in terms of action and actors is newsworthy. Talking about it until everyone gets sick of it is a valid tactic.
Sometimes the only way to invade the fortress is by chipping away at the walls inch by bloody inch. It's boring, painful and creates no heroes right up until the walls finally do come down.
Whenever somebody invokes the "spirit of the GPL", that's usually because the GPL doesn't actually say what somebody wants it to say, typically over the use of the word "free".
And you've missed the meaning of the word 'spirit'.
The GPL is not an end in itself. It is the mainstay of an attempt to protect the Four Freedoms:
"Free software is a matter of the users' freedom to run, copy, distribute, study, change and improve the software."
(Emphasis mine.)
Collectively, they represent what many people call the spirit of the GPL. Admittedly, that's a bit of a back-asswards expression, but it'll do.
Novell and Microsoft undoubtedly have undermined the Four Freedoms through their patent indemnification tapdance. Likewise, the agreement to share information preferentially undermines the Four Freedoms as well. The patent agreement subverts the freedom to copy and distribute software, and preferential distribution of documentation subverts the freedom to study the software, which is a necessary precursor to the other three.
The first is well known, Windows is hundreds of times more popular....
You mis-spelled predictable. The issue isn't that more people use Windows; the issue is that the same exploit reliably works on vast numbers of Windows machines. It's not the popularity, it's the monoculture, combined with a broken design that is trivially easy to exploit. Another example of monoculture and utter lack of security combining to create havoc is the Morris Worm of 1988. Happily, *nix systems have moved on since then.
Secondly is a much smarter reason. Who uses these operating systems. Average windows user, knows nothing about PCs, more than willing to go to dodgy websites, doesn't notice when things are strange, hell most of them don't even update windows with the security patches and as a result they are a really nice target. Now linux users, they know what they're doing, they're either programmers/hackers etc. or they are using for very specific tasks- these people know what's going on, update their system and sweep for bugs and notice things.
Sorry to rain on your parade, but that's utter bollocks. I have empirical proof of this, from having installed and run numerous Linux-only computer resource centres for first-time computer users. The users are mostly under- or uneducated youth from a developing country, who love nothing more than to click anything that flashes or shines. The number of people who have used these centres is in the thousands, so it's statistically significant. We've just opened another centre that uses only Mac Minis.
So why, pray tell, is the total number of malware-infected machines a big fat zero? It's not the administration. The staff are taken from among the youth themselves. In most cases, they have no prior experience with IT. They're simply more interested in it. It's not user habits; the youth do wander regularly onto malware-infested sites.
The bottom line is that Windows gets regularly and predictably infested with malware because it's so easy to do, and the 'rewards' are so great.
Novell is an incredibly shrewd company. Over the years they have screwed MS out of almost a billion dollars in the form of out of court settlements.
The bulk of this billion dollars you talk about derives from the breach of contract lawsuit between Novell and Microsoft concerning their 'collaboration' on directory services. Microsoft effectively built Active Directory on what they learned from Novell Directory Services. A few years later on, we see Microsoft's implementation everywhere and Novell effectively dead in an industry sector they used to dominate utterly.
Novell lost billions and nearly died because MS effectively stole[*] directory services from them. I would not call the loss of your position in the market and billions in revenue 'shrewd'. I would use another word[**] that sounds almost the same.
[*] Yes, 'stole'. There's really no other way to describe signing NDAs and non-competition agreements, sitting your developers down with Novell's to pore over the sources, then heading back to the mother ship to implement your own version based on what you've learned and a few months later announcing a product identical to NDS. Along with the OS/2 - Windows debacle, this is one of the dirty tricks that gave Microsoft the dominance it has today.
Stallman needs to communicate with people via third parties for exactly the same reason that Darth Vader ended up needing to wear the black suit; the outer appearance needs to be made at least vaguely palatable, because the genuine, internal reality is in fact truly monstrous.
"Monstrous?" Who the hell modded this scurrilous piece of character assassination Insightful? The only thing that prevents it from being outright libelous is that it consists of nothing but empty venting.
I've seen Stallman speak in public. I've read a great deal of his writing. 'Monstrous' is a characterisation so wildly, hilariously wrong that I think parent deserves some kind of fiction award. Unfortunately, this being slashdot, he gets a ride on the karma roller-coaster instead.
Seriously, though: Mods, this is ad hominem attack of the purest sort. It depicts a prominent member of the Geek community in a light that bears not even a passing resemblance to reality while making no attempt whatsoever to debate the topic, which, unless I've forgotten, is supposed to be Stallman's pronouncements on the implication of this deal. Pronouncements which have since been proven to be 100% spot on.
NORTEL bought Bay Networks that year - most of the new network infrastructure was barely a year old. And all of it was ripped out and replaced with Bay Networks gear in short order. The worst part was the gear they replaced it with wasn't up to the Fore level for the backbone - that took another year or two as I recall for the Bay stuff to equal it.
Ah, the wisdom of Nortel. Those were heady days. 8^)
This was hardly the worst part of the Bay Networks acquisition (at the time, one of the largest corporate buy-outs ever). Nortel also scrapped its latest multi-gigabit switch in favour of Bay's. They had spent about USD 50 million developing it, and right before it got to production, they simply turfed it. This in spite of the fact that the Nortel switch out-performed the Bay switch by almost 30%.
That was a year or two before they wrote off USD 15 BILLION in losses. Now how could that have come about?
it's rediculous to suggest such a practise will be accepted by the masses, thats my point.
Your point draws exactly the opposite conclusion to that of the GP, who says:
And only one person has to fuck around, come up with a fix, submit it upstream and get it merged for everyone else to have their problem solved.
[emphasis mine]
FOSS has worked this way from day 1. And it continues not only to work, but to prove itself superior in many ways to proprietary software approaches. It particularly excels at dealing with software quality. In FOSS, code quality is one of the core metrics[*] of the value of a project, whereas security, debugging and testing are dealt with as externalities (i.e. cost centres to be minimised) by many proprietary software makers. Drivers are a perfect place to make significant investments in FOSS, because then hardware vendors won't be stuck owning the entire problem, and innovative uses of their products will allow them to sell into niches that they never could have afforded before.
---- [*] This is not to say that all FOSS software is quality software. Just like everything else in the world, 95% of it is crap. But the best FOSS software is very high quality indeed in terms of stability, resource usage and suitability to the task. ----
Is Linux ready for the desktop? In managed environments, the answer is an emphatic yes. Ease of administration is many times greater under Linux than under the other offerings, and this means that in-house support and developers can focus on making things better rather than simply fighting fires. A number of organisations have discovered this, and more will do so in the months and years to come. I think time will show that document formats are not nearly the bugbear that people currently think them to be.
Is Linux ready for the desktop at home? It's ready in potentio, but it will take time for vendors to work out how to package it on new machines. This will be a tough slog, not for technical reasons, but because Microsoft will do its very best to ensure that they have every incentive not to move from a Windows-only sales model. Having open source drivers provides one more bit of leverage against this inertia.
The funniest thing is that the paper is titled ""A Developers Bill of Rights: What Open Source Developers Want in a Software License."
Yes, Microsoft is proposing a Bill of Rights, for open source developers! Can you believe that?
Okay, I will never - ever - again accuse them of lacking a sense of humour.
See, that's what's missing in the arena of world domination: a bit of drollery. I mean, if an power-hungry megalomaniac can't let his hair down from time to time, where's the point in it?
All of that new NSA equipment would have to be re-worked. I doubt that the taxpayers would approve.
I am posting in this thread because I'm fresh out of mod points... But even if I weren't, there isn't any "+1, Deftly Ironic" moderation or I'd set you up with one of those...
It was removed because people kept using it when they should have chosen the "+1, Biting Satire" option instead.
(For reference, this post should be modded "+1, Deadpan".)
We all want cheaper hardware, but is flooding developing nations with $100 electronic equipment environmentally sound?
Let's consider the alternatives:
It is many times more environmentally sound than flooding developing nations with the current crop of laptops, desktops or worse yet, with used computer equipment. OLPC computers are more robust, use less power and require fewer resources in their manufacture. They represent less waste and are better sealed (and therefore more easily disposed of) than any current alternative.
It is many times less environmentally sound than giving absolutely nothing to developing nations. While this might momentarily seem the more attractive course, its effect in the longer term would be less than desirable. Whatever your beliefs about the Social Contract, human rights and the equality of man, it's better to be known as someone who gave a hand than to be known as someone who left his brother to die. Because when - not if - the shoe is on the other foot, you want to be sure it's not going to kick you in the teeth.
I find it hard to believe that Intel is trying to undermine the OLPC project in this way.
Who do you think is funding OLPC News, a 'concern troll' website that hides its affiliation behind the thinnest veneer? The site's main producer (and owner of the domain) is a guy named Wayan Vota. This Wayan Vota is also the head of Geekcorps, a USAID-funded semi-government agency that does IT-related development work. Wayan Vota is also tied in closely to HP and Intel's efforts, sitting on Intel's development committee, and helping to coordinate the Classmate PC inititative.
But you'd never know that from the OLPC News site. Wayan never once discloses this glaring conflict of interest, nor does he anywhere (that I've found) acknowledge that he might have a stake in the game as anything other than a concerned observer.
Rest assured, Intel is doing the old Fox 'News' routine on OLPC. I personally find that behaviour despicable, and since this came to light, I've dropped all support of Geekcorps, whom I used to promote quite actively in Development circles.
When you say, 'he', I'm assuming that you mean Negroponte.
I'd say it's at least as much about his ego than actually helping kids. He doesn't just want the kids helped, he also wants everyone coming an patting HIM on the back for it and telling him what a great guy he is.
You know what? I don't care. Because the plain fact is that he's doing it right. I've been working for almost four years now in ICT in the developing world, and OLPC appropriately answers just about every significant challenge raised in terms of information and communication in the developing world.
This is the silliest kind of ad hominem attack. He's vain? So what? What exactly should I do with this knowledge? Should I stop supporting OLPC? Support Intel, because Intel is *choke* more humble?! Go ahead and use the OLPC, but spit whenever I say his name? Please inform me how this 'insight' of yours is in any way useful to the discussion.
Guess what? I don't care whether this guy's pimped out brighter than Huggy Bear or doing a 'Developers!' tango with Ballmer. I don't care if he preens like a peacock and can't finish a sentence without using the word 'I'. I don't care if he makes me kiss his ring, for crying out loud. All I know is that there will soon be 5 million more laptops than there were, and they're all for the people I care about most.
Don't forget, having copyright in the first place causes a strain on society. IP is not a natural right.
That assertion is false in many cultures. While I am a committed believer in the value of community and of sharing ideas and information, I think it's important to recognise that what we're proposing is actually counterintuitive to many people.
I'm currently working in a developing country where indigenous people are in the majority, and their culture and customs are very much alive. Encouraging the free and open exchange of ideas is a difficult task - probably the single biggest hurdle I face here. A local friend of mine, when he introduces me to others, goes to great lengths to explain that I don't charge for my advice and ideas, that I just give it away. Then I get to explain why I do this. I've spoken with a large number of village chiefs and various other important people, and to most of them, this behaviour is unusual.
There are certain dances, carving styles, herbal medicines, rites and rituals that have been the exclusive property of families for untold generations. The national cultural centre has to sign agreements explicitly ensuring payment for any use of certain images and recordings before they are allowed to store them for posterity.
When we set up the local IT community of interest, the same issue quickly came out. Numerous professionals had more or less guaranteed their job security by virtue of being the only one who knew about particular applications and technologies. Now here were some interlopers who proposed to share everything, to put everything on a wiki that anyone could add to! The idea was, needless to say, welcomed by a lot of the up-and-coming crowd, but many of the older, established professionals have looked askance at this process.
Rest assured, it's a perfectly natural human attribute to say, 'It's my idea, I deserve to benefit from it.' To share openly and without thought of direct recompense is a revolutionary idea in human society. It's an idea whose time has come, and which, I believe, will be necessary to propel human learning to the next level (what Pratchett calls 'extelligence'), but it is, as far as I can tell, a new one. It's only natural for the establishment to question it, in the same way that in the past the nobility assumed it was their God-given right to own all the land and put those who believed in the equality of man to the sword.
Slashdot Mirror
So start with Cheney. Move on to Gonzales. Repeat as necessary.
Heck, leave Bush alone for all I care. He's not driving this bus, he's just the guy with the hat.
Impeachment: It's not just for presidents.
DRM is an issue, but the underlying problem is vendor lock-in. Microsoft has already decided not to support Windows Media Player on the Mac. I won't assume malice here; I honestly think they just made a business decision. But that's the danger right there. When the vendor decides something isn't profitable any more, they no longer have any incentive to support a product, file format, what have you.
The BBC's interests are elsewhere. They need to operate in a cost-effective manner, true, but their ultimate responsibility is to promote and make accessible all things good about British culture. So even when Microsoft has long since moved on to bigger and better things than WMV, the BBC will still have a responsibility to make episodes of Brideshead Revisited and Fawlty Towers accessible to the public.
It's true that in theory third parties might be able to create more public-friendly player software or codec implementations within the WMV framework, but ultimately they will be at the mercy of Microsoft. It can change the specs arbitrarily, and effectively dictate how this format gets used. Again, I'm not necessarily assuming malice here, but Microsoft and other vendors have consistently demonstrated their willingness to force customers to upgrade for commercial reasons. Again, this gives them unnecessary leverage over the BBC's viewers, who have already paid for this service.
DRM is a worry, because this is one way that Microsoft could make the business case for continued support of a file format. If they knew that they would be paid every time someone watched a show, they might be convinced to support WMV for much longer than they might otherwise do.
But that's just one example. The bottom line is that cultural and business interests should never be closely tied, as they often work at cross-purposes to one another. The BBC's mandate is to ensure that its vast library of material remains accessible to the British public in perpetuity. MS' mandate is simply to profit this quarter, the next and the one after that, ad infinitum.
Open, vendor-neutral standards are more immune to the vagaries of business and the passage of time. This is something that's evident to the majority of people posting on this site, and there is some surprise that the BBC could have overlooked something so fundamental as this. Either that, or they've done a very poor job explaining what reasons compelled them to choose something other than the obvious course.
It's a fine target to shoot for, if you're a business. But the BBC has another target, mandated by Act of Parliament: Their target is the people of the UK and, to a lesser extent, the Commonwealth and English-speaking peoples around the world. Whether or how this coincide with the number of WMV users is coincidental and not fundamentally relevant.
should be forced to broadcast in NTSC also for me.
Uh, no. PAL is a standard format mandated by the relevant bodies. People are only asking that the BBC choose one standard, not that they support the standard that I arbitrarily decide to use tomorrow.
WMV is not encoded using any formally recognised and platform-neutral codec, and it's DRM-locked. Whatever its benefits, the BBC should know better than to place their customers at the disposal of a single commercial entity, and their social/historical legacy at the mercy of a corporate body whose sole reason for existence is profit.
I think I'm beginning to see where the problem might be.... 8^)
The latter is not possible. Politics is partisan, by its very nature. The moment you oppose a policy, a statute or a platform, you find yourself on the outside looking in. Once entrenched, vested interests are not interested in being divested of them simply because someone else has a better idea. It's so much easier to throw mud than to actually address matters of substance that the political battle quickly descends into a shin-kicking, name-calling contest, rather than a sober discussion of the merits of a particular idea.
Politics is ugly, stupid, dishonest and ultimately boring. Partisanship is a fundamental element of the only means by which large numbers of people can be moved to act, let alone care. We don't have to like it, and we don't have to stop striving for better manifestations of popular government, but we would be blind to discard anyone's political message simply because it's partisan.
Of course it's partisan! But is it any good?
Oh! Foreigners! Well, that's all right, then!
I guess we won't be needing the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, then. Silly thing says all humans are created equal. And Article 13, the part about freedom of movement, is clearly a quaint antique, a relic of a bygone era when Americans actually cared about others.
-matthew
That distinction is actually a little less clear than you think. The biggest issues affecting the quality of life on this island are poor (i.e. no) health care and very low educational standards. We've been working with members of two villages to try to improve conditions, and in the course of this work identified communications as one of the key criteria in enabling improvements in basic services. Those very devices that seem so superfluous in North America and Europe can actually save lives here.
Let me put it this way: That camera phone that's nothing but a toy for some can be used to save lives by allowing doctors to make remote diagnoses. An iPod can be used to store and easily transport multimedia files in areas where laptops just can't survive.
I'm not contending that this thread hasn't been about people's silly and time-wasting toys; rather I'm trying to put those toys into a broader context so that we can better understand just what technology means to humanity, and to try to save an otherwise useless thread from utter triviality. I'm sorry if you find that a distraction
What you say is quite true. I've been living in a developing country where there's little or no technology in the rural areas, and I too would be dead already if not for modern medicine. It's amazing what a little infection can do when it goes untreated.
That said, a tech-free lifestyle is extremely healthy, if you can survive it. As evidence, here is a photo of a man in his late fifties or early sixties, who has lived his entire life without any automation whatsoever. While I'm sure most of us want a physique like that, I don't know how many would be willing to pay the price....
Really obvious. Blindingly, mind-numbingly, stupefactifyingly obvious.
I was writing geographically-based search functions (in a non-web context) in 1998. They were just another feature of the search applications we wrote. The products I was supporting had been in use since 1994.
You were doing great until that last sentence. Microsoft wants everyone to use Microsoft software, everywhere and all the time. This latest round of manoeuvres on the patent front is simply one aspect of a concerted attempt to de-commodify software, standards and protocols.
This is not news. We've known since the Halloween Documents first appeared in 1998 that they might do this:
Protocols are by their nature immune to copyright protection, but not to patents. It seems clear that Microsoft sees patents as a necessary weapon in their fight against open standards. I think they're right. Software patents are anathema to open standards, and that's why software patents have to be stopped.
For my part I find it a little disturbing that people who've been in the FOSS game for this long should so easily forget this. Microsoft's take on the patent issue seems to be that they're big enough to cope with the madness of patent litigation. They'll take some hits in the short term, but ultimately, they'll end up holding enough of the patent pie that they'll be unassailable.
FOSS, however, suffers far more than Microsoft ever could. Even today, the presence of sharks in the patent waters might be enough to stop the next Linus Torvalds from sitting down and writing the Next Big Thing, or perhaps to convince the next Richard Stallman that the battle is already lost. The more they drive developers into the embrace of large corporations, the more they can influence - if not dictate - the directions software development takes.
Your cheer was incomplete. I've finished it for you below.
"Give me an I! Give me an N!"Give me a billion dollars a month or Steve will fucking crush you!"
Actually, I meant to suggest that anyone who suggested to Gandhi et alia that they should sit down and shut up would have sooner or later come to regret those words.
But that's not what I actually wrote. So: Good point, but no bet. 8^)
All I can say in reply is that I hope nobody ever tried to tell that to Ghandi, Martin Luther King or Nelson Mandela.
The fact that an injustice persists, and that the abuses remain consistent in terms of action and actors is newsworthy. Talking about it until everyone gets sick of it is a valid tactic.
Sometimes the only way to invade the fortress is by chipping away at the walls inch by bloody inch. It's boring, painful and creates no heroes right up until the walls finally do come down.
Nonsense! Everything you need to know is in the RAID 5 song:
(My friend Rich actually came up with this. I like him too much to slashdot him, though.)
And you've missed the meaning of the word 'spirit'.
The GPL is not an end in itself. It is the mainstay of an attempt to protect the Four Freedoms:
(Emphasis mine.)
Collectively, they represent what many people call the spirit of the GPL. Admittedly, that's a bit of a back-asswards expression, but it'll do.
Novell and Microsoft undoubtedly have undermined the Four Freedoms through their patent indemnification tapdance. Likewise, the agreement to share information preferentially undermines the Four Freedoms as well. The patent agreement subverts the freedom to copy and distribute software, and preferential distribution of documentation subverts the freedom to study the software, which is a necessary precursor to the other three.
You mis-spelled predictable. The issue isn't that more people use Windows; the issue is that the same exploit reliably works on vast numbers of Windows machines. It's not the popularity, it's the monoculture, combined with a broken design that is trivially easy to exploit. Another example of monoculture and utter lack of security combining to create havoc is the Morris Worm of 1988. Happily, *nix systems have moved on since then.
Sorry to rain on your parade, but that's utter bollocks. I have empirical proof of this, from having installed and run numerous Linux-only computer resource centres for first-time computer users. The users are mostly under- or uneducated youth from a developing country, who love nothing more than to click anything that flashes or shines. The number of people who have used these centres is in the thousands, so it's statistically significant. We've just opened another centre that uses only Mac Minis.
So why, pray tell, is the total number of malware-infected machines a big fat zero? It's not the administration. The staff are taken from among the youth themselves. In most cases, they have no prior experience with IT. They're simply more interested in it. It's not user habits; the youth do wander regularly onto malware-infested sites.
The bottom line is that Windows gets regularly and predictably infested with malware because it's so easy to do, and the 'rewards' are so great.
The bulk of this billion dollars you talk about derives from the breach of contract lawsuit between Novell and Microsoft concerning their 'collaboration' on directory services. Microsoft effectively built Active Directory on what they learned from Novell Directory Services. A few years later on, we see Microsoft's implementation everywhere and Novell effectively dead in an industry sector they used to dominate utterly.
Novell lost billions and nearly died because MS effectively stole[*] directory services from them. I would not call the loss of your position in the market and billions in revenue 'shrewd'. I would use another word[**] that sounds almost the same.
[*] Yes, 'stole'. There's really no other way to describe signing NDAs and non-competition agreements, sitting your developers down with Novell's to pore over the sources, then heading back to the mother ship to implement your own version based on what you've learned and a few months later announcing a product identical to NDS. Along with the OS/2 - Windows debacle, this is one of the dirty tricks that gave Microsoft the dominance it has today.
[**] Screwed. Sheesh, you had to ask?
"Monstrous?" Who the hell modded this scurrilous piece of character assassination Insightful? The only thing that prevents it from being outright libelous is that it consists of nothing but empty venting.
I've seen Stallman speak in public. I've read a great deal of his writing. 'Monstrous' is a characterisation so wildly, hilariously wrong that I think parent deserves some kind of fiction award. Unfortunately, this being slashdot, he gets a ride on the karma roller-coaster instead.
Seriously, though: Mods, this is ad hominem attack of the purest sort. It depicts a prominent member of the Geek community in a light that bears not even a passing resemblance to reality while making no attempt whatsoever to debate the topic, which, unless I've forgotten, is supposed to be Stallman's pronouncements on the implication of this deal. Pronouncements which have since been proven to be 100% spot on.
Ah, the wisdom of Nortel. Those were heady days. 8^)
This was hardly the worst part of the Bay Networks acquisition (at the time, one of the largest corporate buy-outs ever). Nortel also scrapped its latest multi-gigabit switch in favour of Bay's. They had spent about USD 50 million developing it, and right before it got to production, they simply turfed it. This in spite of the fact that the Nortel switch out-performed the Bay switch by almost 30%.
That was a year or two before they wrote off USD 15 BILLION in losses. Now how could that have come about?
Your point draws exactly the opposite conclusion to that of the GP, who says:
[emphasis mine]
FOSS has worked this way from day 1. And it continues not only to work, but to prove itself superior in many ways to proprietary software approaches. It particularly excels at dealing with software quality. In FOSS, code quality is one of the core metrics[*] of the value of a project, whereas security, debugging and testing are dealt with as externalities (i.e. cost centres to be minimised) by many proprietary software makers. Drivers are a perfect place to make significant investments in FOSS, because then hardware vendors won't be stuck owning the entire problem, and innovative uses of their products will allow them to sell into niches that they never could have afforded before.
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[*] This is not to say that all FOSS software is quality software. Just like everything else in the world, 95% of it is crap. But the best FOSS software is very high quality indeed in terms of stability, resource usage and suitability to the task.
----
Is Linux ready for the desktop? In managed environments, the answer is an emphatic yes. Ease of administration is many times greater under Linux than under the other offerings, and this means that in-house support and developers can focus on making things better rather than simply fighting fires. A number of organisations have discovered this, and more will do so in the months and years to come. I think time will show that document formats are not nearly the bugbear that people currently think them to be.
Is Linux ready for the desktop at home? It's ready in potentio, but it will take time for vendors to work out how to package it on new machines. This will be a tough slog, not for technical reasons, but because Microsoft will do its very best to ensure that they have every incentive not to move from a Windows-only sales model. Having open source drivers provides one more bit of leverage against this inertia.
Yes, Microsoft is proposing a Bill of Rights, for open source developers! Can you believe that?
Okay, I will never - ever - again accuse them of lacking a sense of humour.
See, that's what's missing in the arena of world domination: a bit of drollery. I mean, if an power-hungry megalomaniac can't let his hair down from time to time, where's the point in it?
It was removed because people kept using it when they should have chosen the "+1, Biting Satire" option instead.
(For reference, this post should be modded "+1, Deadpan".)
Let's consider the alternatives:
It is many times more environmentally sound than flooding developing nations with the current crop of laptops, desktops or worse yet, with used computer equipment. OLPC computers are more robust, use less power and require fewer resources in their manufacture. They represent less waste and are better sealed (and therefore more easily disposed of) than any current alternative.
It is many times less environmentally sound than giving absolutely nothing to developing nations. While this might momentarily seem the more attractive course, its effect in the longer term would be less than desirable. Whatever your beliefs about the Social Contract, human rights and the equality of man, it's better to be known as someone who gave a hand than to be known as someone who left his brother to die. Because when - not if - the shoe is on the other foot, you want to be sure it's not going to kick you in the teeth.
Who do you think is funding OLPC News, a 'concern troll' website that hides its affiliation behind the thinnest veneer? The site's main producer (and owner of the domain) is a guy named Wayan Vota. This Wayan Vota is also the head of Geekcorps, a USAID-funded semi-government agency that does IT-related development work. Wayan Vota is also tied in closely to HP and Intel's efforts, sitting on Intel's development committee, and helping to coordinate the Classmate PC inititative.
But you'd never know that from the OLPC News site. Wayan never once discloses this glaring conflict of interest, nor does he anywhere (that I've found) acknowledge that he might have a stake in the game as anything other than a concerned observer.
Rest assured, Intel is doing the old Fox 'News' routine on OLPC. I personally find that behaviour despicable, and since this came to light, I've dropped all support of Geekcorps, whom I used to promote quite actively in Development circles.
When you say, 'he', I'm assuming that you mean Negroponte.
You know what? I don't care. Because the plain fact is that he's doing it right. I've been working for almost four years now in ICT in the developing world, and OLPC appropriately answers just about every significant challenge raised in terms of information and communication in the developing world.
This is the silliest kind of ad hominem attack. He's vain? So what? What exactly should I do with this knowledge? Should I stop supporting OLPC? Support Intel, because Intel is *choke* more humble?! Go ahead and use the OLPC, but spit whenever I say his name? Please inform me how this 'insight' of yours is in any way useful to the discussion.
Guess what? I don't care whether this guy's pimped out brighter than Huggy Bear or doing a 'Developers!' tango with Ballmer. I don't care if he preens like a peacock and can't finish a sentence without using the word 'I'. I don't care if he makes me kiss his ring, for crying out loud. All I know is that there will soon be 5 million more laptops than there were, and they're all for the people I care about most.
That assertion is false in many cultures. While I am a committed believer in the value of community and of sharing ideas and information, I think it's important to recognise that what we're proposing is actually counterintuitive to many people.
I'm currently working in a developing country where indigenous people are in the majority, and their culture and customs are very much alive. Encouraging the free and open exchange of ideas is a difficult task - probably the single biggest hurdle I face here. A local friend of mine, when he introduces me to others, goes to great lengths to explain that I don't charge for my advice and ideas, that I just give it away. Then I get to explain why I do this. I've spoken with a large number of village chiefs and various other important people, and to most of them, this behaviour is unusual.
There are certain dances, carving styles, herbal medicines, rites and rituals that have been the exclusive property of families for untold generations. The national cultural centre has to sign agreements explicitly ensuring payment for any use of certain images and recordings before they are allowed to store them for posterity.
When we set up the local IT community of interest, the same issue quickly came out. Numerous professionals had more or less guaranteed their job security by virtue of being the only one who knew about particular applications and technologies. Now here were some interlopers who proposed to share everything, to put everything on a wiki that anyone could add to! The idea was, needless to say, welcomed by a lot of the up-and-coming crowd, but many of the older, established professionals have looked askance at this process.
Rest assured, it's a perfectly natural human attribute to say, 'It's my idea, I deserve to benefit from it.' To share openly and without thought of direct recompense is a revolutionary idea in human society. It's an idea whose time has come, and which, I believe, will be necessary to propel human learning to the next level (what Pratchett calls 'extelligence'), but it is, as far as I can tell, a new one. It's only natural for the establishment to question it, in the same way that in the past the nobility assumed it was their God-given right to own all the land and put those who believed in the equality of man to the sword.