That's some great stuff. I really love listening to Eben Moglen.. he has such a great law professor tone. Unforutnately, the same tone puts many people to sleep before they hear what it is he is saying. Business people.
Caveat Snoozor. I don't think 'I slept through the briefing' is acceptable as a defence in a court of law, even for business people.
That excuse is reserved for presidents and cabinet members.
You had a few typos in there. I've fixed them for you:
We've all heard the joke about how cars would behave if made by Microsoft, but how about if they were made by the Open Source Movement?
1. The car would come in a kit, and would have to be assembled by hand.
Amazingly, a whole bunch of people whom you've never met before would show up and construct the entire thing for you.
3. The gearstick would be designed by EMACS fans. It would be powerful, and feature rich, but changing gear would be an 18 step process designed for a driver with 4 hands.
True, you'd have to spend time learning the steering and gears, but again, once you'd programmed the route to Grandma's House, the car would automatically avoid any red lights, keep you out of the slow lane, and get you the best price on gas if you have to tank up on the way.
5. The steering wheel would be gone. In its place, an "innovative" interface designed by the Blender and Gimp teams, consisting of 2 dead fish and a broken plastic spatula.
It's true that the 'Dali wheel' interface is available, but the default is actually something called 'Steering Wheel'; it comes without any distracting advertisements and doesn't lock itself after a 30 day 'trial'.
8. In car entertainment would consist entirely of items cloned from Microsoft.
The only difference being that these ones would actually work.
9. Your grandmother wouldn't be able to drive it.
Are you kidding? She'd have her own, which would only require that you schedule a monthly Remote Oil Change, as opposed to her constantly pestering you for assistance because of broken door handles, stolen rims, non-functional headlights and a nasty fluid leak.
The more we post articles about how Microsoft is claiming patent violations, the better it is for Microsoft. This is simply a case of the more your story is in the news, the better the results for you.
Disagree. I think we should inextricably link Microsoft with the word patent. As long as we include the words 'Bullshit' or 'Troll' in the same sentence every time.
The argument that one should not directly address the FUD one's foe is spreading has some weight, I'll grant you. But it's often safer to counter the point directly and consistently, rather than to give them any ground whatsoever. In years past, Democratic party candidates didn't want to take the war in Iraq head on, for more or less the same reason you offer above. They got no traction at all with the electorate until some of the braver souls stood up and said, essentially, 'How dare you attack our patriotism? This war is bullshit and you know it.'
I think that in this case, the FUD campaign is too well financed and coordinated to give it any room to grow. Microsoft's claims need to be scoffed at and belittled, but most importantly, they need to be challenged directly with a simple response: Put up or shut up. This is exactly what Linus has done, and I applaud him for it.
Damnit, Jim, I'm a computer user, not a philosopher! But honestly, I think most of the people COMING to Linux in the Desktop world could care less about these "ethical" issues. Once again, it's just another thing that some of the Linux community puts above having things Just Work(tm).
Look, the majority of people visiting their doctor don't spend much time on the Hippocratic Oath, but if you don't think 'First, do no harm' doesn't have an impact on how medicine gets practiced, you've got another thing coming.
The Four Freedoms described by Richard Stallman aren't just nice to have, they define the nature of Free Software. They aren't just abstract constructs to be bandied about at the pub, these are the mechanisms by which software can be made accessible enough for it to exist in a vendor-neutral, independant manner.
The individual elements of the Hippocratic Oath are under constant scrutiny, and are constantly being challenged, and the process of doing so keeps medical practice healthy, by and large. It's not a debate that many patients enter into, but you can be darn sure it affects their lives directly. Precisely the same thing is true in terms of Free Software: Users may not care much about the arcana of the GPL and such, but adherence to its principles is integral to the entire FOSS system.
So please, stop putting quotation marks around the word ethical. You may not put much value in it, but those who think about these things understand that ethics are very practical considerations.
Why should the free software movement rethink its strategy when it's just starting to gain traction in a big way?
I think the author makes a huge error when considering how FOSS can leverage the Web to improve their offering. He ignores the blindingly obvious fact that Linux would never have achieved the great things it has done without the Internet, and especially the Web. FOSS people know - possibly better than anyone else - how the Web works and what it's for.
With apologies to Marshall McLuhan, I'd like to say that 'Software as a Service' misses the point completely. For Linux, Software is the Service and the web is how it gets delivered.
Every single successful Linux distro leverages web automation to manage its software. With varying degrees of sophistication, every one of them relies almost entirely on web interfaces (automated à la yum or apt) interacting with client-side processing to handle the extremely difficult and complex task of dependancy resolution and software configuration.
This is obviously not a technologist writing, because if it were, the author might have realised that behind the clicky-clicky of Synaptic, for example, lies a web application.
So the question of whether or not we should use web-based software has, for the moment, been adequately answered: We already do it, in order to deliver applications to their desired platform. The web is not the app, the web is the medium.
When He extended a Noodly Appendage to Bless Microsoft with his Divine Wisdom an unbeliever cut it off and shaped it into the form of Clippy, the Anti Christ.
The least you could do is get it right: Clippy is not the Antichrist; he's the Antipasto.
When are we going to start seeing regular Slashdot postings outlining Linux or other free software security patch releases in the same accusatory tone that the monthly Microsoft security bulletin releases bring? No, I'm not trolling, but I'm getting sick of the clear bias Slashdot editors (and most readers) have when it comes to matters of Microsoft.
No one's going to see this, and if they do it'll get modded down. But I'll feel better when I'm done.
You, sir, are a liar.
You complain about an accusatory tone, and when pressed to provide evidence, you admit that this advisory is actually perfectly neutral in its tone.
It makes me sick to see this kind of perverse logic through which one's critical faculties can be so twisted that even to make observations of fact and to draw logical, rational conclusions from them (e.g. Microsoft's security sucks) is somehow morally wrong.
Well I for one reserve the right to shit on whoever damn well deserves it. When Ubuntu releases a kernel patch that breaks an entire class of processor, or breaks X for a large number of their clients, I call them stupid. When Netscape broke the HTML standards and went cowboying around the Web with their 'Best Viewed With Netscape' logos, I shat on them as well. When WordPerfect made a perfect clusterfuck out of what was once the best piece of office software in the business, I castigated them for it, too.
But no company in the history of computing has ever been so deserving of our derision as Microsoft. Their business practices have caused me headaches and lost hours beyond count. In 2003-4 I did a rough estimate of the amount of time I lost to virus/trojan/spyware infested desktops. It was between 30 and 40% of my time. I moved all my clients to non-Microsoft applications for anything that touched the Internet, and my support time devoted to malware dropped to between 5 and 10%.
So when Microsoft releases 19 critical patches, do I consider it news? Damn straight. Am I inclined to be skeptical about these patches, to wonder what they're not telling me, what 'hidden treasures' might be included? Yes, and when I find that they disable my supported settings and re-enable that clusterfuck of a web browser IE for no good reason, do I get pissed off? Yes, I do.
And now you want me to cut MS some slack, because of bias? Let me tell you something, sonny Jim: Microsoft has earned this bias the hard way. I worked professionally on MS OSes for 9 long years before I finally gave up on them. If you can't see the purpose of critical appraisal and rational reaction, if you simply want to sit around the IT campfire singing Kumbaya and be nice even when somebody shits in your food, go ahead. But you and your astroturfing colleagues can leave me the hell out of it.
Working in IT is all about having a critical eye, and knowing when someone is trying to sell you code that more resembles a flaming bag of shit than anything else. It's obvious to me that you haven't yet mastered that art. So with all due respect, kindly sit down, shut up and learn to reason before you start shooting your mouth off again.
An improvement? Maybe.
Foolproof? No.
DNS poisoning is still just as prolematic, and appended URLs (i.e. www.mybank.bank.badurl.com) will still fool *some* people.
True, but this time, we could actually use technical means to ensure the validity of the address. Browser plugins could quite easily be programmed to mitigate (if not solve) the issues you raise. A hypothetical 'MyBank' plugin could, among other things, use only trusted (or consensus) DNS to resolve the name, and it could absolutely, positively be guaranteed to check the domain spelling every time.
Knowing the precise namespace would not solve every problem, but software developers could do a lot with that one extra datum for validation.
That's why efforts like by the Shuttleworth Foundation [http://www.shuttleworthfoundation.org/]
to make some of the sort of software you are asking about for schools is misguided IMHO. You can't fix a bad process producing undesireable outcomes by automating it or reducing its cost. You need to change it entirely.
The Shuttleworth Foundation operates mostly in sub-Saharan Africa, which suffers from a great many problems, but has virtually nothing in common with the US Education system.
You're right to state that institutional change is required. The move toward universal testing represents a systematic 'dumbing down' of the educational system, and it's had devastating results just about everywhere it's been implemented.
But in order to get out of this trap, you need to tools to do things differently. And Edubuntu (among a great many others) is a remarkable step in the right direction. In the places where the Shuttleworth Foundation does most of its work, the big problem is infrastructure, so having low- or no-cost tools that can be molded to the particular needs of individual schools and districts is an integral element to success.
Your point about change is perfectly valid, but IMO what we're talking about here are the very tools required to effect that change. I'm not from the US, so YMMV, of course. 8^)
I can tell you the big difference between this situation and "those" situations. I never _ran_ 3rd party software on Solaris, IRIX, or Linux (well, I ran 3rd party software on linux all the time, but i just expected it to break anytime i patched anything.. it was a mandatory recompile of any dependant libraries and applications).
Could you please clarify what you mean here? You're apparently implying that Linux even has a concept of 'third party software'. All software is third party in Linux, because there's no first or second party in the first place. 8^)
I run very little non-Microsoft software on my windows machines and thus I rarely worry about patches from MS. If you're doing something weird, you need to be more risk averse.
Er, sorry, I think you need to clarify again. Are you implying that running non-MS software on Windows is 'weird' and risky? Maybe we make our servers do different things, but I can tell you that I have only very rarely managed to find an MS-only solution for just about any business need I've ever faced. In almost 100% of the cases, MS did not - could not - do everything required.
That's certainly not weird. It's risky, I'll grant you, but not in any way that Microsoft QA should be proud of.
Novel hasn't done anything wrong outside talking to Microsoft. So what does the deal specifically do that is so bad?
In signing this deal with Microsoft, Novell (note spelling) has deliberately and disingenuously circumvented one of the key elements that ensures the continuity of the GNU General Public License, version 2. The GPL states that you cannot encumber the license with additional terms (patent limitations, for example), because that would work against the the principle of the FSF's four freedoms: to study, copy, modify and redistribute software.
Novell inked a deal with Microsoft that did an end-run around this limitation by agreeing not to sue Novell's customers for patent infringement. This makes a scenario possible in which an unsuspecting company or individual could use GPL software, assuming that they had every right to do so, only to have Microsoft sue them later for breach of patent. As long as they're not Novell customers, MS would be perfectly within their rights to do so.
It stretches belief to imagine that Microsoft didn't know they were subverting the essence - if not the letter - of the GPL with this deal. But we've known for years now that Microsoft sees the GPL as a threat, and that they are working actively to defeat it using both fair means and foul.
What gets people's knickers in a knot over this deal is the fact that Novell should have known better. They built a major part of their business strategy on the hard work of the FOSS community, and contributed a lot to it, too. But now they've gone and exploited an inherent weakness in the current version of the GPL, and damaged FOSS in general for short-sighted, selfish reasons. In effect, they're poisoning the very well they drink from.
Needless to say, a great many people in the FOSS world, including RMS, Bruce Perens and a lot of others who know a thing or two about this stuff, have castigated Novell for being remarkably stupid. And a lot of us here on Slashdot agree.
But as long as there is a cash-per-page-view market, the onslaught of adverspam will reach every corner of the web. It can't be stopped as long as there is money to be made there.
Agreed. As long as there are bullshit artists in the world, they will find ways of expressing themselves.
Certainly the big "pure knowledge" sites will defend themselves, as Wikipedia does, but that is an arms race that will eventually exhaust the resources of any single organization.
I don't think so. I think that liars work at a deficit in this contest, as they do everywhere in society. They remain a constant irritant, true, but the value of truth is (nearly) universal, whereas the value of deceit derives only to a few. For that reason, if for no other, the majority of the population value truth over deceit, and will support and supplement technical measures to trounce this spam with the one tool computing has never adequately replicated: Human pattern matching.
The really interesting part about the Semantic Web is not what authors says about their content, but what readers say about it. This is a resource that can sometimes be polluted, but never utterly subverted.
The OLPCs are not going to people who are sitting on the side of a ditch oblivious of the wider IT world. They will have heard of Windows, and they will want to know why they are getting this 'second-rate' linux thingy.
That's perfectly untrue.
I've set up several computer centres in developing countries, and the one I'm currently living in will be involved in an OLPC pilot project shortly. I can tell you with 100% confidence that the people who are being targeted by OLPC don't give a hoot whether they're using Windows or not, and the majority of people supporting them don't care either.
The argument that we have to teach children and new computer users the same software we're using today is the purest fallacy. It makes several false assumptions:
That people will be using the same software 5-10 years from now;
That we're teaching children how to use computers, and not using computers to teach them other things;
That we want to use generic software instead of something purpose-built for the task;
That there is some magical brain attribute that prevents someone who has used Linux from ever learning Windows, and vice versa;
That Windows will even run properly on the OLPC architecture.
To summarise: There is no immediate need to run Windows. I will grant that the perception is widespread that Windows == The Computer. But there is no good reason to continue perpetuating that fallacy, and numerous very good reasons to toss it out the, er, window. It serves no useful purpose, especially in the context of this project.
And if our buildings and public places were built securely, we wouldn't need police, right?
Put down that analogy; you're liable to cut yourself. 8^)
Security in buildings and public places represents an utterly different problem set from software security. They have virtually nothing in common. Suggesting that software security today is like (heh) a walk in the park is wildly wrong.
I hate analogies, because they cloud things more than they clarify them. But if I were to use yours, I would say that if our buildings and public spaces were better policed, we wouldn't need to pay for personal, individual security guards who pat down and disarm even our friends before they allow us to so much as look at one another.
Schneier's point is valid. In a healthy, heterogeneous software environment, the threats are fundamentally different from those we face today. We could move from trying to protect ourselves from clicking on tainted image and document files(!) to creating secure site configurations tailored to our particular needs. I too dream about the day when we have configurations that are not so draconian that people are precluded by fear from taking advantage of some of the Internet's greatest advantages: the end to end network.
There are some who will say that software is inherently insecure, and that it cannot be secured. There are some who say that people using 'safe' technologies and processes are only safe by virtue of the fact that there are easier targets in abundance. They are wrong. And this is Schneier's point: Whatever inherent problems there may be in software security, the vast majority of Windows users - let's call a spade a spade - work in an environment that is so utterly flawed that there is a quantum difference between the security issues they face and the vastly more limited security issues they could be facing, if only the manufacturers would cease to treat security as a cost centre external to their core business.
People are posting the same story over and over again. It's functioning as a defacto DoS attack on Digg, too....
On the contrary, it appears to be working exactly as designed. The community decides what goes onto the site, and what reaches the top. Isn't this precisely what's happening?
Of course, there might be one or two inherent flaws in the design, but the service is working.... 8^)
There is an underlying assumption that even though the coders apparently can't do graphic design worth jack, that graphic designers can somehow code worth jack. Most graphic designers aren't coders, and most coders aren't graphic designers. The disciplines aren't mutually exclusive, but most in one field can't do much of value in the arts of the other field. Usually, it's better to have mutual cooperation than expect graphic designers to come in on their own.
I agree with what you're saying, but I think you've got the onus wrong. As someone with design and coding experience, I can say that FOSS programmers often bend over backwards to package things nicely, but are often rebuffed by non-programmers if the interface is not 100% to their liking.
There is a disconnect, but IME it comes from people who think that being a user entitles them to sit back and wait for manna to drop from heaven. The bottom line is simply this: If you're going to work in FOSS, then you have to get your hands dirty. This almost necessarily means learning a little about areas that are not your forte. In order for there to be reasonable cooperation, we need to speak the same language. In the Perl community especially, there is a real desire to learn new things and share knowledge, but if designers et alia aren't willing to learn at least a little Perl, then there's not much to be done.
"Don't make me look at code" is, unfortunately, not often a valid condition for any FOSS participant, regardless of their other talents.
Politically [The Economist is] "liberal" in the traditional sense of the word (i.e. slightly right wing and think the government should keep out of our lives)
No offense, but: You need to get out of the US more often.
The Economist's research and analysis is the best in journalism today, but its editorial stance is most decidedly not liberal. It has little tolerance for many of the things liberalism holds dear, and if anything aligns more with centrist conservative philosophy than anything else[*]. That said, they do occasionally see the value of government intervention in things, but if that's how you define liberalism, then... well, you need to get out of the US more often. 8^)
[*] I am sure, by the way, that the editors of the Economist would not admit to any political philosophy except a shrewd and realistic appraisal of the world as it exists today.
And in addition, if this were a Microsoft product, everyone would be yelling "vaporware!" and bitching about the price increase.
OLPC would qualify as vapourware if:
The first production run weren't already going ahead.
There weren't already programmes in place to deploy this laptop, and lots more in the works.
The company producing them hadn't already stated their desire to market them into the consumer supply chain as well.
For those of you keeping score, India's attempt at this died on the vine, Microsoft's $600-cell-phone-attached-to-keyboard-and-TV alternative does meet the criteria for vapourware. Intel's ClassmatePC is barely out of the gate. And AMD's offering seems to have been shelved (wisely, perhaps) in favour of OLPC.
Near as I can tell, OLPC is the one project that least resembles vapourware of all the announced projects out there.
A system with guaranteed bandwidth aka "net neutrality" aka "truth in advertising" would allow you to spend your bandwidth however you want. This seams like it would foster adoption of high bandwidth service such as "entertainment, gaming, telephony, telemedicine, teleteaching, or telemeetings". A tiered system would probably let you use low bandwidth things like email, web, and text chat at your full speed, but would charge you extra or throttle you for high bandwidth items. A tiered Internet is the enemy of newer multimedia services.
In short, no. You're right, but that's not the point.
You're falling victim to the common misconception that this is all about charging consumers more for 'premium content'. That is a straw man constructed by those who want to destroy net neutrality.
This is all about toll roads. The telcos want to charge everyone who uses their network, every time, and they want to do so prejudicially, letting their friends through cheaply, and charging killing rates to others. As things stand right now, Google pays one price to access the Internet, and everyone who has paid to access the Internet can access them. The price determines the quality of the service, but they only pay it once.
What the net neutrality 'debate' is about is that the Telco A wants to charge every bit of traffic that passes onto its network from Telco B, regardless of the fact that Telco B has already been paid for Internet access. In other words, Telco A is setting up a toll booth, and charging companies for something they've already paid for.
(There are numerous permutations to this scenario, but that's the simplest way I can express it.)
This practice is the precise antithesis of the end-to-end network that we like to call the Internet. Net Neutrality is not about consumer choice, it's not about quality of service, and it's not about new business opportunities. It's about whether we still want an Internet. If you do, then you must support Net Neutrality.
Practically everyone I know is running Beryl as their WM. I'm staring at it right now as I type. I couldn't however for a moment, and nor would any of my colleagues, suggest that it is 'stable'.
Indeed. I find myself asking why someone would expect anything at all from a 0.2.0 rc3 release - the version of Beryl currently available on Feisty.
I think it's a good time to evaluate Beryl/Compiz features, and to comment on their usability and appeal. Performance, compatibility and stability are not IMO relevant, because this is a pre-beta experimental release aimed directly at geeks interested in playing on the bleeding edge.
My personal take on the UI elements that Beryl offers is that it's a promising package. The improvements since version 0.1 are significant, especially in terms of integration and performance. They bode well for the quality of the final product.
But most interesting of all are the GUI elements. There are numerous visual tricks in use that make using it much much more pleasant than Windows/GNOME/KDE. In the absence of an actual useful review, here's my quick take on some aspects of it:
The smooth fade-in and fade-out when windows and menus are opened and closed is a good deal less alarming for people who aren't confident at the computer. I find it quite soothing, too.
For as long as I've been using X windows, I've tried to come to terms with virtual desktops. My big hang-up is that out of sight means out of mind. Regardless of those tiny inconised displays of desktop contents that many desktop managers have, I just couldn't visualise what was there, and as a result, found it difficult to use them. But the three-dimensional desktop switching has given me a metaphor I can 'see'. Compiz treats each of the virtual desktops as one face on the exterior of a cube, so switching desktops is as intuitive as turning your head to view what's on the wall beside you, or spinning a card rack, if you like. Suddenly I'm using three desktops where two was too many before.
Push the mouse cursor to the top right corner and you get a Mac-like display of all the windows nicely arranged against a muted background. It's a straight rip-off from another platform, but that's one of the things that Linux sometimes does very well.
The new ALT-TAB switching clearly has merit. Again, the background recedes and is muted while the candidate windows step to the foreground one by one. The images are 'live' representations of each window, so if, for example, you have multiple browser windows open, you can flip to the one with the website you're looking for without trying to decipher the title bar text.
The 'wobbly window' effect, in which a window takes on a Jello-like consistency when moved, really seems like silly geek eye candy at first. Its only purpose seemed to be to encourage me to buy a proper graphics card. Then I went back to GNOME/Metacity and found that I didn't like the rigid windows at all any more. They're not nearly as welcoming. YMMV, but I find them more intuitive, in the sense that they feel more like paper.
BUT: Imbuing min/maximising windows with the same physical dynamics as the surface tension of water, so that windows SNAP-BOINGGG! into their new size is just plain weird. The effects are straight out of a Chuck Jones animated short - fine for Saturday mornings, but.... I'm definitely turning off that feature.
Window borders of background apps become partially transparent when there's no activity in them, opaque when there is. Interesting way of giving visual cues when multi-tasking. I'll wait to see how they behave with a proper graphics adapter before I make a decision about this feature. I've got a multi-gigabyte rsync running in a console at the moment, and it's pulsing faintly in behind this edit window as it sticks on larger files, then moves on. Right now, the transition is smooth enough not be be distracting, but that might be a side-effect of
As for OLPC, I doubt they want to slow the project -- they want to make the pie bigger and OLPC will help them do that.
Now see, there's your mistake: You're thinking about this reasonably.
Microsoft absolutely do want to slow the OLPC project. Bill Gates has as much as said that he thinks it's crap and that people should instead consider his masterful plan to provide an over-powered mobile phone that plugs into a TV, instead. The fact that the phone costs USD 600-1000, requires mains power, an external keyboard, mouse and television doesn't seem to be a problem for him.
Microsoft is not the only company attempting to pour water on the OLPC project, by the way. Even more shameful behaviour is being shown by HP and its proxies. Check out the 'concern' website OLPC News. It's written in true Fox News style, with false objectivity and vocabulary weighted to cast aspersions without regard to the factual content of the article. And last I checked, the author of all this concern did not once admit that he was involved in the management of HP's Classmate PC project, designed explicitly as a response to OLPC.
Make no mistake - the business world does not like OLPC, and they will do what it takes to stop it. And for me, that's as good a reason to support it as any. 8^)
Slashdot Mirror
How long before rectu.ms points to goatse?
Caveat Snoozor. I don't think 'I slept through the briefing' is acceptable as a defence in a court of law, even for business people.
That excuse is reserved for presidents and cabinet members.
You had a few typos in there. I've fixed them for you:
We've all heard the joke about how cars would behave if made by Microsoft, but how about if they were made by the Open Source Movement?1. The car would come in a kit, and would have to be assembled by hand.
Amazingly, a whole bunch of people whom you've never met before would show up and construct the entire thing for you.
3. The gearstick would be designed by EMACS fans. It would be powerful, and feature rich, but changing gear would be an 18 step process designed for a driver with 4 hands.True, you'd have to spend time learning the steering and gears, but again, once you'd programmed the route to Grandma's House, the car would automatically avoid any red lights, keep you out of the slow lane, and get you the best price on gas if you have to tank up on the way.
5. The steering wheel would be gone. In its place, an "innovative" interface designed by the Blender and Gimp teams, consisting of 2 dead fish and a broken plastic spatula.It's true that the 'Dali wheel' interface is available, but the default is actually something called 'Steering Wheel'; it comes without any distracting advertisements and doesn't lock itself after a 30 day 'trial'.
8. In car entertainment would consist entirely of items cloned from Microsoft.The only difference being that these ones would actually work.
9. Your grandmother wouldn't be able to drive it.Are you kidding? She'd have her own, which would only require that you schedule a monthly Remote Oil Change, as opposed to her constantly pestering you for assistance because of broken door handles, stolen rims, non-functional headlights and a nasty fluid leak.
There, that's better. 8^)
Disagree. I think we should inextricably link Microsoft with the word patent. As long as we include the words 'Bullshit' or 'Troll' in the same sentence every time.
The argument that one should not directly address the FUD one's foe is spreading has some weight, I'll grant you. But it's often safer to counter the point directly and consistently, rather than to give them any ground whatsoever. In years past, Democratic party candidates didn't want to take the war in Iraq head on, for more or less the same reason you offer above. They got no traction at all with the electorate until some of the braver souls stood up and said, essentially, 'How dare you attack our patriotism? This war is bullshit and you know it.'
I think that in this case, the FUD campaign is too well financed and coordinated to give it any room to grow. Microsoft's claims need to be scoffed at and belittled, but most importantly, they need to be challenged directly with a simple response: Put up or shut up. This is exactly what Linus has done, and I applaud him for it.
Look, the majority of people visiting their doctor don't spend much time on the Hippocratic Oath, but if you don't think 'First, do no harm' doesn't have an impact on how medicine gets practiced, you've got another thing coming.
The Four Freedoms described by Richard Stallman aren't just nice to have, they define the nature of Free Software. They aren't just abstract constructs to be bandied about at the pub, these are the mechanisms by which software can be made accessible enough for it to exist in a vendor-neutral, independant manner.
The individual elements of the Hippocratic Oath are under constant scrutiny, and are constantly being challenged, and the process of doing so keeps medical practice healthy, by and large. It's not a debate that many patients enter into, but you can be darn sure it affects their lives directly. Precisely the same thing is true in terms of Free Software: Users may not care much about the arcana of the GPL and such, but adherence to its principles is integral to the entire FOSS system.
So please, stop putting quotation marks around the word ethical. You may not put much value in it, but those who think about these things understand that ethics are very practical considerations.
I think the author makes a huge error when considering how FOSS can leverage the Web to improve their offering. He ignores the blindingly obvious fact that Linux would never have achieved the great things it has done without the Internet, and especially the Web. FOSS people know - possibly better than anyone else - how the Web works and what it's for.
With apologies to Marshall McLuhan, I'd like to say that 'Software as a Service' misses the point completely. For Linux, Software is the Service and the web is how it gets delivered.
Every single successful Linux distro leverages web automation to manage its software. With varying degrees of sophistication, every one of them relies almost entirely on web interfaces (automated à la yum or apt) interacting with client-side processing to handle the extremely difficult and complex task of dependancy resolution and software configuration.
This is obviously not a technologist writing, because if it were, the author might have realised that behind the clicky-clicky of Synaptic, for example, lies a web application.
So the question of whether or not we should use web-based software has, for the moment, been adequately answered: We already do it, in order to deliver applications to their desired platform. The web is not the app, the web is the medium.
The least you could do is get it right: Clippy is not the Antichrist; he's the Antipasto.
When are we going to start seeing regular Slashdot postings outlining Linux or other free software security patch releases in the same accusatory tone that the monthly Microsoft security bulletin releases bring? No, I'm not trolling, but I'm getting sick of the clear bias Slashdot editors (and most readers) have when it comes to matters of Microsoft.
No one's going to see this, and if they do it'll get modded down. But I'll feel better when I'm done.
You, sir, are a liar.
You complain about an accusatory tone, and when pressed to provide evidence, you admit that this advisory is actually perfectly neutral in its tone.
It makes me sick to see this kind of perverse logic through which one's critical faculties can be so twisted that even to make observations of fact and to draw logical, rational conclusions from them (e.g. Microsoft's security sucks) is somehow morally wrong.
Well I for one reserve the right to shit on whoever damn well deserves it. When Ubuntu releases a kernel patch that breaks an entire class of processor, or breaks X for a large number of their clients, I call them stupid. When Netscape broke the HTML standards and went cowboying around the Web with their 'Best Viewed With Netscape' logos, I shat on them as well. When WordPerfect made a perfect clusterfuck out of what was once the best piece of office software in the business, I castigated them for it, too.
But no company in the history of computing has ever been so deserving of our derision as Microsoft. Their business practices have caused me headaches and lost hours beyond count. In 2003-4 I did a rough estimate of the amount of time I lost to virus/trojan/spyware infested desktops. It was between 30 and 40% of my time. I moved all my clients to non-Microsoft applications for anything that touched the Internet, and my support time devoted to malware dropped to between 5 and 10%.
So when Microsoft releases 19 critical patches, do I consider it news? Damn straight. Am I inclined to be skeptical about these patches, to wonder what they're not telling me, what 'hidden treasures' might be included? Yes, and when I find that they disable my supported settings and re-enable that clusterfuck of a web browser IE for no good reason, do I get pissed off? Yes, I do.
And now you want me to cut MS some slack, because of bias? Let me tell you something, sonny Jim: Microsoft has earned this bias the hard way. I worked professionally on MS OSes for 9 long years before I finally gave up on them. If you can't see the purpose of critical appraisal and rational reaction, if you simply want to sit around the IT campfire singing Kumbaya and be nice even when somebody shits in your food, go ahead. But you and your astroturfing colleagues can leave me the hell out of it.
Working in IT is all about having a critical eye, and knowing when someone is trying to sell you code that more resembles a flaming bag of shit than anything else. It's obvious to me that you haven't yet mastered that art. So with all due respect, kindly sit down, shut up and learn to reason before you start shooting your mouth off again.
HTH HAND.
Outlook is an e-mail client? I thought it was a rootkit!
True, but this time, we could actually use technical means to ensure the validity of the address. Browser plugins could quite easily be programmed to mitigate (if not solve) the issues you raise. A hypothetical 'MyBank' plugin could, among other things, use only trusted (or consensus) DNS to resolve the name, and it could absolutely, positively be guaranteed to check the domain spelling every time.
Knowing the precise namespace would not solve every problem, but software developers could do a lot with that one extra datum for validation.
The Shuttleworth Foundation operates mostly in sub-Saharan Africa, which suffers from a great many problems, but has virtually nothing in common with the US Education system.
You're right to state that institutional change is required. The move toward universal testing represents a systematic 'dumbing down' of the educational system, and it's had devastating results just about everywhere it's been implemented.
But in order to get out of this trap, you need to tools to do things differently. And Edubuntu (among a great many others) is a remarkable step in the right direction. In the places where the Shuttleworth Foundation does most of its work, the big problem is infrastructure, so having low- or no-cost tools that can be molded to the particular needs of individual schools and districts is an integral element to success.
Your point about change is perfectly valid, but IMO what we're talking about here are the very tools required to effect that change. I'm not from the US, so YMMV, of course. 8^)
Could you please clarify what you mean here? You're apparently implying that Linux even has a concept of 'third party software'. All software is third party in Linux, because there's no first or second party in the first place. 8^)
Er, sorry, I think you need to clarify again. Are you implying that running non-MS software on Windows is 'weird' and risky? Maybe we make our servers do different things, but I can tell you that I have only very rarely managed to find an MS-only solution for just about any business need I've ever faced. In almost 100% of the cases, MS did not - could not - do everything required.
That's certainly not weird. It's risky, I'll grant you, but not in any way that Microsoft QA should be proud of.
In signing this deal with Microsoft, Novell (note spelling) has deliberately and disingenuously circumvented one of the key elements that ensures the continuity of the GNU General Public License, version 2. The GPL states that you cannot encumber the license with additional terms (patent limitations, for example), because that would work against the the principle of the FSF's four freedoms: to study, copy, modify and redistribute software.
Novell inked a deal with Microsoft that did an end-run around this limitation by agreeing not to sue Novell's customers for patent infringement. This makes a scenario possible in which an unsuspecting company or individual could use GPL software, assuming that they had every right to do so, only to have Microsoft sue them later for breach of patent. As long as they're not Novell customers, MS would be perfectly within their rights to do so.
It stretches belief to imagine that Microsoft didn't know they were subverting the essence - if not the letter - of the GPL with this deal. But we've known for years now that Microsoft sees the GPL as a threat, and that they are working actively to defeat it using both fair means and foul.
What gets people's knickers in a knot over this deal is the fact that Novell should have known better. They built a major part of their business strategy on the hard work of the FOSS community, and contributed a lot to it, too. But now they've gone and exploited an inherent weakness in the current version of the GPL, and damaged FOSS in general for short-sighted, selfish reasons. In effect, they're poisoning the very well they drink from.
Needless to say, a great many people in the FOSS world, including RMS, Bruce Perens and a lot of others who know a thing or two about this stuff, have castigated Novell for being remarkably stupid. And a lot of us here on Slashdot agree.
Agreed. As long as there are bullshit artists in the world, they will find ways of expressing themselves.
I don't think so. I think that liars work at a deficit in this contest, as they do everywhere in society. They remain a constant irritant, true, but the value of truth is (nearly) universal, whereas the value of deceit derives only to a few. For that reason, if for no other, the majority of the population value truth over deceit, and will support and supplement technical measures to trounce this spam with the one tool computing has never adequately replicated: Human pattern matching.
The really interesting part about the Semantic Web is not what authors says about their content, but what readers say about it. This is a resource that can sometimes be polluted, but never utterly subverted.
That's perfectly untrue.
I've set up several computer centres in developing countries, and the one I'm currently living in will be involved in an OLPC pilot project shortly. I can tell you with 100% confidence that the people who are being targeted by OLPC don't give a hoot whether they're using Windows or not, and the majority of people supporting them don't care either.
The argument that we have to teach children and new computer users the same software we're using today is the purest fallacy. It makes several false assumptions:
To summarise: There is no immediate need to run Windows. I will grant that the perception is widespread that Windows == The Computer. But there is no good reason to continue perpetuating that fallacy, and numerous very good reasons to toss it out the, er, window. It serves no useful purpose, especially in the context of this project.
Put down that analogy; you're liable to cut yourself. 8^)
Security in buildings and public places represents an utterly different problem set from software security. They have virtually nothing in common. Suggesting that software security today is like (heh) a walk in the park is wildly wrong.
I hate analogies, because they cloud things more than they clarify them. But if I were to use yours, I would say that if our buildings and public spaces were better policed, we wouldn't need to pay for personal, individual security guards who pat down and disarm even our friends before they allow us to so much as look at one another.
Schneier's point is valid. In a healthy, heterogeneous software environment, the threats are fundamentally different from those we face today. We could move from trying to protect ourselves from clicking on tainted image and document files(!) to creating secure site configurations tailored to our particular needs. I too dream about the day when we have configurations that are not so draconian that people are precluded by fear from taking advantage of some of the Internet's greatest advantages: the end to end network.
There are some who will say that software is inherently insecure, and that it cannot be secured. There are some who say that people using 'safe' technologies and processes are only safe by virtue of the fact that there are easier targets in abundance. They are wrong. And this is Schneier's point: Whatever inherent problems there may be in software security, the vast majority of Windows users - let's call a spade a spade - work in an environment that is so utterly flawed that there is a quantum difference between the security issues they face and the vastly more limited security issues they could be facing, if only the manufacturers would cease to treat security as a cost centre external to their core business.
On the contrary, it appears to be working exactly as designed. The community decides what goes onto the site, and what reaches the top. Isn't this precisely what's happening?
Of course, there might be one or two inherent flaws in the design, but the service is working.... 8^)
I agree with what you're saying, but I think you've got the onus wrong. As someone with design and coding experience, I can say that FOSS programmers often bend over backwards to package things nicely, but are often rebuffed by non-programmers if the interface is not 100% to their liking.
There is a disconnect, but IME it comes from people who think that being a user entitles them to sit back and wait for manna to drop from heaven. The bottom line is simply this: If you're going to work in FOSS, then you have to get your hands dirty. This almost necessarily means learning a little about areas that are not your forte. In order for there to be reasonable cooperation, we need to speak the same language. In the Perl community especially, there is a real desire to learn new things and share knowledge, but if designers et alia aren't willing to learn at least a little Perl, then there's not much to be done.
"Don't make me look at code" is, unfortunately, not often a valid condition for any FOSS participant, regardless of their other talents.
No offense, but: You need to get out of the US more often.
The Economist's research and analysis is the best in journalism today, but its editorial stance is most decidedly not liberal. It has little tolerance for many of the things liberalism holds dear, and if anything aligns more with centrist conservative philosophy than anything else[*]. That said, they do occasionally see the value of government intervention in things, but if that's how you define liberalism, then... well, you need to get out of the US more often. 8^)
[*] I am sure, by the way, that the editors of the Economist would not admit to any political philosophy except a shrewd and realistic appraisal of the world as it exists today.
And the specs on it are actually not half bad, not as bad as you might think:
15.4" screen
1.5 ghz Via C7-M
512 ram
128 meg shared video
DVD +/- DL burner
60 GB HDD
802.11 b/g
10/100 ethernet
v.92 modem
Vista Basic
Just one question: Where would you plug it in? Most of the people destined to use these have no mains power.
OLPC would qualify as vapourware if:
For those of you keeping score, India's attempt at this died on the vine, Microsoft's $600-cell-phone-attached-to-keyboard-and-TV alternative does meet the criteria for vapourware. Intel's ClassmatePC is barely out of the gate. And AMD's offering seems to have been shelved (wisely, perhaps) in favour of OLPC.
Near as I can tell, OLPC is the one project that least resembles vapourware of all the announced projects out there.
In short, no. You're right, but that's not the point.
You're falling victim to the common misconception that this is all about charging consumers more for 'premium content'. That is a straw man constructed by those who want to destroy net neutrality.
This is all about toll roads. The telcos want to charge everyone who uses their network, every time, and they want to do so prejudicially, letting their friends through cheaply, and charging killing rates to others. As things stand right now, Google pays one price to access the Internet, and everyone who has paid to access the Internet can access them. The price determines the quality of the service, but they only pay it once.
What the net neutrality 'debate' is about is that the Telco A wants to charge every bit of traffic that passes onto its network from Telco B, regardless of the fact that Telco B has already been paid for Internet access. In other words, Telco A is setting up a toll booth, and charging companies for something they've already paid for.
(There are numerous permutations to this scenario, but that's the simplest way I can express it.)
This practice is the precise antithesis of the end-to-end network that we like to call the Internet. Net Neutrality is not about consumer choice, it's not about quality of service, and it's not about new business opportunities. It's about whether we still want an Internet. If you do, then you must support Net Neutrality.
Indeed. I find myself asking why someone would expect anything at all from a 0.2.0 rc3 release - the version of Beryl currently available on Feisty.
I think it's a good time to evaluate Beryl/Compiz features, and to comment on their usability and appeal. Performance, compatibility and stability are not IMO relevant, because this is a pre-beta experimental release aimed directly at geeks interested in playing on the bleeding edge.
My personal take on the UI elements that Beryl offers is that it's a promising package. The improvements since version 0.1 are significant, especially in terms of integration and performance. They bode well for the quality of the final product.
But most interesting of all are the GUI elements. There are numerous visual tricks in use that make using it much much more pleasant than Windows/GNOME/KDE. In the absence of an actual useful review, here's my quick take on some aspects of it:
Now see, there's your mistake: You're thinking about this reasonably.
Microsoft absolutely do want to slow the OLPC project. Bill Gates has as much as said that he thinks it's crap and that people should instead consider his masterful plan to provide an over-powered mobile phone that plugs into a TV, instead. The fact that the phone costs USD 600-1000, requires mains power, an external keyboard, mouse and television doesn't seem to be a problem for him.
Microsoft is not the only company attempting to pour water on the OLPC project, by the way. Even more shameful behaviour is being shown by HP and its proxies. Check out the 'concern' website OLPC News. It's written in true Fox News style, with false objectivity and vocabulary weighted to cast aspersions without regard to the factual content of the article. And last I checked, the author of all this concern did not once admit that he was involved in the management of HP's Classmate PC project, designed explicitly as a response to OLPC.
Make no mistake - the business world does not like OLPC, and they will do what it takes to stop it. And for me, that's as good a reason to support it as any. 8^)
Emacs
*ducks and runs*