Old story: Body in power enacts unethical laws to promote own agenda. People have no choice but to violate the unethical laws. Big disputes ensue over punishment of legal violations.
New spin: Companies buy off US government and enact unethical laws to improve profits. People have no choice but to violate the unethical laws, since no one makes enough money to legally purchase all the music/software/movies they need. Napster, DeCSS, and Aimster suits follow, and appeals of those suits, and so on.
How the story ends depends on how the body in power chooses to enforce the laws.
In the case of software piracy, individuals who swap copies of Windows with their friends never go to federal prison for it, while large-scale counterfit software operations or businesses that use pirated software for their needs usually get busted. This is actually a pretty fair and ethical enforcement of software copyright law in most people's minds, so the law remains. It is ethical and fair because everyone knows that no individual person could possibly afford to purchase all the software they really need (it would put them out of food and shelter), while we all know that if you can afford to be running a business or if you're counterfitting software for your own profit then you're basically ripping off someone else's hard work unnecessarily.
In the case of music, individuals who swap songs over the Internet are not being punished. Only the large-scale facilitators of music piracy are being attacked and shut down. This is exactly the kind of punishment that has gone on in the software world for years with popular acceptance, and yet it raises an uproar among music lovers who feel their ethical rights to swap copies are being destroyed.
I've got news for you: it is no more your ethical entitlement to a service like Napster than it is your ethical entitlement to access a counterfit software operation. The RIAA isn't punishing individuals for copying songs for their friends. The RIAA is punishing large-scale facilitators of copyright violation, and I think most of us can be reasonable people and agree with that approach. It's necessary in order to protect and compensate the people who work hard to create that content for us.
Now, the RIAA has every ethical right to make it as technologically difficult as possible for you to individually make copies, just as you have every ethical right to reverse-engineer those protection technologies to make your own copies. And the RIAA has every ethical right to attack large-scale distributors of reverse-engineering software, just as you have every ethical right to make individual copies of it and swap it with your friends behind the RIAA's back. It's an ongoing battle that achieves balance and compromise through the raging of the battle itself.
Microsoft is attacking open source at its weakest point: the GPL.
GPL==Free Software; GPL!=Open Source Software.
And there appears to be a fundamental misunderstanding by each of the three camps about the others. Let me clarify for the public good:
Closed source commercial software developers don't care about trying to make the world a better place or freeing intellectual information for public usage. They only care about making money and satisfying their customers. That doesn't mean they are evil. They are just playing an entirely different game.
Open source software developers don't care about freeing intellectual information for public usage. They may or may not care about making money. The only thing they do believe is that there is no reason to keep source code hidden away if you're not trying to make money. For this reason the label "open source developer" or "open source software" can mean a wide variety of philosophies and goals.
Free software developers don't care about making money or gaining widespread usage or "marketshare". They don't care about satisfying any computer users other than themselves. They want all intellectual information to be freely and publicly available, and their legal licenses ensure that no code they have ever written will end up being unavailable to the public.
You can't base a business around Free Software and the GPL because it's not designed to be a business model or a way to make money. That is why companies like Red Hat will struggle in the long run, because they can only make money through "added value" crap like tech support and shrink-wrapped product, which won't be nearly enough to make up for their R&D costs. And you can't take a GPL project and let businesses overtake the majority of development and expect it to stay afloat and remain free, because businesses need to make money.
Here are the real reasons that tech support sucks:
1. Most companies don't have sensible infrastructures, specifically databases. Too many companies maintain multiple internal databases that can't talk to each other, such that one arm of the company doesn't know what the other arm is doing. Then the customer gets told 10 different stories by 10 different people in 10 different departments, and not one of the stories is true.
2. Most companies don't believe they have any obligation to provide support for their products, especially for products they have stopped manufacturing. They also short-sightedly believe that there is no money to be made in providing good tech support, so they don't invest in it. A company should be legally obligated to continue to support its products, even if those products are no longer being manufactured, as long as those products are still on retailer's shelves. And a truly successful company has the foresight to understand that investments in tech support do pay off. Tech support adds value to a product and can increase sales of the product beyond the cost of providing the technical support.
3. Most technical products are not designed to be easy enough for average people to use. They are ludicrously complex and problematic by nature, and so it's no small wonder that tech support departments are overloaded at companies that produce such products. If companies invested more in usability and quality assurance, then they wouldn't have to pay for it later in tech support costs.
4. Most companies rely on a pre-fabbed, one-size-fits all, choose-your-own-misadventure approach to dealing with a customer's problem. A customer who possesses masters degrees in computer science and computer engineering shouldn't have to be subjected to a ludicrously moronic line of questioning ("Are you sure it's plugged in? Have you tried turning the power switch on?" etc) before being permitted to ship back a faulty product for repair or replacement. Companies take this approach because they feel it can take the place of having to hire trained support personnel to man the phones--unfortunately, there is no replacement for having people on the other end of the line who actually know what they are doing.
Again - the system really, REALLY needs to change - but who's going to do it?
Until campaign finance reform is enacted and enforced, injustices will continue to be practiced daily by the US government.
The US Patent Office is just like any other federal agency: it is implicitly owned by major corporations. Legislators are afraid to enact reforms that might alienate their largest campaign contributors. Every significant decision made by our legislature favors corporate will over ethics or citizen's rights.
About the only thing you can do to have any say in the matter is to become a mega-millionaire and start bribing legislators. In the USA, if you don't have money and an army of lawyers, you just get ignored.
What this country really needs is a new constitutional ammendment which provides a strict separation between money and state.
The US Patent Office incorrectly believes that the place to hammer out issues of patent legitimacy is the courtroom. They don't believe that it's their responsibility.
Obviously this logic is flawed. Individuals and small businesses must spend huge sums of money to simply defend themselves in court. Large corporations know this, and use bogus patent challenges as a way to squash anyone who stands in their way.
One recent example is Creative Labs vs. Aureal. Although Aureal ultimately won against Creative Labs' patent charges, the legal defense costs bankrupted Aureal.
How can you spot a rich white man? Ask him if he thinks the US Patent Office is doing a good job.
While I agree whole-heartedly with the "code in any form is free speech deserving protection" argument, it's not the right approach to take on appeal. There are two more fundamental problems with the MPAA vs 2600 case that aren't even being addressed by this appeal.
Problem #1: You shouldn't be able to shut down or file suit against a web site simply because you don't like the material to which it links. Links are just a form of reference, and there is nothing illegal about making a reference to anything you want.
Problem #2: DeCSS was the result of legitimate reverse-engineering. The DMCA is inherently evil and unlawful because it removes what was a previously protected ethical right to reverse-engineer any product just by observing it or taking it apart.
This case is only about free speech as far as links are concerned. It is actually more concerned with the legality of reverse-engineering and the illegality of the DMCA.
Mention how you got their address, to remind them that they gave you their address and to help them remember what was interesting about your company's products.
But on the flip side of the coin, be damn careful that you don't LIE and accuse people of having visited your web site or signed up for your e-mails when in reality they have not.
I get SPAM all the time that say things like "We never send mail unsolicited," (Bullshit), "You are receiving this because you signed up for a membership at so-and-so web site," (actually, I did no such fucking thing nor have ever heard of the web site in question), "To be removed please reply with the word 'reply' in the subject line" (so that instead of actually removing me, you can confirm my address and send me more shit!).
Completely stupid plot holes
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How many chiefs of security at major technology corporations run off and leave their workstations unlocked and logged in?
How many CEOs of tech corporations routinely leave their satellite control computers unlocked and logged in?
How many TCP-IP-based networking programs are advanced enough to control satellite networks but are too primitive to actually REMEMBER IP addresses instead of requiring you to manually enter them by hand each time you want to connect?
How many people are smart enough to rise to the level of CEO but dumb enough to think they can base their company's success on murder without getting caught?
How many tech-savvy murderers would be dumb enough to leave video-recorded evidence of their crimes available on unencrypted file stores accessible by developer-level employees?
How many real-life "genius" developers do you think could immediately take some random piece of undocumented source code (written on a different platform by totally unknown persons), look at it for a mere 10 seconds, and not only understand what it does but be able to comment on the extent of its elegance or cleverness?
How many entry-level developers at Microsoft were recruited directly by Bill Gates, including a personal tour of his mansion?
Isn't it convenient how everyone in the world uses GNOME and unix-based OSes, and how easily portable all the code is among them?
There were so many completely unrealistic and unbelievable holes in this movie that all I could do was laugh and try not to miss my $7.50.
Unless you're a stockholder in this company, you shouldn't have such a strong level of concern for their continued success. You should care more about your own mental health and quality of life, and use up all of that vacation time! If you return from vacation to find that they expect YOU ALONE to fix all the damage, that's THEIR fault for not hiring enough admins... it's not YOUR fault for taking the vacation you are legally entitled to take.
How can a corporation infringe on your rights unless the government gives them that right?
Disregard for a moment the fact that the government already does give corporations the legal rights to infringe upon your ethical rights via legislation such as the DMCA.
Now, realize that just because there are laws enacted, that doesn't mean that there is any enforcement of or adherence to those laws.
For instance, there have been laws on the books for years againt companies making untrue claims about the capabilities of their products. This is called false advertising. But computer hardware component manufacturers regularly practice false advertising despite it being illegal.
For instance, just this month my family purchased a NetLux NAT router for use with their new cable modem connection at home. The router claims that it will work with NetMeeting and numerous other software applications by allowing certain TCP and UDP ports to be forwarded to a specific computer in the home network. However, even when patched with the latest firmware and properly configured, the router simply can't be made to work with NetMeeting, Asheron's Call, and several other programs that it is advertised as being able to support.
Even though NetLux is guilty of false advertising, my family has no recourse. We have to suck up the 25% restocking fee that NetLux requires in order to return the product to them, and they won't send us a newer model that they think might fix the problem unless we pay them more money for the cost difference between the two units. Nevermind that the problem is entirely theirs for making untrue claims about their product in the first place.
Are you beginning to see the problem yet? There's no way that an individual can defend themselves against wrongdoing performed by a corporation even if the law clearly states that what the corporation is doing is wrong. The legal costs of defending themselves (and in effect enforcing the law) are too high for 99% of individuals. If you're really lucky, some greedy lawyer might decide to start a class-action suit, but that assumes that enough other people have also been wronged by the same corporation in the same way and are willing to join the suit.
How about another example? Corporations with web sites often collect personal information about users and then claim (via a published privacy policy) that they will not sell your information to other companies or use it for marketing purposes. And yet, those companies routinely violate those published privacy policies and sell the information or use it for marketing. How can they do this? Because individuals don't have the financial resources available to defend themselves against a corporation in a court of law, and because government agents can't be monitoring every corporation 24/7/365 to watch for violations of published privacy policies. Companies can and do get away with breaking the law every day, while poor fucked-over individuals are left without any course of action to defend themselves or see that the law gets enforced.
So THOSE are current, real-life examples of how corporations can infringe on your rights even when the government has not granted them the legal right to do so. Welcome to reality.
Sure, they CAN do those things to you if you LET them. If you speak your mind and read the constitution, then you might just get what you want!
What a nice little dream world you must live in! Belive it or not, most people in the USA don't have the financial resources to hire a team of hardball lawyers to defend them every time a corporation or the government wrongs them.
Your argument is just as shallow as those who say that the US Patent Office should bear no obligation to carefully research patents before granting them, and that the legal system should be the place for patent issues to be settled. Believe it or not, not every company has the financial resources to defend themselves against frivolous patent lawsuits! Look at what happened to Aureal, for instance. Creative Labs took them to court over patent issues, and even though Aureal won the case and had done no wrong, the legal costs of defending themselves were so high that it bankrupted them anyway. This is NOT an ethical way to run the system!
I was simply trying to point out that if we indeed had a directly elected president, the president could win the popular vote by courting a handful of states -- ignoring the vast majority of the country.
You mean ignoring the vast geographical majority of the country. And the question is, why should that matter? Shouldn't the people majority be what matters in a vote anyway? If 90% of the population lives in a handful of large cities, then doesn't it only make sense that the election should mostly reflect those large cities? After all, land doesn't vote or determine political issues--people do! I don't recall seeing any four-acre farms at the polls this year.
No it didn't. No one's vote was worth a damn in the general presedential election this year, because both candidates were utter crap. It was only so close because neither one was worth voting for, had a clear message or direction or was able to demonstrate that they believed in anything.
You're almost right. No candidate with a clear message or firm stances would ever succeed in winning an election. By definition, when you take a firm stance on a particular issue, you immediately alienate all those voters who have taken the opposite stance.
If your opponent refuses to take any firm stances, instead pandering vaguely to both sides of the issue, they will pick up votes from both sides and beat you. This is why any candidate who takes firm stances on the issues (such as third party and independent candidates) will never end up winning an election in this country.
I can't envision any kind of fix to this problem. Being young, naive, and politically inexperienced, it's easy for someone to think, "Well I'LL run for office someday and actually stand for something!" But should you try to travel that path, you'll find that if you choose to stick by your stances, you'll only end up being a fringe candidate. You have to pander and be confusing and vague enough to pick up votes from both sides in order to win over an opponent who also plays that tactic.
It's interesting to note that open source projects are way ahead of AOL in developing a full featured AIM client for GNU/Linux.
There's nothing interesting about it. Obviously, AOL doesn't care about supporting Linux. If they were actually concerned about Linux support, then they would allocate more development resources to the Linux AIM client and make it better.
There are many things that I hope to see in my lifetime, but that I fear will never come to fruition due to inherent faults in human nature. Still, I'll list some of them here in hope that some improbabilities may yet occur.
1: I hope to see humankind mature to the point that it no longer needs or wants organized religion or creationism. Individual spiritualism and personal religion are fine, but organized religion and creationism have been the largest setbacks to human development and the most wide-scale causes of human suffering in the history of humankind.
2: I hope to see humankind mature enough for people to stop trying to force their personal opinions (including religious beliefs and personal definitions of morality) onto everyone else, and instead mind their own business without feeling a need to take away everyone else's rights and freedoms.
3: I hope to see the United States (and in fact, all countries in the world) become a true democracy with choices made by the general population, rather than a representative republic biased in favor of corporations, the wealthy, and/or old white men.
4: I hope to see backwards and artificial notions of "land ownership" and "intellectual property" abolished, and to see land and creative ideas once again free and open and shared cooperatively and courteously by people. (We could take a few lessons from the native American indians here.)
5: I hope to see all people fairly compensated for their work by the economy. No one should have to struggle and wear themselves to the point of near-insanity just to be able to feed themselves or their children or to have an adequate place to live. Retail workers and burger flippers should be getting a lot more than the current minimum wage because they are a lot more valuable to society then the economy gives them credit for.
6: I hope to see the day when humankind first touches down on another planet within our solar system, and first discovers independently-evolved life (even if it's just microbes) on another planet.
7: I hope to see society's priorities change from money and productivity to people and quality of life.
You would be correct if man pages were kept up-to-date and were written/edited for consistency (in terms of both the information offered and the target audience's skill level).
Unfortunately, the man and info pages included in nearly every distro end up being out-of-date with the newer utilities/libs/etc actually included with the distribution, and even when you find a page that is up-to-date, it could be (and usually is) written to such an advanced target audience that it is of absolutely no help to a newbie who is trying to figure out how to accomplish a basic task such as "I want to print my Word document. My printer doesn't seem to work. How do I install my printer?"
I dare you to have a new user use "man" to answer that question. They will never even think to enter "man lpr" and even if they stumble on it, few will understand the terminology or background used in the document well enough to figure out what the hell is going on. Most newbies don't even know what a "printer queue" or "spooling" is, so using those terms to describe printing doesn't help them at all.
BeOS and Linux suffer from a lot of the same problems:
The available desktop user interfaces are too primitive and are basically just piss-poor clones of Windows or Mac with no real improvements. I think that KDE leads the GUI/desktop pack in terms of providing an interface that is consistent, simple, and yet rich enough all at the same time to approach the ease-of-use of either Mac or Windows. Coming from a Mac or Windows, BeOS's GUI is frustratingly simplistic and lacking in features; and Gnome is just too piece-mealed together to offer proper consistency from one app to the next or from one customized desktop to the next.
The vast majority of PC hardware isn't supported by either OS. You can't expect your new Gateway or Dell PC to run either OS, and you can't expect any add-on peripherals or boards you buy at CompUSA or Best Buy to work with them either. Until an alternative PC OS supports hardware at a comparable level as Windows, Microsoft will continue to rule the desktop user world.
The vast majority of applications on which the world depends (Microsoft Office, for example) won't run on either OS, and neither OS has a fully-featured office suite that is 100% compatible with the latest release of MS Office. Having the ability to be only 90% accurate when importing a Word document, while also completely lacking the ability to save a latest-version Word document, is a major setback to global adoption of any other OS. And don't rant on about Windows support layers or emus for Linux and/or BeOS, because those are simply too complex and not yet 100% compatible enough to run all the Windows software that people want to use. The most important application development focus for any alternative OS that wants to overthrow Windows should be on a kick-ass office suite with 100% MS Office compatibility and capability.
Both systems rely on the UNIX-style filesystem hierarchy, which is far too complex for most users to figure out or understand. Most users can barely understand "Program Files, Windows, My Documents"... what the hell makes you think they are going to be able to deal with "/etc,/bin,/sbin,/usr,/usr/bin,/usr/sbin,/opt,/root,/boot,/dev,/home"?
So if BeOS were released as Free Software (which is ethically much better than just open-source), the only thing that would happen is that all the hardcore geeks in the world would take sides and argue about BeOS vs. Linux, while Microsoft and Apple would just pull their proprietary software even further ahead in terms of innovation and marketshare than they are already.
They deliver a solid product, good drivers, and are open source sympathetic.
I have to say I disagree with every point you just mentioned. I purchased a G400 Dual Head card last year, and it fried its own BIOS when I tried to install the Win2k drivers that were available at the time. The Win98 drivers that I tried were dog slow and had some weird quirks (such a graphic artifacting with certain Direct3D games that always worked fine with the Voodoo3 I bought afterward). And frankly, most consumers don't give a rat's ass about open-source sympathy or not, so I consider that a non-issue when it comes to predicting the successs of a video board company.
He "works from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m., 355 days a year, and says he has never taken a vacation."
And this is supposed to be a good thing? Obsessing about anything to the verge of lunacy, and sacrificing all the other things that really make life worth living, is hardly a healthy way to live. The quality of life on this planet is only going to get worse as long as people keep praising this kind of unreasonable work ethic.
In a capitalist market, survival of the fittest is a rule, and 3Dfx just wasn't fit anymore. They were releasing crappy products, failing to license out their technology, and selling their cards only at retail (rather than working to get them integrated or included with new PCs).
A few people here have mentioned the Voodoo 1, 2, and 3's good cost-performance ratios and their stable drivers, and those are very true observations. However, 3Dfx shot themselves in the foot when they stopped marketing their products in any ways that bring in strong revenue. They stopped running television ads and stopped licensing their chip technology to other board manufacturers--and all the revenue dried up right there.
Someone here said that ATI owns 80% of the PC video card market because they get their chips and boards included with OEM systems. ATI has traditionally made somewhat crappy products, but as a business they have thrived because they know how to work themselves into revenue-making positions in the marketplace. They have become so successful as a business, in fact, that they have finally gotten back around to investing more resources in R&D and QA, and the quality of their products has improved radically in the last 2-4 years.
nVidia is especially interesting because they have a pretty even mix (IMHO) of product and marketing excellence. They have figured out how to achieve rapid growth in both areas. The only problem is that they now have only one worthy competitor left on their radar (ATI; Matrox just doesn't have enough market share or technical superiority). When one company in a given industry pulls far, far ahead of all the rest, it means they run the risk of getting lazy.
That hasn't happened with all large behemoths (Sony and Microsoft continue to work hard and produce excellent stuff, for instance), but it has happened with many (General Electric, Phillips/Magnavox). Let's hope that nVidia doesn't get too cozy as it approaches the top of the food chain.
He basically says that the drop in PC prices will cut into the margins that PC sellers can afford, and that they'll drop the M$ tax, and replace their bundled OS with something cheaper, like Linux.
The last thing PC manufacturers would do in response to shrinking margins would be to switch from Windows to Linux. The choice of OS isn't simply about per-unit margin costs; it factors in such novel concepts as Will most people actually buy or use a computer with this OS on it?
Nevermind that most of the world runs on Windows already and couldn't switch to Linux for that reason alone. Nevermind that no Windows runtime environment or emu for Linux is 100% accurate or up-to-date with the latest shipped version of Windows, and so you can't run 100% of Windows applications on it. Nevermind the fact that cheap hardware shortcuts like WinModems that increase margins won't work with Linux. Nevermind the fact that 99.9999% of computer games aren't available on Linux.
Just considering the ease-of-use issue, if Gateway were to install Linux instead of Windows on its machines, they wouldn't be able to sell half of the computers they do now. Home users wouldn't buy (or buy and keep) machines pre-installed with Linux because they would be far too difficult for them to use.
Like it or not, Linux is only properly suited for being a harcore computer user's OS, or a network server of some kind. No matter how many layers of desktop environment or GUI you throw over top of it, it's still too complex for most people to configure and maintain, and most of the desktop-style apps for it still suck.
...when it is saturated with total crap at unfairly high prices long enough for customers to realize it and for the companies to stop making profits.
Look at the gaming fall-out of the 2600 era. Why did it happen? Because tons of crappy 2600 games at $30 a piece (or more) were flooding the market for so long that people eventually saw through the crap and found a complete lack of non-crap. Result: customers stopped purchasing, companies stopped making profits, companies fell out.
But hey, guess what happened? Nintendo released the NES and enough non-crappy games for it at reasonable prices that customers got interested again, and Nintendo rose above all others (until Sega finally started making non-crap at reasonable prices as well, i.e. Genesis).
Look at the recent dot-coms fall-out. Guess why it happened? Because the companies weren't producing any tangible products or services that people actually wanted for the prices being asked. After about 2 years of flooding the marketplace with crap, customers finally caught on and stopped buying, and venture capitalists finally ran out of patience and said "No profits, no funding". Result: all these companies stopped having a source of money for doing business, and went bankrupt. Quite simple.
I think that the gaming industry has grown large and diverse enough that it isn't likely there will be another big fall-out like the 2600 era. It's not like we have 5-10 big companies making all the games in the world--there are TONS of different little companies making all kinds of games for all kinds of platforms, so if Nintendo or Sony or Microsoft or SEGA screw it all up, there will still be innovative smaller companies trying new and different things, so there will always be a starting point of non-crap alive somewhere in the industry.
Spammers don't even come close to comparing to assholes that drive 50 miles per hour in the fast lane on the freeway.
Very true--thanks for pointing that out. However, most of the slow drivers in the fast lane are mentally impaired, so at least they have an excuse. Spammers are obviously mentally endowed enough to take advantage of the technology... they aren't lacking in brains, just ethics.
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Old story: Body in power enacts unethical laws to promote own agenda. People have no choice but to violate the unethical laws. Big disputes ensue over punishment of legal violations.
New spin: Companies buy off US government and enact unethical laws to improve profits. People have no choice but to violate the unethical laws, since no one makes enough money to legally purchase all the music/software/movies they need. Napster, DeCSS, and Aimster suits follow, and appeals of those suits, and so on.
How the story ends depends on how the body in power chooses to enforce the laws.
In the case of software piracy, individuals who swap copies of Windows with their friends never go to federal prison for it, while large-scale counterfit software operations or businesses that use pirated software for their needs usually get busted. This is actually a pretty fair and ethical enforcement of software copyright law in most people's minds, so the law remains. It is ethical and fair because everyone knows that no individual person could possibly afford to purchase all the software they really need (it would put them out of food and shelter), while we all know that if you can afford to be running a business or if you're counterfitting software for your own profit then you're basically ripping off someone else's hard work unnecessarily.
In the case of music, individuals who swap songs over the Internet are not being punished. Only the large-scale facilitators of music piracy are being attacked and shut down. This is exactly the kind of punishment that has gone on in the software world for years with popular acceptance, and yet it raises an uproar among music lovers who feel their ethical rights to swap copies are being destroyed.
I've got news for you: it is no more your ethical entitlement to a service like Napster than it is your ethical entitlement to access a counterfit software operation. The RIAA isn't punishing individuals for copying songs for their friends. The RIAA is punishing large-scale facilitators of copyright violation, and I think most of us can be reasonable people and agree with that approach. It's necessary in order to protect and compensate the people who work hard to create that content for us.
Now, the RIAA has every ethical right to make it as technologically difficult as possible for you to individually make copies, just as you have every ethical right to reverse-engineer those protection technologies to make your own copies. And the RIAA has every ethical right to attack large-scale distributors of reverse-engineering software, just as you have every ethical right to make individual copies of it and swap it with your friends behind the RIAA's back. It's an ongoing battle that achieves balance and compromise through the raging of the battle itself.
Microsoft is attacking open source at its weakest point: the GPL.
GPL==Free Software; GPL!=Open Source Software.
And there appears to be a fundamental misunderstanding by each of the three camps about the others. Let me clarify for the public good:
You can't base a business around Free Software and the GPL because it's not designed to be a business model or a way to make money. That is why companies like Red Hat will struggle in the long run, because they can only make money through "added value" crap like tech support and shrink-wrapped product, which won't be nearly enough to make up for their R&D costs. And you can't take a GPL project and let businesses overtake the majority of development and expect it to stay afloat and remain free, because businesses need to make money.
Here are the real reasons that tech support sucks:
1. Most companies don't have sensible infrastructures, specifically databases. Too many companies maintain multiple internal databases that can't talk to each other, such that one arm of the company doesn't know what the other arm is doing. Then the customer gets told 10 different stories by 10 different people in 10 different departments, and not one of the stories is true.
2. Most companies don't believe they have any obligation to provide support for their products, especially for products they have stopped manufacturing. They also short-sightedly believe that there is no money to be made in providing good tech support, so they don't invest in it. A company should be legally obligated to continue to support its products, even if those products are no longer being manufactured, as long as those products are still on retailer's shelves. And a truly successful company has the foresight to understand that investments in tech support do pay off. Tech support adds value to a product and can increase sales of the product beyond the cost of providing the technical support.
3. Most technical products are not designed to be easy enough for average people to use. They are ludicrously complex and problematic by nature, and so it's no small wonder that tech support departments are overloaded at companies that produce such products. If companies invested more in usability and quality assurance, then they wouldn't have to pay for it later in tech support costs.
4. Most companies rely on a pre-fabbed, one-size-fits all, choose-your-own-misadventure approach to dealing with a customer's problem. A customer who possesses masters degrees in computer science and computer engineering shouldn't have to be subjected to a ludicrously moronic line of questioning ("Are you sure it's plugged in? Have you tried turning the power switch on?" etc) before being permitted to ship back a faulty product for repair or replacement. Companies take this approach because they feel it can take the place of having to hire trained support personnel to man the phones--unfortunately, there is no replacement for having people on the other end of the line who actually know what they are doing.
Until campaign finance reform is enacted and enforced, injustices will continue to be practiced daily by the US government.
The US Patent Office is just like any other federal agency: it is implicitly owned by major corporations. Legislators are afraid to enact reforms that might alienate their largest campaign contributors. Every significant decision made by our legislature favors corporate will over ethics or citizen's rights.
About the only thing you can do to have any say in the matter is to become a mega-millionaire and start bribing legislators. In the USA, if you don't have money and an army of lawyers, you just get ignored.
What this country really needs is a new constitutional ammendment which provides a strict separation between money and state.
The US Patent Office incorrectly believes that the place to hammer out issues of patent legitimacy is the courtroom. They don't believe that it's their responsibility.
Obviously this logic is flawed. Individuals and small businesses must spend huge sums of money to simply defend themselves in court. Large corporations know this, and use bogus patent challenges as a way to squash anyone who stands in their way.
One recent example is Creative Labs vs. Aureal. Although Aureal ultimately won against Creative Labs' patent charges, the legal defense costs bankrupted Aureal.
How can you spot a rich white man? Ask him if he thinks the US Patent Office is doing a good job.
While I agree whole-heartedly with the "code in any form is free speech deserving protection" argument, it's not the right approach to take on appeal. There are two more fundamental problems with the MPAA vs 2600 case that aren't even being addressed by this appeal.
Problem #1: You shouldn't be able to shut down or file suit against a web site simply because you don't like the material to which it links. Links are just a form of reference, and there is nothing illegal about making a reference to anything you want.
Problem #2: DeCSS was the result of legitimate reverse-engineering. The DMCA is inherently evil and unlawful because it removes what was a previously protected ethical right to reverse-engineer any product just by observing it or taking it apart.
This case is only about free speech as far as links are concerned. It is actually more concerned with the legality of reverse-engineering and the illegality of the DMCA.
Mention how you got their address, to remind them that they gave you their address and to help them remember what was interesting about your company's products.
But on the flip side of the coin, be damn careful that you don't LIE and accuse people of having visited your web site or signed up for your e-mails when in reality they have not.
I get SPAM all the time that say things like "We never send mail unsolicited," (Bullshit), "You are receiving this because you signed up for a membership at so-and-so web site," (actually, I did no such fucking thing nor have ever heard of the web site in question), "To be removed please reply with the word 'reply' in the subject line" (so that instead of actually removing me, you can confirm my address and send me more shit!).
How many chiefs of security at major technology corporations run off and leave their workstations unlocked and logged in?
How many CEOs of tech corporations routinely leave their satellite control computers unlocked and logged in?
How many TCP-IP-based networking programs are advanced enough to control satellite networks but are too primitive to actually REMEMBER IP addresses instead of requiring you to manually enter them by hand each time you want to connect?
How many people are smart enough to rise to the level of CEO but dumb enough to think they can base their company's success on murder without getting caught?
How many tech-savvy murderers would be dumb enough to leave video-recorded evidence of their crimes available on unencrypted file stores accessible by developer-level employees?
How many real-life "genius" developers do you think could immediately take some random piece of undocumented source code (written on a different platform by totally unknown persons), look at it for a mere 10 seconds, and not only understand what it does but be able to comment on the extent of its elegance or cleverness?
How many entry-level developers at Microsoft were recruited directly by Bill Gates, including a personal tour of his mansion?
Isn't it convenient how everyone in the world uses GNOME and unix-based OSes, and how easily portable all the code is among them?
There were so many completely unrealistic and unbelievable holes in this movie that all I could do was laugh and try not to miss my $7.50.
Unless you're a stockholder in this company, you shouldn't have such a strong level of concern for their continued success. You should care more about your own mental health and quality of life, and use up all of that vacation time! If you return from vacation to find that they expect YOU ALONE to fix all the damage, that's THEIR fault for not hiring enough admins... it's not YOUR fault for taking the vacation you are legally entitled to take.
How can a corporation infringe on your rights unless the government gives them that right?
Disregard for a moment the fact that the government already does give corporations the legal rights to infringe upon your ethical rights via legislation such as the DMCA.
Now, realize that just because there are laws enacted, that doesn't mean that there is any enforcement of or adherence to those laws.
For instance, there have been laws on the books for years againt companies making untrue claims about the capabilities of their products. This is called false advertising. But computer hardware component manufacturers regularly practice false advertising despite it being illegal.
For instance, just this month my family purchased a NetLux NAT router for use with their new cable modem connection at home. The router claims that it will work with NetMeeting and numerous other software applications by allowing certain TCP and UDP ports to be forwarded to a specific computer in the home network. However, even when patched with the latest firmware and properly configured, the router simply can't be made to work with NetMeeting, Asheron's Call, and several other programs that it is advertised as being able to support.
Even though NetLux is guilty of false advertising, my family has no recourse. We have to suck up the 25% restocking fee that NetLux requires in order to return the product to them, and they won't send us a newer model that they think might fix the problem unless we pay them more money for the cost difference between the two units. Nevermind that the problem is entirely theirs for making untrue claims about their product in the first place.
Are you beginning to see the problem yet? There's no way that an individual can defend themselves against wrongdoing performed by a corporation even if the law clearly states that what the corporation is doing is wrong. The legal costs of defending themselves (and in effect enforcing the law) are too high for 99% of individuals. If you're really lucky, some greedy lawyer might decide to start a class-action suit, but that assumes that enough other people have also been wronged by the same corporation in the same way and are willing to join the suit.
How about another example? Corporations with web sites often collect personal information about users and then claim (via a published privacy policy) that they will not sell your information to other companies or use it for marketing purposes. And yet, those companies routinely violate those published privacy policies and sell the information or use it for marketing. How can they do this? Because individuals don't have the financial resources available to defend themselves against a corporation in a court of law, and because government agents can't be monitoring every corporation 24/7/365 to watch for violations of published privacy policies. Companies can and do get away with breaking the law every day, while poor fucked-over individuals are left without any course of action to defend themselves or see that the law gets enforced.
So THOSE are current, real-life examples of how corporations can infringe on your rights even when the government has not granted them the legal right to do so. Welcome to reality.
Sure, they CAN do those things to you if you LET them. If you speak your mind and read the constitution, then you might just get what you want!
What a nice little dream world you must live in! Belive it or not, most people in the USA don't have the financial resources to hire a team of hardball lawyers to defend them every time a corporation or the government wrongs them.
Your argument is just as shallow as those who say that the US Patent Office should bear no obligation to carefully research patents before granting them, and that the legal system should be the place for patent issues to be settled. Believe it or not, not every company has the financial resources to defend themselves against frivolous patent lawsuits! Look at what happened to Aureal, for instance. Creative Labs took them to court over patent issues, and even though Aureal won the case and had done no wrong, the legal costs of defending themselves were so high that it bankrupted them anyway. This is NOT an ethical way to run the system!
I was simply trying to point out that if we indeed had a directly elected president, the president could win the popular vote by courting a handful of states -- ignoring the vast majority of the country.
You mean ignoring the vast geographical majority of the country. And the question is, why should that matter? Shouldn't the people majority be what matters in a vote anyway? If 90% of the population lives in a handful of large cities, then doesn't it only make sense that the election should mostly reflect those large cities? After all, land doesn't vote or determine political issues--people do! I don't recall seeing any four-acre farms at the polls this year.
No it didn't. No one's vote was worth a damn in the general presedential election this year, because both candidates were utter crap. It was only so close because neither one was worth voting for, had a clear message or direction or was able to demonstrate that they believed in anything.
You're almost right. No candidate with a clear message or firm stances would ever succeed in winning an election. By definition, when you take a firm stance on a particular issue, you immediately alienate all those voters who have taken the opposite stance.
If your opponent refuses to take any firm stances, instead pandering vaguely to both sides of the issue, they will pick up votes from both sides and beat you. This is why any candidate who takes firm stances on the issues (such as third party and independent candidates) will never end up winning an election in this country.
I can't envision any kind of fix to this problem. Being young, naive, and politically inexperienced, it's easy for someone to think, "Well I'LL run for office someday and actually stand for something!" But should you try to travel that path, you'll find that if you choose to stick by your stances, you'll only end up being a fringe candidate. You have to pander and be confusing and vague enough to pick up votes from both sides in order to win over an opponent who also plays that tactic.
It's interesting to note that open source projects are way ahead of AOL in developing a full featured AIM client for GNU/Linux.
There's nothing interesting about it. Obviously, AOL doesn't care about supporting Linux. If they were actually concerned about Linux support, then they would allocate more development resources to the Linux AIM client and make it better.
There are many things that I hope to see in my lifetime, but that I fear will never come to fruition due to inherent faults in human nature. Still, I'll list some of them here in hope that some improbabilities may yet occur.
1: I hope to see humankind mature to the point that it no longer needs or wants organized religion or creationism. Individual spiritualism and personal religion are fine, but organized religion and creationism have been the largest setbacks to human development and the most wide-scale causes of human suffering in the history of humankind.
2: I hope to see humankind mature enough for people to stop trying to force their personal opinions (including religious beliefs and personal definitions of morality) onto everyone else, and instead mind their own business without feeling a need to take away everyone else's rights and freedoms.
3: I hope to see the United States (and in fact, all countries in the world) become a true democracy with choices made by the general population, rather than a representative republic biased in favor of corporations, the wealthy, and/or old white men.
4: I hope to see backwards and artificial notions of "land ownership" and "intellectual property" abolished, and to see land and creative ideas once again free and open and shared cooperatively and courteously by people. (We could take a few lessons from the native American indians here.)
5: I hope to see all people fairly compensated for their work by the economy. No one should have to struggle and wear themselves to the point of near-insanity just to be able to feed themselves or their children or to have an adequate place to live. Retail workers and burger flippers should be getting a lot more than the current minimum wage because they are a lot more valuable to society then the economy gives them credit for.
6: I hope to see the day when humankind first touches down on another planet within our solar system, and first discovers independently-evolved life (even if it's just microbes) on another planet.
7: I hope to see society's priorities change from money and productivity to people and quality of life.
You would be correct if man pages were kept up-to-date and were written/edited for consistency (in terms of both the information offered and the target audience's skill level).
Unfortunately, the man and info pages included in nearly every distro end up being out-of-date with the newer utilities/libs/etc actually included with the distribution, and even when you find a page that is up-to-date, it could be (and usually is) written to such an advanced target audience that it is of absolutely no help to a newbie who is trying to figure out how to accomplish a basic task such as "I want to print my Word document. My printer doesn't seem to work. How do I install my printer?"
I dare you to have a new user use "man" to answer that question. They will never even think to enter "man lpr" and even if they stumble on it, few will understand the terminology or background used in the document well enough to figure out what the hell is going on. Most newbies don't even know what a "printer queue" or "spooling" is, so using those terms to describe printing doesn't help them at all.
Congratulations! You have essentially reinvented the World Wide Web and Windows Help!
BeOS and Linux suffer from a lot of the same problems:
So if BeOS were released as Free Software (which is ethically much better than just open-source), the only thing that would happen is that all the hardcore geeks in the world would take sides and argue about BeOS vs. Linux, while Microsoft and Apple would just pull their proprietary software even further ahead in terms of innovation and marketshare than they are already.
They deliver a solid product, good drivers, and are open source sympathetic.
I have to say I disagree with every point you just mentioned. I purchased a G400 Dual Head card last year, and it fried its own BIOS when I tried to install the Win2k drivers that were available at the time. The Win98 drivers that I tried were dog slow and had some weird quirks (such a graphic artifacting with certain Direct3D games that always worked fine with the Voodoo3 I bought afterward). And frankly, most consumers don't give a rat's ass about open-source sympathy or not, so I consider that a non-issue when it comes to predicting the successs of a video board company.
He "works from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m., 355 days a year, and says he has never taken a vacation."
And this is supposed to be a good thing? Obsessing about anything to the verge of lunacy, and sacrificing all the other things that really make life worth living, is hardly a healthy way to live. The quality of life on this planet is only going to get worse as long as people keep praising this kind of unreasonable work ethic.
In a capitalist market, survival of the fittest is a rule, and 3Dfx just wasn't fit anymore. They were releasing crappy products, failing to license out their technology, and selling their cards only at retail (rather than working to get them integrated or included with new PCs).
A few people here have mentioned the Voodoo 1, 2, and 3's good cost-performance ratios and their stable drivers, and those are very true observations. However, 3Dfx shot themselves in the foot when they stopped marketing their products in any ways that bring in strong revenue. They stopped running television ads and stopped licensing their chip technology to other board manufacturers--and all the revenue dried up right there.
Someone here said that ATI owns 80% of the PC video card market because they get their chips and boards included with OEM systems. ATI has traditionally made somewhat crappy products, but as a business they have thrived because they know how to work themselves into revenue-making positions in the marketplace. They have become so successful as a business, in fact, that they have finally gotten back around to investing more resources in R&D and QA, and the quality of their products has improved radically in the last 2-4 years.
nVidia is especially interesting because they have a pretty even mix (IMHO) of product and marketing excellence. They have figured out how to achieve rapid growth in both areas. The only problem is that they now have only one worthy competitor left on their radar (ATI; Matrox just doesn't have enough market share or technical superiority). When one company in a given industry pulls far, far ahead of all the rest, it means they run the risk of getting lazy.
That hasn't happened with all large behemoths (Sony and Microsoft continue to work hard and produce excellent stuff, for instance), but it has happened with many (General Electric, Phillips/Magnavox). Let's hope that nVidia doesn't get too cozy as it approaches the top of the food chain.
He basically says that the drop in PC prices will cut into the margins that PC sellers can afford, and that they'll drop the M$ tax, and replace their bundled OS with something cheaper, like Linux.
The last thing PC manufacturers would do in response to shrinking margins would be to switch from Windows to Linux. The choice of OS isn't simply about per-unit margin costs; it factors in such novel concepts as Will most people actually buy or use a computer with this OS on it?
Nevermind that most of the world runs on Windows already and couldn't switch to Linux for that reason alone. Nevermind that no Windows runtime environment or emu for Linux is 100% accurate or up-to-date with the latest shipped version of Windows, and so you can't run 100% of Windows applications on it. Nevermind the fact that cheap hardware shortcuts like WinModems that increase margins won't work with Linux. Nevermind the fact that 99.9999% of computer games aren't available on Linux.
Just considering the ease-of-use issue, if Gateway were to install Linux instead of Windows on its machines, they wouldn't be able to sell half of the computers they do now. Home users wouldn't buy (or buy and keep) machines pre-installed with Linux because they would be far too difficult for them to use.
Like it or not, Linux is only properly suited for being a harcore computer user's OS, or a network server of some kind. No matter how many layers of desktop environment or GUI you throw over top of it, it's still too complex for most people to configure and maintain, and most of the desktop-style apps for it still suck.
...when it is saturated with total crap at unfairly high prices long enough for customers to realize it and for the companies to stop making profits.
Look at the gaming fall-out of the 2600 era. Why did it happen? Because tons of crappy 2600 games at $30 a piece (or more) were flooding the market for so long that people eventually saw through the crap and found a complete lack of non-crap. Result: customers stopped purchasing, companies stopped making profits, companies fell out.
But hey, guess what happened? Nintendo released the NES and enough non-crappy games for it at reasonable prices that customers got interested again, and Nintendo rose above all others (until Sega finally started making non-crap at reasonable prices as well, i.e. Genesis).
Look at the recent dot-coms fall-out. Guess why it happened? Because the companies weren't producing any tangible products or services that people actually wanted for the prices being asked. After about 2 years of flooding the marketplace with crap, customers finally caught on and stopped buying, and venture capitalists finally ran out of patience and said "No profits, no funding". Result: all these companies stopped having a source of money for doing business, and went bankrupt. Quite simple.
I think that the gaming industry has grown large and diverse enough that it isn't likely there will be another big fall-out like the 2600 era. It's not like we have 5-10 big companies making all the games in the world--there are TONS of different little companies making all kinds of games for all kinds of platforms, so if Nintendo or Sony or Microsoft or SEGA screw it all up, there will still be innovative smaller companies trying new and different things, so there will always be a starting point of non-crap alive somewhere in the industry.
Spammers don't even come close to comparing to assholes that drive 50 miles per hour in the fast lane on the freeway.
Very true--thanks for pointing that out. However, most of the slow drivers in the fast lane are mentally impaired, so at least they have an excuse. Spammers are obviously mentally endowed enough to take advantage of the technology... they aren't lacking in brains, just ethics.
This attempt to troll is ridiculous...
It's not an attempt to "troll" at all. It's my serious opinion on the matter.
It's not propaganda. It's a statement of my personal opinion.
(I just hope it's a smart troll, cause if it isn't, I'm surprised to see such a dumbass alive)
Oooh, such manly words from such a manly Anonymous Coward! Go play with AOL or something.