A different tack, but maybe an RDF search engine is the ticket. But where to get the RDF? Will people who create the metadata be willing to share it? Will enough people create the metadata in the first place?
Anyone else wonder if part of the motivation behind this asinine behaviour might be to scare people to use UnitedLinux? With Caldera having an interest, they may be the only distro immune to these kinds of frivilous lawsuits.
I bet we'll see a campaign along the lines of "UnitedLinux is better, because UnitedLinux is the only Linux incorporating proven UNIX technology."... or some such bullshit.
It would be nice if they also considered how they might financially compensate the authors of the free software they elect to use. I realize that establishing a fair correspondence between the value of the software you use and the value of the time contributed by its author(s), for the multitude of interdepent components that comprise a working solution is easier said than done. Still worth thinking about.
NFS should go away. What Linux needs, that UNIX doesn't have, is a filesharing system as featureful as AFS without all the complication. NFS4, perhaps, but that remains to be seen. Even NetBIOS is more secure than NFS, I hate to say.
Discovery can happen by accident as well as by understanding:)
And there are degrees of understanding. "Oh", we say, "those guy's didn't really understand batteries, they just discovered how to make them." O.K., fine. So how many people reading/. this morning can explain how a battery works? How it really works?
The point is that a packeteer can't look inside of encrypted packets, which is what all the p2p traffic that everyone is trying to manage will soon be.
Has anyone in Congress considered the fact that enforcing such strictures will likely soon be impossible? Even now, the act of policing how people are using their computer would involve invading their privacy.
It doesn't take a genius to figure out that the natural evolution of this technology will be to add encryption. On top of that, perhaps use mix-net or other anonymizing technology. Run all the traffic over port 443. How do you police that? Bet you can't wait to tell your boss that the $50,000 you spent on a Packeteer is down the toilet. We read recently how Microsoft is collecting information about your computer every time you do an update. Perhaps we should pass legislation which mandates that people disclose the contents of their hard drives without warrent? Give me a break.
So university administrators should be held reponsible for the actions of their clients? Among other things, remember, students are not (typically) employees.
If this flies, then I think members of Congress should also be held personally responsible for any and all undesireable actions taken by any resident of the United States. Obviously they could be doing more to prevent criminal behaviour. Because they are not, because criminals still roam the streets, they should be held liable.
Can anyone point to a good place to read more about all the idiot ideas floating around in Congress? I'd like to get a better handle on who the real bozos are who float this kind of stupid shit.
focusing on reducing vulnerabilities in the next version of Windows, rather than attempting to fix 2000 or XP.
Yeah, why would you want to fix a product that was originally sold as a trustworthy product to an unsuspecting (gullible? naive?) public when doing so would undermine your ability to coerce people into buying your next so-called trustworthy product; which they'll eventually have to buy in order to protect themselves against all of the unaddressed problems with the old product?
How many times will people fall for this? Come on, Charlie Brown, get a clue and stop falling for Lucy's stupid fucking trick!
Right. I don't think this is about trademarks. This is about the way people percieve the word "google". It used to be a really big number. Now it's associated with searching. Maybe google has bigger aspirations, and wants to prevent its name from assuming a definition that limits its applicability to other endeavors. Remember when Amazon just sold books? The great river. The big number. I dunno.
You like MS Office, you say? Who's going to buy this for you? Are you going to buck up for your own copy at home? Or, like most people, are you expecting your company to buy it for you? That way, it's kind of like it doesn't really cost anything, right? Except it does cost something. It's money your company could have paid you directly. It's money your company could have used to improve their market penetration. It's money your company could have used to improve their facilities. It's money that could have been used to increase the R&D budget. It's money that could have been used to hire additional staff. And on and on.
But a new version of Office with pretty new buttons and a three panel view like Outlook? A new version that's intentionally incompatible with everything else in the world, including Microsoft's own products? That's precious.
Gates talks excitedly about putting together software he thinks may change the world.
Microsoft's greatest contribution to the computing landscape is not software. There is nothing particularly innovative or inspired about anything they have ever written. I'm not saying it's bad software, just that there's very little that they have done that wasn't preceded by other less successful counterparts.
Microsoft's great contribution is their business method. Ensure customer loyalty by ensnaring them with de-facto proprietary standards. They aren't the only ones playing this game, but they are far and away the best at it.
Microsoft's business model, not their software (or their service, for that matter), is responsible for their success. Those who believe shareholder value at any cost is the ultimate objective can be very happy. On the other hand, those who believe customer loyalty should be earned, rather than enforced by patents, copyrights, licensing and killing off the competition are mortified.
I don't know anyone who is delighted to use Microsoft products. I know a lot of people who feel they have no choice. Given the option to use a truly viable alternative, they would. I don't myself see such an alternative available today. However, I do think the writing is on the wall. And when the tide turns, it will be like a dam bursting.
I don't think DRM is really the most important issue. Although I'm not a big fan of DRM, I am a big fan of alternatives and competition. It's not DRM that really concerns me. I can imagine an open spec for DRM that anyone could implement. What concerns me is society's oblivious willingness to support Microsoft's software monoculture. QuickTime's DRM is better only in the sense that it's not as ubiquitous and compulsary as Microsoft's crap. It's still proprietary. It's still the same game.
I'd say it's always been their office monopoly. People buy computers for the applications. They want the applications to be compatible with those of their friends, coworkers, family, etc. This just takes things to a new level. A very frightening level. From "use MS because it will interoperate better" to "use MS because you really have no choice."
...once they buy it, they will have to upgrade to keep the DRM working. This is way cool stuff.
Are you trolling?
This whole idea should come as a surprise to no-one. Microsoft's business plan has always been, and will always be, to compell people to use their products by creating de-facto proprietary standards. Remember all the starry-eyed innocent newbies gushing about Microsoft creating open XML standards for their file formats> Dream on. It never ceases to amaze me that people continue to bend over for these assholes. "Killer app"?! Yeah, like you can shoot me before I put up with this shit.
Timeline's position is that Microsoft is not a law firm, thus customers who relied on Microsoft's assertion that everything was OK failed to cover their own butts
That doesn't necessarily mean that they're not trying to stick it to Microsoft. This reminds me of the athletic coach who punishes people for being late by making _everyone else_ run laps.
We should hope that other organizations besides booksellers consider this example. Libraries and ISP's suffer the same intrusive privacy invasions established by the Busybody act. Wouldn't it be nice for Verizon, for example, if they could tell the RIAA to f*** off 'cuz there just ain't no damn records to give them? Finger that, Hilary. Libarians have been compelled to submit to our newly established right-wing autocracy as well. They've got to give up the goods and shut up about it, or they can be branded criminals. Pretty sorry state of affairs if you ask me.
Server logs in the bit bucket! Yippidy dippidy dee! I have prurient interests! But you won't catch me!
A determined terrorist doesn't need a kit to build a bomb or even a crude missile
A determined terrorist doesn't need bombs and missles either. I'm convinced the threat of terrorism is overstated for one simple reason: if anyone in the US were really keen on causing death and destruction, it would be easy. I don't want to enumerate all the possiblities here, lest someone conclude I spend too much time thinking about this stuff; but really, if you want to kill, maim, and destroy, it wouldn't be that hard - our current police state's silly lockdown tactics notwithstanding. Gasoline and a match, ya know? The fact that we don't see trains derailing all over the place and so forth gives me some confidence that Ashcroft/Ridge/Cheney/Bush et al. have their heads up their butts.
Are there bad people in the world? Yup. Do some of them hate Americans? Yup. Are some of them planning to do bad things to the US? Yup. Is the free world in danger of being destroyed by these yokels? Nope. Should we go get them? Yup. Should we mobilize many many billions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of troops and our military's finest and best to isolated whackos dispersed around the globe in various loosely confederated pockets of extremism? Nope. This is a job for CIA snipers, not heavy bombers and tanks. There are other dangers to the homeland besides whacky religious fundamentalists from abroad. Like AIDS. Like social security. Like child welfare. Like the economy. Like our own heavy handed police-state thugs like Ashcroft. The US needs new management badly.
Capitalism should have no problem eliminating overzealous, opressive DRM
As long as we can count on congress to pass no law abridging people's right to use general purpose computers. Imagine substituting palladium for the broadcast flag. As the existence of the broadcast flag advocates indicates, there are people working hard to use the power of law to limit your rights. These people must be drooling all over themselves at the prospect of a virtually unbreakable technological solution. "Imagine, all the advantages of the broadcast flag, without the drawback of requiring vigilant surveillance and massive enforcement action! It's a jackboot that looks like an Oxford!"
Which echos the punch line to Stutz's article: Stop looking over your shoulder and invent something!
Just what exactly has Microsoft ever invented, anyway? I'm curious to know if anyone can offer some enlightenment. What serious honest-to-god inspired contributions to the computing landscape have come out of Redmond? I'll give them credit for consummate attention to user interface consistency. But what else? Really. What?
BTW, before someone says "but that's insecure because I might be too dumb to properly configure my webserver and someone will download my shadow password file and find all my poorly chosen passwords":
<Files "shadow">
Order allow,deny
Deny from all </Files>
Slashdot Mirror
A different tack, but maybe an RDF search engine is the ticket. But where to get the RDF? Will people who create the metadata be willing to share it? Will enough people create the metadata in the first place?
Anyone else wonder if part of the motivation behind this asinine behaviour might be to scare people to use UnitedLinux? With Caldera having an interest, they may be the only distro immune to these kinds of frivilous lawsuits.
... or some such bullshit.
I bet we'll see a campaign along the lines of "UnitedLinux is better, because UnitedLinux is the only Linux incorporating proven UNIX technology."
Ransom Love is a wanker.
It would be nice if they also considered how they might financially compensate the authors of the free software they elect to use. I realize that establishing a fair correspondence between the value of the software you use and the value of the time contributed by its author(s), for the multitude of interdepent components that comprise a working solution is easier said than done. Still worth thinking about.
NFS should go away. What Linux needs, that UNIX doesn't have, is a filesharing system as featureful as AFS without all the complication. NFS4, perhaps, but that remains to be seen. Even NetBIOS is more secure than NFS, I hate to say.
They sometime do: man procmailex, for example. I agree that we'd all benefit if the practice were more commonplace.
The requests can be anonymized.
Discovery can happen by accident as well as by understanding :)
/. this morning can explain how a battery works? How it really works?
And there are degrees of understanding. "Oh", we say, "those guy's didn't really understand batteries, they just discovered how to make them." O.K., fine. So how many people reading
Right.
The point is that a packeteer can't look inside of encrypted packets, which is what all the p2p traffic that everyone is trying to manage will soon be.
Has anyone in Congress considered the fact that enforcing such strictures will likely soon be impossible? Even now, the act of policing how people are using their computer would involve invading their privacy.
It doesn't take a genius to figure out that the natural evolution of this technology will be to add encryption. On top of that, perhaps use mix-net or other anonymizing technology. Run all the traffic over port 443. How do you police that? Bet you can't wait to tell your boss that the $50,000 you spent on a Packeteer is down the toilet. We read recently how Microsoft is collecting information about your computer every time you do an update. Perhaps we should pass legislation which mandates that people disclose the contents of their hard drives without warrent? Give me a break.
So university administrators should be held reponsible for the actions of their clients? Among other things, remember, students are not (typically) employees.
If this flies, then I think members of Congress should also be held personally responsible for any and all undesireable actions taken by any resident of the United States. Obviously they could be doing more to prevent criminal behaviour. Because they are not, because criminals still roam the streets, they should be held liable.
Can anyone point to a good place to read more about all the idiot ideas floating around in Congress? I'd like to get a better handle on who the real bozos are who float this kind of stupid shit.
focusing on reducing vulnerabilities in the next version of Windows, rather than attempting to fix 2000 or XP.
Yeah, why would you want to fix a product that was originally sold as a trustworthy product to an unsuspecting (gullible? naive?) public when doing so would undermine your ability to coerce people into buying your next so-called trustworthy product; which they'll eventually have to buy in order to protect themselves against all of the unaddressed problems with the old product?
How many times will people fall for this? Come on, Charlie Brown, get a clue and stop falling for Lucy's stupid fucking trick!
Right. I don't think this is about trademarks. This is about the way people percieve the word "google". It used to be a really big number. Now it's associated with searching. Maybe google has bigger aspirations, and wants to prevent its name from assuming a definition that limits its applicability to other endeavors. Remember when Amazon just sold books? The great river. The big number. I dunno.
You like MS Office, you say? Who's going to buy this for you? Are you going to buck up for your own copy at home? Or, like most people, are you expecting your company to buy it for you? That way, it's kind of like it doesn't really cost anything, right? Except it does cost something. It's money your company could have paid you directly. It's money your company could have used to improve their market penetration. It's money your company could have used to improve their facilities. It's money that could have been used to increase the R&D budget. It's money that could have been used to hire additional staff. And on and on.
But a new version of Office with pretty new buttons and a three panel view like Outlook? A new version that's intentionally incompatible with everything else in the world, including Microsoft's own products? That's precious.
Gates talks excitedly about putting together software he thinks may change the world.
Microsoft's greatest contribution to the computing landscape is not software. There is nothing particularly innovative or inspired about anything they have ever written. I'm not saying it's bad software, just that there's very little that they have done that wasn't preceded by other less successful counterparts.
Microsoft's great contribution is their business method. Ensure customer loyalty by ensnaring them with de-facto proprietary standards. They aren't the only ones playing this game, but they are far and away the best at it.
Microsoft's business model, not their software (or their service, for that matter), is responsible for their success. Those who believe shareholder value at any cost is the ultimate objective can be very happy. On the other hand, those who believe customer loyalty should be earned, rather than enforced by patents, copyrights, licensing and killing off the competition are mortified.
I don't know anyone who is delighted to use Microsoft products. I know a lot of people who feel they have no choice. Given the option to use a truly viable alternative, they would. I don't myself see such an alternative available today. However, I do think the writing is on the wall. And when the tide turns, it will be like a dam bursting.
I don't think DRM is really the most important issue. Although I'm not a big fan of DRM, I am a big fan of alternatives and competition. It's not DRM that really concerns me. I can imagine an open spec for DRM that anyone could implement. What concerns me is society's oblivious willingness to support Microsoft's software monoculture. QuickTime's DRM is better only in the sense that it's not as ubiquitous and compulsary as Microsoft's crap. It's still proprietary. It's still the same game.
I'd say it's always been their office monopoly. People buy computers for the applications. They want the applications to be compatible with those of their friends, coworkers, family, etc. This just takes things to a new level. A very frightening level. From "use MS because it will interoperate better" to "use MS because you really have no choice."
It's time for the mass defection to begin.
...once they buy it, they will have to upgrade to keep the DRM working. This is way cool stuff.
Are you trolling?
This whole idea should come as a surprise to no-one. Microsoft's business plan has always been, and will always be, to compell people to use their products by creating de-facto proprietary standards. Remember all the starry-eyed innocent newbies gushing about Microsoft creating open XML standards for their file formats> Dream on. It never ceases to amaze me that people continue to bend over for these assholes. "Killer app"?! Yeah, like you can shoot me before I put up with this shit.
You're correct. And people in the position you describe should be pretty pissed off at Microsoft. No?
I'm not defending anyone's tactics, just pointing out possibilities.
Timeline's position is that Microsoft is not a law firm, thus customers who relied on Microsoft's assertion that everything was OK failed to cover their own butts
That doesn't necessarily mean that they're not trying to stick it to Microsoft. This reminds me of the athletic coach who punishes people for being late by making _everyone else_ run laps.
We should hope that other organizations besides booksellers consider this example. Libraries and ISP's suffer the same intrusive privacy invasions established by the Busybody act. Wouldn't it be nice for Verizon, for example, if they could tell the RIAA to f*** off 'cuz there just ain't no damn records to give them? Finger that, Hilary. Libarians have been compelled to submit to our newly established right-wing autocracy as well. They've got to give up the goods and shut up about it, or they can be branded criminals. Pretty sorry state of affairs if you ask me.
Server logs in the bit bucket!
Yippidy dippidy dee!
I have prurient interests!
But you won't catch me!
A determined terrorist doesn't need a kit to build a bomb or even a crude missile
A determined terrorist doesn't need bombs and missles either. I'm convinced the threat of terrorism is overstated for one simple reason: if anyone in the US were really keen on causing death and destruction, it would be easy. I don't want to enumerate all the possiblities here, lest someone conclude I spend too much time thinking about this stuff; but really, if you want to kill, maim, and destroy, it wouldn't be that hard - our current police state's silly lockdown tactics notwithstanding. Gasoline and a match, ya know? The fact that we don't see trains derailing all over the place and so forth gives me some confidence that Ashcroft/Ridge/Cheney/Bush et al. have their heads up their butts.
Are there bad people in the world? Yup. Do some of them hate Americans? Yup. Are some of them planning to do bad things to the US? Yup. Is the free world in danger of being destroyed by these yokels? Nope. Should we go get them? Yup. Should we mobilize many many billions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of troops and our military's finest and best to isolated whackos dispersed around the globe in various loosely confederated pockets of extremism? Nope. This is a job for CIA snipers, not heavy bombers and tanks. There are other dangers to the homeland besides whacky religious fundamentalists from abroad. Like AIDS. Like social security. Like child welfare. Like the economy. Like our own heavy handed police-state thugs like Ashcroft. The US needs new management badly.
Capitalism should have no problem eliminating overzealous, opressive DRM
As long as we can count on congress to pass no law abridging people's right to use general purpose computers. Imagine substituting palladium for the broadcast flag. As the existence of the broadcast flag advocates indicates, there are people working hard to use the power of law to limit your rights. These people must be drooling all over themselves at the prospect of a virtually unbreakable technological solution. "Imagine, all the advantages of the broadcast flag, without the drawback of requiring vigilant surveillance and massive enforcement action! It's a jackboot that looks like an Oxford!"
If he's not, I will.
Which echos the punch line to Stutz's article: Stop looking over your shoulder and invent something!
Just what exactly has Microsoft ever invented, anyway? I'm curious to know if anyone can offer some enlightenment. What serious honest-to-god inspired contributions to the computing landscape have come out of Redmond? I'll give them credit for consummate attention to user interface consistency. But what else? Really. What?