You're still viewing the whole software industry through industrial-age goggles.
Software distribution is not like typewriter manufacturing, particularly when it is done via ftp.
Yes, there are up-front costs, but the "manufacturing" costs and distribution costs are trivial when an Internet-based distribution method is used.
Even in the more traditional software industry, you don't seem to understand something: support *is* what you're really paying for. Yes, people operate under the fallacy that they're purchasing software, but they're wrong; hasn't anyone read their EULAs?
So, what are they buying, really? A license? How expensive is that to "manufacture?" No, what they're really paying for is support, just like they do in the Free Software model. The big difference? The Free Software vendors are honest about what they're selling.
Consider that there continues to be no open-source alternative at the strength and dependibility of the RSA product. Consider also that this is an area key to the viability of Linux as a serious alternative operating system.
Sure there is. OpenSSL. It's just not usable in the US (at least for commercial use, and only if you use RSAREF), because of stupid software patents.
But next year, the patent *finally* goes away, and we should be able to use OpenSSL at long last.
In my defense, Microsoft has been *claiming* NTFS is a journaling file system since NT 3.1 was introduced. I guess I'm not really surprised to learn that that's not entirely true.
Apparently it does something kind of, almost like journaling, but not quite.
It looks quite a bit better than even a few months ago.
I can build and *run* from CVS now, and the only thing I needed to do was update libIDL. It's still a *little* crashy, but really not that bad. They do still have some memory usage issues, though.
The page rendering is great, and forms work better than they did before.
I think they'll be able to have a decent beta by the end of the year.
3) What the hell is wrong with the colors on this message? No offense to whosever idea this was, but the usual green and white looks much better.
I think this is the color scheme for the "Your Rights Online" subsection that this article belongs to. It has its own color scheme, like "Ask Slashdot" does.
I agree; the colors don't fit. Especially with the green/white Slashdot logo at the top.
I mean what are they gunna make disposible next....computers?
Packard Bell already thought of this, and for years sucessfully marketed computers which were ready to be tossed in the trash as soon as you took them out of the box.
Once everyone's compliant with YOUR stuff, just change the terms of the agreements, knowing that those who've signed up HAVE to comply or risk being destroyed by market forces.
But, you're still thinking about thing in terms of government that is designed to assist business.
Consider the following, provided by government:
Civil courts
Copyright laws
Police power
These are all tools that are provided by government to Microsoft to assist them in their quest for monopoly.
Now, I'm not saying that we should necessarily abolish the above, but consider: how would Microsoft enforce its monopoly if it was without these governmental resources (barring a private Microsoft police force/army...*shudder*)? Who would enforce the OEM/ISV agreements in absence of civil court authority? Who would stop Joe Blow from selling unauthorized copies of Microsoft Office?
My point is simply that it is not as simple as government good, corporation bad. They tend to work together to crush the little guy. Governments need money to run...large corporations have lots of money; you have less. Not too hard to figure out who will always control whatever government power there is. So, I prefer the minimum amount of government necessary to prevent mayhem.
There is no easy answer. If there was, we'd have figured it out long ago.
Can you imagine what life would be like, without regulation, and the only TV stations with licences are all Microsoft-run, the only pre-packaged food you can buy was all Microsoft-made, and could only be cooked in a Microsoft oven, the only software you could buy was all Microsoft-made, and the only Internet ISPs and backbones were all Microsoft-run?
Such a scenario is only possible when government power is available to Microsoft, in order to enforce their monopoly. Without it, they would be forced to compete.
I don't believe in letting someone wield god-like power on the hope (and prayer) that they'll be a benevolent God.
Sure you do. You just limit god-like power to people employed by governments. Personally, I don't believe that the fact that someone has been hired by a government magically transforms them into some sort of all-knowing, eternally wise, super-human.
Remember: Microsoft used government power to enforce the exclusive agreements they set up with OEMs and ISVs.
Well, I certainly don't claim to have all the answers. I was just suggesting that a user-funded organization may be somewhat more effective than an industry-funded one.
What I picture as a somewhat effective "International Internet Users Association:"
Reasonable yearly fees: ~US$25-50/year
Not primarily legal oriented; more of a "there are a lot of us, so you'd be wise to deal with us fairly" sort of thing
User fees would fund arbitrators/negotiators who would help resolve conflicts
Member benefits to encourage membership would probably include an email address and access to the association's database of vendor data
It might not work, but then again, it might be better than what we have.
I still don't think legislation is the answer, partially because the Internet is super-national; it exists beyond traditional national boundaries.
It seems to me that privacy is a pretty desirable thing among most Internet users. And, it's clear that an organization is most accountable to the people who fund it. So, why not have an organization somewhat like the AAA (American Automobile Association), that is funded (at least primarily) directly by the users? I'm guessing a lot of people would be willing to spend $25 per year for an organization of this type.
If this sounds stupid, please excuse...it's pretty early in the morning right now.:-/
Please stop FUDding. We're obviously talking about *after* the release of Netscape 5.0, which will be based on Mozilla, and bears little resemblance to the old proprietary code base.
Mozilla is stable enough for me to use right now, as I'm posting with it; it should be quite stable by the time it gets put into Communicator 5.
Besides that, Netscape 4.x isn't *that* unstable. I manage to keep it running for a couple of days, usually. It just has a huge memory leak.
Well...I'm certainly not going to argue with *you*...:-)
Of course, as you point out, the Netcenter portal was the key reason for the acquisition. I was trying to say, but failing to make it clear, that it is my belief that when you own something as valuable as Netscape Communicator, you don't generally throw it away. It still has value. Also, I believe that I had heard shortly after the acquisition that AOL fully intended to move to Navigator 5 at some point for the AOL browser component. And when they do, it *will* have a significant effect on browser share stats...no two ways about it.
Don't count on AOL to save the day.
I'm not. I'm well aware of you feelings about the Mozilla project, and I agree to an extent about the failure of the project to achieve significant goals. Nevertheless, they are going to ship something *eventually*, and when they do, it will still attract a fair amount of interest.
I guess I'm just trying to tell people that there is no reason to panic. People like to get themselves worked up into a frenzy over software "wars," and I really don't think there's any reason to do so. The Mozilla source is out there; so is the Linux source, the FreeBSD source, the OpenBSD source, and the Xscreensaver source (:-)). It's not going away; there will be a significant number of people who wish to use it for the forseeable future, so it can be maintained.
There's just no reason to panic...at least not now, in my opinion.
What do you mean? If there's no other browser on the scene?!?
Hello? AOL owns Netscape. Do you think they are going to just let that investment go to waste? Of course not! AOL is going to replace IE with Netscape in their client; it's just a matter of time.
Then, we will see the resurgence of Netscape...and just how much AOL skews the browser usage numbers.
Yes. Mouse Systems did a lot of cool stuff. Just the other day, I happened to look at the bottom of an optical mouse hooked to our SPARC Classic, and the name on it: Mouse System. I had no idea they made those optical mice. Cool stuff.
I rememeber this very well -- it was a "bonus pack" in warp 3 for internet support, and then you had to download a 3rd party driver for PPP support.
You have a poor memory. OS/2 Warp 3 (Red Box) initially shipped (in October 1994) with an unfinished "Dial Other Internet Providers" tool. You had to download the updated tool to get PPP. It came from IBM, not a third party. This was only the case for Red Box Warp. Blue Box Warp 3 (which included Win-OS/2) never had this problem, as it shipped later. Warp 4 (released 1996) came with the full TCP/IP stack, and Peer to Peer.
OS/2 never stood a chance, regardless of anything IBM did. Microsoft had already blanketed the industry with illegal exclusive preload deals.
Nonsense. Microsoft got where they are through exclusive contracts that guaranteed that they, and they alone, would have a steady income from OEM sales.
The only areas where they truly dominate are Windows/IE and Office, both of which are the benificiaries of exclusive preload deals.
Microsoft knows they write inferior software; otherwise, they would not focus so much of their energies on preventing anyone from competing with them.
Which Linux distribution? Oh...you must have thought we were dozing off and not paying attention. No, we're not as stupid as you think we are. We know the difference between Free Software and proprietary, closed software.
If there were as many companies selling Windows as there are selling Linux, we wouldn't be in this mess right now.
I should add that I installed the Secure-Linux patch on one of my Linux boxes, and then temporarily installed ProFTPd 1.2.0pre1 (a known vulnerable version) on it. I tested it with one of the exploits that we know works, and with Secure-Linux, the exploit failed. Pretty neat.
Secure-Linux won't necessarily keep you safe from every potential exploit, but if you keep up to date, it will at least lessen your chances of getting bit by a heretofore-unknown exploit.
Yes. I too, wondered exactly what he meant by that statement. Was he saying that he wished he had chosen OpenBSD in retrospect because:
He is under attack from script kiddies and thinks he might be more secure with OpenBSD, or
He is getting tired of all the people asking him why he didn't choose OpenBSD
BTW, if you're already using Linux, and want to increase security at the kernel level, you might want to look at Secure-Linux, a kernel patch which adds some nice security options to the Linux kernel.
Netscape doesn't crash very often for me; it does, however have a memory leak the size of the Colorado River. So, I ususally restart it every couple/few days.
But, Netscape, being a closed-source program, is hardly typical. Everything else I run, other than StarOffice (which I only use on occasion), is Free Software, and it doesn't tend to have those kinds of problems (and when it does, it gets fixed pretty quickly).
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Software distribution is not like typewriter manufacturing, particularly when it is done via ftp.
Yes, there are up-front costs, but the "manufacturing" costs and distribution costs are trivial when an Internet-based distribution method is used.
Even in the more traditional software industry, you don't seem to understand something: support *is* what you're really paying for. Yes, people operate under the fallacy that they're purchasing software, but they're wrong; hasn't anyone read their EULAs?
So, what are they buying, really? A license? How expensive is that to "manufacture?" No, what they're really paying for is support, just like they do in the Free Software model. The big difference? The Free Software vendors are honest about what they're selling.
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Sure there is. OpenSSL. It's just not usable in the US (at least for commercial use, and only if you use RSAREF), because of stupid software patents.
But next year, the patent *finally* goes away, and we should be able to use OpenSSL at long last.
Argh. Software patents suck!
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Apparently it does something kind of, almost like journaling, but not quite.
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Windows 1.0 wasn't released until 1985, to the best of my knowledge.
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Where the hell does this writer come off saying that NT 4.0 lacks a journaling file system?
NTFS has had journaling since 1993, as far as I know.
OTOH, It fragments very badly, but so does ext2.
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I can build and *run* from CVS now, and the only thing I needed to do was update libIDL. It's still a *little* crashy, but really not that bad. They do still have some memory usage issues, though.
The page rendering is great, and forms work better than they did before.
I think they'll be able to have a decent beta by the end of the year.
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I think this is the color scheme for the "Your Rights Online" subsection that this article belongs to. It has its own color scheme, like "Ask Slashdot" does.
I agree; the colors don't fit. Especially with the green/white Slashdot logo at the top.
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Packard Bell already thought of this, and for years sucessfully marketed computers which were ready to be tossed in the trash as soon as you took them out of the box.
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But, you're still thinking about thing in terms of government that is designed to assist business.
Consider the following, provided by government:
- Civil courts
- Copyright laws
- Police power
These are all tools that are provided by government to Microsoft to assist them in their quest for monopoly.Now, I'm not saying that we should necessarily abolish the above, but consider: how would Microsoft enforce its monopoly if it was without these governmental resources (barring a private Microsoft police force/army...*shudder*)? Who would enforce the OEM/ISV agreements in absence of civil court authority? Who would stop Joe Blow from selling unauthorized copies of Microsoft Office?
My point is simply that it is not as simple as government good, corporation bad. They tend to work together to crush the little guy. Governments need money to run...large corporations have lots of money; you have less. Not too hard to figure out who will always control whatever government power there is. So, I prefer the minimum amount of government necessary to prevent mayhem.
There is no easy answer. If there was, we'd have figured it out long ago.
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Such a scenario is only possible when government power is available to Microsoft, in order to enforce their monopoly. Without it, they would be forced to compete.
I don't believe in letting someone wield god-like power on the hope (and prayer) that they'll be a benevolent God.
Sure you do. You just limit god-like power to people employed by governments. Personally, I don't believe that the fact that someone has been hired by a government magically transforms them into some sort of all-knowing, eternally wise, super-human.
Remember: Microsoft used government power to enforce the exclusive agreements they set up with OEMs and ISVs.
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What I picture as a somewhat effective "International Internet Users Association:"
- Reasonable yearly fees: ~US$25-50/year
- Not primarily legal oriented; more of a "there are a lot of us, so you'd be wise to deal with us fairly" sort of thing
- User fees would fund arbitrators/negotiators who would help resolve conflicts
- Member benefits to encourage membership would probably include an email address and access to the association's database of vendor data
It might not work, but then again, it might be better than what we have.I still don't think legislation is the answer, partially because the Internet is super-national; it exists beyond traditional national boundaries.
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If this sounds stupid, please excuse...it's pretty early in the morning right now. :-/
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Mozilla is stable enough for me to use right now, as I'm posting with it; it should be quite stable by the time it gets put into Communicator 5.
Besides that, Netscape 4.x isn't *that* unstable. I manage to keep it running for a couple of days, usually. It just has a huge memory leak.
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Posts by people with high karma who are logged in start with a score of 2; that's why if you look at this one, it will start off at 2.
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Of course, as you point out, the Netcenter portal was the key reason for the acquisition. I was trying to say, but failing to make it clear, that it is my belief that when you own something as valuable as Netscape Communicator, you don't generally throw it away. It still has value. Also, I believe that I had heard shortly after the acquisition that AOL fully intended to move to Navigator 5 at some point for the AOL browser component. And when they do, it *will* have a significant effect on browser share stats...no two ways about it.
Don't count on AOL to save the day.
I'm not. I'm well aware of you feelings about the Mozilla project, and I agree to an extent about the failure of the project to achieve significant goals. Nevertheless, they are going to ship something *eventually*, and when they do, it will still attract a fair amount of interest.
I guess I'm just trying to tell people that there is no reason to panic. People like to get themselves worked up into a frenzy over software "wars," and I really don't think there's any reason to do so. The Mozilla source is out there; so is the Linux source, the FreeBSD source, the OpenBSD source, and the Xscreensaver source (:-)). It's not going away; there will be a significant number of people who wish to use it for the forseeable future, so it can be maintained.
There's just no reason to panic...at least not now, in my opinion.
Thanks for responding, BTW!
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Hello? AOL owns Netscape. Do you think they are going to just let that investment go to waste? Of course not! AOL is going to replace IE with Netscape in their client; it's just a matter of time.
Then, we will see the resurgence of Netscape...and just how much AOL skews the browser usage numbers.
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No reason to panic yet.
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Yes. Mouse Systems did a lot of cool stuff. Just the other day, I happened to look at the bottom of an optical mouse hooked to our SPARC Classic, and the name on it: Mouse System. I had no idea they made those optical mice. Cool stuff.
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You have a poor memory. OS/2 Warp 3 (Red Box) initially shipped (in October 1994) with an unfinished "Dial Other Internet Providers" tool. You had to download the updated tool to get PPP. It came from IBM, not a third party. This was only the case for Red Box Warp. Blue Box Warp 3 (which included Win-OS/2) never had this problem, as it shipped later. Warp 4 (released 1996) came with the full TCP/IP stack, and Peer to Peer.
OS/2 never stood a chance, regardless of anything IBM did. Microsoft had already blanketed the industry with illegal exclusive preload deals.
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The only areas where they truly dominate are Windows/IE and Office, both of which are the benificiaries of exclusive preload deals.
Microsoft knows they write inferior software; otherwise, they would not focus so much of their energies on preventing anyone from competing with them.
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Which Linux distribution? Oh...you must have thought we were dozing off and not paying attention. No, we're not as stupid as you think we are. We know the difference between Free Software and proprietary, closed software.
If there were as many companies selling Windows as there are selling Linux, we wouldn't be in this mess right now.
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Secure-Linux won't necessarily keep you safe from every potential exploit, but if you keep up to date, it will at least lessen your chances of getting bit by a heretofore-unknown exploit.
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- He is under attack from script kiddies and thinks he might be more secure with OpenBSD, or
- He is getting tired of all the people asking him why he didn't choose OpenBSD
BTW, if you're already using Linux, and want to increase security at the kernel level, you might want to look at Secure-Linux, a kernel patch which adds some nice security options to the Linux kernel.--
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But, Netscape, being a closed-source program, is hardly typical. Everything else I run, other than StarOffice (which I only use on occasion), is Free Software, and it doesn't tend to have those kinds of problems (and when it does, it gets fixed pretty quickly).
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Easy to duplicate? I think not.
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