Unlike the author of this article, I don't claim to speak for everyone. I know he doesn't speak for me, and I strongly suspect he doesn't speak for many people. First off, he talks of the "Linux Community" as if the label is useful, as if it describes a monolithic community with common beliefs. Secondly much of what he ascribes to the "Open Source Movement" is stuff done by the "Free Software Movement", an older and very different movement. Thirdly, he falls into the common trap of equating commercial and proprietary, which irrecoverably muddles his argument.
There are many communities out there, with much overlap between them. There's the Linux Community, the Free Software Community, the BSD Community, and so on. You cannot say that the Linux community is here because of some holy crusade against Redmond, some clearly feel that way, for most it's a lesser or non-issue. They are here because they like to hack on their own system, or they are here because Linux works better for what they want to do. None of these people are wedded permanently to Linux, but none of them are likely to leave just because Linux becomes the majority system. Also, just because Linux becomes the majority system doesn't mean it has "joined the ranks of Windows as a sell-out".
I'm sure there are some who are so committed to being a part of something unpopular as to act the way the author describes, but they are solidly in the minority. People might leave the Linux community eventually, but the reasons will be "it's not as much fun anymore" or "system X does what I need better". And those will be the real reasons, not rationalizations.
Secondly, the Open Source movement as a whole has done nothing about development models. ESR, the originator of the Open Source movement described existing development models, not only didn't that change the models, but it was before there even was an Open Source movement. What the Open Source movement did was threefold. It tried to repackage the Free Software Movement into a business suit, it tried to downplay the benefits of Freedom in software (since Freedom is apparently scary to businesses), and it started the push to coerce businesses to change their licensing schemes.
You predict a dire future for Linux, "[The Linux Community] won't want any part in the corporate-sponsored demographic-pandering mainstream beast that Linux will have become. GPL'ed or not, they're going to hate Linux." I have a little more faith in the community than the author does. The corporate influence has been here for years. Most distributions of Linux over the past year and a half have included a commercial compiler (egcs), and people cheered! Why? Because commercial does not equal evil. I for one am not fighting against commercialism, I am fighting against proprietary software. Many companies have been very helpful against this, including Cygnus and RedHat. Also, the GPL is not the only protection against such evils as the author describes. The distribution of packages is the other. It doesn't get into the kernel unless Linus says so. Most packages have similar reins.
In conclusion, I agree, it's not about Open Source, but it's also not about being a fickle part of a counterculture. For most of the community, it's about "Having something that works". For me, it's about Freedom, plain and simple.
I do not think it is going to be very long before ISP's *have* to offer free connections, and need to make their money elsewhere (through advertisements, online stores, etc.).
While you might be right for most ISP's, I for one (and probably many others) would be more than willing to pay a fair price for a "premium" ISP that offers good service without all the ads. There should be enough of a market that at least some will survive.
Once more, I hear paranoia at/. The Gvmnt right to a digital feed of phone info is emminent domain.
No, "eminent domain" is the right of the government to take private property in exchange for just compensation. It is completely unrelated to what we are talking about here. The government has no right to a digital feed of phone info, in fact, the Fourth Amendment explicitly says the opposite, that a citizen has the right to security against such searches unless probable cause exists, and an appropriatly detailed warrant is issued.
Believe it or not, they don't have time to track ordinary law abiding citizens, just the criminals.
Believe it or not, even without bringing paranoia into the mix, they sometimes have trouble distinguishing between law abiding citizens and criminals, and try to track them anyway. That is one reason why we have a Fourth Amendment, to ensure that there are checks and balances on the government when it comes to investigating citizens.
Would you have a terrorist/drug trafficker in the US able to coordinate activities without any way for law enforcement to track his communications?
First, you are misrepresenting the issue. We are not preventing the government from tracking terrorists. If they pay attention to the rights of citizens it is merely more difficult to track a terrorist or drug trafficer, not impossible. Secondly, I, and most people I know, know and accept that if they maintain our rights as citizens, law enforcement's job is harder, and there might be more crime. That is the price of freedom.
Think about it, you're opening Pandora's box; and folks like don't care who gets hurt.
No, the Feds are opening Pandora's box by removing the citizen's right to protection against searches. They don't care who gets hurt. In addition, if we get another J. Edgar Hoover in the FBI, than the paranoid fears are all justified.
True you take the risk that the law may be abused at some time, but then if you don't have such a law.. you can be certain that the loophole will be exploited by terrorists or criminals.
Such laws don't prevent terrorists from using these products. A terrorist can easily go to Europe, buy an Iridium phone, and use it in the US. A terrorist is more likely to do this than a private citizen.
unfortunately our Founding Fathers had no idea of nukes, germ warfare, car bombs, etc. I have no doubt if they had, they would have supported the ability to infringe on those folks rights (who would commit such crimes) for the greater good of the nation.
I disagree. One of the key rights that was implicit in many of the ideas put forth by the founding fathers (especially Thomas Jefferson) was that the Constitution must maintain the citizen's rights to the means of revolution, should the citizens decide that a change of government was necessary. That thread strongly underlies the bill of rights. Why should a government not allowed to hunt for muskets and bombs be allowed to hunt for automatic weapons and car bombs?
I've said it before, I'll say it again. If you have nothing to hide, you really have nothing to fear.
I have nothing to hide, but I disagree. I have a lot to fear from the US Government intruding in my rights. The key fear is "how far will they go?"!
That sounds really sweet, I'll keep my eyes open for when they actually ship something. Are they going to release full specs to the Mesa and XFree groups?
To "show off Windows 2000", I would think they could do with a better designed web page. I get about 250 pixels (vertically) of broken-looking header, followed by about 800 pixels of whitespace, followed by the actual text. I have to scroll down more than a screenful just to read anything. And a Javascript error to boot. I mean, if they still can't even design a competent website, what makes them think they can design a whole OS?
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Re:That's putting it mildly.
on
LinModems?
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· Score: 2
fireproof wrote:
A wise man once told me "There are two ways to get something done -- the right way and the cheap way."
You can't get RPM's for this yet, it's just been released! You'll be able to get them when someone makes them, and you'll surely be able to get them at the Rufus RPM Repository. In the mean time, you can try compiling it yourself from the released source. Even better, you can make your own RPM of it, go to RPM.org to learn how (Maximum RPM is a great book).
Sorry, my bad. Louis J. Freeh is the Director of the FBI. Janet Reno is the Attorney General, head of the US Department of Justice, the boss of Louis J. Freeh, and the author of the letter (well, one of her aides probably wrote it, but she signed it). Madeleine K. Albright is the Secretary of State and not the author of the letter.
This letter is still is a part of a long-term program by the DOJ and FBI to systematically remove the tools to protect our privacy in general, and encryption tools in particular.
No way. Albright was You mean Reno, don't you? Madeleine Albright is the Secretary of State, Janet Reno is the Director of the FBI and the author of this letter (which is way out of bounds for the FBI)
basically saying "wouldn't it be nice if encryption wasn't available to non-government entities". This is no more than her opinion.
Firstly, when the head of a branch of a government sends an official letter to the head of a branch of a different government, it is never "no more than her opinion". Secondly, it is not saying "Wouldn't it be nice", it is strongly recommending that the German Secretary of Justice take action to stop the distribution of encryption software over the internet from Germany. Whether Minister Däubler-Gmelin listens is a different issue, the fact that we are pressuring them to do this is bad enough.
Granted, her opinion carries some weight, but it's a faaaaaar way from actually enacting coordinated legislation that would prohibit private encryption.
Of course it is, but don't brush it off as "her opinion", it is part of a coordinated effort by the FBI to make strong encryption unavailable.
So don't get your panties all bunched up.
I don't know if Reno wears panties, I think you might be thinking of an earlier FBI director, J. Edgar Hoover:-)
This is not going to happen for a very large set of reasons, starting with political climate
I don't see how the political climate is against this sort of thing. We've been seeing a lot of "I'm scared, take away my rights so I feel safer" lately, particularly in the US.
and ending with the Bill of Rights (at least for Americans).
The Bill of Rights has nothing to do with this letter, which was to put pressure on a German minister to do things in Germany. It's also a hard battle to get the Bill of Rights to have something to do with this in the US. The courts are not consistant when they rule whether or not source code is protected speech. Binaries have never been protected by the Bill of Rights.
Yeah, at least you can count on the NSA keeping your dirty laundry quiet, even the President has trouble geting information out of them. The FBI won't keep secrets anywhere near as well, and if they happen on something criminal, they'll try to prosecute even though due process wasn't followed.
They WANT business servers to become commidities. They want message queues, tp monitors, ORB's, web servers, app servers and file/print sharing to be all rolled into ONE commodity product: Windows NT.
That's not a commodity. That's an integrated product intended to build a business server monopoly. They are mutually exclusive. If you have a monopoly on an class of items, it is not a commodity, no matter how many times you call it one.
Microsoft has always been about selling in volume to drown competitors in a sea of dirt-cheap prices. Getting to that level requires a commoditization of the market.
Volume and low price does not make something a commodity. A large volume of magazines are printed every month, yet they are not a commodity. Why? Because you cannot replace one Cosmopolitan, or even Forbes, with, say Money magazine, they serve different purposes, they have different information. Newspapers, on the other hand, are perpetually on the verge of being a commodity, since a great deal of the paper is spent serving roughly the same AP and UPI articles to the readers.
A commodity market is typified by minor product differentiation. Microsoft always tries for drastic product differentiation.
Microsoft is fighting against the commoditization of software, through ads like the one you mentioned and other means. They don't want commodity software, because their business model depends on inter-software tie-ins (eg. SQL Server requires NT and really encourages IE too). This is not commodity software.
A commodity is an type of item where everything is pretty much the same, like an orange, or wheat. There are differences (navel oranges, seedless oranges), but they all work as an orange, and they all do orangey things.
Commodity software is similar. You have a job to do, and you aren't tied into any particular piece of software to do it. For example, NCSA httpd, Apache, Roxen, IIS and Netscape Server will all serve the same web pages, so basic web servers are a commodity market. Microsoft fights the commodity trend by trying to encourage superfluous proprietary extensions like ASP and VBScript, so people will say "It's not a commodity, look, httpd won't run my ASP pages". They encourage this with ads like the one you complained about.
The Free Software community goes a step further, from commodity software to commodity information. Not only do you have choice in software packages, you have choice in source code. If you don't like the selection, fix one of the choices or use the commodity information to write a new choice. Run Apache and OpenSSL together into one binary, nobody will stop you.
This is what I mean by the commoditization of the software industry. This will lead to much pain in the shrinkwrap software industry, but many good things for the real software industry.
Almost certainly not. Oranges are a commodity, farmers are not. More on topic, there are many fields based on commodity information, most of the sciences, law and medicine come to mind. As software becomes commoditized, programmers will become a more professionalized field. A good thing if you ask me.
I've had way too many newbies try to tell me that the 3½" floppies were officially called "hard disk" or "hard drive", and the term was developed to distinguish them from the floppy 5¼" ones. At this point, I'm usually tempted to bust open their floppy, and show them how floppy it really is. If they still don't believe me, then I get to bust open their hard drive.
First, the ISP who knew that their pages were reaching a limited audience, and said nothing. What they did is annoying and obnoxious, but they were not censoring your site, your site is available to the entire internet. Yes, some people don't have access to your site, but that's because they only have access to a limited internet feed (eg. filtered through CyberPatrol). There are thousands of machines that have no internet connection at all, they can't get to your site either. There are thousands of people who are on machines behind firewals that filter out the http port, they can't get to your site either.
Your ISP did its job, they made the site accessible. It would be a nice gesture if they set up an alternate website in the hopes that it doesn't get filtered, but they have no obligation to, nor is it guaranteed to work. Yes, they should have mentioned the filtering, but they are not responsible for circumventing it for you.
CyberPatrol, on the other hand, is essentially telling its customers that your resume is "inappropriate" and "containing material that parents might find objectionable" (descriptions of filtered sites taken from CyberPatrol's page). This is potentially libel. Contact CyberPatrol, make them fix their screwup. If they refuse, legal action is an option, but it probably won't be worth it to you.
In addition, CyberPatrol claims that their block list "can be managed down to the file directory or page level. This means that appropriate material at an internet address need not be blocked simply because there is some restricted material elsewhere at the address." So they have the ability to limit their filtering to just the adult pages on your ISP's site, they just choose not to. Your ISP can potentially sue them for both libel and restraint of trade. They also have the option of helping their customers with a class action suit against CyberPatrol.
It's an external storage device, similar to an external RAID (in fact it probably is a RAID), it's many hard drives, plus I/O, plus a couple processors.
You can't put this in your Pentuim, you have to plug into your external Fibre Channel or Ultra-SCSI port. These sorts of systems have been around for a while, the 430GB part isn't the impressive bit. The impressive bit is it scales up to 11TB, none of them have gotten that big before in one box.
Because if they don't care enough to at least understand it, they're going to have trouble making money. I don't think all companies need to drop everything and switch to Free Software immediately, but I think the companies who keep blinders on, who show as little comprehension of the issues as Adobe, are doomed to failure.
Adobe has two cash cows, PhotoShop and PageMaker (to a lesser extent, Illustrator). There's already serious Free Software competition for one of them, and various people are starting up projects to compete with the other.
From ESR, I would add The Jargon File. The Cathedral And the Bazaar is more about Software than the Internet, but if that's there, than RMS's Why Software Should Be Free should also be there.
Another critically important RMS piece (and one more relevant to the internet) is The Right to Read.
Getting more internetty, you've got RFC Number 1, the description of the tentative IMP protocol to be used between the four systems on the brand spanking new ARPA network.
Going to distant history (in computer terms) there is the 1945 paper by Vandemaar Bush, As We May Think, one of the inspirations for the ARPA project.
I'm pretty sure that Caldera uses the frame buffer feature during it's install of OpenLinux 2.2. Friendly looking graphics during installation, and it lets you play Tetris during most of it. (It also includes the older text-based installation tools)
Any organization where people are expected to die in the line of duty, including the Military and Police forces, has procedures for notifying next of kin. They almost always send an officer to your house to express condolences in person.
In general, while letters are one way to add a more personal touch to communications, there are plenty of other ways, depending on the nature of the communications (many love letters are sent by FTD, for example). USPS is not going to thrive by the dwindling number of people using snail mail for personal correspondance. They're going to thrive from everyone's electric bill, and the package you just ordered.
Sure, first class personal letters are declining, but they weren't making any real money on that, so there's no great loss there. The post office actually loses money delivering a handwritten envelope.
Bills and junk mail are just as popular as ever, that's probably the bulk of the USPS's business. On top of that, they're pushing their premium services, Priority Mail and Express Mail, which I'm sure are profit centers. They also are expanding their line of products for sale (another profit center). They used to just sell mailing boxes, now you can get books, tee shirts, caps, posters, stamp collecting supplies, phone cards, they even sell a leather carry bag syled after the ones the postal workers carry. I'm just waiting for them to start offering commemerative firearms;-)
With radio, you had a wide open field, and the government stepped in to restore order. That is certainly not the case here. Here you have a few companies who are using their government created local broadband wire monopolies to butt into the internet business. Basically, the government is already hip deep in the issue, before it even was an issue.
So think of the current situation not as free enterprise, because it's not. It's government created monopolies on local broadband internet access. This is regulation. If the government decides to do nothing else, it's still regulating the industry.
I'm undecided as to which side of the issue I'm on. The only sane solutions still keep the cable companies in charge of bandwidth, so if third parties are allowed to lease access to broadband customers, they will still be at the mercy of the cable companies. This isn't necessarily better than the current situation, particularly when you add the extra administrative and infrastructure costs of such a solution.
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Unlike the author of this article, I don't claim to speak for everyone. I know he doesn't speak for me, and I strongly suspect he doesn't speak for many people. First off, he talks of the "Linux Community" as if the label is useful, as if it describes a monolithic community with common beliefs. Secondly much of what he ascribes to the "Open Source Movement" is stuff done by the "Free Software Movement", an older and very different movement. Thirdly, he falls into the common trap of equating commercial and proprietary, which irrecoverably muddles his argument.
There are many communities out there, with much overlap between them. There's the Linux Community, the Free Software Community, the BSD Community, and so on. You cannot say that the Linux community is here because of some holy crusade against Redmond, some clearly feel that way, for most it's a lesser or non-issue. They are here because they like to hack on their own system, or they are here because Linux works better for what they want to do. None of these people are wedded permanently to Linux, but none of them are likely to leave just because Linux becomes the majority system. Also, just because Linux becomes the majority system doesn't mean it has "joined the ranks of Windows as a sell-out".
I'm sure there are some who are so committed to being a part of something unpopular as to act the way the author describes, but they are solidly in the minority. People might leave the Linux community eventually, but the reasons will be "it's not as much fun anymore" or "system X does what I need better". And those will be the real reasons, not rationalizations.
Secondly, the Open Source movement as a whole has done nothing about development models. ESR, the originator of the Open Source movement described existing development models, not only didn't that change the models, but it was before there even was an Open Source movement. What the Open Source movement did was threefold. It tried to repackage the Free Software Movement into a business suit, it tried to downplay the benefits of Freedom in software (since Freedom is apparently scary to businesses), and it started the push to coerce businesses to change their licensing schemes.
You predict a dire future for Linux, "[The Linux Community] won't want any part in the corporate-sponsored demographic-pandering mainstream beast that Linux will have become. GPL'ed or not, they're going to hate Linux." I have a little more faith in the community than the author does. The corporate influence has been here for years. Most distributions of Linux over the past year and a half have included a commercial compiler (egcs), and people cheered! Why? Because commercial does not equal evil. I for one am not fighting against commercialism, I am fighting against proprietary software. Many companies have been very helpful against this, including Cygnus and RedHat. Also, the GPL is not the only protection against such evils as the author describes. The distribution of packages is the other. It doesn't get into the kernel unless Linus says so. Most packages have similar reins.
In conclusion, I agree, it's not about Open Source, but it's also not about being a fickle part of a counterculture. For most of the community, it's about "Having something that works". For me, it's about Freedom, plain and simple.
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I do not think it is going to be very long before ISP's *have* to offer free connections, and need to make their money elsewhere (through advertisements, online stores, etc.).
While you might be right for most ISP's, I for one (and probably many others) would be more than willing to pay a fair price for a "premium" ISP that offers good service without all the ads. There should be enough of a market that at least some will survive.
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Anonymous Chemist wrote:
/. The Gvmnt right to a digital feed of phone info is emminent domain.
Once more, I hear paranoia at
No, "eminent domain" is the right of the government to take private property in exchange for just compensation. It is completely unrelated to what we are talking about here. The government has no right to a digital feed of phone info, in fact, the Fourth Amendment explicitly says the opposite, that a citizen has the right to security against such searches unless probable cause exists, and an appropriatly detailed warrant is issued.
Believe it or not, they don't have time to track ordinary law abiding citizens, just the criminals.
Believe it or not, even without bringing paranoia into the mix, they sometimes have trouble distinguishing between law abiding citizens and criminals, and try to track them anyway. That is one reason why we have a Fourth Amendment, to ensure that there are checks and balances on the government when it comes to investigating citizens.
Would you have a terrorist/drug trafficker in the US able to coordinate activities without any way for law enforcement to track his communications?
First, you are misrepresenting the issue. We are not preventing the government from tracking terrorists. If they pay attention to the rights of citizens it is merely more difficult to track a terrorist or drug trafficer, not impossible. Secondly, I, and most people I know, know and accept that if they maintain our rights as citizens, law enforcement's job is harder, and there might be more crime. That is the price of freedom.
Think about it, you're opening Pandora's box; and folks like don't care who gets hurt.
No, the Feds are opening Pandora's box by removing the citizen's right to protection against searches. They don't care who gets hurt. In addition, if we get another J. Edgar Hoover in the FBI, than the paranoid fears are all justified.
True you take the risk that the law may be abused at some time, but then if you don't have such a law.. you can be certain that the loophole will be exploited by terrorists or criminals.
Such laws don't prevent terrorists from using these products. A terrorist can easily go to Europe, buy an Iridium phone, and use it in the US. A terrorist is more likely to do this than a private citizen.
unfortunately our Founding Fathers had no idea of nukes, germ warfare, car bombs, etc. I have no
doubt if they had, they would have supported the ability to infringe on those folks rights (who would commit such crimes) for the greater good of the nation.
I disagree. One of the key rights that was implicit in many of the ideas put forth by the founding fathers (especially Thomas Jefferson) was that the Constitution must maintain the citizen's rights to the means of revolution, should the citizens decide that a change of government was necessary. That thread strongly underlies the bill of rights. Why should a government not allowed to hunt for muskets and bombs be allowed to hunt for automatic weapons and car bombs?
I've said it before, I'll say it again. If you have nothing to hide, you really have nothing to fear.
I have nothing to hide, but I disagree. I have a lot to fear from the US Government intruding in my rights. The key fear is "how far will they go?"!
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That sounds really sweet, I'll keep my eyes open for when they actually ship something. Are they going to release full specs to the Mesa and XFree groups?
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To "show off Windows 2000", I would think they could do with a better designed web page. I get about 250 pixels (vertically) of broken-looking header, followed by about 800 pixels of whitespace, followed by the actual text. I have to scroll down more than a screenful just to read anything. And a Javascript error to boot. I mean, if they still can't even design a competent website, what makes them think they can design a whole OS?
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fireproof wrote:
A wise man once told me "There are two ways to get something done -- the right way and the cheap way."
I've heard it a slightly different way:
Good, Fast, Cheap: Pick any two (you can't have all three)
-- From RFC 1925, The Twelve Networking Truths, by R. Callon, I.O.O.F.
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You can't get RPM's for this yet, it's just been released! You'll be able to get them when someone makes them, and you'll surely be able to get them at the Rufus RPM Repository. In the mean time, you can try compiling it yourself from the released source. Even better, you can make your own RPM of it, go to RPM.org to learn how (Maximum RPM is a great book).
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Sorry, my bad. Louis J. Freeh is the Director of the FBI. Janet Reno is the Attorney General, head of the US Department of Justice, the boss of Louis J. Freeh, and the author of the letter (well, one of her aides probably wrote it, but she signed it). Madeleine K. Albright is the Secretary of State and not the author of the letter.
This letter is still is a part of a long-term program by the DOJ and FBI to systematically remove the tools to protect our privacy in general, and encryption tools in particular.
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Kaa writes:
:-)
No way. Albright was
You mean Reno, don't you? Madeleine Albright is the Secretary of State, Janet Reno is the Director of the FBI and the author of this letter (which is way out of bounds for the FBI)
basically saying "wouldn't it be nice if encryption wasn't available to non-government entities". This is no more than her opinion.
Firstly, when the head of a branch of a government sends an official letter to the head of a branch of a different government, it is never "no more than her opinion". Secondly, it is not saying "Wouldn't it be nice", it is strongly recommending that the German Secretary of Justice take action to stop the distribution of encryption software over the internet from Germany. Whether Minister Däubler-Gmelin listens is a different issue, the fact that we are pressuring them to do this is bad enough.
Granted, her opinion carries some weight, but it's a faaaaaar way from actually enacting coordinated legislation that would prohibit private encryption.
Of course it is, but don't brush it off as "her opinion", it is part of a coordinated effort by the FBI to make strong encryption unavailable.
So don't get your panties all bunched up.
I don't know if Reno wears panties, I think you might be thinking of an earlier FBI director, J. Edgar Hoover
This is not going to happen for a very large set of reasons, starting with political climate
I don't see how the political climate is against this sort of thing. We've been seeing a lot of "I'm scared, take away my rights so I feel safer" lately, particularly in the US.
and ending with the Bill of Rights (at least for Americans).
The Bill of Rights has nothing to do with this letter, which was to put pressure on a German minister to do things in Germany. It's also a hard battle to get the Bill of Rights to have something to do with this in the US. The courts are not consistant when they rule whether or not source code is protected speech. Binaries have never been protected by the Bill of Rights.
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Sendmail isn't the part that doesn't scale, it's POP3 when dealing with Sendmail files.
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Yeah, at least you can count on the NSA keeping your dirty laundry quiet, even the President has trouble geting information out of them. The FBI won't keep secrets anywhere near as well, and if they happen on something criminal, they'll try to prosecute even though due process wasn't followed.
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While it sounds big for a laptop, it sounds great for a desktop LCD display, particularly if they make enough so the price is reasonable.
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Stu Charlton writes:
They WANT business servers to become commidities. They want message queues, tp monitors, ORB's, web servers, app servers and file/print sharing to be all rolled into ONE commodity product: Windows NT.
That's not a commodity. That's an integrated product intended to build a business server monopoly. They are mutually exclusive. If you have a monopoly on an class of items, it is not a commodity, no matter how many times you call it one.
Microsoft has always been about selling in volume to drown competitors in a sea of dirt-cheap prices. Getting to that level requires a commoditization of the market.
Volume and low price does not make something a commodity. A large volume of magazines are printed every month, yet they are not a commodity. Why? Because you cannot replace one Cosmopolitan, or even Forbes, with, say Money magazine, they serve different purposes, they have different information. Newspapers, on the other hand, are perpetually on the verge of being a commodity, since a great deal of the paper is spent serving roughly the same AP and UPI articles to the readers.
A commodity market is typified by minor product differentiation. Microsoft always tries for drastic product differentiation.
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Microsoft is fighting against the commoditization of software, through ads like the one you mentioned and other means. They don't want commodity software, because their business model depends on inter-software tie-ins (eg. SQL Server requires NT and really encourages IE too). This is not commodity software.
A commodity is an type of item where everything is pretty much the same, like an orange, or wheat. There are differences (navel oranges, seedless oranges), but they all work as an orange, and they all do orangey things.
Commodity software is similar. You have a job to do, and you aren't tied into any particular piece of software to do it. For example, NCSA httpd, Apache, Roxen, IIS and Netscape Server will all serve the same web pages, so basic web servers are a commodity market. Microsoft fights the commodity trend by trying to encourage superfluous proprietary extensions like ASP and VBScript, so people will say "It's not a commodity, look, httpd won't run my ASP pages". They encourage this with ads like the one you complained about.
The Free Software community goes a step further, from commodity software to commodity information. Not only do you have choice in software packages, you have choice in source code. If you don't like the selection, fix one of the choices or use the commodity information to write a new choice. Run Apache and OpenSSL together into one binary, nobody will stop you.
This is what I mean by the commoditization of the software industry. This will lead to much pain in the shrinkwrap software industry, but many good things for the real software industry.
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um... Lucas writes:
If the software becomes commoditized, so will we.
Almost certainly not. Oranges are a commodity, farmers are not. More on topic, there are many fields based on commodity information, most of the sciences, law and medicine come to mind. As software becomes commoditized, programmers will become a more professionalized field. A good thing if you ask me.
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Don't forget
3½" Floppy = hard drive
I've had way too many newbies try to tell me that the 3½" floppies were officially called "hard disk" or "hard drive", and the term was developed to distinguish them from the floppy 5¼" ones. At this point, I'm usually tempted to bust open their floppy, and show them how floppy it really is. If they still don't believe me, then I get to bust open their hard drive.
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First, the ISP who knew that their pages were reaching a limited audience, and said nothing. What they did is annoying and obnoxious, but they were not censoring your site, your site is available to the entire internet. Yes, some people don't have access to your site, but that's because they only have access to a limited internet feed (eg. filtered through CyberPatrol). There are thousands of machines that have no internet connection at all, they can't get to your site either. There are thousands of people who are on machines behind firewals that filter out the http port, they can't get to your site either.
Your ISP did its job, they made the site accessible. It would be a nice gesture if they set up an alternate website in the hopes that it doesn't get filtered, but they have no obligation to, nor is it guaranteed to work. Yes, they should have mentioned the filtering, but they are not responsible for circumventing it for you.
CyberPatrol, on the other hand, is essentially telling its customers that your resume is "inappropriate" and "containing material that parents might find objectionable" (descriptions of filtered sites taken from CyberPatrol's page). This is potentially libel. Contact CyberPatrol, make them fix their screwup. If they refuse, legal action is an option, but it probably won't be worth it to you.
In addition, CyberPatrol claims that their block list "can be managed down to the file directory or page level. This means that appropriate material at an internet address need not be blocked simply
because there is some restricted material elsewhere at the address." So they have the ability to limit their filtering to just the adult pages on your ISP's site, they just choose not to. Your ISP can potentially sue them for both libel and restraint of trade. They also have the option of helping their customers with a class action suit against CyberPatrol.
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It's an external storage device, similar to an external RAID (in fact it probably is a RAID), it's many hard drives, plus I/O, plus a couple processors.
You can't put this in your Pentuim, you have to plug into your external Fibre Channel or Ultra-SCSI port. These sorts of systems have been around for a while, the 430GB part isn't the impressive bit. The impressive bit is it scales up to 11TB, none of them have gotten that big before in one box.
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Samael asks:
Why should [Adobe] care about Open Source?
Because if they don't care enough to at least understand it, they're going to have trouble making money. I don't think all companies need to drop everything and switch to Free Software immediately, but I think the companies who keep blinders on, who show as little comprehension of the issues as Adobe, are doomed to failure.
Adobe has two cash cows, PhotoShop and PageMaker (to a lesser extent, Illustrator). There's already serious Free Software competition for one of them, and various people are starting up projects to compete with the other.
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From ESR, I would add The Jargon File. The Cathedral And the Bazaar is more about Software than the Internet, but if that's there, than RMS's Why Software Should Be Free should also be there.
Another critically important RMS piece (and one more relevant to the internet) is The Right to Read.
Also there's The Declaration of Independence [of the USA], not as a document in its own right, but as the first entry into Project Gutenberg.
Getting more internetty, you've got RFC Number 1, the description of the tentative IMP protocol to be used between the four systems on the brand spanking new ARPA network.
Going to distant history (in computer terms) there is the 1945 paper by Vandemaar Bush, As We May Think, one of the inspirations for the ARPA project.
There's the 1989 whitepaper from CERN's Tim Berners-Lee, Information Management: A Proposal, the paper that started the WWW.
I'm pretty sure that Caldera uses the frame buffer feature during it's install of OpenLinux 2.2. Friendly looking graphics during installation, and it lets you play Tetris during most of it. (It also includes the older text-based installation tools)
To make this perfect, they should do a version with an ncurses or newt frontend, so you can put it on a single-floppy distribution of Linux.
Any organization where people are expected to die in the line of duty, including the Military and Police forces, has procedures for notifying next of kin. They almost always send an officer to your house to express condolences in person.
In general, while letters are one way to add a more personal touch to communications, there are plenty of other ways, depending on the nature of the communications (many love letters are sent by FTD, for example). USPS is not going to thrive by the dwindling number of people using snail mail for personal correspondance. They're going to thrive from everyone's electric bill, and the package you just ordered.
Sure, first class personal letters are declining, but they weren't making any real money on that, so there's no great loss there. The post office actually loses money delivering a handwritten envelope.
;-)
Bills and junk mail are just as popular as ever, that's probably the bulk of the USPS's business. On top of that, they're pushing their premium services, Priority Mail and Express Mail, which I'm sure are profit centers. They also are expanding their line of products for sale (another profit center). They used to just sell mailing boxes, now you can get books, tee shirts, caps, posters, stamp collecting supplies, phone cards, they even sell a leather carry bag syled after the ones the postal workers carry. I'm just waiting for them to start offering commemerative firearms
With radio, you had a wide open field, and the government stepped in to restore order. That is certainly not the case here. Here you have a few companies who are using their government created local broadband wire monopolies to butt into the internet business. Basically, the government is already hip deep in the issue, before it even was an issue.
So think of the current situation not as free enterprise, because it's not. It's government created monopolies on local broadband internet access. This is regulation. If the government decides to do nothing else, it's still regulating the industry.
I'm undecided as to which side of the issue I'm on. The only sane solutions still keep the cable companies in charge of bandwidth, so if third parties are allowed to lease access to broadband customers, they will still be at the mercy of the cable companies. This isn't necessarily better than the current situation, particularly when you add the extra administrative and infrastructure costs of such a solution.