Re:Check out Internet Mail 2000
on
Replacing SMTP?
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· Score: 4, Informative
Maybe ISP's should charge users for each outbound SMTP connection they make? I'd happily pay 10 cents per email I sent if it would reduce the amount of SPAM I received. It would only cost me a couple of bucks a month too at the rate that I send email...
John Dvorak suggested a scheme along these lines, and in theory, it's a good one, though I'd suggest a tenth of a cent, which would still make sending a million emails prohibitively expensive.
In practice, though, it's not workable. Spammers aren't using the SMTP server their ISP provides; they're using their own, just like most desktop Linux users are. As far as the ISP is concerned, Spammer X is making a bunch of outbound connections, but they're streaming out through the ISP's switches and routers, not through their SMTP server.
To impose a tax on certain kinds of TCP connections would require detailed inspection of outbound packets. This is because a single SMTP connection can involve the transfer of many messages. To be reliable, the ISP would have to parse every outbound packet bound for port 25 on a remote system in order to count the number of emails sent. I don't think most people want that level of attention paid to their private emails.
Moreover, this presumes that all ISPs participate honestly and thoroughly in such a system. All it would take is a few spam-friendly ISPs (and they exist, are legion, and jump around IP ranges like ferrets on a hot skillet) to render such a system useless.
The alternative would be to implement email billing at the recipient side. Maybe AOL and Earthlink can pull that kind of blockade off, but small companies and J. Random Luser cannot.
Bernstein's IM2000 proposal at least keeps the bandwidth consumption down, but that's primarily a cost issue for ISPs. (Don't try to convince me that if the amount of spam declined, ISPs would lower their prices.) The main hassle of spam for the user is that it takes time and energy to delete spam, and having to inspect the stuff with ambiguous could-be-from-someone-I-know subject lines would not be alleviated by IM2000; you'd still have to pick and choose what pending inbound email to read or delete.
The fundamental problem with email as a mail system is that it's open to anyone who wants to send mail -- which is part of the point of mail in the first place -- but there is no economic limiting factor for the sender as there is with paper mail. Since we can't eliminate the openness without destroying the utility of the system, the only possible strategy is to artificially impose a cost on the sender. Unfortunately, owing to the nature of public networking, the only remotely reliable way to do that would be to route all mail through a centralized clearing house. No one company will be able to establish such a monopoly, and I don't think anyone wants the alternative -- which is to have the government do it.
This may or may not be a soluble problem, but it is, as of today, still an unsolved problem. Personally, I think it's going to take national legislation and international agreements to stop it, and that will no doubt take a long time. Paper (actually clay tablet) mail existed for several millennia before the International Postal Union was finally established. Let's hope email is brought into line a little faster than that.
The really disturbing thing is that the best time for opening a 32,000 line spreadsheet in Gnumeric was over seven minutes.
This is a perfect example of why, as much as I would like it to be otherwise, I can neither switch entirely to Linux nor recommend others to do so either if they are dependent on any kind of office suite. Excel performs the same task (okay, a bigger task -- my largest spreadsheet is some 59,000 lines) in well under thirty seconds. Open Office runs much more slowly than MS Office on the same hardware and is completely unusable on some hardware that supports MS Office just fine. AbiWord can take thirty minutes just to change the screen scaling with a large document -- MS Word does this almost instantly.
Please don't get me wrong or think I'm a big Microsoft fan. I detest Microsoft, and I've been waiting for Free Software to save me ever since I started using Linux daily in the mid-90's. Common end-user application developers for Linux seem not to use their own products very much or else test them on the latest and greatest hardware. The open source feature set has made great strides since I started using Linux, but the performance of open source office software frankly sucks horribly compared to Microsoft's offerings. This is especially depressing since you'd almost have to try to write software that wastes more CPU cycles and memory than MS software. It doesn't seem to be getting any better, either.
It's not Windows 98 and Office 97 that are too bloated and inefficient for my 1996 IBM Thinkpad with a 120MHz Pentium and 40 megs of RAM -- it's X and Open Office that bring it to its knees. Sure, I could spend a wad of cash to upgrade my hardware so it could handle Open Office, but that's missing the point. OSS is supposed to be more efficient, not less. For myself, this is a much bigger barrier to full adoption than feature parity, which is not a significant issue anymore.
Why the fuss over low power FM? Because it allows anyone to become a broadcaster or content creator. By raising the specter of 'interference', broadcasters and others can FUD the legislatures into banning enabling technologies like this.
This is, I think, a bit over the top. Neither the iTrip nor any other low-power FM device constitutes any kind of threat to corporations with 100kW transmitters scattered across the country. There's a world of difference between a transmitter that can (maybe) reach the front yard from the back yard and transmitters pushing enough wattage to actually burn your flesh if you stand too close to them.
I don't know about UK law on the subject, but in the US using a transmitter exceeding a certain power rating in regulated frequencies requires a license from the FCC for the simple reason that unregulated frequencies would turn into a pissing contest between giant transmitters. For legal devices -- which includes the iTrip inside the US -- you must still avoid interfering with anyone's reception of licensed frequencies, e.g., your neighbor can sic the FCC on you if you stomp all over his favorite Adult Lite Contemporary Audio Sedative station.
Even if you were legally allowed to broadcast outside of your own property, you still have to pay royalties to the copyright holders. These are actually fairly cheap, but they add up if you're broadcasting 24-7. Pushing a strong signal also involves expensive, failure-prone equipment notable for attracting lightning, and one hell of an electric bill -- those kilowatts don't grow on trees.
Now if you have a complaint about exhorbitant FCC licensing fees and policies heavily biased towards large corporations, you definitely have a point, but the main barrier to 'independent' broadcasting is that the sheer operating costs are considerable. I'd be surprised if ClearChannel considers the iTrip to be worth worrying about.
Yes, yes, sounds like a great little piece of hardware. The question is -- will they give away the SDK?
The exorbitant licensing fees for the 'privilege' to help hardware manufacturers to sell their products is the reason I, for one, don't write games for the Gameboy and its ilk. (Which is particularly sad, since I used to program in assembly language on a very similar platform years ago and still have the skills.)
Even coming from C, Perl syntax is unnatural. Seems like once you go Perl, you can never go back (or try to learn a new language).
I came from C (not that I exactly left it) and I didn't find Perl unnatural, and it hasn't crippled me for other purposes, unless you count involuntarily prepending '$' to variable names in C after a long session of Perl coding. As far as I am concerned, there are only three major problems with Perl:
1. Type sigils. The underlying theory necessary to implement variables without special leading characters dates back, oh, thirty years or so. (This is particularly egregious with PHP, where there is only one generic sigil for all types rendering them pointless anyway, but that's a separate gripe.) The '$' notation for shell scripts existed to simplify the ad hoc parsers most shells use; it has no place in a full-blown language.
2. Complex data structures. Even C syntax for deeply nested pointers is cleaner than Perl. Mostly because of 1, above.
3. Writing large applications in Perl depends totally on intense self-discipline as a programmer, and everything about Perl actively encourages you to break that discipline. TMTOWTDI, past a certain point, is a liability, especially with large development teams.
Obviously, Larry and Co. feel differently about these things, but they drive me up the fnarking wall.
I think if I went to hell, satan would probably make me write a Perl parser. (without the help of Yacc)
If Satan really wanted to put the screws to you, he'd require yacc. (The inside joke, for those who aren't deeply into compiler design, is that Perl can't be parsed by a yacc parser because it's not even remotely context-free. Whether that's a good idea or not is a debate that goes back to the days of the ALGOL design committee. The practical effect is that the syntax of Perl is described not by a formal grammar but by the implementation itself, which makes it all but impossible to validate a competing implementation.)
All things considered, this is actually a glowing review, and the complaints about the current state of affairs are minor (though real -- cutting and pasting with Mozilla is remarkably buggy considering what a simple piece of functionality is.)
I did want to remark that the way we solved our SMB issues at my company was by converting the file servers to Linux. This was easy to get management approval for because it was mostly transparent to the users -- largely because we were very, very careful and thorough in making sure it would be, which is key for any change of this sort. OTOH, ours is a small company, so there wasn't much bureaucracy to navigate. I doubt -- no, I'm absolutely certain -- that nothing like this would have happened while I was working for Intel.
When I was in the eighth grade, our computer teacher wrote a voting program in BASIC to run on our Apple IIs. One of my classmates exploited a security hole (okay, he pressed CTRL-C) in order to examine the source code. He found that our devious computer teacher had written the program so that a vote for Reagan counted as 1.5 votes, and a vote for, um, Mondale or whoever it was, counted as.5 votes.
So this raises the question -- what's to keep unscrupulous officials from rigging an electronic election? And equally importantly, what technologies and procedures are in place to detect vote fraud after the fact? Analog elections involve a fairly solid system of observers to prevent fraud. It's not perfect, but it usually works. In an electronic election, who will verify the validity of the code in the first place, and after the election, who will check each and every machine to make sure it hasn't been tampered with? I mention each and every machine because only one machine would be necessary to completely skew the numbers in any given precinct.
Never ascribe to malice anything that can be explained by stupidity.
It's more than just stupidity; as the article notes, some of these problems have been known -- and left uncorrected -- for five years. It may not yet rise to the level of malice, but it certainly qualifies for utter laziness and gross negligence.
If this were a medical device whose flaws were causing patient deaths and the manufacturer knew about it for five years, stupid would be a rather mild word for the manufacturer.
On the other hand, stupid does at least begin to describe a company like Diebold which is opening itself to the possibility of a class-action suit on a scale that would make the tobacco settlements look like pocket change if it is ever demonstrated that their machines screwed up a presidential election.
I mean, isnt shredding a type of encrypton? And isnt this reverse engineering?
I know this was meant to be a joke, but I think you could, under the absurdly broad terms of the DMCA, actually make this case seriously. Shredding is, after all, a sort of transposition cipher.
Try burning several thousand pages of unshredded paper sometime. It's surprisingly hard to burn because paper is self-smothering -- the first few sheets burn and the accumlated ash prevents the next sheets from catching fire.
Shredded paper burns very easily and quickly because of all the open space for air to circulate, though I wouldn't recommend cross-shredding it because then you're back to a thick, heavy mound of slow-burning material.
The important issue that's being missed here is that filesharing networks are used for a hell of a lot more than sharing pirated music. (Granted, that's obviously their main use...)
For example, doesn't Debian have a system for retrieving their distribution that essentially amounts to a distributed fileshare?
Moreover, if I use something like Kazaa to share copies of the latest Red Hat distro, would I not be in violation of this proposed law? Sure, it's "free software," but looking at Red Hat's site, RH Linux 9 is retailing for $39.95. So does it cost nothing or does it cost forty bucks? Will the answer to this question depend on how much Microsoft contributed to the election campaigns of various governors, state attorneys general, and congressmen?
Finally, what safeguards exist to keep some perfectly innocent party from being expensively railroaded before, eventually and at the cost of personal ruin, being acquitted? I am suddenly reminded of one fellow, previously featured here, who wasn't permitted to sell his own music on eBay because it was automatically assumed by eBay management -- an assumption shared by the RIAA -- that the only purpose of CD-Rs is piracy. I am also reminded of the young fellow whose search engine got him an expensive suit from the RIAA that wiped out his life's savings.
I've said it before and I'll say it again: if the clash between personal liberty and intellectual property is really as irreconcilable as the RIAA, MPAA, BSA, et al., seem to think, then it is intellectual property that must be abolished.
The question our so-called leaders need to answer before any more of this nonsense goes on is this: At what point must intellectual property rights yield to civil liberties?
I fear that they won't have an answer to that one.
I remember after Columbine that a big deal was made about the fact that the perpetrators listened to Rammstein.
Why is this connection always made when some sort of vaguely fringe music is involved, but when some suburban father of three snaps and murders his family before killing himself, no one in the press says, "A-ha! This man has all of Celine Dion's albums! That explains everything."
For crying out loud, folks, no one gets up in the morning and decides on the basis of their musical tastes or favorite video game to go kill people. You have to be severely fucked up to do that sort of thing, and it takes a lot more than dressing in black and listening to old Bauhaus records to do that.
Re:What SCO is really afraid of.
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My Visit to SCO
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· Score: 1
All that anger would be unleached in an orgy of coding the likes of which even God has not seen.
Right on, Stilgar.
"[SCO] feels large chunks are derivative. It argued that even a full replacement would be in part based on the prior effort, and thus would itself be derivative, at least under the terms of the IBM contract."
This is the meat of this case, and what makes it much, much larger than just a clash between Free Software and its corporate allies on one hand and a predatory IP firm on the other. What SCO is arguing, essentially, is that the creator of anything has ownership rights in perpetuity over anything that is derivative from it -- even if it is derivative in a post facto sense. In other words, if this were a few decades ago and I invented the line editor, then by SCO's reasoning, I would own the rights to Microsoft Word because a word processor is conceptually derivative from a line editor, not that MS coders borrowed code from the original line editor or necessarily even know what a line editor is.
If SCO actually wins this, then the number of lawyers who will end up owning the entire field of human discourse within a few years will fit comfortably in my cubicle. Of course, that's absurd, but it may take some really horrid, large-scale absurdities before people clue back into the Jeffersonian idea that intellectual property is always a bad idea, and should be tolerated only where absolutely necessary.
In a discussion I was reading that mentioned this article, it was mentioned that there was a misspelled word in the comments of some allegedly copied code. If true, then one could just strip the comments from the Linux source, and do a spell check in the appropriate language.
Either you can't spell, which apparently isn't the case based on your post, or you've never looked at the kernel source. Tracking down all the misspellings would be about as effective a way of finding the infringing code as printing it all out on fanfold paper, taping it to a very large wall, and hurling a dart at the source while blindfolded.
I had a coworker who was very, very good at kissing ass. He was also one of the crassest and most irreverent people I have ever met. One day I asked him how he could, given his character, kiss ass the way he did.
He looked around to see if anyone was listening, and whispered to me, "Don't think of it as ass kissing. Think of it as patronizing."
He might be a slightly crazed filthy socialist hippy, but by golly, he nailed this one.
Damn straight.
When I was a slightly crazed filthy socialist hippy teenager -- lo these many years ago -- one of my friends told me something that I have ignored at my peril in the decades since. She said, "Never trust anyone with sex, money, or drugs. No one. Ever."
Like RMS, perhaps she was being just a little paranoid. But only a little. ESR, on the other hand, with his blind libertarian ideological brain lock and his belief that we could traipse hand in hand with big capital through the meadows, is the one who needs to get into closer touch with reality.
All businessmen are about making money. Anyone who isn't finds another line of work. Some of them operate within ethical frameworks with varying degrees of rigidity. But always bear this in mind: the market is designed to be a very darwininan place. If being unethical, or even illegal (but not prosecuted), provides a business advantage, unethical and occasionally outright criminal businessmen will outcompete the ethical ones.
Evolution does not favor the good, the fair, or the just. The reason we have a complex legal system is precisely because the good, the fair, and the just are not fit to survive on their own and require, in the form of that legal system and the larger society, a high degree of coordination and cooperation to fend off the attacks of the unfair and unjust.
RMS sees this pretty clearly. I'm not sure his strategy -- which is essentially to win by ending the game -- can actually work when so many powerful bastards have vested interests in the game, but his basic vision is sound. ESR seems to believe that the "best" will win, but doesn't seem to realize the being the best competitor may involve exhibiting traits most of us would consider reprehensible.
I know for a fact that I've done way more learning (at least CS-related) since I graduated and got OUT of undergrad than I ever did slaving through a Programming Languages course (Sorry Prof. Allen, Scheme will never be fun no matter what you say). Does anyone else feel like they've learned more on their own than in school?
Well, in my own case, certainly, as my formal CS education consists of exactly one course on C taken at a local community college more than a decade ago. On the weight of totally unrelated skills, I sneaked into the business chiefly as a designer, writing a little code here and there, until I do nothing but write code ten years later.
I was programming for about half that time before I sat down with several textbooks on algorithms and design methodologies and finally flashed on the fact that knowing a programming language is probably the least part of being a programmer, just as knowing a natural language doesn't make you a good novelist. I suppose I could have learned that in school, but the impression I got from friends who were students was that it wasn't a major focus. Of course, my friends weren't attending MIT, and I suspect it's different there.
The biggest part of being a "real programmer" can't be taught in school, and that's the reality of programming in a business environment. No book will adequately prepare you for office politics or time management. Despite my lack of formal training, I've been considered an excellent programmer everywhere I've worked. When I entered the field, I thought that was all that mattered. The big secret, I learned, was knowing where and when to write shitty, sloppy, hastily conceived code in order to get a project out the door on time and under budget, and when to push back to get more time to write good code, because shitty code in that particular case will come back to bite you in the ass and wreck schedules further down the road. That is the job skill par excellence of programming, and you can only learn it from experience.
OTOH, if you're basically perfectionist, the shame of writing corporate code will lead you to spend your spare time writing textbook-perfect open source projects. Occupational hazard, I guess.
You won't learn the fine arts of ass kissing or blame shifting in books, either, but that's something everyone but the receptionist and the mailboy needs to know, not just programmers.
If our constitutional rights are colliding with the interests of the content industry, the proper solution is not to destroy our constitutional rights but rather to destroy the content industry. This is especially the case considering how, in the grand scheme of multinational business, movies and records are small potatoes.
If copyright cannot coexist with freedom of speech, the right to privacy, and due process of law, it is time for copyright to go.
Put it that way to the content industry, and maybe they'll have a strong incentive to think of a workable and non-subversive way to run their businesses.
Surely, this should be modded to +5 Funny, not Interesting.
Using DHTML as a standard UI has several problems, not the least of which is that, even in theory, it's too inflexible and limiting for all but the most simple form-based applications. You could build a PIM or a database browser on top of DHTML, but not Photoshop, SoundForge, a real word processor, or pretty much any game chosen at random. In practice, every DHTML client on earth is slow, bloated, and more of a resource hog than the windowing system it runs on top of.
I'm not sure being platform agnostic is really a goal worth striving for, at least in an absolute sense, since it essentially limits applications to the least-common-denominator of available platform features. Practically speaking, it's not much different than having only one platform, and if that's your cup of tea, capitulating to Redmond is always an option.
According to Infoworld, Sun has joined the debate by taking advantage of the uncertainty over IBM.
Sun? Oh yeah, I've heard of them. I just replaced one of their overpriced 6U rackmount units with 4U of commodity Intel-based 1U rackmount PCs running Linux and substantially increased our performance at a fraction of the price of the Sun box.
It would be very, very stupid of Sun to get involved in this. To be fair, Solaris is a nice system -- even if you have to install the GNU tools and tons of other free software to make it usable -- but Sun has made the terrible tactical error of depending on overpriced, underperforming, proprietary hardware that doesn't begin to make sense until you get into their really high-end and expensive machines, a space in which they compete with several other companies, including IBM.
Given that one Unix-like OS is potentially replaceable by another Unix-like OS -- which is the entire point of open standards -- Sun ought to take care not to taint themselves by associating too closely with SCO. There is an extent to which any tech vendor exists at the sufferance of the technicians who run their systems, and nowhere is this more true than it is in the *nix world.
That 6U rackmount Sun box I just removed from service? I've still got it. It's standing on its end next to my desk holding up my telephone and a bottle of Mountain Dew.
What is stopping the people within SCO who started this case and subsequently destroyed SCO utterly from quietly selling all of their SCO stock sometime between now and the point SCO goes into court
Insider trading laws? In stark contrast to a large corporation, SCO is actually small enough to lack the necessary executive branch inside connections to get off the hook. Hell, they're even smaller than Martha freaking Stewart.
scot-free and with a big impressive "CFO, SCO CORP" bulletpoint on their resume.
Being CFO of a company that evaporated as a result of an incredibly naive and desperate legal maneuver isn't a strong selling point. Sure, you might get a job at a Fortune 500 company that way, but only if the company is McDonalds and you have a flair for saying, "Would you like fries with that?"
I know it sometimes seems otherwise, but most of the time, gross misconduct and epic stupidity are neither excused nor rewarded.
I actually feel kind of sorry for Darl McBride. Every time he crosses the street at a crosswalk for the rest of his life, he's going to have to wonder if any of the cars in the front row have a penguin sticker on the back.
If I make a bunch of allegations about some person or company, why shouldn't they be allowed to respond? Most of the posters here seem to be looking at this from the angle of Some Giant Company forcing Some Pathetic Little Blog to publish a corporate press release (as if this were a great imposition, anyway.) Look at it the other way: if Some Giant News Agency runs a story which reflects badly on you, you get a chance to refute the charges in the same venue, which is a much nicer deal than posting something on your blog to be read by a few dozen people while the BBC gets to defame you before millions.
Consider the case when Microsoft or SCO spread their lies about Linux or, for that matter, competing companies. Suddenly, Microsoft doesn't get to run the whole show -- at least in Europe -- and it becomes much harder to spin bullshit without a challenge.
This is all about the "marketplace of ideas." It's just ensuring that the marketplace of ideas is open to everyone instead of just those with deep pockets. I can see how this wouldn't appeal to the socially-Darwinian cash-equals-merit Libertarian crowd, but those less ideologically rigid ought to be able to see that this is a sword that cuts both ways and if it lets the big guy shaft the little guy, the little guy can shaft him right back, and with greater effect.
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Maybe ISP's should charge users for each outbound SMTP connection they make? I'd happily pay 10 cents per email I sent if it would reduce the amount of SPAM I received. It would only cost me a couple of bucks a month too at the rate that I send email ...
John Dvorak suggested a scheme along these lines, and in theory, it's a good one, though I'd suggest a tenth of a cent, which would still make sending a million emails prohibitively expensive.
In practice, though, it's not workable. Spammers aren't using the SMTP server their ISP provides; they're using their own, just like most desktop Linux users are. As far as the ISP is concerned, Spammer X is making a bunch of outbound connections, but they're streaming out through the ISP's switches and routers, not through their SMTP server.
To impose a tax on certain kinds of TCP connections would require detailed inspection of outbound packets. This is because a single SMTP connection can involve the transfer of many messages. To be reliable, the ISP would have to parse every outbound packet bound for port 25 on a remote system in order to count the number of emails sent. I don't think most people want that level of attention paid to their private emails.
Moreover, this presumes that all ISPs participate honestly and thoroughly in such a system. All it would take is a few spam-friendly ISPs (and they exist, are legion, and jump around IP ranges like ferrets on a hot skillet) to render such a system useless.
The alternative would be to implement email billing at the recipient side. Maybe AOL and Earthlink can pull that kind of blockade off, but small companies and J. Random Luser cannot.
Bernstein's IM2000 proposal at least keeps the bandwidth consumption down, but that's primarily a cost issue for ISPs. (Don't try to convince me that if the amount of spam declined, ISPs would lower their prices.) The main hassle of spam for the user is that it takes time and energy to delete spam, and having to inspect the stuff with ambiguous could-be-from-someone-I-know subject lines would not be alleviated by IM2000; you'd still have to pick and choose what pending inbound email to read or delete.
The fundamental problem with email as a mail system is that it's open to anyone who wants to send mail -- which is part of the point of mail in the first place -- but there is no economic limiting factor for the sender as there is with paper mail. Since we can't eliminate the openness without destroying the utility of the system, the only possible strategy is to artificially impose a cost on the sender. Unfortunately, owing to the nature of public networking, the only remotely reliable way to do that would be to route all mail through a centralized clearing house. No one company will be able to establish such a monopoly, and I don't think anyone wants the alternative -- which is to have the government do it.
This may or may not be a soluble problem, but it is, as of today, still an unsolved problem. Personally, I think it's going to take national legislation and international agreements to stop it, and that will no doubt take a long time. Paper (actually clay tablet) mail existed for several millennia before the International Postal Union was finally established. Let's hope email is brought into line a little faster than that.
This is a bit off-topic, but...
The really disturbing thing is that the best time for opening a 32,000 line spreadsheet in Gnumeric was over seven minutes.
This is a perfect example of why, as much as I would like it to be otherwise, I can neither switch entirely to Linux nor recommend others to do so either if they are dependent on any kind of office suite. Excel performs the same task (okay, a bigger task -- my largest spreadsheet is some 59,000 lines) in well under thirty seconds. Open Office runs much more slowly than MS Office on the same hardware and is completely unusable on some hardware that supports MS Office just fine. AbiWord can take thirty minutes just to change the screen scaling with a large document -- MS Word does this almost instantly.
Please don't get me wrong or think I'm a big Microsoft fan. I detest Microsoft, and I've been waiting for Free Software to save me ever since I started using Linux daily in the mid-90's. Common end-user application developers for Linux seem not to use their own products very much or else test them on the latest and greatest hardware. The open source feature set has made great strides since I started using Linux, but the performance of open source office software frankly sucks horribly compared to Microsoft's offerings. This is especially depressing since you'd almost have to try to write software that wastes more CPU cycles and memory than MS software. It doesn't seem to be getting any better, either.
It's not Windows 98 and Office 97 that are too bloated and inefficient for my 1996 IBM Thinkpad with a 120MHz Pentium and 40 megs of RAM -- it's X and Open Office that bring it to its knees. Sure, I could spend a wad of cash to upgrade my hardware so it could handle Open Office, but that's missing the point. OSS is supposed to be more efficient, not less. For myself, this is a much bigger barrier to full adoption than feature parity, which is not a significant issue anymore.
Why the fuss over low power FM? Because it allows anyone to become a broadcaster or content creator. By raising the specter of 'interference', broadcasters and others can FUD the legislatures into banning enabling technologies like this.
This is, I think, a bit over the top. Neither the iTrip nor any other low-power FM device constitutes any kind of threat to corporations with 100kW transmitters scattered across the country. There's a world of difference between a transmitter that can (maybe) reach the front yard from the back yard and transmitters pushing enough wattage to actually burn your flesh if you stand too close to them.
I don't know about UK law on the subject, but in the US using a transmitter exceeding a certain power rating in regulated frequencies requires a license from the FCC for the simple reason that unregulated frequencies would turn into a pissing contest between giant transmitters. For legal devices -- which includes the iTrip inside the US -- you must still avoid interfering with anyone's reception of licensed frequencies, e.g., your neighbor can sic the FCC on you if you stomp all over his favorite Adult Lite Contemporary Audio Sedative station.
Even if you were legally allowed to broadcast outside of your own property, you still have to pay royalties to the copyright holders. These are actually fairly cheap, but they add up if you're broadcasting 24-7. Pushing a strong signal also involves expensive, failure-prone equipment notable for attracting lightning, and one hell of an electric bill -- those kilowatts don't grow on trees.
Now if you have a complaint about exhorbitant FCC licensing fees and policies heavily biased towards large corporations, you definitely have a point, but the main barrier to 'independent' broadcasting is that the sheer operating costs are considerable. I'd be surprised if ClearChannel considers the iTrip to be worth worrying about.
Yes, yes, sounds like a great little piece of hardware. The question is -- will they give away the SDK?
The exorbitant licensing fees for the 'privilege' to help hardware manufacturers to sell their products is the reason I, for one, don't write games for the Gameboy and its ilk. (Which is particularly sad, since I used to program in assembly language on a very similar platform years ago and still have the skills.)
Open the SDK and they will come.
What about issues of availability and maintainability?
I think it's fair to say that a machine that is unavailable and unmaintainable is hard to use.
Even coming from C, Perl syntax is unnatural. Seems like once you go Perl, you can never go back (or try to learn a new language).
I came from C (not that I exactly left it) and I didn't find Perl unnatural, and it hasn't crippled me for other purposes, unless you count involuntarily prepending '$' to variable names in C after a long session of Perl coding. As far as I am concerned, there are only three major problems with Perl:
1. Type sigils. The underlying theory necessary to implement variables without special leading characters dates back, oh, thirty years or so. (This is particularly egregious with PHP, where there is only one generic sigil for all types rendering them pointless anyway, but that's a separate gripe.) The '$' notation for shell scripts existed to simplify the ad hoc parsers most shells use; it has no place in a full-blown language.
2. Complex data structures. Even C syntax for deeply nested pointers is cleaner than Perl. Mostly because of 1, above.
3. Writing large applications in Perl depends totally on intense self-discipline as a programmer, and everything about Perl actively encourages you to break that discipline. TMTOWTDI, past a certain point, is a liability, especially with large development teams.
Obviously, Larry and Co. feel differently about these things, but they drive me up the fnarking wall.
I think if I went to hell, satan would probably make me write a Perl parser. (without the help of Yacc)
If Satan really wanted to put the screws to you, he'd require yacc. (The inside joke, for those who aren't deeply into compiler design, is that Perl can't be parsed by a yacc parser because it's not even remotely context-free. Whether that's a good idea or not is a debate that goes back to the days of the ALGOL design committee. The practical effect is that the syntax of Perl is described not by a formal grammar but by the implementation itself, which makes it all but impossible to validate a competing implementation.)
Could the next must-have computer input device be a morse key?
Something wrong with any randomly selected key on the keyboard?
Of course, the real danger is that net.poseurs will use ASCII-to-Morse translators with programmable semi-random delays to simulate mad Morse skillz.
Hey, I hear cuneiform is dying out. Will the next must-have computer input device be a slab of wet mud?
All things considered, this is actually a glowing review, and the complaints about the current state of affairs are minor (though real -- cutting and pasting with Mozilla is remarkably buggy considering what a simple piece of functionality is.)
I did want to remark that the way we solved our SMB issues at my company was by converting the file servers to Linux. This was easy to get management approval for because it was mostly transparent to the users -- largely because we were very, very careful and thorough in making sure it would be, which is key for any change of this sort. OTOH, ours is a small company, so there wasn't much bureaucracy to navigate. I doubt -- no, I'm absolutely certain -- that nothing like this would have happened while I was working for Intel.
When I was in the eighth grade, our computer teacher wrote a voting program in BASIC to run on our Apple IIs. One of my classmates exploited a security hole (okay, he pressed CTRL-C) in order to examine the source code. He found that our devious computer teacher had written the program so that a vote for Reagan counted as 1.5 votes, and a vote for, um, Mondale or whoever it was, counted as .5 votes.
So this raises the question -- what's to keep unscrupulous officials from rigging an electronic election? And equally importantly, what technologies and procedures are in place to detect vote fraud after the fact? Analog elections involve a fairly solid system of observers to prevent fraud. It's not perfect, but it usually works. In an electronic election, who will verify the validity of the code in the first place, and after the election, who will check each and every machine to make sure it hasn't been tampered with? I mention each and every machine because only one machine would be necessary to completely skew the numbers in any given precinct.
Never ascribe to malice anything that can be explained by stupidity.
It's more than just stupidity; as the article notes, some of these problems have been known -- and left uncorrected -- for five years. It may not yet rise to the level of malice, but it certainly qualifies for utter laziness and gross negligence.
If this were a medical device whose flaws were causing patient deaths and the manufacturer knew about it for five years, stupid would be a rather mild word for the manufacturer.
On the other hand, stupid does at least begin to describe a company like Diebold which is opening itself to the possibility of a class-action suit on a scale that would make the tobacco settlements look like pocket change if it is ever demonstrated that their machines screwed up a presidential election.
1. Quit drinking beer in the office. If you really must be inebriated while you're coding, try whiskey instead.
2. People won't look at you funny if you work in the office and work out out of the office.
3. Tell me what slack-ass place you work at so I can get a job there.
I mean, isnt shredding a type of encrypton? And isnt this reverse engineering?
I know this was meant to be a joke, but I think you could, under the absurdly broad terms of the DMCA, actually make this case seriously. Shredding is, after all, a sort of transposition cipher.
Why bother cross-shredding it first?
Try burning several thousand pages of unshredded paper sometime. It's surprisingly hard to burn because paper is self-smothering -- the first few sheets burn and the accumlated ash prevents the next sheets from catching fire.
Shredded paper burns very easily and quickly because of all the open space for air to circulate, though I wouldn't recommend cross-shredding it because then you're back to a thick, heavy mound of slow-burning material.
The important issue that's being missed here is that filesharing networks are used for a hell of a lot more than sharing pirated music. (Granted, that's obviously their main use...)
For example, doesn't Debian have a system for retrieving their distribution that essentially amounts to a distributed fileshare?
Moreover, if I use something like Kazaa to share copies of the latest Red Hat distro, would I not be in violation of this proposed law? Sure, it's "free software," but looking at Red Hat's site, RH Linux 9 is retailing for $39.95. So does it cost nothing or does it cost forty bucks? Will the answer to this question depend on how much Microsoft contributed to the election campaigns of various governors, state attorneys general, and congressmen?
Finally, what safeguards exist to keep some perfectly innocent party from being expensively railroaded before, eventually and at the cost of personal ruin, being acquitted? I am suddenly reminded of one fellow, previously featured here, who wasn't permitted to sell his own music on eBay because it was automatically assumed by eBay management -- an assumption shared by the RIAA -- that the only purpose of CD-Rs is piracy. I am also reminded of the young fellow whose search engine got him an expensive suit from the RIAA that wiped out his life's savings.
I've said it before and I'll say it again: if the clash between personal liberty and intellectual property is really as irreconcilable as the RIAA, MPAA, BSA, et al., seem to think, then it is intellectual property that must be abolished.
The question our so-called leaders need to answer before any more of this nonsense goes on is this: At what point must intellectual property rights yield to civil liberties?
I fear that they won't have an answer to that one.
I remember after Columbine that a big deal was made about the fact that the perpetrators listened to Rammstein.
Why is this connection always made when some sort of vaguely fringe music is involved, but when some suburban father of three snaps and murders his family before killing himself, no one in the press says, "A-ha! This man has all of Celine Dion's albums! That explains everything."
For crying out loud, folks, no one gets up in the morning and decides on the basis of their musical tastes or favorite video game to go kill people. You have to be severely fucked up to do that sort of thing, and it takes a lot more than dressing in black and listening to old Bauhaus records to do that.
All that anger would be unleached in an orgy of coding the likes of which even God has not seen.
Right on, Stilgar.
"[SCO] feels large chunks are derivative. It argued that even a full replacement would be in part based on the prior effort, and thus would itself be derivative, at least under the terms of the IBM contract."
This is the meat of this case, and what makes it much, much larger than just a clash between Free Software and its corporate allies on one hand and a predatory IP firm on the other. What SCO is arguing, essentially, is that the creator of anything has ownership rights in perpetuity over anything that is derivative from it -- even if it is derivative in a post facto sense. In other words, if this were a few decades ago and I invented the line editor, then by SCO's reasoning, I would own the rights to Microsoft Word because a word processor is conceptually derivative from a line editor, not that MS coders borrowed code from the original line editor or necessarily even know what a line editor is.
If SCO actually wins this, then the number of lawyers who will end up owning the entire field of human discourse within a few years will fit comfortably in my cubicle. Of course, that's absurd, but it may take some really horrid, large-scale absurdities before people clue back into the Jeffersonian idea that intellectual property is always a bad idea, and should be tolerated only where absolutely necessary.
In a discussion I was reading that mentioned this article, it was mentioned that there was a misspelled word in the comments of some allegedly copied code. If true, then one could just strip the comments from the Linux source, and do a spell check in the appropriate language.
Either you can't spell, which apparently isn't the case based on your post, or you've never looked at the kernel source. Tracking down all the misspellings would be about as effective a way of finding the infringing code as printing it all out on fanfold paper, taping it to a very large wall, and hurling a dart at the source while blindfolded.
Please mod parent up +1 Unintentionally Funny.
I had a coworker who was very, very good at kissing ass. He was also one of the crassest and most irreverent people I have ever met. One day I asked him how he could, given his character, kiss ass the way he did.
He looked around to see if anyone was listening, and whispered to me, "Don't think of it as ass kissing. Think of it as patronizing."
He might be a slightly crazed filthy socialist hippy, but by golly, he nailed this one.
Damn straight.
When I was a slightly crazed filthy socialist hippy teenager -- lo these many years ago -- one of my friends told me something that I have ignored at my peril in the decades since. She said, "Never trust anyone with sex, money, or drugs. No one. Ever."
Like RMS, perhaps she was being just a little paranoid. But only a little. ESR, on the other hand, with his blind libertarian ideological brain lock and his belief that we could traipse hand in hand with big capital through the meadows, is the one who needs to get into closer touch with reality.
All businessmen are about making money. Anyone who isn't finds another line of work. Some of them operate within ethical frameworks with varying degrees of rigidity. But always bear this in mind: the market is designed to be a very darwininan place. If being unethical, or even illegal (but not prosecuted), provides a business advantage, unethical and occasionally outright criminal businessmen will outcompete the ethical ones.
Evolution does not favor the good, the fair, or the just. The reason we have a complex legal system is precisely because the good, the fair, and the just are not fit to survive on their own and require, in the form of that legal system and the larger society, a high degree of coordination and cooperation to fend off the attacks of the unfair and unjust.
RMS sees this pretty clearly. I'm not sure his strategy -- which is essentially to win by ending the game -- can actually work when so many powerful bastards have vested interests in the game, but his basic vision is sound. ESR seems to believe that the "best" will win, but doesn't seem to realize the being the best competitor may involve exhibiting traits most of us would consider reprehensible.
I know for a fact that I've done way more learning (at least CS-related) since I graduated and got OUT of undergrad than I ever did slaving through a Programming Languages course (Sorry Prof. Allen, Scheme will never be fun no matter what you say). Does anyone else feel like they've learned more on their own than in school?
Well, in my own case, certainly, as my formal CS education consists of exactly one course on C taken at a local community college more than a decade ago. On the weight of totally unrelated skills, I sneaked into the business chiefly as a designer, writing a little code here and there, until I do nothing but write code ten years later.
I was programming for about half that time before I sat down with several textbooks on algorithms and design methodologies and finally flashed on the fact that knowing a programming language is probably the least part of being a programmer, just as knowing a natural language doesn't make you a good novelist. I suppose I could have learned that in school, but the impression I got from friends who were students was that it wasn't a major focus. Of course, my friends weren't attending MIT, and I suspect it's different there.
The biggest part of being a "real programmer" can't be taught in school, and that's the reality of programming in a business environment. No book will adequately prepare you for office politics or time management. Despite my lack of formal training, I've been considered an excellent programmer everywhere I've worked. When I entered the field, I thought that was all that mattered. The big secret, I learned, was knowing where and when to write shitty, sloppy, hastily conceived code in order to get a project out the door on time and under budget, and when to push back to get more time to write good code, because shitty code in that particular case will come back to bite you in the ass and wreck schedules further down the road. That is the job skill par excellence of programming, and you can only learn it from experience.
OTOH, if you're basically perfectionist, the shame of writing corporate code will lead you to spend your spare time writing textbook-perfect open source projects. Occupational hazard, I guess.
You won't learn the fine arts of ass kissing or blame shifting in books, either, but that's something everyone but the receptionist and the mailboy needs to know, not just programmers.
If our constitutional rights are colliding with the interests of the content industry, the proper solution is not to destroy our constitutional rights but rather to destroy the content industry. This is especially the case considering how, in the grand scheme of multinational business, movies and records are small potatoes.
If copyright cannot coexist with freedom of speech, the right to privacy, and due process of law, it is time for copyright to go.
Put it that way to the content industry, and maybe they'll have a strong incentive to think of a workable and non-subversive way to run their businesses.
Using standards-based DHTML as the UI.
Surely, this should be modded to +5 Funny, not Interesting.
Using DHTML as a standard UI has several problems, not the least of which is that, even in theory, it's too inflexible and limiting for all but the most simple form-based applications. You could build a PIM or a database browser on top of DHTML, but not Photoshop, SoundForge, a real word processor, or pretty much any game chosen at random. In practice, every DHTML client on earth is slow, bloated, and more of a resource hog than the windowing system it runs on top of.
I'm not sure being platform agnostic is really a goal worth striving for, at least in an absolute sense, since it essentially limits applications to the least-common-denominator of available platform features. Practically speaking, it's not much different than having only one platform, and if that's your cup of tea, capitulating to Redmond is always an option.
According to Infoworld, Sun has joined the debate by taking advantage of the uncertainty over IBM.
Sun? Oh yeah, I've heard of them. I just replaced one of their overpriced 6U rackmount units with 4U of commodity Intel-based 1U rackmount PCs running Linux and substantially increased our performance at a fraction of the price of the Sun box.
It would be very, very stupid of Sun to get involved in this. To be fair, Solaris is a nice system -- even if you have to install the GNU tools and tons of other free software to make it usable -- but Sun has made the terrible tactical error of depending on overpriced, underperforming, proprietary hardware that doesn't begin to make sense until you get into their really high-end and expensive machines, a space in which they compete with several other companies, including IBM.
Given that one Unix-like OS is potentially replaceable by another Unix-like OS -- which is the entire point of open standards -- Sun ought to take care not to taint themselves by associating too closely with SCO. There is an extent to which any tech vendor exists at the sufferance of the technicians who run their systems, and nowhere is this more true than it is in the *nix world.
That 6U rackmount Sun box I just removed from service? I've still got it. It's standing on its end next to my desk holding up my telephone and a bottle of Mountain Dew.
What is stopping the people within SCO who started this case and subsequently destroyed SCO utterly from quietly selling all of their SCO stock sometime between now and the point SCO goes into court
Insider trading laws? In stark contrast to a large corporation, SCO is actually small enough to lack the necessary executive branch inside connections to get off the hook. Hell, they're even smaller than Martha freaking Stewart.
scot-free and with a big impressive "CFO, SCO CORP" bulletpoint on their resume.
Being CFO of a company that evaporated as a result of an incredibly naive and desperate legal maneuver isn't a strong selling point. Sure, you might get a job at a Fortune 500 company that way, but only if the company is McDonalds and you have a flair for saying, "Would you like fries with that?"
I know it sometimes seems otherwise, but most of the time, gross misconduct and epic stupidity are neither excused nor rewarded.
I actually feel kind of sorry for Darl McBride. Every time he crosses the street at a crosswalk for the rest of his life, he's going to have to wonder if any of the cars in the front row have a penguin sticker on the back.
If I make a bunch of allegations about some person or company, why shouldn't they be allowed to respond? Most of the posters here seem to be looking at this from the angle of Some Giant Company forcing Some Pathetic Little Blog to publish a corporate press release (as if this were a great imposition, anyway.) Look at it the other way: if Some Giant News Agency runs a story which reflects badly on you, you get a chance to refute the charges in the same venue, which is a much nicer deal than posting something on your blog to be read by a few dozen people while the BBC gets to defame you before millions.
Consider the case when Microsoft or SCO spread their lies about Linux or, for that matter, competing companies. Suddenly, Microsoft doesn't get to run the whole show -- at least in Europe -- and it becomes much harder to spin bullshit without a challenge.
This is all about the "marketplace of ideas." It's just ensuring that the marketplace of ideas is open to everyone instead of just those with deep pockets. I can see how this wouldn't appeal to the socially-Darwinian cash-equals-merit Libertarian crowd, but those less ideologically rigid ought to be able to see that this is a sword that cuts both ways and if it lets the big guy shaft the little guy, the little guy can shaft him right back, and with greater effect.