(well, at least until the Linux Standard Base is done)
At the risk of starting a flamefest over a now-obscure language, I have two words for the LSB: ANSI FORTH. Like many other standards, this one took so long to come to fruition and was so far from any existing implementation that it was largely irrelevant by the time it finally crawled out of committee because FORTH had been eclipsed by other languages.
I'm not saying that Linux will be obsolete by the time the LSB produces results, but if the LSB waits much longer, it will be obsolete. In the meantime, most of the larger vendors have fixed on Red Hat as the de facto standard, for better or worse.
The LSB is now about two years out of the gate. That's not an unreasonable space of time yet. But where will we stand at the three-year mark? Four years? C'mon, fnarking Mozilla will probably produce usable software before the LSB even has a partial standard at this rate.
Re:Most americans can't take animation seriously
on
End Of Fox Animation
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Remember folks, this ain't Japan where animation is considered a highly respectable, serious artform that all ages appreciate.
Too true. What's worse is that generally, when good anime does make it to the American market, its American distributors dumb it down and strip out all of the "naughty bits" so that American parents won't be scandalized by boobs when they take their kids to see a film in a genre that is defined for them by Disney. (The peculiar American delusion that nipples are somehow a threat to civilization is a rant for another occasion.)
I didn't see Titan A.E. It wasn't on account of the trailers, as some have said, since I stopped watching TV more than a decade ago and it's hard to get me to go spend money for two hours of passive low-brow entertainment. It was because everyone I know who is an avid animation fan said it sucked. I have no idea how the animation was -- most of my acquaintances' venom was reserved for the purportedly awful plot and characterization. I was actually planning to see it up until then.
There's plenty of room for 2D animation, especially for parents like me who are tired of seeing Disney recycle the same three plots twice a year. (Anyone ever notice how all Disney films since Walt died revolve around orphans and dead or absent parents? What's up with that?) I'm actually less likely to go see a 3D CGI film, because -- excepting Pixar -- computer animation has only started to outgrow its gimmicky gee-whiz phase.
Privacy is not considered a basic human right by any but privacy nuts and their sympathisers.
Try busting into a counseling session between a therapist and an underage rape victim and spew that nonsense. When the lack of privacy, at least under some conditions, is injurious to people, then it is a right, insofar as not being injured without due process of law is a right.
Yes, and not only that, but both Jesus and Santa Claus will be contributing code to Mozilla this year. Please.
Embedded apps don't typically need compliance with standards because most embedded devices are standalone machines with specialized purposes and limited interfaces. If I want an web-ish interface on my control system for industrial HVAC, all it's got to be compatible with is the underlying control software. It doesn't have to render CNN's homepage. The same is true of any specialized device I can think of for my car, my stereo, household appliances, cellphones, whatever.
AOL plainly did not then and does not now care much about Navigator. What they wanted were the eyeballs on NetCenter. The idea that AOL -- we are talking about America OnLine and not some other AOL, aren't we? -- is going to be some sort of bastion of compliance with open standards is so funny that it ought to have its own sitcom.
I spend my discretionary income on three things: books, music, and computing hardware. (Okay, I also spend on my old VW bus, but while random, that's not exactly discretionary.) MP3 is for me mainly a way of previewing music. It sounds okay on the cheap speakers at the office, and if affordable car MP3 players ever emerge from the vapor, I think MP3s will be great in the acoustically-challenged environment of my car. But pumped through my stereo at home, the flaws of a 128kbps MP3 are plainly evident, even after much tinkering with the EQ and various filters. To my ear, MP3s are "near CD quality" only for certain very liberal values of near. They sound like they're closer to "near worn LP quality" to me.
I've bought quite a few CDs recently after hearing MP3 versions. Some have been major label releases, others have been independent artists who've uploaded samples of their stuff to MP3.com. I anticipate more of the latter than the former as time goes by, since the major labels won't touch a lot of the stuff I like. And that is what I think the RIAA is really afraid of -- people being able to select from material outside of the hundred or so major label acts.
And IBM's journalling filesystem is what, chopped liver? Sure, I'd like to see them make more contributions to the kernel, but they've already headed in that direction and purportedly plan to do more. IBM's plans to port Linux to the AS/400 and S/390 architectures will almost certainly result in kernel code!
While it would be stretching the truth to suggest that I fully trust IBM, a number of high-level IBM execs have pretty well staked their careers on the success of Linux and free software in general and IBM has made some significant contributions to the body of open source software. IBM's open source Java software goes a heck of a lot further than any gesture Sun has made.
Besides, while I'm sure Slashdotters all have a wish-list for the kernel, the great unwashed masses currently sucking at the great tit of Redmond don't -- they'll plainly accept any old operating system, but they want apps. Heck, I want more apps.
These Katz articles in that regard make me feel like he's preaching to the choir on this and other topics.
I don't know that that's the case here. I've seen a surprising level of quite passionate anti-privacy sentiment expressed on Slashdot. Some of that comes from the crowd that feels privacy is a lost cause or that future abuses are a continuation of (and somehow justified by) past abuses. These people are, IMHO, apathetic idiots whose right to vote would scare me if I thought any of them ever used it. But a lot of it comes from people who seem to genuinely believe that basic human rights are a threat to their security or to corporate profits.
The most absurd variation on that theme these days is David Brin's dumb idea of a surveillance state in which citizens get access to surveillance data. Ignoring for the moment the blackmailer's paradise that would be, the argument is still fundamentally flawed. Government surveillance is dangerous because the government has police forces, one of the world's largest militaries, the entire judicial system, and prisons capable of holding (at present) about two-and-a-half million people. Unless giving Joe and Mary Sixpack access to surveillance cameras also gives them the powers of the government, it hardly results in balancing power between the people and the government. Instead, it creates a situation like the one proposed in Fahrenheit 451 in which the general public vicariously participates in the oppression of their neighbors. Bradbury at least had the brains to see that this was a bad idea; Brin apparently believes that human suffering is ameliorated by being available for download.
Rosen argues that new software..encryption, pseudonymous e-mails, etc. will return a sense of privacy to the Net. Is this so?
In a word, no. Encryption and other technological approaches are forms of hiding, not privacy. Privacy is when They aren't looking because They have no right to, not because They don't have enough computing resources to throw at the 2048-bit RSA cipher I'm using. Having to encrypt my mail definitely does not enhance my sense of privacy.
Look at it this way: my wife and I have an explicit agreement not to go through each other's papers. She can leave her personal journal on the hard drive, and I can leave my (old-fashioned paper) diary on my desk, and neither of us pries. That's privacy. If she had to encrypt her journal, and I had to keep my diary in a locked box, that might be security, but it would not be privacy.
Unlike security, privacy entails a basic respect for other people. The absence of that basic respect is the primary cause of the current erosion of our rights. Bad laws and bad company policies are, in this case, just an epiphenomenon.
If you want the internet to be your soapbox, then deal with the repercussions.
There are more issues at hand here than civil liability for libel, as in the case of damaging corporate profits through false rumours you mention. At the most trivial level, a person who damages corporate profits by telling the truth can be subjected to civil prosecution, and even if it is baseless, he/she can be ruined by the cost of litigation.
At a more serious level, the absence of privacy opens to door to political and religious persecution. Suppose my employer is a lumber company and, in this privacy-free world you advocate, he catches me online arguing in favor of banning the harvesting of lumber in national parks and fires me. Or what if he (or the local police) disapprove of my choice of religion? What about an online support group for rape victims? How about an anonymous tipster leading the police to a serial killer?
Privacy isn't just a matter of hiding from responsibility. It's often a matter of hiding from persecution or standing up for what is right without placing one's family at risk. It would be nice if everyone lived in a social class so fat and complacent that they'd gladly give up their basic rights to protect stock valuations, but the middle class of the western world is less than 4% of the world's total population. The privileged attitude of "let them eat cake" has a less than encouraging history.
It might or might not be possible to make money off of shrink-wrapped mass-market software -- like, say, MS Word -- if it was GPLed. I rather suspect you could, at least in the corporate world, where the promise of poor-to-nonexistent technical support from MS seems to appeal to the suits.
That being said, most programmers are not working for producers of shrink-wrapped software. They are producing custom software for internal and external customers. In most of these cases, they are being paid for addressing a specific need -- in essence, they are being paid for the service of writing the software, not the software itself -- and neither their company nor their customers are in the business of mass-market software sales.
While much custom software of this sort is of little interest to anyone other than the intended customer, some is of more general use, or could be made more general with a little work. It is also often the case that releasing that software under the GPL poses no competitive threat to the parent company. I've found my employers fairly open to the idea of releasing in-house software under the GPL, and I use a fair number of packages from other programmers that originated in the same way. Odds are, most of you do, too.
I currently work for a suburban public school district, which is obviously going to be more open to this sort of thing, but the advertising firm I worked at prior to this gig was also hip to the idea -- they looked at it as a form of advertising. I have several projects on the burner that should see the light of day this year under the GPL, and last time I checked, I was getting paid to do my job.
I realize I'm begging the question here. What anti-GPL types really mean when they say that you can't make money from GPLed software is that you can't get rich from GPLed software. I'm not sure that's actually true -- there are some fairly wealthy people involved in free software these days. But the point that is being missed is that it's very hard to get rich making any kind of software. Depending on your specialization, most programmers make between $30k-$120k/yr. The people getting rich off of closed-source software are mostly venture capitalists.
The other point that the closed-source crowd likes to ignore is that the whole point of the GPL is helping people and sharing knowledge. That closed-sourcers view profit and altruism as mutually exclusive goals or, more accurately, that they seem to view altruism as unworthy or stupid, tells me all I need to know about the other side of the fence.
Being innovative matters in ways beyond IP laws. Even if IP laws were discarded, software would still be subject to a global free market -- where the innovative get paid well for their services, and the average get paid not-so-well.
That is very true, but also only relevant to the individual developer(s), not to the community of users. C has been very useful to me and to many other programmers; the arc of Kernighan and Ritchie's careers affects the usefulness of C in no discernable way, however significant it may be to them, personally. My point wasn't that innovation doesn't matter, just that while it may matter a great deal to a developer, it is often a secondary consideration for his or her users.
The Open Source Community will never lead as long as it continues to follow.
Being the most innovative kid on the block may look good on the resume, but it only really matters in a world of restrictive intellectual property laws. The whole point of free software is to demolish IP boundaries so that the collective creativity and intelligence of the world's developers and users can be pooled to the benefit of all without being hindered by proprietary restrictions. If the free software community did nothing but plunder the work of other people and use it to build the cheapest, most flexible, easiest-to-use, and most reliable software around and did it without coming up with one idea of its own, well, mission accomplished.
Anyone who wants to get into a pissing match with Sun, MS, or whomever about creativity and innovation is certainly free to do so, but the main purpose of both the Free and Open Source software communities is the sharing of knowledge. Hot-dogging is a personal imperative, and really irrelevant to the world at large.
Not too terribly long ago, John Dvorak ran a column decrying office suites on the grounds that before the office suite, you were free to pick the best-of-breed for each type of application. (Of course, this was back when there was a selection to pick from.)
What we really need are open API and file format specifications, and preferably file formats based on XML. If there were some competition where individual suite components are concerned, you might not see Access, an app that's almost too buggy even to load itself into memory, stuffed in with Excel (which is fairly stable) and Word (somewhat less stable).
While I'm certainly eager to see M$ dismembered by the DOJ, I'd also be happy to see them forced into publishing their APIs and file format specs.
So does anyone actually believe that the Indianapolis Bull Manure company is going to be able to register ibm.shop? Gimme a break. So long as the existing IP laws remain in effect, this is just another way for moneyed interests to muscle their way in to the endless profit of Network Solutions.
Further, it would actually show that there's a demand for that functionality, and that W3C is moving too slow to be useful.
That's putting it mildly. No browser today has the layout engine functionality that MS Word or Pagemaker had in 1993. People talk about web technology moving fast, but I have no idea where that comes from -- it's certainly not at the client end. There have been a bunch of plugins for inline media boxes, but beyond that, all that has happened is that browsers have crawled along nearly a decade behind the state of the art in word processors. And W3C? Heck, my third-grader was still in preschool when they started mumbling about CSS.
I don't guess I'll win any friends by saying this, but the closest thing we have to a fully-documented, practical markup language is Postscript. At this point, I'd just as soon see someone graft an HTTP client onto gv as continue mucking around with Microsoft and AOL/Netscape.
What sort of impact does it have if and when businesses get flame mail about their propriety-based websites?
It has a big impact. More than one company I've done work for has repeatedly ordered major website changes on account of just one or two angry emails -- and these were sites that, while not as large as Slashdot:), nonetheless did a few million hits a month.
Management types are indeed clueless, but this can be to your advantage. Most websites get so little feedback that your cranky email about standards compliance might change some minds -- if you remember to avoid "standards compliance" and instead say that you'd like to buy their products, but their site isn't fully compatible with your non-M$ browser.
If the reviews that are out there are telling me Linux is highly reliable when in fact it isn't, then I could stand to loose a great deal more than just some download and learning time.
If you're basing business decisions on reviews you read in glossy software industry magazines, your business is in trouble from a lot more than just potentially unstable software. Please turn over technology purchasing decisions to someone less naive and go back to chasing your secretary.
The only halfway reliable source of information about software is the experience of other users, and preferably not the user who made the purchasing decision. Before you buy mission-critical software, talk to other professionals you respect who have used it.
Ignore this drivel. It is an obvious attempt to drive up their banner counts.
DING! Exactly correct. Jesse Berst figured this out some time ago, and now it's spreading through the rest of the ZD editorial department. Publish something especially absurd or scandalous about free software, and the odds are good that the article will get Slashdotted and a few hundred thousand geeks will make life easy for the ZD marketing department.
What I'd like to know is this: What's Jesse Berst's pseudonym on Slashdot, and how hard does he laugh when he submits one of his own editorials here?
This is a big worry of mine, too. I've spent the last several years keying in several thousand pages of manuscript. How do I preserve this file now?
CDR's have limited lifespans -- not much better than floppies for the cheaper varieties -- and laser printer output is heat sensitive. (Doubt me? Put a hundred pages of printouts in a car on a hot summer day -- the toner melts and sticks the pages together.) Inkjet is actually a bit more reliable than you suggest. Sure, it's water soluble and not lightfast, but the same is true of 5,000-year-old Egyptian papyri. The paper, on the other hand, may disintegrate because of acid content, and who knows about the acidity of all those secret ink formulas?
IMHO, this is a very big problem as we rush to move everything over to digital media. I can't think of a single commonly-available digital format that doesn't have a much shorter shelf-life than traditional media. Your vinyl records will still be playable centuries after your CDs oxidize. Even acid-rich greenbar printouts will outlast their magnetic-media sources by decades.
If additional TLDs are going to be added, shouldn't they be more 'generic' so everyone can make use of them, not just the OSS community?
I know this is just nitpicking, but if I had to guess, I'd say that RMS wasn't thinking of the OSS community, since he isn't part of it. Free Software, as Stallman defines it, involves a much more specific definition than Open Source(tm).
Your pigs are still airborne? The pigs over here all died from hypothermia when Hell flash-froze this afternoon.
Personally, I have a love-hate relationship with Orrin Hatch. Yes, he's sponsored some boneheaded legislation, the DMCA being the most recent major example, but he's also been a strong critic of Microsoft and now, holy of holies, the RIAA.
If nothing else, Hatch does appear to at least think about what he does, and he's plainly open to reason instead of blindly following the party line.
OTOH, he could have actually meant what he said about millions of voters running Napster, and maybe he's just making a cynical play for the Metallica fan vote. God knows Metallica hasn't been doing too much of that lately.
Or let me put it another way; I don't get why people like the Mac GUI so much. I've worked with Windows, Mac, and X systems for years, and I've always found the Mac interface to be immensely frustrating. Yes, the interface is completely consistent from app to app but for some reason Mac apps tend to lack keyboard shortcuts -- compare Mac and Windows versions of Photoshop, for example -- and most of that consistency comes at the expense of reducing the featureset to the lowest common denominator. The Mac interface has always struck me as awkward and cumbersome compared to Windows.
(In fairness to both Apple and Microsoft, Linux GUIs are pretty awkward in comparison to both, though the latest version of GNOME has come a long damn way.)
Personally, I think interface consistency is overrated. Some common elements -- mostly editing keystrokes and window management features -- are highly desirable, but beyond that, who cares? No matter how weird a program is, you'll get used to it pretty quickly if you use it much, and if you don't use it much, it's going to be awkward and unfamiliar anyway. UI consistency issues mostly touch on superficial functionality, anyway -- how much common functionality is there between Adobe Illustrator and Microsoft Excel? Not much. And would I really want to use Adobe's swiss-army-knife color picker in Excel?
The real promise of Linux GUIs -- as opposed to the one-size-fits-all approach favored by Apple and Microsoft -- is that we will eventually have a common default interface that we can customize the holy living crap out of. And that's my biggest complaint with Apple's philosophy, which is that all users shall conform to the same UI, rather than having the UI conform to individual users.
Agreed. Linux is already a complete and total success for me, i.e., it lets me do what I want to do with a computer: tinker, write programs, pursue bizarre experiments of little interest to anyone else, etc. And it freed me from the tyranny of Richmond, which ever since Win95 had made me dislike my computer.
Commercial success for Linux would be nice, since that tends to attract developers, some of whom will write new free software, but hardly essential. The domination of the low-to-mid-range server market that we're approaching may be enough for that. But it's hardly necessary.
Will the day come when the current Mac crowd switches to Linux? I rather doubt it, and I don't care. Why should I? I've got what I always wanted right now.
Except adequate documentation. I'm not holding my breath on that one, though.;-P
Mac users catch as much flak as they do not because they aren't usually programmers, but because of the smarmy Apple ueber alles attitude that Guy Kawasaki and his ilk have engendered. Amiga users had the same attitude problem, and it was so extreme that I suspect that it was at least a contributory factor in the demise of the Amiga.
(And yes, I realize that there is a contingent of Linux users who do the same damn thing. And the prospect that they might kill Linux by associating it with asinine script kiddies scares the hell out of me.)
I'm okay with people using Macs as long as they don't bug me endlessly about how I should switch platforms. Linux is "working for me now", which is something Macs can't possibly do for me in much the same way that Linux is not (at least not yet) ready to work out of the box for the average musician or designer.
Real progress would be for the vast majority of all users on all platforms to support their platforms by dumping all their rancor on their particular platform's obnoxious advocates. Strident Mac advocates are the worst enemies of the Mac, and the same applies to other platform bigots. You play with your toys, and I'll play with mine.
I've never understood the love for the Mac that one sees in some parts of the Open Source community. Apple is everything Open Source isn't: expensive, closed-standard, proprietary, treat-the-user-like-an-idiot, and against choice. Windows at least runs on top of open hardware standards. Apple is less successful than Microsoft in part because they are even more greedy, controlling, and closed than MS.
I bailed on Apple when the Mac came out with its one-true-wayism that eschewed the hacker and the hobbyist. Nothing has changed since Apple's big comeback -- unless your idea of "innovation" is case design and a new UI skin. I can't say I'm interested in OS X, either -- why would I want a pseudo-open Unix crippled by Apple's inflexible GUI and proprietary hardware dependencies when there are not just one but several genuinely open free Unices that run on dozens of hardware platforms.
If I ever get an itch to buy an overpriced proprietary hardware platform for myself, I'll at least get a Sun.
Slashdot Mirror
(well, at least until the Linux Standard Base is done)
At the risk of starting a flamefest over a now-obscure language, I have two words for the LSB: ANSI FORTH. Like many other standards, this one took so long to come to fruition and was so far from any existing implementation that it was largely irrelevant by the time it finally crawled out of committee because FORTH had been eclipsed by other languages.
I'm not saying that Linux will be obsolete by the time the LSB produces results, but if the LSB waits much longer, it will be obsolete. In the meantime, most of the larger vendors have fixed on Red Hat as the de facto standard, for better or worse.
The LSB is now about two years out of the gate. That's not an unreasonable space of time yet. But where will we stand at the three-year mark? Four years? C'mon, fnarking Mozilla will probably produce usable software before the LSB even has a partial standard at this rate.
Remember folks, this ain't Japan where animation is considered a highly respectable, serious artform that all ages appreciate.
Too true. What's worse is that generally, when good anime does make it to the American market, its American distributors dumb it down and strip out all of the "naughty bits" so that American parents won't be scandalized by boobs when they take their kids to see a film in a genre that is defined for them by Disney. (The peculiar American delusion that nipples are somehow a threat to civilization is a rant for another occasion.)
I didn't see Titan A.E. It wasn't on account of the trailers, as some have said, since I stopped watching TV more than a decade ago and it's hard to get me to go spend money for two hours of passive low-brow entertainment. It was because everyone I know who is an avid animation fan said it sucked. I have no idea how the animation was -- most of my acquaintances' venom was reserved for the purportedly awful plot and characterization. I was actually planning to see it up until then.
There's plenty of room for 2D animation, especially for parents like me who are tired of seeing Disney recycle the same three plots twice a year. (Anyone ever notice how all Disney films since Walt died revolve around orphans and dead or absent parents? What's up with that?) I'm actually less likely to go see a 3D CGI film, because -- excepting Pixar -- computer animation has only started to outgrow its gimmicky gee-whiz phase.
Privacy is not considered a basic human right by any but privacy nuts and their sympathisers.
Try busting into a counseling session between a therapist and an underage rape victim and spew that nonsense. When the lack of privacy, at least under some conditions, is injurious to people, then it is a right, insofar as not being injured without due process of law is a right.
2 things actually: embedded apps, and AOL.
Yes, and not only that, but both Jesus and Santa Claus will be contributing code to Mozilla this year. Please.
Embedded apps don't typically need compliance with standards because most embedded devices are standalone machines with specialized purposes and limited interfaces. If I want an web-ish interface on my control system for industrial HVAC, all it's got to be compatible with is the underlying control software. It doesn't have to render CNN's homepage. The same is true of any specialized device I can think of for my car, my stereo, household appliances, cellphones, whatever.
AOL plainly did not then and does not now care much about Navigator. What they wanted were the eyeballs on NetCenter. The idea that AOL -- we are talking about America OnLine and not some other AOL, aren't we? -- is going to be some sort of bastion of compliance with open standards is so funny that it ought to have its own sitcom.
I spend my discretionary income on three things: books, music, and computing hardware. (Okay, I also spend on my old VW bus, but while random, that's not exactly discretionary.) MP3 is for me mainly a way of previewing music. It sounds okay on the cheap speakers at the office, and if affordable car MP3 players ever emerge from the vapor, I think MP3s will be great in the acoustically-challenged environment of my car. But pumped through my stereo at home, the flaws of a 128kbps MP3 are plainly evident, even after much tinkering with the EQ and various filters. To my ear, MP3s are "near CD quality" only for certain very liberal values of near. They sound like they're closer to "near worn LP quality" to me.
I've bought quite a few CDs recently after hearing MP3 versions. Some have been major label releases, others have been independent artists who've uploaded samples of their stuff to MP3.com. I anticipate more of the latter than the former as time goes by, since the major labels won't touch a lot of the stuff I like. And that is what I think the RIAA is really afraid of -- people being able to select from material outside of the hundred or so major label acts.
And IBM's journalling filesystem is what, chopped liver? Sure, I'd like to see them make more contributions to the kernel, but they've already headed in that direction and purportedly plan to do more. IBM's plans to port Linux to the AS/400 and S/390 architectures will almost certainly result in kernel code!
While it would be stretching the truth to suggest that I fully trust IBM, a number of high-level IBM execs have pretty well staked their careers on the success of Linux and free software in general and IBM has made some significant contributions to the body of open source software. IBM's open source Java software goes a heck of a lot further than any gesture Sun has made.
Besides, while I'm sure Slashdotters all have a wish-list for the kernel, the great unwashed masses currently sucking at the great tit of Redmond don't -- they'll plainly accept any old operating system, but they want apps. Heck, I want more apps.
These Katz articles in that regard make me feel like he's preaching to the choir on this and other topics.
I don't know that that's the case here. I've seen a surprising level of quite passionate anti-privacy sentiment expressed on Slashdot. Some of that comes from the crowd that feels privacy is a lost cause or that future abuses are a continuation of (and somehow justified by) past abuses. These people are, IMHO, apathetic idiots whose right to vote would scare me if I thought any of them ever used it. But a lot of it comes from people who seem to genuinely believe that basic human rights are a threat to their security or to corporate profits.
The most absurd variation on that theme these days is David Brin's dumb idea of a surveillance state in which citizens get access to surveillance data. Ignoring for the moment the blackmailer's paradise that would be, the argument is still fundamentally flawed. Government surveillance is dangerous because the government has police forces, one of the world's largest militaries, the entire judicial system, and prisons capable of holding (at present) about two-and-a-half million people. Unless giving Joe and Mary Sixpack access to surveillance cameras also gives them the powers of the government, it hardly results in balancing power between the people and the government. Instead, it creates a situation like the one proposed in Fahrenheit 451 in which the general public vicariously participates in the oppression of their neighbors. Bradbury at least had the brains to see that this was a bad idea; Brin apparently believes that human suffering is ameliorated by being available for download.
Rosen argues that new software..encryption, pseudonymous e-mails, etc. will return a sense of privacy to the Net. Is this so?
In a word, no. Encryption and other technological approaches are forms of hiding, not privacy. Privacy is when They aren't looking because They have no right to, not because They don't have enough computing resources to throw at the 2048-bit RSA cipher I'm using. Having to encrypt my mail definitely does not enhance my sense of privacy.
Look at it this way: my wife and I have an explicit agreement not to go through each other's papers. She can leave her personal journal on the hard drive, and I can leave my (old-fashioned paper) diary on my desk, and neither of us pries. That's privacy. If she had to encrypt her journal, and I had to keep my diary in a locked box, that might be security, but it would not be privacy.
Unlike security, privacy entails a basic respect for other people. The absence of that basic respect is the primary cause of the current erosion of our rights. Bad laws and bad company policies are, in this case, just an epiphenomenon.
If you want the internet to be your soapbox, then deal with the repercussions.
There are more issues at hand here than civil liability for libel, as in the case of damaging corporate profits through false rumours you mention. At the most trivial level, a person who damages corporate profits by telling the truth can be subjected to civil prosecution, and even if it is baseless, he/she can be ruined by the cost of litigation.
At a more serious level, the absence of privacy opens to door to political and religious persecution. Suppose my employer is a lumber company and, in this privacy-free world you advocate, he catches me online arguing in favor of banning the harvesting of lumber in national parks and fires me. Or what if he (or the local police) disapprove of my choice of religion? What about an online support group for rape victims? How about an anonymous tipster leading the police to a serial killer?
Privacy isn't just a matter of hiding from responsibility. It's often a matter of hiding from persecution or standing up for what is right without placing one's family at risk. It would be nice if everyone lived in a social class so fat and complacent that they'd gladly give up their basic rights to protect stock valuations, but the middle class of the western world is less than 4% of the world's total population. The privileged attitude of "let them eat cake" has a less than encouraging history.
That being said, most programmers are not working for producers of shrink-wrapped software. They are producing custom software for internal and external customers. In most of these cases, they are being paid for addressing a specific need -- in essence, they are being paid for the service of writing the software, not the software itself -- and neither their company nor their customers are in the business of mass-market software sales.
While much custom software of this sort is of little interest to anyone other than the intended customer, some is of more general use, or could be made more general with a little work. It is also often the case that releasing that software under the GPL poses no competitive threat to the parent company. I've found my employers fairly open to the idea of releasing in-house software under the GPL, and I use a fair number of packages from other programmers that originated in the same way. Odds are, most of you do, too.
I currently work for a suburban public school district, which is obviously going to be more open to this sort of thing, but the advertising firm I worked at prior to this gig was also hip to the idea -- they looked at it as a form of advertising. I have several projects on the burner that should see the light of day this year under the GPL, and last time I checked, I was getting paid to do my job.
I realize I'm begging the question here. What anti-GPL types really mean when they say that you can't make money from GPLed software is that you can't get rich from GPLed software. I'm not sure that's actually true -- there are some fairly wealthy people involved in free software these days. But the point that is being missed is that it's very hard to get rich making any kind of software. Depending on your specialization, most programmers make between $30k-$120k/yr. The people getting rich off of closed-source software are mostly venture capitalists.
The other point that the closed-source crowd likes to ignore is that the whole point of the GPL is helping people and sharing knowledge. That closed-sourcers view profit and altruism as mutually exclusive goals or, more accurately, that they seem to view altruism as unworthy or stupid, tells me all I need to know about the other side of the fence.
Being innovative matters in ways beyond IP laws. Even if IP laws were discarded, software would still be subject to a global free market -- where the innovative get paid well for their services, and the average get paid not-so-well.
That is very true, but also only relevant to the individual developer(s), not to the community of users. C has been very useful to me and to many other programmers; the arc of Kernighan and Ritchie's careers affects the usefulness of C in no discernable way, however significant it may be to them, personally. My point wasn't that innovation doesn't matter, just that while it may matter a great deal to a developer, it is often a secondary consideration for his or her users.
The Open Source Community will never lead as long as it continues to follow.
Being the most innovative kid on the block may look good on the resume, but it only really matters in a world of restrictive intellectual property laws. The whole point of free software is to demolish IP boundaries so that the collective creativity and intelligence of the world's developers and users can be pooled to the benefit of all without being hindered by proprietary restrictions. If the free software community did nothing but plunder the work of other people and use it to build the cheapest, most flexible, easiest-to-use, and most reliable software around and did it without coming up with one idea of its own, well, mission accomplished.
Anyone who wants to get into a pissing match with Sun, MS, or whomever about creativity and innovation is certainly free to do so, but the main purpose of both the Free and Open Source software communities is the sharing of knowledge. Hot-dogging is a personal imperative, and really irrelevant to the world at large.
What we really need are open API and file format specifications, and preferably file formats based on XML. If there were some competition where individual suite components are concerned, you might not see Access, an app that's almost too buggy even to load itself into memory, stuffed in with Excel (which is fairly stable) and Word (somewhat less stable).
While I'm certainly eager to see M$ dismembered by the DOJ, I'd also be happy to see them forced into publishing their APIs and file format specs.
So does anyone actually believe that the Indianapolis Bull Manure company is going to be able to register ibm.shop? Gimme a break. So long as the existing IP laws remain in effect, this is just another way for moneyed interests to muscle their way in to the endless profit of Network Solutions.
Further, it would actually show that there's a demand for that functionality, and that W3C is moving too slow to be useful.
That's putting it mildly. No browser today has the layout engine functionality that MS Word or Pagemaker had in 1993. People talk about web technology moving fast, but I have no idea where that comes from -- it's certainly not at the client end. There have been a bunch of plugins for inline media boxes, but beyond that, all that has happened is that browsers have crawled along nearly a decade behind the state of the art in word processors. And W3C? Heck, my third-grader was still in preschool when they started mumbling about CSS.
I don't guess I'll win any friends by saying this, but the closest thing we have to a fully-documented, practical markup language is Postscript. At this point, I'd just as soon see someone graft an HTTP client onto gv as continue mucking around with Microsoft and AOL/Netscape.
What sort of impact does it have if and when businesses get flame mail about their propriety-based websites?
:), nonetheless did a few million hits a month.
It has a big impact. More than one company I've done work for has repeatedly ordered major website changes on account of just one or two angry emails -- and these were sites that, while not as large as Slashdot
Management types are indeed clueless, but this can be to your advantage. Most websites get so little feedback that your cranky email about standards compliance might change some minds -- if you remember to avoid "standards compliance" and instead say that you'd like to buy their products, but their site isn't fully compatible with your non-M$ browser.
If the reviews that are out there are telling me Linux is highly reliable when in fact it isn't, then I could stand to loose a great deal more than just some download and learning time.
If you're basing business decisions on reviews you read in glossy software industry magazines, your business is in trouble from a lot more than just potentially unstable software. Please turn over technology purchasing decisions to someone less naive and go back to chasing your secretary.
The only halfway reliable source of information about software is the experience of other users, and preferably not the user who made the purchasing decision. Before you buy mission-critical software, talk to other professionals you respect who have used it.
Ignore this drivel. It is an obvious attempt to drive up their banner counts.
DING! Exactly correct. Jesse Berst figured this out some time ago, and now it's spreading through the rest of the ZD editorial department. Publish something especially absurd or scandalous about free software, and the odds are good that the article will get Slashdotted and a few hundred thousand geeks will make life easy for the ZD marketing department.
What I'd like to know is this: What's Jesse Berst's pseudonym on Slashdot, and how hard does he laugh when he submits one of his own editorials here?
This is a big worry of mine, too. I've spent the last several years keying in several thousand pages of manuscript. How do I preserve this file now?
CDR's have limited lifespans -- not much better than floppies for the cheaper varieties -- and laser printer output is heat sensitive. (Doubt me? Put a hundred pages of printouts in a car on a hot summer day -- the toner melts and sticks the pages together.) Inkjet is actually a bit more reliable than you suggest. Sure, it's water soluble and not lightfast, but the same is true of 5,000-year-old Egyptian papyri. The paper, on the other hand, may disintegrate because of acid content, and who knows about the acidity of all those secret ink formulas?
IMHO, this is a very big problem as we rush to move everything over to digital media. I can't think of a single commonly-available digital format that doesn't have a much shorter shelf-life than traditional media. Your vinyl records will still be playable centuries after your CDs oxidize. Even acid-rich greenbar printouts will outlast their magnetic-media sources by decades.
If additional TLDs are going to be added, shouldn't they be more 'generic' so everyone can make use of them, not just the OSS community?
I know this is just nitpicking, but if I had to guess, I'd say that RMS wasn't thinking of the OSS community, since he isn't part of it. Free Software, as Stallman defines it, involves a much more specific definition than Open Source(tm).
Your pigs are still airborne? The pigs over here all died from hypothermia when Hell flash-froze this afternoon.
Personally, I have a love-hate relationship with Orrin Hatch. Yes, he's sponsored some boneheaded legislation, the DMCA being the most recent major example, but he's also been a strong critic of Microsoft and now, holy of holies, the RIAA.
If nothing else, Hatch does appear to at least think about what he does, and he's plainly open to reason instead of blindly following the party line.
OTOH, he could have actually meant what he said about millions of voters running Napster, and maybe he's just making a cynical play for the Metallica fan vote. God knows Metallica hasn't been doing too much of that lately.
(In fairness to both Apple and Microsoft, Linux GUIs are pretty awkward in comparison to both, though the latest version of GNOME has come a long damn way.)
Personally, I think interface consistency is overrated. Some common elements -- mostly editing keystrokes and window management features -- are highly desirable, but beyond that, who cares? No matter how weird a program is, you'll get used to it pretty quickly if you use it much, and if you don't use it much, it's going to be awkward and unfamiliar anyway. UI consistency issues mostly touch on superficial functionality, anyway -- how much common functionality is there between Adobe Illustrator and Microsoft Excel? Not much. And would I really want to use Adobe's swiss-army-knife color picker in Excel?
The real promise of Linux GUIs -- as opposed to the one-size-fits-all approach favored by Apple and Microsoft -- is that we will eventually have a common default interface that we can customize the holy living crap out of. And that's my biggest complaint with Apple's philosophy, which is that all users shall conform to the same UI, rather than having the UI conform to individual users.
Agreed. Linux is already a complete and total success for me, i.e., it lets me do what I want to do with a computer: tinker, write programs, pursue bizarre experiments of little interest to anyone else, etc. And it freed me from the tyranny of Richmond, which ever since Win95 had made me dislike my computer.
;-P
Commercial success for Linux would be nice, since that tends to attract developers, some of whom will write new free software, but hardly essential. The domination of the low-to-mid-range server market that we're approaching may be enough for that. But it's hardly necessary.
Will the day come when the current Mac crowd switches to Linux? I rather doubt it, and I don't care. Why should I? I've got what I always wanted right now.
Except adequate documentation. I'm not holding my breath on that one, though.
Mac users catch as much flak as they do not because they aren't usually programmers, but because of the smarmy Apple ueber alles attitude that Guy Kawasaki and his ilk have engendered. Amiga users had the same attitude problem, and it was so extreme that I suspect that it was at least a contributory factor in the demise of the Amiga.
(And yes, I realize that there is a contingent of Linux users who do the same damn thing. And the prospect that they might kill Linux by associating it with asinine script kiddies scares the hell out of me.)
I'm okay with people using Macs as long as they don't bug me endlessly about how I should switch platforms. Linux is "working for me now", which is something Macs can't possibly do for me in much the same way that Linux is not (at least not yet) ready to work out of the box for the average musician or designer.
Real progress would be for the vast majority of all users on all platforms to support their platforms by dumping all their rancor on their particular platform's obnoxious advocates. Strident Mac advocates are the worst enemies of the Mac, and the same applies to other platform bigots. You play with your toys, and I'll play with mine.
I hate to post a 'me too' reply, but... me too.
I've never understood the love for the Mac that one sees in some parts of the Open Source community. Apple is everything Open Source isn't: expensive, closed-standard, proprietary, treat-the-user-like-an-idiot, and against choice. Windows at least runs on top of open hardware standards. Apple is less successful than Microsoft in part because they are even more greedy, controlling, and closed than MS.
I bailed on Apple when the Mac came out with its one-true-wayism that eschewed the hacker and the hobbyist. Nothing has changed since Apple's big comeback -- unless your idea of "innovation" is case design and a new UI skin. I can't say I'm interested in OS X, either -- why would I want a pseudo-open Unix crippled by Apple's inflexible GUI and proprietary hardware dependencies when there are not just one but several genuinely open free Unices that run on dozens of hardware platforms.
If I ever get an itch to buy an overpriced proprietary hardware platform for myself, I'll at least get a Sun.