Was it Mencken said something to the effect that people who say they want to save the world really just want to control it?
This is a pathological solution to a problem that doesn't exist. You don't need to know who I am (that is, what skin I inhabit); you only need to know what our relationship is. If I'm the person who put in the highest bid, I'm the one who gets the item. If I'm the one who deposited the money, I'm the one who gets to withdraw it (Swiss Banks understand this--they don't give a dam about identity).
What you want to know is that you are dealing with a consistent persona "in sickness and in health".
I have a number of personae that I keep isolated. The important ones have enough in common that with some work you might connect the dots. Others have unrelated names and don't even share the same workstation or network access. None of us are doing anything illegal, but I have good reasons to draw distinctions. Getting them all linked up would serve no one in any legitimate way.
Epson's warning (on my last two printers) is that the ink level is low. The text of the warning says that there is less than 20% ink left and that it is time to buy a new cartridge (not replace it). Reminding you to have a new cartridge on hand is a nice thing to do.
You get a more urgent message when the printer thinks the cartridge is bone-dry. It's usually right within about ten pages.
Also to Epson's credit is the status line that will say something like "There is enough ink to print 100 pages like the last page printed." What more could they do?
Maine and, apparently, a fair sample of/. seem to think that the internet is a public utility. It isn't.
The day AlterNet came online, public investment in the internet as a fraction of total investment began to decline—to the point that today it is irrelevant.
The internet is not a shared resource—it's a widely distributed commercial service. The ocean is a shared resource; the ships that travel on it are not. Your right to internet service is the same as your right to sail the QE II.
The internet is not a scarce or limited resource; the "tragedy of the commons" is irrelevant. Someone can always lay more fiber or make what's there more efficient.
As in the case of Open Source, if you don't like what you see—fork it. The industry will serve whatever the demand is at whatever price the market will bear, unless some state nanny imposes controls enabling some favored people to get more than what they pay for (artificially creating scarcity). In a free society, if someone is not getting adequate service, that's a business opportunity.
That last point is particularly relevant; it's how the commercial internet came about. As originally implemented, the internet was the private domain of a small circle of institutions harder and more expensive to penetrate than the upper levels of Scientology. Seeing a market for internet services that was not being served, Jack Rickard's army of BBS sysops tore up the Internet AUP and reconfigured their BBSs into ISPs. They bought IP bandwidth from broadband suppliers who also saw the opportunity, and started selling internet service to anyone willing to pay for it. The rest is history.
A bit of trivia: AOL was one of the last BBSs to make the switch.
Say what?! Maine passes a socialist nanny-state law to tell private industry how and to whom they will sell their services and you praise it for it's "streak of independence"?
Perhaps it's time for Maine to change its anthem to "Someone to Watch Over Me".
In the case of anthropogenic global warming, a lot of them are violating many of those rules, ignoring the laws, and are bereft of theories. They seem to have forgotten:
Consensus isn't proof.
Statistics isn't science.
Correlation is not causation.
Extraordinary claims call for extraordinary evidence.
To be a theory, it has to explain how something happens, not just that it happens. Anything else is just observation.
Let's net it out: people who can't reliably tell me whether it will rain three days from now claim not only that they can predict the climate, but that with everybody's help, they can control it.
If you don't understand what "complex at all scales" means, I have a very nice bridge for sale.
Given this and the other replies in this thread, it would seem that Sun's very expensive marketing campaign for Java, built entirely on the "Write once, run anywhere" mantra was mainly misdirection. Strange, I don't remember a whole lot of people calling them on it at the time. What I do remember is a big fuss about Java's multi-platform portability and how it would free the world from the Great Satan. I don't recall anyone saying it was no big deal because we already had platform independence with perl and php, etc.
True enough, but vm bytecode for for those languages wouldn't have an audience; the developers didn't advertise a WORA system and make the vm available to everybody's grandmother.
Does anyone who isn't a php developer know how to get the vm only for php?
Sourceless distribution is possible for these languages, but it's rare, and not the intent. In the case of Java, sourceless distribution is the intent, it's common, and Sun has made sure the vm is on every machine.
In any case, this doesn't change the fact that Sun's Big Thing is antithetic to Open Source.
Even with a large sample size, it's a matter of luck.
War is complex--lots of unpredictable external factors and serious ordering dependencies. That a model of a complex system has been tweaked so that it predicts the past is zero indication that it can predict the future—and any claim that it can falls under "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence."
Even the argument from averages fails; the problem is not merely randomness, it is unpredictability that persists at all scales.
To my mind, the relationship between Sun and Open Source has always been coloured by Sun's Big Thing: Java.
As a development platform, Java only had one new thing to offer. Perl, Python, PHP, C et al. are "write once, run anywhere" languages, as long as you publish the source. Sun's contribution is a language that supports "write once, run anywhere" without publishing the source.
In other words, Sun's most interesting contribution to the software industry is a powerful (if painful to use) tool for distributing proprietary closed source applications.
I keep wondering whether they just stumbled into this or whether it was a strategic move. In either case, it's hardly a testimonial to Sun's support of Open Source.
Actually, if you really are centrist or right-of-center, you will know that Harper and the CPC have taken a hard turn to the left. (If you really are leftisch, you won't have noticed; many studies show that lefties tend to be unaware of their own or any one else's leftishness.)
Conservative voters can only hope that this is a strategy to get a majority in the next election, that it will be successful, and that the CPC will revert to the right after forming the government. It's a long shot, but one can always hope. One might say that, as for marriage after divorce, voting CPC in the next election would be setting hope over experience.
Needless to say, if that is the plan, they can't tell us about it. This entails a significant risk: a lot of conservative voters are talking about abstaining, since they apparently have no party to vote for.
An interesting thing about all this is that GPL3 and DRM share at least one significant fault: they both make compliant use more burdensome than non-compliant.
Actually, Tivo isn't whining. They are advising their shareholders, through a mandatory SEC filing, that they may have some unplanned costs that could affect their share value. These are the costs associated with recovering from what could turn out to have been a bad decision: to tie a product strategy to an unstable development regime beyond their control. The filing is matter-of-fact, which indicates that they have a plan for dealing with it.
Implementing with GNU/Linux was, for all intents and purposes, making a deal with the GNU community which is voided by GPL3. Given the anti-capital culture that suffuses FOSS, they should have known they were sleeping with the enemy. I'm going to hazard a guess that the decision to go GNU/Linux was driven from the bottom.
I'm thinking that, right about now, Tivo product management is wishing they'd stuck with Plan-A and popped for the extra buck or two per unit for QNX.
You have to wonder what these people do with their computers.
Our SOHO system includes a Win98 laptop, NT4 server, XP laptop, XP desktop, and a linux NAS. The Win95 machine was retired about a year ago.
According to my logs, the last crash on any machine was in 2001, and I traced that to a broken network card. Before that was in 1998 when, silly me, I installed some Corel software on the NT machine. A big red reset switch? Gimme a break.
Actually, when Lotus 1-2-3 was cracked, it was the beginning of the end. It's just taking longer to die than a cowboy in a spaghetti western. Not only has software DRM never worked, there's more than one theoretical work showing that it can't. The simple answer is that the key is always available to the hacker if the system functions at all.
On the other hand, CSS and AACS are especially weak because they were designed by relative amateurs. The movie and music industries are richer than Croesus; they can afford to buy the best cryptographic talent there is. But the best talent there is told them things they didn't want to hear (like "it will never work"), whereas the snake-oil salesmen assured them they could have effective DRM. That's why AACS is so clumsy and obvious. Reminds me of the flurry of teeny-bopper-designed "unbreakable, 1,000-bit, one-time-pad" encryption products that followed PGP's release. Anybody remember the encryption in MS Word 2, or WordPerfect 5? Even though both companies could afford to hire competent help, both implementations were somewhere short of a Captain Corbett decoder ring,.
But what keeps DRM alive is not some expected return on investment. You need to take into account the culture around the key people involved and where they come from. The driving factor is avoidance—they can't abide being cheated of even the smallest bit of what they believe is their entitlement—and they have lawyers who encourage this attitude. These kind of folk have no trouble at all spending a dollar to avoid losing a dime. It's not about money; it's about a pathological principle: "Nobody cheats me, period". This is why they have no trouble going after children and little old ladies—in their war, they are on the side of the angels, and on the other side there are no innocents.
An irreverent gun—now there's a thought. A gun that only shoots revered people? An assassin's gun?
Of course, your revered person is my fatuous fool, so how do we go about training the gun to make the right choices? How many nondescript people would need to be sacrificed in the process?
And then there's the Brady question: Should we ban them all, or ban just those trained to shoot revered liberals?
Going on so long and using so many big words, it's a pity this argument, like most of the others in this thread, is based on a misunderstanding of copyright.
Copyright does not apply to ideas but to expression. No amount of copyright would have stopped West Side Story from replaying Romeo and Juliette; or, for that matter any of the other few hundred novels, movies and TV series based on the idea (which itself was a replay of the millenial Tristan and Isult folk tale). Copyrights don't provide monopolies over ideas—that's what patents do. It's best not to get them confused.
When an author publishes a novel they spent a few years writing, they don't get a few years' income on the day it hits the stores. They hope to get a decent return dribbling in over the shelf life of the book. Copyright makes that possible. It would be nice to be on salary and get paid up front for the market value of the work, but the market value of the work is not known until well after it's published—sometimes not until after the author dies. If it were a sculpture rather than a story, the author's estate would benefit. Why not a story as well?
Halprin's main point has not been answered anywhere in any of the posts I've waded through so far: Publishers continue to profit from a work after the copyright has run out. To argue against perpetual copyright you need to explain why publishers should profit in perpetuity but not the authors or their estates.
"University of Michigan Researchers": Read "Sensitive Urban Liberal Academics".
—are unlikely to be able to distinguish between an angry face and a hard face.
Not surprising that hard people are attracted to other hard people at a visceral level. Maybe they'll have hard children. Could save us all in the end.
"Metrosexual?" Why make up a new word when we have a perfectly good old one: "effeminate".
JavaFX appears to be a (hopefully last) desperate attempt at relevance beyond the enterprise in-house app. My guess is it will fail. Anything that needs a non-captive audience to install and maintain a JRE, especially if it includes enabling Java in the browser, doesn't have much of a future.
On the other hand, it's a very nice new tool. It should do well in the enterprise app space already occupied by Java.
"an argument for regulation... so that a free market can exist"
ROFL. Thanks--you just made my day.
As to the rest: The "unix-like OS" market is heavily segmented. Think about it and you'll find each addresses (and dominates) its own niche. O'Reilley's market is well defined, most of the purchases are online and unit volumes are too small to rate shelf space at Chapters. Comterm's target market was the Canadian Federal Government, not the world.
"an argument for regulation... so that a free market can exist"—Delicious!
That won't happen. Can't. Talk to anyone who went through Economics 101 and understood what was being said.
The cost of the first copy of Windows was astronomical. The cost of the next copy of Windows is the cost of cutting and shipping a DVD; exactly the same as the cost of the next copy of the latest RedHat distribution and a great deal less than the cost (including labor at minimum wage) of downloading and compiling all the pieces for a DIY linux build.
In this environment, where no one has a cost advantage, but the barriers to entry are high, the market splits on other criteria (usually related to service, standardization and compatibility) and positive feedback sets in: "No one ever lost their job for selecting IBM"; VHS vs Beta. Each in their time, Xerox, WordStar, and WordPerfect owned 70 to 80% of the word processor market.
If you need a computer book, you'll probably buy something published by O'Reilley—why?—because if you wrote a computer book, you probably went to O'Reilley first to get it published. O'Reilley owns that particular market.
Back in the days of the dinosaur, my company, Comterm, sold about 75% of the PCs and LANs bought by the Canadian Federal Government. We weren't the cheapest; in fact we were more expensive than the competition. What we did was to tailor a product and a sales approach specifically for that market, set the standard and kept improving it. No one else could keep up. Truth be told, eventually there were better products out there, at better prices, but they couldn't interoperate with ours, so they lost.
Microsoft is dominant in the PC OS market in part because someone had to be. It could have been DR, but they never managed to get critical mass. There were a bunch of other contenders. Be very happy it wasn't IBM.
Slashdot Mirror
do I click setup.exe, setup.msi , install.bat ?
Click on readme.txt and do what it says. This assumes, of course, that you can read.
Was it Mencken said something to the effect that people who say they want to save the world really just want to control it?
This is a pathological solution to a problem that doesn't exist. You don't need to know who I am (that is, what skin I inhabit); you only need to know what our relationship is. If I'm the person who put in the highest bid, I'm the one who gets the item. If I'm the one who deposited the money, I'm the one who gets to withdraw it (Swiss Banks understand this--they don't give a dam about identity).
What you want to know is that you are dealing with a consistent persona "in sickness and in health".
I have a number of personae that I keep isolated. The important ones have enough in common that with some work you might connect the dots. Others have unrelated names and don't even share the same workstation or network access. None of us are doing anything illegal, but I have good reasons to draw distinctions. Getting them all linked up would serve no one in any legitimate way.
Perhaps he meant "idiosyncratic", but hadn't got that far in the English Language Reference Manual.
Epson's warning (on my last two printers) is that the ink level is low. The text of the warning says that there is less than 20% ink left and that it is time to buy a new cartridge (not replace it). Reminding you to have a new cartridge on hand is a nice thing to do.
You get a more urgent message when the printer thinks the cartridge is bone-dry. It's usually right within about ten pages.
Also to Epson's credit is the status line that will say something like "There is enough ink to print 100 pages like the last page printed." What more could they do?
Maine and, apparently, a fair sample of /. seem to think that the internet is a public utility. It isn't.
That last point is particularly relevant; it's how the commercial internet came about. As originally implemented, the internet was the private domain of a small circle of institutions harder and more expensive to penetrate than the upper levels of Scientology. Seeing a market for internet services that was not being served, Jack Rickard's army of BBS sysops tore up the Internet AUP and reconfigured their BBSs into ISPs. They bought IP bandwidth from broadband suppliers who also saw the opportunity, and started selling internet service to anyone willing to pay for it. The rest is history.
A bit of trivia: AOL was one of the last BBSs to make the switch.
Say what?! Maine passes a socialist nanny-state law to tell private industry how and to whom they will sell their services and you praise it for it's "streak of independence"?
Perhaps it's time for Maine to change its anthem to "Someone to Watch Over Me".
In the case of anthropogenic global warming, a lot of them are violating many of those rules, ignoring the laws, and are bereft of theories. They seem to have forgotten:
Let's net it out: people who can't reliably tell me whether it will rain three days from now claim not only that they can predict the climate, but that with everybody's help, they can control it.
If you don't understand what "complex at all scales" means, I have a very nice bridge for sale.
Try reading what I actually wrote.
Given this and the other replies in this thread, it would seem that Sun's very expensive marketing campaign for Java, built entirely on the "Write once, run anywhere" mantra was mainly misdirection. Strange, I don't remember a whole lot of people calling them on it at the time. What I do remember is a big fuss about Java's multi-platform portability and how it would free the world from the Great Satan. I don't recall anyone saying it was no big deal because we already had platform independence with perl and php, etc.
So if it wasn't WORA, what was the fuss about?
True enough, but vm bytecode for for those languages wouldn't have an audience; the developers didn't advertise a WORA system and make the vm available to everybody's grandmother.
Does anyone who isn't a php developer know how to get the vm only for php?
Sourceless distribution is possible for these languages, but it's rare, and not the intent. In the case of Java, sourceless distribution is the intent, it's common, and Sun has made sure the vm is on every machine.
In any case, this doesn't change the fact that Sun's Big Thing is antithetic to Open Source.
Even with a large sample size, it's a matter of luck.
War is complex--lots of unpredictable external factors and serious ordering dependencies. That a model of a complex system has been tweaked so that it predicts the past is zero indication that it can predict the future—and any claim that it can falls under "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence."
Even the argument from averages fails; the problem is not merely randomness, it is unpredictability that persists at all scales.
To my mind, the relationship between Sun and Open Source has always been coloured by Sun's Big Thing: Java.
As a development platform, Java only had one new thing to offer. Perl, Python, PHP, C et al. are "write once, run anywhere" languages, as long as you publish the source. Sun's contribution is a language that supports "write once, run anywhere" without publishing the source.
In other words, Sun's most interesting contribution to the software industry is a powerful (if painful to use) tool for distributing proprietary closed source applications.
I keep wondering whether they just stumbled into this or whether it was a strategic move. In either case, it's hardly a testimonial to Sun's support of Open Source.
Actually, if you really are centrist or right-of-center, you will know that Harper and the CPC have taken a hard turn to the left. (If you really are leftisch, you won't have noticed; many studies show that lefties tend to be unaware of their own or any one else's leftishness.)
Conservative voters can only hope that this is a strategy to get a majority in the next election, that it will be successful, and that the CPC will revert to the right after forming the government. It's a long shot, but one can always hope. One might say that, as for marriage after divorce, voting CPC in the next election would be setting hope over experience.
Needless to say, if that is the plan, they can't tell us about it. This entails a significant risk: a lot of conservative voters are talking about abstaining, since they apparently have no party to vote for.
An interesting thing about all this is that GPL3 and DRM share at least one significant fault: they both make compliant use more burdensome than non-compliant.
Actually, Tivo isn't whining. They are advising their shareholders, through a mandatory SEC filing, that they may have some unplanned costs that could affect their share value. These are the costs associated with recovering from what could turn out to have been a bad decision: to tie a product strategy to an unstable development regime beyond their control. The filing is matter-of-fact, which indicates that they have a plan for dealing with it.
Implementing with GNU/Linux was, for all intents and purposes, making a deal with the GNU community which is voided by GPL3. Given the anti-capital culture that suffuses FOSS, they should have known they were sleeping with the enemy. I'm going to hazard a guess that the decision to go GNU/Linux was driven from the bottom.
I'm thinking that, right about now, Tivo product management is wishing they'd stuck with Plan-A and popped for the extra buck or two per unit for QNX.
You have to wonder what these people do with their computers.
Our SOHO system includes a Win98 laptop, NT4 server, XP laptop, XP desktop, and a linux NAS. The Win95 machine was retired about a year ago.
According to my logs, the last crash on any machine was in 2001, and I traced that to a broken network card. Before that was in 1998 when, silly me, I installed some Corel software on the NT machine. A big red reset switch? Gimme a break.
Actually, when Lotus 1-2-3 was cracked, it was the beginning of the end. It's just taking longer to die than a cowboy in a spaghetti western. Not only has software DRM never worked, there's more than one theoretical work showing that it can't. The simple answer is that the key is always available to the hacker if the system functions at all.
On the other hand, CSS and AACS are especially weak because they were designed by relative amateurs. The movie and music industries are richer than Croesus; they can afford to buy the best cryptographic talent there is. But the best talent there is told them things they didn't want to hear (like "it will never work"), whereas the snake-oil salesmen assured them they could have effective DRM. That's why AACS is so clumsy and obvious. Reminds me of the flurry of teeny-bopper-designed "unbreakable, 1,000-bit, one-time-pad" encryption products that followed PGP's release. Anybody remember the encryption in MS Word 2, or WordPerfect 5? Even though both companies could afford to hire competent help, both implementations were somewhere short of a Captain Corbett decoder ring, .
But what keeps DRM alive is not some expected return on investment. You need to take into account the culture around the key people involved and where they come from. The driving factor is avoidance—they can't abide being cheated of even the smallest bit of what they believe is their entitlement—and they have lawyers who encourage this attitude. These kind of folk have no trouble at all spending a dollar to avoid losing a dime. It's not about money; it's about a pathological principle: "Nobody cheats me, period". This is why they have no trouble going after children and little old ladies—in their war, they are on the side of the angels, and on the other side there are no innocents.
That is a really relevant point. Is anyone actually publishing software under the GPL 3?
An irreverent gun—now there's a thought. A gun that only shoots revered people? An assassin's gun?
Of course, your revered person is my fatuous fool, so how do we go about training the gun to make the right choices? How many nondescript people would need to be sacrificed in the process?
And then there's the Brady question: Should we ban them all, or ban just those trained to shoot revered liberals?
Going on so long and using so many big words, it's a pity this argument, like most of the others in this thread, is based on a misunderstanding of copyright.
Copyright does not apply to ideas but to expression. No amount of copyright would have stopped West Side Story from replaying Romeo and Juliette; or, for that matter any of the other few hundred novels, movies and TV series based on the idea (which itself was a replay of the millenial Tristan and Isult folk tale). Copyrights don't provide monopolies over ideas—that's what patents do. It's best not to get them confused.
When an author publishes a novel they spent a few years writing, they don't get a few years' income on the day it hits the stores. They hope to get a decent return dribbling in over the shelf life of the book. Copyright makes that possible. It would be nice to be on salary and get paid up front for the market value of the work, but the market value of the work is not known until well after it's published—sometimes not until after the author dies. If it were a sculpture rather than a story, the author's estate would benefit. Why not a story as well?
Halprin's main point has not been answered anywhere in any of the posts I've waded through so far: Publishers continue to profit from a work after the copyright has run out. To argue against perpetual copyright you need to explain why publishers should profit in perpetuity but not the authors or their estates.
I've been to the University of Michigan and I've been to Detroit—both many times.
They aren't on the same planet.
"University of Michigan Researchers": Read "Sensitive Urban Liberal Academics". —are unlikely to be able to distinguish between an angry face and a hard face.
Not surprising that hard people are attracted to other hard people at a visceral level. Maybe they'll have hard children. Could save us all in the end.
"Metrosexual?" Why make up a new word when we have a perfectly good old one: "effeminate".
JavaFX appears to be a (hopefully last) desperate attempt at relevance beyond the enterprise in-house app. My guess is it will fail. Anything that needs a non-captive audience to install and maintain a JRE, especially if it includes enabling Java in the browser, doesn't have much of a future.
On the other hand, it's a very nice new tool. It should do well in the enterprise app space already occupied by Java.
You didn't say "fair market", you said "free market". I wonder how liberal you have to be to not understand the difference.
"an argument for regulation ... so that a free market can exist"
ROFL. Thanks--you just made my day.
As to the rest: The "unix-like OS" market is heavily segmented. Think about it and you'll find each addresses (and dominates) its own niche. O'Reilley's market is well defined, most of the purchases are online and unit volumes are too small to rate shelf space at Chapters. Comterm's target market was the Canadian Federal Government, not the world.
"an argument for regulation ... so that a free market can exist"—Delicious!
That won't happen. Can't. Talk to anyone who went through Economics 101 and understood what was being said.
The cost of the first copy of Windows was astronomical. The cost of the next copy of Windows is the cost of cutting and shipping a DVD; exactly the same as the cost of the next copy of the latest RedHat distribution and a great deal less than the cost (including labor at minimum wage) of downloading and compiling all the pieces for a DIY linux build.
In this environment, where no one has a cost advantage, but the barriers to entry are high, the market splits on other criteria (usually related to service, standardization and compatibility) and positive feedback sets in: "No one ever lost their job for selecting IBM"; VHS vs Beta. Each in their time, Xerox, WordStar, and WordPerfect owned 70 to 80% of the word processor market.
If you need a computer book, you'll probably buy something published by O'Reilley—why?—because if you wrote a computer book, you probably went to O'Reilley first to get it published. O'Reilley owns that particular market.
Back in the days of the dinosaur, my company, Comterm, sold about 75% of the PCs and LANs bought by the Canadian Federal Government. We weren't the cheapest; in fact we were more expensive than the competition. What we did was to tailor a product and a sales approach specifically for that market, set the standard and kept improving it. No one else could keep up. Truth be told, eventually there were better products out there, at better prices, but they couldn't interoperate with ours, so they lost.
Microsoft is dominant in the PC OS market in part because someone had to be. It could have been DR, but they never managed to get critical mass. There were a bunch of other contenders. Be very happy it wasn't IBM.