Because software geeks think everything needs to be solved in software? Because when you have a shiny new hammer everything starts looking like a nail?
Not to knock Linux or anything, but if the problem statement is "I want a watch to keep track of Martian time on my wrist wherever I go", the answer is a custom circuit in a digital watch (probably an extra capacitor or two), or a slightly larger gear in a mechanical watch. I think it's pretty obvious that you can write a Javascript Mars clock for your computer in about 5 minutes. I'd like to assume that NASA already came up with that idea.
Maybe you get what you deserve for hiring low paid commodity workers from India? It should hardly be a shocker that you will likely get code back tainted with other people's copyrighted work. Maybe you should hire real professionals to monitor, track and audit the work your team in India is doing?
Remember that.su didn't go away when the old Soviet Union died, and in fact is still around today (http://www.nic.su). Also, Hong Kong is technically now part of China but still retains the.hk TLD. It's rather doubtful, even if Niue ceases to be a nominally independent nation that its TLD would disappear - there are a lot of sites operating under.nu and they would likely do a lot of bitching and moaning if ICANN tried to make.nu go away.
Honestly, based on my knowledge of Simson Garfinkel, I really don't think he's an establishment guy in that sense (he's a friend-of-a-friend). He refers in one place, the first paragraph of this article, to "peer-to-peer copyright violation systems", but doesn't seem to take such a judgmental view elsewhere in the article, acknowledging that IPV6 will encourage P2P traffic volumes to increase, but acknowledging this will cut both ways.
You have to remember that these articles do get edited at Tech Review. And that _some_ of the editors there are ASTOUNDINGLY dumb. I respect Simson as a technology reporter and writer - compare his technical knowledge and writing quality to that of many popular tech writers, and you'll see that he's definitely a cut above.
That throw away about "copyright violation systems" could very well have been an editorial addition to this piece.
Which unfortunately is in exactly the same position as Speak Freely is - it was a great VoIP+strong encryption program back in its day, but it's not being currently maintained, it's probably fairly hopelessly out of date (APIs have changed, standards exist that didn't and so on), and nobody has picked up maintenance of a fork of it.
Also, PGPFone is copyrighted and though the source is available, it is essentially just source-available abandonware as there is no appropriate Open Source license for it, as best as I can tell.
So if somebody wanted to create an up-to-date VoIP+strong encryption program, they'd be much better off to use Speak Freely as a base, or at least as a source for code snippets or inspiration than PGPFone.
Right, if ATI changed their marketing and claimed that "9200" was not a specific product, but rather a performance indicator like AMD's processor ratings, then this would be a different case entirely. The problem is you can't set expectations one way, change your definitions once a product is being sold on the market, and claim that the purchasers just didn't know that you had changed your definition. That's definitely false labeling and misleading advertising, no way around it.
I'm sorry, I'm not clear where somebody has offered any sort of evidence that these strange IMs were other than coincidence, and that they were sent by Israeli intelligence. That's pure, rampant speculation - the people who reported it were Israelis and they were clearly puzzled at the time too. Presumably if there were anything behind it, the FBI would have discovered it - of course, I guess if we are going to spin conspiracy theories, they might as well include everyone.
I suspect that many of the bizarre stories printed in the days and weeks after September 11th that we never heard anything about again disappeared from the radar simply because the truth behind them was so uninteresting that there was no story at all. Luckily, we have lots of annoying reporters to run around trying to get scoops in this country, and if there were something behind these conspiracy theories, we'd probably have heard about it by now.
Why the hell is Boston so expensive? I pay substantially more for digital cable+broadband internet from Comcast here than my family in NYC does. My combined bill (in Cambridge) is 120 bucks a month - my family gets almost all the premium channels, has 3 digital cable boxes, and pays about 110. And those are NYC prices, mind you.
I guess we have to pay the corruption taxes and all that up here. Or we're just making up for all the ridiculous M&A activity that's gone on over the last few years (first MediaOne, then AT&T Broadband, now Comcast) - each change bringing worse service and more restrictive AUPs.
I recommend MagnaTune if you are into non-DRM, lossless format music. They also are starting to get digitized cover art for their music. They have non-major label music that actually doesn't suck (unlike an MP3.com or similar, submissions must be approved and they are apparently at least somewhat selective), and their service basically encourages you to explore new songs and albums, listen to high bitrate MP3 streams and then buy at a price (of your choosing - between 5 and 18 dollars I think, with 8 dollars being the "recommended" price).
About the only thing "Weed" has going for it as a music distribution system as far as I can tell is the pyramid scheme payment system. Kinda cool that if you get friends to try and buy a new song you get rewarded with a small cut, but I'm not sure how much of a factor that would be for most casual users.
About a year ago or so I was assaulted by a pack of 50 or 60 rollerskating fruitcakes all dressed up in the MSN butterfly outfit, carrying signs with such witty slogans as "it's better with the butterfly". They were creating a nuisance on the sidewalks all around Lincoln Center - I think this was for the launch of MSN8 or something.
I think they lost themselves any potential customers they might have had in the neighborhood that day.
Re:Encryption ain't it all tapped out to be...
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Feds Want to Tap VoIP
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Nobody ever suggested strong crypto will protect against dedicated law enforcement efforts. If you are a dangerous criminal, they have ways to monitor you. Strong crypto protects against casual _mass_ monitoring by the government, screening every VOIP call or every email for incriminating words, and other Big Brother tactics. If the government has probable cause and can show it to a judge, then yes, they can (and should be able to) enter your home and plant a bug in your phone. They aren't going to flag me as a tax evader, log the fact that I'm having an affair and use it to blackmail me, and so on, which are the legitimate kinds of concerns people have about mass monitoring technology.
False dichotomy. 20 billion dollars over 10 years is a dot in our government's budget. I'd like to see the US spend 20 billion on a manned mission to Mars, AND spend a substantially larger fraction of our budget on health care research. I'd like to see our country spend 100 billion dollars developing alternative energy sources INSTEAD of spending 100 billion dollars fighting a war in the Middle East. Don't get me wrong, Saddam Hussein was a terribly guy and the world and the Iraqi people are definitely better off with him out of power, but in purely financial terms, that 100 billion would have been far more useful elsewhere. And while we're at it, why don't we scrap the shuttle program and use that budget to support a Mars mission? That would provide a pretty darned big chunk of the budget needed.
In any case, I hardly see how Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid are being held up as fabulous examples of use of government dollars. These programs selectively benefit people, in many cases the WRONG people. Let's look at working people who have to pay 470 dollars a month for decent health insurance coverage (i.e. non-HMO). And that's blessed by the consumer-friendly laws of Massachusetts. The comparable coverage in New York would run over 700 dollars a month. The fact that individual health plans are complete fuck jobs is a travesty. While we're at it, why doesn't the government use their bargaining power and open up the Federal health plans and give group plan rates to self-employed and those whose jobs don't provide health insurance for them? You know, the people who are currently getting fucked by the insurance companies royally?
My point is that yes, there are a lot of problems with the government right now and misallocation of resources. That doesn't mean that a Mars mission would be a bad use of 20 billion dollars though.
True, but there are far cheaper options still that are effectively as good for 98%+ of the web surfing population. Go to www.ev1servers.net and get a GeoTrust certificate (GeoTrust acquired the old Equifax cert business, and the Equifax root cert is in browsers going back to IE 5.0 and Netscape 4.something I believe). And ev1servers.net will sell you a $150 retail price GeoTrust cert for 49 bucks. You'd have to really want to capture the "wicked old web browsers and Windows 95" market to justify the marginal cost of a Verisign (or Thawte) cert over this (900 bucks for a 128-bit cert from Verisign... lol).
I would love to see a copy of the "attached notification letter" with references to what specifically constitutes the ABI they claim to be under their copyright. Anybody have a copy of this letter?
I was also under the impression that all the original UNIX header files are covered under the license discussed here that came out of the original AT&T/USL/BSDi cases, or are not copyrightable at all as you point out.
It's much like advertising an "all-you-can-eat" buffet, then turning away fat people at the door, telling them that the buffet is really only for skinny people, and pointing at the sign that says "we reserve the right to refuse service to anybody". You can say you reserve the right to refuse service to anybody, but that doesn't give you the actual right to refuse service to anybody for arbitrary reasons.
Whether it's actually okay to refuse service to somebody simply because they are not one of your more profitable customers probably won't cut it. If the cable companies weren't upfront about their limits and changed them after hooking customers, they have probably opened themselves up to class action lawsuits.
One user cut off unfairly, suffering from termination of service and having to wait to find another ISP isn't necessarily a huge financial issue, but thousands of users banded together with rabid, vicious lawyers at the forefront is.
Agreed - distributions like MEPIS that make the user experience the first and foremost concern ARE ready for prime time. The problem has been the more popular mainstream distros, like Red Hat and Mandrake, have not achieved anywhere near the same level of desktop usability. Don't get me wrong, Mandrake is great once you get it working and tweaked to your heart's content, and URPMI and the related apps are pretty much superior to anything else out there (one you get proper repositories with useful software set up - argh, again, not quite there out of the box), but their zealot-like refusal to include out of the box NVidia drivers guarantees that it won't work on a massive percentage of new PCs out of the box (Mandrake 9.2 won't start X period with the built-in nv driver on my NForce2/GeForce4Ti desktop at all for reasons unknown to me).
So when people have experiences like trying to install Mandrake and they find that their network card doesn't work and their graphics card doesn't work out of the box, and the desktop font configuration out of the box is STILL heinous, it's not surprising they conclude that Linux still isn't ready for the desktop (I won't even address Red Hat since they've given up on a desktop distro entirely - who knows how the Fedora project will shape up). MEPIS and similar projects need to become the mainstream desktop flavors of Linux. I think Texstar's PCLinuxOS also stands to kick some serious ass, the Mandrake-based equivalent of MEPIS.
Clearly you have no idea how shorting a stock works if you think it's that simple. Making money on the collapse of a bubble is all about timing. You have to know when things are going to go to shit. If you short SCO right now, you may very well lose your ass. It all depends on when the news bubbles over and reaches the mass media that the SCO case is going to collapse, and how high the stock is going to go before it happens. You can't just short a stock and ride it indefinitely, no matter how out of the money your short is until it comes back into the money.
Sorry Apple fans. I guess basic economics is at work against you here. Apple didn't want to release a low margin MP3 player after all - they prefer the high margin, sexy cool segment of the market as many have already noted.
In retrospect, all the people saying they thought the mini iPod would be priced at 99 dollars are pretty laughable. Given that the material cost alone is probably close to 80 dollars (assuming 60 dollars for the hard drive in bulk), it would be possible to sell it for 150 dollars retail, and make no money. Apple is just not in that business and doesn't want to be there.
However, no need to fear. My guess is that somebody else with come out with a less sexy micro-harddrive based player at the 150 dollar price point within the next 6-8 months. It just won't be Apple.
Sure, Darl may not be getting a lot of options, but it's pretty clear that the secondary execs are trying to get as much out as possible. Can't say I blame them, they've made a lot in the last year or two, it would be foolish to leave it there when the entire share price is based on unrealistically optimistic expectations about lawsuit outcomes. Of course, this only comes out to a half million here, a half million there.
I'm sure that the big money manipulations are going on with Canopy et. al.
Very interesting, I had always assumed that it was at least common folk knowledge if not scientifically known that coffee had some effect on blood sugar. For several years, whenever I have sucked down too many sweets had a big slice of cake at a party or something else that would normally give me that very ill "sugar shock" feeling, I've found that the best antidote is a cup of coffee consumed shortly thereafter.
Mind you, that six cup a day thing doesn't sound like a good idea either, but I have no doubt that something in coffee works to stabilize blood sugar levels.
Right, well some of us would like to keep the P2P networks somewhat obscure and hard-to-use. As soon as things start being transparent and simple, they start showing up on the RIAA radar. I am perfectly happy with smaller, fragmented, harder to use P2P networks that don't interest Joe Average. Just remember, it was all fun and games until Joe Average came along and fucked it up for all of us.
eDonkey/eMule has been so long lived precisely because there have always been several steps, settings tweaking and so on involved in getting things up and running. Not hard, mind you, just too much bother for Joe Average.
Agreed. Though sometimes I use WinMX still (it's nowhere near as polluted as Kazaa), I generally prefer AllOfMP3.com which while slightly sketchy is still less sketchy than P2P services, and the quality is far, far, far better. Also the low price on AllOfMP3 gets me buying lots of music I would otherwise probably never hear and certainly wouldn't buy. Occasionally I frequent iTunes, though a buck a song still feels too expensive to me, and the M4P format, while far better than WMA, is still annoying. Or best of all, Magnatune, which is starting to look like what MP3.com should have been.
No, I've run 20 person development teams before. I realize that people like the ones you describe exist. And your goal as a manager should be to fire them as soon as possible (well, except for the last one - it's not really such a big deal if somebody borrows a copy of an MSDN CD to play with at home for personal use - I wouldn't want somebody doing it openly and I wouldn't want to KNOW about it, but that would not be a termination-worthy offense). You don't want developers working for you who don't understand basic principles of copyright law, for example that if you didn't write the code, it's not yours and you can't claim it and throw it into your product. People like that are a liability for any company.
Most programmers don't seem to understand basic principles of multithreading either. That doesn't make it acceptable for a software development professional to lack basic knowledge critical to their field.
And I never said it should be the responsbility of every developer to handle all licensing issues, I said that their manager should take responsibility, and not punt every issue to a lawyer. If you don't know enough about software to understand how to buy licenses for Winzip for your developers, you should not be managing a development team, full stop.
And you need to talk to the legal department to figure out if you've properly purchased a copy of WinZip for your developers? Or whether emacs needs to be purchased before it's used? If issues that trivial can't be solved by a 10 second conversation between a developer and their manager, then your company is broken. Don't expect to be putting out product any time soon.
There are certainly issues that do require discussion with a lawyer and conference with a legal department or outside counsel. If you plan on incorporating or using a piece of Open Source software as part of a product for customer delivery, your plan should definitely be vetted by legal, or if you are going to use a commercial enterprise software product with complicated license terms (think: Oracle, at least the way they used to do RDBMS licenses - they would sometimes lead small companies in to using their software than come back later and tell them they had misinterpreted their licensing terms and hit them with a $100k bill).
So yes, unlicensed or improperly licensed software can be a problem in certain circumstances, but generally buying or using a general piece of software, open source or commercial, like a text editor, IDE, or other general purpose desktop tool should not require intervention of a legal department. I didn't say there shouldn't be an approval process to buy such things with company dollars, just that the approval process shouldn't require the legal department's intervention.
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Not to knock Linux or anything, but if the problem statement is "I want a watch to keep track of Martian time on my wrist wherever I go", the answer is a custom circuit in a digital watch (probably an extra capacitor or two), or a slightly larger gear in a mechanical watch. I think it's pretty obvious that you can write a Javascript Mars clock for your computer in about 5 minutes. I'd like to assume that NASA already came up with that idea.
Maybe you get what you deserve for hiring low paid commodity workers from India? It should hardly be a shocker that you will likely get code back tainted with other people's copyrighted work. Maybe you should hire real professionals to monitor, track and audit the work your team in India is doing?
Remember that .su didn't go away when the old Soviet Union died, and in fact is still around today (http://www.nic.su). Also, Hong Kong is technically now part of China but still retains the .hk TLD. It's rather doubtful, even if Niue ceases to be a nominally independent nation that its TLD would disappear - there are a lot of sites operating under .nu and they would likely do a lot of bitching and moaning if ICANN tried to make .nu go away.
You have to remember that these articles do get edited at Tech Review. And that _some_ of the editors there are ASTOUNDINGLY dumb. I respect Simson as a technology reporter and writer - compare his technical knowledge and writing quality to that of many popular tech writers, and you'll see that he's definitely a cut above.
That throw away about "copyright violation systems" could very well have been an editorial addition to this piece.
Also, PGPFone is copyrighted and though the source is available, it is essentially just source-available abandonware as there is no appropriate Open Source license for it, as best as I can tell.
So if somebody wanted to create an up-to-date VoIP+strong encryption program, they'd be much better off to use Speak Freely as a base, or at least as a source for code snippets or inspiration than PGPFone.
Right, if ATI changed their marketing and claimed that "9200" was not a specific product, but rather a performance indicator like AMD's processor ratings, then this would be a different case entirely. The problem is you can't set expectations one way, change your definitions once a product is being sold on the market, and claim that the purchasers just didn't know that you had changed your definition. That's definitely false labeling and misleading advertising, no way around it.
I suspect that many of the bizarre stories printed in the days and weeks after September 11th that we never heard anything about again disappeared from the radar simply because the truth behind them was so uninteresting that there was no story at all. Luckily, we have lots of annoying reporters to run around trying to get scoops in this country, and if there were something behind these conspiracy theories, we'd probably have heard about it by now.
I guess we have to pay the corruption taxes and all that up here. Or we're just making up for all the ridiculous M&A activity that's gone on over the last few years (first MediaOne, then AT&T Broadband, now Comcast) - each change bringing worse service and more restrictive AUPs.
About the only thing "Weed" has going for it as a music distribution system as far as I can tell is the pyramid scheme payment system. Kinda cool that if you get friends to try and buy a new song you get rewarded with a small cut, but I'm not sure how much of a factor that would be for most casual users.
I think they lost themselves any potential customers they might have had in the neighborhood that day.
Nobody ever suggested strong crypto will protect against dedicated law enforcement efforts. If you are a dangerous criminal, they have ways to monitor you. Strong crypto protects against casual _mass_ monitoring by the government, screening every VOIP call or every email for incriminating words, and other Big Brother tactics. If the government has probable cause and can show it to a judge, then yes, they can (and should be able to) enter your home and plant a bug in your phone. They aren't going to flag me as a tax evader, log the fact that I'm having an affair and use it to blackmail me, and so on, which are the legitimate kinds of concerns people have about mass monitoring technology.
In any case, I hardly see how Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid are being held up as fabulous examples of use of government dollars. These programs selectively benefit people, in many cases the WRONG people. Let's look at working people who have to pay 470 dollars a month for decent health insurance coverage (i.e. non-HMO). And that's blessed by the consumer-friendly laws of Massachusetts. The comparable coverage in New York would run over 700 dollars a month. The fact that individual health plans are complete fuck jobs is a travesty. While we're at it, why doesn't the government use their bargaining power and open up the Federal health plans and give group plan rates to self-employed and those whose jobs don't provide health insurance for them? You know, the people who are currently getting fucked by the insurance companies royally?
My point is that yes, there are a lot of problems with the government right now and misallocation of resources. That doesn't mean that a Mars mission would be a bad use of 20 billion dollars though.
Okay, in other words you're saying you aren't breaking the law unless you are doing something against the law. Yes, that is true.
True, but there are far cheaper options still that are effectively as good for 98%+ of the web surfing population. Go to www.ev1servers.net and get a GeoTrust certificate (GeoTrust acquired the old Equifax cert business, and the Equifax root cert is in browsers going back to IE 5.0 and Netscape 4.something I believe). And ev1servers.net will sell you a $150 retail price GeoTrust cert for 49 bucks. You'd have to really want to capture the "wicked old web browsers and Windows 95" market to justify the marginal cost of a Verisign (or Thawte) cert over this (900 bucks for a 128-bit cert from Verisign... lol).
I was also under the impression that all the original UNIX header files are covered under the license discussed here that came out of the original AT&T/USL/BSDi cases, or are not copyrightable at all as you point out.
Whether it's actually okay to refuse service to somebody simply because they are not one of your more profitable customers probably won't cut it. If the cable companies weren't upfront about their limits and changed them after hooking customers, they have probably opened themselves up to class action lawsuits.
One user cut off unfairly, suffering from termination of service and having to wait to find another ISP isn't necessarily a huge financial issue, but thousands of users banded together with rabid, vicious lawyers at the forefront is.
So when people have experiences like trying to install Mandrake and they find that their network card doesn't work and their graphics card doesn't work out of the box, and the desktop font configuration out of the box is STILL heinous, it's not surprising they conclude that Linux still isn't ready for the desktop (I won't even address Red Hat since they've given up on a desktop distro entirely - who knows how the Fedora project will shape up). MEPIS and similar projects need to become the mainstream desktop flavors of Linux. I think Texstar's PCLinuxOS also stands to kick some serious ass, the Mandrake-based equivalent of MEPIS.
Clearly you have no idea how shorting a stock works if you think it's that simple. Making money on the collapse of a bubble is all about timing. You have to know when things are going to go to shit. If you short SCO right now, you may very well lose your ass. It all depends on when the news bubbles over and reaches the mass media that the SCO case is going to collapse, and how high the stock is going to go before it happens. You can't just short a stock and ride it indefinitely, no matter how out of the money your short is until it comes back into the money.
In retrospect, all the people saying they thought the mini iPod would be priced at 99 dollars are pretty laughable. Given that the material cost alone is probably close to 80 dollars (assuming 60 dollars for the hard drive in bulk),
it would be possible to sell it for 150 dollars retail, and make no money. Apple is just not in that business and doesn't want to be there.
However, no need to fear. My guess is that somebody else with come out with a less sexy micro-harddrive based player at the 150 dollar price point within the next 6-8 months. It just won't be Apple.
Sure, Darl may not be getting a lot of options, but it's pretty clear that the secondary execs are trying to get as much out as possible. Can't say I blame them, they've made a lot in the last year or two, it would be foolish to leave it there when the entire share price is based on unrealistically optimistic expectations about lawsuit outcomes. Of course, this only comes out to a half million here, a half million there.
I'm sure that the big money manipulations are going on with Canopy et. al.
Mind you, that six cup a day thing doesn't sound like a good idea either, but I have no doubt that something in coffee works to stabilize blood sugar levels.
eDonkey/eMule has been so long lived precisely because there have always been several steps, settings tweaking and so on involved in getting things up and running. Not hard, mind you, just too much bother for Joe Average.
Agreed. Though sometimes I use WinMX still (it's nowhere near as polluted as Kazaa), I generally prefer AllOfMP3.com which while slightly sketchy is still less sketchy than P2P services, and the quality is far, far, far better. Also the low price on AllOfMP3 gets me buying lots of music I would otherwise probably never hear and certainly wouldn't buy. Occasionally I frequent iTunes, though a buck a song still feels too expensive to me, and the M4P format, while far better than WMA, is still annoying. Or best of all, Magnatune, which is starting to look like what MP3.com should have been.
Most programmers don't seem to understand basic principles of multithreading either. That doesn't make it acceptable for a software development professional to lack basic knowledge critical to their field.
And I never said it should be the responsbility of every developer to handle all licensing issues, I said that their manager should take responsibility, and not punt every issue to a lawyer. If you don't know enough about software to understand how to buy licenses for Winzip for your developers, you should not be managing a development team, full stop.
There are certainly issues that do require discussion with a lawyer and conference with a legal department or outside counsel. If you plan on incorporating or using a piece of Open Source software as part of a product for customer delivery, your plan should definitely be vetted by legal, or if you are going to use a commercial enterprise software product with complicated license terms (think: Oracle, at least the way they used to do RDBMS licenses - they would sometimes lead small companies in to using their software than come back later and tell them they had misinterpreted their licensing terms and hit them with a $100k bill).
So yes, unlicensed or improperly licensed software can be a problem in certain circumstances, but generally buying or using a general piece of software, open source or commercial, like a text editor, IDE, or other general purpose desktop tool should not require intervention of a legal department. I didn't say there shouldn't be an approval process to buy such things with company dollars, just that the approval process shouldn't require the legal department's intervention.