I think both the author of this article and Grossman blur a very important distinction between different types of video games. I think it was one of the id guys who recently pointed out, there's a difference between a game where you aim with the mouse and shoot with mouse clicks, and one where you use an actual gun mock-up (e.g. Duck Hunt and Virtua Cop) to aim and fire. The former cannot, by any stretch of the imagination, teach you to kill, at least from a skills standpoint. The latter, however, possibly can. There's quite a difference between squeezing a plastic trigger and firing a real gun (weight, noise, recoil, etc.), but it's a lot closer than mouse-clicks.
The gun interface of Virtua Cop et. al. is probably unneccessary- a more conventional interface could be just as much fun, and without the potential negative repercussions. In general, I think steps away from realism in various ways would, on the whole, be a positive thing: The more unrealistic and video-gamey a game is, the more it will be disconnected in people's minds from the real act of killing. Furthermore, I find a video-gamey unrealism to be fun. Take a look at Quake 3, for example- almost everything about it is ludicrously unrealistic (e.g. the weapons), but it's a lot of fun, and that very unrealism makes it more fun. Furthermore, Quake 3 and other deathmatch games are probably an improvement on single-player-style games because yyour opponents are as strong and capable as you, and so it is less likely to condition one to a massacre mentality, since you cannot simply find a big gun and mow down a whole room full of bad guys.
I disagree. The reverse-engineering time varies from invention to invention, and for some relatively simple (yet still non-obvious) ideas, the reverse-engineering time can be close to instantaneous - sometimes the essence of an idea can be visible right on the surface. Furthermore, this scheme disadvantages the little guy- the winners are the ones with the most resources, who can reverse-engineer the fastest. Thus, the rich stay rich. I have no problem with this per se, but such a situation tends to lead to stagnation and general inefficiency.
Put it this way: If I (an individual with no economic infrastructure to leverage) have an idea, and I know that within six months Microsoft will be able to copy it, there's nothing I can do. It will take me at least 6 months to be able to produce my idea in bulk and begin to turn a profit, and by then I'm screwed by MS, who can have their product packaged and in stores across the country in weeks. Therefore, I will not invent it, or at least not put it on the market where it can do some good, at all; why waste time and money on a losing proposition? Thus, everybody loses. And large, rich corporations tend to be extremely stagnant, and far less likely to produce good ideas. It's individuals, not corporations, who are the essence of the free market at its best, and it is their rights that most need protection if the free market is to function properly.
I am, by the way, a libertarian myself, and as such I recognize the fundamental necessity of property rights to the establishment of a free market. Intellectual property is one sort of property right which needs to be protected if the free market is to function. The trick, as you say, is to do so without trampling individual rights.
The fundamental problem is that ideas have value- potentially enormous value. Anything that has value must be protected by a form of property rights, or that value will be destroyed. On the other hand, ideas, once had, are not characterized by scarcity and thus are difficult to treat as economic goods.
By the way, Clear-headed thinkers, libertarian or no, see attacks on the arguer, rather than the argument, as unneccessary to an intelligent discussion, and the sign of a weak underlying argument.
The idea behind the patent system is that, to encourage individuals to publish their knowledge and advance the nation's technology base, we grant them a short term monopoly.
Not exactly. The purpose of patents is not to encourage publication or contribution of ideas, but rather to encourage economic development. After all, what good does publication do for society if legally no-one can use the published idea? The patent system creates a meaningful economic incentive for people and corporations to invent things and generally have ideas- they get to profit from them, for a time. Without patents, there would be no reason to invent anything, except the extremely dubious motivational power of generosity. Since inventions and ideas are the driving force behind economic growth, it makes sense for society to encourage ideas and innovation.
This, however, is ridiculous. Patent law does include, as one poster pointed out, a requirement that the idea be non-obvious to specialists in the field, and this obviously fails that test. I hope the companies being threatened have the guts to fight it. I expect that they will, though, because they have a lot to lose if their Y2K programs aren't on track. Maybe this will get the powers that be to wake up to the problems with current patent law as it applies to the computer age.
The source code has value to Microsoft only because they can control its distrubution. They use legal, not logical or natural means to do so. This is a shaky proposition. It turns out their "profits" are built upon the same shaky ground.
In making this argument, you are implicitly claiming that there is some underlying substance called "value" which is inherent in an object, and cannot be created or destroyed; some immutable, objectively measurable quantity which software does not posess, which is inherent only in "real" things. This notion is, quite simply, false. The only reality that the notion of "value" has is how much people will pay. If I will pay $50 for Windows 98, that means that, to me, Windows 98 has a value of at least $50 compared to not having it. Value "on paper" is just as real as any other kind of value. Value == what people will pay, no more, no less.
And, by your argument, all value is on paper anyway. You claim that there is something shaky about MS's ownership of their software. This is not the case. Nobody with any real knowledge of the law seriously argues that, under current law, Microsoft does not own their source and their binaries, and hold the exclusive right to sell them. Barring a change in the law, their control of their software is rock-solid. And do you really think, considering how much money is at stake, that congress would ever even think about repealing intellectual property rights? Microsoft's profits in terms of software sales are shaky only in a highly theoretical sense. So, to put it most precisely, when you buy Windows 98, you are buying A. the physical media and the convenience of not having to track down a Warez site to get it from, B. the documentation in useful, printed form, C. the right to not get sued or prosecuted for using the software, and D. the ethical peace of mind corresponding to C, if that sort of thing bothers you. Most of the value in this transaction comes from C and D.
Moreover, the same principles apply to what you call "logical and natural" exchanges. Ford's ability to sell cars only exists on paper; it is perfectly possible for me to simply steal one and save myself the money. Ford uses legal, not logical or natural means to prevent this. To use another of your arguments, those cars only have value to Ford because they can control their distribution. The fact is that, if you do not count the law as logical or natural, the only logical or natural exchange that can take place is of the form "Give me that, or I will bash your skull in." Everything else is built on the structure which law and order provide, and that makes the law a very real, as well as a very logical and natural, system.
I know it's far too late for a posting to get any attention, but I just feel like getting this off my chest. Congratulations for having the perseverance to get down to this post.
This article is rather poorly-written, which is unfortunate, because it comes close to being very interesting. Fundamentally, the problem is that the author is unwilling to recognize the difference between his own opinion, and factual reporting. In the genuinely factual areas, this article is fascinating, but it is ruined by the author's tendency to liberally sprinkle his own opinions through it, presenting them as equally factual reporting.
For starters, the author is obviously a trekkie. This already bodes ill- people form very strong opinions about things they care about, and often find it difficult to separate those opinions from fact. In this case, the author is obviously from the "Original Series was the high point" camp of Trek thought. This is not a problem, but his refusal to even acknowledge the validity of the other camps is, especially when he takes his opinion as the premise for his argument that Berman is responsible for the death of Trek.
He even lets his perceptions distort the facts "Generations," FYI, did not debut "just weeks" after Paramount pulled TNG's plug. And Paramount's "screwy" DVD release schedule makes perfect sense when you consider that a DVD-quality print of Star Trek I is a *teeny* bit harder to get hold of than a corresponding print of, say, "Insurrection." His point about the lackluster quality of the discs is well taken, except that they haven't exactly given Berman's pet Next Generation films that star treatment either, suggestion that the problem is higher up than Berman.
Personally, I see Trek as having come in 3 phases (he sees only two). These were the Original Series, the Next Generation, and the DS9/Voyager era. The latter is defined by UPN and Paramount's explicit desire to make the series into cash cows, with the resulting emphasis on cheap ratings tricks like action and soap-opera. To my mind, this is what killed Trek. The most recent 2 series, to be sure, show gleams of brilliance here and there, but the average quality has gone sharply downhill.
The point is, there are a great many people like me, weaned on TNG, who regard it as a worthwhile entity in its own right. It may be somewhat different from the Original Series, but it has its own identity, which many of us would still regard as Trek.
The factual parts of this article are fascinating- the inside look at the intra-Trek animostities between Nimoy and Berman, and the portrayal of the various sides in the battle for Trek's future, were very interesting. However, he severly dilutes his journalistic effectiveness by rejecting out of hand any possiblity of the validity of one side in that debate. As a result, this article becomes little more than an opinion piece whining about how much better things were in the old days.
As one final comment, I agree with several other posters that the best hope for Trek is that it can be given a rest for a while, to find its center and restore some balance. In fact, this supposed "death" may be a blessing in disguise- if Trek is no longer a sacred cash cow for Paramount, it may be possible to take it in more worthwhile, less profit-motivated directions.
It's possible he might, but my estimation of him is that his trademark is defensive: to prevent anyone else from trademarking Linux and trying to take it over somehow. I suppose it's possible if someone really egregiously sold as "Linux" something that wasn't, he might break out the legal hammer, but I really doubt that it is worth his time, money, and energy to sue Turbo over something like this.
And, as I said, the trademark is really a trivial issue. If Linus died with no will and his executors sold the Linux trademark to Microsoft, Alan Cox could start coming out with new kernel editions and call it "Alanix" or something. It might take the media and PHB types a few months to catch on, but everyone important would know who to get the real kernel from. Moreover, I'm no IP attorney, but it seems to me that even if someone else owned the Linux copyright, one could sucessfully defend the right to keep calling the kernel "Linux," with so much of a history of it having that name. I think there's some sort of ruling about being allowed to call something by its common name, even if the name is trademarked by someone else. Anyone know more about this?
It really doesn't matter. Linus has no 'say' in any legal, inheritable sense of the word. Linus' key 'posession' is something that cannot be passed on by a will: the respect of the community. Absolutely nothing prevents me from declaring myself the administrator of the Linux kernel. I can grab a copy of the source and start accepting changes. The reason I don't do this is that I know I'd be an incompetent administrator, and I have absolutely no voice whatsoever in the community, and so everyone would ignore my kernel and it would die a miserable death. Linus administers the kernel purely out of the respect people have for his abilities, not out of any legal, inheritable right.
The one thing that Linus legally owns is the Linux trademark, but that really is a minor issue. And, as someone else said, it looks right now like the inheritor of the Linux kernel in the eyes of the community would be Alan Cox, based on his extensive expertise with the kernel, and the general respect he recieves.
I will concede your point: I have not seen or used Photogenics. Undoubtedly it is an innovative piece of software, and well worth that $99 for some people. You've convinced me that it may find a market in the graphics world, and I retract the claim that people who own Photoshop have no reason to buy Photogenics. My main point, however, has nothing to do with its quality as software.
I did not mean to suggest that Photoshop has nothing to fear from Photogenics. In absence of any knowledge of Photogenics, it is entirely possible that it is capable of outdoing PShop and becoming the premiere image-manipulating software in its class. There are, as you say, an appreciable number of people for whom a good piece of graphics software is worth $100. You are right, not all of them are graphics professionals.
However, there are an awfully large number of people for whom $99 is a lot to spend on graphics software, regardless of how good it is, and not all of them are impoverished college kids. Everybody who maintains a web page or two as a side concern, every hacker who has a page for her latest OSS project, needs a few graphics to liven things up. And, impoverished or not, for those people (like me) $99 is a lot to spend on those graphics, especially when nearly the same quality can be gotten from the Gimp for free, with only a little more investment of effort. Take a look at all the "graphics by Gimp" pages around the web and you'll see what I mean. Furthermore, all the hackers with an itch to scratch and a hankering to work in graphics software will be working on the Gimp, since the other contenders are closed-source. For these reasons, the Gimp has nothing to fear in terms of mindshare from Photogenics, no matter how good it is. (I say 'mindshare' because 'market share' is, of course, a meaningless term as far as free software is concerned)
The Gimp is unlikely to face serious competition from this software. Open Source, free software trumps $99 proprietary software any day. Let's face it, how many of us are willing to shell out $99 for whatever difference exists between this and the Gimp? The only people who might consider this worthwhile are graphics professionals, and if they're willing to spend that kind of money, they've already bought PhotoShop, thank you very much. Pshop might not run under Linux, but the ability to work in Linux isn't worth that much, esp. to someone doing something so OS-independent as graphics.
Besides, give the Gimp another major version number or two, and a slightly bigger Script-fu development community, and it'll outdistance Pshop, Photogenics, or any proprietary software, and be the best choice on grounds of both price and quality. Anyone excited about Photogenics for Linux is backing the wrong horse. The most worthwhile thing about this is the fact that it will give the Gimp designers another source of inspiration (besides Pshop).
Let's see... I'm thinking back to the media coverage of the Deep Blue fiasco. By the kind of thinking so much in evidence at the time, Deep Blue beat Kasparov at chess, ergo Deep Blue is smarter than Kasparov (witness the outbreak of "will computers replace humans?" panic stories).
By similar reasoning, and based on the fact that Kasparov beat the entire world at chess, it is not difficult to show that Deep Blue is smarter than the entire world put together. Perhaps Deep Blue ought to be renamed Deep Thought.
You speak as though the battle were already over, which is far from the case. My point was exactly that this is a test, to see if your doubts are justified or not, and it's far too early to tell. I don't really have the energy to respond to your criticisms, but I'd reccomend any or all of Eric Raymond's papers, particularly The Magic Cauldron, as to why Red Hat's business model may be commercially viable.
I will say (beacuse Raymond doesn't directly address it) is that Red Hat is, to a large extent, buying goodwill. They have contributed a lot to the OSS community, in a variety of ways, and as a direct result, I think of them first when I think about buying Linux (same reason my next computer is going to be a VA box). An awful lot of Linux types think in precisely this way. This effect could be offset by a truly substantial, worthwhile proprietary offering from Turbo, but even then the ickiness of proprietary software (and its attendant disadvantages) could offset that to some extent. And if all the geeks use Red Hat at home, when they go to work they're going to want to use systems they're familiar with, and will push for Red Hat at work.
Think about what Turbo is saying. "OSS is a great development model, which produces the best-quality software available. That's why we think you should buy Linux. We also think that doesn't apply to us, so buy our Linux because its proprietary software is better than the OSS alternatives." Who would buy that message?
Shoot. Dumb move on their part, IMHO. Well, then the question becomes whether Red Hat will stay free, or feel forced to go proprietary in order to compete. This puts Intel's move in another light as well: perhaps they're setting up these two business models (totally free a la Red Hat, and free/proprietary mix a la Turbo Linux) in direct competition, to see which is more viable. My money's on Red Hat.
Also, this might cool off the flameage directed at Red Hat. If Turbo sticks to a proprietary strategy, Red Hat will look like the champion of Free Software by comparison.
Tempting, but this would be very bad. Think about it. While you are online doing interesting things, the script kiddies are making sure that they are the most well-armed, trigger-happy morons in cyberspace. You'd be hard pressed to even touch them before they paint the wall with you. What's more, they are just the sort of people to go around shooting random bystanders just for the hell of it, so you'd probably never even see them coming. The problem is that anything a well-adjusted human being can do to get the better of a luser/AC/script kiddie, the kiddie can learn to do better, because they have nothing better to do. Thus, the only way of dealing with them is to ignore them.
Weapons have no place in a virtual world, except in specially designated places, precisely because of what the haX0rs would do with them.
This could actually be a major test of the commercial viability of open-source. There are a number of Linux distributions out there, a number of them moneymaking ventures to one extent or another, but Red Hat has been, until now, the only company to really build a business model on a corporate scale around Linux. If this investement really grows Turbo Linux into a full-scale, commercial Linux corporation, this will be a chance to observe two large-scale corporations competing to sell Linux as their core product in the same market (N. America).
The OSS naysayers have been insisting that a company cannot survive in a competitive market space by giving away their core product, and all of their R&D. This is exactly what Red Hat has been doing, and hopefully Turbo Linux will follow suit. Will they chicken out and go proprietary (with non-OSS add-ons and such)? Will one of them crush the other? Or can they really both prosper? Only time will tell. The future of corporate open-source could be at stake.
This is a smart move on Intel's part. They've been not-so-subtly tugging at Microsoft's leash, and this investment has the potential to drive up Linux's acceptance (nothing like a little competition to make Red Hat and Turbo work hard for customers). Furthermore, it gives Intel a chance to test the strength of the OSS model, and see whether they can count on it to rescue them from their death-embrace with MS.
You're right, nobody was really holding their breath when that first bomb was tested (or rather they were, but not because they were afraid of destroying the planet (at least not right then)). On the other hand, the first tests on Bikini atoll, which got a substantial amount of publicity, had a lot of people holding their breath. Not informed people, to be sure, but people nonetheless. A rumor got started that a new sort of superbomb was being tested which would activate a runaway chain-reaction that would destroy the planet. As you said, didn't happen. The resulting mood of impending doom, however, was credited with lowering inhibitions and leading to the sucess of the Bikini swimsuit, which came out around that time and was named after the atoll.
I am sure Raymond realized that some people will take offense at his statement of his political views. I am sure he also realized that this comment would start a raging flamewar on Slashdot regarding capitalism vs. socialism, or whatever. However, he realized that causing, or preventing, flamewars on Slashdot is entirely beside the point.
Raymond was not writing for Slashdot readers, he was writing for scholars and academics. CatB and its sucessors were academic papers, and as such, discussion and criticism of them properly belongs in the academic arena. Raymond made his point in order to demonstrate the obvious falsity of Bezroukov's key assertion- that CatB et al. advocate a 'vulgar Marxist' view of open-source software development. That this is false is patently obvious to anyone who has read those papers, but to drive the point home, Raymond made it clear exactly how far he is from advocating any form of Marxism. In doing so, he was perhaps unnecessarily inflamatory, but he realized that the levelheaded thinkers for whome he was writing the rebuttal would be able to tell the difference between an aside and a central point, and focus their attention on the latter.
On a related note, does anyone know where I can find a substantive response to his rebuttal?
Full disclosure: I agree, though not as strongly, with Raymond's views on Marxism. See my sig.
Yes, Arthur C. Clarke did propose the idea of diamond-core gas giants, but I think he got it from some research similar to this. The idea was first mentioned in either 2001, or 2010, and became a plot point in 2063, when a mountain-sized chunk of diamond winds up embedded in the surface of Europa.
The whole debate about whether the DOJ's education program will squash future hackers, or just stop them from being crackers, is a moot point. It's funny, by debating this, you give the DOJ way too much credit in their ability to affect the minds of kids.
I've been through a few animal-mascot 'education' programs in my time, and I thought they were as dumb then as I do now. The fact is that the people who concieve these campaigns have no understanding of the intelligence of the students they are trying to reach. Instead, they learn all the wrong lessons from Sesame Street (whose success was due to the respect with which it treated its viewers) and give us talking dogs with hackneyed, condescending messages like "Kids, say no to drugs," and hope we listen. However, the real message of these programs is "You can't be allowed to know the truth, so we'll lie to you with puppets," and most kids can see right through that at a very young age.
What makes this program even dumber is the target audience: potential crackers. The defining characteristics of crackers, even at that age, are high intelligence and a serious opposition to authority. The former means that they will see right to the heart of what the program is trying to do, and the latter means that they will totally reject the program once they realize where it's coming from (the authorities that they can't stand). If anything, this is likely to encourage them by giving them a target, a way of expressing their defiance.
Remember the "Just Say No" campaign? This totally unsuccessful program is the ultimate example of a government education program. Built on misguided stereotypes and incorrect, unverified theories (in that case, the notion that everybody got started on drugs because of peer pressure), and implemented heavy-handedly by beuraucrats and school adminsitrators who didn't even care if it worked, it had the net effect of boring a lot of students with tedious lectures, and making a lot of them start wondering what was so special about drugs, that the grown-ups were so afraid of them.
Of course, nobody can oppose such an obviously righteous program, and so the "Just Say No" campaign was universally hailed as the salvation of our kids, never mind that it doesn't work. The DOJ's anti-cracker campaign will meet with the same fate.
Nice idea, but you haven't provided a sufficiently precise definition of the 'Dublin'. A unit of measure needs to be (theoretically) infinitely precise. e.g. the meter is defined precisely in terms of the speed of light (of a particular wavelength, in a vacuum, etc. etc.), and so you can determine a meter to as much precision as your instruments have, and someone else can determine a meter to to as much precision as their instruments have, and their results will agree to within +- the uncertainty of the measurements. Your 'Dublin,' by contrast, can only be measured to about 2 decimal places. 9.8 m/sec^2 is an approximation for doing high-school physics problems- the real g is far from constant, and in fact varies substantially on the order of (I believe) cm/sec^2, which is way too much variation for a unit of measure, particularly one so fundamental as length. Even if you add the requirement that g be measured at sea level, variations in the earth's density and such vary g's value substantially.
In the same vein, 1 sec is only equal to 1/86400 of a day to a few decimal places, for the same reason- a day is extremely hard to measure precisely. 1 sec is actually (at least in Metric) defined in terms of the oscillations of a particular atom under certain conditions.
Before you say it, I know you were joking. I'm feeling anal today.
There isn't any real substance to this battle, and never was. The challenge was made in sufficiently vague terms that both parties could always claim victory in their respective press releases. That $1M was never going to leave Larry Ellison's pocket no matter what, and he knew it. You can make benchmarks say pretty much whatever you want them to say. Ultimately, descisions between the two shouldn't be made on benchmarks, but on less quantifiable issues like usability, reliability, features, standards-compliance, etc.
Mr. Katz raises some valid issues about the sometimes-overwhelming presence of technology in our lives. Why does he feel the need to cloak them in an obviously ludicrous apocalyptic vision? Are we all so saturated with disaster that every problem must be presented as the end of the world in order to get our attention? His overinflated rhetoric only serves to weaken his argument in the eyes of those of us not prone to leaping on the end-of-the-world bandwagon.
Mr Katz here doesn't even try to defend the notion of a Cyberclysm. He treats it as a foregone conclusion, and jumps ahead to ways to escape it. This is a rather common Modus Operandi of apocalyptic prophets (and how many of them have been right so far?). I won't reiterate all of the problems I have with the Cyberclysm argument, I posted them all here yesterday. It will suffice to say that Mr. Katz has pointed out (with some nice "I'm more educated than you" mythological references) exactly what I was arguing in my post yesterday- that when dramatic change takes place in a society, people buffer themselves against that change, and the rate of change slows down. He presents 'Clotho' as the salvation of the chosen people who will escape the Cyberclysm.
In reality, 'Clotho' is part of the reason the Cyberclysm will never happen. It embodies the human capacity to adapt, and take control of one's own life in the face of change and turmoil, and moreover it exposes technology for what it is- neither a force for good which will save mankind, nor a force for evil which will destroy us unless we destroy it first, but merely a tool, which will serve whatever ends we see fit to seek. Even without 'Clotho,' most people (present company excepted) posess a faculty called "common sense" (perhaps I should call this 'Athena') which enables them to avoid allowing themselves to be overwhelmed by things that do not matter. On a global scale, society posesses enough 'Athena' to avoid destroying itself over something which is of so little significance. One understands why Mr. Katz might have overlooked the faculty of Common Sense, since he so obviously falied to apply it to the notions the Neo-Luddites have been feeding him.
I would like to think I'm a geek. At least, I enjoy knowing things, and thinking about things, to an extent that other people don't. However, I also remember how I got here. Mostly it's because of the work I put into knowing things and learning things, by reading a lot, paying attention in class, asking questions etc. But it wasn't all me. The reason I know what I know is that other people have taken the time to teach me, whether by writing a book, teaching a class, or answering my dumb questions. As a result, I regard the teaching of others as one of the noblest things one can do, even if it means answering "stupid questions." Even on a self-interest level, answering "stupid questions" both gives one a reputation for knowledge, and tests one's knowledge. You can think you know something, but you don't really understand it until you can teach it.
Of course, as you point out, there's a difference between stupid questions asked for the sake of learning, which are by definition not stupid, and questions asked as a roudabout way of getting someone else to do your thinking for you.
Slashdot Mirror
I think both the author of this article and Grossman blur a very important distinction between different types of video games. I think it was one of the id guys who recently pointed out, there's a difference between a game where you aim with the mouse and shoot with mouse clicks, and one where you use an actual gun mock-up (e.g. Duck Hunt and Virtua Cop) to aim and fire. The former cannot, by any stretch of the imagination, teach you to kill, at least from a skills standpoint. The latter, however, possibly can. There's quite a difference between squeezing a plastic trigger and firing a real gun (weight, noise, recoil, etc.), but it's a lot closer than mouse-clicks.
The gun interface of Virtua Cop et. al. is probably unneccessary- a more conventional interface could be just as much fun, and without the potential negative repercussions. In general, I think steps away from realism in various ways would, on the whole, be a positive thing: The more unrealistic and video-gamey a game is, the more it will be disconnected in people's minds from the real act of killing. Furthermore, I find a video-gamey unrealism to be fun. Take a look at Quake 3, for example- almost everything about it is ludicrously unrealistic (e.g. the weapons), but it's a lot of fun, and that very unrealism makes it more fun. Furthermore, Quake 3 and other deathmatch games are probably an improvement on single-player-style games because yyour opponents are as strong and capable as you, and so it is less likely to condition one to a massacre mentality, since you cannot simply find a big gun and mow down a whole room full of bad guys.
I think they mean 30 kilowatt-hours per hour
Or, in other words, 30 kilowatts? :-)
Your point is well-taken, though. 30 kilowatts per hour is a pretty meaningless quantity.
I disagree. The reverse-engineering time varies from invention to invention, and for some relatively simple (yet still non-obvious) ideas, the reverse-engineering time can be close to instantaneous - sometimes the essence of an idea can be visible right on the surface. Furthermore, this scheme disadvantages the little guy- the winners are the ones with the most resources, who can reverse-engineer the fastest. Thus, the rich stay rich. I have no problem with this per se, but such a situation tends to lead to stagnation and general inefficiency.
Put it this way: If I (an individual with no economic infrastructure to leverage) have an idea, and I know that within six months Microsoft will be able to copy it, there's nothing I can do. It will take me at least 6 months to be able to produce my idea in bulk and begin to turn a profit, and by then I'm screwed by MS, who can have their product packaged and in stores across the country in weeks. Therefore, I will not invent it, or at least not put it on the market where it can do some good, at all; why waste time and money on a losing proposition? Thus, everybody loses. And large, rich corporations tend to be extremely stagnant, and far less likely to produce good ideas. It's individuals, not corporations, who are the essence of the free market at its best, and it is their rights that most need protection if the free market is to function properly.
I am, by the way, a libertarian myself, and as such I recognize the fundamental necessity of property rights to the establishment of a free market. Intellectual property is one sort of property right which needs to be protected if the free market is to function. The trick, as you say, is to do so without trampling individual rights.
The fundamental problem is that ideas have value- potentially enormous value. Anything that has value must be protected by a form of property rights, or that value will be destroyed. On the other hand, ideas, once had, are not characterized by scarcity and thus are difficult to treat as economic goods.
By the way, Clear-headed thinkers, libertarian or no, see attacks on the arguer, rather than the argument, as unneccessary to an intelligent discussion, and the sign of a weak underlying argument.
The idea behind the patent system is that, to encourage individuals to publish their knowledge and advance the nation's technology base, we grant them a short term monopoly.
Not exactly. The purpose of patents is not to encourage publication or contribution of ideas, but rather to encourage economic development. After all, what good does publication do for society if legally no-one can use the published idea? The patent system creates a meaningful economic incentive for people and corporations to invent things and generally have ideas- they get to profit from them, for a time. Without patents, there would be no reason to invent anything, except the extremely dubious motivational power of generosity. Since inventions and ideas are the driving force behind economic growth, it makes sense for society to encourage ideas and innovation.
This, however, is ridiculous. Patent law does include, as one poster pointed out, a requirement that the idea be non-obvious to specialists in the field, and this obviously fails that test. I hope the companies being threatened have the guts to fight it. I expect that they will, though, because they have a lot to lose if their Y2K programs aren't on track. Maybe this will get the powers that be to wake up to the problems with current patent law as it applies to the computer age.
The source code has value to Microsoft only because they can control its distrubution. They use legal, not logical or natural means to do so. This is a shaky proposition. It turns out their "profits" are built upon the same shaky ground.
In making this argument, you are implicitly claiming that there is some underlying substance called "value" which is inherent in an object, and cannot be created or destroyed; some immutable, objectively measurable quantity which software does not posess, which is inherent only in "real" things. This notion is, quite simply, false. The only reality that the notion of "value" has is how much people will pay. If I will pay $50 for Windows 98, that means that, to me, Windows 98 has a value of at least $50 compared to not having it. Value "on paper" is just as real as any other kind of value. Value == what people will pay, no more, no less.
And, by your argument, all value is on paper anyway. You claim that there is something shaky about MS's ownership of their software. This is not the case. Nobody with any real knowledge of the law seriously argues that, under current law, Microsoft does not own their source and their binaries, and hold the exclusive right to sell them. Barring a change in the law, their control of their software is rock-solid. And do you really think, considering how much money is at stake, that congress would ever even think about repealing intellectual property rights? Microsoft's profits in terms of software sales are shaky only in a highly theoretical sense. So, to put it most precisely, when you buy Windows 98, you are buying A. the physical media and the convenience of not having to track down a Warez site to get it from, B. the documentation in useful, printed form, C. the right to not get sued or prosecuted for using the software, and D. the ethical peace of mind corresponding to C, if that sort of thing bothers you. Most of the value in this transaction comes from C and D.
Moreover, the same principles apply to what you call "logical and natural" exchanges. Ford's ability to sell cars only exists on paper; it is perfectly possible for me to simply steal one and save myself the money. Ford uses legal, not logical or natural means to prevent this. To use another of your arguments, those cars only have value to Ford because they can control their distribution. The fact is that, if you do not count the law as logical or natural, the only logical or natural exchange that can take place is of the form "Give me that, or I will bash your skull in." Everything else is built on the structure which law and order provide, and that makes the law a very real, as well as a very logical and natural, system.
I know it's far too late for a posting to get any attention, but I just feel like getting this off my chest. Congratulations for having the perseverance to get down to this post.
This article is rather poorly-written, which is unfortunate, because it comes close to being very interesting. Fundamentally, the problem is that the author is unwilling to recognize the difference between his own opinion, and factual reporting. In the genuinely factual areas, this article is fascinating, but it is ruined by the author's tendency to liberally sprinkle his own opinions through it, presenting them as equally factual reporting.
For starters, the author is obviously a trekkie. This already bodes ill- people form very strong opinions about things they care about, and often find it difficult to separate those opinions from fact. In this case, the author is obviously from the "Original Series was the high point" camp of Trek thought. This is not a problem, but his refusal to even acknowledge the validity of the other camps is, especially when he takes his opinion as the premise for his argument that Berman is responsible for the death of Trek.
He even lets his perceptions distort the facts "Generations," FYI, did not debut "just weeks" after Paramount pulled TNG's plug. And Paramount's "screwy" DVD release schedule makes perfect sense when you consider that a DVD-quality print of Star Trek I is a *teeny* bit harder to get hold of than a corresponding print of, say, "Insurrection." His point about the lackluster quality of the discs is well taken, except that they haven't exactly given Berman's pet Next Generation films that star treatment either, suggestion that the problem is higher up than Berman.
Personally, I see Trek as having come in 3 phases (he sees only two). These were the Original Series, the Next Generation, and the DS9/Voyager era. The latter is defined by UPN and Paramount's explicit desire to make the series into cash cows, with the resulting emphasis on cheap ratings tricks like action and soap-opera. To my mind, this is what killed Trek. The most recent 2 series, to be sure, show gleams of brilliance here and there, but the average quality has gone sharply downhill.
The point is, there are a great many people like me, weaned on TNG, who regard it as a worthwhile entity in its own right. It may be somewhat different from the Original Series, but it has its own identity, which many of us would still regard as Trek.
The factual parts of this article are fascinating- the inside look at the intra-Trek animostities between Nimoy and Berman, and the portrayal of the various sides in the battle for Trek's future, were very interesting. However, he severly dilutes his journalistic effectiveness by rejecting out of hand any possiblity of the validity of one side in that debate. As a result, this article becomes little more than an opinion piece whining about how much better things were in the old days.
As one final comment, I agree with several other posters that the best hope for Trek is that it can be given a rest for a while, to find its center and restore some balance. In fact, this supposed "death" may be a blessing in disguise- if Trek is no longer a sacred cash cow for Paramount, it may be possible to take it in more worthwhile, less profit-motivated directions.
I have a perverse need to give my machines arcane names that are hard to type:
It's possible he might, but my estimation of him is that his trademark is defensive: to prevent anyone else from trademarking Linux and trying to take it over somehow. I suppose it's possible if someone really egregiously sold as "Linux" something that wasn't, he might break out the legal hammer, but I really doubt that it is worth his time, money, and energy to sue Turbo over something like this.
And, as I said, the trademark is really a trivial issue. If Linus died with no will and his executors sold the Linux trademark to Microsoft, Alan Cox could start coming out with new kernel editions and call it "Alanix" or something. It might take the media and PHB types a few months to catch on, but everyone important would know who to get the real kernel from. Moreover, I'm no IP attorney, but it seems to me that even if someone else owned the Linux copyright, one could sucessfully defend the right to keep calling the kernel "Linux," with so much of a history of it having that name. I think there's some sort of ruling about being allowed to call something by its common name, even if the name is trademarked by someone else. Anyone know more about this?
It really doesn't matter. Linus has no 'say' in any legal, inheritable sense of the word. Linus' key 'posession' is something that cannot be passed on by a will: the respect of the community. Absolutely nothing prevents me from declaring myself the administrator of the Linux kernel. I can grab a copy of the source and start accepting changes. The reason I don't do this is that I know I'd be an incompetent administrator, and I have absolutely no voice whatsoever in the community, and so everyone would ignore my kernel and it would die a miserable death. Linus administers the kernel purely out of the respect people have for his abilities, not out of any legal, inheritable right.
The one thing that Linus legally owns is the Linux trademark, but that really is a minor issue. And, as someone else said, it looks right now like the inheritor of the Linux kernel in the eyes of the community would be Alan Cox, based on his extensive expertise with the kernel, and the general respect he recieves.
I will concede your point: I have not seen or used Photogenics. Undoubtedly it is an innovative piece of software, and well worth that $99 for some people. You've convinced me that it may find a market in the graphics world, and I retract the claim that people who own Photoshop have no reason to buy Photogenics. My main point, however, has nothing to do with its quality as software.
I did not mean to suggest that Photoshop has nothing to fear from Photogenics. In absence of any knowledge of Photogenics, it is entirely possible that it is capable of outdoing PShop and becoming the premiere image-manipulating software in its class. There are, as you say, an appreciable number of people for whom a good piece of graphics software is worth $100. You are right, not all of them are graphics professionals.
However, there are an awfully large number of people for whom $99 is a lot to spend on graphics software, regardless of how good it is, and not all of them are impoverished college kids. Everybody who maintains a web page or two as a side concern, every hacker who has a page for her latest OSS project, needs a few graphics to liven things up. And, impoverished or not, for those people (like me) $99 is a lot to spend on those graphics, especially when nearly the same quality can be gotten from the Gimp for free, with only a little more investment of effort. Take a look at all the "graphics by Gimp" pages around the web and you'll see what I mean. Furthermore, all the hackers with an itch to scratch and a hankering to work in graphics software will be working on the Gimp, since the other contenders are closed-source. For these reasons, the Gimp has nothing to fear in terms of mindshare from Photogenics, no matter how good it is. (I say 'mindshare' because 'market share' is, of course, a meaningless term as far as free software is concerned)
The Gimp is unlikely to face serious competition from this software. Open Source, free software trumps $99 proprietary software any day. Let's face it, how many of us are willing to shell out $99 for whatever difference exists between this and the Gimp? The only people who might consider this worthwhile are graphics professionals, and if they're willing to spend that kind of money, they've already bought PhotoShop, thank you very much. Pshop might not run under Linux, but the ability to work in Linux isn't worth that much, esp. to someone doing something so OS-independent as graphics.
Besides, give the Gimp another major version number or two, and a slightly bigger Script-fu development community, and it'll outdistance Pshop, Photogenics, or any proprietary software, and be the best choice on grounds of both price and quality. Anyone excited about Photogenics for Linux is backing the wrong horse. The most worthwhile thing about this is the fact that it will give the Gimp designers another source of inspiration (besides Pshop).
Let's see... I'm thinking back to the media coverage of the Deep Blue fiasco. By the kind of thinking so much in evidence at the time, Deep Blue beat Kasparov at chess, ergo Deep Blue is smarter than Kasparov (witness the outbreak of "will computers replace humans?" panic stories).
By similar reasoning, and based on the fact that Kasparov beat the entire world at chess, it is not difficult to show that Deep Blue is smarter than the entire world put together. Perhaps Deep Blue ought to be renamed Deep Thought.
I don't think many people who go online for a chat would want to deal with all that, RPG fans aside. Much better, and simpler, to just have no weapons
You speak as though the battle were already over, which is far from the case. My point was exactly that this is a test, to see if your doubts are justified or not, and it's far too early to tell. I don't really have the energy to respond to your criticisms, but I'd reccomend any or all of Eric Raymond's papers, particularly The Magic Cauldron, as to why Red Hat's business model may be commercially viable.
I will say (beacuse Raymond doesn't directly address it) is that Red Hat is, to a large extent, buying goodwill. They have contributed a lot to the OSS community, in a variety of ways, and as a direct result, I think of them first when I think about buying Linux (same reason my next computer is going to be a VA box). An awful lot of Linux types think in precisely this way. This effect could be offset by a truly substantial, worthwhile proprietary offering from Turbo, but even then the ickiness of proprietary software (and its attendant disadvantages) could offset that to some extent. And if all the geeks use Red Hat at home, when they go to work they're going to want to use systems they're familiar with, and will push for Red Hat at work.
Think about what Turbo is saying. "OSS is a great development model, which produces the best-quality software available. That's why we think you should buy Linux. We also think that doesn't apply to us, so buy our Linux because its proprietary software is better than the OSS alternatives." Who would buy that message?
Shoot. Dumb move on their part, IMHO. Well, then the question becomes whether Red Hat will stay free, or feel forced to go proprietary in order to compete. This puts Intel's move in another light as well: perhaps they're setting up these two business models (totally free a la Red Hat, and free/proprietary mix a la Turbo Linux) in direct competition, to see which is more viable. My money's on Red Hat.
Also, this might cool off the flameage directed at Red Hat. If Turbo sticks to a proprietary strategy, Red Hat will look like the champion of Free Software by comparison.
Tempting, but this would be very bad. Think about it. While you are online doing interesting things, the script kiddies are making sure that they are the most well-armed, trigger-happy morons in cyberspace. You'd be hard pressed to even touch them before they paint the wall with you. What's more, they are just the sort of people to go around shooting random bystanders just for the hell of it, so you'd probably never even see them coming. The problem is that anything a well-adjusted human being can do to get the better of a luser/AC/script kiddie, the kiddie can learn to do better, because they have nothing better to do. Thus, the only way of dealing with them is to ignore them.
Weapons have no place in a virtual world, except in specially designated places, precisely because of what the haX0rs would do with them.
This could actually be a major test of the commercial viability of open-source. There are a number of Linux distributions out there, a number of them moneymaking ventures to one extent or another, but Red Hat has been, until now, the only company to really build a business model on a corporate scale around Linux. If this investement really grows Turbo Linux into a full-scale, commercial Linux corporation, this will be a chance to observe two large-scale corporations competing to sell Linux as their core product in the same market (N. America).
The OSS naysayers have been insisting that a company cannot survive in a competitive market space by giving away their core product, and all of their R&D. This is exactly what Red Hat has been doing, and hopefully Turbo Linux will follow suit. Will they chicken out and go proprietary (with non-OSS add-ons and such)? Will one of them crush the other? Or can they really both prosper? Only time will tell. The future of corporate open-source could be at stake.
This is a smart move on Intel's part. They've been not-so-subtly tugging at Microsoft's leash, and this investment has the potential to drive up Linux's acceptance (nothing like a little competition to make Red Hat and Turbo work hard for customers). Furthermore, it gives Intel a chance to test the strength of the OSS model, and see whether they can count on it to rescue them from their death-embrace with MS.
Interesting historical note:
You're right, nobody was really holding their breath when that first bomb was tested (or rather they were, but not because they were afraid of destroying the planet (at least not right then)). On the other hand, the first tests on Bikini atoll, which got a substantial amount of publicity, had a lot of people holding their breath. Not informed people, to be sure, but people nonetheless. A rumor got started that a new sort of superbomb was being tested which would activate a runaway chain-reaction that would destroy the planet. As you said, didn't happen. The resulting mood of impending doom, however, was credited with lowering inhibitions and leading to the sucess of the Bikini swimsuit, which came out around that time and was named after the atoll.
I am sure Raymond realized that some people will take offense at his statement of his political views. I am sure he also realized that this comment would start a raging flamewar on Slashdot regarding capitalism vs. socialism, or whatever. However, he realized that causing, or preventing, flamewars on Slashdot is entirely beside the point.
Raymond was not writing for Slashdot readers, he was writing for scholars and academics. CatB and its sucessors were academic papers, and as such, discussion and criticism of them properly belongs in the academic arena. Raymond made his point in order to demonstrate the obvious falsity of Bezroukov's key assertion- that CatB et al. advocate a 'vulgar Marxist' view of open-source software development. That this is false is patently obvious to anyone who has read those papers, but to drive the point home, Raymond made it clear exactly how far he is from advocating any form of Marxism. In doing so, he was perhaps unnecessarily inflamatory, but he realized that the levelheaded thinkers for whome he was writing the rebuttal would be able to tell the difference between an aside and a central point, and focus their attention on the latter.
On a related note, does anyone know where I can find a substantive response to his rebuttal?
Full disclosure: I agree, though not as strongly, with Raymond's views on Marxism. See my sig.
Yes, Arthur C. Clarke did propose the idea of diamond-core gas giants, but I think he got it from some research similar to this. The idea was first mentioned in either 2001, or 2010, and became a plot point in 2063, when a mountain-sized chunk of diamond winds up embedded in the surface of Europa.
The whole debate about whether the DOJ's education program will squash future hackers, or just stop them from being crackers, is a moot point. It's funny, by debating this, you give the DOJ way too much credit in their ability to affect the minds of kids.
I've been through a few animal-mascot 'education' programs in my time, and I thought they were as dumb then as I do now. The fact is that the people who concieve these campaigns have no understanding of the intelligence of the students they are trying to reach. Instead, they learn all the wrong lessons from Sesame Street (whose success was due to the respect with which it treated its viewers) and give us talking dogs with hackneyed, condescending messages like "Kids, say no to drugs," and hope we listen. However, the real message of these programs is "You can't be allowed to know the truth, so we'll lie to you with puppets," and most kids can see right through that at a very young age.
What makes this program even dumber is the target audience: potential crackers. The defining characteristics of crackers, even at that age, are high intelligence and a serious opposition to authority. The former means that they will see right to the heart of what the program is trying to do, and the latter means that they will totally reject the program once they realize where it's coming from (the authorities that they can't stand). If anything, this is likely to encourage them by giving them a target, a way of expressing their defiance.
Remember the "Just Say No" campaign? This totally unsuccessful program is the ultimate example of a government education program. Built on misguided stereotypes and incorrect, unverified theories (in that case, the notion that everybody got started on drugs because of peer pressure), and implemented heavy-handedly by beuraucrats and school adminsitrators who didn't even care if it worked, it had the net effect of boring a lot of students with tedious lectures, and making a lot of them start wondering what was so special about drugs, that the grown-ups were so afraid of them.
Of course, nobody can oppose such an obviously righteous program, and so the "Just Say No" campaign was universally hailed as the salvation of our kids, never mind that it doesn't work. The DOJ's anti-cracker campaign will meet with the same fate.
Nice idea, but you haven't provided a sufficiently precise definition of the 'Dublin'. A unit of measure needs to be (theoretically) infinitely precise. e.g. the meter is defined precisely in terms of the speed of light (of a particular wavelength, in a vacuum, etc. etc.), and so you can determine a meter to as much precision as your instruments have, and someone else can determine a meter to to as much precision as their instruments have, and their results will agree to within +- the uncertainty of the measurements. Your 'Dublin,' by contrast, can only be measured to about 2 decimal places. 9.8 m/sec^2 is an approximation for doing high-school physics problems- the real g is far from constant, and in fact varies substantially on the order of (I believe) cm/sec^2, which is way too much variation for a unit of measure, particularly one so fundamental as length. Even if you add the requirement that g be measured at sea level, variations in the earth's density and such vary g's value substantially.
In the same vein, 1 sec is only equal to 1/86400 of a day to a few decimal places, for the same reason- a day is extremely hard to measure precisely. 1 sec is actually (at least in Metric) defined in terms of the oscillations of a particular atom under certain conditions.
Before you say it, I know you were joking. I'm feeling anal today.
There isn't any real substance to this battle, and never was. The challenge was made in sufficiently vague terms that both parties could always claim victory in their respective press releases. That $1M was never going to leave Larry Ellison's pocket no matter what, and he knew it. You can make benchmarks say pretty much whatever you want them to say. Ultimately, descisions between the two shouldn't be made on benchmarks, but on less quantifiable issues like usability, reliability, features, standards-compliance, etc.
Mr. Katz raises some valid issues about the sometimes-overwhelming presence of technology in our lives. Why does he feel the need to cloak them in an obviously ludicrous apocalyptic vision? Are we all so saturated with disaster that every problem must be presented as the end of the world in order to get our attention? His overinflated rhetoric only serves to weaken his argument in the eyes of those of us not prone to leaping on the end-of-the-world bandwagon.
Mr Katz here doesn't even try to defend the notion of a Cyberclysm. He treats it as a foregone conclusion, and jumps ahead to ways to escape it. This is a rather common Modus Operandi of apocalyptic prophets (and how many of them have been right so far?). I won't reiterate all of the problems I have with the Cyberclysm argument, I posted them all here yesterday. It will suffice to say that Mr. Katz has pointed out (with some nice "I'm more educated than you" mythological references) exactly what I was arguing in my post yesterday- that when dramatic change takes place in a society, people buffer themselves against that change, and the rate of change slows down. He presents 'Clotho' as the salvation of the chosen people who will escape the Cyberclysm.
In reality, 'Clotho' is part of the reason the Cyberclysm will never happen. It embodies the human capacity to adapt, and take control of one's own life in the face of change and turmoil, and moreover it exposes technology for what it is- neither a force for good which will save mankind, nor a force for evil which will destroy us unless we destroy it first, but merely a tool, which will serve whatever ends we see fit to seek. Even without 'Clotho,' most people (present company excepted) posess a faculty called "common sense" (perhaps I should call this 'Athena') which enables them to avoid allowing themselves to be overwhelmed by things that do not matter. On a global scale, society posesses enough 'Athena' to avoid destroying itself over something which is of so little significance. One understands why Mr. Katz might have overlooked the faculty of Common Sense, since he so obviously falied to apply it to the notions the Neo-Luddites have been feeding him.
I would like to think I'm a geek. At least, I enjoy knowing things, and thinking about things, to an extent that other people don't. However, I also remember how I got here. Mostly it's because of the work I put into knowing things and learning things, by reading a lot, paying attention in class, asking questions etc. But it wasn't all me. The reason I know what I know is that other people have taken the time to teach me, whether by writing a book, teaching a class, or answering my dumb questions. As a result, I regard the teaching of others as one of the noblest things one can do, even if it means answering "stupid questions." Even on a self-interest level, answering "stupid questions" both gives one a reputation for knowledge, and tests one's knowledge. You can think you know something, but you don't really understand it until you can teach it.
Of course, as you point out, there's a difference between stupid questions asked for the sake of learning, which are by definition not stupid, and questions asked as a roudabout way of getting someone else to do your thinking for you.