Yes, that's right, if you want unbiased reporting on the facts and a strict comparison done under rigorous conditions, then the only place to turn is Consumer Reports. Unfortunately a peek at their site shows nothing about comparing Linux to Windows. Anyone for a letter-writing campaign?
They're just doing whatever gets the viewers so they can please their advertisers.
Then they need more babes in skimpy outfits and men drinking beer and packing small arsenals of destruction.
The minute a television show uses something in the news as a focal point for a story, it diminishes the story. It's a picture of a picture -- the lines begin to blur. It's bad enough that the populace believes video games are turning the youth of the world into gun-wielding zombie killers (thank you Jack Thompson!), but now that view is becoming acceptable enough that it's making it into the popular medium of TV. And people are gullible enough to believe what the TV tells them, without putting critical thought into how they are forming the opinon or finding out more background information on the subject.
CSI:Miami, a TV-show with violent content, is going to go up against violent content in the video game industry? What do you kow? The vultures are beginning to eat each other! Of course violent games and TV don't make people into killers! Now excuse me as I go strap on my StormTrooper armor, grab my handy blaster, and lay waste to some people at the supermarket...
Exactly. I was the indispensible guy, the only person doing my job for 3 1/2 years. You needed it done, I did it. Mind you it was stressful being the only resource, but I was getting paid good money.
Then one day the head honcho was reviewing the budget and determined that I was being paid way too much for what I was doing, and whacked me out of the budget with his red pen. Result: I lose a good job and am replaced by a Canadian programmer, who works far cheaper than I do. [Note: I am not denigrating Canadians; I am an avid Rush fan. And this guy had skills.]
So now my code is being maintained by someone else, and he's having a much easier time than I was, because I so thoroughly documented everything I did. This article may be meant to be tongue-in-cheek, but it really points out the state of the inustry right now. Those of us with decent skills are being phased out in turn, replaced by lower-paid and often poorly-skilled labor, simply to save a buck. And if it takes the new guy an extra 6 months to figure out the code, so what? He's getting paid next-to-nothing for it, so it doesn't cost the company much. And who knows? The cheap new guy may do all the documenting for them, just in time to be replaced by the newer, cheaper guy.
University of Berlin Tecnological College: Herr Führer, vhat do you say to zese Fascist dogs who proclaim zere rights are being infringed?
Führer Sherman: We believe in the right of the individual to listen to music the way they want, as long as that way is our way! Eventually we will have the music-listening public marching to a single tune, our tune, and a great day will come when we will bring all nations under our heel!
University of Berlin Tecnological College: Sieg Heil! Sieg Heil!
I see... so Google saved us all from ourselves did they? I seem to remember that even though Google was much talked about in 2000, it had yet to become the preminent search engine it is today.
Perhaps this has more to do with it: Results 1 - 10 of about 7,590,000 for Pop-up blocker software. (0.20 seconds). Taken from Google itself. Pop-ups weren't simply replaced, they were stamped out. They still exist, but not at the staggering, nauseating level they were once.
Does anyone know anyone who ever bought one of those X10 cameras?
Passing off a Celeron as a Pentium 4 is not difficult to do, as the two chips use the same basic design, according to a semiconductor executive in Taiwan familiar with the technical details of the two. The main difference between them is that most of the on-chip memory cache has been disabled in the Celerons, the executive said.
Which is why they run like mud. I had an HP with a Celeron and the thing was never efficient or speedy.
I don't see why everyone is so shocked -- this just means that the Chinese have learned the tenets of Capitalism far faster than we gave them credit for. They'll be selling us our own bridges before long.
People will gravitate toward cheaper tunes, unless it's someone they really like and then they'll pay the extra pennies. Marketing types know very little.
I first used USENET in 1985 and I was frankly astounded. It was like having a club, but instead of being local it was world-wide. The topics were so numerous and the opinions so wide-ranging. I began to think it would be the start of some kind of global democracy, where everybody got to have a say.
But even then the signs were there. My first introduction to a flame-war was quite unintentional for a neophyte, but I quickly learned this was more like the Wild West than High Tech. You could have your fair share on intelligent discourse but there were many traps for the unwary and pretty soon you were being bombarded from all sides. It wasn't spam back then, but it was the idea. You learned to give out minimal information and never gave out your email address to anyone you didn't think you could trust.
The came the Web and suddenly everyone and his uncle who could afford an Internet connection could join in and USENET lost its quiet charm. Anyone who used it for a while got annoyed at the same questions being asked 1000's of times and the FAQs became a joke because no newbie would bother reading them. Sanity only seemed to be maintained in the moderated groups, but it was lawless fun in the alt.* groups. Pretty soon they were being overrun by the first generation of spammers and at that point I got out.
They say you can't go home again. True, but it seems the spirit of USENET lives on anyway, in places like Slashdot, and the Internet as a whole. When you think about, blogging is nothing more than having your own moderated newsgroup, and any website can become a focal point for discussion and dissemination of information to the like-minded. USENET is far from dead, but its legacy is well established, and a few of us hope that its spirit never truly dies.
Just think of the number of systems that rely on IPv4 right now: networks, routers, cell phones, etc. There really isn't a lot of room left at the current rate of expansion. But let's face, that's how we get: complacent. The current system is working -- why bother with a new one? I believe the Romans got that way toward the end...
From the article: The Internet was not designed like this. It was designed to enable peer-to-peer and VoIP. In the meantime, through NAT, telecomms companies are offering VoIP but they want to bill you for it, but the Internet was not designed with any billing mechanism. When you connect to the Internet you pay anyway, so why should you pay for more services? This is the big debate. The Internet was not designed for telecomms companies, it was designed for everyone to share expensive CPU power. When you share expensive resources you can do anything.
I agree. Paying for sevrices is basically just icing on the cake for telecoms.
The first line of defense against these things is avoiding the trap of downloading things that may contain them. Same old saw: don't download anything from people you don't know or trust. Don't open suspicious emails. Problem is, no matter how much you say it, the common computer-user doesn't heed the warnings. People are too gullible for their own good and there are so many get-rich-quick, boy-that-sounds-interesting types out there that its only a matter of time before one of these things spreads
Of course, what the article fails to mention is the corporate use of keyloggers, to see just what you've been saying on Slashdot, or worse, the number of people who install them on purpose to trap an unwary spouses or their mischievous kids.
Ultimately, we should all be installing anti-keylogging software right along with our anti-virus. That will work, until the forces of evil come up with the next generation of spyware.
Dateline the Mediterranean: the estates of Plato and Aristotle are claiming that Linux infringes on their patents for "logic", since logic is an intrinsic part of the operating system. There is no word on whether suits will be filed with the World Court.
I say this a lot -- the idea of the software patent is absurd, as much so as patenting genes. Patents in the United States were originally thought of as a means to allow Federal support of science. The idea was to stimulate creativity and industrial innovation and allow inventors to reap the benefits of their inventions. The patent process was meant to be strictly controlled and only the most original ideas and variants on common ideas were granted patents.
Software is generally a commodity, not an invention. If I come up with a novel way of parsing files, storing data, or even creating better processing throughput, perhaps that may be thought of as unique, but the fact is I'm using a programming language that others have access to as well as systems others have access to, and there's every possibility that someone else may have had the same idea.
It comes down the fact the ideas are not proprietary -- anyone can have them. What you choose to do with them is your business. Frankly, I like the Open Source approach, simply from the standpoint of it being a sharing-the-wealth system, that avoids a lot of reinventing-the-wheel that goes on in this world. It gives everyone the opportunity to advance systems and apply new ideas to technology. It is the complete antithesis of the patent model, as it presupposes that developments in software are to be shared, not hoarded.
This whole linux patent business is not over by a longshot, especially since Microsoft has not enterred the fray.
These sound an awful lot like the kind of things they said after Sputnik went up in October 1957. Back then, politicians fanned those flames too. Mind you it got us to the Moon and made Neil Armstrong wish he'd stayed on the farm, but still the motivation behind it turned out to be a little overdone. The Soviets burned themselves up just trying to keep up with us technologically.
From eWeek: Underlining the challenge, Romney said leaders of one technology firm in Massachusetts anticipated that 90 percent of its skilled labor would be in Asia in 10 years.
Read: rather than hiring US programmers at a decent wage, we'd rather send those jobs overseas to slightly less-skilled and cheaper workers. I wonder which firm that was?
From eWeek: He also pointed to statistics that show the United States graduating only 4,400 mathematics and science PhDs each year compared with 24,900 math and science PhDs for greater Asia.
Ok, I'll bite. Imagine how you can turn statistics to your advantage! Let's do a little math based on figures from the The Census 2000 Report. We'll take it as read that "Greater Asia" encompasses mainly India and China; as of 2000, there combined population is 2.3 billion. The US in 2000 tops out at roughly 281 million. Let's assume 60% of each group is capable of going through the motions to get a Ph. D. (I know it's not accurate or based on anything concrete; in Asia, it's probably closer to 25%).
Let's see:
US: (4400 / (281m *.6)) * 100) =.0026%
Asia: (24900 / (2.3b *.6)) * 100) =.0018%
Hardly the same. But then this is wholly unscientific (I have had to do stats in years). Still, it seems a bit premature to claim they are overwhelming us.
Does that mean we can be complacent? No. Our school system in this country is still not functioning effectively and is certainly not turning out top-notch students like it used to. Too much touchy-feely, not enough 3R's. And money will not solve this problem; getting back to fundamentals will.
"Digg is quite different from (older) sites," said founder Kevin Rose. "Slashdot is put together by an editorial board. Digg uses the collective wisdom of the masses and, consequently, news breaks faster."
Oh yes, and we all know about the collective wisdom of the masses! We see it every day in an ineffectual, partisan, out-of-touch Congress and a squirrely, short-sighted, and bumbling President. [sigh]
If Wired wants to annoint Digg as the new Slashdot, fine. Let the "diggies" have their fun in chaos-land. I'm sure the articles are newer, I'm sure more people are reading it every day, and of course their teeth are whiter and they have better lives. I'll stick with what I know. Here, there seems to be a better brand of intellectual discourse. I'm not a geek just to be a geek and I appreciate how Slashdot makes an effort to be informative without the need to pander to everyone.
...is the hand-crank. I can see kids in poor African villages spending their days out in the sun, cranking furiously while trying to play WoW. How much you want to bet that as you crank the handle you hear tinny carnival music and a small Bill Gates head pops out of the top.
My problem is, where is all the infrastructure going to come from? At some point a lot of these places need Internet connectivity, and frankly not everyone in the Third World has convenient access to electricity, let alone a wireless Internet connection. Bill Gates better get out his checkbook.
Do not get me wrong, I'm all for it, as long as it is done right and not as some panacea to appease the general populace. I think a lot of kids in the Third World, or anywhere for that matter, would get a better education if they had a) decent homes, b) clean water, c) lots of food, and d) schools with books and teachers.
...to which Sony will sink. Can you say "lawsuit?" Can you say "royalties?"
But again, just goes to show that protected software and software patents and such are all nonsense. Doesn't matter who it is, hacker or corporation, people are out there using other people's work without just compensation or recognition. It's only going to get worse.
Version Control - find a VC system everyone can agree and use it religiously, whether for scripts, programs, or even web docs. I've use CVS mainly, with a little Perforce, and Subversion is good so I hear.
Coding Standards - depending on how many and what type of languages you have, you'll want to develop standards for how code will be laid out and documented that will make sense and also make it easy for somebody to move from one code base to another with as little trouble as possible. You can be as detailed as like, right down to conventions for naming subroutines and indentation, but don't get carried away or you'll stifle creativity.
Documentation - not just documenting code (which any programmer should be doing reflexively), but documenting system flows and procedures. It doesn't hurt to throw together text docs on your more important scripts/programs, outlining where they live, how they're run, etc.
The Brain Book - there's nothing I hate more than starting a new job and having to learn all those server names, IP addresses, what I'm supposed to have access to, where in the directory tree the stuff I works on live, what types of DBs we use and their versions, etc. So I developed the Brain Book, where I would write these things down as I learned them, to have a point of reference. It's a good idea to do this for all your major projects, so as new people come on, they can spend less time learning their way around and more time coding.
Code Review - everybody's coding style is different and sometimes they don't mesh well or there are divergent opinions on how a particular task should be coded out. Get your programmers together in a room and hash things out as a group. It will provide everyone with a say and may open up some people's eyes to new ways of doing things.
The Moonwalkers found that the stuff clung to everything and on contact with the oxygen in the Lunar Module (LM), gave off a smell like gunpowder, due to the lack of normal oxidation on the Moon's surface.
The stuff was also fine and gritty and was like liquid sandpaper. It would scratch camera lens and wore away at lunar geology equipment. It could also cause fittings to not seat properly, a very important problem if you're counting on the seals on your spacesuit to remain airtight.
Of course if we're going to have people up there more or less permanently, they're going to working in the stuff every day, and the wear and tear on equipment may lead to some dangerous situations. The last thing an astronaut needs to have happen is to lose suit integrity when he/she is nowhere near shelter.
And another important factor is, are you saying all Americans with Disabilities should be forced to purchase Microsoft Office and run a Windows based PC before giving them the right to view documents that are supposedly released in the public domain? The number of Linux users, disabled or not, is increasing, and if you are so passionate about this, feel free to join mailing lists and tell OpenOffice.org to focus on Accessibility. The turnaround time in the [professional] Open Source community is much quicker than at Microsoft.
No, what I'm saying is that it isn't a good idea to take a step backwards just to make a point. Let's face it, if this whole initiative is just a "in your face Microsoft!" move, then it's petty. But if it's an attempt to move forward, to level the playing field, and steer things toward a more Open Source approach, the least that can be done is to make sure no one is lost along the way. If this change is going to be made then OpenOffice needs to be up to at least the current level of capability, so no one suddenly loses functionality they just gained.
And while things might move faster in the Open Source world, dealing with accessability issues in anything has never been glamorous, least of all software. Even getting Microsoft to address the issue was initially like pulling teeth (but what else is new?). There does need to be a push, not just to match the current technology, but improve and expand it. Open Source is everyone's best bet in that regard. It just requires finding people and organizations who will dedicate themselves to it.
Did they install in a way that they couldn't be uninstalled? No.
Did they affect the way other applications and your OS functions? No.
Sorry. They made a slight addition to only their own piece of software. Made it clearly visable, removable. And they gave the software to you as a free service. Nope, sorry. Not a bit like Sony. Not even close. Calling this something 'from the Sony playbook' lessons the outrageous things Sony did.
It's not an issue of what they did, since that was pretty innocuous, but how they did, without warning. Again, I may have downloaded their free software and they have a right to change it as they see fit, but a change like that deserves some sort of advanced notice
And who's to say it stops there? They can add things to my Buddy List -- mostly harmless. But what else can they inject into their software that might make it onto my system? Having AIM installed is like giving AOL its own personal back door to my system. I have a right to know what they intend to do before they do it. It doesn't take much for AOL to decide that they need to install something else on my system to monitor AIM and my interactions with it. If you give them a pass just because this change was so innocuous, you give them the idea they can do what they like at will.
How much are you paying for this service you're bitching about?
Not one red cent, unless you count the time spent fending off SPAM IMs, viruses, trojans, and the like. And the relative cost of the software does not invalidate my argument. By installing AIM, I am agreeing to their TOS, but there has to be a tacit understanding that just because I am using their service does not give them license to modify it without giving me some fair warning. And regardless of price, I can stop using it any time I please, which is the ultimate method of getting my point across. I may very well discontinue using AIM if this trend continues.
Commercial or free, the fact is you're allowing your machine to be used as a platform for their software. Just as they have every right to protect their machines from being compromised, I have the same right, spelled out in a EULA or not. Not to stray too far from the topic, but I'd like to be able to send my own EULA back to AOL, letting them know what I believe is fair use of my system. As long as software is a one-way street, there's going to be abuse.
Apparently once you've installed someone's software or used someone's product on your computer, they have the right to tinker with your machine and settings at will.
I was more than a little distressed to find these things appearing on my Buddy List. Like any "feature", don't I get the right to refuse it? Of course the cute little system message tells me I can right-click and delete them, but that's not the point. If you're going to add capailities to something, fine, but give the opportunity to say yea or nay first.
While not as bad as Sony's rootkit fiasco, it does point out the growing hubris of we, the software users of the world, when we believe that we still have control of how our systems work and how they are configured. It's not just worms and viruses now, but wholesale invasion by any company that feels you're not using their product most effectively. Pretty soon I expect Adobe Reader to ask me "Should you be reading that?" or IE to say "Sorry, no Slashdot for you today!"
Some were incensed at the American's with Disabilties Act (ADA) when it was passed, wondering why they had to go through all this trouble to accomodate a tiny fraction of the population. But the disabled population is not that small and it grows larger every year due to various factors most people don't think about or recognize.
Before getting back into computing, I spent 8 years in social services, working with the autistic and developmentally disabled. You don't realize what challenges there are to everyday living until you see how hard it is for anyone with any type of disability to do the simple tasks we "normals" take for granted.
Ultimately MA is going to have to decide whether it can afford to turn its back on a small slice of its populace or continue the process of inclusion. I'm hoping for the latter, since within the disabled spectrum, there are plenty of people still capable of working and being productive members of society.
Even if I lost the use of my legs, I could still program...
The Internet was originally intended for use in the US only, mainly as a more secure link for military installations and the groups that supported them in the private sector. Even as late as the mid-80's it was still a very small undertaking, just reaching a global audience (I can still remember the pre-SPAM, pre-AOL days of getting emails from Germany, France, even China, and thinking this was a great tool for communication and logical discourse).
Flash forward to the present and the Internet has crept into every strata of society and has gone from a novelty to an integral part of everyone's daily lives all over the world. From blogs, to on-line banking, up through instant news and on-demand music/movies, a great fraction of the world has come to rely on it.
Doesn't it make sense that the rest of the world would look at our dominance of the Internet and go "Hey, we know you blokes created it and all, but we use it to!"
This oversight committee will start out as a joke, but will end up being the catalyst for the slow and inexorable evolution of the Internet into a true global communications and information-sharing infrastructure. The change is inevitable. The world has been shrinking for years and this change stands to bind everyone together, for better or worse.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, that's right, if you want unbiased reporting on the facts and a strict comparison done under rigorous conditions, then the only place to turn is Consumer Reports. Unfortunately a peek at their site shows nothing about comparing Linux to Windows. Anyone for a letter-writing campaign?
They're just doing whatever gets the viewers so they can please their advertisers.
Then they need more babes in skimpy outfits and men drinking beer and packing small arsenals of destruction.
The minute a television show uses something in the news as a focal point for a story, it diminishes the story. It's a picture of a picture -- the lines begin to blur. It's bad enough that the populace believes video games are turning the youth of the world into gun-wielding zombie killers (thank you Jack Thompson!), but now that view is becoming acceptable enough that it's making it into the popular medium of TV. And people are gullible enough to believe what the TV tells them, without putting critical thought into how they are forming the opinon or finding out more background information on the subject.
CSI:Miami, a TV-show with violent content, is going to go up against violent content in the video game industry? What do you kow? The vultures are beginning to eat each other! Of course violent games and TV don't make people into killers! Now excuse me as I go strap on my StormTrooper armor, grab my handy blaster, and lay waste to some people at the supermarket...
Exactly. I was the indispensible guy, the only person doing my job for 3 1/2 years. You needed it done, I did it. Mind you it was stressful being the only resource, but I was getting paid good money.
Then one day the head honcho was reviewing the budget and determined that I was being paid way too much for what I was doing, and whacked me out of the budget with his red pen. Result: I lose a good job and am replaced by a Canadian programmer, who works far cheaper than I do. [Note: I am not denigrating Canadians; I am an avid Rush fan. And this guy had skills.]
So now my code is being maintained by someone else, and he's having a much easier time than I was, because I so thoroughly documented everything I did. This article may be meant to be tongue-in-cheek, but it really points out the state of the inustry right now. Those of us with decent skills are being phased out in turn, replaced by lower-paid and often poorly-skilled labor, simply to save a buck. And if it takes the new guy an extra 6 months to figure out the code, so what? He's getting paid next-to-nothing for it, so it doesn't cost the company much. And who knows? The cheap new guy may do all the documenting for them, just in time to be replaced by the newer, cheaper guy.
University of Berlin Tecnological College: Herr Führer, vhat do you say to zese Fascist dogs who proclaim zere rights are being infringed?
Führer Sherman: We believe in the right of the individual to listen to music the way they want, as long as that way is our way! Eventually we will have the music-listening public marching to a single tune, our tune, and a great day will come when we will bring all nations under our heel!
University of Berlin Tecnological College: Sieg Heil! Sieg Heil!
Where's Neville Chamberlin when you need him?
I see... so Google saved us all from ourselves did they? I seem to remember that even though Google was much talked about in 2000, it had yet to become the preminent search engine it is today.
Perhaps this has more to do with it: Results 1 - 10 of about 7,590,000 for Pop-up blocker software. (0.20 seconds). Taken from Google itself. Pop-ups weren't simply replaced, they were stamped out. They still exist, but not at the staggering, nauseating level they were once.
Does anyone know anyone who ever bought one of those X10 cameras?
Passing off a Celeron as a Pentium 4 is not difficult to do, as the two chips use the same basic design, according to a semiconductor executive in Taiwan familiar with the technical details of the two. The main difference between them is that most of the on-chip memory cache has been disabled in the Celerons, the executive said.
Which is why they run like mud. I had an HP with a Celeron and the thing was never efficient or speedy.
I don't see why everyone is so shocked -- this just means that the Chinese have learned the tenets of Capitalism far faster than we gave them credit for. They'll be selling us our own bridges before long.
People will gravitate toward cheaper tunes, unless it's someone they really like and then they'll pay the extra pennies. Marketing types know very little.
I first used USENET in 1985 and I was frankly astounded. It was like having a club, but instead of being local it was world-wide. The topics were so numerous and the opinions so wide-ranging. I began to think it would be the start of some kind of global democracy, where everybody got to have a say.
But even then the signs were there. My first introduction to a flame-war was quite unintentional for a neophyte, but I quickly learned this was more like the Wild West than High Tech. You could have your fair share on intelligent discourse but there were many traps for the unwary and pretty soon you were being bombarded from all sides. It wasn't spam back then, but it was the idea. You learned to give out minimal information and never gave out your email address to anyone you didn't think you could trust.
The came the Web and suddenly everyone and his uncle who could afford an Internet connection could join in and USENET lost its quiet charm. Anyone who used it for a while got annoyed at the same questions being asked 1000's of times and the FAQs became a joke because no newbie would bother reading them. Sanity only seemed to be maintained in the moderated groups, but it was lawless fun in the alt.* groups. Pretty soon they were being overrun by the first generation of spammers and at that point I got out.
They say you can't go home again. True, but it seems the spirit of USENET lives on anyway, in places like Slashdot, and the Internet as a whole. When you think about, blogging is nothing more than having your own moderated newsgroup, and any website can become a focal point for discussion and dissemination of information to the like-minded. USENET is far from dead, but its legacy is well established, and a few of us hope that its spirit never truly dies.
Just think of the number of systems that rely on IPv4 right now: networks, routers, cell phones, etc. There really isn't a lot of room left at the current rate of expansion. But let's face, that's how we get: complacent. The current system is working -- why bother with a new one? I believe the Romans got that way toward the end...
I read the article and it was insightful, but I didn't have a lot of background on IPv6, so I searched for some background and found this on the details and this on implementing it in Linux.
From the article: The Internet was not designed like this. It was designed to enable peer-to-peer and VoIP. In the meantime, through NAT, telecomms companies are offering VoIP but they want to bill you for it, but the Internet was not designed with any billing mechanism. When you connect to the Internet you pay anyway, so why should you pay for more services? This is the big debate. The Internet was not designed for telecomms companies, it was designed for everyone to share expensive CPU power. When you share expensive resources you can do anything.
I agree. Paying for sevrices is basically just icing on the cake for telecoms.
The first line of defense against these things is avoiding the trap of downloading things that may contain them. Same old saw: don't download anything from people you don't know or trust. Don't open suspicious emails. Problem is, no matter how much you say it, the common computer-user doesn't heed the warnings. People are too gullible for their own good and there are so many get-rich-quick, boy-that-sounds-interesting types out there that its only a matter of time before one of these things spreads
Of course, what the article fails to mention is the corporate use of keyloggers, to see just what you've been saying on Slashdot, or worse, the number of people who install them on purpose to trap an unwary spouses or their mischievous kids.
Ultimately, we should all be installing anti-keylogging software right along with our anti-virus. That will work, until the forces of evil come up with the next generation of spyware.
Dateline the Mediterranean: the estates of Plato and Aristotle are claiming that Linux infringes on their patents for "logic", since logic is an intrinsic part of the operating system. There is no word on whether suits will be filed with the World Court.
I say this a lot -- the idea of the software patent is absurd, as much so as patenting genes. Patents in the United States were originally thought of as a means to allow Federal support of science. The idea was to stimulate creativity and industrial innovation and allow inventors to reap the benefits of their inventions. The patent process was meant to be strictly controlled and only the most original ideas and variants on common ideas were granted patents.
Software is generally a commodity, not an invention. If I come up with a novel way of parsing files, storing data, or even creating better processing throughput, perhaps that may be thought of as unique, but the fact is I'm using a programming language that others have access to as well as systems others have access to, and there's every possibility that someone else may have had the same idea.
It comes down the fact the ideas are not proprietary -- anyone can have them. What you choose to do with them is your business. Frankly, I like the Open Source approach, simply from the standpoint of it being a sharing-the-wealth system, that avoids a lot of reinventing-the-wheel that goes on in this world. It gives everyone the opportunity to advance systems and apply new ideas to technology. It is the complete antithesis of the patent model, as it presupposes that developments in software are to be shared, not hoarded.
This whole linux patent business is not over by a longshot, especially since Microsoft has not enterred the fray.
These sound an awful lot like the kind of things they said after Sputnik went up in October 1957. Back then, politicians fanned those flames too. Mind you it got us to the Moon and made Neil Armstrong wish he'd stayed on the farm, but still the motivation behind it turned out to be a little overdone. The Soviets burned themselves up just trying to keep up with us technologically.
From eWeek: Underlining the challenge, Romney said leaders of one technology firm in Massachusetts anticipated that 90 percent of its skilled labor would be in Asia in 10 years.
Read: rather than hiring US programmers at a decent wage, we'd rather send those jobs overseas to slightly less-skilled and cheaper workers. I wonder which firm that was?
From eWeek: He also pointed to statistics that show the United States graduating only 4,400 mathematics and science PhDs each year compared with 24,900 math and science PhDs for greater Asia.
Ok, I'll bite. Imagine how you can turn statistics to your advantage! Let's do a little math based on figures from the The Census 2000 Report. We'll take it as read that "Greater Asia" encompasses mainly India and China; as of 2000, there combined population is 2.3 billion. The US in 2000 tops out at roughly 281 million. Let's assume 60% of each group is capable of going through the motions to get a Ph. D. (I know it's not accurate or based on anything concrete; in Asia, it's probably closer to 25%).
Let's see:
- US: (4400 / (281m *
.6)) * 100) = .0026%
- Asia: (24900 / (2.3b *
.6)) * 100) = .0018%
Hardly the same. But then this is wholly unscientific (I have had to do stats in years). Still, it seems a bit premature to claim they are overwhelming us.Does that mean we can be complacent? No. Our school system in this country is still not functioning effectively and is certainly not turning out top-notch students like it used to. Too much touchy-feely, not enough 3R's. And money will not solve this problem; getting back to fundamentals will.
"Digg is quite different from (older) sites," said founder Kevin Rose. "Slashdot is put together by an editorial board. Digg uses the collective wisdom of the masses and, consequently, news breaks faster."
Oh yes, and we all know about the collective wisdom of the masses! We see it every day in an ineffectual, partisan, out-of-touch Congress and a squirrely, short-sighted, and bumbling President. [sigh]
If Wired wants to annoint Digg as the new Slashdot, fine. Let the "diggies" have their fun in chaos-land. I'm sure the articles are newer, I'm sure more people are reading it every day, and of course their teeth are whiter and they have better lives. I'll stick with what I know. Here, there seems to be a better brand of intellectual discourse. I'm not a geek just to be a geek and I appreciate how Slashdot makes an effort to be informative without the need to pander to everyone.
...is the hand-crank. I can see kids in poor African villages spending their days out in the sun, cranking furiously while trying to play WoW. How much you want to bet that as you crank the handle you hear tinny carnival music and a small Bill Gates head pops out of the top.
My problem is, where is all the infrastructure going to come from? At some point a lot of these places need Internet connectivity, and frankly not everyone in the Third World has convenient access to electricity, let alone a wireless Internet connection. Bill Gates better get out his checkbook.
Do not get me wrong, I'm all for it, as long as it is done right and not as some panacea to appease the general populace. I think a lot of kids in the Third World, or anywhere for that matter, would get a better education if they had a) decent homes, b) clean water, c) lots of food, and d) schools with books and teachers.
Boss: What's that? [pointing to screen]
Worker: Ubuntu. Been using it for a while. Works so much better than Windows and I'm much more productive.
Boss: Excellent! Good job! Keep it up!
[Boss shuffles off to his office, closes the door, and kneels before raised, circular object on the floor. Hologram of hooded figure appears.]
Figure: What is it?
Boss: My Master, there is a Linux-user here!
Figure: I see. The Rebels are becoming bold, moving faster than anticipated. No matter!
Boss: What shall we do?
Figure: Do nothing. I will send Darth Ballmer to deal with this "Linux-user."
Boss: Very well, My Master.
[Hologram disappears]
...to which Sony will sink. Can you say "lawsuit?" Can you say "royalties?"
But again, just goes to show that protected software and software patents and such are all nonsense. Doesn't matter who it is, hacker or corporation, people are out there using other people's work without just compensation or recognition. It's only going to get worse.
The Moonwalkers found that the stuff clung to everything and on contact with the oxygen in the Lunar Module (LM), gave off a smell like gunpowder, due to the lack of normal oxidation on the Moon's surface.
The stuff was also fine and gritty and was like liquid sandpaper. It would scratch camera lens and wore away at lunar geology equipment. It could also cause fittings to not seat properly, a very important problem if you're counting on the seals on your spacesuit to remain airtight.
Of course if we're going to have people up there more or less permanently, they're going to working in the stuff every day, and the wear and tear on equipment may lead to some dangerous situations. The last thing an astronaut needs to have happen is to lose suit integrity when he/she is nowhere near shelter.
No, what I'm saying is that it isn't a good idea to take a step backwards just to make a point. Let's face it, if this whole initiative is just a "in your face Microsoft!" move, then it's petty. But if it's an attempt to move forward, to level the playing field, and steer things toward a more Open Source approach, the least that can be done is to make sure no one is lost along the way. If this change is going to be made then OpenOffice needs to be up to at least the current level of capability, so no one suddenly loses functionality they just gained.
And while things might move faster in the Open Source world, dealing with accessability issues in anything has never been glamorous, least of all software. Even getting Microsoft to address the issue was initially like pulling teeth (but what else is new?). There does need to be a push, not just to match the current technology, but improve and expand it. Open Source is everyone's best bet in that regard. It just requires finding people and organizations who will dedicate themselves to it.
Did they install in a way that they couldn't be uninstalled? No.
Did they affect the way other applications and your OS functions? No.
Sorry. They made a slight addition to only their own piece of software. Made it clearly visable, removable. And they gave the software to you as a free service. Nope, sorry. Not a bit like Sony. Not even close. Calling this something 'from the Sony playbook' lessons the outrageous things Sony did.
It's not an issue of what they did, since that was pretty innocuous, but how they did, without warning. Again, I may have downloaded their free software and they have a right to change it as they see fit, but a change like that deserves some sort of advanced notice
And who's to say it stops there? They can add things to my Buddy List -- mostly harmless. But what else can they inject into their software that might make it onto my system? Having AIM installed is like giving AOL its own personal back door to my system. I have a right to know what they intend to do before they do it. It doesn't take much for AOL to decide that they need to install something else on my system to monitor AIM and my interactions with it. If you give them a pass just because this change was so innocuous, you give them the idea they can do what they like at will.
Not one red cent, unless you count the time spent fending off SPAM IMs, viruses, trojans, and the like. And the relative cost of the software does not invalidate my argument. By installing AIM, I am agreeing to their TOS, but there has to be a tacit understanding that just because I am using their service does not give them license to modify it without giving me some fair warning. And regardless of price, I can stop using it any time I please, which is the ultimate method of getting my point across. I may very well discontinue using AIM if this trend continues.
Commercial or free, the fact is you're allowing your machine to be used as a platform for their software. Just as they have every right to protect their machines from being compromised, I have the same right, spelled out in a EULA or not. Not to stray too far from the topic, but I'd like to be able to send my own EULA back to AOL, letting them know what I believe is fair use of my system. As long as software is a one-way street, there's going to be abuse.
Apparently once you've installed someone's software or used someone's product on your computer, they have the right to tinker with your machine and settings at will.
I was more than a little distressed to find these things appearing on my Buddy List. Like any "feature", don't I get the right to refuse it? Of course the cute little system message tells me I can right-click and delete them, but that's not the point. If you're going to add capailities to something, fine, but give the opportunity to say yea or nay first.
While not as bad as Sony's rootkit fiasco, it does point out the growing hubris of we, the software users of the world, when we believe that we still have control of how our systems work and how they are configured. It's not just worms and viruses now, but wholesale invasion by any company that feels you're not using their product most effectively. Pretty soon I expect Adobe Reader to ask me "Should you be reading that?" or IE to say "Sorry, no Slashdot for you today!"
Some were incensed at the American's with Disabilties Act (ADA) when it was passed, wondering why they had to go through all this trouble to accomodate a tiny fraction of the population. But the disabled population is not that small and it grows larger every year due to various factors most people don't think about or recognize.
Before getting back into computing, I spent 8 years in social services, working with the autistic and developmentally disabled. You don't realize what challenges there are to everyday living until you see how hard it is for anyone with any type of disability to do the simple tasks we "normals" take for granted.
Ultimately MA is going to have to decide whether it can afford to turn its back on a small slice of its populace or continue the process of inclusion. I'm hoping for the latter, since within the disabled spectrum, there are plenty of people still capable of working and being productive members of society.
Even if I lost the use of my legs, I could still program...
The Internet was originally intended for use in the US only, mainly as a more secure link for military installations and the groups that supported them in the private sector. Even as late as the mid-80's it was still a very small undertaking, just reaching a global audience (I can still remember the pre-SPAM, pre-AOL days of getting emails from Germany, France, even China, and thinking this was a great tool for communication and logical discourse).
Flash forward to the present and the Internet has crept into every strata of society and has gone from a novelty to an integral part of everyone's daily lives all over the world. From blogs, to on-line banking, up through instant news and on-demand music/movies, a great fraction of the world has come to rely on it.
Doesn't it make sense that the rest of the world would look at our dominance of the Internet and go "Hey, we know you blokes created it and all, but we use it to!"
This oversight committee will start out as a joke, but will end up being the catalyst for the slow and inexorable evolution of the Internet into a true global communications and information-sharing infrastructure. The change is inevitable. The world has been shrinking for years and this change stands to bind everyone together, for better or worse.