Well, I doubt Mozilla was the one dragging their feet about implementing the toolbar. I imagine the scene was a few Moz developers sitting in meeting with a few of eBay's PHBs for a few weeks, explaining what a Firefox add-on is while eBay's folks asked how they can embed more ads in the toolbar and maybe make it report user browsing information back to eBay.
I imagine the Moz devs felt a bit embarrassed for themselves, having wasted those weeks in meetings with nothing to show for it, but I don't think anyone doubts that Mozilla developers can code.
Open-source software is relatively easy to port to a 64-bit architecture; most of the time it's just a recompile of the same source code. Non-free software, however, is a problem because we don't have the source and therefore can't just recompile it. So, free stuff tends to work just fine on 64-bit Linux, but non-free stuff is dodgy precisely because it's non-free. The issue with Flash is an indication of this.
And, if you'll think back to the days of download.com et al, where adware and spyware were routinely embedded in software offered for public download through a seemingly respectable and authoritative site -- it took some training and cleverness to safely use a Windows machine, download useful applications, and avoid all malware. Kazaa and most of the other P2P programs had spyware. Regardless of whether XP SP2 hardened Windows into an electronic Fort Knox, those older machines are still around, being used by uninformed users and reckless kids, gleefully spewing spam onto the internet. The vast majority of PC users don't know how to keep a machine clean. (Interestingly, Ubuntu's package management system safely avoids most of this trouble.)
As I understood it, the portion of code Netscape open-sourced didn't really even compile into a browser. Netscape was in the middle of rewriting all their own stuff in Java (of all things) already, so the codebase was incomplete and neglected. Mozilla managed to extract Bugzilla and some other interesting stuff, but they did not throw away a functioning browser implementation; they cannibalized a mostly abandoned codebase and used what they thought they could.
Food for thought: Imagine how different it would be if Netscape had been written in Lisp, with Lisp naturally also replacing Javascript as the extension language. (Or, slightly more realistically, if Smalltalk had won out over Java, with similar results.) Discuss.
But you would also have to do away with the FDA and let people be free and responsible for what they put in their body. But that's just me.
The danger of drugs, and the reason the FDA exists, is that nobody knows what new chemicals will do inside the human body until they've been tested. The most spectacular medical disasters aren't usually the result of malice, but ignorance -- insufficient testing. Clinical trials are the reason drugs cost insane amounts of money, and there's no other acceptable way to judge a drug's safety and efficacy than to actually use it in a controlled experiment with a large sample size.
The U.S. legislature was strongly opposed to regulating industry until the Elixir Sulfanilimide tragedy forced the issue. Sulfanilamide was a popular drug used to streptococcal infections in the first half of the 20th century. It worked, but it originally came as a pill or powder, which was distasteful to children. A well-respected drug company, S.E. Massengill, determined that a liquid form would be a popular with kids and southerners, so they tasked a chemist with creating the Elixir. The chemist, Harold Cole Watkins, dissolved the drug in diethylene glycol (normally an antifreeze), did some quick tests for aesthetics, including small amounts for taste, and sent the result straight to manufacturing. The time from concept to market was about 3 months.
Diethylene glycol is deadly poison in the amounts prescribed for the Elixir, and this detail wasn't noticed until the product had already been purchased, prescribed, and used by over a hundred people across the country. Massengill Inc. sent out letters to the various drug stores asking for the product to be returned, and then another round of letters specifying that the recall was urgent, at the FDA's behest. It was essentially the FDA's work to ensure that 100% of the product was recalled from stores.
Since the product was designed to be kid-friendly, most of the deaths were, of course, children. There was one more death, too: the chemist who had designed the Elixir committed suicide. Massengill Inc. asserted that they had followed regulations throughout the incident, and though the results were regrettable, Massengill could not be blamed for the disaster.
Two decades later, a German drug company created a sedative called Thalidomide. The FDA allowed a small clinical trial in the U.S. but never approved the drug for sale; however, the drug was approved in many other countries and was marketed to pregnant women for morning sickness, and of course we have the right to travel to other countries and take advantage of the "miracle drugs" they have that we don't -- anyway, the drug generally causes flipper babies when taken by pregnant women, and affected about 10,000 children, mostly in Europe, between 1956 and 1962.
So, what was that about "free and responsible"? It is impossible to overestimate the unscrupulousness of commercial manufacturers. If they don't know something about a product, then we certainly can't, and so we're forced to rely on reputation. The only way to be responsible in the face of that is to avoid the products altogether, and that doesn't sound like a great solution either.
By the way, the USPTO also reserves the right to void a patent for the public good -- if there was an AIDS epidemic in the US the way there is in Brazil, India, South Africa, and so on, the U.S. could easily exercise that right. Is it legit for the Brazilian government to do the same for their own country? Yes, it just cheeses off the U.S. drug manufacturers.
Nope, he supreme court hasn't touched this case yet. The district court tossed the case out, Odom took it to the appeals court, the appeals court reinstated the case, and bloggers started writing in Latin.
The blame on the Supreme Court is presumably a reference to an earlier decision (on another case) that set a precedent, making it legally feasible to pursue this case under RICO. I haven't yet decoded which previous case they're referring to, though.
Brother, it's OK to chill sometimes. There are many ways to take that remark. To a Gnome or KDE user who doesn't know all the tricks for tweaking Macs, OS X seems like it's guided by strict rules. It's so... consistent. Of course OS X and Windows are both quite hackable, but they don't urge you to tweak them the way the main open-source desktop environments do. (Caveat -- Windows XP does compel me to spend hours modifying and adjusting it, but for different reasons.)
Macs have a "cathedral" feel to them. Non-native apps are easy to spot. Other systems have a hack-at-will arrangement where most apps look neither out of place, nor particularly integrated, either. They just do, it's not personal.
And that's why Camino and Firefox are different concepts -- and also why Epiphany seems like a stillborn idea to me (sorry!).
Yes, that's how it used to work before music went digital. Record labels were abusive back then, too, and we still see the occasional case of some formerly well-known but now downtrodden artist suing a label for unpaid royalties. Not only are the contracts pretty hardball on artists at the time of signing, but labels also have the ability to illegally drop their end of the contract if the artist doesn't take off -- if you're not selling albums, you certainly don't have money to hire a lawyer, do you? Anyway.
The industry of identifying and distributing recorded music no longer requires the billions of dollars currently invested in it. Recording is cheaper than it's ever been -- not that that was responsible for most of the markup in the first place -- and the problem of distribution is more solved than the RIAA would care to discuss. If it weren't for the RIAA's additional efforts to stifle online and independent radio, and other forums for finding new music, that source of value in the industry would also be considerably leaner.
Now, identifying who's good and who sucks has value. We're used to seeing creative content spoonfed to consumers by some industry, since that's how music, movies, and print publishing have always been. But what about websites? The Web is a content industry that sprung up without an industry to be its cheerleader: You wouldn't expect a WWWAA to select the "best" websites for us, advertise them, and tack on a commission for the service -- and still be the primary way to access web pages. You can use a search engine, can't you? It should and will be the same with any digitized content, eventually. A combination of Musician's Friend and Google can effectively replace 95% of the existing recording industry.
However, musicians still often seem a little obsessed with the glamor of the old way. It's not as fun to tour in a beat-up van for years and know you'll never be on Cribs. That's not hot. We like watching a few lucky musicians become stupidly rich, then maybe realize they don't actually have that much in the bank and go broke 3 years later. The old content industry is much better at delivering tabloid material and meteoric rise-to-fame, crash-and-burn stories, the ones that let one-hit wonders live like Al Pacino in Scarface for exactly 18 months, nail twins, and burn their own mansions to the ground. That's why I learned guitar in the first place. It's probably why most people pay attention to popular music. We'll have more independent music in the new digital era, but we won't have the flagrant, unsustainable insanity that piques the public interest. E! will die.
Off the top of my head, it was something like: Warty Warthog (4.10) Hoary Hedgehog 5.04 Breezy Badger 5.10 Dapper Drake 6.06 Edgy Eft 6.10 Feisty Fawn 7.04 [Next: Gutsy Gibbon 7.10, though Glossy Gnu was considered]
Release dates are every 6 months, except in the case of Dapper Drake. Version numbers are Y.MM, so you can calculate back from today.
I think it's pretty straightforward to install a package in your home directory without admin permissions -- use dpkg if you have a.deb package.
I'm not sure it makes sense to install dubious software anywhere else without requiring su or sudo along the way. (I'm no sysadmin, just a home user.) If the goal is to install a program that other users can run, with no admin rights granted anywhere during installation or use, then put the program in your home folder and set the permissions to allow whoever else to also execute it.
Ignore the piracy->monopoly argument, young one. Microsoft has a monopoly because IBM had a monopoly before it, and (somewhat unintentionally) passed the torch. Once you have a monopoly in an industry that's too new for regulators to understand, it's easy enough to maintain it through anticompetitive practices, bundling, price-dumping (turning a blind eye to piracy), etc. Sorry, I shouldn't be replying to this, just poke around on Wikipedia for the history.
He mentions how he got around this with Judge Nault, where the brief was scanned by the courthouse. He planted a key phrase in the brief (that would probably piss off the judge if he actually read it), then asked an ambiguous question during the hearing to see if the judge understands. The judge doesn't.
From the brief:
Next time I'm in court I'll ask about a word to make sure you read this motion all the way through, and the word is computer.
After that motion was denied, he asks the same judge at his next court appearance:
BENNETT HASELTON: So what was the word on that other motion?
JUDGE NAULT: The other one, I just said I would review it...
If the judge had actually read the brief, the response would instead have been, "Oh, about that. I'm going to grind you into salt for that, you little bastard." So it's clear that the judge did not read the brief.
Yep, the experiment looks like the scientists set out to test a hypothesis, not just to have a look-see. Surely they suspected that since humans historically kept themselves to small, isolated tribes, while chimps constantly bred, spread and warred,the result would look like this -- but showing it in a published study would get the press riled up and maybe make a point to the layfolk who generally imagine evolution as a directed progression from ape to human.
So, picture how well this one's going to slide into Kansas schoolbooks: Humans actually aren't descended from chimps -- chimps are descended from us.
SVG has an overly complicated spec due to some of Adobe's own chicanery on the standardization committee once upon a time. Then a "core" subset of the specification was defined, and I believe that's what we're supposed to implement if we don't have the patience/money to support the whole gnarly thing. Quite a few apps have support for at least some of the standard, including Mozilla, Inkscape, and even Microsoft Visio (Visio's support is a little odd; I assume the original developers snuck it in before Microsoft bought them).
It would take off if the standard had full support from the major players, particularly Microsoft. Unfortunately, the standard has instead been more of a target for sabotage by uncooperative corporations.
More specifically:
Microsoft already has an infrastructure for creating an abusive lock-in situation, and the ability to leverage its monopoly status in one area to gain an unfair advantage in another area. Windows and Internet Explorer have huge market dominance and are completely proprietary, rather than borrowing existing standards -- not that that's evil by itself, but it allows the single vendor of these products to change the infrastructure at will and force the market to follow. Windows Live, Vista and IE7 are being marketed to function as a complete, closed unit controlled by Microsoft. Successfully buying a strong position in the online advertising industry adds another piece to this closed infrastructure and allows Microsoft to essentially force online advertisers to conform to this framework, or risk losing access to the majority of the market. A corporation's sole responsibility is to create value for its stockholders without getting nailed by the SEC, and Microsoft has created its business such that the best way to create this value is by using its monopoly position and lock-in tactics. So that's what they'll do.
Google does not have this framework in place, and has no infrastructure to create vendor lock-in. Every one of Google's popular web apps allows an easy out -- Gmail is easy to export, using a different search engine is trivial, and web mapping services are now essentially a commodity. If you don't like AdSense, there are plenty of other ad networks to go with (including Microsoft's fledgling), and there's no significant barrier to joining or leaving. Google succeeds because its search is reliable, its mail client is simple and useful, and AdSense is dead simple to use. There was no passing of the monopoly torch in its early days, no set of proprietary protocols, and no long-time company strategy of creating lock-in as the basis for extracting profit. The strategy instead is to be useful, ubiquitous, and unimposing. The Google empire will collapse as soon as it starts to suck; right now it's far from sucking, and Google benefits most from easy access, open networks and standard protocols. So that's what they'll fight to maintain.
And yes, Virginia, there is such a thing as corporate culture. Executives bring aboard managers who think like themselves, and so an organization does tend to resemble its leaders throughout -- at least on the upper half. These folks entrench themselves, and so companies rarely change once the culture's established, until their finances go to hell and they're dismanteled. Microsoft has a predatory leadership that believes very strongly in maintaining closed standards; Google managed to keep a tech-startup mentality in its leadership, so they'll push for easy access and a constant shuffling of other startups and new technologies. I think this recent media-sprawling we've seen of Google is the effect of trying to predict and block Microsoft's strategy of swooping into the content-ownership world and eventually owning all the distribution channels.
Thanks for the link. But why don't other text editors choke on it, too? I tried the same file with gVim, and a commenter on Raymond's blog mentioned Emacs and Wordpad, with no ill effects.
They still keep encyclopedias and almanacs in public school libraries. Even before Wikipedia existed, kids still had to figure out the technique of looking in encyclopedias for an overview of a topic, sketching out some sub-topics and areas for research, and then rifling through the card catalog to find some dusty old hardcovers that are worth putting into a bibliography. Wikipedia's the same thing, but faster, and still more reliable than random Googling, which is what kids will actually do as the alternative.
Suspicions: Either (1) some zealot on the school got really worked up about the idea of an online encyclopedia that anyone can edit, even pedophiles and other children!!!, or (2) someone very anxious asked an underqualified lawyer about how to handle user-generated content online, and lawyer said, "Block it all, and you won't have to even think about it," or (3) someone discovered that there's a Wikipedia entry for the word Fuck.
Of course, now that the teachers can't check Wikipedia either, it's slightly more of a pain for them to check for plagiarism in papers, or do some quick fact-checking before class on a topic that the textbook skims over. Then again, there's really no problem at all, since Answers.com and Reference.com both copy Wikipedia articles verbatim -- as random Googling quickly shows.
That's what leads me to believe that almost-freezing development on IE and Windows gave Microsoft an interesting sort of business advantage during the past 6 years. It gave enough time for users and developers to "standardize" on IE6 and WinXP, so younger corporate environments came to expect that they'd always be available -- web devs learned all the workarounds for IE6, and off-web devs were able to get away with assuming NT/IE availability. The path of least resistance in the boring sort of IT became deeply settled into an environment with these slow-moving targets.
Of course, Firefox became popular enough to break the lock on browser space, and Vista is different enough from XP to effectively break that monopoly, too. So the disadvantage to becoming a slow-moving target is that it's difficult to speed up again. Corporate customers will hang onto their MS contracts for decades, because that's what bureaucracies do, but the folks Paul Graham cares about carry Macbooks for personal use and use Linux/BSD/Solaris for everything else. The market cares about what succeeds, and these folks are the ones succeeding.
Also, keep in mind that Microsoft is much less entrenched outside the US. With capital investment in the EU now greater than that in the US, it's possible for MS to look alive and well within corporate America and stone-dead to the majority of the world. Look at the price of MSFT stock over the past 6 years -- it's frozen in the $20-$30 range, not even keeping up with inflation. In contrast, the Russell 3000 index of tech companies has roughly doubled in value during that time. Investors care about the factual outcome of Microsoft more than any blogger, and they're saying it's going nowhere.
Yeah, but come on. They threw the baby out with the bathwater.
It's curious how recently the writeoff was dumped. And dumped completely, rather than putting caps on the value of a writeoff or tinkering with the way a patent's value is calculated -- or working with the patent office to stop granting so many worthless patents. Clearly there's a public benefit in having companies release their unused patents; the knowledge is distributed and the free market can get to work immediately, rather than hanging around for the temporarily granted monopoly to expire.
Summoning the power of my tinfoil hat, I see the following:
After granting huge, high-profile tax cuts in the few years leading up to 2004, the Bush administration scrambled to make up some of the revenue shortage by eliminating more obscure deductions. The alternative minimum tax soaked up some of the change; donated-patent deductions were also sacrificed for the cause, along with many other things.
Until recently, Big Business liked having lots of patents lying around. The big players had (and have) huge war chests of patents -- so that licensing squabbles with other big players have an overtone of mutually assured destruction, keeping negotiations under control; to keep dangerous upstarts in line; to list as company assets for interested parties; because silver-haired WASPs grew up thinking of patents as The American Way. If Big Business decides to take on patent law, the patent law will change.
IBM would probably be fine with donating some of its patents to the FSF or a similar patent-lefting (hmm, doesn't sound as good as copylefting) nonprofit organization. Except that, as a big company involved in something as radically un-American as free sofware, they need a sufficiently deadly patent portfolio to ward off an IT monopolist that the US government refuses to bust because they feel that having an operating-system monopolist on US soil gives them technological dominion over the rest of the world.
Idle patents are not the problem that needs fixing; they're a symptom of having oo many low-value patents granted in the first place. But giving back the incentive to relinquish patents would be nice.
Meh, I think the letter was intended more for the general public rather than for Dell's eyes. Dell knows about OpenOffice, but it's not clear whether pre-installing OOo would give Dell a competitive edge (by decreasing reliance on MS Works and generating goodwill among certain IT folk) or be an unqualified disaster (via Microsoft's wrath, customer-support hell, etc). The letter sounds like OOo wants journalists, bloggers, curious IT lurkers, and money-conscious PC users to become interested in the issue of Dell supporting and benefiting from open-source software.
The option was always there, but now it's become a slightly more high-profile issue -- if there ever was a time for Joe Power User to start bugging Dell about default software configurations, it's now, in the wake of this IdeaStorm madness.
Personally, I think OOo has huge momentum behind it right now, and the current issue of it sucking a little right now will be resolved during the next year or so. Remember, Mozilla was a disaster for the first few years after Netscape begat it; they built tools like Bugzilla, poked at the remaining components, wept and gnashed their teeth for a couple more years, and then went about creating a framework to make the project feasible for the community to develop. OpenOffice looks to have been in a better shape to begin with, but I see they're going a similar route with UNO and the OpenDocument Toolkit Project -- so OpenOffice 2.x may feel like the bloaty, compatibility-beset Mozilla of yore, but there's a niche for a Firefox equivalent on the horizon.
Ubuntu and Debian steer clear of MP3 support and other patent/licensing minefields in order to stay relatively "pure" in the GNU sense. It's legal to have the other stuff on there, and that's why more multimedia stuff is available in the Multiverse repositories. For example, Macromedia Flash on Linux exists and can be distributed in binary for free, but it isn't open-source, so it's not part of the Ubuntu base system. There's nothing in the GPL that says you can't run proprietary and Free software together.
I haven't tried Freespire/Linspire, but I think they basically toss the ideology and put a lot of handy non-GPL stuff into their distro to make it more usable out of the box. Dell would probably want to go that route and resell support contracts back to Linspire, Canonical, Novell or whomever. Although if they wanted to slap a bunch of trialware onto the system as usual then they could even roll their own distro and just not offer support contracts for it.
As others have pointed out: No. What you said only applies to trademarks.
Patents are solid until they expire, whether or not anyone knows that the patent exists -- hence, patent trolls.
And copyrights are a pain to archivists because of the incredibly long lifespan of copyrights in the U.S. and many other countries: The original owner of a work from 1925 may be unreachable, unconcerned or dead, but by default everything is protected by copyright, so it's illegal to duplicate, restore or otherwise preserve an abandoned work without explicit permission from the owner.
I was going to say...What would happen if we all started replying with the same auto generated mails? How would the spammers tell the difference from legit spam replies?
Sure, it'd be pretty tedious to do that by hand, but if we automated the process somehow...
I imagine that if you ran a script by yourself, your e-mail address would be targeted as belonging to a valid sucker, and passed around on lists, so you'd be spammed even more. The efforts of a scrappy community of geeks are no match for the millions of pwned PCs around the world.
Agreed. Former Windows users tend to crash and burn on Linux the first time they try to install new programs -- go to a website, download the.deb or.tar.gz, double-click it, see unhelpful things happen, Google for what the hell to do next, and the nightmare continues. I had to apply numerous beatings to my sister before she would learn to always try Synaptic first.
But I see the closed-source capability as a Good Thing. I like writing and using open-source software, but I want the software industry to keep breathing even after the revolution comes. There's a place in the world for a company that organizes smart developers and creates a great product for a reasonable price -- and with CNR, it's much easier for those products to coexist with Free software on a Linux system. I, for one, don't want software companies (especially game makers) to feel unwelcome on Linux.
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Well, I doubt Mozilla was the one dragging their feet about implementing the toolbar. I imagine the scene was a few Moz developers sitting in meeting with a few of eBay's PHBs for a few weeks, explaining what a Firefox add-on is while eBay's folks asked how they can embed more ads in the toolbar and maybe make it report user browsing information back to eBay.
I imagine the Moz devs felt a bit embarrassed for themselves, having wasted those weeks in meetings with nothing to show for it, but I don't think anyone doubts that Mozilla developers can code.
Open-source software is relatively easy to port to a 64-bit architecture; most of the time it's just a recompile of the same source code. Non-free software, however, is a problem because we don't have the source and therefore can't just recompile it. So, free stuff tends to work just fine on 64-bit Linux, but non-free stuff is dodgy precisely because it's non-free. The issue with Flash is an indication of this.
And, if you'll think back to the days of download.com et al, where adware and spyware were routinely embedded in software offered for public download through a seemingly respectable and authoritative site -- it took some training and cleverness to safely use a Windows machine, download useful applications, and avoid all malware. Kazaa and most of the other P2P programs had spyware. Regardless of whether XP SP2 hardened Windows into an electronic Fort Knox, those older machines are still around, being used by uninformed users and reckless kids, gleefully spewing spam onto the internet. The vast majority of PC users don't know how to keep a machine clean. (Interestingly, Ubuntu's package management system safely avoids most of this trouble.)
As I understood it, the portion of code Netscape open-sourced didn't really even compile into a browser. Netscape was in the middle of rewriting all their own stuff in Java (of all things) already, so the codebase was incomplete and neglected. Mozilla managed to extract Bugzilla and some other interesting stuff, but they did not throw away a functioning browser implementation; they cannibalized a mostly abandoned codebase and used what they thought they could.
Food for thought: Imagine how different it would be if Netscape had been written in Lisp, with Lisp naturally also replacing Javascript as the extension language. (Or, slightly more realistically, if Smalltalk had won out over Java, with similar results.) Discuss.
The danger of drugs, and the reason the FDA exists, is that nobody knows what new chemicals will do inside the human body until they've been tested. The most spectacular medical disasters aren't usually the result of malice, but ignorance -- insufficient testing. Clinical trials are the reason drugs cost insane amounts of money, and there's no other acceptable way to judge a drug's safety and efficacy than to actually use it in a controlled experiment with a large sample size.
The U.S. legislature was strongly opposed to regulating industry until the Elixir Sulfanilimide tragedy forced the issue. Sulfanilamide was a popular drug used to streptococcal infections in the first half of the 20th century. It worked, but it originally came as a pill or powder, which was distasteful to children. A well-respected drug company, S.E. Massengill, determined that a liquid form would be a popular with kids and southerners, so they tasked a chemist with creating the Elixir. The chemist, Harold Cole Watkins, dissolved the drug in diethylene glycol (normally an antifreeze), did some quick tests for aesthetics, including small amounts for taste, and sent the result straight to manufacturing. The time from concept to market was about 3 months.
Diethylene glycol is deadly poison in the amounts prescribed for the Elixir, and this detail wasn't noticed until the product had already been purchased, prescribed, and used by over a hundred people across the country. Massengill Inc. sent out letters to the various drug stores asking for the product to be returned, and then another round of letters specifying that the recall was urgent, at the FDA's behest. It was essentially the FDA's work to ensure that 100% of the product was recalled from stores.
Since the product was designed to be kid-friendly, most of the deaths were, of course, children. There was one more death, too: the chemist who had designed the Elixir committed suicide. Massengill Inc. asserted that they had followed regulations throughout the incident, and though the results were regrettable, Massengill could not be blamed for the disaster.
Two decades later, a German drug company created a sedative called Thalidomide. The FDA allowed a small clinical trial in the U.S. but never approved the drug for sale; however, the drug was approved in many other countries and was marketed to pregnant women for morning sickness, and of course we have the right to travel to other countries and take advantage of the "miracle drugs" they have that we don't -- anyway, the drug generally causes flipper babies when taken by pregnant women, and affected about 10,000 children, mostly in Europe, between 1956 and 1962.
So, what was that about "free and responsible"? It is impossible to overestimate the unscrupulousness of commercial manufacturers. If they don't know something about a product, then we certainly can't, and so we're forced to rely on reputation. The only way to be responsible in the face of that is to avoid the products altogether, and that doesn't sound like a great solution either.
By the way, the USPTO also reserves the right to void a patent for the public good -- if there was an AIDS epidemic in the US the way there is in Brazil, India, South Africa, and so on, the U.S. could easily exercise that right. Is it legit for the Brazilian government to do the same for their own country? Yes, it just cheeses off the U.S. drug manufacturers.
Nope, he supreme court hasn't touched this case yet. The district court tossed the case out, Odom took it to the appeals court, the appeals court reinstated the case, and bloggers started writing in Latin.
The blame on the Supreme Court is presumably a reference to an earlier decision (on another case) that set a precedent, making it legally feasible to pursue this case under RICO. I haven't yet decoded which previous case they're referring to, though.
Brother, it's OK to chill sometimes. There are many ways to take that remark. To a Gnome or KDE user who doesn't know all the tricks for tweaking Macs, OS X seems like it's guided by strict rules. It's so... consistent. Of course OS X and Windows are both quite hackable, but they don't urge you to tweak them the way the main open-source desktop environments do. (Caveat -- Windows XP does compel me to spend hours modifying and adjusting it, but for different reasons.)
Macs have a "cathedral" feel to them. Non-native apps are easy to spot. Other systems have a hack-at-will arrangement where most apps look neither out of place, nor particularly integrated, either. They just do, it's not personal.
And that's why Camino and Firefox are different concepts -- and also why Epiphany seems like a stillborn idea to me (sorry!).
Yes, that's how it used to work before music went digital. Record labels were abusive back then, too, and we still see the occasional case of some formerly well-known but now downtrodden artist suing a label for unpaid royalties. Not only are the contracts pretty hardball on artists at the time of signing, but labels also have the ability to illegally drop their end of the contract if the artist doesn't take off -- if you're not selling albums, you certainly don't have money to hire a lawyer, do you? Anyway.
The industry of identifying and distributing recorded music no longer requires the billions of dollars currently invested in it. Recording is cheaper than it's ever been -- not that that was responsible for most of the markup in the first place -- and the problem of distribution is more solved than the RIAA would care to discuss. If it weren't for the RIAA's additional efforts to stifle online and independent radio, and other forums for finding new music, that source of value in the industry would also be considerably leaner.
Now, identifying who's good and who sucks has value. We're used to seeing creative content spoonfed to consumers by some industry, since that's how music, movies, and print publishing have always been. But what about websites? The Web is a content industry that sprung up without an industry to be its cheerleader: You wouldn't expect a WWWAA to select the "best" websites for us, advertise them, and tack on a commission for the service -- and still be the primary way to access web pages. You can use a search engine, can't you?
It should and will be the same with any digitized content, eventually. A combination of Musician's Friend and Google can effectively replace 95% of the existing recording industry.
However, musicians still often seem a little obsessed with the glamor of the old way. It's not as fun to tour in a beat-up van for years and know you'll never be on Cribs. That's not hot. We like watching a few lucky musicians become stupidly rich, then maybe realize they don't actually have that much in the bank and go broke 3 years later. The old content industry is much better at delivering tabloid material and meteoric rise-to-fame, crash-and-burn stories, the ones that let one-hit wonders live like Al Pacino in Scarface for exactly 18 months, nail twins, and burn their own mansions to the ground. That's why I learned guitar in the first place. It's probably why most people pay attention to popular music. We'll have more independent music in the new digital era, but we won't have the flagrant, unsustainable insanity that piques the public interest. E! will die.
Off the top of my head, it was something like:
Warty Warthog (4.10)
Hoary Hedgehog 5.04
Breezy Badger 5.10
Dapper Drake 6.06
Edgy Eft 6.10
Feisty Fawn 7.04
[Next: Gutsy Gibbon 7.10, though Glossy Gnu was considered]
Release dates are every 6 months, except in the case of Dapper Drake. Version numbers are Y.MM, so you can calculate back from today.
I think it's pretty straightforward to install a package in your home directory without admin permissions -- use dpkg if you have a .deb package.
I'm not sure it makes sense to install dubious software anywhere else without requiring su or sudo along the way. (I'm no sysadmin, just a home user.) If the goal is to install a program that other users can run, with no admin rights granted anywhere during installation or use, then put the program in your home folder and set the permissions to allow whoever else to also execute it.
Ignore the piracy->monopoly argument, young one. Microsoft has a monopoly because IBM had a monopoly before it, and (somewhat unintentionally) passed the torch. Once you have a monopoly in an industry that's too new for regulators to understand, it's easy enough to maintain it through anticompetitive practices, bundling, price-dumping (turning a blind eye to piracy), etc. Sorry, I shouldn't be replying to this, just poke around on Wikipedia for the history.
He mentions how he got around this with Judge Nault, where the brief was scanned by the courthouse. He planted a key phrase in the brief (that would probably piss off the judge if he actually read it), then asked an ambiguous question during the hearing to see if the judge understands. The judge doesn't.
From the brief:
After that motion was denied, he asks the same judge at his next court appearance:
If the judge had actually read the brief, the response would instead have been, "Oh, about that. I'm going to grind you into salt for that, you little bastard." So it's clear that the judge did not read the brief.
Yep, the experiment looks like the scientists set out to test a hypothesis, not just to have a look-see. Surely they suspected that since humans historically kept themselves to small, isolated tribes, while chimps constantly bred, spread and warred,the result would look like this -- but showing it in a published study would get the press riled up and maybe make a point to the layfolk who generally imagine evolution as a directed progression from ape to human.
So, picture how well this one's going to slide into Kansas schoolbooks: Humans actually aren't descended from chimps -- chimps are descended from us.
SVG has an overly complicated spec due to some of Adobe's own chicanery on the standardization committee once upon a time. Then a "core" subset of the specification was defined, and I believe that's what we're supposed to implement if we don't have the patience/money to support the whole gnarly thing. Quite a few apps have support for at least some of the standard, including Mozilla, Inkscape, and even Microsoft Visio (Visio's support is a little odd; I assume the original developers snuck it in before Microsoft bought them).
It would take off if the standard had full support from the major players, particularly Microsoft. Unfortunately, the standard has instead been more of a target for sabotage by uncooperative corporations.
More specifically: Microsoft already has an infrastructure for creating an abusive lock-in situation, and the ability to leverage its monopoly status in one area to gain an unfair advantage in another area. Windows and Internet Explorer have huge market dominance and are completely proprietary, rather than borrowing existing standards -- not that that's evil by itself, but it allows the single vendor of these products to change the infrastructure at will and force the market to follow. Windows Live, Vista and IE7 are being marketed to function as a complete, closed unit controlled by Microsoft. Successfully buying a strong position in the online advertising industry adds another piece to this closed infrastructure and allows Microsoft to essentially force online advertisers to conform to this framework, or risk losing access to the majority of the market. A corporation's sole responsibility is to create value for its stockholders without getting nailed by the SEC, and Microsoft has created its business such that the best way to create this value is by using its monopoly position and lock-in tactics. So that's what they'll do. Google does not have this framework in place, and has no infrastructure to create vendor lock-in. Every one of Google's popular web apps allows an easy out -- Gmail is easy to export, using a different search engine is trivial, and web mapping services are now essentially a commodity. If you don't like AdSense, there are plenty of other ad networks to go with (including Microsoft's fledgling), and there's no significant barrier to joining or leaving. Google succeeds because its search is reliable, its mail client is simple and useful, and AdSense is dead simple to use. There was no passing of the monopoly torch in its early days, no set of proprietary protocols, and no long-time company strategy of creating lock-in as the basis for extracting profit. The strategy instead is to be useful, ubiquitous, and unimposing. The Google empire will collapse as soon as it starts to suck; right now it's far from sucking, and Google benefits most from easy access, open networks and standard protocols. So that's what they'll fight to maintain. And yes, Virginia, there is such a thing as corporate culture. Executives bring aboard managers who think like themselves, and so an organization does tend to resemble its leaders throughout -- at least on the upper half. These folks entrench themselves, and so companies rarely change once the culture's established, until their finances go to hell and they're dismanteled. Microsoft has a predatory leadership that believes very strongly in maintaining closed standards; Google managed to keep a tech-startup mentality in its leadership, so they'll push for easy access and a constant shuffling of other startups and new technologies. I think this recent media-sprawling we've seen of Google is the effect of trying to predict and block Microsoft's strategy of swooping into the content-ownership world and eventually owning all the distribution channels.
This being UCSC, they probably used both in equal amounts. It's like Night of the Living Dead over there.
Thanks for the link. But why don't other text editors choke on it, too? I tried the same file with gVim, and a commenter on Raymond's blog mentioned Emacs and Wordpad, with no ill effects.
They still keep encyclopedias and almanacs in public school libraries. Even before Wikipedia existed, kids still had to figure out the technique of looking in encyclopedias for an overview of a topic, sketching out some sub-topics and areas for research, and then rifling through the card catalog to find some dusty old hardcovers that are worth putting into a bibliography. Wikipedia's the same thing, but faster, and still more reliable than random Googling, which is what kids will actually do as the alternative.
Suspicions: Either (1) some zealot on the school got really worked up about the idea of an online encyclopedia that anyone can edit, even pedophiles and other children!!!, or (2) someone very anxious asked an underqualified lawyer about how to handle user-generated content online, and lawyer said, "Block it all, and you won't have to even think about it," or (3) someone discovered that there's a Wikipedia entry for the word Fuck.
Of course, now that the teachers can't check Wikipedia either, it's slightly more of a pain for them to check for plagiarism in papers, or do some quick fact-checking before class on a topic that the textbook skims over. Then again, there's really no problem at all, since Answers.com and Reference.com both copy Wikipedia articles verbatim -- as random Googling quickly shows.
That's what leads me to believe that almost-freezing development on IE and Windows gave Microsoft an interesting sort of business advantage during the past 6 years. It gave enough time for users and developers to "standardize" on IE6 and WinXP, so younger corporate environments came to expect that they'd always be available -- web devs learned all the workarounds for IE6, and off-web devs were able to get away with assuming NT/IE availability. The path of least resistance in the boring sort of IT became deeply settled into an environment with these slow-moving targets.
Of course, Firefox became popular enough to break the lock on browser space, and Vista is different enough from XP to effectively break that monopoly, too. So the disadvantage to becoming a slow-moving target is that it's difficult to speed up again. Corporate customers will hang onto their MS contracts for decades, because that's what bureaucracies do, but the folks Paul Graham cares about carry Macbooks for personal use and use Linux/BSD/Solaris for everything else. The market cares about what succeeds, and these folks are the ones succeeding.
Also, keep in mind that Microsoft is much less entrenched outside the US. With capital investment in the EU now greater than that in the US, it's possible for MS to look alive and well within corporate America and stone-dead to the majority of the world. Look at the price of MSFT stock over the past 6 years -- it's frozen in the $20-$30 range, not even keeping up with inflation. In contrast, the Russell 3000 index of tech companies has roughly doubled in value during that time. Investors care about the factual outcome of Microsoft more than any blogger, and they're saying it's going nowhere.
Fact: Microsoft is dead.
Yeah, but come on. They threw the baby out with the bathwater.
It's curious how recently the writeoff was dumped. And dumped completely, rather than putting caps on the value of a writeoff or tinkering with the way a patent's value is calculated -- or working with the patent office to stop granting so many worthless patents. Clearly there's a public benefit in having companies release their unused patents; the knowledge is distributed and the free market can get to work immediately, rather than hanging around for the temporarily granted monopoly to expire.
Summoning the power of my tinfoil hat, I see the following:
Meh, I think the letter was intended more for the general public rather than for Dell's eyes. Dell knows about OpenOffice, but it's not clear whether pre-installing OOo would give Dell a competitive edge (by decreasing reliance on MS Works and generating goodwill among certain IT folk) or be an unqualified disaster (via Microsoft's wrath, customer-support hell, etc). The letter sounds like OOo wants journalists, bloggers, curious IT lurkers, and money-conscious PC users to become interested in the issue of Dell supporting and benefiting from open-source software.
The option was always there, but now it's become a slightly more high-profile issue -- if there ever was a time for Joe Power User to start bugging Dell about default software configurations, it's now, in the wake of this IdeaStorm madness.
Personally, I think OOo has huge momentum behind it right now, and the current issue of it sucking a little right now will be resolved during the next year or so. Remember, Mozilla was a disaster for the first few years after Netscape begat it; they built tools like Bugzilla, poked at the remaining components, wept and gnashed their teeth for a couple more years, and then went about creating a framework to make the project feasible for the community to develop. OpenOffice looks to have been in a better shape to begin with, but I see they're going a similar route with UNO and the OpenDocument Toolkit Project -- so OpenOffice 2.x may feel like the bloaty, compatibility-beset Mozilla of yore, but there's a niche for a Firefox equivalent on the horizon.
Ubuntu and Debian steer clear of MP3 support and other patent/licensing minefields in order to stay relatively "pure" in the GNU sense. It's legal to have the other stuff on there, and that's why more multimedia stuff is available in the Multiverse repositories. For example, Macromedia Flash on Linux exists and can be distributed in binary for free, but it isn't open-source, so it's not part of the Ubuntu base system. There's nothing in the GPL that says you can't run proprietary and Free software together.
I haven't tried Freespire/Linspire, but I think they basically toss the ideology and put a lot of handy non-GPL stuff into their distro to make it more usable out of the box. Dell would probably want to go that route and resell support contracts back to Linspire, Canonical, Novell or whomever. Although if they wanted to slap a bunch of trialware onto the system as usual then they could even roll their own distro and just not offer support contracts for it.
As others have pointed out: No. What you said only applies to trademarks.
Patents are solid until they expire, whether or not anyone knows that the patent exists -- hence, patent trolls.
And copyrights are a pain to archivists because of the incredibly long lifespan of copyrights in the U.S. and many other countries: The original owner of a work from 1925 may be unreachable, unconcerned or dead, but by default everything is protected by copyright, so it's illegal to duplicate, restore or otherwise preserve an abandoned work without explicit permission from the owner.
Sure, it'd be pretty tedious to do that by hand, but if we automated the process somehow...
Oh, wait.
I imagine that if you ran a script by yourself, your e-mail address would be targeted as belonging to a valid sucker, and passed around on lists, so you'd be spammed even more. The efforts of a scrappy community of geeks are no match for the millions of pwned PCs around the world.
And I'm not sure what Sun had to do with the
Sun instigated it all by creating Java. See? It all ties back in.
Agreed. Former Windows users tend to crash and burn on Linux the first time they try to install new programs -- go to a website, download the .deb or .tar.gz, double-click it, see unhelpful things happen, Google for what the hell to do next, and the nightmare continues. I had to apply numerous beatings to my sister before she would learn to always try Synaptic first.
But I see the closed-source capability as a Good Thing. I like writing and using open-source software, but I want the software industry to keep breathing even after the revolution comes. There's a place in the world for a company that organizes smart developers and creates a great product for a reasonable price -- and with CNR, it's much easier for those products to coexist with Free software on a Linux system. I, for one, don't want software companies (especially game makers) to feel unwelcome on Linux.