(This probably won't be heard because no-one will be wasting mod points on this story any more, but here goes...)
Why did Europe bother suing MS? It's easy money. Microsoft can't put up as much of a case, and put as much pressure on the EU council members, there as it can in the US (for political reasons). And while $800 million may be a drop in MS's bucket, it's good money for the EU to use on its own projects. The EU is strapped for cash with all the new eastern european states coming in - any money it can get out of a big monopoly is a good thing.
Not that I see that as the main reason the case went ahead in Europe, BTW, but it's something to keep in mind.
The other problem is that 'taking [their] business elsewhere' has historically led to MS offering their products at a fraction of the cost to win back the business. As far as MS and its reserves of money are concerned, creating new products costs nothing; the far greater cost is in perceived marketshare. This is why Thailand gets a 99% off deal for Windows when it wants to move to Linux.
(That was a deal which would probably put a big spike in the illegal software market, since the bulk of products being distributed only run on MS products. So MS has done no-one any favours but itself by trying to keep that market alive.)
The real problem with MS is that it keeps 'leveraging' its products into new markets in underhanded ways, and at the same time ships under-developed products with major business problems (remember the MS Mail SMTP gateway?). They just aren't behaving like the fine, upstanding corporate citizen they could be.
If you look at some of the nifty and speedy C work - like Duff's device - implicit is the knowledge that you're working on an actual machine. Look at K&R's string copy code - the while (*s++ = *t++) also generates much more efficient assembly code than keeping a separate counter for your position in the string. I know (because I've programmed some 8086 assembly myself and used this instruction) that there's a specific instruction that makes such a piece of code execute in about two instructions!
If you'd programmed that without knowing what architecture you were working on, you probably wouldn't use such a construction because you wouldn't be sure that the compiler could optimise it. The flipside of this is that knowing what architecture you're programming on can, and should, affect your code.
The compiler might have a good idea of what registers it's used, and the chip itself might have branch prediction and clever pipeline filling logic, but you as a programmer (should) have a much better idea of how your code works than either.
However, this shouldn't stop people programming in high-level languages - the rich feature set and the portability more than makes up for the machine-code-ambivalence. And since a lot of OS projects end up executing on different architectures anyway, sacrificing portability for speed is not necessarily a good idea. But, fundamentally, I think knowing what architecture you're running on is highly important to writing good, slick code.
The same applies for file systems and other hardware. Try to write a program that can insert arbitrary quantities of data in the middle of the file without overwriting the surroundings using standard C operations - it just isn't possible. But if you know how the file system works and have the API handles, you can do it (somehow).
IANAL, but isn't there a part of the copyright process that says that if a person or company who owns the copyright on a thing fails to enforce it, or can be proven to only enforce it selectively, then they lose the right to enforce that copyright? Doesn't that apply here?
Wouldn't that mean that in countries like Australia and the UK, even if it is illegal to copy copyrighted works, the copyright holders have forfeited their right to enforce this because they have not been completely enforcing their own copyrights?
(Hopefully some moderator out there will notice this post...)
Although, the other main pressure on independent stores (with their eclectic, specialised collections and ability to order things) is the presence of big online CD stores like CD-Now and Amazon. Why go down to the record store only to be told "we don't have it, we can order it in but it'll take weeks" when you can go to an online store just about any time and they can instantly tell you whether they've got it in stock. And since they're effectively selling straight from the warehouse, they can have a massive catalogue instantly available.
I went to a record store here in Canberra to buy a 12" vinyl release. "Sorry, not in stock, we'll place the order," they said - in October! I still haven't received it. I could go right now to the online vinyl store in Australia and get them to send it to me and they would be guaranteeing it to get to me. None of this "if our distributor feels like doing it" stuff.
And that's why independent music stores are dying out...
Perhaps we could also get American travellers to wear something... a little yellow star, say, with the word American printed on it, you know, just in case, just so we know who they are.
You mean that their loud holiday shirts, obvious accents, lack of basic knowledge of the country they're visiting, and patronising manner isn't enough?
(Joking, of course - the few USAdians I've met on my travels have usually been the opposite of the National Lampoon stereotypes...)
Everyone vaguely into getting digital music knows Apple and iTunes now. As Steve Jobs implied, Apple is the brand that we associate with creative technology solutions. Like Amazon, Google or eBay, iTunes is getting to be the default, most popular option because it's well known and has a good range. The answer will simply be "Why go anywhere else?" When each of these smaller offerings has a tiny fraction of the range and is hard to use or offers bad service - and lets face it bad news goes around faster than good - who will want to take their chance with a new micro-distributor when you can go to iTunes (or get the music some other how).
Look at it another way. I don't shop online at any store that I also shop in person at. This is almost always because either the shopping interface sucks, they don't sell things online to my area (like fruit and veges), or the range of products is poor. So all these places that should have the money and the products to muscle in on anyone in the same field of business online is actually failing to do so. I know of several that have scaled back their online presence or cut it altogether after the initial fanfare.
So having a whole bunch of new players in the digital music distribution game pollutes the new players' names. I'm pretty sure that Apple will continue to hold its brand name high - and that it'll continue to make money out of iPods and other cool gear. Even if they're big brands or have big muscle, they'll never do as well as Apple in this regard.
IMO Microsoft has effectively kicked all its would-be helpers in the pants with this one.
In countries like Australia (where I live), where it isn't offered. Sadly, with only 20 million people in the land, companies like Tivo say that it's unprofitable for them to try to produce an Australian model. So we have to make one ourselves out of bits of bared wire, fishhooks, soup cans and whatever comes to hand. This is why I'm interested in this thread!
I've also downloaded a trial version of ShowShifter and that comes with plug-ins for Australian programming. Since the TV card I have (LeadTek WinTV 2000 XP, fairly popular here) doesn't seem to be listed under the 'supported products' list of either ShowShifter, freevo or even Video4Linux, so on the whole it doesn't look very promising for us Antipodeans...
Wow, what a lot of work for so little real point. You spent half an hour faking evidence and a couple of minutes swearing in German. Gee, I can see just how valuable this must be to you. And for what?
I did this to prove a point -- Slashdot moderators are complete morons that don't even bother to read before they moderate.
Oh, no! Sound the alarms! Some of the moderators must be *gasp* human!
Big whoopee. So your puny attempts at witty rebuttal failed the last couple of times, and this time you wanted to get even. To prove, ultimately, that humans are not as reliable as we'd like to be.
So what? No-one ever claimed that the moderation system wouldn't be without errors, or bias, or political chicanery (of which you've given us a perfect example). At worst, moderators just behave like every other ordinary person, believing what they're told because it's easier than disbelieving.
Your point seems to me to be similar to that russian 'wonderkid' who 'cracked' the distributed.net RC5 system to submit a huge number of bogus results. He successfully gave the distributed.net people weeks of hassles - to appear first on the scores (how terribly unimportant) and to 'crack' a system that was never designed to be 'secure' in the first place. It's like opening the door to someone's house and saying "look, a burglar can get through here!"
Ultimately, Slashdot cannot be a useful source of news and opinion without moderation. There's just simply too much bandwidth taken up with idiots banging on their own private joy-buttons posting garbage that no-one wants to read. I, and most other Slashdot readers, take the risk of bad moderation because the information that the non-bad moderation leaves us with is useful.
Fleischmann and Pons thought they'd invented Cold Fusion, too, and that's been a feature on Slashdot. If we wanted an authoritative journal, we'd buy "Nature". We come to Slashdot to listen to the speculation and opinions as much as to hear the facts. All you've done in your puny attempt at 'revolution' is to successfully point out the weaknesses in the system that everyone already knows about.
Congratulations, you've just proved how useless and redundant your point really is.
Hmmm - I'm sure this is going to be a brain strain. Sorry, people, but I can't be bothered to hunt down the URLs for these. In no particular order:
The story of Mel, a Real Programmer. Here's a person who was programming in bubble memory, with every instruction having an implicit jump to somewhere else, and his loop apparently doesn't terminate - but it does...
The Voyager space probe. Rather than include a prewired processor, they used a generic microprocessor and included the ability to upload new software versions. In the time that the probe was flying out to Jupiter, they took the black and white image from the main camera, doubled its resolution and made it three colour. They had a hundred spare bytes of RAM at one point, and they wrote a simple object recognition algorithm that would take pictures of interesting things.
The Internet Worm. Ethical? Maybe not. Nice? Big no there. Clever? It had at least four methods of invading a system, and its only flaw was that the code that was supposed to limit its distribution didn't work. Great power-to-size ratio.
Public Key Encryption. I know it's not exactly a computer hack, but it's revolutionised the process of security and encryption. And the new matrix and polynomial curve methods that are in development will only further the ultimate end of privacy and authenticity in the digital domain.
PERL. The sheer scope of the hackery you can achieve in Perl defies description. A language where you can write entire programs without variables? Which can almost be written without use of alphabetic characters entirely? Which has singlehandedly shaped the dynamic content of the WWW? What else but PERL!
The login hack. I forget who perpetrated this, but his username/password combination would work on most UNIX systems up until around 1985 or so. The login program had extra code included to allow his username/password. To avoid that being hoed out, the C compiler had code to check if it was compiling the login program, and would include the code as necessary. To stop that being compiled out, the C compiler would check to see if it was compiling itself, and would include the code to modify itself, and the login program, if necessary. Ergo, it was impossible to remove without someone remaking a C compiler from scratch...
The Internet I know, it's very generic. But from a Military/University project, we now have the global, public, accessible network with open standards (most of the time). Every other attempt at this has failed; the one that succeeds is one not owned by some big telecommunications carrier, or, in fact, anyone:-)
Some of these have already been mentioned. Some, like Apollo 13 or Bletchley Park, I'm not going to repeat. Some others, like the transistor and the MP3, aren't really a 'hack' even though they've made a bit impact. And go the revolving statues!
Sorry, but you really do seem to have the Microsoft Blinkers on today, don't you?
Microsoft only has about a quarter of the world's web servers. They are decidedly an underdog.
Oh, and so therefore Microsoft's underhanded leveraging of its products is therefore OK? Microsoft stopping anyone using NT Workstation - functionally an identical product to NT Server - as a web server; they wanted people to have to install Server and thus bundle IIS in. Tim's point about the registry changes is not about the cost of the license or whatever, it's that Server is not somehow 'more powerful' or 'better equipped' for serving. It has exactly the same features as Workstation. So why charge five times the price for it? Marketing, that's why.
I just installed Win2k two days ago, and IIS was indeed an installation option. If I didn't want to use it, of course, I could always turn the bitch off...
Again, you're missing the point. Microsoft's strategy is simple here. Here's a sample internal dialogue from a new company getting started on the Internet:
Well, I want a web server. One that's powerful, fast, compliant with all the standards, and cheap. I could try installing Apache, or whatever, but IIS does come with NT. So why don't I just use that?
Microsoft is exploting the laziness of people to get their product used. Sure, IIS might be free, but I bet MS make their money back on copies of FrontPage and various IIS add-ons. This does NOT justify bundling. Bundling is, after all, one of the things that Judge Jackson noted was a prime Microsoft strategy to dominate markets.
I think you'd better go out and use some non-Microsoft products some time soon. It may freshen your viewpoint.
The Halloween documents talked of Microsoft finding ways to subvert public standards to promote their own products. I believe you can find a perfect example of this with Microsoft's Management Console.
MMC is the new 'wonder tool' for administration - one standard interface able to display a wide variety of information supplied by the server. (Gee, sounds like the web, doesn't it?) It relies very heavily on custom Active X controls, ASP and MS-Java. It requires IE5.0 to be installed (spot the bundling!). It vaguely uses HTTP, but breaks several standards, such as the URL forming rules. In short, there's no way that anyone else could supply a similar console using, say, Netscape.
So, once again, Microsoft is finding yet another way to ensure that its own products dominate the user base, and deliberately exclude competitors. But, most significantly, this is the standards perversion we had feared. Because, of course, you can't get a standalone program to manage those remote services (we're not just talking about NT here - MMC is required to maintain SQL, Exchange, and IIS).
So keep using Opera and Netscape - while you can...
There's one essential problem with your view here - your statement that the purchase price of a piece of software has " has nothing whatsoever to do with its development costs."
This is a fallacy - there are several ways of determining a price per unit:
Pick a run size, divide the total cost of producing the software (and packaging and CDs and etc...) by the size of the run and that gives you the price per unit.
Add in a percentage profit to the above calculation.
Add in a cost of development, maintenance and support of that product.
Add in a cost for developing and producing another piece of software which is the next product you will sell...
Increase or decrease the run size based on the size of the expected market for the product, what that market thinks is an appropriate value for that product, and so on.
This is the way most companies have to think of these things, because most people still buy software on a unit-by-unit basis (even a license fee for registering a free download is still a unit, and not an ongoing rental cost, for instance).
This is not to say I disagree with the rest of what you say - in fact I totally agree with your conclusions. The fact that I can take a copy of your data or programs and you won't know and won't lose your original fundamentally changes the way people have to look at ownership as a whole.
Once on-line distribution becomes commonplace (instead of the rarity it is now) we can hope that the price of software goes down. However, you cannot avoid the fact that you as a software programmer want to be paid for your work, simply because you no software programmer lives a fully money-independant lifestyle (do you grow your own food? Produce your own power? Own your own cost-free connection to the Internet? Etc...) As practically everyone else on this planet earns money by working, you probably think you should get the same deal. So software does cost money to produce (even if you then give it away - this sort of charity has put the FSF and Linux where it is today, don't forget).
So if data is copiable at negligable cost, how do I get paid for it? This is where software licenses come in. You buy a license from me to run a copy of my software - and plenty of shareware programs do this already. What's the cost? Well, significantly less than the traditional cost for software, because you haven't had to shell out for the production of multiple copies of physical media. But it still costs money, because you as the programmer still want to be reimbursed for your time.
Though I agree with the bulk of your arguments, Schwab, there are several fallacies in your reasoning. Fortunately, this doesn't change your intent, which is that we have to come up with a better paradigm of paying programmers and companies to produce the software we use than the one we currently have.
Good luck. The future of software may depend on it.
This not a new opinion, but I thought I'd add some more contemplation.
A multi-threading chip would be useless in a non-multi-threading environment (e.g. DOS). This sort of chip is responding to the prevalence of multi-threading multitasking operating systems and applications. Since the BeOS is the furthest anyone's gone to making an OS multithread and multitask, to my mind this chip would run the BeOS like teflon-coated lightning.
Think about it - the best way to get maximum performance out of this architecture is to have lots of 'small' threads, to have as many threads available for immediate execution should one stall. If there's any OS out there that is more comprehensively thread oriented (which leads to more application threading) it must be proprietary.
But enough of that pipe-dream - let's get back to reality. Be won't dedicate engineering efforts to a new chip whose market is unproven without backup. PC owners won't abandon their investment just for some pretty new architecture which is basically incompatible (as far as we know) with their existing hardware. And the whole thing will stagnate because no-one can start a market big enough to get the software backing (the Hardware-Software Paradox).
It's on the wish-list somewhere, but I'm not selling the Celeron just yet.
"Hmmm - I wonder how good the Indian Ocean link is. Because we could always just cut the U.S.A. out of the link completely. Let them sort it out and connect them up once they want the rest of the world back."
I fear this sort of thing - it produces yet another block of mindless statistics, generates more FUD against the Internet and the whole reason we should be getting computers to talk to eachother in the first place, and serves only to increase the importance of the watchers at the expense of the watched.
Leave aside methods of IP forging and misdirection, and the possibility of abuse by hackers and corrupt agencies. You've still got the threat hanging over your head. The FBI might not have any power over me as an Australian Citizen directly, but no doubt ASIO would love to help its big brother, and even if I was immune to that pressure, there's always the people I've been talking to, and the servers they run, and...
Write to your congressman. Do everything in your power to point out the futility of the Big Brother mentality. The best argument is to ask to see their records on public display. After all, if you knew who a terrorist was, wouldn't it be easier if you could use FIDNET's tools? No big surprise that this doesn't appeal to them...
AFAICS, you people in the USA have a problem. How to stop the mentality of blame and mistrust in your government that is crippling your education, legal, communications and health systems, and turn it around into productive work. I don't have the solutions - you'll have to do the best you can.
Has anyone thought about building into the protocols a method of charging for your services? The Distributed.net challenge has an uncertain payout - most of the reason to put more computers on the case seems to be just to score higher than everyone else - but it's also a 'charity' thing. We're donating time to a research project.
For commercial applications, I think the intangible benefit of putting your computer on the net for someone else to use is almost nonexistent. The company is making money out of using your computer - why shouldn't you make some money in return? I think that it shouldn't be too difficult to arrange some scheme where you can get some monetary benefit (credits at internet stores, payments to an internet bank, or even money banked to a normal bank).
There are lots of issues here - maybe I'll write them up on my own pages. Email me (after taking out the anti-spam part of my address) with your thoughts!
As revealed in the Halloween documents, one strategy of MS is to pervert 'standardised' protocols used on the Internet to prevent entry of competitors into the market. This sort of thing has been proposed in the past, and there's gotta be an RFC about connecting low-complexity devices via a simple interface.
It's fairly easy to envision: MS and its allies in this venture write a proprietary extension of one of the standard protocols (Telnet? HTTP? SNMP?) and keep the specs to themselves. No-one else can make devices which communicate with their control programs, or make programs which communicate with their devices, because the standard's secret. This gouges other competitors out of the market because the blind consumer (who naively thinks that 'standardisation is a good thing') won't buy a product which isn't compatible.
Interesting Point: As we've seen with the ICQ chat protocol, people have been clever enough to packet-sniff the protocol and produce an open specification. Decoding people's proprietary programs is difficult, esp. when they start getting tricky, but there's little you can do about packet-sniffers, except maybe encryption. And then you'd be exporting munitions under the good ol' US of A's mindless export laws.
Slashdot Mirror
(This probably won't be heard because no-one will be wasting mod points on this story any more, but here goes...)
Why did Europe bother suing MS? It's easy money. Microsoft can't put up as much of a case, and put as much pressure on the EU council members, there as it can in the US (for political reasons). And while $800 million may be a drop in MS's bucket, it's good money for the EU to use on its own projects. The EU is strapped for cash with all the new eastern european states coming in - any money it can get out of a big monopoly is a good thing.
Not that I see that as the main reason the case went ahead in Europe, BTW, but it's something to keep in mind.
The other problem is that 'taking [their] business elsewhere' has historically led to MS offering their products at a fraction of the cost to win back the business. As far as MS and its reserves of money are concerned, creating new products costs nothing; the far greater cost is in perceived marketshare. This is why Thailand gets a 99% off deal for Windows when it wants to move to Linux.
(That was a deal which would probably put a big spike in the illegal software market, since the bulk of products being distributed only run on MS products. So MS has done no-one any favours but itself by trying to keep that market alive.)
The real problem with MS is that it keeps 'leveraging' its products into new markets in underhanded ways, and at the same time ships under-developed products with major business problems (remember the MS Mail SMTP gateway?). They just aren't behaving like the fine, upstanding corporate citizen they could be.
JM$0.45W.
Paul
I'd agree with this - in principal.
If you look at some of the nifty and speedy C work - like Duff's device - implicit is the knowledge that you're working on an actual machine. Look at K&R's string copy code - the while (*s++ = *t++) also generates much more efficient assembly code than keeping a separate counter for your position in the string. I know (because I've programmed some 8086 assembly myself and used this instruction) that there's a specific instruction that makes such a piece of code execute in about two instructions!
If you'd programmed that without knowing what architecture you were working on, you probably wouldn't use such a construction because you wouldn't be sure that the compiler could optimise it. The flipside of this is that knowing what architecture you're programming on can, and should, affect your code.
The compiler might have a good idea of what registers it's used, and the chip itself might have branch prediction and clever pipeline filling logic, but you as a programmer (should) have a much better idea of how your code works than either.
However, this shouldn't stop people programming in high-level languages - the rich feature set and the portability more than makes up for the machine-code-ambivalence. And since a lot of OS projects end up executing on different architectures anyway, sacrificing portability for speed is not necessarily a good idea. But, fundamentally, I think knowing what architecture you're running on is highly important to writing good, slick code.
The same applies for file systems and other hardware. Try to write a program that can insert arbitrary quantities of data in the middle of the file without overwriting the surroundings using standard C operations - it just isn't possible. But if you know how the file system works and have the API handles, you can do it (somehow).
join('',map programmer{$_}, @world).
Paul
IANAL, but isn't there a part of the copyright process that says that if a person or company who owns the copyright on a thing fails to enforce it, or can be proven to only enforce it selectively, then they lose the right to enforce that copyright? Doesn't that apply here?
Wouldn't that mean that in countries like Australia and the UK, even if it is illegal to copy copyrighted works, the copyright holders have forfeited their right to enforce this because they have not been completely enforcing their own copyrights?
(Hopefully some moderator out there will notice this post...)
Have fun,
Paul
Although, the other main pressure on independent stores (with their eclectic, specialised collections and ability to order things) is the presence of big online CD stores like CD-Now and Amazon. Why go down to the record store only to be told "we don't have it, we can order it in but it'll take weeks" when you can go to an online store just about any time and they can instantly tell you whether they've got it in stock. And since they're effectively selling straight from the warehouse, they can have a massive catalogue instantly available.
I went to a record store here in Canberra to buy a 12" vinyl release. "Sorry, not in stock, we'll place the order," they said - in October! I still haven't received it. I could go right now to the online vinyl store in Australia and get them to send it to me and they would be guaranteeing it to get to me. None of this "if our distributor feels like doing it" stuff.
And that's why independent music stores are dying out...
Paul
Haven't you worked it out yet?
When she gets to the second red pill, it's time. This doesn't help you anyway, since watching the countdown and observing the symptoms is worse.
Still, it works for me. Flame me if you will, but I don't think this is sexist at all.
Paul
You mean that their loud holiday shirts, obvious accents, lack of basic knowledge of the country they're visiting, and patronising manner isn't enough?
(Joking, of course - the few USAdians I've met on my travels have usually been the opposite of the National Lampoon stereotypes...)
Paul
Personally I think this is good news.
Everyone vaguely into getting digital music knows Apple and iTunes now. As Steve Jobs implied, Apple is the brand that we associate with creative technology solutions. Like Amazon, Google or eBay, iTunes is getting to be the default, most popular option because it's well known and has a good range. The answer will simply be "Why go anywhere else?" When each of these smaller offerings has a tiny fraction of the range and is hard to use or offers bad service - and lets face it bad news goes around faster than good - who will want to take their chance with a new micro-distributor when you can go to iTunes (or get the music some other how).
Look at it another way. I don't shop online at any store that I also shop in person at. This is almost always because either the shopping interface sucks, they don't sell things online to my area (like fruit and veges), or the range of products is poor. So all these places that should have the money and the products to muscle in on anyone in the same field of business online is actually failing to do so. I know of several that have scaled back their online presence or cut it altogether after the initial fanfare.
So having a whole bunch of new players in the digital music distribution game pollutes the new players' names. I'm pretty sure that Apple will continue to hold its brand name high - and that it'll continue to make money out of iPods and other cool gear. Even if they're big brands or have big muscle, they'll never do as well as Apple in this regard.
IMO Microsoft has effectively kicked all its would-be helpers in the pants with this one.
Paul
In countries like Australia (where I live), where it isn't offered. Sadly, with only 20 million people in the land, companies like Tivo say that it's unprofitable for them to try to produce an Australian model. So we have to make one ourselves out of bits of bared wire, fishhooks, soup cans and whatever comes to hand. This is why I'm interested in this thread!
I've also downloaded a trial version of ShowShifter and that comes with plug-ins for Australian programming. Since the TV card I have (LeadTek WinTV 2000 XP, fairly popular here) doesn't seem to be listed under the 'supported products' list of either ShowShifter, freevo or even Video4Linux, so on the whole it doesn't look very promising for us Antipodeans...
Paul
I faked the whole thing.
Wow, what a lot of work for so little real point. You spent half an hour faking evidence and a couple of minutes swearing in German. Gee, I can see just how valuable this must be to you. And for what?
I did this to prove a point -- Slashdot moderators are complete morons that don't even bother to read before they moderate.
Oh, no! Sound the alarms! Some of the moderators must be *gasp* human!
Big whoopee. So your puny attempts at witty rebuttal failed the last couple of times, and this time you wanted to get even. To prove, ultimately, that humans are not as reliable as we'd like to be.
So what? No-one ever claimed that the moderation system wouldn't be without errors, or bias, or political chicanery (of which you've given us a perfect example). At worst, moderators just behave like every other ordinary person, believing what they're told because it's easier than disbelieving.
Your point seems to me to be similar to that russian 'wonderkid' who 'cracked' the distributed.net RC5 system to submit a huge number of bogus results. He successfully gave the distributed.net people weeks of hassles - to appear first on the scores (how terribly unimportant) and to 'crack' a system that was never designed to be 'secure' in the first place. It's like opening the door to someone's house and saying "look, a burglar can get through here!"
Ultimately, Slashdot cannot be a useful source of news and opinion without moderation. There's just simply too much bandwidth taken up with idiots banging on their own private joy-buttons posting garbage that no-one wants to read. I, and most other Slashdot readers, take the risk of bad moderation because the information that the non-bad moderation leaves us with is useful.
Fleischmann and Pons thought they'd invented Cold Fusion, too, and that's been a feature on Slashdot. If we wanted an authoritative journal, we'd buy "Nature". We come to Slashdot to listen to the speculation and opinions as much as to hear the facts. All you've done in your puny attempt at 'revolution' is to successfully point out the weaknesses in the system that everyone already knows about.
Congratulations, you've just proved how useless and redundant your point really is.
- The story of Mel, a Real Programmer.
- The Voyager space probe.
- The Internet Worm.
- Public Key Encryption.
- PERL.
- The login hack.
- The Internet
:-)
Some of these have already been mentioned. Some, like Apollo 13 or Bletchley Park, I'm not going to repeat. Some others, like the transistor and the MP3, aren't really a 'hack' even though they've made a bit impact. And go the revolving statues!Here's a person who was programming in bubble memory, with every instruction having an implicit jump to somewhere else, and his loop apparently doesn't terminate - but it does...
Rather than include a prewired processor, they used a generic microprocessor and included the ability to upload new software versions. In the time that the probe was flying out to Jupiter, they took the black and white image from the main camera, doubled its resolution and made it three colour. They had a hundred spare bytes of RAM at one point, and they wrote a simple object recognition algorithm that would take pictures of interesting things.
Ethical? Maybe not. Nice? Big no there. Clever? It had at least four methods of invading a system, and its only flaw was that the code that was supposed to limit its distribution didn't work. Great power-to-size ratio.
I know it's not exactly a computer hack, but it's revolutionised the process of security and encryption. And the new matrix and polynomial curve methods that are in development will only further the ultimate end of privacy and authenticity in the digital domain.
The sheer scope of the hackery you can achieve in Perl defies description. A language where you can write entire programs without variables? Which can almost be written without use of alphabetic characters entirely? Which has singlehandedly shaped the dynamic content of the WWW? What else but PERL!
I forget who perpetrated this, but his username/password combination would work on most UNIX systems up until around 1985 or so. The login program had extra code included to allow his username/password. To avoid that being hoed out, the C compiler had code to check if it was compiling the login program, and would include the code as necessary. To stop that being compiled out, the C compiler would check to see if it was compiling itself, and would include the code to modify itself, and the login program, if necessary. Ergo, it was impossible to remove without someone remaking a C compiler from scratch...
I know, it's very generic. But from a Military/University project, we now have the global, public, accessible network with open standards (most of the time). Every other attempt at this has failed; the one that succeeds is one not owned by some big telecommunications carrier, or, in fact, anyone
Microsoft only has about a quarter of the world's web servers. They are decidedly an underdog.
Oh, and so therefore Microsoft's underhanded leveraging of its products is therefore OK? Microsoft stopping anyone using NT Workstation - functionally an identical product to NT Server - as a web server; they wanted people to have to install Server and thus bundle IIS in. Tim's point about the registry changes is not about the cost of the license or whatever, it's that Server is not somehow 'more powerful' or 'better equipped' for serving. It has exactly the same features as Workstation. So why charge five times the price for it? Marketing, that's why.
I just installed Win2k two days ago, and IIS was indeed an installation option. If I didn't want to use it, of course, I could always turn the bitch off...
Again, you're missing the point. Microsoft's strategy is simple here. Here's a sample internal dialogue from a new company getting started on the Internet:
Well, I want a web server. One that's powerful, fast, compliant with all the standards, and cheap. I could try installing Apache, or whatever, but IIS does come with NT. So why don't I just use that?
Microsoft is exploting the laziness of people to get their product used. Sure, IIS might be free, but I bet MS make their money back on copies of FrontPage and various IIS add-ons. This does NOT justify bundling. Bundling is, after all, one of the things that Judge Jackson noted was a prime Microsoft strategy to dominate markets.
I think you'd better go out and use some non-Microsoft products some time soon. It may freshen your viewpoint.
MMC is the new 'wonder tool' for administration - one standard interface able to display a wide variety of information supplied by the server. (Gee, sounds like the web, doesn't it?) It relies very heavily on custom Active X controls, ASP and MS-Java. It requires IE5.0 to be installed (spot the bundling!). It vaguely uses HTTP, but breaks several standards, such as the URL forming rules. In short, there's no way that anyone else could supply a similar console using, say, Netscape.
So, once again, Microsoft is finding yet another way to ensure that its own products dominate the user base, and deliberately exclude competitors. But, most significantly, this is the standards perversion we had feared. Because, of course, you can't get a standalone program to manage those remote services (we're not just talking about NT here - MMC is required to maintain SQL, Exchange, and IIS).
So keep using Opera and Netscape - while you can...
This is a fallacy - there are several ways of determining a price per unit:
This is the way most companies have to think of these things, because most people still buy software on a unit-by-unit basis (even a license fee for registering a free download is still a unit, and not an ongoing rental cost, for instance).
This is not to say I disagree with the rest of what you say - in fact I totally agree with your conclusions. The fact that I can take a copy of your data or programs and you won't know and won't lose your original fundamentally changes the way people have to look at ownership as a whole.
Once on-line distribution becomes commonplace (instead of the rarity it is now) we can hope that the price of software goes down. However, you cannot avoid the fact that you as a software programmer want to be paid for your work, simply because you no software programmer lives a fully money-independant lifestyle (do you grow your own food? Produce your own power? Own your own cost-free connection to the Internet? Etc...) As practically everyone else on this planet earns money by working, you probably think you should get the same deal. So software does cost money to produce (even if you then give it away - this sort of charity has put the FSF and Linux where it is today, don't forget).
So if data is copiable at negligable cost, how do I get paid for it? This is where software licenses come in. You buy a license from me to run a copy of my software - and plenty of shareware programs do this already. What's the cost? Well, significantly less than the traditional cost for software, because you haven't had to shell out for the production of multiple copies of physical media. But it still costs money, because you as the programmer still want to be reimbursed for your time.
Though I agree with the bulk of your arguments, Schwab, there are several fallacies in your reasoning. Fortunately, this doesn't change your intent, which is that we have to come up with a better paradigm of paying programmers and companies to produce the software we use than the one we currently have.
Good luck. The future of software may depend on it.
This not a new opinion, but I thought I'd add some more contemplation.
A multi-threading chip would be useless in a non-multi-threading environment (e.g. DOS). This sort of chip is responding to the prevalence of multi-threading multitasking operating systems and applications. Since the BeOS is the furthest anyone's gone to making an OS multithread and multitask, to my mind this chip would run the BeOS like teflon-coated lightning.
Think about it - the best way to get maximum performance out of this architecture is to have lots of 'small' threads, to have as many threads available for immediate execution should one stall. If there's any OS out there that is more comprehensively thread oriented (which leads to more application threading) it must be proprietary.
But enough of that pipe-dream - let's get back to reality. Be won't dedicate engineering efforts to a new chip whose market is unproven without backup. PC owners won't abandon their investment just for some pretty new architecture which is basically incompatible (as far as we know) with their existing hardware. And the whole thing will stagnate because no-one can start a market big enough to get the software backing (the Hardware-Software Paradox).
It's on the wish-list somewhere, but I'm not selling the Celeron just yet.
You know what the first thing that I think is?
...
"Hmmm - I wonder how good the Indian Ocean link is. Because we could always just cut the U.S.A. out of the link completely. Let them sort it out and connect them up once they want the rest of the world back."
I fear this sort of thing - it produces yet another block of mindless statistics, generates more FUD against the Internet and the whole reason we should be getting computers to talk to eachother in the first place, and serves only to increase the importance of the watchers at the expense of the watched.
Leave aside methods of IP forging and misdirection, and the possibility of abuse by hackers and corrupt agencies. You've still got the threat hanging over your head. The FBI might not have any power over me as an Australian Citizen directly, but no doubt ASIO would love to help its big brother, and even if I was immune to that pressure, there's always the people I've been talking to, and the servers they run, and
Write to your congressman. Do everything in your power to point out the futility of the Big Brother mentality. The best argument is to ask to see their records on public display. After all, if you knew who a terrorist was, wouldn't it be easier if you could use FIDNET's tools? No big surprise that this doesn't appeal to them...
AFAICS, you people in the USA have a problem. How to stop the mentality of blame and mistrust in your government that is crippling your education, legal, communications and health systems, and turn it around into productive work. I don't have the solutions - you'll have to do the best you can.
For commercial applications, I think the intangible benefit of putting your computer on the net for someone else to use is almost nonexistent. The company is making money out of using your computer - why shouldn't you make some money in return? I think that it shouldn't be too difficult to arrange some scheme where you can get some monetary benefit (credits at internet stores, payments to an internet bank, or even money banked to a normal bank).
There are lots of issues here - maybe I'll write them up on my own pages. Email me (after taking out the anti-spam part of my address) with your thoughts!
It's fairly easy to envision: MS and its allies in this venture write a proprietary extension of one of the standard protocols (Telnet? HTTP? SNMP?) and keep the specs to themselves. No-one else can make devices which communicate with their control programs, or make programs which communicate with their devices, because the standard's secret. This gouges other competitors out of the market because the blind consumer (who naively thinks that 'standardisation is a good thing') won't buy a product which isn't compatible.
Interesting Point: As we've seen with the ICQ chat protocol, people have been clever enough to packet-sniff the protocol and produce an open specification. Decoding people's proprietary programs is difficult, esp. when they start getting tricky, but there's little you can do about packet-sniffers, except maybe encryption. And then you'd be exporting munitions under the good ol' US of A's mindless export laws.
Lesson Number One: Never trust the monopoly.