This reminds me somewhat of the first implementation of the avian IP network discussed earlier in this forum.
There seems to be a great deal of potential for using pneumatic tubes as part of IP network.
Right off I can think of one problem though. If I were to load my tube with a nonstandard payload, of say a bunch of "holes" (the variety that is produced by a 3-ring punch) or the ever favorite chads then my recipient would likely suffer from packet fragmentation in a big way.
Yes, yes, this is definitely a troll post blown out of proportion. That said, however, there is still some interesting meat here.
The interesting part really is the focus on corporate bulk purchasers justifying OS-less PC hardware by virtue of existing site licenses.
Why interesting, you say?
Well, because those buyers would be the intelligent cost-conscious consumers of new PC hardware, that's why!
If you have a n 1000 site license like my large corporation, where PC support wipes the disk clean at Stage Zero before Ghosting on the full complement of officially sanctioned and approved corporate standard (Windoze) apps suite, etc., then why should you buy a PC with an OS already installed if you're going to blow it away first thing?
The only reason I can think of for doing so is to implicitly provide MS with a gratuitous revenue stream from an effective double purchase of an OS: the preinstalled one and the one for which we have the site license. This happens all the time with one-off purchases of PC hardware that inevitably comes with a preinstalled OS. Since most large corporations have left hands and right hands operating independently, I suspect this revenue stream is not insubstantial.
MS is simply curious who has figured this out and wants to FUD them back into what is the more profitable business model for them.
But you'll excuse me (and probably 98 % of the rest of Western civilization) if it takes us a little bit longer to rid ourselves of our quaint outdated cultural expectations of having a right to privacy for actions such as defecation or procreation.
As regards the clampdown on information flow by the powers that be: we are merely returning to the larger norm that prevails in most societies and cultures, where disseminating information inimical to the interests of the powerful is guaranteed to be a risky business.
History is full of many more examples of authoritarian regimes with a strong handle on the flow of information than of freak governments that give away the right to free speech to every Tom, Dick and Harry.
It is only the conceit of the last few centuries in Western civilization with the advent of such curious mechanisms such as the First Amendment that justify the above outrage about the very recent degradation of rights in the digital era by the DMCA, UCITA or other blights.
What's really hilarious, though, is that all this talk of copyrighted works blurs the distinction between worthwhile ideas (that, interestingly, are usually not copyrighted) and the omnipresent drivel of mass market entertainment (video, music) that typically is dispensed to addicts that, in the long run, are paying for this fix not only with their present day dollars, but also by sacrificing their minds, which are constantly becoming ever more conditioned to substituting instinctual emotion for rational thought on any issue that you care to name.
In the larger picture, I think vested interests work the levers of emotional hooks installed in most of the population to much greater effect for their gain than, say, lawsuits against Napster, etc.
I agree with the potential utility of subscription ware.
What I fear, though, is that, alongside the potentially great developments in technology (automatic upgrades, bug fixes, translations) and in business models,(subscription service revenue) will be embedded the same gratuituous toll collectors gathering money merely because they own the tollboth on the main highway and not because of any intrinsic new value added. (See other posting about Word 6.0 being essentially featureful.)
I'll go out on a limb and put words in the mouths of Bill Gates and Scott McNealy...
"Standards? Standards are great! I love standards! As a matter of fact, I own several!"
I suspect that anything sent from whitehouse.gov using government property should be officially related to government business or else would be waste, fraud and abuse of government property. Thus, all email originating therefrom would be subject to as much scrutiny as any hard copy document produced in the WhiteHouse. If he were to encrypt it, then he could be legally bound to produce the key. My place of business condones only the use of encryption products that provide them a backdoor.
Nevertheless, W. could still correspond with friends via his ISP:)
Due to advances in electronics, communications and storage, public officials will probably see another development in the near future: video and audio records of everything that transpires in the Whitehouse or other government installations is not far away. Then, no communications with another human being will be beyond recording. To date, verbal communications has been an effective means of communicating that could not be tied down much by the legal system, independent of whether said verbal communication was used to accomplish good things or bad. Verbal communications are used to do most of governement work at the highest levels. If hushed converstations in the halls of the whitehouse or the legislatures disappear entirely because of fear of monitoring, then it will have a big impact on what gets done.
I hope that before that point (by which time corporate databases will be rapidly filling up with similar information about the public in the interests of more effective marketing) that commonsense legislation will be passed to regulate the harvesting and sale of what previously was taken for granted to be private information.
P.S. A recent movie, The Contender, portrays some of the issues involved in how much privacy is due public officials. It's not an easy issue to resolve in a democracy that depends on a well informed public choosing their leaders.
I agree with the need for sanity about where to put things after wrestling with various flavors of UNIX for the past 15 years.
I've lost my personal favorite: user directories currently go into/home, where I had hoped the early transition would have been made from/usr into/u.
Given some of the divergence that has already occurred in some of the Linux distributions, I suggest that while it is fine to encourage uniform placement of libraries, config files etc. in the file system, that such a battle is already lost.
Retreat and fortify the next line of defense!
That is, enforce a standard with something like a global/configure script that populates a named database. That database will have name value pairs showing the important places that important things exist:
glibc_directory =/usr/lib
for example. Now, then, the line of defense against needless diversity is to enforce a standard on the metadata, the names, not the values!
If every distribution can agree that the same name will be used to contain the value, we can stop at one level of indirection and breathe a collective sigh of relief. Third party app installation will include a check for the existence of such a database to know where it should try to look for some dependent shared library, for example.
Then, every system should have a cron job to cull through every directory on the system looking for.MagicConfigure files to run that will update the database of name value pairs. Make it so the database can be mapped nicely into a hierarchal tree, can be converted to XML, etc.
I had assumed everything was contingent on trust too.
Trust transfer - the rusty hinge of ecommerce.
That is, I can place some level of trust in Alice (she always seems to play a pivotal role in any crypto scheme!), but how good is my notion of any trust that Alice extends to "easy-sleazy Bob" that might affect me? Those PGP key-signing parties seem a little too ad hoc for some things.
A open, standardized system of kinds and levels of transferable trust is something I'd like to see. Certainly before I electronically transfer money to Charlie's Certifying Authority. And, BTW, I'd like verifiably existing but certifiably anonymous cash, too.
An open, zero-cost-of-entry PKI system would be nice; I can see where at this juncture everyone wants to be the lottery winner with business model that collects micropayments from each and every electronic transaction or ecommerce software installation. That desire is probably delaying the emergence of this technology, since there are probably some bright people that have already thought out a largely workable system.
Metropoli have human population density distributions akin to the fairy ring fungus.
So, while city dwellers in the dead core have buildings to block their lasers, they are consoled by the relative lower cost of installing wire for the last mile, be it cable or a separate DSL connection.
I live in the pleasant semi-rural `burbs where my phone monopoly's C.O. doesn't provide DSL and where the cable TV stops about 1 km from my house. I'd love to have broadband access and can't get it under the current business model.
I'm willing to pay up to about US$100/month to get that access, but I doubt this technology satisfies that criterion yet.
Does anyone know if RF wireless technology, such as 2.4 GHz that is used in cordless phones, can be adapted to provide such access, say if enough neighbors installed them so a P2P net reached to someplace with a wire connection?
The proposed remedy, the one that MS is fighting so furiously with all its legal muscle, is not so structurally damaging to their business model as you might guess based solely on the spectacle of blood and fur that you see in the press.
Real competition would be better served if the company were not simply broken into an OS maker with an effective monopoly and an office product maker with an effective monopoly. Rather, the public's interest would be better served if at least 2 companies of each variety and comparable size were created.
Some might argue with me that the inside pipe between Office and OS is an incredibly lucrative lever the current company possesses - I don't know for sure, given all the arguments that a Chinese Wall separates the two developer teams. Such a wall may only be for show and may not prevent the upper level management from coordinating efforts with a view to both sides of the wall.
However, I don't see consumer choices and the competitive landscape improving much simply by creating MS-OS vendor with 90% of the desktop OS market and an MS-Office vendor with 90% of the desktop productivity suite market.
At least the appeals process takes time. To the extent that such time permits the current situation to prevail, their currently successful business model can thrive.
I was once an intelligent young person, but due to my age I was not considered of "sufficient maturity and experience" for tasks for which I frankly had most of the brains.
Now I'm on the other end. I'm 25 years older and have lost that 100 millisecond rapier wit that I had in high school.
As such an overworked technical person, I find that it is difficult to spring loose the time to adequately mentor a young person, even if I do enjoy it.
From that standpoint I'd suggest this:
Be a self starter. Learn everything you can about the business and look for opportunities to creatively apply something you've learned to improve their quality of life.
I'm thinking here of things like Perl and PHP programming, setting up a web page to dynamically update their view of what's going on in the company, etc. But don't be limited by my suggestions. Use your own mind to create your own suggested job!
Be assured, if you don't figure out something creative to occupy your mind at work, someone there will assign you some drudgery to keep you busy. They might still assign you drudgery, but if you start to show some sparkly creation, you might get a reprieve and get to dom something you enjoy that will be of greater educational and vocational value to you in the longer run.
ESR's coding contributions have some genuine measure of usefulness. He sweats details (like little bugs, documentation) that other open source projects gloss over.
His philosophy is also interesting and insightful. The problem, of course, that whatever amount of insight and creativity he has is finite and becomes wearily diluted when hyped in the media. The same problem would afflict any "visionary" the media happens to glorify.
Regarding XML-RPC, I figure SOAP has become the next incarnation for better or worse. I've heard it's got chrome tailfins, but the same essential useful concept under the hood.
sed -e 's/open source/openly published scientific research/g' << EOF
"Open source is an intellectual-property destroyer," Allchin said. ''I can't imagine something that could be worse than this for the software business and the intellectual-property business."
What you're asking for is definitely something that a *lot* of people would want. I, for one, would like to be able to integrate home webcams with my PC, my satellite TV and with my web server, for example. Imagine programming your softVCR over the web, etc.
The TiVo meets this need part way. Previous discussion on/. indicated a crying need for the TiVo to have an Ethernet port so that easy up/down loading of recorded media could take place, as well as enable the development of Web based controllability. There was talk of the next official version of the TiVo having such a port, but I haven't about such a product yet, despite its technical feasibility.
All that said, I think there's a great deal of apprehension over the legal ramifications since most publicly broadcast programs have specific prohibitions against rebroadcast.
I presume that's rebroadcast (a) to others, going beyond a typical definition of personal use; (b) for profit to others (definitely a no-no).
Certainly there's nothing illegal with taping or disk recording for later use by you in your own home or anywhere else you happen to be (eg, recording your personal CD collection on MP3 to take in your car.)
But a lot of video content producers would get very jittery if you provided that recorded content to others beside yourself. There, even though I can invite friends over to my house to watch a rented movie or to listen to a CD, I cannot charge them admission. And, if I run a business as, for example, a daycare center, then I can get into trouble for public exhibition of copyrighted videos to toddlers in my charge (though providing books does not seem to be so dangerous to my legal health). Clearly, the legal definitions have been strongly influenced by parties with a vested interests in the existing revenue models associated with media distribution.
Once you have such a video system, a P2P network that enables trading favorite TV programs, pr0n, etc. is only a short step away, with all the hullabaloo that has accompanied trading of music files over the past several years.
Perhaps the Java Media API provides a good framework, but it would be nice to have some open source standard API for the control and activation functions of the next generation of consumer electronic equipment: network-enabled video and audio jukeboxes.
That we weren't talking about the trademark infringement of OpenTCP on a company selling a product TCP® that also uses the same underlying protocol.
In this case, however, I think "OpenSSH" ought to be renamed, although the underlying names of config files, etc. should remain static.
The request, if late, is both respectful and from a man who has contributed much to the community. The hardworking members of OpenSSH should decide on a new name.
BTW, I was thinking of establishing a project for a cleanroom implementation of exec() that I would call openexec()...
Well, the interesting difference here is that in our totally free market society you are calling freedom of speech a commodity, instead of some sacred Right of Man.
The U. S. Government, for one, would be legally prohibited from making a contract with you to categorically give up your constitutional rights, such as from slavery, etc.
Corporations, then, would not seem to be so bound: they are permitted to treat any of these rights as just another commodity that factors into good bottom line results for their stockholders.
Since the vast majority of people typically need active employment to buy food, I would guess that come the next high unemployment recession, that employers could make fantastic progress towards getting their employees to relinquish all kinds of supposed Rights if they thought it might help their bottom lines. "Pee in this cup." would just be the beginning.
The free market is a remarkably powerful mechanism for getting independent agents to come to some kind of equilibrium. But, in this and in other instances (eg, my current cost of polluting public air costs me nothing, costs others' grandchildren a bundle), I think you need to think about the longer term ramifications of the equilibrium you will get unless you want to live in a distopia.
Why not become explicit and make human life a commodity instead of pussy footing around the implications?
Advantages:
* You can choose your own editor for composition.
* Integrated with glimpse indexing (although the glimpse license kinda reminds me of one of the few bad parts of Qt).
* Integrates nicely with PGP and GnuPG for encryption and signatures.
Disadvantages:
* HTML rendering clunky.
* Automatic image popups can really slow things down.
I waver yet, wondering if I'll keep using exmh, or to consider VM inside emacs. I've tried netscape's mail interface and, despite many good features, I dislike not being able to use emacs as my text editor.
How do people justify two standards (apart from mind warp)?
Well, in this case, because one piece of software costs money, and people generally expect to get what they pay for. If it does not live up to their expectations of what the software should provide for that kind of money, then they will gripe, whine and complain.
Given the baseline of free software, software buyers want to see genuine value-added for the money they pay over the free solution. Their expectations have been raised so that they expect more than nothing for a price of zero (not even beginning to account for expectations raised by advertising of the product in question)
They want to see happen for computer software what has already happened for computer hardware -- cost/performance over the past couple of decades have plummeted by orders of magnitude.
(I think the days are finally coming when the bright people at MS are finding that the combined efforts of (i) putting up with Bill's ranting and (ii) putting triphazard code in bloatware are sorely testing their patience, especially given the recently lengthing rise times on the share price.)
All that aside, I'd say that Dflat represents only marginal improvement over Java as a language; and not so much improvement as to justify using it or switching to it given the strong base already in Java in terms of capability and bug-fixing that has already polished most of the rough edges of that language. To be sure, there are still some warts on Java, the major problem being Sun's desire to keep it locked up far longer than would be beneficial for the community at large.
The.NET XML thingy does sound pretty cool. I'm hoping that a nicely thought out design will result that can be built upon, that B doesn't pollute it with marketing driven squirrely behavior "to protect Windows" or some other equally misguided objective.
I think the proactive company here in this context is IBM, what with releasing initial SOAP examples as well as various tools like the XML parser.
MS Windows and Java have both been examples of potentially useful standardization that have been needlessly thwarted into beasts with built-in impediments. They became architecturally necessary for programmers due to some inherent usefulness, but they were built with the objective of making some particular corporation the gatekeepers and toll collectors rather than simply providing the purest technical solution.
There REALLY needs to be a better mechanism for migrating emerging technology from the outer limits into the core. I like to think of the process along the same lines as what took place so that we now are able to refer to substances called dry ice or bandaids without capital letters and without fear of trademark/copyright infringement. The current situation takes far too long.
With the large numbers of ex-MS employees working out there in the real world with "non-compete with MS" agreements hanging over their heads, and the fact that MS has business interests in such widely diverse fields, does this not constitute some unreasonable restriction of the marketplace?
Practically, though, if you happen to have a good idea that builds upon MS technology and they're your employer, then it seems like you're 0wn3d. My employer cannot afford the kind of legal muscle that MS can, so I'm not as worried about arguing such clauses and having a fair to good chance of convincing a judge that my new good idea is not exactly what I was working on here.
But isn't the UK where citizen's trust each other even less than in the United States and have consequently authorized their government to place more restrictions on their individual freedoms and liberties?
So much so, that, for example, video cameras constantly surveil streets and sidewalks and the police are constantly vigilant looking at recently released criminals on the streets (was it Birmingham?). I think the U.S. has started doing this, too, in some cities, but I think the idea got started in the U.K.
And the U.K., too, iswhere citizens have no qualms with the government restricting their ownership of firearms to a much greater degree than the United States. You may argue that they have done a better job of balancing the needs of the public welfare againts potential crazy individual gun owners, but the fact remains that the direction of the judgement is further against individual liberties. I know, I know, we in the U.S. probably inherited our violent streak from the U.K. where public hangings were a spectacle several centuries ago and where rampaging U.K. soccer mobs frighten their host counties.
Generally, you won't find anything being done about privacy encroachment, yet. When the technology improves, the costs decrease and cameras and microphones proliferate, and I purchase surveillance from a retailer of either that pretty actress or that other political enemy for a very reasonable cost and such survailance covers their every public action, itinerary and most conversations with the possible exception of some events in their homes, and if I mis-use this information, say, as a stalker, THEN and ONLY THEN will the public start to realize the ramifications of what is happening.
The acts of government encroachments upon individual freedoms and privacy have a very long history that includes cases of abuse, where power has been exercised contrary to the individual's will. It is not sufficient that the mere potential for abuse exists. It is only when similar acts of abuse occur that the public will become aware of the dangers.
The one who win will be the one who give Microsoft the biggest bucks. Eventually, the whole democratic system will be reimplaced by an auction stuff. There will be a private company who will deliver the presidence to the most generous candidate, and who will deliver its benefits to its shareholders.
Hmmm...we're pretty close to that model already!
Loopholes in soft money donation rules in the US already create the semblance of an auction process. It would be hard to quantify the effect exactly, but you know that Joe CEO gets more face time with the candidate/elected incumbent than John Poorperson. The weird twist is that most purchasers of political power bet on both horses, just to be sure.
There are limits to what political advisors can do to "deliver the presidency to the most generous candidate", but if the quality of recent candidates are any guide, their powers of marketing are quite formidable. I'd love to see advertising slogans for such a company - just think - "We can get a Mushroom elected! We'll provide both the darkness and the 8u115hit !"
Finally, just for the record, I'm almost certain that the single largest purchaser of MS software is the United States Government. It's such a cash cow for M$ that it qualifies as "giving".
Slashdot Mirror
This reminds me somewhat of the first implementation of the avian IP network discussed earlier in this forum.
There seems to be a great deal of potential for using pneumatic tubes as part of IP network.
Right off I can think of one problem though. If I were to load my tube with a nonstandard payload, of say a bunch of "holes" (the variety that is produced by a 3-ring punch) or the ever favorite chads then my recipient would likely suffer from packet fragmentation in a big way.
Yes, yes, this is definitely a troll post blown out of proportion. That said, however, there is still some interesting meat here.
The interesting part really is the focus on corporate bulk purchasers justifying OS-less PC hardware by virtue of existing site licenses.
Why interesting, you say?
Well, because those buyers would be the intelligent cost-conscious consumers of new PC hardware, that's why!
If you have a n 1000 site license like my large corporation, where PC support wipes the disk clean at Stage Zero before Ghosting on the full complement of officially sanctioned and approved corporate standard (Windoze) apps suite, etc., then why should you buy a PC with an OS already installed if you're going to blow it away first thing?
The only reason I can think of for doing so is to implicitly provide MS with a gratuitous revenue stream from an effective double purchase of an OS: the preinstalled one and the one for which we have the site license. This happens all the time with one-off purchases of PC hardware that inevitably comes with a preinstalled OS. Since most large corporations have left hands and right hands operating independently, I suspect this revenue stream is not insubstantial.
MS is simply curious who has figured this out and wants to FUD them back into what is the more profitable business model for them.
Brave vision, to the extreme.
But you'll excuse me (and probably 98 % of the rest of Western civilization) if it takes us a little bit longer to rid ourselves of our quaint outdated cultural expectations of having a right to privacy for actions such as defecation or procreation.
As regards the clampdown on information flow by the powers that be: we are merely returning to the larger norm that prevails in most societies and cultures, where disseminating information inimical to the interests of the powerful is guaranteed to be a risky business.
History is full of many more examples of authoritarian regimes with a strong handle on the flow of information than of freak governments that give away the right to free speech to every Tom, Dick and Harry.
It is only the conceit of the last few centuries in Western civilization with the advent of such curious mechanisms such as the First Amendment that justify the above outrage about the very recent degradation of rights in the digital era by the DMCA, UCITA or other blights.
What's really hilarious, though, is that all this talk of copyrighted works blurs the distinction between worthwhile ideas (that, interestingly, are usually not copyrighted) and the omnipresent drivel of mass market entertainment (video, music) that typically is dispensed to addicts that, in the long run, are paying for this fix not only with their present day dollars, but also by sacrificing their minds, which are constantly becoming ever more conditioned to substituting instinctual emotion for rational thought on any issue that you care to name.
In the larger picture, I think vested interests work the levers of emotional hooks installed in most of the population to much greater effect for their gain than, say, lawsuits against Napster, etc.
I agree with the potential utility of subscription ware.
What I fear, though, is that, alongside the potentially great developments in technology (automatic upgrades, bug fixes, translations) and in business models,(subscription service revenue) will be embedded the same gratuituous toll collectors gathering money merely because they own the tollboth on the main highway and not because of any intrinsic new value added. (See other posting about Word 6.0 being essentially featureful.)
I'll go out on a limb and put words in the mouths of Bill Gates and Scott McNealy...
How about
? (You might even be able to get away with capitalizing the "IL" inside...I suspect that anything sent from whitehouse.gov using government property should be officially related to government business or else would be waste, fraud and abuse of government property. Thus, all email originating therefrom would be subject to as much scrutiny as any hard copy document produced in the WhiteHouse. If he were to encrypt it, then he could be legally bound to produce the key. My place of business condones only the use of encryption products that provide them a backdoor.
Nevertheless, W. could still correspond with friends via his ISP:)
Due to advances in electronics, communications and storage, public officials will probably see another development in the near future: video and audio records of everything that transpires in the Whitehouse or other government installations is not far away. Then, no communications with another human being will be beyond recording. To date, verbal communications has been an effective means of communicating that could not be tied down much by the legal system, independent of whether said verbal communication was used to accomplish good things or bad. Verbal communications are used to do most of governement work at the highest levels. If hushed converstations in the halls of the whitehouse or the legislatures disappear entirely because of fear of monitoring, then it will have a big impact on what gets done.
I hope that before that point (by which time corporate databases will be rapidly filling up with similar information about the public in the interests of more effective marketing) that commonsense legislation will be passed to regulate the harvesting and sale of what previously was taken for granted to be private information.
P.S. A recent movie, The Contender, portrays some of the issues involved in how much privacy is due public officials. It's not an easy issue to resolve in a democracy that depends on a well informed public choosing their leaders.
I agree with the need for sanity about where to put things after wrestling with various flavors of UNIX for the past 15 years.
I've lost my personal favorite: user directories currently go into /home, where I had hoped the early transition would have been made from /usr into /u.
Given some of the divergence that has already occurred in some of the Linux distributions, I suggest that while it is fine to encourage uniform placement of libraries, config files etc. in the file system, that such a battle is already lost.
Retreat and fortify the next line of defense!
That is, enforce a standard with something like a global /configure script that populates a named database. That database will have name value pairs showing the important places that important things exist:
for example. Now, then, the line of defense against needless diversity is to enforce a standard on the metadata, the names, not the values!If every distribution can agree that the same name will be used to contain the value, we can stop at one level of indirection and breathe a collective sigh of relief. Third party app installation will include a check for the existence of such a database to know where it should try to look for some dependent shared library, for example.
Then, every system should have a cron job to cull through every directory on the system looking forI had assumed everything was contingent on trust too.
That is, I can place some level of trust in Alice (she always seems to play a pivotal role in any crypto scheme!), but how good is my notion of any trust that Alice extends to "easy-sleazy Bob" that might affect me? Those PGP key-signing parties seem a little too ad hoc for some things.
A open, standardized system of kinds and levels of transferable trust is something I'd like to see. Certainly before I electronically transfer money to Charlie's Certifying Authority. And, BTW, I'd like verifiably existing but certifiably anonymous cash, too.
An open, zero-cost-of-entry PKI system would be nice; I can see where at this juncture everyone wants to be the lottery winner with business model that collects micropayments from each and every electronic transaction or ecommerce software installation. That desire is probably delaying the emergence of this technology, since there are probably some bright people that have already thought out a largely workable system.
Metropoli have human population density distributions akin to the fairy ring fungus.
So, while city dwellers in the dead core have buildings to block their lasers, they are consoled by the relative lower cost of installing wire for the last mile, be it cable or a separate DSL connection.
I live in the pleasant semi-rural `burbs where my phone monopoly's C.O. doesn't provide DSL and where the cable TV stops about 1 km from my house. I'd love to have broadband access and can't get it under the current business model.
I'm willing to pay up to about US$100/month to get that access, but I doubt this technology satisfies that criterion yet.
Does anyone know if RF wireless technology, such as 2.4 GHz that is used in cordless phones, can be adapted to provide such access, say if enough neighbors installed them so a P2P net reached to someplace with a wire connection?
The proposed remedy, the one that MS is fighting so furiously with all its legal muscle, is not so structurally damaging to their business model as you might guess based solely on the spectacle of blood and fur that you see in the press.
Real competition would be better served if the company were not simply broken into an OS maker with an effective monopoly and an office product maker with an effective monopoly. Rather, the public's interest would be better served if at least 2 companies of each variety and comparable size were created.
Some might argue with me that the inside pipe between Office and OS is an incredibly lucrative lever the current company possesses - I don't know for sure, given all the arguments that a Chinese Wall separates the two developer teams. Such a wall may only be for show and may not prevent the upper level management from coordinating efforts with a view to both sides of the wall.
However, I don't see consumer choices and the competitive landscape improving much simply by creating MS-OS vendor with 90% of the desktop OS market and an MS-Office vendor with 90% of the desktop productivity suite market.
At least the appeals process takes time. To the extent that such time permits the current situation to prevail, their currently successful business model can thrive.
I appreciate your problem.
I was once an intelligent young person, but due to my age I was not considered of "sufficient maturity and experience" for tasks for which I frankly had most of the brains.
Now I'm on the other end. I'm 25 years older and have lost that 100 millisecond rapier wit that I had in high school.
As such an overworked technical person, I find that it is difficult to spring loose the time to adequately mentor a young person, even if I do enjoy it.
From that standpoint I'd suggest this:
Be a self starter. Learn everything you can about the business and look for opportunities to creatively apply something you've learned to improve their quality of life.
I'm thinking here of things like Perl and PHP programming, setting up a web page to dynamically update their view of what's going on in the company, etc. But don't be limited by my suggestions. Use your own mind to create your own suggested job!
Be assured, if you don't figure out something creative to occupy your mind at work, someone there will assign you some drudgery to keep you busy. They might still assign you drudgery, but if you start to show some sparkly creation, you might get a reprieve and get to dom something you enjoy that will be of greater educational and vocational value to you in the longer run.
Yes.
ESR's coding contributions have some genuine measure of usefulness. He sweats details (like little bugs, documentation) that other open source projects gloss over.
His philosophy is also interesting and insightful. The problem, of course, that whatever amount of insight and creativity he has is finite and becomes wearily diluted when hyped in the media. The same problem would afflict any "visionary" the media happens to glorify.
Regarding XML-RPC, I figure SOAP has become the next incarnation for better or worse. I've heard it's got chrome tailfins, but the same essential useful concept under the hood.
sed -e 's/open source/openly published scientific research/g' << EOF
"Open source is an intellectual-property destroyer," Allchin said. ''I can't imagine something that could be worse than this for the software business and the intellectual-property business."
EOF
What you're asking for is definitely something that a *lot* of people would want. I, for one, would like to be able to integrate home webcams with my PC, my satellite TV and with my web server, for example. Imagine programming your softVCR over the web, etc.
The TiVo meets this need part way. Previous discussion on /. indicated a crying need for the TiVo to have an Ethernet port so that easy up/down loading of recorded media could take place, as well as enable the development of Web based controllability. There was talk of the next official version of the TiVo having such a port, but I haven't about such a product yet, despite its technical feasibility.
All that said, I think there's a great deal of apprehension over the legal ramifications since most publicly broadcast programs have specific prohibitions against rebroadcast.
I presume that's rebroadcast (a) to others, going beyond a typical definition of personal use; (b) for profit to others (definitely a no-no).
Certainly there's nothing illegal with taping or disk recording for later use by you in your own home or anywhere else you happen to be (eg, recording your personal CD collection on MP3 to take in your car.)
But a lot of video content producers would get very jittery if you provided that recorded content to others beside yourself. There, even though I can invite friends over to my house to watch a rented movie or to listen to a CD, I cannot charge them admission. And, if I run a business as, for example, a daycare center, then I can get into trouble for public exhibition of copyrighted videos to toddlers in my charge (though providing books does not seem to be so dangerous to my legal health). Clearly, the legal definitions have been strongly influenced by parties with a vested interests in the existing revenue models associated with media distribution.
Once you have such a video system, a P2P network that enables trading favorite TV programs, pr0n, etc. is only a short step away, with all the hullabaloo that has accompanied trading of music files over the past several years.
Perhaps the Java Media API provides a good framework, but it would be nice to have some open source standard API for the control and activation functions of the next generation of consumer electronic equipment: network-enabled video and audio jukeboxes.
That we weren't talking about the trademark infringement of OpenTCP on a company selling a product TCP® that also uses the same underlying protocol.
In this case, however, I think "OpenSSH" ought to be renamed, although the underlying names of config files, etc. should remain static.
The request, if late, is both respectful and from a man who has contributed much to the community. The hardworking members of OpenSSH should decide on a new name.
BTW, I was thinking of establishing a project for a cleanroom implementation of exec() that I would call openexec()...
OK, what will impress me is the analog of those "print_self()" C programs.
I can see it now: in the future, I'll get encoded spam that won't ever decode.
Ultimate!
Well, the interesting difference here is that in our totally free market society you are calling freedom of speech a commodity, instead of some sacred Right of Man.
The U. S. Government, for one, would be legally prohibited from making a contract with you to categorically give up your constitutional rights, such as from slavery, etc.
Corporations, then, would not seem to be so bound: they are permitted to treat any of these rights as just another commodity that factors into good bottom line results for their stockholders.
Since the vast majority of people typically need active employment to buy food, I would guess that come the next high unemployment recession, that employers could make fantastic progress towards getting their employees to relinquish all kinds of supposed Rights if they thought it might help their bottom lines. "Pee in this cup." would just be the beginning.
The free market is a remarkably powerful mechanism for getting independent agents to come to some kind of equilibrium. But, in this and in other instances (eg, my current cost of polluting public air costs me nothing, costs others' grandchildren a bundle), I think you need to think about the longer term ramifications of the equilibrium you will get unless you want to live in a distopia.
Why not become explicit and make human life a commodity instead of pussy footing around the implications?
What else could a small robot with cameras be used for anyway? The major application, in my view, is crime fighting.
Or dissident fighting, should the powers that fund so deign.
Basically, exmh rocks.
More:
Advantages:* You can choose your own editor for composition.
* Integrated with glimpse indexing (although the glimpse license kinda reminds me of one of the few bad parts of Qt).
* Integrates nicely with PGP and GnuPG for encryption and signatures.
Disadvantages:
* HTML rendering clunky.
* Automatic image popups can really slow things down.
I waver yet, wondering if I'll keep using exmh, or to consider VM inside emacs. I've tried netscape's mail interface and, despite many good features, I dislike not being able to use emacs as my text editor.
You're absolutely right.
You have a very good point.
It is a double standard.
How do people justify two standards (apart from mind warp)?
Well, in this case, because one piece of software costs money, and people generally expect to get what they pay for. If it does not live up to their expectations of what the software should provide for that kind of money, then they will gripe, whine and complain.
Given the baseline of free software, software buyers want to see genuine value-added for the money they pay over the free solution. Their expectations have been raised so that they expect more than nothing for a price of zero (not even beginning to account for expectations raised by advertising of the product in question)
They want to see happen for computer software what has already happened for computer hardware -- cost/performance over the past couple of decades have plummeted by orders of magnitude.
Good rundown.
(I think the days are finally coming when the bright people at MS are finding that the combined efforts of (i) putting up with Bill's ranting and (ii) putting triphazard code in bloatware are sorely testing their patience, especially given the recently lengthing rise times on the share price.)
All that aside, I'd say that Dflat represents only marginal improvement over Java as a language; and not so much improvement as to justify using it or switching to it given the strong base already in Java in terms of capability and bug-fixing that has already polished most of the rough edges of that language. To be sure, there are still some warts on Java, the major problem being Sun's desire to keep it locked up far longer than would be beneficial for the community at large.
The .NET XML thingy does sound pretty cool. I'm hoping that a nicely thought out design will result that can be built upon, that B doesn't pollute it with marketing driven squirrely behavior "to protect Windows" or some other equally misguided objective.
I think the proactive company here in this context is IBM, what with releasing initial SOAP examples as well as various tools like the XML parser.
MS Windows and Java have both been examples of potentially useful standardization that have been needlessly thwarted into beasts with built-in impediments. They became architecturally necessary for programmers due to some inherent usefulness, but they were built with the objective of making some particular corporation the gatekeepers and toll collectors rather than simply providing the purest technical solution.
There REALLY needs to be a better mechanism for migrating emerging technology from the outer limits into the core. I like to think of the process along the same lines as what took place so that we now are able to refer to substances called dry ice or bandaids without capital letters and without fear of trademark/copyright infringement. The current situation takes far too long.
As I've said before: 17 months, not 17 years.
They should change the nomenclature.
It should not be called Copyright, but rather Copycharge.
Once I have content, I should have the right to make and distributed free copies.
Let the owner of the Copycharge preserve the right to make and distribute copies for a fee.
That is all.
Here's a thought
With the large numbers of ex-MS employees working out there in the real world with "non-compete with MS" agreements hanging over their heads, and the fact that MS has business interests in such widely diverse fields, does this not constitute some unreasonable restriction of the marketplace?
Practically, though, if you happen to have a good idea that builds upon MS technology and they're your employer, then it seems like you're 0wn3d. My employer cannot afford the kind of legal muscle that MS can, so I'm not as worried about arguing such clauses and having a fair to good chance of convincing a judge that my new good idea is not exactly what I was working on here.
But isn't the UK where citizen's trust each other even less than in the United States and have consequently authorized their government to place more restrictions on their individual freedoms and liberties?
So much so, that, for example, video cameras constantly surveil streets and sidewalks and the police are constantly vigilant looking at recently released criminals on the streets (was it Birmingham?). I think the U.S. has started doing this, too, in some cities, but I think the idea got started in the U.K.
And the U.K., too, iswhere citizens have no qualms with the government restricting their ownership of firearms to a much greater degree than the United States. You may argue that they have done a better job of balancing the needs of the public welfare againts potential crazy individual gun owners, but the fact remains that the direction of the judgement is further against individual liberties. I know, I know, we in the U.S. probably inherited our violent streak from the U.K. where public hangings were a spectacle several centuries ago and where rampaging U.K. soccer mobs frighten their host counties.
Generally, you won't find anything being done about privacy encroachment, yet. When the technology improves, the costs decrease and cameras and microphones proliferate, and I purchase surveillance from a retailer of either that pretty actress or that other political enemy for a very reasonable cost and such survailance covers their every public action, itinerary and most conversations with the possible exception of some events in their homes, and if I mis-use this information, say, as a stalker, THEN and ONLY THEN will the public start to realize the ramifications of what is happening.
The acts of government encroachments upon individual freedoms and privacy have a very long history that includes cases of abuse, where power has been exercised contrary to the individual's will. It is not sufficient that the mere potential for abuse exists. It is only when similar acts of abuse occur that the public will become aware of the dangers.
The one who win will be the one who give Microsoft the biggest bucks. Eventually, the whole democratic system will be reimplaced by an auction stuff. There will be a private company who will deliver the presidence to the most generous candidate, and who will deliver its benefits to its shareholders.
Hmmm...we're pretty close to that model already!