Compliance with court orders to remove the polluted versions of JVM does not
require that those entire product lines be discontinued.
However, it is in Microsoft's business interest to push users of those products into upgrading to newer Microsoft products, for which they'll gain license revenue AND lower support costs associated with discontinuing support for those old products.
And, it is in MSFT's public relations interests to deflect blame for this action away from themselves and upon enemy Sun and its Java legal action.
Congratulations, you have found the hidden cost of open source software. You do realize that for a company to fork themselves, they have to pay for it?
Yes, FOSS has a potentially greater future cost associated with following a fork that is less-traveled and more customized to what you want.
But real businesses rarely can get by with commercial products "as they are out of the box". They need tweaking and tuning. In that respect, those costs would be incurred in a commercial software environment, too.
Finally, speaking of hidden costs that happen in the future: it's not unknown for a vendor to refuse to support some old version of software upon which a business has built up reliance.
Businesses are essentially forced by the vendor into an upgrade for which they can see no justification.
Free and open source software empowers businesses to make their own decisions about upgrade cycles based on their own needs. If they decide a system ain't broke and doesn't need fixing, they can let their own aging branch keep running. If a security patch is needed, then they can simply apply it and keep going without being told that they need to upgrade to Blah Professional Gold 2004.
With Linus of course providing a link allowing the reader to see the law for themselves.
That's low.
Darl would have provided a URL to SCO's business model - you know, the one based on RAMBUS -- but he quickly realized that such a business method was likely to already be patented.
Trojans and man-in-the-middle attacks on ATM machines.
This should help raise public awareness of what I've long worried about.
Everyone worries about authenticating the user to the machine (PIN numbers, biometrics), but I worry about whether what's shown to me is my authentic machine.
simply not that many rennaissance hackers to staff even our company at our current size
Not just that.
At MyCorp, young renaissance hackers are not in charge. And they won't be in charge for 10 to 20 years because of the existing management power structure. They have to serve their sentence and wait for the powers that be to retire before they are trusted with power.
By which time, their brilliance will have lost its edge, they will have become cynical watching their good ideas bounce against the wall and drop to the floor in a crumpled heap, and they will be ready with a rusty framework of what were good ideas for 20 years ago to impose on the next generation.
Since my whole life is a special act I perform for monetary gain, I will wear a sandwich board with the same "FBI warning" that plays at the beginning of rented videos.
Should any surveillance camera record me in violation of my sacred copyright protections, I will have them arrested.
For example, security cameras pointed towards the parking lots of large retail stores.
Copyright and patent laws have created a distorted marketplace. Most people probably look at moves like this much like the early indigenous Americans looked upon the whole idea of land ownership.
It's true that artificial protections encourage research and creation of artistic works to a certain point.
But we're far past the point of maximizing the overall benefit.
Extended protection times for patents and copyrights have gone beyond symbiosis; they have become parasitic.
I remember decades ago coming across the towers of Hanoi built with wooden dowels and hardwood disks with holes in them. This was late one evening when everyone else had retired.
After playing around with it for a few minutes, my mind just naturally got into the algorithm. The disks were flying around with hardly any conscious thought required on my part.
Just one of those cool game zombie states...
Probably because I'm prone to addictive behaviors I tend to avoid getting involved too closely with games; but I still remember the great buzz of doing Towers of Hanoi the first time.
[There's another hardware puzzle, like a Chinese lock with multiple loops, that's similarly fun for the recursively minded.]
Someone purchases a house ["PIG"] with walls that aren't very sound proof ["POKE"]. They presumably knew this at the time of purchase, it would be ridiculous to think otherwise.
Not it's not ridiculous to assume otherwise.
In case you haven't noticed, there are a lot of buyers out there that
do not thoroughly investigate their purchases,
are easily swayed by the superficial.
not to mention sellers that are financially motivated to
not disclose or to minimize hidden or long-term problems,
to emphasize the superficial attractiveness.
Despite 2000+ year old advice and plenty of unscrupulous sellers, there are still plenty of unwary and stupid buyers.
We could just say that stupid and unwary people get what they deserve. But I'd hate to live in a society where we encourage intelligent people to learn to profit by deceiving the less intelligent.
Since it's impossible to legislate people into being smarter, it's probably reasonable to legislate awkward regulations that require the home seller to check boxes disclosing substantive issues with homes or to get inspections that include decibel profiles during a week.
Winner: people in Europe whose governments tend to protect voters from loss of standard of living, loser: people in the US whose government is leading the race to the bottom.
It's not that simple.
As an American that's been in Europe, I'll say that the protectionism that Europe uses makes them pay a lot more money for goods that Americans buy for less money.
Look at food, housing, gasoline, taxes that Europeans pay compared with what Americans pay and you'll get the idea pretty quickly that protectionism is not a solution. High quality low cost (well, they used to be low cost) Japanese cars that are common in the U.S. and have spurred domestic automakers to improve their quality are not nearly as common in Europe, where, frankly, car quality suffers.
ATM machines over there dispense 50 Euro notes (about 50 dollars) for a good reason - you'll need them to pay for ordinary goods and services.
I recognize that the marketplace for labor is becoming globalized and that there is benefit to the efficiencies gained.
Make no mistake, it's been hard slogging in the good ole USA. Over the past few decades, there's been substantial erosion of the standard of living. Blue-collar unionized jobs in the 1950
s and 1960's that easily produced middle-class lifestyles are all but gone. In their place are lower paying jobs without as many benefits. And a consumer culture of debt, both parents working, the TV raising the kids to live on the same consumer treadmill and to feel and emote rather than to think.
There's been some impressive gains in U.S. worker productivity, especially through the 1990's, but these have not translated into correspondingly higher wages, but rather into improved returns on shareholder equity.
If left to continue, current trends will result in a small number of people owning lots of equity and most people working for subsistence wages.
While I don't believe that simply robbing the rich and giving to the poor is a viable model, there needs to be some checks and balances to prevent situations like what prevailed in the 19th century in the US and the UK. Capitalism provides no inherent floor to wages except when people get really fed up and unionize or change government policy either democratically or violently. But it's not at all certain that the new system they'll institute will create the greatest good.
Here's some ideas that might help.
1. There's no reason whatsoever to guarantee the heirs of stockholders as many economic benefits as they currently receive.
2. Workers should receive equity stakes in companies as well as wages. Intended for retirement, these stakes could only be sold early at a substantial loss.
3. Management should definitely receive the majority of their compensation in long-term equity stakes to inhibit actions which only serve the short-term interests of shareholders.
4. Remove the farm subsidies in the U.S., Europe, Japan that not only cost taxpayers and consumers, but also prevent 3rd world nations from competing on a level playing field and providing an opportunity for them to raise their standard of living out of the subbasement.
will corporations lobby to pass laws that make it illegal to do so?
Good question.
Copyright law, patent law and some legislation like the DMCA already place limits on how information can be copied, or how physical objects can be copied.
IMHO, the really interesting area will be information encoded chemically, as in DNA.
There are already cases where farmers have been sued for illegally re-using seed from artifically-created genetically modified plants.
WIth the possibility of deliberately creating human-like slave creatures with engineered lower intelligence and higher compliance with authority, there will be some interesting ethical matters to resolve about procreation that will make issues like abortion and cloning seem tame by comparison.
Re:Sad state of affairs...
on
Stealth Inflation
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
That doctor made as much in 2 minutes as I do in 6 hours at work
No, she didn't.
My experience is generally that typical doctors charge about US$10/minute that I actually see them. Your charge is a little high, but not when you consider everything going on.
In case you hadn't noticed, there's a whole phalanx of nurses, receptionists and People to Deal with Insurance Companies. Not to mention overhead like materials, cost of space, phones, etc. Not to mention whatever is lost because of services provided for less than cost (indigent care, etc.) All in all, it's not too different from MyCorp, where an outsider that wants to purchase my time must pay MyCorp about 2.5 times what I make to include all of the overhead (as well as benefits, etc.).
Recently I read where some doctors have actually thrown in the towel and refused to have anything to do with insurance claims processing and the micromanagement that goes with it. They just take cash, check or credit card. It's simpler all around.
The broken U.S. health care system is a very inefficient market in a large number of ways. Eg.
Unfortunately, fixing it requires considerable force because there are several different kinds of organisms making good money based on those inefficiencies.
you can't fix all the md5sums that are scattered around the internet
That would be hard.
What might be easier is to fix the routers to, uhmm..., make those downloaded md5sums be The Right Answer. Just look for http or ftp with URL ending.md5sum
Or, compromise the md5sum source code in core-utils prior to the attack so that it reports The Right Answer when requested.
To make it harder on the cracker, digitally signed code and a repository of previously- downloaded public keys make it pretty damn tough.
Quick [OT] warning note about plasma TV's for non-coast dwellers.
If you want to use a plasma TV at high altitude, say above 5000' elevation (eg, Denver), many of the less expensive models hum so loudly it can make the experience not worthwhile.
I vaguely recall some French manufacturer produced a plasma TV that supposedly did not hum, but was expensive and made with thick and heavy glass.
if the machine doesn't have enough memory to guarantee that you can use the block returned from malloc(), why does it pretend to?
It's kind of like airlines overbooking seats.
In Linux 2.7, an improved malloc() will return memory 4 hours later and also give you a free voucher good for memory allocation anywhere that your computer can fly.
How when music is "pirated" that the "music treasure" is copied, there will be two copies of treasure! The first treasure owner can still play the music all they want!
Explain that "copying treasure" is Very Bad.
You can see how this is Very Bad, can't you?
Your inbred human tuition should make you recoil in revulsion from even thinking about giving away anything with a (c).
It is so Evil that I'm sure most of the world's major religions have strict prohibitions against it.
The Common Criteria seems to be at least as much about money as security.
If I were concerned about security, I'd start looking at OpenBSD first, FreeBSD next.
But those OS's don't seem to be on the CCEVS list.
It's ridiculous that a monetary hurdle will arbitrarily exclude excellent secure OS's from consideration while including less secure OS's that do little more than buy certification.
IMHO an impartial standards body like NIST ought to periodically evaluate OS's for security, performance and reliability for different "real world" functionality (desktop/web browser/email/document authoring), (web/db server), etc.
This would be something useful to the public at large and would be a beneficial result of using government funding: a more economically efficient and secure computing environment. But I realize that such a brutal cruel evaluation might conflict with the honorable free-market tradition of "may the biggest advertising budget win". For that reason, that it might run counter to the advertised claims, we'll never see such a rundown except in an expensive whitepaper that you'll need to pay $2500 to see.
I would expect to see trade-offs between security and performance ( or correlation between security and reliability), but there might be some interesting bargains in OS choice depending on your application mix.
OpenSource really really worked, there would only be one Browser that really kicked ass
No, there will be variations, great and small, with the "better" mutation gaining more adherents.
Then, as people see itches in a dominant application, they'll fork to investigate possibly promising alternatives. (I'm thinking of all the different Gecko based browsers, the KHTML based browsers).
There's no doubt that alternative partial development of multiple applications is inefficient. That is, everyone would benefit the most if all the development resources were simply poured into doing the best thing. Doing it once.
But the "best thing" is not known a priori. Then, all of the evolutionary pathways and competition, visible for all to see, is a great way for the world to decide what's the best.
In the closed source world, exactly the same thing happens but on a smaller scale, internally, and a united front is put out to the public as if the optimum has been achieved.
But a company proprietary optimum is still only a local optimum, not a global optimum.
Slashdot Mirror
Compliance with court orders to remove the polluted versions of JVM does not require that those entire product lines be discontinued.
However, it is in Microsoft's business interest to push users of those products into upgrading to newer Microsoft products, for which they'll gain license revenue AND lower support costs associated with discontinuing support for those old products.
And, it is in MSFT's public relations interests to deflect blame for this action away from themselves and upon enemy Sun and its Java legal action.
Exactly the same red-herring strategy is being used to hold up class action settlements in California and to blame it on Lindows.
Congratulations, you have found the hidden cost of open source software. You do realize that for a company to fork themselves, they have to pay for it?
Yes, FOSS has a potentially greater future cost associated with following a fork that is less-traveled and more customized to what you want.
But real businesses rarely can get by with commercial products "as they are out of the box". They need tweaking and tuning. In that respect, those costs would be incurred in a commercial software environment, too.
Finally, speaking of hidden costs that happen in the future: it's not unknown for a vendor to refuse to support some old version of software upon which a business has built up reliance.
Businesses are essentially forced by the vendor into an upgrade for which they can see no justification.
Free and open source software empowers businesses to make their own decisions about upgrade cycles based on their own needs. If they decide a system ain't broke and doesn't need fixing, they can let their own aging branch keep running. If a security patch is needed, then they can simply apply it and keep going without being told that they need to upgrade to Blah Professional Gold 2004.
With Linus of course providing a link allowing the reader to see the law for themselves.
That's low.
Darl would have provided a URL to SCO's business model - you know, the one based on RAMBUS -- but he quickly realized that such a business method was likely to already be patented.
nothing will be an "Outlook Killer" until it runs everywhere that Outlook runs (ie: Windows).
You have a good point.
OTOH, just move down the food chain one more level:
Evo/*NIX will run on the same existing x86 boxes that Outlook/Windows runs on.
probability have mastered the use of nano-technology
The thought occurs that we might be the ping packet.
Send out a clump of amino acids, hope some land in favorable water, then wait.
We're expected to return electromagnetic waves if and when we're successfully "done" and where we are.
Not sure what to expect of traffic after that, though.
The second ping could be a doozy.
attaching false fronts to existing ATMs
Trojans and man-in-the-middle attacks on ATM machines.
This should help raise public awareness of what I've long worried about.
Everyone worries about authenticating the user to the machine (PIN numbers, biometrics), but I worry about whether what's shown to me is my authentic machine.
It's already kind of iffy, but in a few years it will be a foregone conclusion that I cannot trust my machine when it no longer trusts me.
simply not that many rennaissance hackers to staff even our company at our current size
Not just that.
At MyCorp, young renaissance hackers are not in charge. And they won't be in charge for 10 to 20 years because of the existing management power structure. They have to serve their sentence and wait for the powers that be to retire before they are trusted with power.
By which time, their brilliance will have lost its edge, they will have become cynical watching their good ideas bounce against the wall and drop to the floor in a crumpled heap, and they will be ready with a rusty framework of what were good ideas for 20 years ago to impose on the next generation.
Since my whole life is a special act I perform for monetary gain, I will wear a sandwich board with the same "FBI warning" that plays at the beginning of rented videos.
Should any surveillance camera record me in violation of my sacred copyright protections, I will have them arrested.
For example, security cameras pointed towards the parking lots of large retail stores.
Copyright and patent laws have created a distorted marketplace. Most people probably look at moves like this much like the early indigenous Americans looked upon the whole idea of land ownership.
It's true that artificial protections encourage research and creation of artistic works to a certain point.
But we're far past the point of maximizing the overall benefit.
Extended protection times for patents and copyrights have gone beyond symbiosis; they have become parasitic.
I remember decades ago coming across the towers of Hanoi built with wooden dowels and hardwood disks with holes in them. This was late one evening when everyone else had retired.
After playing around with it for a few minutes, my mind just naturally got into the algorithm. The disks were flying around with hardly any conscious thought required on my part.
Just one of those cool game zombie states...
Probably because I'm prone to addictive behaviors I tend to avoid getting involved too closely with games; but I still remember the great buzz of doing Towers of Hanoi the first time.
[There's another hardware puzzle, like a Chinese lock with multiple loops, that's similarly fun for the recursively minded.]
when Indian developers are even cheaper than grad students!
However, some of the brightest Indian code developers are graduate students at MIT.
Someone purchases a house ["PIG"] with walls that aren't very sound proof ["POKE"]. They presumably knew this at the time of purchase, it would be ridiculous to think otherwise.
Not it's not ridiculous to assume otherwise.
In case you haven't noticed, there are a lot of buyers out there that
- do not thoroughly investigate their purchases,
- are easily swayed by the superficial.
not to mention sellers that are financially motivated to- not disclose or to minimize hidden or long-term problems,
- to emphasize the superficial attractiveness.
Despite 2000+ year old advice and plenty of unscrupulous sellers, there are still plenty of unwary and stupid buyers.We could just say that stupid and unwary people get what they deserve. But I'd hate to live in a society where we encourage intelligent people to learn to profit by deceiving the less intelligent.
Since it's impossible to legislate people into being smarter, it's probably reasonable to legislate awkward regulations that require the home seller to check boxes disclosing substantive issues with homes or to get inspections that include decibel profiles during a week.
Winner: people in Europe whose governments tend to protect voters from loss of standard of living, loser: people in the US whose government is leading the race to the bottom.
It's not that simple.
As an American that's been in Europe, I'll say that the protectionism that Europe uses makes them pay a lot more money for goods that Americans buy for less money.
Look at food, housing, gasoline, taxes that Europeans pay compared with what Americans pay and you'll get the idea pretty quickly that protectionism is not a solution. High quality low cost (well, they used to be low cost) Japanese cars that are common in the U.S. and have spurred domestic automakers to improve their quality are not nearly as common in Europe, where, frankly, car quality suffers.
ATM machines over there dispense 50 Euro notes (about 50 dollars) for a good reason - you'll need them to pay for ordinary goods and services.
I recognize that the marketplace for labor is becoming globalized and that there is benefit to the efficiencies gained.
Make no mistake, it's been hard slogging in the good ole USA. Over the past few decades, there's been substantial erosion of the standard of living. Blue-collar unionized jobs in the 1950 s and 1960's that easily produced middle-class lifestyles are all but gone. In their place are lower paying jobs without as many benefits. And a consumer culture of debt, both parents working, the TV raising the kids to live on the same consumer treadmill and to feel and emote rather than to think.
There's been some impressive gains in U.S. worker productivity, especially through the 1990's, but these have not translated into correspondingly higher wages, but rather into improved returns on shareholder equity.
If left to continue, current trends will result in a small number of people owning lots of equity and most people working for subsistence wages.
While I don't believe that simply robbing the rich and giving to the poor is a viable model, there needs to be some checks and balances to prevent situations like what prevailed in the 19th century in the US and the UK. Capitalism provides no inherent floor to wages except when people get really fed up and unionize or change government policy either democratically or violently. But it's not at all certain that the new system they'll institute will create the greatest good.
Here's some ideas that might help.
1. There's no reason whatsoever to guarantee the heirs of stockholders as many economic benefits as they currently receive.
2. Workers should receive equity stakes in companies as well as wages. Intended for retirement, these stakes could only be sold early at a substantial loss.
3. Management should definitely receive the majority of their compensation in long-term equity stakes to inhibit actions which only serve the short-term interests of shareholders.
4. Remove the farm subsidies in the U.S., Europe, Japan that not only cost taxpayers and consumers, but also prevent 3rd world nations from competing on a level playing field and providing an opportunity for them to raise their standard of living out of the subbasement.
will corporations lobby to pass laws that make it illegal to do so?
Good question.
Copyright law, patent law and some legislation like the DMCA already place limits on how information can be copied, or how physical objects can be copied.
IMHO, the really interesting area will be information encoded chemically, as in DNA.
There are already cases where farmers have been sued for illegally re-using seed from artifically-created genetically modified plants.
WIth the possibility of deliberately creating human-like slave creatures with engineered lower intelligence and higher compliance with authority, there will be some interesting ethical matters to resolve about procreation that will make issues like abortion and cloning seem tame by comparison.
That doctor made as much in 2 minutes as I do in 6 hours at work
No, she didn't.
My experience is generally that typical doctors charge about US$10/minute that I actually see them. Your charge is a little high, but not when you consider everything going on.
In case you hadn't noticed, there's a whole phalanx of nurses, receptionists and People to Deal with Insurance Companies. Not to mention overhead like materials, cost of space, phones, etc. Not to mention whatever is lost because of services provided for less than cost (indigent care, etc.) All in all, it's not too different from MyCorp, where an outsider that wants to purchase my time must pay MyCorp about 2.5 times what I make to include all of the overhead (as well as benefits, etc.).
Recently I read where some doctors have actually thrown in the towel and refused to have anything to do with insurance claims processing and the micromanagement that goes with it. They just take cash, check or credit card. It's simpler all around.
The broken U.S. health care system is a very inefficient market in a large number of ways. Eg.
Unfortunately, fixing it requires considerable force because there are several different kinds of organisms making good money based on those inefficiencies.
So why is IBM still putzing around?
Because buying Sun will be less expensive later than now.
you can't fix all the md5sums that are scattered around the internet
That would be hard.
What might be easier is to fix the routers to, uhmm..., make those downloaded md5sums be The Right Answer. Just look for http or ftp with URL ending .md5sum
Or, compromise the md5sum source code in core-utils prior to the attack so that it reports The Right Answer when requested.
To make it harder on the cracker, digitally signed code and a repository of previously- downloaded public keys make it pretty damn tough.
buy a few poster prints
So, just out of curiousity, how small can a 1 Gpxl image be put onto paper?
Thinking idly, 10^(9/2) along an edge would be pretty big on a laser printer capable of 300,600,1200 dpi...
insist I pop out and reseat the RAM
Building a white box myself once I ran into various problems that I misdiagnosed as motherboard issues.
Later, a friend that does this kind of thing every day for living pointed me to that exact same solution for a POST problem.
That, and a cruddy power supply in the cheapo cabinet I bought.
Sigh, experience isn't cheap.
I'm usually pretty patient with helpdroids, unless they steer me into something I've already tried that's very time consuming.
km/h
h?
hour?
What about seconds?
I've never understood why the metric transformation didn't go all the way and make units of time measurement denominated in factors of 10.
Instead, we get all this Terran legacy units of days, weeks, months, years.
We'll be stuck with hard-to-multiply units of time until a sizable population inhabits other worlds.
Quick [OT] warning note about plasma TV's for non-coast dwellers.
If you want to use a plasma TV at high altitude, say above 5000' elevation (eg, Denver), many of the less expensive models hum so loudly it can make the experience not worthwhile.
I vaguely recall some French manufacturer produced a plasma TV that supposedly did not hum, but was expensive and made with thick and heavy glass.
if the machine doesn't have enough memory to guarantee that you can use the block returned from malloc(), why does it pretend to?
It's kind of like airlines overbooking seats.
In Linux 2.7, an improved malloc() will return memory 4 hours later and also give you a free voucher good for memory allocation anywhere that your computer can fly.
How when music is "pirated" that the "music treasure" is copied, there will be two copies of treasure! The first treasure owner can still play the music all they want!
Explain that "copying treasure" is Very Bad.
You can see how this is Very Bad, can't you?
Your inbred human tuition should make you recoil in revulsion from even thinking about giving away anything with a (c).
It is so Evil that I'm sure most of the world's major religions have strict prohibitions against it.
but after that we're facing the physical limits.
There's an insidious corollary to Moore's Law: the increasing cost of building fabs.
More than any other factor, money limitations will bend Moore's Law.
The Common Criteria seems to be at least as much about money as security.
If I were concerned about security, I'd start looking at OpenBSD first, FreeBSD next.
But those OS's don't seem to be on the CCEVS list.
It's ridiculous that a monetary hurdle will arbitrarily exclude excellent secure OS's from consideration while including less secure OS's that do little more than buy certification.
IMHO an impartial standards body like NIST ought to periodically evaluate OS's for security, performance and reliability for different "real world" functionality (desktop/web browser/email/document authoring), (web/db server), etc.
This would be something useful to the public at large and would be a beneficial result of using government funding: a more economically efficient and secure computing environment. But I realize that such a brutal cruel evaluation might conflict with the honorable free-market tradition of "may the biggest advertising budget win". For that reason, that it might run counter to the advertised claims, we'll never see such a rundown except in an expensive whitepaper that you'll need to pay $2500 to see.
I would expect to see trade-offs between security and performance ( or correlation between security and reliability), but there might be some interesting bargains in OS choice depending on your application mix.
OpenSource really really worked, there would only be one Browser that really kicked ass
No, there will be variations, great and small, with the "better" mutation gaining more adherents.
Then, as people see itches in a dominant application, they'll fork to investigate possibly promising alternatives. (I'm thinking of all the different Gecko based browsers, the KHTML based browsers).
There's no doubt that alternative partial development of multiple applications is inefficient. That is, everyone would benefit the most if all the development resources were simply poured into doing the best thing. Doing it once.
But the "best thing" is not known a priori. Then, all of the evolutionary pathways and competition, visible for all to see, is a great way for the world to decide what's the best.
In the closed source world, exactly the same thing happens but on a smaller scale, internally, and a united front is put out to the public as if the optimum has been achieved.
But a company proprietary optimum is still only a local optimum, not a global optimum.