I agree with you completely. I don't use Windows myself, but I do know there is a setting. I was surprised that in the case of this hospital, that they had it set to autoupdate. I would get into their face about it, but I don't want to do the work myself. In the past I supported Microsoft products, and they failed to support me numerous times. I use Mac OS X and Linux and FreeBSD now. The slingbox player was my last reason to use Windows and now the Mac version is released, whahoo!!
I was at the hospital visiting a loved one. I noticed that the nurses console was hung in the middle of an autoreboot. I admit that autoupdating critical computers is a bad idea. The amount of power that Microsoft has over the windows update feature is of great concern to me. The ability to corrupt/reboot most of the desktop computers in the country controlled by one company is too much power in my mind. This is a risky system that we cannot absolutely control, much like a nuclear reactor. Just not as spectacular when it fails.
I bought PS3 hardware specifically because it had the cell cores. For the purpose of doing parallel programming research. I am not giving up my equipment after spending the time and money to develop on it. If they actually try to seize and destroy these consoles, I expect a small revolution over it. I will be waitching this litigation closely.
For quite a few years, the WRT series wireless routers were terrific. They were easy to deploy and they worked for long periods of time without intervention. Just around the time that Cisco showed up, the reliability went to hell. To make things worse, the WRT300N product hit the streets and things became worse. I like to browse the isles at BB looking for good deals on hard drives and other stuff, and it drives me mad to listen to BB staff telling people to buy the Linksys 802.11n(sort-of) products. I own a huge pile of 802.11n(prelim) routers. I have 3 each of linksys, dlink, and netgear. I have yet to find a reliable solution. The best consumer router IMHO is the NetGear WPN824 "g" unit. The one with the blue window on top. In my opinion it has the most reliable operation of any of the current consumer units. Getting back to Linksys, I bought the three WRT300N units and immediately had trouble. I went to Linksys' web forum and found may other people with the same problems, all having their postings on the forum deleted as "unhelpful" or "unproductive". In fact I was banished from their forum for discussing firmware problems. They finally agreed to upgrade my units to the next version, and after I RMA'd them, three "new" units of the old version number arrived and someone had whited out the "SHIP V2 only" note on the RMA and replaced it with "SHIP V1". I have decided not to spend any more money on linksys products of any kind. I am a "vote with my money" kind of guy.
Oh, I forgot to mention that IBM wanted to buy CP/M-86 outright for peanuts leaving DRI no rights to it whatsoever, and Gary didn't want to give up his flagship 16-bit OS. I can understand that. If IBM only wanted to license it, Gary would have done it. I seem to remember that IBM wanted to pay several hundred thousand for it but DRI's investment exceeded that, and things were looking up.
Well, in the book, the stone was created by the Alchemist, Flaumel. In times past, there was a fine line between chemistry and sourcery when it came to performing alchemy and creating the philosopher's stone. Some question exists as to whether the stone was physical or spiritual (or both). This is what I was referring to as the details of alchemy, as some believe that what sounds like a physical process for creating the stone is actually an analogy for a mental/spiritual process in the mind. The stone was said to change the most common substance, maybe lead, into gold. Or maybe the stone changed a most common substance, the unenlightened human mind, into gold (an illuminated human mind). Hence the vagueness of the distinction between a wise man (scientist) and a sourcerer (philospher/seeker). Namaste - doug
DEC, HP, others didn't understand how dangerous Microsoft was to their survival. Just like how IBM effectively killed off Digital Research by licensing MS-DOS along with DR-DOS but pre-loading MS-DOS and reselling DR-DOS at a very high price. The original hardware vendors found their PC OS "partner" soon became a threat to any software they where doing or wanted to do and also became so dependent on Microsoft it allowed Microsoft to actually dictate product development via strong arm tactics.
Not exactly so. Gary insisted on so high a royalty for cp/m-86 that IBM had to price the OS at $250/copy. Gary was busy selling lots of cp/m-86 and didn't want to undercut his other business. IBM got a good deal from Microsoft on Dos so could sell the Dos more cheaply. It remains a shame that IBM didn't choose on the basis of technical merits because cpm-86 was a better operating system and had lots of development software and apps available. Cp/m-86 was big on the Compupro systems and others at the time.
It is normally called the Philosopher's Stone in America. I just think that they were concentrating on the fact that it was a stone needed by the dark sourcerer in Harry Potter, as opposed to a long explanation about the nature of Alchemy. Before Harry Potter, I had never heard of the Sourcerer's Stone before. But I have read extensively about alchemy and the Philosopher's Stone.
Over the last 40 years I have written a lot of software, and some of it has ended up in unexpected places. I recently found some source code I wrote while at Digital Research in a zip file on a server in a remote vampire sanctuary in europe. I wrote some encryption interfaces for Motorola for the military and I expect that code was widely used in places I can only imagine. As long as we are writing code modules, we have very little control over where those modules end up. The best we can hope to do is not actually integrate anything we personaly consider immoral. You make a personal stand. You make an example. People notice and respect you or not. As you get older, your views change and hopefully, you don't regret later what you did when you were younger. If I invented something that was used for an immoral purpose, I would think once about killing the asshole that used my code in an immoral way before I would consider suicide. Serve the society in the way you see best. Namaste - doug
Then we would get to go back to arguing^h^h^h^h^h^hdiscussing whether the united states (and other) governments should have the ability to read all encrypted traffic (for official "authorized" purposes only of course).
Thank you Anonymous Coward for your authoritative and informative explanation with specifics and links to better information. (sarcastic)
I am a software engineer who has worked on certifying RAID drivers to be compatible with Microsoft's operating systems. I can say that it is a job from hell. The difficulty in certification and testing is one of the reasons that hardware manufacturers concentrate mostly on building new hardware that is compatible with existing drivers cheaper rather than creating new hardware that requires expensive driver development to support Windows.
I am starting to feel that reading posts from Anonymous Coward is a waste of time. How much credibility do you have if you are not willing to sign your posting. I understand if you are an insider needing the protection, but I don't see that here.
When I was a kid, I knew about a certain jelly bean machine that was generous if you wiggled the knob. The mechanism was slightly faulty I guess. Regarding TFA, should I have been liable for knowlingly using a defective jelly bean machine and receiving 20% more beans than normal? Vendors keep an eye on the yield of machines and should know when profit declines. Gambling machine vendors have a legal responsibility to assure the gambling commission that the machines operates within certain performance boundaries. If they are not paying attention, they are not doing their jobs. Do gamblers have a legal responsibility to walk away from a machine that is paying off more often. Good luck with that:-)
There are a few major truths here. High Definition looks nice. We don't know for sure who will win. IMHO the unsung hero is the upsampling DVD player fed into a HD display. Anyone with a HD display and a collection of DVDs should buy an upsampling DVD player so they can enjoy their existing library and their HD display. If the upsampling player happens to do HDDVD also, what's not to like about that. While I do own four BD titles, I have 125 wide screen DVDs that look great on the upsampling player on my HD display (46" LCD). Personally, I own a PS3 so my BD needs are covered and I own a $100 upsampling DVD player (Panasonic). If I did not yet own an upsampling DVD player, I might bite on the HDDVD/upsampling DVD player just for the versatility. I think the HD titles cost way too much money and I am not rushing out to collect them. In fact the way to go is probably to rent them. The new releases cost about $40 which is way too much for a piece of plastic. When I bought my PS3, I thought the BD titles were going to cost $25 and I thought about budgeting for one per month. At the higher price, I am rethinking my decision to collect.
The fact that it is not an Objective-C compiler requires a lot of thought. I was thinking about the fact that their professional package comes with their threading toolkit and it might make a good tool for application development, but if you want to write an application specifically for the Mac, Objective-C seems like the way to go, if OS transportability is not a design goal. This is a difficult decision to make. I am still struggling with it. Normally I try to keep my code transportable with generic and os-dependent sections. I still like Unix/Linux and embedded platforms, but I am tending towards Mac OS X as my target platform for my next product.
I am interested in other people's thoughts about this...
I was a TechNet Plus and MSDN licensee for many years. I purchased Xeon server grade equipment and tried running XP Pro 64-bit and Windows 2003 Server R2 64-bit and was in driver hell. No support for the hardware adapters in my machine. Trouble with the sound card, Sata interface hardware, Video cards... It went on and on. In the future, hardware vendors will provide 64-bit drivers but for now, the only way to get fully supported hardware seems to be by purchasing OEM machines with driver support provided by the OEM. Is the only difference in you DVD piracy scenario the OS version?
According to Cingular/ATT, they were rolling out their 3G service last year and expected it to be available in all service areas. I am somewhat surprised that at this time, the 3G just plain isn't there. When I was considering a 3G card for my notebook, cingular was very clear about how the serevice would be available soon to upgrade the EDGE service. I am glad I didn't buy it on the basis of the promise.
"This is where my knowledge of OS design perhaps hits a stumbling block. This erratum says that the next page may be marked as accessed, even though it hasn't actually been accessed. In order for this to be exploitable, the OS must perform some operations that affect this not-really-accessed page without checking the accessed bit. What operation? And what OS?"
This example doesn't indicate whether the access was a write or a read. If it was a read, who cares? If it is a spurious write indication, it could cause a write fault exception that wasn't real and could cause a process to be terminated when it hadn't done anything wrong. I could see that being a real problem for any operating system that uses virtual memory in protected mode with write protected code segments. That would probably mean windows and Unix.
Before the current administration, I would have thought that your posting was science fiction. But the erosion of civil rights in the last few years has brused my sensibilities about what can happen. I can see much of your posting coming to pass if we aren't paying attention. Sometimes I feel blessed to live in this exciting technical time, and sometimes I feel trepidation.
Thank you for your posting. It is thought provoking. This is indeed an age of social responsibility. By the way, at Internic, my nicname was dg223.
I have mod points today and read every posting in this thread. I couldn't find a single posting that I felt like moderating.
As a security consultant, I have many years of experience and study in the field of computer/general security. A password is something you know. A carkey is something you have. The obvious best choice for security is "Who you are". What you know can be guessed or coerced from you. What you have can be forged, stolen, borrowed, or bought from you. Part of the appeal of the implantable chip is the idea that it's inherent security is closer to "Who you are" than other contemporary methods.
It is easy enough to write a short list of things that can go wrong with the use of RFID for personal identification. Hacking, Unreliability, Abuse, Impersonalization... No contemporary identification methods are completely reliable. Combinations of methods can improve reliability. Biometrics + Photo + DNA might be the best I can suggest off hand.The fact is we are still looking for the best way to identify "Who you are". I don't believe that any of the existing systems today really do the job. RFID tags can make some things easier like keeping tack of shipping containers, but not with complete certainty, just as a cost efficient method. Restricting access on the basis of identity is a process subject to change as new methods are created and hackers learn to circumvent them. We have to pay attention no matter what method we use. I would really hate to have an imbedded RFID tag and have my access to the toilet accidentally restricted due to a database problem somewhere. When you take humans out of the equation and rely on technology, a lot of problems can occur, The quality of life for living beings is more important than the corporate bottom line, and I don't want to be shot with an RFID silver bullet.
Here we are, 21st century. And our secretary of defense is "low tech" and "does'nt use email".Here we are, 21st century. And our secretary of defense is "low tech" and "does'nt use email".
I too find it hard to take that someone in that position would claim to be low-tech. Even if it's true, I can't believe he actually said it.:-)
I would build a billion cheap PCs meant to run the operating system with the weakest security and try to get them used in as many places as possible. I would build and export inexpensive network infrastructure devices that were cheap enough to be located in every home and business. Then I would sit back and wait for the viruses to take it all apart. This would most likely happen if one particular insecure (closed source) operating system was to be used almost everywhere so that a targeted virus would do the most damage. Meanwhile the company selling the insecure operting system would gleefully sit there making money and feel superior. IMHO.
On one side we have closed source operating systems with closed source development tools and libraries that are riddled with bugs, are inefficient, and expensive to get support for. Examples being Microsoft Windows, Visual Studio... People actually get paid to work for commercial companies that provide serious software in the space. The get to have families, homes, cars, and a life.
On the other side we have free open source OSs with free open source development tools. People who have spare time write open software so that anyone with enough money for a computer can get a working OS and some application programs and enjoy computing.
What is missing here is something in the middle where people who have committed their lives to software engineering can write useful software, make some money, and survive in a world where it takes money to live. I remember when their were a dozen commercial Unix versions we asked for a unified API so that we could write software that would just run. I am truly sorry that Java wasn't it. I am sick to my core that Microsoft says.NET is it.
It is great that RMS (and other people) worked hard and their is an alternative to Windows and SCO Unix/Xenix. While RMS was busy making sure there would be some free software, he made very few allowances for how motivated skillful people could write software and distribute it, and profit from their knowledge, skill, and efforts.
I have never pirated source code in my life and I have worked for hundreds of companies as a consulting engineer. I don't need to hide my code to hide unethical behavior. But around the time people started talking about reverse engineering as a legitimate competitive engineering technique, I fell of the cabbage cart and couldn't keep up with what they were thinking. Over my career, I have bought dozens of proprietary language compilers for various operating systems. That was how I worked for thirty years. It was a required tool of the trade. If I want to write a unique contemporary software product, and sell it to assure my financial stability in my old age, it is very unclear how to do that any more when the big players have patent portfolios, and the small players insist on an open software world. RMS says programmer's art should belong to the world. To the best of my knowledge, he has plenty of money, so he figured out how to leverage the marketplace and make a living. I am not a devious businessman who knows how to leverage everyone to make a fortune. Just a hard working engineer who solves technical problems one at a time for people who have problems.
I am clinically depressed about the current state of the computer industry, and my pride of being part of an unfolding technological society has faded as my talents and experience become worthless in the current marketplace where saving a few dollars on engineers results in technical jobs being sent offshore, and marketing costs are so high you have to sell the majority interests out to make a visible mark in the marketplace. When I started programming, hardly anyone even knew what that was, and I thought I hade found a good niche. I read that soon there will be a billion personal computers. I guess that means there will be some part of a billion people who think they are programmers cluttering up the product space too.
Things have really gone to hell. Bill Gates is the richest man in the world. Computers are so cheap that they aren't worth fixing any more. People expect that they should be entitled to all the software they need for free. I know that releasing your hobby code into the free software world is a good way to let people see how smart you are. I don't know what else to say, and that's saying something. I usually have something to say about everything. Douglas Goodall (Internic nicname DG223) SNMP Private Enterprise number 204, goodall.com domain registered in 1991. Started on 1620s and 360/20s. Worked at arpa host #1 network measurement center.
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I agree with you completely. I don't use Windows myself, but I do know there is a setting. I was surprised that in the case of this hospital, that they had it set to autoupdate. I would get into their face about it, but I don't want to do the work myself. In the past I supported Microsoft products, and they failed to support me numerous times. I use Mac OS X and Linux and FreeBSD now. The slingbox player was my last reason to use Windows and now the Mac version is released, whahoo!!
I was at the hospital visiting a loved one. I noticed that the nurses console was hung in the middle of an autoreboot. I admit that autoupdating critical computers is a bad idea. The amount of power that Microsoft has over the windows update feature is of great concern to me. The ability to corrupt/reboot most of the desktop computers in the country controlled by one company is too much power in my mind. This is a risky system that we cannot absolutely control, much like a nuclear reactor. Just not as spectacular when it fails.
I bought PS3 hardware specifically because it had the cell cores. For the purpose of doing parallel programming research. I am not giving up my equipment after spending the time and money to develop on it. If they actually try to seize and destroy these consoles, I expect a small revolution over it. I will be waitching this litigation closely.
For quite a few years, the WRT series wireless routers were terrific. They were easy to deploy and they worked for long periods of time without intervention. Just around the time that Cisco showed up, the reliability went to hell. To make things worse, the WRT300N product hit the streets and things became worse. I like to browse the isles at BB looking for good deals on hard drives and other stuff, and it drives me mad to listen to BB staff telling people to buy the Linksys 802.11n(sort-of) products. I own a huge pile of 802.11n(prelim) routers. I have 3 each of linksys, dlink, and netgear. I have yet to find a reliable solution. The best consumer router IMHO is the NetGear WPN824 "g" unit. The one with the blue window on top. In my opinion it has the most reliable operation of any of the current consumer units. Getting back to Linksys, I bought the three WRT300N units and immediately had trouble. I went to Linksys' web forum and found may other people with the same problems, all having their postings on the forum deleted as "unhelpful" or "unproductive". In fact I was banished from their forum for discussing firmware problems. They finally agreed to upgrade my units to the next version, and after I RMA'd them, three "new" units of the old version number arrived and someone had whited out the "SHIP V2 only" note on the RMA and replaced it with "SHIP V1". I have decided not to spend any more money on linksys products of any kind. I am a "vote with my money" kind of guy.
Oh, I forgot to mention that IBM wanted to buy CP/M-86 outright for peanuts leaving DRI no rights to it whatsoever, and Gary didn't want to give up his flagship 16-bit OS. I can understand that. If IBM only wanted to license it, Gary would have done it. I seem to remember that IBM wanted to pay several hundred thousand for it but DRI's investment exceeded that, and things were looking up.
Well, in the book, the stone was created by the Alchemist, Flaumel. In times past, there was a fine line between chemistry and sourcery when it came to performing alchemy and creating the philosopher's stone. Some question exists as to whether the stone was physical or spiritual (or both). This is what I was referring to as the details of alchemy, as some believe that what sounds like a physical process for creating the stone is actually an analogy for a mental/spiritual process in the mind. The stone was said to change the most common substance, maybe lead, into gold. Or maybe the stone changed a most common substance, the unenlightened human mind, into gold (an illuminated human mind). Hence the vagueness of the distinction between a wise man (scientist) and a sourcerer (philospher/seeker). Namaste - doug
Not exactly so. Gary insisted on so high a royalty for cp/m-86 that IBM had to price the OS at $250/copy. Gary was busy selling lots of cp/m-86 and didn't want to undercut his other business. IBM got a good deal from Microsoft on Dos so could sell the Dos more cheaply. It remains a shame that IBM didn't choose on the basis of technical merits because cpm-86 was a better operating system and had lots of development software and apps available. Cp/m-86 was big on the Compupro systems and others at the time.
It is normally called the Philosopher's Stone in America. I just think that they were concentrating on the fact that it was a stone needed by the dark sourcerer in Harry Potter, as opposed to a long explanation about the nature of Alchemy. Before Harry Potter, I had never heard of the Sourcerer's Stone before. But I have read extensively about alchemy and the Philosopher's Stone.
Over the last 40 years I have written a lot of software, and some of it has ended up in unexpected places. I recently found some source code I wrote while at Digital Research in a zip file on a server in a remote vampire sanctuary in europe. I wrote some encryption interfaces for Motorola for the military and I expect that code was widely used in places I can only imagine. As long as we are writing code modules, we have very little control over where those modules end up. The best we can hope to do is not actually integrate anything we personaly consider immoral. You make a personal stand. You make an example. People notice and respect you or not. As you get older, your views change and hopefully, you don't regret later what you did when you were younger. If I invented something that was used for an immoral purpose, I would think once about killing the asshole that used my code in an immoral way before I would consider suicide. Serve the society in the way you see best. Namaste - doug
Then we would get to go back to arguing^h^h^h^h^h^hdiscussing whether the united states (and other) governments should have the ability to read all encrypted traffic (for official "authorized" purposes only of course).
I mean if the web site were being browsed with ssl encryption it would be harder to filter, right?
I am a software engineer who has worked on certifying RAID drivers to be compatible with Microsoft's operating systems. I can say that it is a job from hell. The difficulty in certification and testing is one of the reasons that hardware manufacturers concentrate mostly on building new hardware that is compatible with existing drivers cheaper rather than creating new hardware that requires expensive driver development to support Windows.
I am starting to feel that reading posts from Anonymous Coward is a waste of time. How much credibility do you have if you are not willing to sign your posting. I understand if you are an insider needing the protection, but I don't see that here.
When I was a kid, I knew about a certain jelly bean machine that was generous if you wiggled the knob. The mechanism was slightly faulty I guess. Regarding TFA, should I have been liable for knowlingly using a defective jelly bean machine and receiving 20% more beans than normal? Vendors keep an eye on the yield of machines and should know when profit declines. Gambling machine vendors have a legal responsibility to assure the gambling commission that the machines operates within certain performance boundaries. If they are not paying attention, they are not doing their jobs. Do gamblers have a legal responsibility to walk away from a machine that is paying off more often. Good luck with that :-)
For those people I recommend keeping a Fargo oDVD on hand so they can watch it in their notebook computer while they wait for their flight...
There are a few major truths here. High Definition looks nice. We don't know for sure who will win. IMHO the unsung hero is the upsampling DVD player fed into a HD display. Anyone with a HD display and a collection of DVDs should buy an upsampling DVD player so they can enjoy their existing library and their HD display. If the upsampling player happens to do HDDVD also, what's not to like about that. While I do own four BD titles, I have 125 wide screen DVDs that look great on the upsampling player on my HD display (46" LCD). Personally, I own a PS3 so my BD needs are covered and I own a $100 upsampling DVD player (Panasonic). If I did not yet own an upsampling DVD player, I might bite on the HDDVD/upsampling DVD player just for the versatility. I think the HD titles cost way too much money and I am not rushing out to collect them. In fact the way to go is probably to rent them. The new releases cost about $40 which is way too much for a piece of plastic. When I bought my PS3, I thought the BD titles were going to cost $25 and I thought about budgeting for one per month. At the higher price, I am rethinking my decision to collect.
I am interested in other people's thoughts about this...
I was a TechNet Plus and MSDN licensee for many years. I purchased Xeon server grade equipment and tried running XP Pro 64-bit and Windows 2003 Server R2 64-bit and was in driver hell. No support for the hardware adapters in my machine. Trouble with the sound card, Sata interface hardware, Video cards... It went on and on. In the future, hardware vendors will provide 64-bit drivers but for now, the only way to get fully supported hardware seems to be by purchasing OEM machines with driver support provided by the OEM. Is the only difference in you DVD piracy scenario the OS version?
According to Cingular/ATT, they were rolling out their 3G service last year and expected it to be available in all service areas. I am somewhat surprised that at this time, the 3G just plain isn't there. When I was considering a 3G card for my notebook, cingular was very clear about how the serevice would be available soon to upgrade the EDGE service. I am glad I didn't buy it on the basis of the promise.
Thank you for your response. You are obviously much smarter than I am and my well considered response has no value in the light of your brilliance.
This example doesn't indicate whether the access was a write or a read. If it was a read, who cares? If it is a spurious write indication, it could cause a write fault exception that wasn't real and could cause a process to be terminated when it hadn't done anything wrong. I could see that being a real problem for any operating system that uses virtual memory in protected mode with write protected code segments. That would probably mean windows and Unix.
Thank you for your posting. It is thought provoking. This is indeed an age of social responsibility. By the way, at Internic, my nicname was dg223.
As a security consultant, I have many years of experience and study in the field of computer/general security. A password is something you know. A carkey is something you have. The obvious best choice for security is "Who you are". What you know can be guessed or coerced from you. What you have can be forged, stolen, borrowed, or bought from you. Part of the appeal of the implantable chip is the idea that it's inherent security is closer to "Who you are" than other contemporary methods.
It is easy enough to write a short list of things that can go wrong with the use of RFID for personal identification. Hacking, Unreliability, Abuse, Impersonalization... No contemporary identification methods are completely reliable. Combinations of methods can improve reliability. Biometrics + Photo + DNA might be the best I can suggest off hand.The fact is we are still looking for the best way to identify "Who you are". I don't believe that any of the existing systems today really do the job. RFID tags can make some things easier like keeping tack of shipping containers, but not with complete certainty, just as a cost efficient method. Restricting access on the basis of identity is a process subject to change as new methods are created and hackers learn to circumvent them. We have to pay attention no matter what method we use. I would really hate to have an imbedded RFID tag and have my access to the toilet accidentally restricted due to a database problem somewhere. When you take humans out of the equation and rely on technology, a lot of problems can occur, The quality of life for living beings is more important than the corporate bottom line, and I don't want to be shot with an RFID silver bullet.
I too find it hard to take that someone in that position would claim to be low-tech. Even if it's true, I can't believe he actually said it. :-)
I would build a billion cheap PCs meant to run the operating system with the weakest security and try to get them used in as many places as possible. I would build and export inexpensive network infrastructure devices that were cheap enough to be located in every home and business. Then I would sit back and wait for the viruses to take it all apart. This would most likely happen if one particular insecure (closed source) operating system was to be used almost everywhere so that a targeted virus would do the most damage. Meanwhile the company selling the insecure operting system would gleefully sit there making money and feel superior. IMHO.
On the other side we have free open source OSs with free open source development tools. People who have spare time write open software so that anyone with enough money for a computer can get a working OS and some application programs and enjoy computing.
What is missing here is something in the middle where people who have committed their lives to software engineering can write useful software, make some money, and survive in a world where it takes money to live. I remember when their were a dozen commercial Unix versions we asked for a unified API so that we could write software that would just run. I am truly sorry that Java wasn't it. I am sick to my core that Microsoft says .NET is it.
It is great that RMS (and other people) worked hard and their is an alternative to Windows and SCO Unix/Xenix. While RMS was busy making sure there would be some free software, he made very few allowances for how motivated skillful people could write software and distribute it, and profit from their knowledge, skill, and efforts.
I have never pirated source code in my life and I have worked for hundreds of companies as a consulting engineer. I don't need to hide my code to hide unethical behavior. But around the time people started talking about reverse engineering as a legitimate competitive engineering technique, I fell of the cabbage cart and couldn't keep up with what they were thinking. Over my career, I have bought dozens of proprietary language compilers for various operating systems. That was how I worked for thirty years. It was a required tool of the trade. If I want to write a unique contemporary software product, and sell it to assure my financial stability in my old age, it is very unclear how to do that any more when the big players have patent portfolios, and the small players insist on an open software world. RMS says programmer's art should belong to the world. To the best of my knowledge, he has plenty of money, so he figured out how to leverage the marketplace and make a living. I am not a devious businessman who knows how to leverage everyone to make a fortune. Just a hard working engineer who solves technical problems one at a time for people who have problems.
I am clinically depressed about the current state of the computer industry, and my pride of being part of an unfolding technological society has faded as my talents and experience become worthless in the current marketplace where saving a few dollars on engineers results in technical jobs being sent offshore, and marketing costs are so high you have to sell the majority interests out to make a visible mark in the marketplace. When I started programming, hardly anyone even knew what that was, and I thought I hade found a good niche. I read that soon there will be a billion personal computers. I guess that means there will be some part of a billion people who think they are programmers cluttering up the product space too.
Things have really gone to hell. Bill Gates is the richest man in the world. Computers are so cheap that they aren't worth fixing any more. People expect that they should be entitled to all the software they need for free. I know that releasing your hobby code into the free software world is a good way to let people see how smart you are. I don't know what else to say, and that's saying something. I usually have something to say about everything. Douglas Goodall (Internic nicname DG223) SNMP Private Enterprise number 204, goodall.com domain registered in 1991. Started on 1620s and 360/20s. Worked at arpa host #1 network measurement center.