Posts by Glen Turner

Re: why don't the open source people do something original

Um, like the web, DNS, USENET, ...

What is the point of voting machines?

Australia has a major election every two years. The votes are cast and counted by hand. Results are available by midnight.

If you think the process is being manipulated, you can go and watch. No decertified voting machines, no hanging chads.

Patent system broken for innovators too

Astronomy and computing researchers at CSIRO invented a multipath radio reception technology where multipath signals actually improved reception rather than degraded it. They built it, they used it in their own astronomy receivers, and they patented it in 1992.

Now CSIRO are involved in multi-year litigation against huge multinational firms to force manufacturers using 802.11a, 802.11g and 802.11n to take a license. This is despite the 802.11 committee making it clear that a patent license would be required by manufacturers, by approaching CSIRO during the development of the standards for a statement that the patent would be license on reasonable and non-discriminatory terms.

Of course computer manufacturers faced with a $5 license fee would much rather litigate than pay. Unfortunately for them, the Australian government decided to fund the litigation rather than see a successful strategy against research commercialisation gain hold. A "small" private sector innovator would not have been bankrolled.

It's about leadership

The "but there are billions of people in China" argument is asking the people of China and India to forgo comfortable shelter whilst you bask in the warmth of your inefficient patio heater. Understandably, they raise their middle finger to your insistence that the costs of reducing global warming fall upon them whilst you continue in the habits that made global warming a problem in the first place.

Red Hat have the CIO mindshare, not Oracle

Hi Macka,

You paint Oracle as a force that will enter the Linux market and steam roller it, based on CIO's irresistible attraction to the Oracle name and slightly smaller administrivia.

It's not going to happen.

If the world is as you paint it, then Oracle wouldn't be shipping a Red Hat-compatible operating system, but Red Hat would be shipping a Oracle-compatible operating system.

Imagine that "smaller administrivia" negotiation in that single contract with Oracle. You are running PeopleSoft, Oracle, and OracleLinux. Do you think you are in a better position to do a deal them someone running PeopleSoft+Oracle, lots of MySQL, and RHL? Or do you think your migration costs lock you in to whatever price Oracle asks? So drinking the Oracle KoolAid isn't going to save money.

Nor is it going to reduce risk. Who would you rather take Linux maintenance from: Red Hat on a Red Hat-built operating system, or Oracle on a Red Hat-built operating system. I think the market has already answered "Red Hat". Red Hat haven't even dropped their costs, so Oracle have failed to lay a glove on them.

Oracle's next response is a true OracleLinux. But that still doesn't help get rid of the Red Hat taint. A Red Hat sales person can very simply show that there is 100,000% more Red Hat code in OracleLinux than Oracle code. It's still too obvious a re-badging of a product better bought elsewhere.

Sure, Oracle is giving it a go, trying to "own" the enterprise server market. That's the best response it can think of to lock customers into Oracle before MySQL eats away its database business. But Oracle has miscalculated again.

Cheers, Glen

Not part of the "public record", whatever that is

The clip doesn't have its copyright license altered by being referenced by a court decision.

But, in the interests of future readers, ephemeral content such as YouTube clips shouldn't be referenced at all, but incorporated into the judgment.

If incorporated, then the clip in the judgment would be able to be reproduced by anyone. However, publishers of the clip would be subject to the usual laws of court reportage. That opens another can of worms if an edited clip is published.

I use my iPod for Podcasts

So tell me again why I should pay Universal to listen to science podcasts?

Anyway, it's bad public policy to levy the player as a proxy for music listening royalties.

Firstly, it is anti-competitive. Imagine how a new firm (such as Virgin Records once was) would ever appear in the future digital music market.

Secondly, it's far too complex. There are substantial differences in record company market share depending on where you are -- English speakers don't listen to many Japanese-language recordings, some English-language groups are unaccountably "big in Japan", dragging their record company's market share with them.

Thirdly, it prevents the evolution of the market. Flickr and YouTube don't make money by levying product. What makes digital music so special that it will always need the particular form of intermediatary known as a "record company"?

Fourthly, levying the iPod denies artists subsequent revenues. Music preferences change as people age. But the revenue via the hardware purchase will always be frozen to my preferences at the time I purchased the player. Since art follows money, those annoying boy bands so appealing to teenagers will exist forever.

Replacement parts

I've had a similar experience, but with Dell. Four motherboards within a month.

It's pretty plain to me that the replacement parts used for servicing are *reconditioned* parts. That is, they have been removed on suspicion of being faulty, but no fault could be verified. Unfortunately, this often means that the part is actually faulty but inadequately tested before being added to the stock of spares.

This means that once you have a fault your odds of getting a on-going lemon are massively increased.

The only way out of this ongoing pain is to hassle the vendor for a factory-new machine. I made the mistake the first time of settling for a "as-new" (ie, returned with a fault, inadequately tested, added to pile of "reconditioned, as-new" machines). Of course, it was actually faulty.

Two final observations.

1. Vendors don't know how these things work anymore. I rejected a machine because it's ethernet port didn't work. To make this more than a assertion I ran the standard logic analyser measurements from the ethernet standard and it showed a under-voltage when loaded. That sent the vendor alternatingly confused and ballistic (thinking that I'd opened the cover).

2. You need the cooperation of your government consumer agency to force a refund. Most suppliers of electronic kit allow 3% for refunds, I suspect computer manufacturers allow for 0%. Computer manufacturers don't want to hear that a unrepairably faulty machine leads to a right of refund (at least here in Oz) and don't have any procedure for this in any case.

Malware or VMware?

So you can detect if you are running on a VM by looking at hardware oddities. But how does the virus detector know it is running in a malware VM? And this will get worse, not better, as operating systems use paravirtualisation more and there's no "real hardware" to look for oddities in.