| Thursday,
July 18, 2002 In
response to an earlier e-mail that linked to a
worldtechtribune.com article criticizing the EFF, all I can say is that
the author of the article is simply setting up a straw man. I have never
seen the EFF argue such a thing in anything that I've read.
The real problem with such diverse issues as gun
control, cyber vandalism and “digital rights” enforcement isn’t so
much that most people agree that there should be limits, but rather the
fear that there are ulterior motives involved. For example, in gun
control, most people would agree that a law restricting people from firing
guns in crowd meets legitimate safety concerns; however, some fear that
gun opponents would use any restriction to remove all guns. In the digital
rights area, most would agree that pirating music should be unlawful,
however you should be able to make copies of a song that you purchased in
order to use it on your media of choice (cd, computer, walkman). Those who
oppose government mandated security measures (I would point out that any
company is currently free to implement any security measure on their own,
such as Sony has with copy protection on some of their music cds), fear
that the eventual goal of such measures is to force you to buy the same
song for each device you want to play it on (cd, computer or walkman) or
perhaps even force you to pay each time you play the song (an idea which
has been floated about from time to time).
If we were all reasonable people, acting in
good faith, much of the debate would go away. But alas that doesn’t
appear to be the case.
pww
Agreed.
A long digression on the
Microsoft story. This probably ought to end up in a report; it's long and
of interest only to those who follow these matters. In particular the link
leads to a web page of a long exchange I didn't think interesting enough
to post here. To skip all this click here.
. It began with a long letter whose header I put
here:
I recently discovered the "I Hate
Microsoft" website and just finished reading the posted email dialog
between the two of you, and it occurred to me that I might have some
personal information which could shed additional light on the subject of
the missing 3rd-party Windows applications. As follows:
I asked:
What exchange and why am I getting this? I mean I
am willing to publish it with comments but was it meant for me? And got
this response:
I apologize. This is the page to which I refer: http://www.euronet.nl/users//frankvw/Pournelle.txt
I had just found that page this week, and the
exchange presented there motivated me to contribute some personal history.
I was responding to one of the issues discussed there between you and one
Frank van Wensveen. According to the email header information as presented
on that page, that dialog occurred during January of this year.
Eric Hainline Santa Ana, CA.
I went over and looked at that page. It's a very
long exchange which was boring to me (probably why it never got printed
here, or if it did I don't remember it) and while it got some details on
the record, nothing came of it. My point there was the Microsoft merely
exploited careless and even egregious mistakes made by its major
competitors, particularly IBM and WordPerfect but also others.
The bottom line is that until far too late,
IBM saw PC's as "Entry Systems" and based their strategy on that
assumption. Gates from the first saw desktops as the coming dominant
product in the computer world, and that they were not merely "entry
systems" for people who would move on to mini-computers and
mainframes. That was rather prescient of Gates: most people didn't realize
that (I did, he preened: I titled my column in Popular Computing "The
Computer Revolution" and the thrust of my columns in OS/ Professional
were an attempt to wake IBM up to make OS/2 a real competitor to
Windows).
Mr. Hainline adds a data point that might be
significant. His letter follows:
A more storied phase of my technology career
involved my employment with Wang Laboratories during the time when they
still held out some hope of remaining a major player in the computer
industry. Details of the following incident remain cloudy only because, at
the time, it did not seem like it was going to be so epochal to the future
of the industry.
It was either in the Fall/Winter of 1988 or 1989,
when I found myself rising to the level of "Senior" Marketing
Support Analyst. This was a rather dubious distinction because all of the
more intelligent and qualified Support Analysts had, by definition, been
smart enough to see the future of Wang Labs and jump ship. So, via
attrition more than anything, I found myself near the top of the heap of
technical marketing specialists in Southern California. This
responsibility meant that I sat in during many high-level briefings with
various Home Office Product Managers, etc.
One such visit involved a last-minute, unannounced,
review of Wang's Personal Computer initiatives delivered by their
senior-most manager of all desktop software/hardware programs. Again, I
apologize that I cannot recall his name. I did not realize just how
important his visit would turn out to reflect on the entire industry just
a little while later, and I have long since tossed out all of the business
cards of my contacts within what used to be Wang. I am sure that, with
enough effort, some record of his attendance exists somewhere within the
historical records of Microsoft or IBM and he could be identified. Anyway,
he had been sent as Wang's emissary to a private, executive-level,
conference that had been held in San Diego, CA. After this conference, his
return route involved driving up to Los Angeles in order to board a more
convenient direct flight back to Boston, MA. In the extra time he had
available, he stopped by our Western Area offices which were located just
north of the airport. Several of us were quickly assembled together in our
Executive Briefing Center, which I then managed.
During this briefing this Product Manager gleefully
recounted how Wang had finally caught a break and all of the PC-related
products released or being developed were falling into the right
marketplace. Wang had begun a lot of work to drive their industry-leading
imaging systems onto personal computers. Scanners, storage systems,
indexing and retrieval software, and networking were all being migrated to
MS Windows 2.0. As a Microsoft Partner, Wang was aware of Windows 3.0
under development, and had ignored OS/2. This decision, to me at the time,
was clearly the result of the central anti-IBM bias that permeated all of
Wang culture. It made sense. I personally didn't know about any new
Windows as most of my responsibilities had historically involved the
mini-computer lines. I only knew that it was better to develop to that
old, ugly, Windows interface than to the "green-screen" stuff
within Wang or anything that IBM would be doing now or in the future. So
this decision to develop for Windows was as much cultural as it may have
been strategic. It had nothing to do with any particular brilliance within
Wang and, considering where Wang ended up, clearly there was none of that
brilliance to be had in Lowell at that time, anyway.
The major message that I took out of that briefing
was a very specific description of an exchange between Bill Gates and the
chief executives of Lotus, WordPerfect, IBM and several unnamed others. To
wit, it was during this conference that Microsoft had discussed that they
were committed to dropping their future development efforts for OS/2 and
throwing their full weight behind the next version of Microsoft Windows. I
don't know how many weeks or months these other companies had already
known about the Microsoft Windows 3.0 project, but this meeting
represented the first and only time that all the major players would
gather together into one forum and discuss the decision by Microsoft, with
Microsoft. The reason that this Product Manager was so cheerful (he
actually was laughing) was that these other corporations, which were major
enterprises with huge customer bases and large applications, had just
spent their whole R&D wads on re-writing their applications so that
the next generation of product was to be ready for OS/2 when OS/2 2.0 was
launched. It was perfectly reasonable to line up the major application
vendors so that customers would have a fairly broad selection of available
applications when the OS was released, and IBM and Microsoft had
accomplished that engagement with the lion's share of commercial
application vendors. The result, however, was that by Microsoft switching
target OS platforms at such a late date, these other vendors had been left
already committing huge amounts of money, time and resources developing
applications for the abandoned OS and those assets could not be recovered.
Since software development was a major part of the lifeblood of Wang, we
all understood just how fatal such a miscue could be.
Now it did not take a Rocket Scientist (even I could
figure this one out) to realize that if anyone wanted to sell application
software, IBM was no longer the gatekeeper. Microsoft was. You could run
anybody's application software on anybody's clone hardware, as long as
that clone hardware ran the standard MS-DOS OS. And this OS was coming
bundled on nearly every clone manufacturer selling in the U.S. So, if you
needed to make money selling application software for personal computers
you actually followed Microsoft, not IBM. But appearances are everything.
Before that point in time, it was generally believed that, despite natural
disputes that occasionally arise between companies, Microsoft was in IBM's
pocket. If you wanted to keep playing in the PC world, you followed IBM
although following IBM meant following IBM/Microsoft. At that time,
following IBM/Microsoft meant that you had better have your
next-generation product ready for OS/2 2.0, else you might lose market
share to whichever competitor was already prepared to launch product in
your application space on the new OS/2 when it hit the streets. By
long-standing tradition, it was thought, once IBM/Microsoft released OS/2
2.0 vast numbers of stodgy corporations would begin the stampede to the
new environment, enriching PC makers and software vendors all over again.
And so all the major vendors in all the important application spaces made
important strategic commitments to developing stronger OS/2 versions of
their apps. For many of them, it turns out, they were betting their
companies.
For these vendors, once they realized that Microsoft
was going to be first to market with something that was NOT IBM, and that
the Microsoft licensing agreements meant that the Microsoft product was
going to be arriving on every personal computer not stamped IBM, they
became furious. Even if they were wealthy enough to fund two parallel
development efforts to upgrade their DOS products, there was not enough
time to do the Windows version. They had no product in the pipeline. Wang,
through nothing more prescient than dumb luck, did have product in the
pipeline (at least in the imaging market). Not being savvy enough to ramp
up OS/2 initiatives, and not being healthy enough to create a whole new
division specific to OS/2 development, they had stuck with what they could
afford to do and knew how to do. That is, continue to develop for good ol'
Windows. By the comments of this executive, I would gather that Wang was a
decided minority in this executive conference. He left us with the general
impression that the Lotus' and the WordPerfects of the computer industry
were very vocal with their feelings of betrayal and the extremely
disadvantageous position they had found themselves in. It was told to us
that the consensus had been that Microsoft had abandoned their role as a
non-partisan "enabler" and had exploited its position to become
a competitor. They had changed not just the rules, but the game itself.
This whole episode came back to roost for me when,
in May of 1990, Microsoft released Windows 3.0 and the only vendor with
leading commercial application software in the front-office suite of
products was, ta da, Microsoft. I had recently left Wang Labs to begin my
career with my current employer, and we had embarked on a very aggressive
program to deploy a large-scale PC-based network for our law firm (believe
it or not, displacing a network of Wang mini-computers!) Our analysis of
the marketplace and comparative testing of the various alternatives
resulted in a package of applications that forced us to standardize on
Microsoft products. Considered heresy among law firms, we were walking
away from such names as Novell and WordPerfect (two companies which owned
the legal vertical) and, essentially, placing all our bets on the strength
of Microsoft's position in the industry. Yes, I must confess that we were
a somewhat integral part of the initial impetus that became the momentum
which resulted in the current Microsoft hegemony. However, I still stand
by those decisions that we made in 1990. Our core team of only 3 I.T.
specialists had built a nationwide PC-based network of approximately 2000
nodes running almost exclusively Microsoft products (and about 99% of
everything Microsoft sold) and we had it fully deployed in only 18 months,
start to finish, including the pilot user program. When complete, we were
informed by Microsoft that we had (for a very brief time until PG&E
soon overwhelmed us) the largest pure client-server network based on the
Intel processor anywhere in the world. And we are still building on that
original foundation 12 years later. Therefore, one can only conclude, our
project was successful by every measure.
All of that bravado aside, the simple truth is that
the technology alternatives were simply not ready for us in the summer of
1990. We went to the other companies. We spent time in Utah and
Massachusetts and Silicon Valley and Washington State. We did a lot of
work trying to figure out how to make things work with alternatives, some
available and some not. But the majority of alternatives were not ready.
By the time they would be ready, it would be too late. And that is when it
all added up for me. The reason that Microsoft was ready and the
competition was not had its earliest echos back in that San Diego
conference. By the time the other companies would be ready, they would be
irrelevant. I still remember a private briefing that was held for our firm
by WordPerfect, anxious to claim one of the larger law firms before we
signed purchase agreements with Microsoft. I think that it was at an early
Windows Conference, held in Boston shortly after the release of 3.0. In
that briefing, we were shown the DOS product and told how eager
WordPerfect was to provide consulting support to make it work in our
Windows world, if necessary. Then we were shown the OS/2 2.0 version and
were regaled in all of the power of that product, promising us untold
productivity riches if we might only change our minds away from Windows.
Finally, we were introduced to the Windows 3.0 Version Product Management
team. The fact that they even existed was subject to an Non-Disclosure
Agreement. (Just kidding. Almost.) Anyway, they were a rather anti-septic
duo of suits that had nothing to show us beyond the podium they leaned
against, asking us why it was so imperative that we make our decision so
soon. At that point, I understood exactly what WordPerfect had so
desperately feared not too very long ago in San Diego, and why.
Eric Hainline Santa Ana, CA.
I have looked the original "dialogue"
over on that other web site and it is interminably boring, which is why it
never got printed here in the first place.
Your story is interesting. Thanks.
(After some brief interchange, Mr. Hainline
added:
Thank you. I find that the I Hate Microsoft crowd
uses such incidents as evidence of anti-competitive behavior. Me, I see an
important business lesson learned. If Microsoft ever came to me and asked
me to port my software to their platform, I would simply ask that
Microsoft sign an agreement promising that this platform would be the
number one product that they would market and support for the next 5
years. That's what being a "partner" is all about. Failure to do
that on my part does not constitute criminal behavior on the part of
Microsoft.
Eric Hainline
Which makes the point nicely. Thank you again.
Note that Roland isn't having
any of Palladium...
Subject: The EETimes article
does indeed
shed some light on the technical details of
Palladium.
My response: So what?
I don't care -how- it works. The point is that
-Microsoft- control it; that they've demonstrated over and over again with
their EULAs, FUD concerning Open Source, etc. that they are control-freak
liars who cannot be trusted; and that they will use their
market-distorting power to make the average moronic IT manager feel that
it's 'unwise' to run non-Palladium-enabled - i.e., Linux, Solaris, FreeBSD,
etc. - OSes.
I know you don't want to believe the worst of
Microsoft, but the EULA for the Windows Media Player update stating that
they reserve to right to delete things on your box without your permission
ought to've given the game away. Whatever they once were, and whatever
good they've accomplished in the past, they're now a completely
domineering, power-obsessed monopoly with the sole and sheer intention of
crushing any perceived competitors at any cost.
And turning out insecure, rootable, backdoored
software whilst they're about it.
If Bill Gates told me it was daytime, I'd look out
the window (pardon the pun) before I'd believe him.
-Roland Dobbins
Well, if they're that bad they won't last. This
is a very volatile business.
To: Jerry Pournelle, BYTE
Sir:
A number of your correspondents have expressed
concern about Microsoft's Palladium initiative. The way to cope with
Palladium is to stabilize the PC architecture. Gwynne Dyer once observed
that the principle of Russian weapons design was "make it simple,
make it cheap-- and make a lot of it!" I think we should apply the
same principle to the PC. Practically speaking, cluster computers, such as
Beowulf are the most promising avenue for performance improvement. They
have the further advantage that once you get into the cluster range,
change consists merely in having more nodes. In the long run, it is not a
good idea to have the CPU and the graphics adapter and the memory on
separate chips, because memory accesses are constrained by the speed of
light. All else failing, Intel and AMD are soon going to have to start
buying bare (unpackaged) RAM chips, and soldering them more or less
directly to the processor to get the interconnect time down. Likewise,
specialized graphics chips, and the proliferation of new CPU instructions
are not a good idea in the long run. The hardware designer can never
foresee all the possible needs of software, and in the last analysis, it
is better to provide the means of running massively multithreaded and
recursive software. This is of course the approach which was adopted
prematurely by the old Inmos Transputers. However, they were attempting it
with only about 4K per chip, back in the 1980's The newest SDRAM modules
are presently running at 512 Megs, and can be expected to reach 4 Gigs
within a couple of years. The manufacturers of radical new graphics chips
will always be giving Microsoft special information. That's unavoidable.
What we should be trying to promote is the kind of manufacturer who
shrinks a conventional CPU and a conventional graphics chip and a
conventional chipset into a single chip, and surface-mounts this chip on a
small motherboard with a minimum number of slots. In due course, the
memory would be added to the chip. Intel and AMD are not going to do
this-- they have their own agendas, mostly fixated around trying to regain
a hardware monopoly. However, there are other manufacturers, and one of
them will be hungry enough to act, as a series of separate markets will
get folded into one market, with correspondingly brutal competition. Now
here's the second part: so far, open source has mostly expanded upwards,
from the kernel to the windowing environment to the applications and the
internet software. However, open-source can also expand downwards. Some
people are starting to promote "open hardware," meaning chips
derived from open-source CAD/CAM files. By the standards of operating
systems, processors are really not all that complicated. Most of their
transistors are in vast rectangular memory grids of one kind or another.
Suppose that a struggling "me-too" intel-clone chipmaker were to
declare its processor open-source, publishing not only the programming
manuals, but also the CAD/CAM files, etching masks, etc. Naturally, this
chipmaker would be entitled to preferential support from the open-souce
movement. Other manufacturers would use the design without payment or or
accounting, as would be their right. This kind of program would make it
very difficult for Microsoft to influence hardware design. At a certain
point, multiple motherboards can go in a common case to make what some of
my Linux-ling friends are starting to call "Beowulf-in-a-Box."
I should probably add a word about Intel's
Simultaneous Multi-Threading (SMT). SMT is probably a limited strategy,
because at a certain point, you get into bus contention. With clever cache
design, it might be possible to get SMT up to 16 processors on a chip, but
this is still not a long-term solution. However, SMT is multi-threading,
and is therefore not in very violent conflict with Beowulf. Most of the
kinds of software rewrites that do for one also do for the other.
Andrew D. Todd 1249 Pineview Dr., Apt 4 Morgantown,
WV 26505
adtodd@mail.wvnet.edu
http://rowboats-sd-ca.com/
The above had paragraphs as sent but it was in a
format that didn't preserve them. Sometimes I can by hand go in and insert
paragraphs, but I don't have time this morning. General advice: ALWAYS
DOUBLE SPACE BETWEEN PARAGRAPHS.
But it is an interesting letter demonstrating the
volatile nature of this industry.
As Monty points out:
Subj: Andy Grove on Stigmatizing Business
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A16187-2002Jul16.html
Don't know how volatile that link is.
I like the parallel Grove draws, between the 1980s
manufacturing-quality troubles and the current accounting-quality
troubles. There was no quick fix for the one; why should we expect there
to be a quick fix for the other?
Eventually, however, we and other
manufacturers realized that if the products were of inherently poor
quality, no amount of inspection would turn them into high-quality goods.
After much struggle -- hand-wringing, finger-pointing, rationalizing and
attempts at damage control -- we finally concluded that the entire system
of designing and manufacturing goods, as well as monitoring the production
process, had to be changed. Quality could only be fixed by addressing the
entire cycle, from design to shipment to the customer. This rebuilding
from top to bottom led to the resurgence of U.S. manufacturing.
Not so sure about Grove's proposed "checks and
balances" remedy, though. John Adams and his colleagues built
separation of powers into the FedGov to make it _inefficient_ -- to keep
the power-seekers busy fighting each other, rather than oppressing _us_.
Is that the proper design pattern for a _business_?
Rod Montgomery == monty@sprintmail.com
Indeed. The Federal Government was supposed to be
one of limited powers, with most of the actual work of government being
left to the states. Alas.
This with its predecessor
on the Sects of Islam probably ought to go into a special report. It
began when I suggested to an expert that I didn't understand the Shia/Sunni
matter, and wondered at its analogies to Christian history, asking for a
succinct summary. I got this reply which I print with permission:
Hmm. Succinct? When it comes to theology and theo-history???
1) The analogy between Protestant/Catholic and Shia/Sunni
is misleading-that's the short answer....
The Shia sect started from the germ of the dispute
over who could become a Caliph-was it elective (the Sunni position) or did
it go through the descendents of Ali (the Son-in-Law of Muhammed). Ali is
the central figure in this. He was a bad politico and was basically
outmanouvered by Muhammed's old enemies from the Quayrish tribe, who
eventually put up the military genius Muwayyiah. Muwayyiah is the founder
of the Umayyad dynasty.
In early Christianity-it seems that theological
differences later crystallize into politic factions (the Nestorian and
Monophysite controversies that started with the Nature of Christ ended up
reflecting political opposition to the Chalcedonian establishment in
Constantinople and found their adherents in Egypt, Syria, Armenia and
Persia). In Islam, it was somewhat the reverse.
The Shia existed as a substrate in the Islamic world
for a century, and helped overthrow the Umayyad Caliphate and placed the
Abbassids in their place. But the Abbassids also turned on the Shia and
from that point on-our view of Islamic history starts to be viewed in
sects. There were several groups. The Shia were always out of political
power in the early ears.
By about the end of the 9th century the old order
was collapsing. Though the Abbassids would continue as figure-heads, they
became local monarchs (somewhat like the early Capetians in France). The
monopoly of Sunni Islam over the political world was gone rather soon too.
Turks were filtering into what was Persia, and began to throw up their own
dynasties, who were stricly speaking Sultanates who owed a symbolic fealty
to the Caliph. Some of these groups were Shia. The Buywayids for one-a
semi-Turkish group of ex-slave solders who took power in western Persia
and Iraq and became protectors of the Sunni Caliphs. But the Shia had
splintered, and their original political raison detre had metastized into
theological differences between the Sunni and each other.
In the early 9th century a theological dispute in
the Sunni world between believers in the un-Created Koran (later the
orthodox position) and the Created Koran (Mutazillites, generally of a
neo- Hellenic rationalistic bent) ended with the "Closing of the
Tradition" and an end to excessive philosophical speculation. Sunni
thought was basically sketched out in close to its modern form, and the
main legal schools also began to define themselves (there are four major
ones in the Sunni tradition). The Shia were outside this loop so to
speak-and preserved some rationalistic theological tendencies from the
Mutazillites. Their Sharia law is also generally considered more liberal
than most of the Sunni Schools. Their emphasis on reason also gives their
ulema-their clerical class-more power to reinterpret their religion.
The Shia themselves were fracturing-more on a
political than a theological level. Some believe that the twelfth Immam
(leader of their community and successor to Ali) was the last (Twelvers or
Ithna Asharis). The Ismailites had a dispute about the 7th Caliph. The
Zaydis are another sect-who I hear are rather close to Sunnis in theology
(mostly in Yemen today).
Around 1000 there were two major Shia powers. The
Fatimid Caliphate in Egypt-who were rivals to the powerless Abassids
spiritually and preeminent temporally, and the Assasins in northern Iraq.
This popping up of Shia power periodically indicates that Shia always
formed a sizable fraction of the population in many areas of the Islamic
world, often coexisting with Sunni populations. This shows that the lines
between the two can be rather blurry-and Shiism might have been a
political protest rather than a theological statement.
The major political event in the later Shia history
was the conversion of Persia. In the early 16th century an order of
Turkish Shia (Ithna Ashari/Twelver) dervishes militarized and managed to
conquer Persia. They were religious fanatics-and promptly forced the
conversion of their Sunni subjects to Shiism. This is why southern Iraq
(which was under their rule), Azeribaijan and Iran are Shia.
I believe this is the point where the true spite and
animus develops. In India at the time, there were Shia and Sunni
Sultanates (before Aurangzeb conquered them late in the 17th century) that
coexisted relatively peacefully. But the constant wars between the
Ottomans and Persia embittered both groups. The Anatolian Turks also had a
group in their midst termed the Alevis-who are probably around 20% of the
population, and have a distant affiliation to those original Shia that
conquered Persia. The Alevis are vilified in traditional orthodox Sunni
circles in Turkey (they say they practice orgies).
But-of the Sunni law schools-I believe only the
Hanbali (who are restricted to Arabia and are the spiritual precedessors
of Wahabbism/Salafism) would consider the Shia non-Muslim-and since Saudi
Arabia does not allow the open practice of non-Islamic faiths, the
presence of Shiism in eastern Saudi Arabia indicates their religious
status even in Wahabbi eyes (compare this to some extremist evangelical
Christians that deny that Catholicism is Christianity at all). In the
United States, when a Muslim population is small enough, Shia and Sunni
pray together without much difficulty. In Yemen, the difference is rather
minor, and as John Walker Lindh found out to his dismay, the Shia and
Sunni pray together there as well.
There is violence in Pakistan between the Shia and
Sunni, but this is generally instigated by Sunni extremists (thank you
Saudi Arabia!). In the 1980s and early 90s, with the spread of Sharia law,
many wealthy Sunni families were apparently converting to Shiism so that
they could avoid some of the more onerous parts of that legal code. This
indicates that the moderate Sunni aversion to Shiism is rather mild-and
again, affiliation is more tradition and political.
I would say that in general, the differences of
substance between Sunni and Shia can not be compared to Protestant
Catholic divisions. Perhaps a High Anglicanism and pre-infallibality Roman
Catholicism comparison is more apt-to show the similarities and originally
political differences that motivated the sectarianism
Razib K
And my thanks.
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