Like Peter Biddle, I like Boggle a lot. Since I've been studying a lot of languages lately, I often notice non-English words when I play, but I'm not allowed to count them. I was thinking that it would be fun at a language class or at an event for foreign-language students to try to actually play Boggle in another language. (The letter distributions are a bit of a problem. Other languages don't have the same letter frequencies as English, and the mere appearance of a "K" or "W" in Latin, for example, would be bad news.)
I tried three minutes or so on a random English Boggle board to see how I would do in Latin, and here's what I came up with.
IBEG
FGSN
VAAM
DSTA
das, dat, data, fas, fata, mane, manes, nata, natas, nega, negas, sane, sat, vas, vasa
It turns out that "saga" is a word, but I didn't know it at the time. Also, I missed "ens", "figas", "figat", "gens", "maga", "magas", "mage", "magi", "negat", "negata", "sata", "sta", "stans", "tange", "tanges", "vaga", "vagas", "vasta", and "vastas". That's all I've been able to find so far.
CNet says that
[t]he Chinese government issued a decree two weeks ago that all PCs will need to have a licensed operating system software installed before leaving the factory gates in an effort to crack down on piracy.
The earlier article reports that
Chinese Vice Premier Wu Yi said her government has already issued rules requiring all manufacturers to preload legal operating systems on all computers sold in China--a change from sales of what the software industry decries as "naked" PCs, lacking legitimate operating systems or applications. [...] Wu said only that "legal operating systems must be preloaded on all machines." [...]
Operating system preloads have been terrible for competition. Historically, almost all operating system preloads have been Microsoft Windows. In many cases, getting a naked machine was either impossible or not any cheaper (sometimes more expensive), a fact which has repeatedly inspired antitrust scrutiny. Microsoft has provided incentives that deterred manufacturers from making computers without Windows easily available at prices below those of computers with Windows. That results in users not perceiving a financial incentive to run a non-Windows operating system -- so, unless they have another kind of incentive, they usually don't.
Windows is expensive, but it takes certain ways of selling computers for end-users to notice this and to consider alternatives to Windows. In other markets -- including the markets for the other components of a working computer system -- end-users have some kind of price feedback to help them make decisions. The car market gives people a variety of options, including aftermarket choices for things like sound and navigation systems (and tires, and most kinds of repair services and replacement parts). If a car dealership does its job in the customer's interest, the customer can consider the relative expense of getting various bundled things and the costs and benefits of alternatives. Microsoft has expanded its dominant market share in part because so few users have seen a line item for the cost of using Microsoft operating systems and applications as opposed to others.
I spent a long time recently unsuccessfully trying to get a modern "naked" laptop. I was astounded that companies that are in current antitrust litigation with Microsoft not only "recommend" Microsoft operating systems but refuse to unbundle them from their laptops. But a national legal mandate prohibiting anyone in China (where most laptops are now made) from selling naked systems is an enormous windfall for Microsoft at the expense of competition. It increases the trend of people who don't use Windows having to pay for it.
I can't help thinking that USTR has just made it even harder for me to get a Windows-free laptop in the future. In its letter to Windows Refund Day participants, Microsoft pointed out that "You can purchase a PC with a non-Microsoft operating system or a PC with no operating system preinstalled at all"; we might have been forgiven for thinking that this meant that Microsoft thought that this state of affairs was legitimate. Perhaps the letter should have added "although the latter option may become unavailable due to our concern that software pirates frequently take advantage of it".
The natural inclination of USTR (and maybe some people at Microsoft, and maybe some people in the PRC government) is to say "Well, software copyright infringement is a trend where people who use Windows don't pay for it. And unbundling or naked machines tends to promote that trend." It's odd to think that a remedy for people using Windows without paying for it is to make people who don't use Windows pay for it. More to the point, the "no naked PCs" requirement -- if manufacturers don't see fit, whether because of their contracts with Microsoft or for other reasons, to bundle operating systems with no royalty, and the CNet article suggests that the major manufacturers are unlikely to do so -- means that non-Microsoft OS users are ending up subsidizing copyright infringers. People who don't use Windows will pay royalties under this scheme to Microsoft for the benefit of future Windows development for people who use Windows without paying.
One way of avoiding that subsidy would be to increase direct copyright enforcement in China and encouraging all retails to pass the full cost of using Microsoft software through to all users of such software, while giving them a straightforward means of deciding to use something else. But it continues to be more appealing for copyright holders and USTR to pursue intermediaries and get intermediaries to stop doing things that "facilitate" infringements -- a strategy which brought us the DMCA, and which always means collateral costs and opportunity costs for people who are not engaging in copyright infringement.
Does anybody have more details about this policy and the OEMs' response to it?
There are two approaches to promoting open source software: 1) avoid any use of existing non-free software, or 2) use some non-free software while free alternatives are being developed. The danger in the first approach is that people will not adopt the solution. The danger in the second approach is that free alternatives will not be developed fast enough because the proprietary alternatives are too compelling. Freespire takes the second approach for the most part. The first approach (an operating system that uses 100% open source offerings), is already well represented in the Linux marketplace, and Freespire salutes those who are representing that approach. Hopefully between their good work and the approach offered by Freespire, Linux will find its way to a much wider audience of mainstream users. (Freespire also supports the first approach with their 100% open source version.)
I think the Freespire FAQ author was very straightforward about this, but I thought of six other problems with the second approach.
- It provides benefits to proprietary software and technologies through network effects (and helps extend the first-mover advantage of some proprietary technologies by giving them an even greater market share).
- It may displace some development resources from free to proprietary software.
- It may make the distinction between free and non-free software more obscure to some users, and cause some users never to become aware of the distinction at all.
- It may persuade manufacturers that they don't need to document their hardware because they perceive the "Linux community" accepting proprietary software. Analogously, it may blunt the ability of Linux customers to send market signals to manufacturers that free software support is necessary.
- It blurs the distinction between technologies where a free software implementation is slow in coming (e.g. Flash, Java) and technologies where a free software implementation already exists but can't be widely commercially distributed some some jurisdictions (e.g. libvdcss) or where free software development will be deterred in the long run for legal reasons. The Freespire FAQ alludes to the risk of free software "not be[ing] developed fast enough" for some application, but doesn't discuss the prospect that legal considerations could prevent it from being developed at all.
- It makes it more difficult for people to understand why laws that burden free software development are a problem; "there is no Linux DVD player" was a much clearer message for many people than "Linspire's DVD player is not open source".
Richard Stallman has famously suggested that it's only legitimate to use proprietary software for the specific purpose of creating a replacement for that software. For example:
To develop GNU, I used Unix. But first, I thought about whether it would be ethical to do that.
I concluded it was legitimate to use Unix to develop GNU, because GNU's purpose was to help everyone else stop using Unix sooner. We weren't merely using Unix to do some worthwhile job, we were using it to end the specific evil that we were participating in.
This seems weird even to many free software advocates because it is so radically prescriptive not only of how software ought to be distributed but even of end users' apparently isolated choices. (Richard doesn't seem to be saying merely that it's wrong to publish, enforce licenses of, promote, or pay for proprietary software, but even that it's wrong to use it!) But you don't have to reach that question in order to see a problem with Freespire's approach -- you only need to consider the existence of network externalities. Among other things, network externalities mean that the installed base of people who can receive something affects the decision facing someone who wants to communicate with them.
Oh all of you who pass along the way:
Your urban life is built from every day
From which Jane Jacobs made her poetry.
Timor mortis conturbat me.
What's wrong with Microsoft's firewall having a default-allow outbound policy (because customers asked for it!) that causes ZDNet and Slashdot to call the firewall "shackled", "crippled", "half its protection turned off", and other like sneering?
My Linux firewall has default allow inbound and outbound. It can enforce other policies that I set, if I tell it to. Does that mean my firewall is "shackled" or "crippled"?
If Microsoft set default deny outbound rules that blocked FTP, Skype, SIP, and BitTorrent, would ZDNet and Slashdot be happy? Or would the article be "Microsoft firewall blocks Skype and BitTorrent by default!"?
It's a tricky point because, as Meng Wong reminded me, empirically, most people accept the defaults they're presented with in many situations. If that's so, however, wouldn't we be happier if Microsoft's market power is used to permit Internet applications to communicate, instead of making a pervasive decision about which applications are OK and which are not? Again, imagine if Microsoft said that Microsoft services were permitted but non-Microsoft services required a firewall configuration change. Youch!
Current U.S. gas prices are cheaper than the price of gas has been in Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, and the U.K at any time in the past decade. According to the DOE chart, gas in those countries has cost between $3.00/gallon and $7.24/gallon this past decade.
Those countries still have large and growing economies and a high material standard of living. But they don't have cheap gas the way the U.S. does.
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Contact: Seth David Schoen
