COMMENTARY--We have more information at our fingertips than ever before; unfortunately it's not the information we want.
Nobody seems to sit through the credits at the end of movies anymore. Granted, with some of the bigger blockbusters, this can end up requiring another box of popcorn. And what about the credits for The Matrix Reloaded? Before they were even finished, I was feeling quite depressed about the fact that, apparently, I was one of the few people in Sydney not actually contributing to the making of the movie.
And yet, despite the armies of professionals, at least 15 continuity errors managed to slip through into the finished flick (according to imdb.com). OK, these are just "goofs" and, lest we be inundated by letters pointing out a typo in this issue, let's just say they can happen to anyone.
What really gets my goat are those technical plot holes that always seem to be the focus upon which the climax of the story revolves. Like the state-of-the-art network in the film Eraser--a network that can't tell an administrator which computer is being used (not right away, anyway--these things take time!). Or the latest James Bond movie--OK, just about any James Bond movie. Let's not go there.
If you're going to do a movie where the plot pivots on technology, can't we at least hope that it might be used in a way that has some relation to the real world? Do all those hordes of people involved in making these movies think we're that dumb?
IT vendors would never think that about people who work in the IT industry, would they? Say, for example, the CEO of SCO Group was instigating lawsuits, and revoking licences, and generally making life difficult for a lot of customers because of what he called the need to "protect his property". He'd have to have some pretty strong proof to back up all that action, wouldn't you think?
I know I'm taking a gamble writing about this situation now because, at the pace things are developing, there'll no doubt be five or ten more lawsuits lodged by someone involved in this situation during the time it takes this magazine to be delivered from the printer to the newsstand. Regardless of what happens between now and then, the point is: how can the validity of SCO's allegations still be in question weeks after they were announced?
SCO Group CEO Darl McBride claims that there is code "showing up inside of Linux today that is either directly related to our Unix System 5 that we directly own or is related to one of our flavours of Unix that we have derivative works rights over." But for weeks, it was never made clear where the code was, or how much of it had "showed up".
In an interview published by CNET on June 16, McBride now tells us that "we're not talking about just lines of code; we're talking about entire programs. We're talking about hundred of thousands of lines of code."
In response to the suggestion that it might be just two programmers doing things the same way, McBride reveals, "We're talking about line-by-line code copying... And the developer comments are exactly, 100 percent the same. The developer comments really get to the DNA of the code. It's one thing to have something look the same, but when the developer comments are exactly the same, that tells you everything you need to know that this is in fact lifted, that it has been copied and pasted from Unix into Linux."
Hmmm. If that's the case, it seems to me that fairly basic technology would have made this very simple to find very quickly. Why did it take so long to come up with this information?
I don't know if recent events have got me a bit paranoid, but the whole thing sound eerily like a recent international case where a certain coalition had "irrefutable proof" of a certain dictator's weapons stockpile, and yet couldn't tell anybody what that proof was.
I guess my gripe comes down to this: what good is the information age if we can't get any good information? Our technology should be (and is!) good enough to prevent us from being kept in the dark by people with suspect agendas.
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