Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft Will Own Part of Corel
<RANT> I need to get something off my chest a minute. If you don't care, just skip below and start reading comments.
Why is it that some people are such asses (and please note, that "some" is perhaps a dozen a day) about having their submissions rejected on Slashdot? Last week we rejected nearly 3000 story submissions and posted about 75. So why is it that sometimes when someone gets their submission, they have to go attack Slashdot? It becomes a conspiracy: favoritism, Rob not caring, Slashdot really sucking these days, the list goes on and on, but it never mentions the real reason.
The fact is that we post a fraction of all submissions. And we don't post any submission just because it contains the word Linux or Microsoft. Just because we reject a submission doesn't mean it doesn't matter, it just means that when it was submitted, it didn't make the cut. I want Slashdot to be a fun mix: stuff that matters. Legos? Linux? Black Holes? Nanotech? If Slashdot was all serious, I wouldn't enjoy reading it or running it. I've always worked hard to make sure that there's a good mix of stories. Stuff that appeals to a wide range of interests within the 'News for Nerds' umbrella.
But I see Web sites all over with these childish little notes on them: "Slashdot rejected my submission, so obviously (fill in blank with conspiracy theory listed above)". This gets worse because in the last 18 months or so, cheesy little Web sites with the word "Linux" or "Geek" in them have started growing exponentially. Don't get me wrong, a lot of really great Web sites have sprung up too, but the fact is that there are hundreds of them now, and a lot of them have hostility towards Slashdot, and take it very personally when they get rejected. I'm not going to link anything and everything they post.
The personal attacks get old; they hurt because we all work so hard making Slashdot happen each day... and attacking us because we didn't agree with your submission doesn't make our jobs any easier.
Oh, and best of all, most every story we post has comments bitching that it shouldn't have been posted. Oh what fun.
All right, I got that off my chest. I'm not mad, I just felt the need to vent a little. Thanks for reading.
update This rant originally was not offtopic: this was in regards to a mean spirited little statement that was attached to this story on AboutLinux.com. The statement was dropped almost immediately after this story appeared. I appreciated that, but an apology would have been nicer.
</RANT>
Corel says you must be 18 to download their Linux distribution, because otherwise the GPL would be unenforacble. But the GPL specifically says that you DON'T need to agree to it's terms to use the software. In fact, it is a GPL violation to refuse to give someone a program because they are under 18. They've had other license problems in the past too (the license on their beta was too restrictive, but they fixed it).
The irony is biting, particularly as I just went through a round of emails with Rob last week regarding off-topic meta-commentary on Slashdot in various posts. I'd run across an announcement of the Slashdot/VA merger in an unrelated article -- prior to Slashdot's posting notice of the announcement -- which had been moderated "Offtopic". I contested the rating, and the general practice of down-moderating Slashdot-topic posts, see below for salient commentary.
Date: Wed, 16 Feb 2000 08:32:55 -0500 (EST)
From: Rob Malda <malda@slashdot.org>
To: kmself@ix.netcom.com
cc: cmdrtaco@slashdot.org
Subject: Re: Metamoderation comments
On Tue, 15 Feb 2000 kmself@ix.netcom.com wrote:
> While the moderation is technically true, the fact is that there is *no*
> place on Slashdot to address news or issues concerning Slashdot itself.
> While the post is off _topic_, I feel it is on _meta_topic, and that
> the moderation was inappropriate.
I think its completely offtopic and deserves to be moderated down.
People need to chill out and wait until a story comes along *about* Slashdot
and talk *there* about it. At least then (surprise) I might read it and do
something about it.
--
| Rob "CmdrTaco" Malda | Just want to be misunderstood,
| malda(@)slashdot.org | I wanna be feared in my neighborhood.
| http://slashdot.org/ | Just want to be a moody man,
| cartoonist*lovemachi | say things that nobody can understand.
| ne*obsessivecompulsi | --Pete Townshend, Misunderstood
My point: Slashdot metacommentary is always, if not on topic, at least on metatopic. What's particularly ironic in this case is that Rob could have created an article to post his rant to, and ensuing commentary, but instead chose to post it here, despite what he'd said to me last week.
It's not the off-topicality that I'm objecting to in Rob's rant, it's the hypocrisy.
And I continue to request that there be a persistant, front-page linked, Slashdot-on-Slashdot forum where these conversations are on topic. Failing to provide such a forum, while encouraging the marking of such posts off-topic, is a subtle form of censorship.
What part of "Gestalt" don't you understand?
What part of "gestalt" don't you understand?
I've submit about a story every 3 months, and I don't think I've had one accepted in like 2 years. ;-) Every time I find out my story was rejected, I feel a bit rejected.
;-)
Honestly though, after a few seconds, I realize you guys get a LOT of stories (every time I post there's like 400 submissions ahead of me), and I know I don't want Slashdot to be posting anything near 400 articles a day. I'm sure that there are 400 people who think there story is just as great/important/life affirming/etc. as mine, so that has to mean most people are going to get disappointed.
This isn't exactly a big leap in logic. I'd suggest to you that those who DON'T make the leap in logic are probably not worth your time and energy.
I sometimes wonder though, if it might be fun to spawn off a seperate site which just lists all the submissions you guys have rejected, if for no other reason than humor.
sigs are a waste of space
Somehow, I don't see many people on this site crying over that, if it happens.
Next, a note to CmdrTaco - Hang in there! There -ARE- people here who know how hard you work, how hard it is to maintain a popular site, and how abusive some of the folks out there can be, if they feel they're not getting enough limelight.
If there is ANYTHING I can do to help, feel free. This is an open-ended, no-strings-attached offer. Even if you just want someone to listen, whilst you vent, that's fine. Sometimes, we all need that. You're a nice guy, and deserve better than to be used as a target.
Lastly, a note to all those who complain that their submissions are being rejected: Run your own news site, if you feel that way! DON'T bug us readers, OR the admins, over your petty jelousy. Slashodt posts maybe a dozen or so topics per day. I've YET to see a day in which the queue hasn't shown 220+ submissions ahead of mine. If your odds of getting a single entry in is 1:220, then you'd have to post 220 articles of interest before you'd have an even chance of getting ONE of those posted!
Are you going to stand there and whinge over the other 219? Or are you going to act like a mature human being, accept that you're not God, and read & reply to the topics that ARE covered?
Are you man or mouse? Human or Heffalump? Are you willing to put your pride to one side, and talk about matters of interest, or wallow in childish self-pity?
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
--
Thanks for the link to kuro5hin.org . It looks like a cool site and I've been looking for an alternative to Slashdot, not because I don't like it anymore, but because I WOULD LIKE MORE TO READ and Slashdot does not post enough stories for me. I've posted something similar before, but no one seems to care and/or listen. Oh well, whatever. If not here, I can go other places for additional content. I'll still come to Slashdot, but now I have another cool weblog to visit. Anyone else have any other sites they particularly like for Slashdot-style stories and information? I'm sure I'm not the only person who would be interested. Thanks in advance.
Have you looked at kuro5hin.org yet? Very cool site. Check it out.
----------------
Co-founder and designer at Music Nearby: http://musicnearby.com
No offense, but rob's rant should have been moderated to (0, Offtopic). If he needed to say that, he could have posted it as an another article. The corel thing is interesting as heck to me, and now i'm going to have to search through comments pertaining to rob's rant, which i don't paticuarly care about (let the kiddies whine all they want, i've had stories rejected before and don't care) to see comments pertaining to the corel thing. *sigh*
If 90% of everything isn't crap, your standards are too high.
Can someone inform me what the trouble is between Debian and Corel? I have no clue.
On the subject of the rant:
Can Slashdot et. al post more stories/articles in a day? I just want to be able to read more interesting stuff.
Stop and consider it. Which has the most assimilating power? For years Microsoft has been our Borg but we created a postive assimilating army to fight back and we call it Linux. Microsoft is only a company but Linux is a viral culture. Trying to stop Linux is like trying to stamp out a the Bible. Pretty damn unlikely right? When the two combine Linux will eventually be the part that shines through. It might actually help our cause if we gave Microsoft a 4% share of all the major Linux companies. Enough to benefit from the profit without being enough to give them control. When they see profit coming from it they'd be foolish to make any attacks and foolish not to grow their own market share by making their apps Linux compatible.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
i'd say the fact Corel ships a halfassed, not-fully-developed, debian-based linux distro is probably not the most alarming aspect of all this.
isn't Corel still suing Microsoft over DR DOS and such?
how, if at all will microsoft owning 4% of Corel affect the outcome of the lawsuit?
At least it's only 4%.. if it were any more you'd have to get really worried about the fact microsoft has a finger in both Word _and_ Wordperfect.
--ps: i agree with rob COMPLETELY about the rant attached to the article. every other story has at least one person whining "why was this rejected when I submitted it?", apparently oblivious to the fact nobody cares. It's probably about the fourth or fifth most irritating thing about slashdot, right behind the people complaining in every other story that the story was unworthy to have made Slashdot's front page. apparently continuing scrolling and not reading or clicking near the article was taking up too much of their time, but posting a comment and bitching was effortless.. apparently cdmrtaco has no right to litter their screens with a linux kernel upgrade announcement that they personally do not care about on slashdot's front page, yet they have the right to litter the screens of the people reading that announcement to announce they don't want to be reading the article they're replying to..--
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
It's a shame that something as trivial as Microsoft's accidental ownership of Corel/Inprise could generate news. Microsoft's payoff to Inprise is very old news indeed, for some of the same reasons that Microsoft paid off Apple. Who cares if Microsoft owns 4% of Corel? Nobody except the truly paranoid. Will it amount to much of anything? Absolutely not. And to the little poster who said that the DoJ would point to this as another instance of Microsoft trying to buy and suppress, get a life.
As far as the rant is concerned, it is equally pointless.
This is also a relatively minor complaint. /. is still probably the most up-to-date place on the net on most of the issues it covers -- but it could be even more so. If /. were able to work out a system whereby if a story is to be posted, it will actually be posted the first time it is submitted, /. would probably have a scoop (or close to it) on with about every story
Anyway, keep up the good work, Rob & co. We do love you (think of it as having 100,000 attentive mothers fussing over you and encouraging you to do what you can to improve :-)
========
+++For-pay Internet distributed processing.+++
<sig>Guvf vf abg n frperg zrffntr
Microsoft owns a silent, non-voting share of Inprise last time I checked. They don't have anybody on the board, so they don't impact on Inprise/Corel's business decisions.
I think there are many more reasons to be skeptical about this (somewhat shady) merger, but they don't have to do with conspiracy theories. There's no reason at all why Corel (productivity/graphics company with a Linux distro targetted at beginners' desktops) needs to be in the same company with Inprise (tools/middleware company with upcoming Linux products targetted at high-end professional developers). There's just no fit there. But some folks figured it would make the two companies seem more credibly like "Linux companies" to some investors who are only looking at keywords, so they let it go through.
--JRZ
The question you should be asking is How much of the NSA does Corel own
Those canucks have been wanting a piece of our National Security Agency for a long time, since they haven't been able to build there own shadow government worth shit. Now that Corel owns a part of the NSA, they can just use ours on the weekends or something. Plenty of time to disappear 'undesirables'
[ c h a d o k e r e ]
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
Please make an About Slashdot Section Give it a Slashbox as "Features" has. Let people submit items to it. Significant articles can be promoted to main page, just as "Ask Slashdot" does.
Then we can have discussions about our discussions system, rather than scattering these metadiscussions within the other articles. At least once a week we go off on a /. tangent in some unfortunate discussion. Save us from ourselves...
This'll be great. Now everytime Corel does something unpopular all of the idiots will be blaming it on MS's 4% ownership of Corel. Great fodder for all of the zealots out there.
What Fools These Mortals Be!
I've posted about 5 stories, one of them got
posted. I could have posted 20-30 stories and
not complaining about them being posted.
When you look at the amount of stories ahead
of you in the queue, it is given that the slashdot
-people may not even have the time to read every
one of them very carefully.
I run my own Linuxssite, in norwegian http://www.linuxguiden.org, and I don't post
every article submitted.
If I really don't think it is interesting to
the readers, I won't post it. It is as easy as that, and really the editors just has to make that choice.
That being said, I don't understand why this
ranting was put under one of the regular news.
Now I have written a comment to the ranting, that
people reading the news, might not be interested
in. It could be moderated down normally, but
the ranting made this posting legit.
Really...post all this ranting under different
headlines than other postings.
Ok, this'll get hammered mercilessly, but as Lando Calrissian once said.. here goes nothing:
Rob, you've been enormously successful with this site. You get million(s) of hits a day. And as your success grows, so does criticism.
You don't learn that studying algorithms and putting together nifty CGI movies, but either in management school (oh, the horror) or through personal experience - as people's attention to your action increases, so does negative coverage. I mean, what're trying to do here is noble; a weblog of matters relevant to a small subsection of the population. Yeah, I know - it's frightening, but the type of geeks we are is and never will be the majority - 'cause if Jon Katz's Hellmouth articles taught us anything, then it was that we're a minority. We were the strange outcasts in school. We were weird. Why? Because we were different from everybody else - yeah, that's right. Everybody else was a majority.
(Bear with me here, I'm getting to a point)
Now, you've created a site that caters to - supposedly - every geek's wet dream, a concoction of tech news, relevant media stuff, general assorted 'rights online' politically-related stories and everything else one could possibly ever care about. And here's the catch. How many stories do you post a day? Not more than a dozen or two. Selected from 400++ daily submissions. Who makes the selections? You do. Hemos does. Roblimo. Emmett. The rest of the gang. And most of those people are either friends of yours or share a fairly near-identical view of what's relevant. Of what's news for nerds. Of what is Stuff That Matters. However, a million page views or so a day to Slashdot is likely to attract the attention of say, 20% of people whose views are fairly different from your own. Of those 20%, perhaps half will fairly violently disagree with the comments attached to stories - and with the general mood of the discussions going on after the stories are posted. I know Slashdot caters to a wide audience, but maybe there're tens of thousands of people reading this, people we're commonly deriding as PHBs. What do they want to read about? Tech news. Stuff that's relevant to their jobs. Perhaps they're even interested in the 63k+ Windows2k bugs, and need to make strategic decisions on how to upgrade their systems. Maybe they care that StarOffice is now supported by Sun. Or that LinuxCare has a deal with Dell. Like that very subsection that we're deriding, another subsection is very dissatisfied when a story they're submitting isn't posted. Perhaps some of the people bitching are not old enough to understand the consequences of their actions. Perhaps they're just annoyed that their latest "M$ SUCKZ, D00D!" article was rejected and Slashdot instead posts something about "Research Institutions and Corporate Interests" - I mean, who carez, D00D? You're not giving any thought to the fact that Slashdot is probably one of the favourite places for script kiddies to go. Their juvenile sense for destruction can express itself in flaming away on the discussion threads. Finally a way for them to publically attract attention to their verbal skills. Finally a forum where their PEERS live. What many people don't figure out is that script kiddies often think that they're ELITE. Some of them may even quickly paste together a website mimicking Slashdot, to attract the same amount of peer attention that you, Rob, have done. So people worship them in the same sense that Rob has become an OSS hero and icon of geeks worldwide. Who became a multimillionaire (Andover money + stock options + VA Linux stock options == lots of AIBOs) simply by turning his hobby into his job. Who wouldn't want to become rich and famous by writing a web page? The complexity of the behind-the-scenes work necessary for Slashdot seems to be lost on many of them, though. Which is why you're in the limelight, Rob. Your work isn't appreciated. You are admired and hated at the same time. The time people spent honing their '$ winnuke www.microsoft.com' skills wasn't used to acquire any social skills. On the internet, people will flame if they dislike who you are, and what you stand for.
Please Rob - don't be amazed and rant at people complaining about story submissions. Slashdot has become increasingly pro-Linux, anti-MS, pro-Libertarian, anti-Responsibility ("don't like that piece of software? hack it yourself!"), and unpalatable for many people. I still like it, but many others don't. Just please don't rant at the reactions caused by the creation of your own hands. It's become very, very big - and all that's missing is the 'Caveat Emptor' banner over the main page.
Finally - in the 'Ask Rob and Hemos anything' interview a while ago, people asked why the story submission queue wasn't opened up for moderation. You guys answered that you didn't really know what the person meant. To clarify: Have a separate page, or possibly even a very very long slashbox, where people can see all the stories currently in the submission queue. People with moderation points (that means more moderators) can then give moderation points to a story. Once the story reaches a certain number of points, it gets moved onto the front page. People can then set their 'threshold' for front page stories, and moderators can still give stories points, so I can for instance decide that I only want to see stories that received 20+ points, etc. Similarly, it's still possible to filter out stories that are on a certain subject - so I can still killfile Apache stories, or FreeBSD stuff.
The result? A truly open source forum. Won't happen, though.
Anyway, here's the end of my offtopic troll flamebait rant. It's really not an ad hominem attack against Rob or anyone else in particular. However, once you reach a certain status/fame, you're subject to attacks by 'lesser' people - as ESR's 'take my job, please' rant once attested.
int end_of_rant();
Alex T-B
While the gist of what you're saying is true, you draw the wrong conclusions. Yes, Rob and Hemos and the rest can do whatever they want with this site, and part of that omnipotence includes allowing or forbidding people from using the site in ways they don't appreciate. They have set up a system where the community gives back its feedback, and if they don't like the feedback then they can change the system.
It's one thing to say: "Hey, we don't think you understand all the effort we put into this site, and we think that you'd realize we're being fair if you did." It's another to complain about people's audacity for "talking back", which is what the site is about in the first place. And the proper place for Rob's rant is not to be attached to this unrelated story but either in its own story, attached to the form you get when you submit a story, or ideally both.
As for the animated oompa loompas, there might be some copyright issues to be worked out first with the Wonka candy company, unless VA Linux is buying them out next. Hey, you never know.
"If one is really a superior person, the fact is likely to leak out without too much assistance" -- John Andrew Holmes
This is true. MS's investment in Inprise was part of a settlement of the lawsuit Inprise filed against MS for stealing their developers.
I think there are many more reasons to be skeptical about this (somewhat shady) merger
I'm curious if you could elaborate on what you consider "shady" about the deal.
here's no reason at all why Corel (productivity/graphics company with a Linux distro targetted at beginners' desktops) needs to be in the same company with Inprise (tools/middleware company with upcoming Linux products targetted at high-end professional developers). There's just no fit there.
Sure there is... let me try to set it out the way I see it... (bear with me, I'm thinking this through as I go...)
- What Corel brings: name brand office suite, desktop-oriented Linux distribution, high-end graphics apps
- What Inprise brings: open source database (Interbase), app server, developers tools
While they may not "need" to be in the same company, I think combining them makes sense, because:- Inprise's developer tools will be building apps for Linux desktops. Corel is shooting for the Linux desktop market, so it makes sense that they'd want Inprise's developer tools to be "optimized" for Corel's distro.
- Corel/Inprise is in the position to provide a total package to a small business. They have a desktop OS, a database, an app server, a server OS, and an office suite... all of which will presumably be designed to work well together.
The way I see it, Corel/Inprise has about six months to a year to get their act together... when MS starts dropping support for NT 4.x, small businesses currently using NT 4.x will have to upgrade. If they're a really small business (i.e. too small for a full-time sysadmin), then a complete package like what Corel/Inprise can deliver is about their only alternative to Win2000. Further, it could be a very compelling alternative, since it'll be a lot cheaper (both outright, and due to the fact that the hardware won't have to be upgraded as well).So basically, Corel is shooting for the business/consumer desktop, and Inprise helps them on both fronts, and doesn't hurt them anywhere. About the only negative to the whole deal I see is Cowpland.
--
To within half a percent, pi seconds is a nanocentury. -- Tom Duff
At most newspapers, press releases comprise a majority of the mail that floods in every day.
Many editors just throw these away, as most of them are trash anyway.
It's an editor's privilige use news judgement and throw out anything that doesn't work.
A "wall of shame" might work to discourage annoying complaints. Every day, just post the most annoying letter you get to the wall, with your editorial comments.
I think you are completely wrongheaded about this. Work ethic has nothing to do with putting up with irritating flames from every story submitter who feels that a rejection is a personal afront. And if you think Rob brought /. this far without work ethic...well...that just doesn't make any sense.
And to be perfectly honest, the extent of the "customer service" required for a site like slashdot is posting stories relevent to most readers and keeping the site online.
You seem to confuse business models here. McDonalds requires you to deal directly with customers and in doing so, be nice to everyone who comes in. Slashdot does not. To reiterate, Rob's job is to a) Keep the site running properly. and b) Post relevant stories.
Notice I didn't include C) Kiss the ass of people who get upset because the story they submitted was rejected.
We don't pay members of the press to be nice.
--GnrcMan--
kuro5hin.org (corrosion) lets readers moderate the submission queue. It's really neat to see it in action for the first time, (log in as a user, then go to "moderate submissions).
As a matter of fact, the website owner hasn't been in town for half the week, and good stories are still making it to the front page. Truly a very interesting website.
--Robert
First and foremost, lemme say Thank God that it wasn't Hemos that made that rant. Then, not only would I have to put up with all the bitching ABOUT the rant, but also that bitching about the SPELLING in the rant.
I'd like to take this time (and waste this karma) to say a few things I've been keeping to myself, trying not to flame while browsing the archives of Slashdot.
If you don't care, just skip below and start reading comments.
That should have been just enough to shut the lot of you up, yet it still wasn't. Oh well, some people have nothing better to do than bitch. I know I'm not setting a shining example, but I'm tired of having to wade through the "anti-Slashdot" crap attached to every fucking article. Get over yourselves. If you don't like it, leave, or do it yourself.
Not even worth two cents,
Later...
Ignore Alien Orders
I would have thought that this was a good idea were it not for the fact that moderation of submissions could be pretty clueless. A lot of moderators aren't experts in a given field and therefore don't know the issues well enough to distinguish between insight and bullshit.
Plus, you have the additional editorial nighmare that if a misleading article gets moderated through and the editors subsequently decide to reject it,then all hell of a flamewar would break loose.
In general, I think the Slashdot editors do a damn fine job. They can't please everybody all the time, but when I see an article I'm not interested in the I simply ignore it rather than complaining.
People who get stressed about the editorial policy of a light-hearted geek news site really should get a life.
By itself, this is pretty meaningless. However, if Microsoft winds up pursuing this as a larger strategy, it could wind up being very significant. There are similarities between that sort of strategy and Microsoft's method of dealing with Apple. Microsoft has to make certain that competitors are on the market to alleviate concerns about a MS monopoly... if they can make sure that they'll be making a modest profit from their competitors' business, as they did with Apple, it strengthens their overall position.
From article, Conversion
Each share of Series C Stock is convertible, at the option of the holder, after the satisfaction of a two year holding period or upon liquidation of the Company, into fully paid and non-assessable shares of Common Stock based upon a fixed conversion ratio. The conversion ratio is subject to certain adjustments, stock splits or other capital reorganizations.
Non-assessable, I believe, means that it is held in trust and not votable. I could be wrong here, but I am VERY vertain thait this is not they case. My estimates of the value of the the Microsoft "investment" is 12%. Given that the investment was ONLY $25m, it seams unlikely that Inprise would give out such large chunks of the company for SO little money. I don't think that the deal gives Microsoft everything. Additionally, reserving that many shares for convertion doesn't mean that that is the conversion ratio. It could be 10:1 even with 10,000:1 reserved... reserved != issued
Like every other deal that involves a lawsuit, a "fair value" amount is assigned to the IP, and what should be punitive damages becomes an "investment" in non-voting preferred stock.
Non voting stock in this case is nearly worthless. If the company goes bankrupt, preferred stock members receive claims to the liquidation before common stock holders, for tech companies, BFD. Additionally, most preferred stock (traditionally) included guaranteed dividends and they were to be paid before any common stock paid dividends. Now, with low capital gains tax rates, dividends rarely exist. Additionally, this "investment" probably didn't include any dividend rights. It may not even involve liquidation claims.
Microsoft does NOT really own any of Corel/Inprise, nor does it REALLY own any of Apple. This is a way of settling law suits off the books.
The reason for this has to do with accounting practices. IANAA (I am not an accountant), but as I understand corporate finance, everything has to go on the books somewhere. The settlement for IP can go on the books as an asset, the technology rights. However, if it were overpriced, it would be fraudulent accounting. The rest can go in as an asset now, because it represents ownership of sorts. This allows companies to settle court cases without screwing up their books. On paper, Microsoft didn't "lose" $25 million, they spent $25m to get $25m in assets. I don't know how companies handle punitive damages from lawsuits. My guess is that it shows up as a loss, which isn't good.
This way, Inprise and Microsoft's balance sheets are unchanged (cash assets -> other assets) which is good for Microsoft an encourages them to settle. It is good for Inprise because as an investment, it isn't subject to taxes (to my knowledge). Microsoft's cash flow drops, Inprise's rises. For a real business, cash flow is MUCH more important than the balance sheet. The balance sheet affects taxes and corporate reports, cash flow affects the ability to conduct business.
Alex
Hay Taco, If you want to rant about something.. why don't you just rant about something. Sticking it in with a completely unrelated Microsoft post is really really lame man.
On a related note... I think you'll see more and more of MS getting into the Linux game. They have everything to gain and nothing to loose. Anyone with their eyes open can look around and see that there is money in dem dar hills. A fabulous source of NEW money even.
They are a threat to free speech and must be silenced! - Andrea Chen
Fish! LipHo
Why is it that some moderators are such asses (and please note, that "some" is perhaps just one a week) about having their opinions become part of unrelated articles on Slashdot? Last week Slashdot posted about 75 stories and two of them contained offtopic opinions in the article. So why is it that sometimes when someone gets the ability to write an article, they have to go attack Slashdot users? It becomes a conspiracy: favoritism, Rob not caring, Slashdot really sucking these days, the list goes on and on, but it never mentions the real reason.
The fact is that posters are allowed to post their opinions, just like the authors. The moderators can only moderate down a fraction of all submissions. But they can't moderate down any submission that comes from the Author of the article. Just because a user can't understand why Slashdot rejected a submission doesn't mean there was a reason, it just means that when it was submitted, no one felt like posting it. |Everyone want Slashdot to be a fun mix: stuff that matters. Legos? Linux? Black Holes? Nanotech? If Slashdot was all serious, many of us wouldn't enjoy reading it or posting to it.
But I see articles all over with these childish little notes on them: "Why is it that some people are such asses...)".
The personal attacks get old Taco; they hurt because we all work so hard making Slashdot happen each day... and attacking us because we didn't agree with your attitude doesn't make our visits filled with joy.
And that's why I like Jon Katz. If he wants to rant he does it in a separate article. He doesn't subvert a decent piece of news like a Grits poster.
-----
No Zen is good zen