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The Code War-- Software By Other Means
ParticleGirl writes "Suck has a great commentary today about the back-handed, back-stabbing nature of the software industry. The for-profit software industry, that is, of course... What kind of light does this sort of business ethic (or lack thereof) shine on the open-source community, and Free vs. free software?"
> Back then, the coal mining companies wouldn't stoop to such dangerous acts as dumpster diving.
Isn't coal mining a form of dumpster diving from the get-go?
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Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Personally, I prefered the original that was mentioned around here some place over a year ago. But this one also lets you rate your friend or sibling and the say time you do your own.
funky
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
There probably *should* be three factors, but when the government is a puppet of the corporations, the individual loses out. Corporations do NOT have the consumer's best interest at heart, no matter what they say. A corporation is answerable only to their stockholders. From time to time a corporation might do something that appears good, but more often than not the purpose is to improve their image to the consumer to increase favor to them over their competitor. Unfortunately, however, it seems that companies are going more and more for lobbying the government for corporate welfare (tax breaks) which often do not help the individuals.
Anyone who believes that a totally free market is blind. A free market is only good if all of the players have an equal chance of succeeding. However, when a monopoly takes hold, it becomes increasingly difficult to compete on a level playing field. Government regulation, especially of monopolies, is required to preserve individual's rights. The recent stories about the utility companies here in California is a good example. Since being deregulated, they have used any means possible to raise rates, knowing that there is no alternative. For example, no matter who I get my electricity or gas from, it must pass over PG&E's lines, and therefore PG&E has total control over distribution, thus shutting out any real competition. As such, the utilities have increased their rates, sometimes significantly (i.e. in San Diego).
Imagine if there were no corporate regulations for a minute... All the major telcos (ATT, MCI, Sprint, etc.) would merge and be able to charge whatever they wanted for telephone usage, reaping huge profits at the cost of the individual. Other industries would do the same thing. Large companies would merge as they saw fit since the lack of competitors increases their control over their markets allowing for higher profits for their shareholders.
There are many other examples of the government not regulating industries. The crash of 1929 comes to mind, where insider trading was the norm, and stocks were bought totally on margin without any real money being invested. In other words, without government oversight the stock market became a pyramid scheme that eventually collapsed and took many people's savings with it as the banks failed. Due to regulation, this is much less likely to happen today (i.e. all bank accounts are now insured via the FDIC).
Other examples are companies like Microsoft. Their early licensing policies eliminated any chance of competition, since computer manufacturers were charged a per-computer fee whether MS DOS and Windows software was installed or not. If the dealer did not agree to the licensing scheme, then the dealer's cost was significantly higher for all computers sold, and since MS held a monopoly and a majority of the customers wanted MS products (because exposure to alternatives was quite limited and most applications ran on MS software), companies like Digital Research failed to penetrate the market.
MS, after the concent decree, changed their licensing policies, but used their monopoly to prevent computer manufacturers from installing competitor's software products. Again, if the competitor did not follow Microsoft's strict licensing policies, their costs for the operating system of choice was much higher.
A final good example is Standard Oil at the turn of the century. Standard oil had total control over the oil industry and could dictate where gas stations would be located and how much they would charge. Any small competitor could easily be squashed by undercutting the competitor's cost in their region until the competitor went out of business, after which Standard Oil could charge whatever they wanted.
The Japanese semiconductor manufacturers used a similar technique in the past to basically eliminate US manufacturers by dumping semiconductors at below cost, and once competition has been destroyed jacking the prices way up (anyone remember when memory prices skyrocketed?)
A "free" market does not work unless there are checks and balances, much like our government. The U.S. government was designed to minimize the chance that one person or group could take over the country. For example, Congress could write any law they want and the President could sign it into law yet the courts could deem the law to be unconstitutional and throw it out. Likewise, the Congress can overrule a Presidential veto with enough votes.
This post is encrypted twice with ROT-13. Documenting or attempting to crack this encryption is illegal.
If I take the source code from a software company, I've basically got the entire product and the means to produce it.
If I take one of GM's cars, I might get some good ideas about how to make a car, but I need dies, tools, and a whole assembly line if I want to duplicate it.
-jlg
ps. use Debian! www.debian.org
Actually, it goes beyond just the price of the CD. There was a time when large franchises were pressured into playing specific material at dance bars, etc. It was my understanding that the public playing of the music violated the lawful use of the music. I know this is true of videos, it is part of the FBI warning that you get to see. The music like the videos are sold for individual use. This is very similiar to libraries paying a hire price for magazine subscriptions. So, just because you own the disc does not mean you can play it anywhere you want to.
In a place beyond time and space, in a land far better than this, look for me there...
I like fdisk.
/MBR
And it's quite a powerful utility, if simple.
It's easy to use it to protect against bootsector viruses. Just add the line:
fdisk
toward the end of your autoexec.bat file and you're protected against many forms of boot sector corruption. To get the added protection of adding it while it isn't even possible for your machine to be already running a boot sector virus, edit your autoexec.bat file to contain the line while you're dual-booted into Linux. Yes, do go do that, Linux hackers.
1. Use the su command to become root.
2. Mount your DOS partition if it isn't already mounted.
3. Use the editor of your choice to add the fdisk line to your autoexec.bat file.
4. Rest easy, with the assurance that from this point onward your boot sector will be free from virus infected code.
It only takes a minute to do. Go do it now.
i have fdisked a 3 gig drive (with a win98 boot disk) and format insisted that it saw 4 gigs. even from the linux partition it looks like 4 gigs. both linux and win98s fdisk sees only 3 gigs.
im just glad this things not mine!
isn't that a bit of a limited view? Corporations are just a bunch of people with sometimes-intersecting viewpoints and resources...morals and ethics are _aggregate_ properties, and hardly divorced from business. Societies can have moral properties just as humans can have rational properties; we too are governed by laws, but that doesn't keep us from pursuing things other than only programmed "goals" of feeding, sleep and reproduction.
Actually their fdisk sucks, it won't remove partitions it doesn't understand, such as ext2 partitions. It claims there is a extended partition with no logical drives defined, then refuses to delete the extended partition because logical drives are defined.
Linux's fdisk seems to be much more effective...
(referencing your MS discussion to trade linux for it)
Didn't they do this with Netscape CDs when they were trying to get IE3.0 to take off? (in addition to the whole ship with us only thing/ we're on the desktop thing/ and the we're tying the UI in for 4.0)
You see where that's starting to get them... anti-trust.
(Referencing your "linux-kidz" discussion)
If you think it is just Kids (or probably you think people acting childishly) that compain about the cost of software, I'd think that Windows 95/98 would be the simpler platform. Yes, you do pay out the nose, but everyone's got it and burners are a dime a dozen. Does anybody remember what 770-077-07077 (or something like that) is?
If the young linux crowd (which usually gets a bad rap) were really jsut a bunch of copyright-infinging pirate H4X0RZ I bet you they'd really be running 95 - its a whole lot more "fun" if that's what you really think they think is 3L173(spelling?). Its not a question of "free" in terms of money that pulls in these kids.
Now as whether or not this younger linux generation picks up the torch and starts to join various open source projects remains to be seen, but wait to find out. I'd bet MOST linux users say they support the FSF, but the second the FSF asks for a handout it looks like somebody just stepped on someone elses' pet turtle.
Think of these kiddie "free-loaders" as seeds...
OS is not against feeding your family, its not "pick Open Source or Microsoft"... its more of a statement of I believe "WE" can make a better product together. If that means I have to work on NT Boxes at work too, then Damnit, I'll work on NT boxes...but when I go home its a different story.
The seeds of revolution have already been planted, all we need is a little catalyst...
You say you want a revolution?
Most software companies have not been established like those of the older industries, but keep this in mind: These companies may have been born at night, but they weren't born yesterday. They know how the new games are played, and they are fighting to keep their awarded copyrights their own. There was no need for rockefeller's standard Oil to copyright/patent their products/processes. Undoubtedly, times have changed.
http://tomgould.com/
This commentary (commentary not investigative article) makes it obvious how absurd 1. how low people/corporations/cmdrtaco will sink when money and power are at stake and 2. how seriously we seem to take this issue when it's been around for years. It's making fun of the problem, yes, but it's not denying that there's a problem. Just because people have been doing this for years doesn't make it any less of an issue. It may be making fun of the "political ramifications that will doom us all" attitude, but it's certainly not hiding the fact that the corrupted system exists.
On a tangent, or parallel, really: just because it's political satire doesn't mean it's not political.
Do something about world hunger. Click here
corporations can buy ethics with money
I don't really understand how one can buy ethics, but that aside what you are talking about is not ethics, but pure PR, aka image management, aka spinmeistering, aka controlling how the outside world sees you. This ancient art has been perfected by politicians and corporations, of course, have been using it quite successfully for quite a while.
What all this has to do with ethics I don't know. I don't even know what ethics are you talking about since even a couple of steps beyound "Thou shall not kill" you would find vigorous (and honest) disagreements about what's ethical and what's not...
Kaa
Kaa
Kaa's Law: In any sufficiently large group of people most are idiots.
I think that people found the concepts presented in the article interesting, and they probably found that the pictures were humorous as well.
As for the snide comment about businesses obviously being competitive... "Competitive" business tactics would involve attempting to manufacture a better product to replace another company's product, such as if I were able to make a better word processing package than Microsoft Word. "Competitive" would not imply, on the other hand, that I should try to bring down a rival through propaganda, libel, rifling through their dumpsters, etc. What a waste of time and resources (which could have been devoted to "competition".
I use VIM now but my first PC was a dual disk (360k) 8088. I had a lot of fun making .bat files in edlin. My menu.bat was 270 lines created with edlin. Another favorite: debug. Opening DOS 3.3 in hex and changing the error messages--those were the days.
1000 SlashDot sigs
That's what I thought - but apparantly, that's not true.
Although both projects are GPL'ed, Gnome can use KDE code (their html widget came from KDE 1.1), but KDE can't use Gnome code (the classic example is the threatened lawsuits over kgimp).
For more (admittedly one-sided and rather frustrated in tone) information, read this thread off of the KDE general mailing list.
--
Evan
"$30 for the One True Ring. $10 each additional ring!" -- JRR "Bob" Tolkien
What's the band's name? This is usually the type of stuff I prefer. Especially if they 'aren't mainstream enough'. I can't think of one 'popular' artist I've bought in about the past 15 years (unless you count Stevie Ray Vaughan, that guy could play).
And BTW, the dedication to your art got sold down the river along with the idea of integrity in general. Take a look around you. A society produces artists that are just as shitty as the society itself (will that earn a flamebait?). There are a few of us out here trying to create good 'art' without wussing out. But most are quick to 'sell' when they get the (quickly broken) promise of a 'mint'. Hopefully that will change soon. But don't hold your breath.
Bite my yammer.
Well, don't we backstab commericial providers from their lawful income when making free software of same kind?. Don't we infact backstab the artists when downloading mp3s? They have to live too. If for-pay mp3s came out - I would _gladly_ sponsor it. FUD can be used in open source too, but its not very ethical. I'm not aware of any examples but I bet there are some out there
-Stskeeps, http://unrealircd.com
Oh god, an actual intelligently humorous post? On slashdot (checking URL to make sure I didn't screw up)?
Now, having said that I realize I just posted another un-intelligently humorous post. (hanging head in shame, like Bud Bundy.)
Anyway, someone needs to mod up +5 funny for the parent post.
Bite my yammer.
The commercial software industry may seem cutthroat compared to the open source industry but notice the average age of commercial computer scientists compared to the age of open source CS people. Let's simplify it even more. Know any succesful politicians under 30?
pt
Will the real Richard Stallman please stand up?
Backhanded and backstabbing of non open source software, you mean! Ok, well, maybe that can get nasty too *averts eyes* -icarus
Butchers make the bestest meat; sugar sugar sugar beet!
So what the hell are we complaining about again? The API is a tool of fascist oppression? gimme a break..
By MS's own words and deeds then, Solitaire is a critical part of the operating system {grin}.
WWJD -- What Would Jimi Do?
I am quite civilized, and I should be brought a beer immediately. -- Bruce Sterling
Back then, the coal mining companies wouldn't stoop to such dangerous acts as dumpster diving.
No, you'd never hear of a coal mining company hiring private detectives to bust unions, and heads.
You'd never hear of Rockefeller's Standard Oil doing anything illegal or unsavory to reduce the competition.
The software companies are still babes in the woods compared to older industries.
What're you, stupid? Who would you rather have calling the shots, a corporation or a government? Bear in mind that if you don't like a corporation, you are free to exercise the ultimate sanction: buy from their rivals. If you don't like a government (particularly one "strong" enough to control corporation), do you really imagine they give a flying fsck if you vote for another party? In fact, they'd simply outlaw other parties, shoot their leaders and lock you in a concentration camp.
This is one thing the bleeding hearts never understand: it's the free market. Free as in speech, not as in beer. It's free individuals organising themselves as they see fit, and pursuing their goals, and taking their own risks, and earning their own rewards. How can you encourage competition in a world where the prize for success is punishment?
The only real supporters of strong government are the wannabe slave drivers.
The software industry is showing its newness whenever an article like this appears. In the big world competition happens. Anytime I write code thinking to sell it, I'm aware that somebody else is probably capable of writing the same code (and probably better.) A limited number of dollars are being chased so I try to help get my code sold as much as possible. I don't resort to hiring PIs but if the battle got way more intense, I could see it happening. Do I want to know what the competition is up to? You'd better believe I do. Full Stop.
So long and thanks for all the fish . . . !!!
Corporations will always evolve to survive in changing market conditions (of course, those that don't survive are replaced by a better-adapted competitor). This is why governments should have no fear in tightening the leash on corporations, instead of pandering to them (which sickens me to watch).
I agree with you partially. However, I don't think this applies to multinational corporations. If a government puts too tight of a restriction on a company, they leave and go somewhere else. Governments are national, Companies are multinational. Some governments understand this, some don't. Most people don't really care about this when they buy the products they do. They only care about the price and the quality. If consumers cared more about where stuff came from, companies would care more about where they make it.
This kind of crap doesn't have anything to do with software. It has to do with good old fashioned corporate greed.
:)
Spying on each other? Screwing each other over? Unethical contracts? Back stabbing? Welcome to corporate america, not just the software industry.
Software companies may engage in this more than other companies, but if so, it's only because the stakes are higher and larger amounts of money are changing hands. If you made the toilet plunger industry into a multibillion dollar industry that was moving as quickly and savagely as the software industry was, they'd act the same way.
So it probably makes free software look pretty good. Or maybe it just makes us look more and more like extremist dope smoking hippies because everybody knows that tech companies are our economic saviors.
They are, aren't they? Aren't they?
-- Truth goes out the door when rumor comes innuendo. -- Groucho Marx
When companies write code they want to make a profit from it and that is there main concern. Don't be fooled by ANY company that sells software. They are doing it for the money. Yes some may be a little more moral than others but thay ALL are just out to make money! Many people who work at these companies do so cause they like what they do. Now there is nothing wrong with makeing money from software, but when a company screws its users just to make a buck it is immoral.
What really bothers me is that there has been no real inovation in the software industry in 10 years. Neither proprietary nor open source. We still use the same tech we did 10 years ago it is just with more features and faster hardware. I want speach input that works! I want a system that does not crash (winblows and mac) or 'panic' *nix!! ;-)
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
I don't want a lot, I just want it all
Flame away, I have a hose!
Only 'flamers' flame!
Be fair to Slashdot, too. The post was in the category "It's funny. Laugh," and the commentary you quote comes courtesy of the original story you quote, not any of the /. crew.
To be fair to Suck, their piece was humor. Its a shame to see Slashdot report this like everything they said was well-grounded factual reporting. Even Suck didn't pretend that.
...note the "It's Funny" foot icon.
Corporations are very powerful now, but I have yet to see the amassed corporate armies that mark typical Cyberpunk corps, but the time could be coming I guess. DX8 is supporting easy voice-over-net connections, so next we have video over net - then we've got the Matrix ala Gibson.
Hmmmm. Cyberpunk future eh? Time to brush up on my VRML. Oh yeah, and by some guns.
I don't think they were Open Source according to the Open Source definition... but in the sense that you got the source...
Or were those programs excluded from the general license terms of MS DOS?!
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Ner lbh sebz gur HFN? Gura lbh'ir whfg ivbyngrq gur QZPN!
Hehehe. You are rich spoiled kid who never really lacked anything. That's the only conclussion one can draw from your post ? "wretched working conditions" my ass - I bet you forget about your slave-type lifestyle when you get into your BWM after work.
If this whole OS thing is not directly related to commercial potential than Raymond and his preaching amounts to pure bullshit and not much more.
I believe they orignally stole the technology from Norton Utilities, and the courts made them pay a settlement to continue using it.
There are several 1 & 2-player versions of Java Nibbles out there, as well.
Nibbles is great.
The Forum on Risks to the Public in Computers and Related Systems
The Software Conspiracy
While there will always be quality problems in software, current practice in many companies is to not even try to do the basic things that tend towards improving software quality. Until the public wakes up and realizes they're being ripped off, and their safety and corporate information being put at risk, we will always have this problem.
One solution is to get every programmer in a company a copy of some good quality tools, static analysis tools like PC-Lint and dynamic (runtime) analysis tools like Spotlight (for the MacOS) or BoundsChecker (for Windows) or Purify for Unix (but apparently not Linux) and NT.
As a Spotlight user and a long-time reader of the Risks forum, I wouldn't dream of shipping a Mac product unless it tested absolutely cleanly under Spotlight and had zero memory leaks.
But it is amazing to try Spotlight on a mature commercial product for the first time. Think you're program's free of bugs? Guess again. I proposed using Spotlight to my manager, on our program which had been shipping for several years and cost $600 retail. It was a serious product for high-end users. My manager said it would be a waste of time because "Our program has so many bugs, Spotlight would keep finding them and progress would be very slow." And you know, he was right. I persisted anyway, and spent three months ferreting bugs out of that program with Spotlight.
There's a lot of tools out there (and there's tools like these for Java too, like OptimizeIt - do you know many Java programs have memory leaks?). You don't have to pick the tools I recommend, but look out for what's available there and make sure you have something for every developer seat in the house.
It will be the best investment you make. The $199 for Spotlight will be paid for in the day it's first used.
And free software writers, I suggest writing free software versions of these. It would be possible in principle to write a special version of gcc, or an command-like option to it, that when your program is linked to a special library all your memory accesses are boundschecked. Note that Spotlight can validate memory reads as well as memory writes.
-- Could you use my software consulting serv
Yes, yes, troll replies bad, offtopic bad, but I just got a bill from Maximum Linux magazine and I'm peeved. No, I haven't received the six issues you say you've sent me. I don't even remember receiving one issue aside from the free trial copy. Anyone else had bad experiences with MLM?
Ceterum censeo Microsoftam esse delendam.
what about BeOS? it's an OS that's fairly dynamic, and it's a fairly new alternative OS (far younger than Mac, windows, or Unix). just a thought.
my pet machine
Uhm... the problem with MS fdisk is generally that you can get errors like "You have a bad partition table, so fdisk won't work! Sorry!" (no, that's no exact quote)... I mean that could be a reason why I want to run fdisk... to wipe all partition entries and start over... but no.. not with MS fdisk... :/
It also can't handle linux partitions...
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Ner lbh sebz gur HFN? Gura lbh'ir whfg ivbyngrq gur QZPN!
Btw, it's "Trumpet Winsock" and nothing else... and it's available for download here... =)
And yes, I have to agree.... those memories... =)..
(of course not only good memories though)
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Ner lbh sebz gur HFN? Gura lbh'ir whfg ivbyngrq gur QZPN!
Technical decision makers have the obligation to rationally evaluate all potential solutions without personal bias. Our decisions should be solely based upon a product's merits. That's why I don't care what any of the companies do, so long as their products meet my customers' needs. For all I care, Bill Gates can be a racist child-molesting serial killer. It's still a fact that the TPC-C records for performance and value are absolutely DOMINATED by MS SQL Server and Windows 2000. Stop whining and get over it. Oh, and visit http://www.tpc.org ! Mmmmmmkay???
"Saddam Hussein cavorts with terrorists."
So in this case I think the joke is about how self-important the software industry is, rather than crying wolf about corporate espionage. There are more serious activism journalism sites than suck; that's where I would look to see that kind of interpretation.
BTW: I see you go to umich. Are you at the Ann Arbor campus? North campus or Central? God I miss that town -- if only it had a tech economy of decent size.
Thats an easy question - fdisk. Its fairly well written, fast, and I have never had it fail on me so far. Of course, once you run it, the other MS products don't seem to be available, but then Linux & the BSDs offer a friendly and much more functional alternative. Still, I think we should be magnanimous enough to offer Microsoft a compliment on the effectiveness and general quality of fdisk - I recommend it to all of my friends.
"The first time I got drunk, I got married. The second time I bought a chimpanzee, after that I stayed sober" Arian Seid
fdisk, followed closely by format. The rest of them suffer feature creep, to the point of being unusable for their primary purpose. Before you all flame on, yes, I know fdisk got a new, unneeded switch in 1997. It suffers too, but one switch in six years isn't bad!!
.sig: Now legally binding!
I didn't find anything worthwhile in this article. Granted, I couldn't stomach it all the way through to the end, but I doubt it got much better.
A good commentary, IMHO, presents well-documented facts to support an opinion and is capable of persuading someone of differing opinion, or no opinion, and less facts to change their point of view. This article was nothing but a string of accusations with no substantiation. Sure, the cartoons were amusing, but this type of writing accomplishes nothing but entertaining others of the same viewpoint and giving them a false sense of justification and vindication.
Let me conclude by saying that I do not necessarily disagree with the viewpoint presented. I simply disagree with the notion that this presentation of that viewpoint represents anything approaching journalism.
Backstabbing tactics are not unique to the computer industry and have, in fact been going on for as long as there has been money. They are usually more rampant when the companies involved are not equals, such as in the movie "Tucker". However, even though the small guy usually does lose, that does not mean his ideas die with him. Tucker's cars were the safest being made, and many of his innovations were fairly quickly included in the later models from the big 3 automakers. This is how M$ treats Linux -- only time will tell the rest of this story, of course.
Within open source software groups of equals, I do think there will be the same sort of attacks, but for different reasons. Instead of just being about money, it may be more about ego, pride, (spite? :) -- for example, who can claim the most improvement to KDE in the next release? In fact, I remember a recent article here about a split in this code because of differences in opinion about the direction in which the code was headed (I may be mistaken about these details, but in either case, this is what I forsee happening). I include money because even though there may be no pay now, one could easily parlay their developments into a nice job.
Some sort of centralized planning will no doubt be needed to keep code branches from divergeing too much. Maybe the developers who worked on a current version would accept submissions of proposals of what should be in the next version. They would vote and determine what will be done, and then anyone would be able to code, and become part of the voting group for the next release. This would at least ensure the integrity of a project in a version-to-version evolution, however, I think it would be difficult to keep any original grand vision intact. Do any of the more advanced open-source projects work in such a way? How successful have they been?
The ivory tower has never had to reach so h
To be fair to Suck, their piece was humor. Its a shame to see Slashdot report this like everything they said was well-grounded factual reporting. Even Suck didn't pretend that.
Yes, I suppose thats why the humor icon was used to denote the article. Those sneaky slashdot bastards!
-- iCEBaLM
yes, specifically, partition type 0c (or at least what linux fdisk calls 0c which is fat32 LBA)
The obvious solution is of course, communism. Kruschev said he would bury us! It's true! The cuban are invading this christmas! Save the children and move to Sealand!
====
Crudely Drawn Games
Still, I think we should be magnanimous enough to offer Microsoft a compliment on the effectiveness and general quality of fdisk - I recommend it to all of my friends
Except, even there, users of MS products get an inferior product: the OS/2 fdisk was significantly more powerful and flexible.
What kind of light does this sort of business ethic (or lack thereof) shine on the open-source community, and Free vs. free software?"
I think this is just the world in microcosm, and you'll find this sort of behavior in the underbelly of any human institution. When I was in college, I had a number of friends who were pre-med. They told me astounding tales of the underhanded tactics that the pre-med students would employ in order to sabotage their fellows. Things like taking their lab cultures out of the incubator and destroying them. They did this because grades were assigned via a fixed curve, so only so many out of a class would get 'A's. So, I guess I'm not either surprised or particularly alarmed to find out that some within the software industry use gutter tactics in the internecine battles. As far as its implications for Free/free software, I have to think that flipping over the right rocks there would find some interesting crawly things as well. It's just a given that some individuals in any group will use underhanded techniques to achieve their goals.
"If I have seen further than other men, it is by stepping on their glasses." - Michael Swaine
> Is it just me or was this strip not funny?
It's just you. This was the funniest thing that they've done in weeks.
My Karma: ran over your Dogma
StrawberryFrog
Note that one use of the word 'Free' is capitalised and the other 'free' is not. This indicates that a desire to compare the notion of free software as described by the GPL (i.e. Free speech) in contrast to software which is totally free (i.e. Free beer) and you never have to pay for, nor can you charge for it.
There are a group of Open source software developers who choose to use the GPL, which allows money to come into the equation. There is another group which develops software which precludes any charge whatsoever. This post is PERHAPS meant to encourage a discussion about whether the GPL group may be better off following the second group, without any financial interest which can corrupt their principles.
The Commercial software industries, NO DOUBT, began with a hope that money would not corrupt their vision and their products. But look at them now!
Well, either way, thank God that the GPL ethic has not been corrupted to date. And may it long continue to be so.
Before you rain holy fire down upon me, please consider my statement. This article is slanted toward a paranoid, the-commies-are-out-to-get-us attitude. In addition, it calls upon evidence that has little to do with corporate espianoge; it deals more with military and state espianoge. In addition, just by taking a look at the sources used, it is clear that these "sources" are as slanted toward a paranoid view as the suck article. Consider the following: - A majority of the sources were either quoted out of context, or they provide a skewed viewpoint. - No evidence is produced to attempt to refute the evidence presented. Any credible work attempts to do this. - The evidence is used out of context. For example, the case of Harold Nicholson is about a state level espianoge case. What does this have to do with corporate espianoge? - Take a look at who owns the sites. The information is publicly available using the whois database. - Consider where this information comes from. I have no doubt in my mind that corporate espianoge does happen. However, I think that instead of buying into poorly supported media content that an effort should be made to research the activities in question. This includes clearly documented, complete records of said activities, alternative suggestions, and clearly supported resons for disagreeing with those suggestions, and reputable sources of information. - Nathaniel Cosgrove [ I am free because I think for myself, and I choose how I act ]
Hell yes.
When Windows 95 was getting to the point where a majority of the Joe Users were using it, I was working in a tech support call center handling ISP user support calls. I rejoiced whenever I got a win3.1 user with Trumpet Winsock...cause damnit...it WORKED. And when it didn't work, it was FIXABLE cause it generally gave you nice descriptive error messages. At least, always better than the infamous "Dialup networking could not negotiate a connection" bullshit error that 99% of problems with 95's stuff tended to throw up.
Don't get me started on that crap ShivaPPP dialer for win3.1 that seemed to ship with every damn prepackaged browser-dialer-whatever bundle. Man that thing sucked. And never ever ever would it give you a hint of what might be wrong.
"That's Tron. He fights for the Users."
For all I care, Bill Gates can be a racist child-molesting serial killer.
Good for you. I personally don't agree with the hypothetical situation supporting a racist child-molesting serial killer because he makes a good product. I think ethics should play some role in decision making, even technical decision making. I certainly don't want to live in a world where psychotic sociopaths hold all the wealth and power. That's why I'd draw the line at the situation you presented.
> Mike
"There is no culture in computer science, only cults." - M. Felleisen
You forgot VIM/Emacs!! And what let's not forget the true/false controversy...
--
python -c "x='python -c %sx=%s; print x%%(chr(34),repr(x),chr(34))%s'; print x%(chr(34),repr(x),chr(34))"
hey..suck always had a weird layout...generates more ad revenue in this cutthroat software industry. of course ads can be blocked..and it does make suck easier to read. ....entertaining look at the industry.
you might want to look at fuckedcompany.com for a more
What the poster was alluding to, I believe, was buying a thin veneer of ethics in the public's eye, behind which they can do all sorts of nasty things.
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
Solitaire is probably the most useful. Keeps users from poking around in places they shouldn't ;)
maybe you shoulf think your plan through a little more. one thing you forgot to mention - corporations only gain control over people by buying off lawmakers. ooops, i mean lobbying. be careful what you wish for...
Have you seen Ironstayn vs Supergovernment yet?
Why does this happen every week? Some company or other does something that is not "nice", and everyone gets to discharge their righteous moral outrage over this fact.
Lets get something straight, corporations are not moral or ethical entities. Anyone expecting them to behave as such is a fool.
A corporation's goal is profit, and its only constraints are laws (whether physical or man made). Thats all there it to it, "nice" does not enter into it.
It's about time somebody said it.
/.! Money bought a law.
Yes, money buys ethics, and it's even more true than you say. Money doesn't just buy the perception of ethics through marketting and advertisement, as you say. Money makes things right.
Witness the RIAA sponsored 'work for hire' copyright rider on the Satelite communications Law that was recently mentioned here on
Now Law is the definition of Ethics for our culture. Individuals define ethics and morality for themselves, but that's just an opinion. When you are in violation of The Law, you are in violation of what society thinks is right.
If money can buy a law, then money can define what society thinks is right, and furthermore, what wrong actions are penalized. "Oooh! He copied a song on Napster! He broke The Law!"
But then again, we've always know this to be true. We all know The Golden Rule - He (and it is invariably a He) who has the Gold, makes The Rules.
-- What you do today will cost you a day of your life.
Backstabing goes on all the time in the Opensource world. It happens when you download a set of Debian floppy disk and install it without making a donation to Debian. It happens when you buy magazines like Maximum Linux install those distro's that ship with the magazines, without buying the boxed set. It happens when you turn your nose up at the thought of even buying a boxed distro because it's too much when you can download what you want for free.Thats ok though, because people fuck with people all the time,but correct me if I'm wrong but I thought the Opensource movement was supposed to be based on the idea of a "gift" culture. You know, I give you something and then you give something back? All i see are a bunch of kids complaining about the high cost of software and turning to Linux as a solution. I wonder if the Opensource Movement would be as strong as it is today if Microsoft desided to drasticly lower thier prices,I'd say $25 bucks for windows 2000 would be a real deal,M$ wouldn't lose anything by it, maybe they could have a special promotion, give us your Linux floppies and burned in cd's and we'll give you a free copy of any particular windows distro you want. Sure the commercial software world is dog eat dog tough, but it works. If the Opensource method of development ever fails it will be because it's users don't contribute enough or support the coders of it's projects and ultimatly developers give up on Opensource because they have to eat!
Several years ago I stumbled upon An Entirely Other Site which is a sort of journal of observations by Mr. Knauss. It's one of those sites that you read the first couple and then turn your 30 second hyperlink jaunt into a more extended voyage as you dive into the archives...
Let's not forget that the communities (KDE or Gnome) do not need to bother with spying. Both are open-source, so they just look at the code and have more than they could want, and still legally use it. Granted, I doubt that either side would want to do that much, considering the different library bases. The holy wars are mainly among the users, not the developers, they're too busy :-).
"The universe seems neither benign nor hostile, merely indifferent." --Carl Sagan
it has trouble getting rid of linux partitions
i think Solitaire, 3D Pinball and Notepad are the best things M$ has ever created.
...dave
Think different? I'd be happy if most people would just think...
Oh no! That's horrible!
Seriously though, the Free Software community is just passionate. Most of the 'holy wars' are just uninformed trolls on Slashdot - none of this has much impact on the rest of the community. If any serious conflicts come up, they are more likely to be personality conflicts between individual developers (e.g. the recent GTK-- thing), and that's unavoidable. I strongly doubt any immoral behavior goes on. The KDE and GNOME people, for example, both aim to provide a user-friendly UNIX desktop. There is strong competition, which encourages each group to work harder. How is this bad?
What the poster was alluding to, I believe, was buying a thin veneer of ethics in the public's eye, behind which they can do all sorts of nasty things.
[sarcasm] And of course, this is a consequences of the much-reviled-by-Katz Corporate Age -- nobody but corporations does this, for sure! [/sarcasm]
Kaa
Kaa
Kaa's Law: In any sufficiently large group of people most are idiots.
I keep waiting for the day Bill Gates gets kidnapped and replaced by an open-source advocating look-alike so we can make M$ Flight Sim opensource and multi-platform. That's the only M$ program I can remember ever being impressed with. When they bought that one they made a good choice. :)
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
This all came about, the crash of startup stock confidence I mean, when companies started becoming scams. They would look viable and sell themselves like a lemon on a used car lot. Wonderful we have something to taint our industry. Reminds me of the law and medical fields where they have become ruthless amd much more concerned with their careers rather than their customers.
Besides that, the viable software companies have their own troubles. The startups have the ability to dynamically find an unused niche in the market to exploit. This is the proper way to go about it. Some are stubborn and like to stick to their guns, slinging mud like politicians in a desperate effort to capture the first seed in the market. The bigger companies are too big and have become a legacy model in themselves, unable to move or change beyond superficial changes like a name change, merge, re-org, new logo, false product announcement... What does this say about software companies? We have aged businessmen applying traditional business tactics to a completely ever-changing market, or we have scam artists who want to float an idea for cash. In the middle somewhere are 10% who have vital leadership and solid contributions to the industry.
-Effendi
-Effendi
Do onto others as you would have them do onto you.
It's a rule that has been around for OVER 2,000 years, and it holds even more true today.
[much pointless ramble on how much I agree deleted]
-- What you do today will cost you a day of your life.
And isn't that what Karl Marx predicted even before the start of the 19th century?
I really wish slashdot folks would make up their mind about how they feel about Suck. Suck is loved or hated depending upon whose sacred cow is being gored.
The welfare of the people has always been the alibi of tyrants. - Albert Camus
> capitalization of Microsoft, IBM, Cicso, Intel.
> They're the "biggest boys" on the planet.
Who owns the money?
I'd say the largest organized crime syndicates would be _government_ and _bankers_.
Just as a note, optical mice have been around long before Microsoft came up with them. Sun Microsystems developed optical mice for use with their Sparcstations. they required a special mousepad, but irreguardless, they were optical.
>Their size should be limited to a market cap of (say) ten billion dollars, for starters.
I agree, but it should be a variable based on the GNP or some other such indicator, not a fixed value. IMO, same should go for personal wealth.
I stopped writing slogans on my notebooks in high school, now I need to come up with a sig....
Suck. I love the name. It's interesting (and unoriginal?) that Business Week did a story about this topic on July 17, 2000.
--
"You're gonna need a bigger boat." - Chief Brody
and eventually we bring MS to their knees.
We have a worldide celebration of peace, until MS products developed in secret launch a devastating attach, forcing the Open Source People to leave for the mythical land Finland aboard the Battlestar Linuxica, leading ragtag fleet of fugitives...
ask slashdot? Nah. How about a poll? Then we could b*tch to our hearts' content about our favorite product not being an option. Plus, no mailbombs; no one takes polls seriously.
NotepAd.exe is my choice because they never added anything to it.
That link to the front page of Suck will point at a new article tomorrow. If you want to see the article Hemos is talking about later, check out the Suck for 11 August 2000.
Capt. Ron
crazy dynamite monkey
Or by employing them. Since we can assume that your average Joe Consumer is going to get himself into a horrendous amount of debt during his working life, or wants to save some money, he'll stick to that job like shit to an army blanket, and put up with all kinds of personal sacrifices and compromises and perhaps even abuse.
For the even more weak-minded there is what I can only assume to be advertising-driven compulsions to do one or more of the following things:
- Wear particular brands of clothing whose cost far exceeds their actual value. "Nike" and "Hilfiger" and all that kind of crap. Said clothing brands are often heavily advertised on the actual product. (Smells like a virus).
- Eat a particular food when in a particular mood. Usually a high-carbohydrate, low nutritional value junk food.
And these are just two examples of mind control that corporations inflict on people that are detrimental in some way. I'm sure some of our fellow slashdotters can think of many more, any meme heads in the house?--
NO TOUCH MONKEY!
That is a good article, but dang hard to read over those @#$%#$* banner ads....sheeesh.
Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.
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"don't smoke, don't drink, don't fuck
at least i can fucking think"
Minor Threat
Yes, the Suck piece was a parody, but every parody - by being a parody - brings attention to some aspect of reality. In every myth there is a kernel of truth.
:)
/.'ers a little credit, would'ya? We're not all idiots.
Portraying Bill Clinton as a chubby, child-molesting hill-billy red-neck is a parody; but it focuses and exaggerates some aspect of the subject.
A truly successful parody is one which does not require excessive suspension of disbelief. Like a good Troll, it starts out totally plausible, and gets deeper and deeper - and you fall for it, hook, line and sinker. Only later, do you realize that it is in fact making drastic fun of something more subtle. That realization then makes you consider the subject being parodied - it forces you to think about an issue that you would normally overlook, or dismiss.
This is why a good parodical troll gets marked as informative, insightful, eventually funny and ultimately overrated and flamebait, without once earning the deserved Troll.
Everyone (almost) realized that the Suck piece was a parody - after all, it's on Suck! Duh! (Doing otherwise is like taking The Onion seriously. If they put big "blink" tag disclaimers on the article, saying "THIS IS A JOKE!", it would have ruined the joke, right?) The subsequent discussions and outbursts are centered on the issue the piece presented; the theme and not the plot, if you will; while continuing the plot. Give
Maybe you're the one who "didn't get it"?
-- What you do today will cost you a day of your life.
So THAT's what you have to do to be successful in the software business! Geeze... I've spent the last 20 years writing software. *sigh* Well, at least that explains why you guys have all the cool geek chics while all I've got is a clapped out Ford Escort - and that's borrowed! :)
Wait -- do you *know* of a good Teletubby song? Could you sing it for us?
The free software community has a lot of competition, holy wars, and other such nonsense. The best example, I think, to apply to this would be KDE and Gnome. Both are quality projects (no, I won't start a flame war here :), and both have similar goals.
:)
There are a lot of community holy wars between the two, but I think what makes the free software community different from most commercial software interests, is that there is acctually intelligence here, because the projects are being managed by the people that understand them, not by the guy the company hired in marketing that just happens to have taken one class in high school in pascal which makes him smarter than you.
Of course, its possible I'm totally off base considering the caffiene content of my blood right now
The software *Industry* is just that, an industry. What makes us think they'd be anymore fair and just than any other industry out there? Hell, almost every software company I can think of should have union the working conditions are so wretched. Check out the good dossier on Old Tricks in The New Economy for what really happens. Maybe this will knock some sense into all the teens out there reading /., thinking that a life of luxury and leisure awaits them as office drones...
You are more than the sum of what you consume.
You are more than the sum of what you consume.
Desire is not an occupation.
Everyone has their own agenda. Some people cheer for Windows, others rally for Linux. Some people take their causes further than others, and people with vested interests tend to take their causes the furthest.
Business in general tends to take the view of "do whatever you can get away with". Industrial espionage is not new. It may be to the computer industry, but that's only because the computer industry itself is fairly new, and with relatively few big players.
(Spudley Strikes Again!)
Why was this considered a 'great article'. It was disjointed, incoherent, and it had what, five sentences per page?
Business are competitive? Wov, what a surprise.
Je ne parle pas francais.
A determined corporation with a little ingenuity can do anything it wants. It spends a little money on its Human Relations and the employees think it's the greatest place in the world to work. You spend a little money on Public Relations, and the general public forgives your sins. You spend a little money on lobbying and the government plays into your hands. If some young hotshot from the government ever decides to oppose you, you spend a little money on lawyers to keep him occupied while you continue on with what you do.
corporations can buy ethics with money - that is to say, with enough money, distributed in the right places, only the thinking minority will ever think a company unethical.
wish
---
Its just human nature. Get over it & get into it.
Portraying Bill Clinton as a chubby, child-molesting hill-billy red-neck is a parody; but it focuses and exaggerates...
Does it? Couldn't tell for sure...
"Research is what I am doing when I don't know what I am doing." -- Wernher von Braun
So, where did this come from? Is there any independent corroboration of these heinous charges leveled against Philadelphia's criminal justice system?
--
--
Do I look like I speak for my employer?
On another note, it was mentioned previously that the cyberpunk culture has been anticipating in dread a world controlled by ultramegacorporations. A world in which individuals supposedly feel powerless against these behemoths. A world in which governments (and hence military, police and intelligence forces) apparently are merely pawns to be pushed around by these corporate beasts. A world in which the all-important Market, a million-headed Hydra consuming everything in its path, cannot be killed unless every head is squashed simultaneously. A world of exploitation of millions of people for no other reason than they don't have as much of this imaginary money as their exploiters. A world of behaviour modification, excessive social repression, isolation, and bizzarre psychological disorders. A world that does not value the unique characteristics of individual people.
Since the end of World War I we have been treading the path toward this world, sometimes with joy, sometimes with the horrible knowledge that we are going to fsck everything up (depending on what mood is more "newsworthy"). When the US president after World War II declared that "the purpose of the American economy is to produce more consumer goods", this set the precedent for the rest of the century.
The twentieth century was strange, as centuries go. Consider the impact of technology here: the automobile, the television, the myriad of household labor saving devices and subsequent proliferation of divertainment devices. All this time freed up so that Consumer Dogma may be absorbed from the various media.
Of course, the dogma doesn't have to be direct. Most of the time, watching the vast majority of TV shows, it is an assumed fundamental axoim on which TV-Reality is based. Thou shalt consume and shut the fsck up.
You might beleive that something is fundamentally wrong with the way all this is set up, but you don't know who to complain to, and you doubt anyone would listen, because you're possibly young, and what would you know?
Here's what I think:
Governments should exert much tighter controls on corporations. 1. Their size should be limited to a market cap of (say) ten billion dollars, for starters. This will not only encourage competition and help prevent monopolies, but create jobs. Adam Smith would be happier with that. 2. Corporations should not be allowed to hold stock in other corporations. A corporation is not a human being and should have not nearly as many right as a human being. 3. Directors and executives should be made personally responsible for the actions of the corporation, including bankruptcy. 4. Corporations should not be allowed to do in foreign countries what is illegal in their home country, to prevent sweatshop slavery and raping of natural resources.
Corporations will always evolve to survive in changing market conditions (of course, those that don't survive are replaced by a better-adapted competitor). This is why governments should have no fear in tightening the leash on corporations, instead of pandering to them (which sickens me to watch).
Therefore, everyone who is pissed off about this kind of stuff should be making lots of noise about it. If everyone told the governments of their respective countries, either at the ballot box or in writing or in protest, what's pissing them off, then that would be something acheived becuase whether the action is successful or not, more people will be made aware of the source of the problem.
--
NO TOUCH MONKEY!
Actually, they have... the ability to change your font has appeard in recent versions of notepad )=
Taco, the next time you post a blurb about a story, would you please include a link to it?
Just my opinion, thanks.
That is the first site I've visited in weeks where I didn't mind waiting for the graphics to download.
The net will not be what we demand, but what we make it. Build it well.
People,
Repeat after me, "When I see a Monty Python foot the article is humour related...ad infinitum..."
Regards.
root@foobar# shutdown -h now
System will be halted.
All we need now are flying cars. Where are my flying cars?
Is it just me or was this strip not funny?
Maybe I need a sense of humor...
love is just extroverted narcissism
Should'nt the suck link go to his ray-tracing/rendering ?
Read as: use unstable, but this does not changes the fact that to build something that
Remember - the techies may be "young blood," but a lot of the "senior hands" in the management slots are good, old-fashioned, corporate-trained folk who've just happened to find jobs in a quickly growing area. Bean-counters are bean-counters, whether they work for Arthur Andersen, Exxon, GM, or (your startup name here). The same goes for advertising, inventory control, sales... a lot of the "new economy" folks got their experience in the "old economy," so we shouldn't be surprised when the old bad habits show up. It's still what they know how to do.
I love vegetarians - some of my favorite foods are vegetarians.
Ye gods, reading Suck annoys the hell out of me. It's like a Powerpoint presentation. It takes more time to load than to read.
Very well tuned to the gnat-like attention spans of the MTV generation, I suppose.
A Dick and a Bush .. You know somebody's gonna get screwed.
War is necrophilia.
But how about favorite non-MS apps for Windows? For that I'd have to go with Trumphet Winsock. Man does that bring back memories! You have your Windows 3.1 box and you're ready to surf the Internet. What? No TCP/IP stack?! No problem..get Winsock! (Of course you have to download it first...)
Isn't this exactly what the cyberpunk genre has been predicting for decades? A world run by gigantic corporations, who wield power as ruthlessly and viciously as any faschist government.
You are more than the sum of what you consume.
You are more than the sum of what you consume.
Desire is not an occupation.
does no one on this fscking web board understand humor? suck.com's article is parody (and mockery), not insightful reporting on some important-undercurrent-in-software-with-political- ramifications-that-will-doom-us-all.
"Suck has a great commentary today about the back-handed, back-stabbing nature of the software industry. The for-profit software industry, that is, of course... What kind of light does this sort of business ethic (or lack thereof) shine on the open-source community, and Free vs. free software?
Suck has a bunch of allegations so weak even it doesn't try to justify them. Come on, Suck's article said exactly nothing. It claims some industry executives do bad things. It doesn't cite a single example, beyond Ellison's famed dumpster-diving. And interestingly, that was nothing to do with software development, it was related to the Microsoft anti-trust matter. Its not like Ellison was actually stealing source code...
To be fair to Suck, their piece was humor. Its a shame to see Slashdot report this like everything they said was well-grounded factual reporting. Even Suck didn't pretend that.
Of course, I've worked in the industry long enough to know that unsavory things happen. Good and noble things also happen. Most of the time what goes on is just plain hard work, neither particularly good nor particularly bad. Welcome to the world of human beings, where people sometimes do good things and sometimes do bad things.
Sailing over the event horizon
What exactly is the point of this story? That software companies should hug each other and sing teletubby songs while playing happy games?
/., which succeeded.
Of course companies are going to stab each other and fight it out. It's called capitalism.
In any case, I don't see any relevance to free software or open source, which basically seems the obligatory tag-on to get the story published on
As for back handed back stabbing, here's a newsflash - so long as it's legal, anything goes. That's how it's always been. Welcome to the real world.
And the cartoons weren't funny either.
w/m
Mister, in my personal opinion you are simply a blind communist. It seems you forgot the world have three actors: the individual, the corporation and the state. Destroy the corporation and the individual will single face the government. Your text, also in my personal opinion, is a damm lie about XX century: the state grows and grows, stealing from corporations and from individuals. How many days work your grandfather for paying taxes? How many days *you* work for paying taxes? is is a shame that you want the state even *more* controlling the market. I feel personally disgusted by what I think that are crypto-communistic remarks.
Catalin Braescu
Ofaly.com
Some lefis have the strange fixation of trying to justify their communist absurdities by packing them in some "objective" packajing. Is my personal opinion that your words are very similar in this respect. Who are you to restrict somebody else willing to work and earn? What if somebody will came to your house and pretend you earn way too much and eventually try to pick some of your money? Remember: communism led to mass unhappiness and systematic civil rights abuse.
Catalin Braescu
Ofaly.com
The record companies have a lock on the old distribution system. Until recently, if you didn't sign with a major, it was impossible to get your product to a mass audience. And the contracts with the record companies were so wonderful that Prince called himself a slave, and George Michael spend years fighting his contract.
So the free market wasn't determining CD prices; the major labels were. Now that the internet is providing alternate methods to order cds or just download mp3s, we might actually see the price drop to a free-market level.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I think they bought that technology from Norton utilities. At least at one point the two looked almost identical. With the latest NT-based windows they just rely on DiskKeeper (they bought the it to put in the Windows 2000 defrag).
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
Why anyone is mentioning my favorites?
Gorilla.bas and nibbles.bas!
They were a fun and great experience.
And they definetely were Open Source.
Fh
The revelation that Oracle hired a group of bungling private dicks to dig into the finances (and through the trash) of trade groups that support Microsoft surprised exactly no one.
Give me a break. This "bungling group of dicks" managed to catch Microsoft with its corporate pants down at embarassing times in the recent trial three times or so. Little things like Microsoft presenting testimonials from supposedly independent groups, only to have David Boise immediately follow up with evidence that that those organizations were funded by Microsoft. Guess who dug up the evidence?
--
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
Some of their hardware doesn't suck. It's thanks to them that scroll wheels are common on mice, and I've heard the optical mouse is cool and some people are happy with the sidewinder stuff. I've been pretty happy with my natural keyboard too. In fact, if it were up to me, I'd have them stop making software altogether and stick at what they're good at.
The concept of illegal plants and animals is obnoxious and ridiculous.
I'd rather be lucky than good.
From the -we-don't-need-no-stinking-Penis-Bird-War dept.
Make dove, not war.
Isn't every debate w/Linux a mini holy war of it's own? I can't count how many snide remarks I have heard about BSD/Linux camp
I would venture to say that because people put their hearts into the projects
For example, what would you say if there was a 'Ask Slashdot' about which is your favorite Microsoft Product?.. Rob would get a mail-bomb if that went through..
anyways.... I have never seen a more emotional holy-war driven passionate band of cowboys in my life. I hope it doesn't ever change!
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Nothing new there (Anyone attend a Westech? "I won't steal your IT employees if you don't steal mine, now just turn around for a sec. ;), but by golly, I thought the post was referring to the Reform Party at first.
Seems art imitates friction...
Vote Naked 2000
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
of why suck.com will never be taken away by the WIPO. It'd be impossible for anyone to suck more than them.
Steven
-- I have marked myself unwilling to moderate-- I don't have other accounts to artificially inflate the karma of