Slashdot Mirror
Slashback: Sorveteria, Rockets, Anger
How is this sanguine? peterb writes "Slashdot has previously reported on Eve Andersson's whitewash of Ars Digita. Her screed placed responsibility for all the problems fully on the shoulders of the Venture Capitalists, while ignoring the role of those that asked the VCs for money. Ars Digita's Michael Yoon has a somewhat more sanguine and less hysterical version of the same story."
I wonder if shoulder chips can be recycled as fuel ...
All them perls don't come cheap. dogma01 writes "It's been almost a year since I submitted this story on Slashdot about the Perl Foundation Fund Drive. With a new year there has been a new round of grants. Every dime helps improve the community and bring us one step closer to Perl6. Please donate here."
The largest model is actually the one that's currently in use. joshamania writes "I knew when I saw the first post about the 'largest scale model of the solar system' I should have piped up. The second post has driven me over the edge. I call shenanigans! The Maine model is not the largest, and Peoria, IL, my hometown, has had the largest model for many years now, the Pluto model (in Kewanee, IL) being over 60 miles away from the sun model. In fact, a bicycle tour of the model is organized every summer and reoccurs in August."
Still at maximum. Danta writes "As the QNX site seems to have received an indirect slashdotting, here is a BitTorrent link to the free version of the QNX OS."
And what's in your makefile? JediTrainer writes "Community backlash begins! The author of Nmap has decided to remove all support of the SCO operating system as of version 3.28. Quoting the changelog, 'SCO operating systems are no longer supported due to their recent (and absurd) attacks against Linux and IBM. Bug reports relating to UnixWare will be ignored, or possibly even laughed at derisively. Note that I have no reason to believe anyone has ever used Nmap on SCO systems. Unixware sucks.'"
Speaking of backlash ... Ransak writes "Speak out! Space-Rockets.com has started a letter/fax campaign to sway political opinion, but needs your help! This hobby enjoyed by thousands of future scientists and astronaunts has been put in serious jeopardy by bad legislation. Senator Herb Kohl was one of the coauthors of the Safe Explosives Act, who not surprisingly, is blocking an amendment to ease restrictions on model rocketry. Wisconson geeks, take note of your Senators actions!"
... and speaking of rockets: BuR4N writes "The x-prize foundation has decided not to accept an application from a Budapest based team called GCT (Gravity Control Technologies) due to their highly questionable proposal. GCT pitched a "propellantless propulsion technology" that quote "is capable of controlling gravity for flight". Here is the full story. It would be very interesting to hear from the scientific community if this is just silliness or something that eventually could lead anywhere.."
I hope these guys don't take up making ham sandwiches. acidblood writes "Following up on yesterday's story concerning ice cream and liquid nitrogen, it appears someone was keen to try it out, and this is the result."
I can't tell from the page when exactly this was made. Whether it was truly in response to Gray's recipe or not, this site certainly provides more amusing visual aids.
The medium is the message, or something like that. LineNoiz writes "There is an interesting article over at MSNBC outlining Metallica's attempt to take advantage of the internet as a music distribution medium. It seems their newest album 'St. Anger' has a code on it which can be used to access their "Audio Vault" where users can download MP3 recordings of live concerts. The site's motto? 'Download. Burn. Share. Kick Ass.' Is this just a flagrant attempt to recapture the interest of the thousands of fans they lost in their battle with Napster, or a genuine good idea?"
Readers may recall this interview with Metallica's Lars Ulrich.
'Download. Burn. Share. Kick Ass.'
Maybe their MP3 files contain Hatch's "special" program.
1f u c4n r34d th1s u r34lly n33d t0 g37 l41d
perl 5 does just about everything I need. From everything I've read, perl 6 will have enough changes to make it almost like learning a new language. Yes, I know there will be a "backwards compatibility" mode, but why do I get the feeeling that if one has problems with the backwards compatibiltiy mode, the answer that will be offered will be "rewrite it as perl 6 code"?
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
Download. Burn. Share. Kick Ass.
Hmmph, for some reason I read this as meaning:
Download, Burn, Share - get YOUR ass kicked by Metallica.
I might actually check out St. Anger to get at the concert recordings, IF Metallica first apologizes for all the crap they pulled over Napster a few years ago. Otherwise, this is pure hypocracy, and a rather sad attempt at pulling back in fans who are deservedly quite angry with them. Of course, this is far from the first time a band has tried something like this. David Bowie has a huge load of rare material available on his website through subscription.
Bush: He's Liberal in all the wrong ways.
Is this just a flagrant attempt to recapture the interest of the thousands of fans they lost in their battle with Napster
Yes.
-Eyston
Damn, Slashdot is catching up !
If GCT actually does it, will the X-Prize folks accept their appliation after the fact?
If all this should have a reason, we would be the last to know.
If the Budapest team finds a way to manipulate gravity into propellantless propulsion, I doubt they'll miss that $10M x-pize too much..
Midnight Commander team seem to be doing the same thing
"And what's in your makefile? JediTrainer writes "Community backlash begins! The author of Nmap has decided to remove all support of the SCO operating system as of version 3.28. Quoting the changelog, 'SCO operating systems are no longer supported due to their recent (and absurd) attacks against Linux and IBM. Bug reports relating to UnixWare will be ignored, or possibly even laughed at derisively. Note that I have no reason to believe anyone has ever used Nmap on SCO systems. Unixware sucks.'"
And the logic of punishing the SCO community instead of the company is?
Metallica Tricks The Tricksters. They're planning to flood file sharing networks with Metallica "named" John Denver tunes to trick users. I hope they have Denver's estate's permission to use his works.
Perl 6 will do $X.
Why learn any new languages? Why not write everything in assembler? Hell, just write it all in machine code.
I have been pwned because my
If you bought their last album (I got the vinyl version) - you got a card which let you go to their web page and download exclusive tracks. Personally I think it's a great idea, I mean most live concert recordings will only be bought by dedicated fans and those people won't be abandoning hte album in favour of these extras (remember the Perl Jam concert series).
Despite all the people who hate Metallica for various reasons ('selling out' on their musical style, becoming mainstream, fighting Napster), aren't they taking steps in the right direction?
Isn't this what all the discussion has been about? They are actually changing their business model to deal with the times. Anyone who wants to pirate the album can go and find it, but they'll miss out on the value added stuff. Granted this isn't an earthshaking change, but I think it's a positive step.
The cynics and haters will gripe no matter what they do anyway.
I call upon all slashdotters who maintain opensource products to remove support for UNIXWARE in all future version. Explicitly disable the generation of your Makefiles for SCO machines, in protest and solidarity of SCO's actions.
Hah! I guess that is the problem when anybody claims "the largest", "the biggest", "the tallest" ... I mean, who has done a world wide search for anything like that? Maybe there is a largest model in China or India or even Patagonia for all that matters.
~~~Please pass the salt, I hate unsalted MD5s
Lars is a fucking twit. If the decline in the quality of Icca's music over the last 6+ years has not disgusted their fans hopefully the public display of idiocy by one of the band members has. I used to go to Metallica concerts and buy their albums, not since Lars opened his retarded mouth.
Speaking of Metallica and downloadable music, I
have to recommend you check out the spoof band
Beatallica. It is insanely funny. Beatallica
is a part time parody project by two good friends
of mine. It answers the questions: What would it
sound like if Metallica did Beatles covers. You
can download their MP3s at www.beatallica.org
The Bolachek Journals
I will never forgive Metallica for being such dumbasses over Napster a couple years ago. I have all their CD's
Then how am I going to use my OpenServer Boxen to crack open the computers of those pesky boys who make fun of my using SCO?
Wanker, indeed...
GCT: proof that Hungarians are crazy. I know. I live here. :) I think it was Edward Teller (??) who in a conference, when someone asked for proof of extraterrestials, jumped up and said: there is proof! They are called Hungarians.
Anyhow, their homepage is quite interesting. See the prototype plans!!:)
http://www.gctspace.com/
Download. Burn. Share. Kick Ass
...
erm,. shouldn't that be
Download, Burn, Share, Explode!
We always had fun on the fourth of july, blowing up bottles with liquid oxygen and nitrogen. I had a wart removed with the stuff... that was interesting. A lot cooler than using duct tape IMHO.
Black and grey are both shades of white.
..to qoute the article on that gravitycontroled spaceship: Rozsnyay said that rocketry has been around for over half a century. That technology is tested and proven, he said. "Gravity control on the other hand does not -- and could not -- even exist according to traditional science," he explained.
So, we have the leader/spokesman of the GCT claiming that they are working to develop a technology that is 'outside' of what science say is even remotly possible (and that in day and age where some scientist ponders on the possibility of timetravel). I don't think they should expect people to take them seriously, and I know that even if they showed a working model to me I'll have big trouble beliving it. The first thing I would do would be to look for the hidden piece of wire =)
In a way, it is as if they claim that they can build a Pertetum(sp?) Mobile - something every halfbaked highschoolstudent with a minimum of knowledge about the basic laws of physics knows is impossible. If someone finds a "loophole" in the laws of physics however... I guess we could have machines generating more power than they consumed, and we would probaly use them to controll gravity with.
Everything in the world is controlled by a small, evil group to which, unfortunately, no one you know belongs.
2) So that's what happened to Ars Digita. I walked by there the other day and wondered why it was now a community college. I still have warm feelings from the time I walked by, looked in the mirror and saw someone using a KDE app I'd written - first time that had happened.
3) What's with the nmap guy? He h4x0r's some kid's computer and publically posts screenshots after hitting on him over a Slashdot post (yeah, models post here all the time) but all SCO rates is a Makefile change?
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
The amateur rocketry scene is in danger because of idiots like Ashcroft and Sen Hatch. read this They think somehow that amateur rocketry clubs are breeding grounds for terrorists to make homemade SAMs and man-pads. The only problem w/ that ass-umption is that amateur rocketry societies and rules *exists* to make rocketry safer. If you want terrorist training in making rockets from metal, etc... you're probably going to go to Hamas, Al-qaida, etc.: you're not going to go to an amateur rocketry club meeting in podunk, ohio. Our nimrods at the doj, atf, etc. just want to outlaw a hobby because of the remote possibility that some lonely crazy is going to build rockets for some artillery strike or something. Let's outlaw guns, gasoline and matches while we're at it then. Shit, you can't even get rocket motors via UPS anymore, and you need a license to do anything. It sounds like raising the bar in an erosive way like 2nd ammendment, prohibition, abortion rights, etc. I wonder if any of the X-Prize peeps had the ATFE breathing down their necks.
The biggest trick the devil pulled was letting lawyers become politicians so they can write the laws.
is so bad, you can't give it away!!
If GCT actually does it, will the X-Prize folks accept their application after the fact?
From TFA:
"We will be happy to reconsider your application when provided with evidence of the feasibility of your proposed technology. We strongly encourage GCT to continue with its research and keep us posted as developments warrant our attention," the letter states.
Vino, gyno, and techno -Bruce Sterling
I wonder if their entry was some kind of Casimir-effect powered unit?
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
Metallica Tricks The Tricksters
When Madonna fans tried to download new tracks from her "American Life" album, they were greeting with a nasty verbal message from Madge herself. Metallica have taken a slightly different route. Those seeking new tracks from the bands "St. Anger" release on peer-to-peer networks have ended up with incomplete tracks at best, at worst - John Denver tunes. It's that kind of business savvy that helped Metallica debut at number one this week in Canada and the U.S.
On the Metallica issue, I recall a very funny series of cartoons mocking Metallica while they were driving napster into the ground. They're still funny today, and can be found here. I mean, with this new site, could they be any more hypocritical? You can find Ulrich's testimony before congress about shutting down napster here. As I recall, he came off as whiny.
/.tted to hell but Sounds Yummy.
On SCO, this is a neat new idea. If enough major OSS developers start a divestment strategy against SCO, if nothing else they'll be ostracized and dead sure to fall when their lawsuits start going downhill. These sort of tactics could make the OSS community a force to be reconed with in buisness as well as technical circles, and maintaining the goodwill of the OSS community more important.
On ice cream and liquid nitrogen, i have no idea what to say because the site is
Since when has this country used intellectual elite as a pejorative term?
I love choice... now I can not download Metallica songs as well as not buying their CDs!
Read reviews of shopping cart software
the contributor's page is especially great...
;)
evidently they've raised $251 !!!
and if you become a level 3 sponsor for only $1000 you will get a ride to space when... ahem... they like, figure out how to get you into space for a thousand dollars... or something
Then that would say something. Its not like UnixWare or OpenServer is really part of SCO's buisness plan for the future, but still, loosing support from the apache group would make it harder for them to pretend to care about their products.
Rather offtopic, but speaking of bands making fun of Metallica, a friend and I decided to make a joke death-metal band a while back because we were bored. Our first song is entitled ...And Then I Laughed and Had a Beer". I did the vocals, my friend did all the guitar work, and the drums are a drum machine program.
Project Steve
looks like the guys forgot to mix the concoction while adding Chemical X... err... i mean liquid nitrogen :P
Did you know that "FTW" ("for the win") is a direct translation of "Sieg Heil"?
Laughed in a bad way, at Michal Yoon:
Apache, yeah. But the Linux business as an exemplar of fiscal prudence?
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
how about slashdotting these ones, too: http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&ie=ISO-8859-1&q =ice+cream+liquid+nitrogen&btnG=Google+Search
The closest thing to this that even remotely has a chance of working is a Laithwaite style "Rock Crusher" or GIT "Gyroscopic Inertial Propulsion." Unfortunately this hypothetical torque to thrust loophole doesn't seem to work after so many failed attempts to make one. Bummer.
The best bet is an ion drive "relativity rocket" where you fire something like a lead atom out of a barrel at the speed of light. Theroetically it takes infinite force to accelerate a particle to the speed of light, so you would get an equal an opposite infinite reaction force. Even in this case you always need a propellant. This is the how to theoretically maximize your thrust produced per mass consumed. You'd need one heck of a particle accelerator, and some humongous nuclear powerplant to run it. Getting all this put together in orbit is beyond our means right now, we can't even build anything like this on the surface yet.
Clickety Click
background reading on the subject can be found here, and here, and pretty much everywhere else google knows about.
if this kind of "boycott" did any good, slashdot would be using PNGs by now, wouldn't they? *cough* in this case, it's only a good idea if the linux community can come up with absolute, solid, will-hold-up-in-court proof that SCO is talking out of their collective asses about this.
and even then, who cares? SCO's unix products blow chunks anyway. SCO is irrelevant. they're being petty. why descend to their level?
I was a big fan of theirs before the Napster/Congress debacle. From that day on, without exception, I have never listened to a single song of theirs when I had control of the choice of music/station. Each time their music comes on I note the station, switch to another, and make it a priority to avoid that station for the rest of the day.
Some people tell me that it is a total waste of time and makes no difference whatsoever. To that I say, if that is true then the entire premise and theory of the whole advertising industry is a complete lie. If every person who feel this way does their part it can and will make a difference
(Stolen sig) Remember: it's a "Microsoft virus", not an "email virus", a "Microsoft worm", not a "computer worm
I am not "punishing" SCO users, just refraining from spending my free time supporting a platform whose vendor has taken Linux hostage as part of their scorched-earth greenmail campaign. Why should I? Also note that I have not (as of now) intentionally broken Nmap on that platform. I just won't spend my time providing free support. Nmap is Open Source, so SCO users can support/maintain it themselves if they care enough.
Like many Slashdot readers, I have been following the SCO updates, their press releases, SEC filings such as their latest 10Q, etc. The more I read, the more absurd their case seems. Yet despite the utter lack of evidence from SCO and their increasing signs of desperation, Wall Street is still believes in them(!). Why? Now I realize the market isn't always rational, and certainly has no conscience. But the disconnect is still surprising. Many people obviously still believe SCO has a case. For this reason, I believe continued publicity and research is called for. Removing Nmap support for SCO systems is just one of my tiny efforts in this area.
-Fyodor
Concerned about your network security? Try the free Nmap Security Scanner
Have you actually heard the new Metallica album??
It should be
Burn (literally) then Kick whats left.
Time to retire.
As big and as rich as they are, they need their fan base back for the same reason they went after Napster: THE CASH. I mean someone's gotta pay for James's rehab.
Yesterday I was torrenting away trying to get QNX for a few hours straight, at unbelievably slow rates. But NOW you slashdot it so I can get faster. Oh, THANKS. Generally it's a good thing to download something before it gets /.'ed, but in this case it's better after... *sigh* :)
~pi
Right. All OSS projects should stop supporting SCO. Because we all know that corporations pay big bucks for UnixWare so that they can run OpenOffice and GNUCash on it.
It's the ISVs that can really hurt SCO, because UW is usually on their bottom tier of supported OSes. One glance in the wrong direction and the ISVs start singing Hello, Solaris. I know for a fact that in at least one case, Novell PAID an ISV for the port of their product to UW and in another, no amount of money would get the vendor to port any of their products to UW.
Unfortunately, ISVs whose bread and butter is proprietary intellectual property are not likely to be all that sympathetic to a boycott of someone who has a chance to set a legal precedent that could help them all in the long run.
Apparently joshamania didn't read this comment about the Solar System model in Sweden that's 300 kilometers long. That's much larger than this one in Peoria that's 64 kilometers long.
All those 1950's movies with people tooling around in flying saucers would have been more accurate than anything produced in the last 30 years.
OMG I lauhged so hard, and I think I would suffer a brain annurism from the irony of seeing one these tooling around during a re-run of "the day the earth stood still"
If you don't vote, you don't matter, so don't waste your time telling me your opinion
SCO operating systems are no longer supported due to their recent (and absurd) attacks against Linux and IBM
Well, that is predicated on the idea that SCO actually has a UNIX business to hurt. It seems to me that they don't really have much of a product anymore.
But assuming they do actually still ship their own version of UNIX enough to make them money, nmap may not make such a big difference. But if projects like Apache, gcc, and others remove SCO support, that might start hurting SCO. Of course, they'd be free to maintain their own ports and incorporate their own bug fixes, but that is going to cost.
I don't think that claims that the Canopy Group is not behind this one will not hold up now.
Now my fellow "crunchies", (the insulting name M$ friendly Forbes gives us), for the million dollar question, where does this money trail lead? I'll bet it doesn't stop at the Canopy.
That this album is not in any way copy protected (at least as far as I can tell... cdparanoia had no problems ripping it). They seem to have decided to fight the file trading networks by putting out the Vault and also including a DVD of them rehearsing the songs (and the DVD's mix seems to be better quality than the CD...), for the price of a standard CD. I've talked to some people who say that they bough the CD for the DVD and the Vault.
In it's second week (first full) and has now sold approximately 800,000 copies (350,000 of which were in the second week). Hopefully the record industry gets the message that the way to survive in the post-Napster world is not by suing the bejeezus out of people but by simply offering more value than can easily be duplicated by the P2P services. I mean, St. Anger has about 7 hours of content (75 minute CD, 75 minute DVD, over 3 hours (soon to grow) of concert MP3s) for (if you bought at Target or Best Buy) $10.
Some have posted that other artists have done this, but none of them are of the stature in the industry of a band like Metallica. By demonstrating that you can do this and succeed with an album that was certified platinum before a single CD (apart from Amazon pre-orders) was sold, the RIAA has to be taking notice; Metallica has proven that if you deliver more bang for the buck, people will buy it regardless of how much free downloading there is.
Now the OSS community is really scared, I'm sure. Besides, you might want to think next time before saying silly things: there is a flaw in your logic. You see, if SCO would succeed, there would be no OSS product to evaluate in the first place (no OSS product in a GPL sense). pfffffffft.
Mass and Energy are the same thing.
We don't need to move masses faster than c to find out if gravity propagates at c.. we only need to track the movement of some masses, and see how fast the change in the gravitational field propagates.
That's like saying we can't measure the speed of sound because we can't move something faseter than sound.. we knew how fast sound was long before. I believe this has been experimentally observed, at least to some degree.
According to relativity, a spinning top has a larger gravitational effect than a stationary one.
The liquid nitrogen ice cream was indeed made in response to the story. The guy on the first picture on the page read the story and decided to do it, and they made the ice cream later in the night.
Join the NFSNET. Our prime goal is making little numbers out of big ones. http://www.nfsnet.org/
It is nice to see a prominent member of the security community (no, I'm not sucking up) respond in this way. I hope that many other developers will respond in kind. I suspect that wall street would loose faith in SCO if most of the commonly used networking tools were not supported on SCO products
"Weapons should be hardy rather than decorative" - Miyamoto Musashi
I think that goes for OS's too
is not a number, and no amount of energy can accelerate a lead atom to "infinite" velocity.
When we say it takes an infinite amount of power, what we mean is there is no such amount of energy that can give the desired result. We can get ever closer, but never there.
What you said is just a fancy way of saying "If we had the ability to amke any amount of energy we wanted, we could make anything go really fast"
There is no such thing as an "infinite force". Infinity is not a number.
I never have been a big Metalica fan, but I did enjoy their music. Their liberal policy on music was a selling point for me back in the 20th century. Atleast, a band that says it's ok to make a copy for a friend. Good for my friend, who wants to know if it's worth buying a real copy, good for Metalica, cause their name gets spread out.
But because Metalica said quite specificly in the year 2000 that they didn't want their music propigated via MP3, I complied FULLY. I will never make a copy for a friend, will never share one of their mp3 files, and in fact got rid of the two CDs of them I owned.
My moderate like for their music doesn't compair for my distaste of their politics. I respect that they are peformers who's material they have a say in how it's distributed, and that's just peachy. Everything else I own with a few exceptions are by artists who are more tolerant of music trading, basicly operating under the assumption that while it is piracy, the gain in word of mouth advertising is far too valuable to interfear with.
Bands like Metalica clearly disagreed with that, which is their right. As a direct result, and through no fault of my own, there is a generation of kids who do say, "Metali-who?". Those kids who know the name respond with, "Oh yea, those are the guys who killed Napster".
Metalica made a choice, they took a stand for what they believe in. I can respect that. But they have to live with it too. A band's success or failure at one time depended wether or not it got airplay, today netplay is a deciding factor. Metalica didn't want net play, no diffrent if they said they didn't want their material played on the radio in the 20th century. This is exactly what they fought for and they sure got it.
There is no sanctuary. There is no sanctuary. SHUT UP! There is no shut up. There is no shut up.
Plus while the first post only claimed (correctly) that it was North America's largest model, the second post claimed it's the World's largest, which as many other posters have pointed out, is wrong.
Yeah. I mean, no SCO customer would notice if GCC or Apache or perl suddenly stopped building on their systems. Yeah, those stupid free software jerks. Whenever have they done anything useful?
I spent three weeks in Brazil back in late 1996/early 1997. The ice cream experience was one of the unexpected highlights. It was good ice cream, for one thing... but the other thing was the way it was served: like a per-lb salad bar in the US. So you'd have 30-50 some odd flavors, plus all the topings, and you got charged some very reasonable amount per kilo. You could get an absolutely rockin' sundae for under 3 Reais (which was almost exactly $3 at the time).
Some enterprising soul oughta do the same here...
Tweet, tweet.
..of course that gravity propagates slower than c.
That Jesus Christ guy is getting some terrible lag... it took him 3 days to respawn! -NJ CoolBreeze
X prize consortium really should allow the gravity guys in to the competition. They need a smidgen of lightening up on the subject. Are the guys really trying, are they degreed credible researchers? Fringe but credible? If so, what does it matter, it will either work or not work, they don't get any money unless it works. And reality is, relying on chemical rockets will doom humans to very near space only. They can be very refined, they are robust and work, but after all is said and done, it's still ancient technology. An entirely brand new way of looking at energy in general and travel is needed, clean slate, a white room approach. These X-guys guys sound like they would have told a young Tesla to STFU and go away.
Maybe that's why they call some other advanced breaktrough in other technology a "quantum leap".
(page title: Ice Cream Parlor -196C LLC)
Do not try to do this at home, ok?
How to make ice cream in 5 minutes.
"Marco, I want some ice cream"
Lucas going to buy the ingredients.
The X ingredient (hahaha, nitrogen)
Fill it up, mister!
Safety gear
Making the ice cream.
Now, it only needs to be frozen... hahaha
hehehe...
More nitrogen.
"Keep stirring, Dili."
There's smoke coming out. It's cold.
Done. One minute later it is ready.
Let's taste it...
Hummmm....
Done. It's good. You can eat it now!
Repeat: do not try to do this at home.
Gee, I *really* need to find something better to do when idle....
GCT Space Seems to be missing a phase 3.
Maybe the underpants gnomes are behind this.
"Never trust a computer you can't throw." -- The Mac
> I call upon all slashdotters who maintain opensource products to remove support for UNIXWARE in all future version.?
For what it is worth, I thought refusing Nmap support for SCO
products might generate a firestorm of flames from angry users. In
fact, the opposite has happened! Obviously Linux/AIX users praised
the move, but even the occasional SCO users seemed pleased. The one
or two complaints were more than offset by pleasant emails like this
one that just came in (name removed for his privacy):
Date: Wed, 18 Jun 2003 17:41:07 -0700
To: <fyodor@insecure.org>
Subject: I'm the one user affected by a lack of SCO support and i'm happy
I'll be sure to report with great delight of your choice to no longer
support UnixWare to the one company I do contract work. The choice to use
SCO isn't mine, it's simply what Mas90 runs on, and in the past has been
adquate for the job. It's my hope others follow your example so I can
report to management that useful applications will no longer be supported
for this overpriced platform.
I appricate your lack of support for the SCO platform and look forward to
future unsupported products.
With great respect...
-- End email paste
Anyway, I thought this datapoint might be useful to people considering
such a move.
-Fyodor
Concerned about your network security? Try the free Nmap Security Scanner
Heck, it doesn't even take that. I worked for a company using HP-UX who were rather pissed off when the vendor of one of their business-critical applications decided not to develop for HP-UX anymore. The vendor got most of their money from clients using NT, and didn't think they could justify developing for HP-UX anymore.
SCO is an even smaller platform. I'm sure they've had lots of similar experiences where closed-source software companies stopped developing for the platform.
"Weapons should be hardy rather than decorative" - Miyamoto Musashi
I think that goes for OS's too
Phase I: Unmanned prototype
Phase II: Manned prototype
Phase IV: Space tourism
Seems familiar?
The rest of it look fishy too.
Analogies don't equal equalities, they are merely somewhat analogous.
FranÃois Pérusse here in Québec did it first about a year ago when he released "L'album pirate" (Pirate's record" or something...). It's not a standard music CD, it's rather a collection of jokes he created that plays on radio. It was the most pirated french material here in Québec (6 albums total I think).
So, to encourage sales, he added a special password, different for each CD, that allows access to his site to download access additionnal content online, updated every few weeks. And guess what? It worked marvels.
Well, I stopped buying and downloading their music the day the Napster lawsuit was announced.
:-)
So it's not like it matters they've come to this point. The only people Metallica is hurting are their own fans.
*shrug*
I always preferred this interview
If he explores all forms and substances Straight homeward to their symbol-essences; He shall not die.
No; Metallica sicced their lawyers on Napster and stormed into their offices with 60,000 printed pages of names of fans they wanted kicked off Napster. When Napster did that, they brought in another 60,000 pages worth, and when Napster did that, and blocked all their songs, they continued their high-profile whining and lawsuit, the latter of which turned into basically an orgy of extortion from the rapidly sinking company. All this while Metallica's record sales were still going up. There is a huge difference between that kind of behavior and Metallica "asking" their fans not to share their music.
The article actually says "It's that kind of business savvy that helped Metallica debut at number one".... Business savvy? Are they kidding? Replacing their songs with John Denver songs as an immature prank aimed at fans is considered "business savvy"???
Note also that Canopy Group owns part of Troll Tech. Just how secure are those Qt licenses?
He that breaks a thing to find out what it is has left the path of wisdom.
-- J.R.R. Tolkien
Did anybody notice that in this article provided by a reader in a comment it mentions that the parent company that owns SCO also owns trolltech! What gives!? Qt's parent is brothers with SCO?
What's this 'we' stuff. Someone else decided decades ago that when someone is making something, they get to decide when to release it into the wild.
First, thanks for the reply. Second, I haven't read those archives...but I will. Thanks.
I say, if they can meet the challenge, I say "have at thee"... If they can't, *THEN* laugh at them... when they surprise the hell out of you by actually doing it, you'll be the one crying. Just cause you think its impossible, doesn't mean it can't be done.
meh
Real world impact is not needed. If a lot of projects picks up on this trend the main street press will pick it up and hurt SCO.
If nothing else their stock price might take a dive.
Help fight continental drift.
Lars and the gang have nothing against file sharing or bootlegging. They just want to be the ones to decide what material they own is shared freely. This whole 'Lars is a hypocrite because he went after Napster but now advocates sharing because of backlash' bit is rediculous. The bottom line is, someone stole material from the studio that didn't belong to them and it got out. That's technology for ya. Although I agree that they went about it the wrong way(Should have sued the intern who leaked the original dat source instead of Napster), they had every right to protect their material legally.
There is a big difference between ripping an album and sharing it online and stealing source material from the studio and releasing it. And whomever took the material crossed that line.
"People should be allowed to keep midgets as pets."
- Gov. Jesse Ventura
* Load
* Garage Inc.
* And Justice for All
* Black (also called Metallica)
And I would like to confess that before this inncident a little while ago (or at least before I heard of it) I was a big Metalica fan who was capible of reciting the lyrics to most Metalica songs, biographising all of the members (except for that wanker who left for Megadeath, I can't even remember his name), but more importantly, who was capible of spending rediculous sums of money on albums, merchandise and concert tickets.
Now I am over Metalica, I am not boycotting them or anything, I just don't like them much anymore, partly because of that napster shit and partly because they havn't done anything as cool as one since the eighties, that song by itself was able to keep Metalica in my good books even through the sissieness of Load and Re-Load, but now it is fifteen years old and they are long overdue for something that cool again.
I love the whole classical guitar intro with the memorable riff and the first quiet but dark verses, and then kirk hammet GOES FUCKING OFF!!!! with those FUCKING INSANE guitar work!!! FUCK YEAH!!!
When Argumentum ad Hominem falls short, try Argumentum ad Matrem
When I was at Burning Man, two years ago, our neighbors made some chocolate ice cream with liquid nitrogen. It was really delicious, and done in 30 seconds!
A translation of the "sorveteria" guys. I guess when I finish it their server will have melted down with /. .
Title: Sorveteria -196C LTDA
Ice Cream Shop -320F Inc
(Actually, LTDA is "limitada", a limited liability company).
0 - Nao tente isso em casa ok? Como fazer um sorvete em 5 minutos.
Don't try this at home, ok? How to make ice cream in 5 minutes.
1 - "Marco, quero sorvete".
"Marco, I want ice cream".
2 - Lucas indo comprar ingredientes.
Lucas going to buy ingredients.
3 - O ingrediente X (hohohoh, nitrogenio)
The ingredient X (hohohoh, nitrogen)
4 - "Completa ai, tio!"
"Fill it up, man!"
5 - Equipamento de seguranca.
Safety gear.
6 - Fazendo a massa...
Making the mass.
I'm not sure if English "mass" have the same meaning as Portuguese "massa", but you can look at the picture and guess what it is.
7 - Pronto, agora sà falta congelar hohoho..
Done, now we only have to freeze it hohoho...
8 - "heheheh"
9 - Mais nitrogenio...
More nitrogen...
10 - "Vai mechendo, Dili."
"Keep moving it, Dili."
(btw, it should be "mexendo" not "mechendo")
11 - Sai fumaÃa. Ã gelado.
Smoke goes out. It's cold.
12 - Pronto. 1 minuto depois ta pronto.
Done. 1 minute later it's done.
(This is a pun with a famous Brazilian lamen jingle).
13 - Vamos provar...
Let's try it...
14 - "Hummmm"
"Hmmmmm"
15 - "Pronto, tà bom, podem comer!"
"It's done, it's good, you may eat!"
16 - Repito: nao tente isso em casa.
I repeat: don't try this at home.
Prescriptive grammar:linguistics
A custom code from Lars? Nuts, that would be like loading up a copy of XP or something. I can hear the development team conversing with Bill Gates, "Download, Burn, Share ... we don't care it's going to vanish like so many radio tunes. Our exclusive code will render all the major P2P inop! The user will be left with a crapy AM radio quality thingy that will vanish. Bwa-ha-ha-ha-ha!"
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Metallica used to be one of the bands (like the Dead, Phish, Allman Brothers, Pearl Jam, Flaming Lips, Throwing Muses, etc.) that allowed open taping at their shows, and free (non-commercial) trading of the tapes. The only thing that they asked was that people NOT trade their official releases.
Note this part from the interview:
Lars: "Well, 1st of all, you have to remember that you're talking to somebody who advocates bootlegging, who has alwyas been pro-bootlegging. We have always let fans tape our shows, we've always had a thing for bootlegging live materials, for special appearances, for that type of stuff. Knock yourselves out, bootleg the fuck out of it, we don't give."
The people who try to paint Metallica as the posterboys of the anti-music-trading movement are just full of it. Metallica was (and probably still is) far more generous with their music than probably 99% of the bands that these Metallica-haters DO like. This is not like Disney, who wants you to pay for humming the theme to one of their movies in the bath. This is a band that was already giving away most of their music for free!
They put very few restrictions on their music. Speaking as free software developer who puts very few restrictions on his software, I feel a lot of sympathy for the band, and I feel about as much sympathy for the napster leeches as I would for a company that was found to be violating the GPL.
Rip off Disney, rip off Microsoft, I won't blink an eye. But when you start ripping off the people who are already giving it away free, that's when I start to get upset.
MeanMF said:
Basically what the Nmap people are showing me is that if I implement an OSS product in my company, I have to worry about the developers dropping support for the platform I'm running it on if they have a personal grudge against the company that makes it. I'll be sure to take that into account next time I'm evaluating software.
Suppose a closed-source application company has a "Business Alliance" with a platform vendor; i.e. they get money upfront from the platform vendor to develop applications for that platform. If the vendor gets upset with the application company and the business alliance ends, they may not write for that platform anymore. This is no surprise.
This is true, but you are missing the whole point of OSS! Even if the developers of these OSS projects drop support for SCO, the apps themselves are still open source! I.e. Someone else can pick up the slack and maintain a SCO port - you can't do that with closed source software!!
As an example - Microsoft dropped support for Windows OS on the Alpha long ago. Sucks to be you if you're running Windows NT on Alpha. RedHat also dropped support for Alpha long ago. Doesn't suck to be me because I can download Mozilla 1.4b2, gnome 2.x, and any of the latest and greatest from the OSS world and build it myself! I.e. I can pick up the slack and still have a modern, up to date system! You can't do that with closed source.
Just my 2 cents.
I'd rather be a conservative nutjob than a liberal with no nuts and no job.
Metallica's last plan (letting people freely tape their shows, and trade the tapes, and even creating special "taper sections" so people could set up fancy rigs for taping without interfering with the main crowd) was done earlier (with great success) by the Grateful Dead. Doesn't mean Metallica weren't awfully nice guys for allowing it.
/. crowd, who wants to yell and scream about how those bastards tried to protect that last little fraction of their own creation. ("How unfair! Only giving away most of their music! We'd better boycott 'em!")
Of course, the fact that this band was already giving away 99.9% of the music they created doesn't matter to the
Seriously. GCT should get togeather with Clonaid and work with Hollywood or something on the next SciFi movie. I'm sorry if you see this as flamebait. But, if it's too good to be true then it prolly is.
Life is not for the lazy.
They tried not to get stolen from!
Didn't even try very hard, since they encouraged concert taping and tape trading! "Those bastards only gave away most of their music, not all of it! String 'em up!"
> Many people obviously still believe SCO has a case.
It's not that investors necessarily believe SCO has a case, it's that they believe SCO's share price will continue to go up. Its share price will most certainly go back down (a lot). The name of the game is dumping it before that happens.Their price has risen up to 1200% in the last year (that's *twelve hundred* percent). Case or no case, that's a nice return.
Not many, actually. Those customers don't build those tools, they use the versions of Apache and Perl that SCO provides with the OS. Their home-grown applications are almost always built with the compiler SCO sells, not GCC. One throat to choke, and all that.
Claimer: I worked on UnixWare for USL and Novell from 1993 to 1996, so I know something of the engineering and marketing decisions behind it.
The point of all this is that there is a small set of large businesses who buy UnixWare in quantity. They buy it for specialized applications, like retail point-of-sale. With a few notable exceptions like Apache, they COULDN'T CARE LESS about the entire corpus of OSS. They only care if their application works, wherever and whenever it's installed.
Sure, there are organizations who install large quantities of Linux systems (think TiVo), but those sets of people don't intersect very much with the UnixWare customer base. The people basing their products on Linux and the GNU toolchain obviously have a vested interest in what the OSS community is doing, and it's in their best interests to keep a good relationship with them.
By ceasing to distribute Linux, SCO no longer has that burden, so I stand by my original point. What the OSS community thinks about whether their products should be supported on UW isn't going to keep Darl awake at night.
'SCO operating systems are no longer supported due to their recent (and absurd) attacks against Linux and IBM. Bug reports relating to UnixWare will be ignored, or possibly even laughed at derisively. Note that I have no reason to believe anyone has ever used Nmap on SCO systems. Unixware sucks.'"
So on European mirrors, SCO has the right to add it's reply in the changelog, right?
did anyone even look at that ice cream page? it's freakin' hilarious! The shit they ended up with looks nasty as hell, but the best part is the quote from one of the captions: "hohohoh, nitrogenio!"
:-)
I found my new sig today
Today's fortune on the bottom of the page:
Unix will self-destruct in five seconds... 4... 3... 2... 1...
Oh, the irony!
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
I agree with you. I was not the author of the AC comments above, and I do not completely agree with them. However...
I was at the (excellent) YAPC::NA in St. Louis in 2002, and it was pretty clear to me then that the grant-funded work had not turned out as well as it might have. I am a long-time fan of Damian Conway's, and I was worshipfully grateful that Larry Wall signed my *old* 1st edition Camel Book. But it was at this conference that I first had the very uneasy feeling that Perl6 would never really "happen". Either it would not be released, or, if it were released, it might not be as relevant as expected. It's now a year later, and therefore even more likely that Perl6 won't "happen". I'm pretty sad about this.
I was very happy to donate money to the grant fund (not a lot of money, but more than millions of others), and I was hoping that it would become a viable model for free software development in general. Unfortunately, since the Perl grants were not viewed as a big success, I think people will be more cautious next time. That can't be the right result, however well or poorly you think the money was spent. And I do wish that the results of the grant program had done more to advance the cause of Perl6, since it might have been an interesting language. Sigh...
Babar
The Sorveteria [ice cream maker] Slashdot story is an example of Brazilians being Brazilian. If it looks like fun, Brazilians will try it.
Here is a translation:
Don't try this at home, okay?
How to make ice cream in 5 minutes.
"Marco, I want ice cream."
Lucas going to buy ingredients.
The ingredient X. Ho ho ho, nitrogen. [In Portuguese, it rhymes.]
"Fill it up, uncle!" [They don't know the name of the man selling liquid nitrogen, so they call him uncle.]
Security Equipment. [The Brazilians obviously work in a laboratory, because they have all the necessary gear.]
Making the mixture...
Ready, now we only lack the freezing, ho ho ho.
"heh heh heh"
More nitrogen... [In this frame we see that they are at home, and several people are watching and waiting.]
"Mix it, Dili."
Smoke comes out. It is frozen.
Ready. 1 minute after, it is ready.
We will try...
"Hmmmmmmm"
"Ready, it is good, we are able to eat!"
Repeated: Don't try this at home. [Unless you work in a laboratory, and have a lot of experience with liquid nitrogen.]
> Unfortunately, since the Perl grants were not viewed as a big success
:-)
Hey, I got to hear Damian's Mars-Bar Quantum talk. That was enough of a success for me.
> even more likely that Perl6 won't "happen"
I guess my feelings (not based on any detailed knowledge of Perl6) are that 1) if you want to do something big, you have to overcome big things 2) stumbling blocks at one stage in a process can lead to immense paradigm changes that wouldn't have been achievable without the stumbling blocks 3) regardless of whether Perl6 as Perl6 "happens" the process of attempting it has got to be firing millions of neurons in the brains of some very smart, hard-working, generous people and the results of all that will find their way back into the community one way or another.
"The Maine model is not the largest, and Peoria, IL, my hometown, has had the largest model for many years now, the Pluto model (in Kewanee, IL) being over 60 miles away from the sun model."
***
Maybe 60 **km**, but *not* 60 miles.
***
Both the Lakeview IL model and the Maine model have SunPluto distances of about 40 miles. (64km).
Lakeview Jupiter: 45" diameter
Maine Jupiter: 61.4" diameter
Lakeview Scale: 1:140,000,000
Maine Scale: 1:93,000,000
Lakeview Earth: 4" diameter
Maine Earth: 5.5" diameter
Go Maine!
Go Illinois!
Go Sweden!
St. Anger quality aside (it's the most unpolished stuff I've ever heard, enjoyable nonetheless). they include a DVD of their rehearsals and the code for the site, which I expect will grow.
We might want information to be free, but I don't think every artist has reached that pinnacle of Grateful Deadness yet.
However, I think it was a good response to the lawsuit that will force the RIAA to pay for price fixing.
Give us something worth the price.
I'd say Metallica did just that.
The message on the other side of this sig is false.
Dude...look at the definition again...
Why should anybody make it easy for these jerks either? Hey if you want "real UNIX" then some BSD variant should meet your needs. People who use SC0 are just "technologically challenged" and they think that they will get this great support. SC0 blows, think UNIX about fifteen years ago. Yep the ancient source code, thats about what you get.
If you run SC0 and you want to use GNU software, then you should run GNU, not SC0.
Obviously GNU utilities could never be superior to professionally developed software in a million years right?
Apache... bah! The SCOHelp http server is vastly superior in every way. I'm sure all those SCO people who run Apache just do it because Apache is the more trendier of the two.
Clickety Click
Sorry, first off I screwed this up:
Run DMC being the first rappers to cross over to rap
Obviously, the second "rap" should be "rock".
Secondly, I left out the Beastie Boys (mental block is all that is) who grew up in the same neighborhood as Anthrax and they all went to each other's shows. The Beastie Boys are the less-commercial fathers of this branch of metal, less commercial than the Aerosmith/RunDMC bullshit that came out, but much more likely to be the father of the Limp Bizkit line than Aerosmith.
Like what I said? You might like my music
Sorry if this is redudant, but I actually searched the page @Flat/-1 before posting, to see if anyone else had already pointed this out...
s you "Last-Modified: Tue, 17 Jun 2003 18:55:50 GMT"
timothy said...
I can't tell from the page when exactly this was made. Whether it was truly in response to Gray's recipe or not, this site certainly provides more amusing visual aids.
Well, it's not exactly proof, but
$ HEAD http://gambiarra.conectway.com.br/svt/1.jpg
tell
Which is about 12 hours (assuming accurate clocks, heh) after the article about making Liquid N2 Sorvete was posted on slashdot. Coincidence?
*shrug*
Damn quick turn-around time, from planning an experiment, conducting it, analyzing the results, and then publishing their (photo)graphs on the web. If they were slashdot-inspired, then them Brazilian boys are certainly men of action, and I applaud their fine work.
Damn, ice cream sounds good now.
E)
I have no special gift, I am only passionately curious. --Albert Einstein
Maybe 60 **km**, but *not* 60 miles.
Why do you say this? How far is it then, wherley?
Mapquest says it's 49.84 miles between Kewanee and Peoria so it sounds like it'd have to be more than 40km (24.8 miles). But I'm not making any statements about how far it really is between the two planetoids--I'll let someone else find that out and inform us all. And then we'll all believe it, because we read it on slashdot!
I have no special gift, I am only passionately curious. --Albert Einstein
...after they released 3 albums of Country and Western of their own and have just started doing Heavy Metal again.
Stick Men
i can't believe this is getting modded down as flamebait. you're right on with this. most companies dont "get" open source, and generally don't use any of these tools. i worked at a pure sun-netscape shop (cc, netscape messenger server, iplanet, the works) everything), and even suggesting the installation of gcc was looked down upon. so let's say i finally convince them to let me use apache for something. and then apache decides to drop support for our platform (sparc64) for political reasons (sun does something immoral or scandalous, for instance). you think they'd ever let me install _anything_ from the bsd / gnu world again?
--BlueLines "The cost of living hasn't affected it's popularity." -anonymous
are said to have been constructed in relation to planet positions and stellar geometry.
And, in effect, if you see at the way pyramids are spred in the desert, you can see a resemblance with a constellation...
So, maybe your hunch was closer to the target than you think...8)
It takes 40+ muscles to frown, but only four to extend your arm and bitchslap the motherfucker
The pictures and commentary about the attempt to make ice-cream with liquid nitrogen looks like it has come straight out of a segment on 'Channel 9' from the Fast Show.
Boutros-Boutros Ghali.
It means, "Finger Arts", it's about a bunch of people that thought it meant "Digital Arts".
sigh.
-pyrrho
...When's his new album coming out?
Truth isn't Truth - Guliani
The main effects of this will simply be to waste developers' time removing SCO support. And if this business gets cleared up, it'll waste even more reinstating it.
In short, isn't this about as impractical, ill-thought-out, short-sighted, and above all immature as adding "Freedom" to the title?
Ceterum censeo subscriptionem esse delendam.
These guys attacked an open source newsreader project. A couple of years ago, the PAN developers incorporated an mp3 decoder into their NNTP client. For some reason, Metallica felt compelled to sue them over this. Clueless f****. The most priceless courtroom moment came when the plaintiff attorney asked "I wonder how the defendants would like it if someone was giving away their work?" The court seemed a little baffled at the laughter that ensued.
/. crowd, who wants to yell and scream about how those bastards tried to protect that last little fraction of their own creation. ("How unfair! Only giving away most of their music! We'd better boycott 'em!")
I could almost understand their attacking Napster. But a newsreader? Sorry but:
Of course, the fact that this band was already giving away 99.9% of the music they created doesn't matter to the
does not suffice to rehabilitate these bungholes. A newsreader? An f****n' newsreader? BTW, the judge was clueless too. The PAN guys had to remove the inline mp3 feature. It still downloads mp3s just fine. Idiots. Lars still needs to be soundly beaten with a clueclub.
I wager that it would hurt if all of the sudden Unixware couldn't run Apache, Samba, Netatalk, PHP, Perl, .... etc. Even on proprietary Unices, opensource adds a lot of value. If a large swath of FOSS software suddenly won't run on SCO without a lot of unsupported rehabilitation then that will go a long way towards monkeywrenching their plans. I wouldn't be terribly opposed to doing Solaris the same way if SUN gets any louder trying to take advantage of this situation. A turning point has been reached. Commercial Unix needs FOSS more than FOSS needs it. I don't think it is in the least immature or inappropriate to give them a little reminder.
I'm sorry, but the Peoria model of the solar system doesn't count. The Sun and possibly Mecury (it's hard to tell from the photo) are not truly modeled. The sun is just a partial yellow disc painted on a building and Mecury might be just a plaque. The winner should have to be a 3D, true to scale, physical model. It is cool that they include the Asteroid Belt, though.
I'm a recovery workaholic, but doing well... haven't worked a day in over a year! I'm so proud.
Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced. - Geek's corollary to Clarke's law
I'm sure this "value added" material won't show up on Kazaa...right?
(check out the route on mapquest, nice curving path, not a straight line.)
why do i say this?
cuz lakeview website says it themselves! look at the link i had again and notice in the " SCALE DISTANCE
FROM LAKEVIEW" entry for Pluto the words "64 km (40 miles)"
"Fazendo a massa"
massa is something like 'dough/batter'. putting a "mo na massa" is putting a hand in the dough. Can be generlized to 'mix' or whatever you're mixing/making.
And my nick (galego) means 'honkey' (more or less) in Brazilian Portuguese ... in case you were curious.
Que Deus te de em dobro o que me desejas
[May God give you double that which you wish for me]
When I lived in Brazil ('92-'94), we would often buy picol (popscicle ... sp?) from the street vendors. If you bought one with friends in the vicinity, you offered them a bite before eating it yourself. Of course, you didn't offer one a bite without offering anyone else there a bite. Often times, your popscicle would have only one bite left once it got back to you.
Free as in 'free ice cream' (for your friends at least =)
Que Deus te de em dobro o que me desejas
[May God give you double that which you wish for me]
I hope their [former] fans have a long memory. I know I do.
Ah. Curved path, of course. I didn't even bother to look at the diagram.
Not one of my brightest moments, certainly.
E)
I have no special gift, I am only passionately curious. --Albert Einstein
"Wisconson geeks, take note of your Senators actions!"
Those of us who live in Wisconsin will also take note of your inability to spell the name of our state correctly.All circuits busy.
I don't personally feel they came off as "whiny" to me they came off as "greedy" which is way worse.
We're talking about a band who has made millions and millions of dollars over the years. I bought several of their albums and t-shirts etc back in the day however now I'm not so inclined to hand them any more of my "hard earned" money.
The media should have kept their mouths shut about the file trading online - I feel that all the hype about it is what really made it popular in the first place. Metallica jumped right in there and started pointing out THEIR OWN FANS to try and get some control over their material - for what reason? Control over their music that's already been pirated? The stuff that got leaked from the studio is their own problem - nothing to do with the people who were fingered out on napster by them. If they were really pro-bootleg they wouldn't have made the fuss that they did about it. When you make music and it is popular it is going to be hard to control - fact of life boys. I guess what I'm getting at is they killed their image as hardcore by complaining in their versace suits to the courts and this made me not want to pay them for their work anymore. They've made enough money to easily set themselves up for generations to come and going out of their way to kick the people who set them up like this is just plain wrong. This new change in their business model is like hitting a tree with a car and driving away like it never happened - well it did and I know many haven't forgotten. I think they've jumped the shark. RIP Metallica.
---------------------
The phone, the bane of my existance, rings. "Hello, Computer Room" I say, being helpful - BOFH
Tell me: you don't have the decency to sign you name here, do you? Didn't think so.
But that was too easy. Here's a more complete answer to your question.
Have I been following the Perl6 development process closely? Not really, since it depends on high-volume mailing lists whose weekly summaries themselves are kinda inside. But what I do know is this:
The Perl RFCs were done by Fall 2000, and since then we've had 6 Apocalypses (3 in 2001, 2 in 2002, only 1 so far in 2003), one half-finished VM (whose FAQ still has an annoying HTML error that I reported weeks ago), some perl design documents, and now, to my utter amazement, a *book* by O'Reilly due anytime now. In other word, over 3 years of effort, and more that you can read than you can run. Again, I'm a casual observer, but I have no particular reason to believe that finishing this will take less than 3 years. I do remember how long Perl5 took, but unless I'm really going crazy, Perl6 progress has been much slower.
I know this is a frustrating situation for all concerned; the timing of the tech downturn could not have been worse for the development of this or most other similarly ambitious projects. But here we are, and I still have concerns about whether Perl6 will ever happen. Looking at what's new or fresh at dev.perl.org/perl6 doesn't make me feel more confident, for that matter.
Babar
Metallica got a bad rap, especially here on Slashdot. Sure things were novel and lots of people were confused. But IIRC, Metallica was always very open about allowing concert-goers to tape records, make bootlegs etc. Their gripe was NOT that people were downloading their MP3s, but that 1) they had not artistic control (people could rip shitty copies and then their work would get degraded), and they were never asked for their opinion/involvement, which is at the very least, rude 2) third party startups (*cough* Napster *cough*) were building business models on what was obviously (or at least perceived to be) their work.
My impression was that Metallica was LOOKING for a way to start an MP3 relationship directly with fans, but came off to the over-reactive Slashdot community as trying to kill it entirely by trying to take control away from Napster.
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
If you're one of the lucky bastards who DOES get something before the site slows to a crawl, please insert it into Freenet and post the CHK in the comments after the story.
There's no reason to wait for someone to put up a bittorrent link, when any bozo can insert anything into Freenet.
Of course it would all be more trustable if the original content provider (QNX.com in this case)would put an MD5 hash on their download page, so even if we don't get the file from them, we can make sure it's authentic.
Of course of course, since a Freenet CHK is itself a form of checksum, if the original content provider would insert the file themselves and post the CHK on their download page, all of this silliness could be averted and their poor server would be happier too.
This guy is not the real miguel, just an imposter. this is the real miguel. Notice the uid.
Celebrate the finer things in life
How about Bungie and Halo, or every other company Microsoft has bought? (Mac users will remember almost not getting MS Office not too long back.)
How about Oracle's announcement that they'll discontinue Peoplesoft apps if they buy the company?
If you're under the impression that commercial companies always support every customer platform in perpuity, you haven't been in this business very long. You pays your money, you places your bets. The difference with OSS is that, if your platform gets dropped, or the whole application stops development, you still have the source, which is a damn sight better than the situation with commercial software as a rule.
Yeah, IHBT, but come on, I had to say it.
If you're under the impression that commercial companies always support every customer platform in perpuity, you haven't been in this business very long. You pays your money, you places your bets. The difference with OSS is that, if your platform gets dropped, or the whole application stops development, you still have the source, which is a damn sight better than the situation with commercial software as a rule.
:-)
Believe it or not, that wasn't a troll
There's certainly no guarantee that any vendor will support a particular platform, but when a platform is dropped there's usually a good economic reason. A commercial vendor usually won't stop supporting a platform as long as there's money to be made there. OSS vendors have no such incentive, and dropping support for a platform because of an ad that a company is running is downright infantile. If OSS vendors want to be taken seriously they need to drop the "true believer" mentality and focus on the bottom line. Linux vendors have done this already and have been very successful as a result.
Also Oracle specifically said that they would continue PeopleSoft to support and enhance PeopleSoft's applications "into the next decade", but I seriously doubt that deal will go through anyway... And if it does, it gives me an excuse to dump our *&#%@( PeopleSoft system for something less bloated.
Well, here's where we part company. You're looking at the actions of a single developer, the nmap guy, who works for free in his spare time to develop software and gives it away, and comparing it "other vendors." But he isn't a vendor. When he says that he won't support changes for the SCO platform because of what SCO is doing, that's a reasonable decision on his part.
Now, Red Hat may do something entirely different. They are an actual vendor, and if they sold a CD of software to run on SCO, and their customers wanted nmap, they would maintain a patch set and apply to the mainline. That's what they do, and what all the major distros do.
So I think the problem here is that you are using the decision of a volunteer to act on his principles to predict the behavior of a corporate OSS software vendor. I suggest that they will not necessarily coincide.
BTW, as a consultant I often find clients who made normal, reasonable software choices that with the passage of time have left them stranded. Like for example, Sybase customers who have a hard time getting support by LDAP synchronization tools is a recent one. If you're lucky enough to predict who will be the market leader in x years, then you don't have to change platforms to add new applications and tools to your corporate platform. But if you are unlucky, then you get hosed. If you choose OSS at least you always have the choice of continuing maintenance yourself (or by proxy) rather then just consigning yourself to a vendor switch for bug fixes and upgrades. This may not always occur at an opportune time, to say the least.
Apologies for mistaking you for a troll.