> In this specific dispute with SCO, we're not talking about the userland tools but about the kernel itself.
In this specific case, we don't know what we're talking about, neither does SCO. They change their story like the breeze. One minute, it's IBM, another minute, it's Linus and the kernel. The next minute, it's userland, too.
I think SCO believes (or wants us to believe) that they own UNIX as a concept and that anything that works like UNIX owes them royalties. I also think that they'll find out in court that they are wrong.
No offense to Mr. Boies, but he's out of his league here. IBM's attornies (who specialize in these types of matters) will eat his lunch. I even snickered back in March when it was announced that Caldera had retained Mr. Boies. "They want to lose," was my first reaction.
> The drive-thru was a similarly revolutionary idea - whoever started it SHOULD have patented it...
Uh, not really. Diners had been doing drive up since the 1930s. The drive thru was a streamlining of that. Besides, at the time that the Drive Thru was invented, you couldn't patent business methods. It wasn't until a court case in the late 1980s, early '90s that business method patents were allowed.
Frankly, I don't think this patent will stand up in court. It will likely fail the "nonobvious to a person with average skill in the art" test. What the USPTO giveth the legal system taketh away.
>All that said, I do suspect there's Wage & Hour restrictions on extreme hours, but sararimen get much less protection than the hourly guys, so I dunno. Never have had to find out, fortunately.
It's why sararimen are called "exempt" employees. The employer is exempt from wage and hour restrictions on salaried employees, i.e. they 0wnz j00.
"You don't have to build it," Ferrell said. "You just have to conceive it. By filing a couple of patents, you essentially have co-opted the standards road map. Anybody who wants to go from G to X has to get through your toll road."
That quote, from a patent Attorney, says all anyone needs to know about why patents on non-tangible things are bad. If you're going to patent something, I think you should have to build it before you're allowed to apply for a patent. If it can't be physically built, then it can't be patented.
I'm reminded of something I heard a few years ago on this subject: "Good programmers write good code, great programmers steal it."
The point the person was trying to make was that good programmers will sit at their computer for a week reinventing wheel, while a great programmer will spend a couple hours finding where someone has already invented the wheel and then adapting that wheel to their project.
In my experience as a professional programmer, it has always been faster to find someone else's code that does what I want and to adapt that code to my project. I've very rarely ever felt the urge to reinvent the wheel. It cuts into my productivity and is a waste of time if I can find something that already works for me.
It usually takes much less time to write a couple wrapper functions or an adaptor object interface to integrate a 3rd party library into your code than it does to duplicate the functionality of that library.
Too many programmers and too many shops suffer from "not invented here" syndrome, i.e. they refuse to use code that they didn't write.
I don't want IBM to buy them out. I want this to drag on until SCO runs out of money.
IBM has more disposable cash than SCO, than Microsoft.
Frankly, I hope they get SCO to hand over all their source code going to back to before SCO acquired UNIX. I'd love the chance to audit their code against historical Linux code.
Five will get you ten that either SCO employees put the code in Linux as Cringley suggest or they "stole" the code from Linux. No one will know the truth of what happened unless SCO can be made to release all of their source code, even historical releases.
I'd sign the NDA, if they'd agree to give me all their source going back, and all the time I need to look it over. I'm not working on any kernel projects, and I'm not even working on KDE any more so, why not?
At the risk of being accused of being humorless, I have to ask, "Did you read the article?"
The chips that the EU is considering getting from Hitachi can transmit thier 128bit ID only. They cannot store data, so they can't store what you've done with the cash on the cash.
I think their main concern is stopping counterfeiting, and scondarily they want to curb money laundering. (I still don't see exactly how these chips are going to help with that.)
Anyway, I also agree with the poster who wonders why you're buying stuff that you'd be ashamed to have known you're buying. Where I'm from that's called "hypocrisy."
Smarter than Junk Mail Senders
on
AI Going Nowhere?
·
· Score: 2, Funny
> Cyc knows that trees are usually outdoors, that once people die they stop buying things...
Hey, that thing is already smarter than the companies that continue to send junk mail to my grandfather who has been dead for 22 years, now. Maybe they should get that software to manage their mailing list?
In one case, a project manager came to me two days before his deadline and said, "Can you look at this? So-and-so was working on it, and it won't run. We think it's there, and it probably just needs a little tweak to get it running."
Sure, I looked at the code. Turns out what I was looking at was a "translation" of a COBOL app that ran on the mainframe to another programming language that would run on the new UNIX server. The translation was a big, tangled ball of string, actually a giant bunch of nested ifs and gotos.
I asked to see the COBOL code, and was given a print out. Heh, same giant mess.
I went to the project manager. I said, "Where are the specification documents for this and who actually uses this program?"
He swallowed hard and said, "Why?"
"'Cause I need to rewrite it from scratch. This code and the original COBOL is a tangled mess, and I can barely make any sense out of it."
So, I was given the documentation and talked with the people in the department that actually used the software, and less than one week later a beautiful example of procedural design was running on the UNIX server, only three days late.
Sometimes, it does pay to start over from scratch. Sometimes, you have no choice if the code is so bad that no one, not even the person who was originally working on it can understand it. (In this case, the program was being rewritten anyway. I just rewrote the rewrite.)
I hate "Me, too" posts, but this time I have to, because I don't have any mod points.
I'd really like to know where this myth of childhood innocence comes from. None of my friends or acquaintances from school were all that innocent, and I'm talking 6 - 12 years old, not teenagers.
Honestly, I think humans, like any animal, are born "knowing" about sex and those things. It's in the genes, and you don't need to "learn" it from adults or pornography. I mean, how could something so basic to the survival of the species not be instinctual?
Anyway, I remember all the "games" and stuff that we used to play as kids. Heh, I even remember buying a Barbie doll so my G.I. Joe (the full-sized one, not the 2-inch crap they sell today) could have someone to fuck. (No, I don't believe in euphemism or misspelling "dirty words." Life is a cess pool, deal with it. I don't believe in "dirty words" for that matter.)
Yeah, we used to write bawdy tales of the exploits of our favorite cartoon and comic book characters, some with illustrations.
I just wanna know what planet all these "innocent" kids come from.
> You still haven't answered my question. What does verbosity or a full screen have to do with salty canned meat?
Nothing, except that Monty Python's Flying Circus did a skit where a modern, normal-looking guy goes into a restaurant full of 10th C. Viking customers and a lady (played by a guy in drag) behind the counter. He asks for something to eat, I forget what. He's told that he can get "Spam, eggs and spam, or spam, spam, and spam." After some discussion that goes nowhere, the Vikings break out into a chant of "Spam! Spam! Spam! Spam-ity spam!" They repeat this chant over and over until it drowns out everything else going on in the scene.
The idea is that screen flooding becomes like the Vikings chanting "Spam." Nothing else goes on because nobody else can get a word in edgewise over the racket.
> If you don't incorporate then your going to have to post a fictious business notice in the paper.
Depends on where you live. It also is only necessary if you are doing business as (DBA) a fictitious name. I do consulting, which might be different than what the poster is wanting to do, out of my home and under my own name. It's the easiest way. No zoning and no paperwork. Of course, if one of my clients sues me, I'm screwed.
Um, no applications for FreeBSD? Is that what you're saying?
I use FreeBSD on a regular basis and just about anything that works on Linux generally works on FreeBSD, too. Either you get the source and compile or you install Linux binary support and run the Linux binary directly. If it works on Red Hat 7.1, then it pretty much works on FreeBSD, too.
This is actually kind of scary if you think about it. This stuff is hitting our atmosphere all the time, and more of it gets through than you'd like to think. When I was a kid, a friend of the family and I used to go looking for meteorites in the hills and valleys of Lincoln Co., WV. We even found some on occasion.
What's scay is when you think of what meteors are. They are chunks thrown off of much larger comets as they pass through the solar system. There are often meteor showers before and after a comet's passing, and the meteors can hang around for a long time after, such as the Perseids. (I mean long in an astronomical sense, not a human sense.)
So every time there's an unexpected meteor shower or a strike like this, I have to wonder, is this just a precursor of something bigger that's on its way, or is this just the left over detritus of something that came and went a while ago?
Well, you do realize, of course, that the meteorite in question was shedding energy at each collision? It lost energy from friction as it passed through the atmosphere, it lost energy going through the roof and ceiling, and the venetian blinds.
What's amazing is that it didn't shatter when it hit the metal window sill and send lots of tiny shards all over the place.
You can often catch them in the replays. When watching the replay, you might see one of your units (usually a hero) suddenly get highlighted as your opponent selected it to see how powerful it is. If this happens and there are no enemy units within visual range and the animated circle of light, that indicates a legitimate far seeing or reveal attempt has been made, doesn't appear then chances are your opponent used a map hack to reveal the entire map and consequently the position of your units.
There are a lot of folks complaining that one of the "top" Scandinavian players does this. They say the proof is in watching the replays and the near prescience of his troop movements. Many of them were quite thrilled when he lost repeatedly to another top European player despite his obvious cheating.
While on the subject, I hate playing against people who don't cheat but who use "highly optimized" strategies. For instance, they load up on one kind of unit. This isn't good strategy, though it might win in the game, and it's no fun to place against or to play as, IMHO. The only effective way to counter players who do so is to load up on the unit that is best at destroying the unit that your opponent has chosen to load up on. This robs the fun from the game as fast any cheat.
Yeah, I actually like Tank Girl. It's not meant to be taken seriously, and there's just something about Lori Petty that turns me on. (Probably that she's female.;-)
The Pophecy:
Christopher Walken just plain rocks, and when you see him play a totally billy bad ass Archangel Gabriel, you believe it! Eric Stoltz and DeNiro don't do a half-bad job acting in this flick, either. Too bad the sequel sucked.
Yeah, I know this sounds crazy, but I just tried it on FreeBSD under Linux emulation. The reason is that I have NWN installed on the Winders partition of my dual boot FreeBSD/Win2K workstation, so it was easiest to try.
Well, after installing SDL & OpenGL for the Linux compatibilitly layer, and making a link from/compat/linux/lib/libGLU.so.3 to/compat/linux/lib/libGLU.so.1, NWN looked like it was starting and then X dumped core. I didn't bother examining the core file, though next time I will. (Yes, I also followed Bioware's instructions.)
Guess it doesn't work, yet on FreeBSD with linux compatibility. Maybe, I'll try again tomorrow and make sure that I have OpenGL set up correctly on the FreeBSD side of things. I may not have it all working just right.
BTW, the Linux server seems to work just fine on FreeBSD with the linux compatibility stuff installed.
Now, what I really want is a Linux version of the Aurora Toolset. If I could work on modules on my laptop, that would be schweet!
Slashdot Mirror
OK, so the moderators are on crack today. What's with all these obviously "funny" posts getting moderated as "insightful?"
Guess it's time to meta-moderate!
> In this specific dispute with SCO, we're not talking about the userland tools but about the kernel itself.
In this specific case, we don't know what we're talking about, neither does SCO. They change their story like the breeze. One minute, it's IBM, another minute, it's Linus and the kernel. The next minute, it's userland, too.
I think SCO believes (or wants us to believe) that they own UNIX as a concept and that anything that works like UNIX owes them royalties. I also think that they'll find out in court that they are wrong.
No offense to Mr. Boies, but he's out of his league here. IBM's attornies (who specialize in these types of matters) will eat his lunch. I even snickered back in March when it was announced that Caldera had retained Mr. Boies. "They want to lose," was my first reaction.
> The drive-thru was a similarly revolutionary idea - whoever started it SHOULD have patented it...
Uh, not really. Diners had been doing drive up since the 1930s. The drive thru was a streamlining of that. Besides, at the time that the Drive Thru was invented, you couldn't patent business methods. It wasn't until a court case in the late 1980s, early '90s that business method patents were allowed.
Frankly, I don't think this patent will stand up in court. It will likely fail the "nonobvious to a person with average skill in the art" test. What the USPTO giveth the legal system taketh away.
I'll say it again:
SCO hired David Boies. They want to lose.
They're just looking to get bought out, plain and simple.
>All that said, I do suspect there's Wage & Hour restrictions on extreme hours, but sararimen get much less protection than the hourly guys, so I dunno. Never have had to find out, fortunately.
It's why sararimen are called "exempt" employees. The employer is exempt from wage and hour restrictions on salaried employees, i.e. they 0wnz j00.
"You don't have to build it," Ferrell said. "You just have to conceive it. By filing a couple of patents, you essentially have co-opted the standards road map. Anybody who wants to go from G to X has to get through your toll road."
That quote, from a patent Attorney, says all anyone needs to know about why patents on non-tangible things are bad. If you're going to patent something, I think you should have to build it before you're allowed to apply for a patent. If it can't be physically built, then it can't be patented.
Do you know just how telling that statement is? When I lived if France 11 years ago, MacGyver was all the rage among French teens.
I'm reminded of something I heard a few years ago on this subject: "Good programmers write good code, great programmers steal it."
The point the person was trying to make was that good programmers will sit at their computer for a week reinventing wheel, while a great programmer will spend a couple hours finding where someone has already invented the wheel and then adapting that wheel to their project.
In my experience as a professional programmer, it has always been faster to find someone else's code that does what I want and to adapt that code to my project. I've very rarely ever felt the urge to reinvent the wheel. It cuts into my productivity and is a waste of time if I can find something that already works for me.
It usually takes much less time to write a couple wrapper functions or an adaptor object interface to integrate a 3rd party library into your code than it does to duplicate the functionality of that library.
Too many programmers and too many shops suffer from "not invented here" syndrome, i.e. they refuse to use code that they didn't write.
This is no reflection on the accuracy or your post. I pretty much agree with you.
I just found it to be humorous that the quote at the bottom of the page said, "The bogosity meter just pegged," when I read your post.
I just had to share that, at the risk of loging karma.
I don't want IBM to buy them out. I want this to drag on until SCO runs out of money.
IBM has more disposable cash than SCO, than Microsoft.
Frankly, I hope they get SCO to hand over all their source code going to back to before SCO acquired UNIX. I'd love the chance to audit their code against historical Linux code.
Five will get you ten that either SCO employees put the code in Linux as Cringley suggest or they "stole" the code from Linux. No one will know the truth of what happened unless SCO can be made to release all of their source code, even historical releases.
I'd sign the NDA, if they'd agree to give me all their source going back, and all the time I need to look it over. I'm not working on any kernel projects, and I'm not even working on KDE any more so, why not?
At the risk of being accused of being humorless, I have to ask, "Did you read the article?"
The chips that the EU is considering getting from Hitachi can transmit thier 128bit ID only. They cannot store data, so they can't store what you've done with the cash on the cash.
I think their main concern is stopping counterfeiting, and scondarily they want to curb money laundering. (I still don't see exactly how these chips are going to help with that.)
Anyway, I also agree with the poster who wonders why you're buying stuff that you'd be ashamed to have known you're buying. Where I'm from that's called "hypocrisy."
> Cyc knows that trees are usually outdoors, that once people die they stop buying things...
Hey, that thing is already smarter than the companies that continue to send junk mail to my grandfather who has been dead for 22 years, now. Maybe they should get that software to manage their mailing list?
I enjoy going to the dentist. Don't you?
She has the pretty, little hygienist who cleans my teeth.
She has the really good dope for when she needs to drill holes in my teeth and slather in the goop.
Not to mention that my dentist is pretty damned attractive herself. Oh, the fantasies!
I keep my regular 6-month check-ups like a religion.
JDK 1.5 is coming out soon, and I still haven't really gotten to play enough with the new stuff in 1.4!
I've had similar experiences.
In one case, a project manager came to me two days before his deadline and said, "Can you look at this? So-and-so was working on it, and it won't run. We think it's there, and it probably just needs a little tweak to get it running."
Sure, I looked at the code. Turns out what I was looking at was a "translation" of a COBOL app that ran on the mainframe to another programming language that would run on the new UNIX server. The translation was a big, tangled ball of string, actually a giant bunch of nested ifs and gotos.
I asked to see the COBOL code, and was given a print out. Heh, same giant mess.
I went to the project manager. I said, "Where are the specification documents for this and who actually uses this program?"
He swallowed hard and said, "Why?"
"'Cause I need to rewrite it from scratch. This code and the original COBOL is a tangled mess, and I can barely make any sense out of it."
So, I was given the documentation and talked with the people in the department that actually used the software, and less than one week later a beautiful example of procedural design was running on the UNIX server, only three days late.
Sometimes, it does pay to start over from scratch. Sometimes, you have no choice if the code is so bad that no one, not even the person who was originally working on it can understand it. (In this case, the program was being rewritten anyway. I just rewrote the rewrite.)
I hate "Me, too" posts, but this time I have to, because I don't have any mod points.
I'd really like to know where this myth of childhood innocence comes from. None of my friends or acquaintances from school were all that innocent, and I'm talking 6 - 12 years old, not teenagers.
Honestly, I think humans, like any animal, are born "knowing" about sex and those things. It's in the genes, and you don't need to "learn" it from adults or pornography. I mean, how could something so basic to the survival of the species not be instinctual?
Anyway, I remember all the "games" and stuff that we used to play as kids. Heh, I even remember buying a Barbie doll so my G.I. Joe (the full-sized one, not the 2-inch crap they sell today) could have someone to fuck. (No, I don't believe in euphemism or misspelling "dirty words." Life is a cess pool, deal with it. I don't believe in "dirty words" for that matter.)
Yeah, we used to write bawdy tales of the exploits of our favorite cartoon and comic book characters, some with illustrations.
I just wanna know what planet all these "innocent" kids come from.
Not to mention that you could always build a firewall, a real one like in your car, between the lava lamp and the delicate electronic components.
'Course the firewall adds weight.
> You still haven't answered my question. What does verbosity or a full screen have to do with salty canned meat?
Nothing, except that Monty Python's Flying Circus did a skit where a modern, normal-looking guy goes into a restaurant full of 10th C. Viking customers and a lady (played by a guy in drag) behind the counter. He asks for something to eat, I forget what. He's told that he can get "Spam, eggs and spam, or spam, spam, and spam." After some discussion that goes nowhere, the Vikings break out into a chant of "Spam! Spam! Spam! Spam-ity spam!" They repeat this chant over and over until it drowns out everything else going on in the scene.
The idea is that screen flooding becomes like the Vikings chanting "Spam." Nothing else goes on because nobody else can get a word in edgewise over the racket.
> If you don't incorporate then your going to have to post a fictious business notice in the paper.
Depends on where you live. It also is only necessary if you are doing business as (DBA) a fictitious name. I do consulting, which might be different than what the poster is wanting to do, out of my home and under my own name. It's the easiest way. No zoning and no paperwork. Of course, if one of my clients sues me, I'm screwed.
Um, no applications for FreeBSD? Is that what you're saying?
I use FreeBSD on a regular basis and just about anything that works on Linux generally works on FreeBSD, too. Either you get the source and compile or you install Linux binary support and run the Linux binary directly. If it works on Red Hat 7.1, then it pretty much works on FreeBSD, too.
This is actually kind of scary if you think about it. This stuff is hitting our atmosphere all the time, and more of it gets through than you'd like to think. When I was a kid, a friend of the family and I used to go looking for meteorites in the hills and valleys of Lincoln Co., WV. We even found some on occasion.
What's scay is when you think of what meteors are. They are chunks thrown off of much larger comets as they pass through the solar system. There are often meteor showers before and after a comet's passing, and the meteors can hang around for a long time after, such as the Perseids. (I mean long in an astronomical sense, not a human sense.)
So every time there's an unexpected meteor shower or a strike like this, I have to wonder, is this just a precursor of something bigger that's on its way, or is this just the left over detritus of something that came and went a while ago?
Well, you do realize, of course, that the meteorite in question was shedding energy at each collision? It lost energy from friction as it passed through the atmosphere, it lost energy going through the roof and ceiling, and the venetian blinds.
What's amazing is that it didn't shatter when it hit the metal window sill and send lots of tiny shards all over the place.
I've seen map hackers in War Craft III.
You can often catch them in the replays. When watching the replay, you might see one of your units (usually a hero) suddenly get highlighted as your opponent selected it to see how powerful it is. If this happens and there are no enemy units within visual range and the animated circle of light, that indicates a legitimate far seeing or reveal attempt has been made, doesn't appear then chances are your opponent used a map hack to reveal the entire map and consequently the position of your units.
There are a lot of folks complaining that one of the "top" Scandinavian players does this. They say the proof is in watching the replays and the near prescience of his troop movements. Many of them were quite thrilled when he lost repeatedly to another top European player despite his obvious cheating.
While on the subject, I hate playing against people who don't cheat but who use "highly optimized" strategies. For instance, they load up on one kind of unit. This isn't good strategy, though it might win in the game, and it's no fun to place against or to play as, IMHO. The only effective way to counter players who do so is to load up on the unit that is best at destroying the unit that your opponent has chosen to load up on. This robs the fun from the game as fast any cheat.
Yeah, I actually like Tank Girl. It's not meant to be taken seriously, and there's just something about Lori Petty that turns me on. (Probably that she's female. ;-)
The Pophecy:
Christopher Walken just plain rocks, and when you see him play a totally billy bad ass Archangel Gabriel, you believe it! Eric Stoltz and DeNiro don't do a half-bad job acting in this flick, either. Too bad the sequel sucked.
Yeah, I know this sounds crazy, but I just tried it on FreeBSD under Linux emulation. The reason is that I have NWN installed on the Winders partition of my dual boot FreeBSD/Win2K workstation, so it was easiest to try.
/compat/linux/lib/libGLU.so.3 to /compat/linux/lib/libGLU.so.1, NWN looked like it was starting and then X dumped core. I didn't bother examining the core file, though next time I will. (Yes, I also followed Bioware's instructions.)
Well, after installing SDL & OpenGL for the Linux compatibilitly layer, and making a link from
Guess it doesn't work, yet on FreeBSD with linux compatibility. Maybe, I'll try again tomorrow and make sure that I have OpenGL set up correctly on the FreeBSD side of things. I may not have it all working just right.
BTW, the Linux server seems to work just fine on FreeBSD with the linux compatibility stuff installed.
Now, what I really want is a Linux version of the Aurora Toolset. If I could work on modules on my laptop, that would be schweet!