Rob seems to have a policy of not changing stories (except to add on a little bit at the end) once he's posted them. Not really a great way of doing things, especially if he doesn't check stories before posting them.
What's worse, however, is the unbelievable level of ignorance this story has revealed amongst the Slashdot population.
D, who spent all yesterday working on a Sun e3500 with a knacked rootdisk plex (courtesy of Veritas Volume Manager and dodgy GBICs).
Old? Methinks not. I saw a very attractive one yesterday in a computer room - a tall rack, encased in black metal mesh standing on a purplish pedestal. At first I thought it was a big SGI machine. It's a recent installation.
It's not just the video card that makes SGIs good boxes...
Exactly. One of SG's strengths in the workstation market has long been their ability to shift data around the motherboard at very high speeds. Have a look at Ars Technica's article about the new SGI NT machines for some information on the sort of approach SG have to designing boxes.
Best of all, they're planning to support Linux on this range of beasts!
Yes you are. And you're about to go and do it again.
Éire _is_ the official name of the state [...] which is also officially described in the constitution as constituting the whole island.
Not any longer. The Irish Constitution was changed as part of the peace process and the clause which laid claim to the entire island of Ireland is no longer part of the Constitution.
Let me give you a piece of advice - at least have a clue what you're talking about before you open your mouth, because you're just talking shite.
... I'm sure it's out in BFE being on the coast like that.
It's about three miles from the coast. For anyone who's interested, it's about four miles NW of Chester, at the base of the peninsual between the estuaries of the Mersey and Dee rivers, south of Liverpool.
It means getting drunk. If one is "pissed", then one is drunk.
The British equivalent for the American use of the word (i.e. to mean "annoyed") would be "pissed off" - c.f. "I'm pissed off!" means that I'm annoyed.
"Éire" is simply the Irish language word for "Ireland" (the whole island), despite assumptions to the contrary.
You are wrong.
Éire is the official name (as enshrined in the Irish Constitution) of the country alternatively known, and more often referred to, as the Republic of Ireland.
"Ulster" is not the same as "Northern Ireland"
This is correct. All of Northern Ireland (often referred to as "the six counties" by people in the Republic) is in Ulster. But not all of Ulster is in Northern Ireland.
Bit of historial background as to what Ulster actually is. Ancient Ireland consisted of five provinces. Four of them, Ulster in the North, Connaught in the West, Munster in the South and Leinster in the East, were ruled by Kings, who paid allegiance to the High King of Ireland, who ruled directly over the much smaller province of Meath, which lay kind of in the middle-east of the island. At some point in history, Meath "merged" with Leinster, leaving four provinces.
I am an Irish citizen. I dont think this a 'neccesary' evil. I think it frightening.
Then go see/write to your TD and tell him to push for a beefing up of the Irish Security Service, beyond the half-dozen Gardai and Customs officers which it consists of at the moment.
I think I remember hearing that the current (Labour) Government were planning to bring in a Bill of Rights or a Citizen's Charter or something along those lines. Anyone else more knowledgable about politics than me?
I hear your point, though. And another worrying thing is the apparent subtle shift towards a situation where someone accused of a crime has to prove their innocence, rather than the onus being on the prosecution to prove their guilt. For example, the current caution given to people when arrested by the British police starts "You have the right to remain silent, but it may harm your defence if you withold something now which you later rely on in court" (or words to that effect).
Wasn't there like a cool, crazy Irish guy with lots of knives or something in Braveheart? Or was that some Robin Hood movie?
Yeah, that was me.;-) Nah, it was actually my mate, Stephen. He's a wee bit touched. Reckons he's the High King of Ireland (hence the "my island" comments in the film).
*tut* Feckin' eejit. Everybody knows I'm the King...
That depends upon your attitude. I don't think there's any doubt that MI5 has overstepped the mark in the past, in terms of surveilling and harassing innocent people and political organisations. I personally think that the reasons for this were paranoia (was it McCarthy who did the same sort of thing in the States?) and political pollution (what a terrific phrase!), which allegedly led to things like the Profumo affair, etc.
On the other hand, these organisations are responsible for the national security of the country, and ensuring that often involves doing unsavoury things. They have to operate outside the normal bounds of law and morality. The majority of people would probably be horrified if they found out the full extent of the operations their country's intelligence services carry out, but, to my mind anyway, the end justifies the means - the good of the people is the highest law. Obviously, there are limits, but we have to trust our Congressional Oversight and Intelligence and Security committees to ensure that those limits are maintained.
As for police files, so what? When I first came over to England, my room at university was searched, and I suspect that the college porter (an ex-military policeman) let them in. But I have no problem with that - I'm not a terrorist, and I had nothing to hide. If searching my room set their minds at rest and allowed them to eliminate me from their list of possible suspect, then I'd have handed over the keys myself. I've no doubt that MI5 have a file on me (as do several other law-enforcement agencies, including at least two in the USA, even though I've never visited the States), and I'm sure that they all know who "The Dodger" really is.
But, because they know that I'm not one of the bad guys (even if I used to break the Computer Misuse Act occasionally), they're probably perfectly happy to leave me alone. And that includes not blocking me from jobs which involve working on law-enforcement and government computer systems.
I think the most surprising thing about this report is the mind-bogglingly large amount of information they must have had to sift through.
I know a guy who works at GCHQ who once had to take delivery of a Sun 10k Starfire. Yes, they do have some serious number-crunching power down in Cheltenham. Never forget that code-breaking was invented by the British.
I think it's understandable that they would want to do it, after all the IRA has set off a bomb or two. As for using it for financial gain, and everything else not related to terrorism, they should string up those who abused the system, not the agency that implemented it.
I assume the "financial gain" you're referring to is surmised from the quote "although the primary justification... was anti-terrorism, the information it gathered was also of economic and commercial significance".
This doesn't surprise me in the slightest. Since the end of the Cold War, there has been a gradual realisation that a country's national security is not guaranteed merely by it's military strength, but by it's economic independence and power as well. That is why the CIA has operated in instances such as the operations it carried out against the French during the GATT negotiations a while back.
You can bet your last penny that the CIA has allocated a significant amount of resources to infiltrating the European Union, for the purposes of obtaining intelligence regarding European economic and monetary affairs.
As for the whole issue of Britain spying on the Republic - it's something that's been generally assumed and accepted, for a long time, especially by us Irish. The Security Service (MI5) and the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) even had a turf war over who should have responsibility for intelligence-gathering operations in the Republic.
Don't get me wrong, I loved Braveheart and think England should let Ireland go if they want to go
Well, a lot of Braveheart was filmed in Ireland (one of the supposedly 'English' castles is actually just a few miles from where I come from), but the film was actually about Scotland's struggle for independence.:-)
I don't feel inclined to hire a lawyer and negotiate [...] for a license.
Piece of potentially interesting info for you - I've just been speaking to a guy I know who owns a company which produces software which includes support for the GIF format. They paid a few hundred pounds (one UK pound ~ $1.60; he can't remember exactly how much) for a one-off, lifetime licence for LZW from Unisys.
If we consider that Unisys probably aren't going to open source LZW, or even licence it on a basis that allows free packages like GD to use LZW, actually talking to Unisys may be the only thing left.
And it may turn out that things aren't as bad they seem.
So has Boutell just decided to stop distributing GD without any outside interference - i.e. Unisys haven't played any part in causing this decision to be taken?
#1. Is this LZW compression the same compression used in the unix "compress" command?
#2. If Unisys failed to defend their patent/copyright (does anyone know the facts regarding what rights they have to LZW?) for so long, wouldn't it have lapsed?
#3. Who do we email at Unisys to complain about this?
My "To Do" list includes building an E3500 with
four 400MHz UltraSPARC II's and 4 Gb of RAM, with a A5200 FCAL storage array.
And I get paid to do this!!! God, sometimes I really love my job... Pity I have to ship it out after build and installation.:+/
But there is some consolation in the fact that I'm going on the Sun Performance Turning course soon. I'll be able to squeeze even more performance out of these little beauties. Before the end of the year, I'll be doing clusters... Hey, maybe Santa will bring me a Starfire!:-)
All of the things you describe are possible, but are they really likely? Red Hat's S-1 makes it abundantly clear that their continued success as a business depends on the goodwill and active assistance of people they don't even employ.
RedHat's current owners recognise and appreciate this. But they're about to sell off a significant percentage of the company and it's possible that this could result in a change of control. I doubt it would, but you never can tell. If control of Red Hat fell into the hands of individual(s)/compan(y|ies) who place more value upon short-term profitability and market share above continued support of the open source community, we could see our worst fears come true.
The Linux community is very, very effective at creating a public reactions crisis on the Internet for any company...[comments about share prices]
So why is Microsoft still the biggest company in the world?
There will be thousands of day traders out there who won't necessarily react even-handedly to any bad news, and a lot of them use altavista, excite, or hotbot as their primary research tools.
#1 - What long-term effect does a depressed share price have upon a financially-healthy company, the majority of whose shares aren't traded on the stock exchange? Is a company going to fold because the 20% of their company that is traded on NASDAQ is worth half what it was this morning? This isn't rhetorical - I don't know enough about the subject to answer this myself.
#2 - I believe that Internet stocks are perceived as being more vulnerable to PR because (a) only a very small portion of their stock is available for trading, and therefore, demand for those stocks results in a disproportionate rise in perceived value; (b) the new breed of amateur/inexperienced day traders know feck-all about investments and go by PR and hype rather than solid indicators, such as sales figures, profitabiity, market share, etc.; (c) many Internet companies are more PR, hype and bull than true substance.
But that's just my opinion. ;-)
If an event like Rasterman's resignation happened after Redhat was publicly traded, his letter and the resulting entertaining threads on Slashdot probably would have slammed their stock price.
I think that the whole Rasterman story reflects more upon the relative youth (immaturity?) of Red Hat as a company. If you think about it, Red Hat has grown pretty damned quickly, and there's not all that much to stop anyone from doing what they've done. Given the necessary skills, ambition, motivation, drive, determination and resources, of course.:-)
RedHat, Amazon & eBay don't have a monopoly on ideas, creativity and technical know-how... None of them were here yesterday, but today they're big. So who's to say that a company which doesn't even exist yet isn't going to wipe the floor any of these companies out?
On the Internet, your competition is just a click away.
The Dodger who's just heard his boss use the phrase "the angle of dangle" and is ROFLing as a result... (-:
Because, if there isn't a stable, scalable 64-bit version of Windows Server ready by the end of next year, the path will be clear for the *nixes to severely dent Microsoft's marketshare.
Suppose LinuxCare, which does not have its own distribution, were to choke off Red Hat's supply line by killing off RH's support.
If LinuxCare were to do this, they'd be shooting themselves in the foot. They would lose a significant proportion of their business, including the Dell deal.
Rather, I suggest that Red Hat and LinuxCare merge, cooperate, or that LinuxCare offers its own polished distro, for the sake of the greater good. A rivalry between the two--as things are now--is a Very Bad Thing(TM).
Rivalry isn't all bad - after all, it implies competition and one of the main problems we have with Microsoft is that they have no competition.
However, having said that, the merger/collaboration idea does have merits. Especially if the anecdotal evidence I've heard reflects the true state of affairs - i.e. RedHat's support operation is somewhat less than perfect.
1. RedHat's actions as a member/citizen of the Linux community.
2. RedHat's apparent increasing influence ove the future development of Linux.
The first issue revolves around the question of whether RedHat's actions are beneficial to the Linux community as a whole. To lift an example from the Salon article, do we think that RedHat's decision to release new C libraries as quickly as possible is a good or bad thing? By asking questions like this, we can determine whether RedHat is a productive member of the Linux community.
This issue will come to a head following RedHat's IPO, because after the IPO we will find out whether RedHat will place the interests of it's shareholders (i.e. profitability, market share, etc.) ahead of the interests of it's stakeholders (which includes the Linux community). The danger is that they will and that, in doing so, they may seriously damage Linux.
The second issue is one I've addressed in a previous posting under this article - see above for my idea regarding a non-profit organisation, funded by contributions from companies which make money from Linux, which employs Linux gurus to develop Linux.
Note that if RedHat do place their shareholders before the community, they could use the fact that they employ many of the leading Linux gurus to influence the development of the OS in a direction which serves RedHat's own commercial interests, rather than the interests of the community and users.
I broadly agree. It seems to me that the work the various hackers RedHat employs do, is primarily aimed at improving the RedHat distribution, and that improving GNU/Linux in general is really a side-effect.
'Twould be much better if, instead of employing Linux gurus and telling them to do specific things, RedHat (and other companies who benefit from Linux, such as LinuxCare, VA, Pac HiTech, etc.) should make contributions to an independent non-profit organisation, run by Linus & Co. which employed people like Alan Cox to improve Linux. That way, these peoples' talents could be harnessed in such a way as to improve the GNU/Linux system for everyone, instead of improving it for RedHat and then letting those improvements filter through into the community at large.
Slashdot Mirror
Rob seems to have a policy of not changing stories (except to add on a little bit at the end) once he's posted them. Not really a great way of doing things, especially if he doesn't check stories before posting them.
What's worse, however, is the unbelievable level of ignorance this story has revealed amongst the Slashdot population.
D, who spent all yesterday working on a Sun e3500 with a knacked rootdisk plex (courtesy of Veritas Volume Manager and dodgy GBICs).
Anyone ever read Schrodinger's Plague? Short story by Greg Bear?
JG
Old? Methinks not. I saw a very attractive one yesterday in a computer room - a tall rack, encased in black metal mesh standing on a purplish pedestal. At first I thought it was a big SGI machine. It's a recent installation.
D.
So has Boutell just decided to stop distributing GD without any outside interference - i.e. Unisys haven't played any part in causing this decision to be taken?
How was GD licensed?
Dodge
#1. Is this LZW compression the same compression used in the unix "compress" command?
#2. If Unisys failed to defend their patent/copyright (does anyone know the facts regarding what rights they have to LZW?) for so long, wouldn't it have lapsed?
#3. Who do we email at Unisys to complain about this?
The Dodger