The concept of Apple-on-Intel threatening Linux might be valid if Linux was a commercial operating system, sold by a company whose market share and profits might suffer if Apple were to compete successfully against them.
But it isn't.
You can't threaten Linux. If Red Hat and all the other Linux companies were to drop Linux and switch to something else, if Dell, IBM and all the other box suppliers stopped supporting Linux, if all the hardware manufacturers who currently provide Linux drivers for their products all stopped supporting Linux, it still wouldn't be dead. You'd still have people like Torvalds and Cox writing code in their spare time and there'd still be geeks downloading Linux and installing it on old PCs.
Giving people an alternative to Linux isn't a threat - it's a choice. It's freedom of choice and freedom is what Linux is all about.
More and more, we see articles and talk about Linux's market share, whether it's going to be successful on the desktop, whether it's going to be able to compete against Windows, against Solaris, et cetera, et cetera, et ad infinitum cetera.
Linux doesn't compete against Windows, MacOS X or Solaris. Linux vendors, like Red Hat, compete against Microsoft, Apple and Sun. Linux just is. The fact that it's supported by various companies is great but it's not essential for Linux survival. The fact that the amount of people and companies using Linux is huge and growing is terrific, but it's not essential. If everyone, right up to and including Linus abandoned Linux, I'd still be able to dig out my Red Hat CDs and install it on an old PC.
This article is just typical of/. these days - it's a stupid, hype-ridden question, which hundreds of clueless fuckwits will comment inanely on, wasting bandwidth and electrons.
One, if a literal interpretation of the Bible is correct, what about all these fossils?
God put them there for a laugh. He's sittin' up in Heaven laughin' his ass off at us all getting all wound up about it. Kinda like when I tell socialists that poor people shouldn't be allowed to vote.
I for one refuse to believe that God would give us brains capable of rational, abstract thought, and then plant fake clues to punish those of us who had the gall to use those brains to attempt to understand the world we live in.
Yeah, but he's also the same God who put Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden and said "Right, here's the deal. You can eat anything you like, anything at all in the whoooooole Garden. Except from this tree here. Every other tree - fine. This tree - no."
He knew the gullible bint was going to eat the apple. He never had any intention of letting mankind stay in the Garden of Eden. He just wanted to be able to say "Gotcha!".
An ideal solution to this fiasco would be the incarceration of McBride/Stowell, and some reputable outfit picking up Unixware and OpenServer for a song, and continuing with their support.
How about IBM?
Just imagine, for a moment, that IBM win and SCO end up owing IBM loads of money (whether because they are ordered to pay IBM's costs and/or IBM win one of their counterclaims against SCO) but don't have the cash to pay up (last I heard, they only had $20m in cash left), so they may well have to reach a straight deal with IBM, dispose of some of their assets in order to raise the cash to pay IBM off, or call in the administrators.
Who is the most obvious (not to mention desirable) candidate to acquire the assets of SCO? I can see an IBM acquisition of SCO's assets being good for everyone - SCO's employees, customers and the open source community.
Hell, even if SCO aren't bankrupted, the company might be so devalued that IBM could chomp them up with some spare change...
This is cool for two reasons. First, this is extending the concept of open source to content which, even if it has been done before, has never been done on this large a scale.
Secondly, it's a step towards the BBC making their programming available for download. The BBC produce a huge amount of programming and, while they make a fair amount of money out of selling DVDs, videos (stuff like Blackadder and Doctor Who) and tapes/CDs (e.g. the HHGTTG radio series), there's a heck of a lot of other stuff that it doesn't make commercial sense to publish in that manner - e.g. programmes like Horizon and Top Gear).
I bet the biggest problem with putting programmes like those on the Archive will be the licencing terms for stuff like incidental music and events rights (like for sports and so on), which are presumably all currently based on the concept of broadcast, with extra payments for repeats. I wonder if they'll have to strip out anything that's not the original, complete creation of the contributing organisations.
Anyone who organise a meet-up without needing the help of some crappy dot-com to doesn't deserve to have a social life! Fuck 'em!
They say: What are you interested in?
I say: Making fun of sad, pathetic losers with no lives! Where's the nearest meetup to me, so I can turn up with a huge banner saying "YOU SAD, PATHETIC LOSERS!"?
Time says: "A convenient, non-threatening way to connect to other people who share similar interests and live nearby."
I say: Non-threatening? Not if I have anything to do with it!
They say: Jobs. Meetup.com is looking for an exceptional Project Manager committed to helping our members succeed.
I say: Succeed at what? Having a life?
Christ, in my day, we had Usenet, 2600 and IRC, and we didn't fucking need no steenking meetup.com charging us 19 of your American dollars each time we wanted to get together and pretend that we weren't sad!
Rational Rose is commercial software, right? I'm not a developer, so feel free to tell me that I don't know what the hell I'm talking about; I promise I won't kill you like I normally would...
Why am I reading press release-style articles about commercial software on Slashdot? That's not what I come here for!
Protocol on Blinding Laser Weapons (Protocol IV to the 1980 Convention), 13 October 1995
Article 1
It is prohibited to employ laser weapons specifically designed, as their sole combat function or as one of their combat functions, to cause permanent blindness to unenhanced vision, that is to the naked eye or to the eye with corrective eyesight devices. The High Contracting Parties shall not transfer such weapons to any State or non-State entity.
Article 2
In the employment of laser systems, the High Contracting Parties shall take all feasible precautions to avoid the incidence of permanent blindness to unenhanced vision. Such precautions shall include training of their armed forces and other practical measures.
Article 3
Blinding as an incidental or collateral effect of the legitimate military employment of laser systems, including laser systems used against optical equipment, is not covered by the prohibition of this Protocol.
Article 4
For the purpose of this protocol "permanent blindness" means irreversible and uncorrectable loss of vision which is seriously disabling with no prospect of recovery. Serious disability is equivalent to visual acuity of less than 20/200 Snellen measured using both eyes.
We're not talking about land. We're talking about a brand, a trademark.
A better way of looking at it from your point of view would be if WalMart announced plans to expand into a new country, and a storeowner there had a painted sign saying "WalMart".
The storeowner waits until WalMart move in, open some stores and spend a few million on advertising, then he hangs the WalMart sign outside his shop and customers start going into his shop because they think it's the WalMart that's been advertising cheap food on the TV.
Because he'd kept the sign in his basement until WalMart established their brand, he hasn't established a trademark and, therefore, has no right to use the name 'WalMart'.
You should now stab yourself in the back of your left hand with the nearest sharp object as punishment for being stupid enough to contradict me.
You make a half-decent point and, therefore, I won't have you flogged.
However, your argument is rejected because this situation is different from the one you outlined - Cohen didn't set up a site branded as iTunes or do anything to create a defensible trademark (you don't have to register a trademark for it to be a trademark).
In your example, assuming you'd branded and marketed the site as iFelch, you could claim that iFelch is your trademark (whether or not you'd registered it) and you'd probably find that Apple would probably offer you a fair price to buy the domain from you, that reflected the value of the trademark you had built up.
When he was a teenager, he (with assistance from his daddy) set up a Jewish community website. This was at the height of the Internet bubble. It was speculated that the website would be worth millions and, hence, that young Cohen was a millionaire. He was a media darling for a while - lots of newspaper articles and I think there was a TV program...
I was part of the dot-com scene back then and some of the stuff we were doing was related to communities and content management, so this guy came across our radar screen as a potential client, but the general view amongst serious players (i.e. those who were actually building a real business model, instead of just setting up a website with a catchy name) was that Cohen was basically a rich kid, his daddy was the real business brains behind it all and that, both the company (TotallyJewish or something like that) and Cohen Jr.'s talent, skills, abilities, value, intelligence, business sense (in fact just about everything apart from his father's PR skills at getting his son exposure in the media) were vastly overrated.
The website/company in question was eventually sold for a paper value (i.e. it was a takeover and he got shares in the company that was doing the taking over) for well, well under £1m...
The site that iTunes.co.uk points to is called QuickQuid.com. Cohen doesn't appear to have invested anything in building a business around the iTunes name.
QuickQuid.com appears to be some kind of marketing/promotional business - i.e. they persuade people to sign up with them, in order to receive discounts, special offers, etc. In addition, QuickQuid.com displays adverts - presumably the more times those adverts are viewed/clicked on, the more advertising revenue QuickQuid.com receives. Hence, the more traffic to their site, the more people are likely to sign up and, hence, the more money the company will make.
Apple own the iTunes trademark and have invested a lot of money in building a business around that name.
The vast, vast majority of people who go to www.itunes.co.uk will do so in the expectation of finding the Apple iTunes service.
Now, it seems to me that there are two reasons the itunes.co.uk domain is of value to Cohen/QuickQuid.com:
It's a catchy name and would have been a good name for a company doing something related to music and the Internet. However, it appears that Cohen failed to register itunes as a trademark and, now that Apple have done so, he almost certainly can't. So, he's missed out on realising that potential.
It brings traffic to the QuickQuid.com site because of people who are trying to reach Apple's iTunes service in the UK.
In other words, the domain would have hardly any value if it wasn't for the fact that Apple have spent millions promoting iTunes. Anyone who thinks that Apple should pay a lot of money for the domain because it's "valuable" is essentially saying that Apple should have to pay for something which is only valuable because of money Apple have invested in their trademark. That doesn't seem just to me.
By capturing traffic to itunes.co.uk, QuickQuid.com is benefitting directly from Apple's marketing of iTunes - in essence, it's a parasite on Apple's marketing budget.
Finally, let's not forget that Apple have a duty to protect their trademark.
So, my judgement is as follows:
Cohen should hand the itunes.co.uk domain over to Apple.
Apple should pay Cohen £1,500 (approx $2,500) for costs involved in transferring the domain.
My fee shall be apportioned as follows: Cohen shall pay 1% (£1,000) and Apple shal pay the other 99% (£99,000).
The Clerk of the Court (aka CmdrTaco) shall book me on a six-week Caribbean cruise.
Um? What world do you live in? If you're really drunk and drive around and happen to kill 10 people, would anyone at Daimler Chrysler get carpeted?
You obviously underestimate:
my capacity for getting pissed off when things go wrong,
my readiness to use any excuse, however tenuous, to vent my frustration on individuals who have come to my attention in ways which haven't made me happy,
the amount I worry about whether the person I'm ranting at bears any responsibility whatsoever for what I'm ranting about, and
my readiness to issue instructions along the lines of "Find someone who's surplus to requirements and fire them!"
Gotta keep the troops motivated, y'know?
D. ..is for "Don't..*smack*..Do..*smack*..That..*smack*..Again !*smack*"
Edward Black, chief executive of the CCIA, said he regretted losing Nokia as a member, adding: "We understand their reasons."
..before hanging up the phone to resume rolling around naked on the dollar-strewn floor, laughing manically and throwing fistfuls of dollars into the air.
I don't blame him. Fuck, if I got offered $9.75m to stop bitching about Microsoft, I'd take Gates' arm off at the elbow!
Slashdot Mirror
Q: "Could Apple's Intel Desktop Threaten Linux?"
A: No.
The concept of Apple-on-Intel threatening Linux might be valid if Linux was a commercial operating system, sold by a company whose market share and profits might suffer if Apple were to compete successfully against them.
But it isn't.
You can't threaten Linux. If Red Hat and all the other Linux companies were to drop Linux and switch to something else, if Dell, IBM and all the other box suppliers stopped supporting Linux, if all the hardware manufacturers who currently provide Linux drivers for their products all stopped supporting Linux, it still wouldn't be dead. You'd still have people like Torvalds and Cox writing code in their spare time and there'd still be geeks downloading Linux and installing it on old PCs.
Giving people an alternative to Linux isn't a threat - it's a choice. It's freedom of choice and freedom is what Linux is all about.
More and more, we see articles and talk about Linux's market share, whether it's going to be successful on the desktop, whether it's going to be able to compete against Windows, against Solaris, et cetera, et cetera, et ad infinitum cetera.
Linux doesn't compete against Windows, MacOS X or Solaris. Linux vendors, like Red Hat, compete against Microsoft, Apple and Sun. Linux just is. The fact that it's supported by various companies is great but it's not essential for Linux survival. The fact that the amount of people and companies using Linux is huge and growing is terrific, but it's not essential. If everyone, right up to and including Linus abandoned Linux, I'd still be able to dig out my Red Hat CDs and install it on an old PC.
This article is just typical of /. these days - it's a stupid, hype-ridden question, which hundreds of clueless fuckwits will comment inanely on, wasting bandwidth and electrons.
Wake up and take your heads out of your asses.
D.
..is for Don't. Be so. Fucking. Stupid.
He knew the gullible bint was going to eat the apple. He never had any intention of letting mankind stay in the Garden of Eden. He just wanted to be able to say "Gotcha!".
D.
What assets, other than the operating systems, does SCO possess?
Why did SCO sue IBM in the first place?
D.
How about IBM?
Just imagine, for a moment, that IBM win and SCO end up owing IBM loads of money (whether because they are ordered to pay IBM's costs and/or IBM win one of their counterclaims against SCO) but don't have the cash to pay up (last I heard, they only had $20m in cash left), so they may well have to reach a straight deal with IBM, dispose of some of their assets in order to raise the cash to pay IBM off, or call in the administrators.
Who is the most obvious (not to mention desirable) candidate to acquire the assets of SCO? I can see an IBM acquisition of SCO's assets being good for everyone - SCO's employees, customers and the open source community.
Hell, even if SCO aren't bankrupted, the company might be so devalued that IBM could chomp them up with some spare change...
D.
Secondly, it's a step towards the BBC making their programming available for download. The BBC produce a huge amount of programming and, while they make a fair amount of money out of selling DVDs, videos (stuff like Blackadder and Doctor Who) and tapes/CDs (e.g. the HHGTTG radio series), there's a heck of a lot of other stuff that it doesn't make commercial sense to publish in that manner - e.g. programmes like Horizon and Top Gear ).
I bet the biggest problem with putting programmes like those on the Archive will be the licencing terms for stuff like incidental music and events rights (like for sports and so on), which are presumably all currently based on the concept of broadcast, with extra payments for repeats. I wonder if they'll have to strip out anything that's not the original, complete creation of the contributing organisations.
D.
It's things like this that enlighten me as to why there aren't more women in science.
Female Genius: "I have this theory that we can create super-fast computers by slowing down light!"
Old, Bald Male Faulty Head: "Stupid woman..."
D.
Anyone who organise a meet-up without needing the help of some crappy dot-com to doesn't deserve to have a social life! Fuck 'em!
They say: What are you interested in?
I say: Making fun of sad, pathetic losers with no lives! Where's the nearest meetup to me, so I can turn up with a huge banner saying "YOU SAD, PATHETIC LOSERS!"?
Time says: "A convenient, non-threatening way to connect to other people who share similar interests and live nearby."
I say: Non-threatening? Not if I have anything to do with it!
They say: Jobs. Meetup.com is looking for an exceptional Project Manager committed to helping our members succeed.
I say: Succeed at what? Having a life?
Christ, in my day, we had Usenet, 2600 and IRC, and we didn't fucking need no steenking meetup.com charging us 19 of your American dollars each time we wanted to get together and pretend that we weren't sad!
Bah! Flogging's too good for 'em!
D.
Why the hell is this a story?
Especially when there's a far more interesting piece of tech-related news this morning?
D.
..is for Don't Waste My Time!
- Uhm, not to me, it's not!
- BWAHAHAHAHAHA!!! No stop it, please, my sides hurt...
- I want some of what that guy's been smoking!
- Err.. I think you got that the wrong way around.
- You know, I think you're a month and a week early with this one.
- *nod*, *smile*, *look for the nearest exit and move slowly towards it*
- echo "Dvorak" | tr -d 'v' | tr -d 'a'
D.You've never gone shopping on London's Oxford Street on a Saturday, have you?
D.
The right? No. The ability? Yes.
Terrorising people into behaving in the way you think they should is despicable. Who made you King?
GUARDS! TAKE THIS MAN OUTSIDE AND BEHEAD HIM!
Just because something's Evil doesn't mean you shouldn't do it...
D.
..is for Darwinism...
Rational Rose is commercial software, right? I'm not a developer, so feel free to tell me that I don't know what the hell I'm talking about; I promise I won't kill you like I normally would...
Why am I reading press release-style articles about commercial software on Slashdot? That's not what I come here for!
D.
Protocol on Blinding Laser Weapons (Protocol IV to the 1980 Convention), 13 October 1995
Article 1
It is prohibited to employ laser weapons specifically designed, as their sole combat function or as one of their combat functions, to cause permanent blindness to unenhanced vision, that is to the naked eye or to the eye with corrective eyesight devices. The High Contracting Parties shall not transfer such weapons to any State or non-State entity.
Article 2
In the employment of laser systems, the High Contracting Parties shall take all feasible precautions to avoid the incidence of permanent blindness to unenhanced vision. Such precautions shall include training of their armed forces and other practical measures.
Article 3
Blinding as an incidental or collateral effect of the legitimate military employment of laser systems, including laser systems used against optical equipment, is not covered by the prohibition of this Protocol.
Article 4
For the purpose of this protocol "permanent blindness" means irreversible and uncorrectable loss of vision which is seriously disabling with no prospect of recovery. Serious disability is equivalent to visual acuity of less than 20/200 Snellen measured using both eyes.
Captain D.
Not strictly true - read your Geneva Conventions.
Captain D.
A better way of looking at it from your point of view would be if WalMart announced plans to expand into a new country, and a storeowner there had a painted sign saying "WalMart".
The storeowner waits until WalMart move in, open some stores and spend a few million on advertising, then he hangs the WalMart sign outside his shop and customers start going into his shop because they think it's the WalMart that's been advertising cheap food on the TV.
Because he'd kept the sign in his basement until WalMart established their brand, he hasn't established a trademark and, therefore, has no right to use the name 'WalMart'.
You should now stab yourself in the back of your left hand with the nearest sharp object as punishment for being stupid enough to contradict me.
D.
However, your argument is rejected because this situation is different from the one you outlined - Cohen didn't set up a site branded as iTunes or do anything to create a defensible trademark (you don't have to register a trademark for it to be a trademark).
In your example, assuming you'd branded and marketed the site as iFelch, you could claim that iFelch is your trademark (whether or not you'd registered it) and you'd probably find that Apple would probably offer you a fair price to buy the domain from you, that reflected the value of the trademark you had built up.
D.
- He didn't create a site - he still hasn't created an itunes.co.uk-branded site. It just points to QuickQuid.com
- "CDs and Music" is one of the menu items on the page you get if you type www.itunes.co.uk into a browser.
- Have Kodak trademarked the word "Gold"? I don't think so.
You are hereby judged to be a complete moron. I'm holding you in contempt of court and sentencing you to a sound flogging.Bailiff! Remove this imbecile from my courtroom forthwith!
D.
..is for Don't Piss Off The Judge!
When he was a teenager, he (with assistance from his daddy) set up a Jewish community website. This was at the height of the Internet bubble. It was speculated that the website would be worth millions and, hence, that young Cohen was a millionaire. He was a media darling for a while - lots of newspaper articles and I think there was a TV program...
I was part of the dot-com scene back then and some of the stuff we were doing was related to communities and content management, so this guy came across our radar screen as a potential client, but the general view amongst serious players (i.e. those who were actually building a real business model, instead of just setting up a website with a catchy name) was that Cohen was basically a rich kid, his daddy was the real business brains behind it all and that, both the company (TotallyJewish or something like that) and Cohen Jr.'s talent, skills, abilities, value, intelligence, business sense (in fact just about everything apart from his father's PR skills at getting his son exposure in the media) were vastly overrated.
The website/company in question was eventually sold for a paper value (i.e. it was a takeover and he got shares in the company that was doing the taking over) for well, well under £1m...
D.
- The site that iTunes.co.uk points to is called QuickQuid.com. Cohen doesn't appear to have invested anything in building a business around the iTunes name.
- QuickQuid.com appears to be some kind of marketing/promotional business - i.e. they persuade people to sign up with them, in order to receive discounts, special offers, etc. In addition, QuickQuid.com displays adverts - presumably the more times those adverts are viewed/clicked on, the more advertising revenue QuickQuid.com receives. Hence, the more traffic to their site, the more people are likely to sign up and, hence, the more money the company will make.
- Apple own the iTunes trademark and have invested a lot of money in building a business around that name.
- The vast, vast majority of people who go to www.itunes.co.uk will do so in the expectation of finding the Apple iTunes service.
Now, it seems to me that there are two reasons the itunes.co.uk domain is of value to Cohen/QuickQuid.com:- It's a catchy name and would have been a good name for a company doing something related to music and the Internet. However, it appears that Cohen failed to register itunes as a trademark and, now that Apple have done so, he almost certainly can't. So, he's missed out on realising that potential.
- It brings traffic to the QuickQuid.com site because of people who are trying to reach Apple's iTunes service in the UK.
In other words, the domain would have hardly any value if it wasn't for the fact that Apple have spent millions promoting iTunes. Anyone who thinks that Apple should pay a lot of money for the domain because it's "valuable" is essentially saying that Apple should have to pay for something which is only valuable because of money Apple have invested in their trademark. That doesn't seem just to me.By capturing traffic to itunes.co.uk, QuickQuid.com is benefitting directly from Apple's marketing of iTunes - in essence, it's a parasite on Apple's marketing budget.
Finally, let's not forget that Apple have a duty to protect their trademark.
So, my judgement is as follows:
- Cohen should hand the itunes.co.uk domain over to Apple.
- Apple should pay Cohen £1,500 (approx $2,500) for costs involved in transferring the domain.
- My fee shall be apportioned as follows: Cohen shall pay 1% (£1,000) and Apple shal pay the other 99% (£99,000).
- The Clerk of the Court (aka CmdrTaco) shall book me on a six-week Caribbean cruise.
Case dismissed.D.
..is for Djudge.
D.
D.
(Score: -279, Bad Taste)
You obviously underestimate:
- my capacity for getting pissed off when things go wrong,
- my readiness to use any excuse, however tenuous, to vent my frustration on individuals who have come to my attention in ways which haven't made me happy,
- the amount I worry about whether the person I'm ranting at bears any responsibility whatsoever for what I'm ranting about, and
- my readiness to issue instructions along the lines of "Find someone who's surplus to requirements and fire them!"
Gotta keep the troops motivated, y'know?D.
But given that i's the public sector, I bet nothing happens...
D.
is for DOH!
I guess NIPLECC was too close for comfort. :-)
D.
I don't blame him. Fuck, if I got offered $9.75m to stop bitching about Microsoft, I'd take Gates' arm off at the elbow!
D.