"When you're CTO of a company and repeatedly use that title and the company name in a publication of that sort, the average reader assumes your represent your company."
When the CTO of a company is speaking for the company, they usually speak in the 'royal we'. Either that or they say "MegaCorp thinks that Microsoft is a threat to society".
When a paper clearly says that "The opinions of the authors are theirs alone", it's pretty hard to argue that they really meant to speak on behalf of their company.
On the other hand, this incident really lowers my opinion of @Stake. With this firing, they've essentially declared that their employees are not free to speak their mind when it comes to matters of security. Given that they're a company that supposedly sells security advice, how in the world am I really going to be able to trust their employees' opinions now when they tell me that "this software wil do you fine"? Are they speaking what's good for me, or just towing the company line? If it's the latter, then why am I paying them to shove an advertisement down my throat?
If we're to be serious about addressing vulnerabilities in our software infrastructure, we have to be willing to discuss these issues honestly, without self-censoring out of fear of stating the obvious when it's inconvenient.
"Sometimes being bold is fashionable. At other times, only the brave dare to be bold.'
. - Ben Kingsly 'Courtship Rites'
6x200MB drives giving 1.2Terabytes... OMB: This means that the guy is using RAID-0. In other words, when (not if) one of those drives goes south, he's gonna have 1.0Terabytes of allmost usable filesystem.
If FSCK manages to make any sort of sense out of what's left, it's gonna take a week of babysitting to get it to the point where it'll do much of anything useful with that data.
One last thing they could do....
on
The Bionic Office
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· Score: 0, Troll
. . . ..
I suspect that $700 per person is on the high side for software developers throughout the world, but if it means we can hire from the 99.9 percentile instead of the 99 percentile, it'll be worth it.
It might help if they moved to a real operating system...
(yes, I just had to say it).
Re:My desk is in a *hallway*...
on
The Bionic Office
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· Score: 2, Funny
A friend of mine had her desk in a closet. Just the desk. If you saw her at the office and didn't know what was going on, you'd think that they put her against the wall as a timeout.
Being openly Lesbian, this led to incessant jokes about being in and out of the closet. Not that she minded (I wouldn't be surprised if she actualy initiated it).. In fact, in the telling of it, I'd say that she seemed downright proud of it.
This reminds me of a story that I got from a Former Navy Seal (although I forget which one it was. I've got an acquaintance who was once a Navy Seal, and a book from a (different) former Navy Seal).. In any case.
The SEAL squad was going in to set up an ambush when they were, instead, caught in an ambush (possibly just an opportunistic attack) by the VC. As they hid in the cover from the attack one of the members of the squad (known for his offbeat humor) yelled to his squad mates:
That was an SCO Australia spokesperson talking about the chances of SCO suing someone Down Under. Presuming that SCO had a real case (a big presumption), SCO US could still file suit and honestly say "That wasn't us talking, that was our aussie subsidiary".
"Diplomacy is the art of telling a lion 'nice kitty, kitty, kitty' while you search for a big rock" - - Unknown
It was perfectly possible to go for 2 out of 3. For example "Linux distribution from HP and support contract" should have been enough,
Well, yes, it's entirely possible. On the other hand, why should HP subsidize your purchase of a Dell CPU with a legal indemnity? This is not an altruistic idea on their part. They intend to profit from the indemnity. Software hardware and service contracts are all profit centres.
The nice thing about this is that it puts the shoe to the likes of MS saying "so why don't Linux vendors indemnify their customers if this is a slam-dunk for Linux?" Well, we now have at least one large manufacturerer effectively saying "We think that SCO's blatherings are bogus -- and we're willing to put our money where our mouth is."
Are you meaning to tell me that Burlington Coat Factory's 1300 Linux boxes back in 1999 wasn't a major win for corporate Linux?;-)
Thanks for the pointer.. I wasn't aware that they are a Linux site. Gives me more incentive to shop there.
It's not that Burlington Coat Factory wasn't a step forward. Having taken a step forward doesn't preclude further steps forward. Clearly, Ford Motor Corp is going to get the attention of more Fortune 500 CEOs and CIOs than Burlington Coat Factory did.
It would be hard for any pro-Linux person to say that this isn't A Good Thing(TM).
On the other hand, I like the article's comment on how this could be condidered a big defeat for Microsoft... "if you count not being seriously considered as being a defeat."
Is my childhood memory fading? I don't remember silly puddy as being "bouncy."
Oh yeah! quite bouncy!
That's part of what made it silly. It was bouncier than most balls, but since it didn't hold shape very well, it would bounce off in a random direction when it hit the floor, the wall, the table the cat and/or the window (not necessarily in that order).
Now, I am going to be forced to friend you out of simple respect for your ability to defend your point.
I would definitely have t take that as a compliment. thanks.
I tend, on occasion, to take people to task for saying things that are technically incorrect . . . but I'm not a total correctness-nazi.
I would make a distinction between technically incorrect and technically correctible.
Technically incorrect correct, is where the final result might be accurate (or at least in the right ballpark), but the method used to get (the technique) was incorrect. An obvious example of that would be where you have a mathematical equation where you get the sign wrong twice -- and the errors end up cancelling each other out. The result might be (roughly) right, but the method is technically correct.
Technically correctible, on the other hand is where the answer is generally correct, but the ambiguities in english allows a listener to interpret it in a way that would make it wrong.
I think that the issue you took on was closer to technically correctable than technically incorrect.
Unfortunately, english
is overloaded enough that just about anything that we say is probably echnically correctible. to be a total correctness nazi with a penchant for noticing the technically correctible would be an invitation to madness. I'm pretty clear that you're not mad, so obviously you're not a correctness Nazi, either.
Btw: the reference to Darl was a cautionary comment, not a descriptive one.
Man, the mods are funny. The real goatse link is at +1 Troll with 50% Informative and my not-the-bad-tubgirl link is at -1 Troll.
It's the almost reflexive reaction of immediately moderating anything to do with the goatse.cx site a troll. Originally it was a protective reaction (not wanting to get a flurry of complaints), then everybody knew what it was, so it became an inside joke. Now a quarter of the Slashdot audience doesn't know what the site is (since it's died out for more than a year because of the automatic domain tags).
In any case, even with these two mods down to -1 I think I'm still net positive for the day.
The Globe and Mail is the older and generally more respected newspaper. The National Post is a recent upstart. It is generally considered much more right-wing and a bit downscale.
You may disagree with his post, but it's far from a troll. Teller's obit mentions that there are many people who consider his work in perfecting and promoting nuclear weapons as evil.
Expressing an honest opinion (even if it is rather caustic) is not a troll.
Re:Corrupted Capitalism
on
Back To SCO
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· Score: 1
Oh man, getting moderated troll is sooo insulting. (sigh).
BTW: Insignificant does not mean zero (although sometimes zero can be an insignificant result). Insignificant means the point at which something no longer provides meaninginful imput to the process. Almost literally (from root meanings): not worth pointing out.
Actually, doesn't something effecting change on something else *mean* that it's exerting an influence, regardless of how statistically small it is? Just because you choose not to notice the difference in something (let's use a very small increment in time, for example), does not make it insignificant.
The English language is full of amibiguities and shortcuts. The expectation of both the listener and speaker is to use it in a way that gravitates to a common meaning.
You can speak and listen the English
the way that it is meant to be used, or you can insist on technical extremeties which -- although not necessarily completely wrong -- reduce the language to a quivering mass of useless verbiage.
If you insist on using the language in the latter manner, you might as well close up shop and become a hermit. Beware for on that path lie the worst examples of the legal profession and the blatherings of Mr. McBride and other SCO hacks.
Corrupted Capitalism
on
Back To SCO
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Adam Smith's seminal treatise on capitalism (based on multiple small businesses in an open market) has often been misquoted as a justification for global multinationalism. There is another aspect to his work that I'd like to adress here.
One of his presumptions is that, 'In advancing his own welfare, a businessman will also advance the welfare of his entire community'. To reverse that logic, I'd say that to powerfully advance his own welare as a 'good' capitalist, a businessman should necessarily benefit his entire community.
In eiter case, Smith's treatise presumes that people play in a reasonably fair manner within the constraints of capitalism. He did not take into account the effects of what I would refer to as meta-game shenanigans like using legal technicalities to usurp the works of others (and thus provide a disincentive to advancing the welfare of the whole.).
McBride and his allies at SCO are an example of these metagame players -- attempting to use rules far outside the domain of the market to shift ownership of the resources being created without really creating any of his own. Although he hids behind a mask of 'last defender of the free enterprise system', he is in fact one of those most earnestly undermining that system from within.
"Patriotism is tha last refuse of the scoundrel".
. - (reference anyone?)
I got a good laugh...
on
Back To SCO
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· Score: 4, Interesting
In feedback to the LinuxWorld article, one reader wrote:
Just because SCO has been unable, or more realistically unwilling to develop this component of their business to meet the rapidly growing demand, does not mean that the opportunity does not exist and that it is not being capatalized upon now, as we speak.
That comment made me laugh -- not because I disagree with it, but because it made me realize domething:
Mr. McBride wants the OS community to come up with a business model for using open source that he can wrap his greedy little mind around, because he wants to usurp that idea too.
It's not like we're expecting him to come up with an inventive idea, are we?
The effects of one object's (eg earth's) gravity can drop below the noise level. As an example, the gravitational pull of a planet orbiting some star in the Andromeda galaxy is provably not zero, but I don't care how many digits you claim to do your math to, it's not worth my time to include it in any meanigfull calculations.
Influence generally implies causality. If the change caused by something -- even though non-zero -- is not worth notice, then influence is generally considered to be lost.
Slashdot Mirror
When the CTO of a company is speaking for the company, they usually speak in the 'royal we'. Either that or they say "MegaCorp thinks that Microsoft is a threat to society".
When a paper clearly says that "The opinions of the authors are theirs alone", it's pretty hard to argue that they really meant to speak on behalf of their company.
On the other hand, this incident really lowers my opinion of @Stake.
With this firing, they've essentially declared that their employees are not free to speak their mind when it comes to matters of security. Given that they're a company that supposedly sells security advice, how in the world am I really going to be able to trust their employees' opinions now when they tell me that "this software wil do you fine"? Are they speaking what's good for me, or just towing the company line? If it's the latter, then why am I paying them to shove an advertisement down my throat?
"Sometimes being bold is fashionable. At other times, only the brave dare to be bold.'
. - Ben Kingsly 'Courtship Rites'
If FSCK manages to make any sort of sense out of what's left, it's gonna take a week of babysitting to get it to the point where it'll do much of anything useful with that data.
I suspect that $700 per person is on the high side for software developers throughout the world, but if it means we can hire from the 99.9 percentile instead of the 99 percentile, it'll be worth it.
It might help if they moved to a real operating system...
(yes, I just had to say it).
Being openly Lesbian, this led to incessant jokes about being in and out of the closet. Not that she minded (I wouldn't be surprised if she actualy initiated it) .. In fact, in the telling of it, I'd say that she seemed downright proud of it.
The SEAL squad was going in to set up an ambush when they were, instead, caught in an ambush (possibly just an opportunistic attack) by the VC. As they hid in the cover from the attack one of the members of the squad (known for his offbeat humor) yelled to his squad mates:
SCO has no intention to sue Linux end-users
That was an SCO Australia spokesperson talking about the chances of SCO suing someone Down Under. Presuming that SCO had a real case (a big presumption), SCO US could still file suit and honestly say "That wasn't us talking, that was our aussie subsidiary".
"Diplomacy is the art of telling a lion 'nice kitty, kitty, kitty' while you search for a big rock"
- - Unknown
Well, yes, it's entirely possible. On the other hand, why should HP subsidize your purchase of a Dell CPU with a legal indemnity? This is not an altruistic idea on their part. They intend to profit from the indemnity. Software hardware and service contracts are all profit centres.
The nice thing about this is that it puts the shoe to the likes of MS saying "so why don't Linux vendors indemnify their customers if this is a slam-dunk for Linux?" Well, we now have at least one large manufacturerer effectively saying "We think that SCO's blatherings are bogus -- and we're willing to put our money where our mouth is."
Reminds me of the French Diplomat's comment about their nuclear test program:
. "It's not a bomb. It's a device that explodes"
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/treeview/default. asp?url=/TechNet/prodtechnol/cms/case/ford.asp
as a proper hotlink, so that SlashDot doesn't break the name up for being too long.
Thanks for the pointer.. I wasn't aware that they are a Linux site. Gives me more incentive to shop there.
It's not that Burlington Coat Factory wasn't a step forward. Having taken a step forward doesn't preclude further steps forward. Clearly, Ford Motor Corp is going to get the attention of more Fortune 500 CEOs and CIOs than Burlington Coat Factory did.
It would be hard for any pro-Linux person to say that this isn't A Good Thing(TM).
On the other hand, I like the article's comment on how this could be condidered a big defeat for Microsoft ... "if you count not being seriously considered as being a defeat."
Methinks I need to find a 'BSD is dying' post, and run it thru sed.
Oh yeah! quite bouncy!
That's part of what made it silly. It was bouncier than most balls, but since it didn't hold shape very well, it would bounce off in a random direction when it hit the floor, the wall, the table the cat and/or the window (not necessarily in that order).
A memo was passed to a number of Government departments asking for "A list of employees in your division broken down by sex."
Came back one reply:
"I'm sorry, but we have nobody in our department who fits your criteria. We do, however have four alcoholics."
I would definitely have t take that as a compliment. thanks.
I tend, on occasion, to take people to task for saying things that are technically incorrect . . . but I'm not a total correctness-nazi.
I would make a distinction between technically incorrect and technically correctible.
Technically incorrect correct, is where the final result might be accurate (or at least in the right ballpark), but the method used to get (the technique) was incorrect. An obvious example of that would be where you have a mathematical equation where you get the sign wrong twice -- and the errors end up cancelling each other out. The result might be (roughly) right, but the method is technically correct.
Technically correctible, on the other hand is where the answer is generally correct, but the ambiguities in english allows a listener to interpret it in a way that would make it wrong. I think that the issue you took on was closer to technically correctable than technically incorrect.
Unfortunately, english is overloaded enough that just about anything that we say is probably echnically correctible. to be a total correctness nazi with a penchant for noticing the technically correctible would be an invitation to madness. I'm pretty clear that you're not mad, so obviously you're not a correctness Nazi, either.
Btw: the reference to Darl was a cautionary comment, not a descriptive one.
It's the almost reflexive reaction of immediately moderating anything to do with the goatse.cx site a troll. Originally it was a protective reaction (not wanting to get a flurry of complaints), then everybody knew what it was, so it became an inside joke. Now a quarter of the Slashdot audience doesn't know what the site is (since it's died out for more than a year because of the automatic domain tags).
In any case, even with these two mods down to -1 I think I'm still net positive for the day.
The Globe and Mail is the older and generally more respected newspaper. The National Post is a recent upstart. It is generally considered much more right-wing and a bit downscale.
Expressing an honest opinion (even if it is rather caustic) is not a troll.
Oh man, getting moderated troll is sooo insulting. (sigh).
Well, your post deserves funny moderation -- but not for the tubgirl referene.
example: this discussion.
The English language is full of amibiguities and shortcuts. The expectation of both the listener and speaker is to use it in a way that gravitates to a common meaning.
You can speak and listen the English the way that it is meant to be used, or you can insist on technical extremeties which -- although not necessarily completely wrong -- reduce the language to a quivering mass of useless verbiage.
If you insist on using the language in the latter manner, you might as well close up shop and become a hermit. Beware for on that path lie the worst examples of the legal profession and the blatherings of Mr. McBride and other SCO hacks.
One of his presumptions is that, 'In advancing his own welfare, a businessman will also advance the welfare of his entire community'. To reverse that logic, I'd say that to powerfully advance his own welare as a 'good' capitalist, a businessman should necessarily benefit his entire community.
In eiter case, Smith's treatise presumes that people play in a reasonably fair manner within the constraints of capitalism. He did not take into account the effects of what I would refer to as meta-game shenanigans like using legal technicalities to usurp the works of others (and thus provide a disincentive to advancing the welfare of the whole.).
McBride and his allies at SCO are an example of these metagame players -- attempting to use rules far outside the domain of the market to shift ownership of the resources being created without really creating any of his own. Although he hids behind a mask of 'last defender of the free enterprise system', he is in fact one of those most earnestly undermining that system from within.
"Patriotism is tha last refuse of the scoundrel". . - (reference anyone?)
That comment made me laugh -- not because I disagree with it, but because it made me realize domething:
Mr. McBride wants the OS community to come up with a business model for using open source that he can wrap his greedy little mind around, because he wants to usurp that idea too.It's not like we're expecting him to come up with an inventive idea, are we?
Influence generally implies causality. If the change caused by something -- even though non-zero -- is not worth notice, then influence is generally considered to be lost.