First of all, they're already going to be forced to pay for being a public company, so they might as well make some money from it.
Secondly, they're selling significantly LESS than majority ownership in the company, which means the same people will call the shots. The only thing that will change them, is if the call of money becomes too strong for the people who brought the company this far.
" The thing he misses is the principle of competition. Basically, by its mere existence, a free alternative threatens the nonfree version into playing nice."
Not exactly. By its mere existence, a free (and legitimate--it can't be a piece of crap) alternative forces the nonfree version into recognising it. The nonfree version can either play nicely or really really dirty.
Nonetheless, RMS certainly does miss a few things. Repeatedly.
I run Solaris, Linux, and Windows at home. After a year of Solaris being my most heavily used platform, I find that it's also the lowest admin-time-cost platform of the three. Upgrades and updates are fast and painless, and fairly infrequent. Versionitis is a non-issue, except when it comes to applications (which have generally been developed on Linux, curiously).
I find that Linux is still a horrible mishmash of interdependencies, some of which are mutually exclusive. apt-get makes it MUCH easier to deal with, but you still do have to deal with it one way or another. Windows is worse--they have a very nice driver install/upgrade system that no vendors in existence seem to use; and entropy forces a clean reinstall of Windows every 12-18 months, no matter what you do.
To the mplayer development team and anyone else concerned about this or any other hypothetical violation of an as-yet untested license, I say this:
Put your money where your mouth is. If you can't negotiate with KISS, then take them to court. Prove or disprove the validity of your claims for once and for all.
First of all, you're right--it's an international community. Thus, international standards should apply!
The USA is the ONLY "localized community" that misspells metre. The rest of the English-speaking world gets it right.
And who am I to say that one spelling is "right" and another is "wrong?" Well I'm no one, but the BIPM seems to claim some authority, and they say metre is official.
Look, it's like this. There is an official, universally recognised, standard unit of length called the metre. Its definition is as follows:
"The metre is the length of the path travelled by light in vacuum during a time interval of 1/299 792 458 of a second."
A meter is either a different (and unrecognised, unstandardized, potentially unknown) unit entirely, or a misspelling. That's all there is to it. The meter is not an SI unit.
That may be what Debian says, but old-school kernel folks (i.e. long before Linux was created) would argue that Debian is wrong.
There has always been some debate over what constitutes an OS. Is it the kernel, the kernel+drivers, or the minimum software required to start a computer? (Or if you're Microsoft, it's every application you might ever need, painfully welded onto the kernel to make it appear to be part of the OS)
The internet won't get any better until we start havin' us some KILLIN'S! Start with the spammers, then the HTML email idiots, and then work our way down until we get to the ALL CAPS TWITS.
Once we're down to ten thousand or so people again, we'll be fine. And the others can go fix the rest of the world.
You can definitely tell that these are computer geeks, and not chemistry geeks. Liquid nitrogen is remarkably safe stuff to play with, unless you're deeply stupid about it.
So exactly why the FUCK should I spend money, time, resources, and effort in an attempt at closing my eyes to criminals, instead of working at getting them thrown in jail where they belong?
OK, I, Robot was a great collection of short stories. Harlan Ellison did a brilliant (and then some) job of tying them into a cohesive screenplay. Then, being Ellison, he pissed off some Hollywood types.
Now they're making a movie that's called "I, Robot" but is actually a new story, 'based on parts of the nine originals.' Good grief!
Seriously, if there was ANY intent on the makers' part to do a faithful rendition of I, Robot, they just would have used Ellison's screenplay and be done with it. Given that they have a new writer and a new story, I'll bet real money that this is going to be a crap movie with crap acting and lots of fight/chase scenes, using Asimov's name to sell more seats.
This is a pretty straightforward question, and not answered as near as I can see.
Were you doing exactly what you were contracted (yes, in writing) to do?
Quite often, being a security analyst doesn't implicitly include vulnerability testing, and when it comes to security, GET IT IN WRITING before touching anything. ANYTHING!
If you failed on this point, then it's just begging to be (inappropriately, but allowably) expoloited by a sleazy company.
If you were being paid to do exactly this, and then were fired as a result of it, then screw it. It's not easy losing a job, but there are some companies you're better off away from.
I've never been a big winamp fan. Certainly winamp3 sucked, but even winamp 2 was painfully flashy and obtuse, not to mention slow and awkward to use (although the playback performance was fine).
So after a lot of digging and trying every other player I could legitimately download, I found The Core Media Player. This is fast, simple, straightforward, and the performance is great.
So what does winamp5 have over TCMP? Not to start a flame war, just wondering if there's any reason I should bother downloading and trying it.
Re:Spam by Any Other name will not sound so Odius
on
The Life of a Spammer
·
· Score: 1
"I don't know about most people, but isn't this business model just too too tempting ?"
Sure it is. Just like chucking a brick through a window and grabbing what you want, instead of buying it. It's theft, plain and simple.
First of all, I'm as suspicious of legislation having any useful effect as anyone. I'm not convinced that this is the solution.
However, how much harm does spam cost? a lot. Hundreds of millions of dollars annually at the very least, and growing incredibly quickly. Your argument about 'good for the ecosystem' is interesting, but irrelevant. Rather than a lion and a wildebeast, a better analogy would be the police and criminals (because make no mistake--spammers are commiting fraud and theft with every spam they send out). IF we eradicated crime from our streets, we wouldn't need much of a police force. Does that mean that we should encourage crime, to keep the cops employed? I'm sure that even the police themselves would agree that it's a preposterous idea.
The money being spent on spam could be BETTER spent on developing better technologies, instead of fighting criminals. Furthermore, the infrastructure we currently have would be far less loaded (and thus faster, more reliable, etc.) without spam.
Now your point about the consequences is very well taken indeed. Filtering doesn't work. Legislation will most likely not work. Finding a way of interrupting the money flowing to the spammers is the only way of stopping spam, and how to do that is a difficult question to say the least. Greylisting is about the best technology I've seen to do it, but any given technology isn't the answer to a whole problem.
OK, this is all just a guess, but I believe it's an educated one.
Solaris/Sparc will continue to be their preferred high-end server platform, and the place that they put most of their R&D money. It will never be pushed as a desktop environment, except for those environments which require it (data analysts, geophysicists, etc.)
Linux/Sparc they won't touch.
Linux/x86, they're pushing on the desktop now with their "Java Desktop." I think that they'll push this _heavily_, even trying to sell to random people off the street. (witness their dealing with Office Despot, last week.)
Solaris/x86. With their recent ties to AMD, I suspect that they're going to encourage people to use Solaris/x86 on their cheap server lines (esp. the blades), and possibly push the application companies to port their Sparc versions over. Ideally they'd be running Landmark apps and such on Solaris/Sparc machines, but right now many of them are pushing Linux/x86, which is much cheaper for a given performance level right now.
The biggest reason for Sun having Solaris/x86 at all is to keep people who can't justify the hardware costs of Sparc gear right now, to keep (or in some cases, start) running Solaris (ideally on Sun boxes), rather than going to ye randome Linux platform. Now if Sun can differentiate between their own Linux/x86 offering (end-user desktop) and Solaris/x86 (workstation and low-end server) while maintaining their REAL product (Solaris/Sparc), then they might have a good plan.
I think that this latest action is mostly to run the x86 product up a flagpole, just to see if anyone cares.
The last time I played with Solaris x86 was the week that Solaris7 was released for that platform. (i.e. early 1998, I think.)
So with no recent knowledge on my part (but LOTS of knowledge of Solaris/Sparc--I'm writing this message on my Ultra2 right now) what makes the x86 version sucky? What differences are there?
Re:How does this help us, or Sun
on
Solaris 9 x86 Review
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
The biggest one is a consistent OS across the board.
We've got a group of geophysicists who use high-end sparc desktops (just receieved eight loaded Blade 2500s this week). Now having the rest of the group using the same computing platform would help substantially, and Intel hardware is still substantially cheaper than the Blade 150.
Really, I suspect that Sun releasing this is a way of seeing what the maximum prospective customer base might be. They're pushing their "X86 Java desktop" hard right now, and before they get too far into that I think they want to gauge how much development to put into Solaris/x86 as a desktop OS. (i.e. fancy apps, user friendly stuff)
Makes me wonder how well you know the product you're supporting.
We just did a massive rollout of WinXP across the company (700 desktops and counting). The project took eight months of the Wintel group's time to plan and test, and will take about five months to deploy.
However, this was the first and only upgrade since their initial WinNT 4.0 desktops were installed. Roughly one rollout per decade isn't too bad, all things considered. The thing is, much of the testing and planning involved building simple, lightweight, minimal machines. with few things to go wrong, with easy and straightforward central admin. The minimum spec for these machines is about half of what MS claims for XP, and the per-desk ongoing admin cost is cheaper than anything else they've had from MS. Win95/98 were judged as BAD options, because they were poor OSes. The biggest 'danger' of using Win2k/XP (and even NT4) is that not all admins have the greater skill set to properly set up and maintain such an environment.
None of which affects me anyways--I administer the Solaris boxes.:-)
Slashdot Mirror
First of all, they're already going to be forced to pay for being a public company, so they might as well make some money from it.
Secondly, they're selling significantly LESS than majority ownership in the company, which means the same people will call the shots. The only thing that will change them, is if the call of money becomes too strong for the people who brought the company this far.
" The thing he misses is the principle of competition. Basically, by its mere existence, a free alternative threatens the nonfree version into playing nice."
Not exactly. By its mere existence, a free (and legitimate--it can't be a piece of crap) alternative forces the nonfree version into recognising it. The nonfree version can either play nicely or really really dirty.
Nonetheless, RMS certainly does miss a few things. Repeatedly.
I run Solaris, Linux, and Windows at home. After a year of Solaris being my most heavily used platform, I find that it's also the lowest admin-time-cost platform of the three. Upgrades and updates are fast and painless, and fairly infrequent. Versionitis is a non-issue, except when it comes to applications (which have generally been developed on Linux, curiously).
I find that Linux is still a horrible mishmash of interdependencies, some of which are mutually exclusive. apt-get makes it MUCH easier to deal with, but you still do have to deal with it one way or another. Windows is worse--they have a very nice driver install/upgrade system that no vendors in existence seem to use; and entropy forces a clean reinstall of Windows every 12-18 months, no matter what you do.
To the mplayer development team and anyone else concerned about this or any other hypothetical violation of an as-yet untested license, I say this:
Put your money where your mouth is. If you can't negotiate with KISS, then take them to court. Prove or disprove the validity of your claims for once and for all.
First of all, you're right--it's an international community. Thus, international standards should apply!
The USA is the ONLY "localized community" that misspells metre. The rest of the English-speaking world gets it right.
And who am I to say that one spelling is "right" and another is "wrong?" Well I'm no one, but the BIPM seems to claim some authority, and they say metre is official.
Look, it's like this. There is an official, universally recognised, standard unit of length called the metre. Its definition is as follows:
"The metre is the length of the path travelled by light in vacuum during a time interval of 1/299 792 458 of a second."
A meter is either a different (and unrecognised, unstandardized, potentially unknown) unit entirely, or a misspelling. That's all there is to it. The meter is not an SI unit.
Would that be the truly awful American Heritage Dictionary? Chiefly British, my ass--it's a French spelling originally, of course.
Nonetheless, every English-speaking country in the world except the USA uses metre, just as is specified by the international bodies.
A meter is a device. A metre is a unit of measure. This SHOULDN'T be difficult stuff.
That may be what Debian says, but old-school kernel folks (i.e. long before Linux was created) would argue that Debian is wrong.
There has always been some debate over what constitutes an OS. Is it the kernel, the kernel+drivers, or the minimum software required to start a computer? (Or if you're Microsoft, it's every application you might ever need, painfully welded onto the kernel to make it appear to be part of the OS)
Well, you know what Calvin (of Calvin and Hobbes) says: "Verbing weirds life."
The internet won't get any better until we start havin' us some KILLIN'S! Start with the spammers, then the HTML email idiots, and then work our way down until we get to the ALL CAPS TWITS.
Once we're down to ten thousand or so people again, we'll be fine. And the others can go fix the rest of the world.
I agree that it's bad, but it's nothing new in the US--Bush jr. did that back in 2000/2001.
Hmm. Safety gloves? Protective glasses?
You can definitely tell that these are computer geeks, and not chemistry geeks. Liquid nitrogen is remarkably safe stuff to play with, unless you're deeply stupid about it.
So exactly why the FUCK should I spend money, time, resources, and effort in an attempt at closing my eyes to criminals, instead of working at getting them thrown in jail where they belong?
OK, I, Robot was a great collection of short stories. Harlan Ellison did a brilliant (and then some) job of tying them into a cohesive screenplay. Then, being Ellison, he pissed off some Hollywood types.
Now they're making a movie that's called "I, Robot" but is actually a new story, 'based on parts of the nine originals.' Good grief!
Seriously, if there was ANY intent on the makers' part to do a faithful rendition of I, Robot, they just would have used Ellison's screenplay and be done with it. Given that they have a new writer and a new story, I'll bet real money that this is going to be a crap movie with crap acting and lots of fight/chase scenes, using Asimov's name to sell more seats.
Crap. Why can't someone get it right?
This is a pretty straightforward question, and not answered as near as I can see.
Were you doing exactly what you were contracted (yes, in writing) to do?
Quite often, being a security analyst doesn't implicitly include vulnerability testing, and when it comes to security, GET IT IN WRITING before touching anything. ANYTHING!
If you failed on this point, then it's just begging to be (inappropriately, but allowably) expoloited by a sleazy company.
If you were being paid to do exactly this, and then were fired as a result of it, then screw it. It's not easy losing a job, but there are some companies you're better off away from.
OK, now THAT was a work of art! One of maybe half a dozen made in the last decade, probably less.
Brilliant, beyond fault.
I've never been a big winamp fan. Certainly winamp3 sucked, but even winamp 2 was painfully flashy and obtuse, not to mention slow and awkward to use (although the playback performance was fine).
So after a lot of digging and trying every other player I could legitimately download, I found The Core Media Player. This is fast, simple, straightforward, and the performance is great.
So what does winamp5 have over TCMP? Not to start a flame war, just wondering if there's any reason I should bother downloading and trying it.
"I don't know about most people, but isn't this business model just too too tempting ?"
Sure it is. Just like chucking a brick through a window and grabbing what you want, instead of buying it. It's theft, plain and simple.
Several points.
First of all, I'm as suspicious of legislation having any useful effect as anyone. I'm not convinced that this is the solution.
However, how much harm does spam cost? a lot. Hundreds of millions of dollars annually at the very least, and growing incredibly quickly. Your argument about 'good for the ecosystem' is interesting, but irrelevant. Rather than a lion and a wildebeast, a better analogy would be the police and criminals (because make no mistake--spammers are commiting fraud and theft with every spam they send out). IF we eradicated crime from our streets, we wouldn't need much of a police force. Does that mean that we should encourage crime, to keep the cops employed? I'm sure that even the police themselves would agree that it's a preposterous idea.
The money being spent on spam could be BETTER spent on developing better technologies, instead of fighting criminals. Furthermore, the infrastructure we currently have would be far less loaded (and thus faster, more reliable, etc.) without spam.
Now your point about the consequences is very well taken indeed. Filtering doesn't work. Legislation will most likely not work. Finding a way of interrupting the money flowing to the spammers is the only way of stopping spam, and how to do that is a difficult question to say the least. Greylisting is about the best technology I've seen to do it, but any given technology isn't the answer to a whole problem.
As much as I agree with your post, I have to ask--what version of the Bible is that? It's horrible!
OK, this is all just a guess, but I believe it's an educated one.
Solaris/Sparc will continue to be their preferred high-end server platform, and the place that they put most of their R&D money. It will never be pushed as a desktop environment, except for those environments which require it (data analysts, geophysicists, etc.)
Linux/Sparc they won't touch.
Linux/x86, they're pushing on the desktop now with their "Java Desktop." I think that they'll push this _heavily_, even trying to sell to random people off the street. (witness their dealing with Office Despot, last week.)
Solaris/x86. With their recent ties to AMD, I suspect that they're going to encourage people to use Solaris/x86 on their cheap server lines (esp. the blades), and possibly push the application companies to port their Sparc versions over. Ideally they'd be running Landmark apps and such on Solaris/Sparc machines, but right now many of them are pushing Linux/x86, which is much cheaper for a given performance level right now.
The biggest reason for Sun having Solaris/x86 at all is to keep people who can't justify the hardware costs of Sparc gear right now, to keep (or in some cases, start) running Solaris (ideally on Sun boxes), rather than going to ye randome Linux platform. Now if Sun can differentiate between their own Linux/x86 offering (end-user desktop) and Solaris/x86 (workstation and low-end server) while maintaining their REAL product (Solaris/Sparc), then they might have a good plan.
I think that this latest action is mostly to run the x86 product up a flagpole, just to see if anyone cares.
Has it really? Funny, since Sun is still in pre-beta with Solaris 10.
I suggest you check your facts again.
The last time I played with Solaris x86 was the week that Solaris7 was released for that platform. (i.e. early 1998, I think.)
So with no recent knowledge on my part (but LOTS of knowledge of Solaris/Sparc--I'm writing this message on my Ultra2 right now) what makes the x86 version sucky? What differences are there?
The biggest one is a consistent OS across the board.
We've got a group of geophysicists who use high-end sparc desktops (just receieved eight loaded Blade 2500s this week). Now having the rest of the group using the same computing platform would help substantially, and Intel hardware is still substantially cheaper than the Blade 150.
Really, I suspect that Sun releasing this is a way of seeing what the maximum prospective customer base might be. They're pushing their "X86 Java desktop" hard right now, and before they get too far into that I think they want to gauge how much development to put into Solaris/x86 as a desktop OS. (i.e. fancy apps, user friendly stuff)
Makes me wonder how well you know the product you're supporting.
:-)
We just did a massive rollout of WinXP across the company (700 desktops and counting). The project took eight months of the Wintel group's time to plan and test, and will take about five months to deploy.
However, this was the first and only upgrade since their initial WinNT 4.0 desktops were installed. Roughly one rollout per decade isn't too bad, all things considered. The thing is, much of the testing and planning involved building simple, lightweight, minimal machines. with few things to go wrong, with easy and straightforward central admin. The minimum spec for these machines is about half of what MS claims for XP, and the per-desk ongoing admin cost is cheaper than anything else they've had from MS.
Win95/98 were judged as BAD options, because they were poor OSes. The biggest 'danger' of using Win2k/XP (and even NT4) is that not all admins have the greater skill set to properly set up and maintain such an environment.
None of which affects me anyways--I administer the Solaris boxes.