Thanks for sharing - I'd like to start my own business and I was a little worried about exactly that - turning something I love into something I have to do.
How did you start your own business? Did you have investors? How did you generate your revenue stream in the beginning? Did it require a lot of up-front R&D?
Any advice for somebody who would like to start a company?
It's my understanding that kernel modules could get around this legal requirement, because kernel modules are not derivatives of the kernel, and are therefore not subject to the GPL. As I'm sure I'm not the first person to think of this, there has to be a reason this doesn't work. Does anybody know why or why not?
Somebody above pointed out the fact that what he said could be grounds for a lawsuit under unfair competition laws. So Microsoft was left between a rock and a hard place. If they didn't say anything, Apple could try to take them to court over copying their specific look and feel ideas (the 1990's case covering this is also mentioned above), but if they did try to officially retract his statement, the Streisand affect comes into play.
They were in a damned-if-they-do-damned-if-they-don't situation, because let's face it: they did copy a lot of ideas from other operating systems. Perhaps they should try to come up with their own ideas instead of playing follow the leader/s (Apple and the KDE team) in UI design.
Gee, now if only somebody thought of a solution that worked for *removable media* like the parent asked in addition to the NFS part, we wouldn't have to read snarky replies on Slashdot that don't really answer the question completely.
Ah, I see your point, although my understanding is that X forwarding is faster than VNC and RDP. There are advantages and disadvantages for everything though, I suppose.
I used X forwarding over SSH from my school's computers to run Firefox to get access to websites behind the school firewall (the VPN software didn't work with my computer - they switched from the Cisco VPN, which had a nice plugin for NetworkManager, to Juniper, which needed a bunch of messing with and still didn't work on my standard Ubuntu desktop - yes). Without the networking functionality of X, I would have had to call up a friend and divulge my password to the school's computers (which would have voided my agreement to use the network to begin with) or drive the 20 minutes to school to use the computers for 5 minutes and then drive back home - roundtrip time: 45 minutes of my life, 40 of which I thankfully spent doing other (admittedly sometimes non-productive) things.
Do not underestimate the utility of networking functionality in today's software environment; Bill Gates wrote an email to his employees in the *90's* about the rise and usefulness of the internet, and when his employees did not share his vision, Google - a company that also recognized the potential of the internet and the browser - managed to become Gates' worst nightmare: a relevant and *widely successful* competitor to the entrenched monopoly that is Microsoft. To successfully compete against a monopoly is difficult, to surpass the monopoly makes the feat even more impressive (even though Google may turn into a bad monopoly in the future, much as Microsoft did).
I am not familiar with the architecture of X, but somebody smarter than I needs to sit down and think about the architecture of X, whether or not it can improve, and whether or not it needs to be rewritten from scratch. FOSS should not fall into the trap of rewriting everything as pointed out by somebody smarter than I (I think it was Jamie Zawinski, who has criticized the X project for quite awhile, perhaps not the best reference).
The more people you have, the more hardware manufacturers and software companies take notice and actually care about Linux. When hardware companies release open source drivers (and even proprietary drivers - look at nVidia) and when software companies release software for Linux (Wolfram's Mathematica, MathWorks' Matlab, National Instruments' LabVIEW), Linux users do benefit. As more applications become more available on Linux, it becomes a more mainstream desktop OS and the interest in Linux grows and quality of software for Linux improves. Once Linux is mainstream, more and more hardware will "just work" because the Linux kernel includes more drivers. The more the hardware "just works", the easier it is to configure for everybody using clickable GUI tools instead of looking up commands and command options (the command line, while sometimes easier to use than GUIS, is not necessarily hard to use for everything, but it is hard to initially learn). The easier it is to configure, the more "Regular Joe" users will be able to use Linux, not only making Linux a more visible solution to Windows, but making all of FOSS a more visible solution to proprietary software. Finally, as the number of Linux users increases, presumably the number non-duplicate bugs are reported (as some users are technically inclined enough to submit a bug, but not enough to fix it - something even Linus, if I remember correctly, has noted as an advantage of FOSS), making architecture errors easier more visible, giving developers to improve the architecture, which hopefully leads to happier developers and users. All of these changes, while insignificant when standing alone, lead towards a better world of software for everybody, including you.
So whether or not Linux developers are aiming for world domination or not, the "Regular Joe" users of the Linux desktop are as important as the developers themselves.
Like Agilent scopes better. At my school, the physics department has two different models of Tektronix scopes, the only difference being that one model can save results to a usb drive. The only problem I've had with them is that they sometimes format the damn usb drive, so you sometimes have to continually swap it out and download the data to a computer, which kind of defeats the purpose (a bit). So, to minimize the problem of people's usb drives and data getting eaten, the lab profs decided to get their own usb drives, which promptly resulted in a few of the usb drives rapidly evolving legs and running out of the room (they were stolen for those of you with no sense of humor). Both models of Tektronix scopes will lie to you if you hit the autoset button.
The engineering department at my school has Agilent scopes, and while they are larger (though they aren't stationary), they have a slightly more intuitive interface. They also don't format usb drives willy nilly without warning you and making sure you know whats going on. They autocalibrate their own probes, and they have storage space for the manual and probes in a compartment on top. Their autoset buttons are better than the Tektronix scopes, but still ended up giving me garbage settings on a few signals. I do vaguely remember somebody having to learn to use the interface and having a little trouble with it, but in a class of 18, that was probably not statistically significant.
My impression was that the Agilent folks had to use their own instruments, which gave them the incentive to go that extra tweak in UI improvement. They also had a spinning wheel for when the drive was being accessed, similar to the Apple beachball. Which looked cool even if it didn't serve a useful purpose.
Disclaimer: I have a few friends that work at Agilent, and love it. I had tried to get a job at Agilent for the summer, but was turned down. I even baked them a cake.
It's actually fairly simple (afaik). Particles bounce between potentials (inside a "well") and create standing waves. These waves die off exponentially in the potentials themselves, and so if you have a potential that is small (thin) enough, there is a non-negligible probability that the particle will be found outside of the well.
In my humble opinion, I don't know whether or not a small clump of cells should be considered human life (has to be a "small" clump of cells because humans are just a big clump of walking, talking cells in the first place).
I become concerned when people say that if we don't know if its a life or not, then we should treat it as dead to help the unambiguously alive. I would disagree with that, and I think that's what Bush meant when he said America should be a "culture of life" not a "culture of death" forever ago (don't worry, that's the only thing I actually appreciate about Bush). If we don't know whether or not a clump of cells is a life, we need to save those cells (except in the case of the health of the mother vs. health of clump of cells) until we know whether or not it is a human life or not. We need to play it safe if it might be a human life.
So, then it becomes a question of philosophy, what is a/the logical definition of life? This is, as you correctly identified, the crux of the matter. The problem is that a lot of conservatives like to define life as broadly as possible, so as somebody else stated, a vial of blood becomes a separate life. On the other hand, I've known a minority of liberals to define life as being severed from all other biological human interaction, which would make everything up to partial birth abortion perfectly acceptable.
My take, and as I stated before, I don't know for sure, is that life begins when it starts to incubate, which, imho, is when it implants into the wall of the uterus. This would make almost all contraceptives legal. I also think that the government doesn't need to dictate medical practices to a doctor, so the doctor will simply have to make the best decision he/she can at the time given the available information. Those decisions would be subject to a medical board if somebody second guesses the doctor, much like it is now.
Whoop, evidently I didn't post anon (bye bye karma, I'll miss you).
I can't see the reasons being: 1) WMDs 2) Spread democracy 3) al Queda 4) Yellowcake (no "Step 5 profit" jokes)
I can't think of any other reason to go in there (barring the WMDs that we haven't found yet, and the yellowcake story that we investigated and found to be false) other than oil. It hasn't gone down yet because the war is a guerilla war, making the area unstable, making supply unstable, driving down supply, and driving the market price up. Granted, previous administrations (read: Bush Sr.) probably foresaw this (or listened to their generals), and didn't want to get into a drawn out war. I wouldn't trust this administration as far as I can throw Cheney (I would have to dodge the shotgun pellets first).;-)
I ask this seriously: Anybody got any other ideas (or excuses) for the administration? If not, then can we start calling it what it is: a distraction/justification from/for infringements on our rights at home? Anybody?
>>Or are we just expecting that actionable intelligence will fall into our laps, like manna from heaven?
We fucking had actionable intelligence, so did everybody else. It told us that Iraq was NOT a threat. But, our benevolent dictator decided to lie to the American people to go get oil and make his buddies rich. How about, instead of wishing for actionable intelligence, you wish that the government would actually USE the intel they have APPROPRIATELY.
Keep in mind that they cannot *outright* discriminate against any minority. They must check as many 80 year old ladies as middle eastern looking men, even though the majority (yes, not all) of the terrorists in the past 20 years have been middle eastern looking males.
What this does is effectively make sure that they don't discriminate against any Enrique Rodriguez's*, only the Abdullah Mohammad's* in the world. Before, the idiot Joe on "guard" duty couldn't tell the difference between the hispanic people and the middle eastern people. Now, they can simply look at the ID and pick out Mr. Abdullah Mohammad for intense questioning and let the Rodriguez's go about their merry business.
And think about it, if they don't bring an ID, they are searched. So even if the middle eastern men do not bring their ID's, they are still searched.
This is simply an attempt to discriminate under the table, if you will.
Before you mod, please understand that this was posted under the assumption that all of this TSA idiocy actually does something to prevent terrorism.
* My profound apologies if any of these names are remotely close to your real name. This was not the intent, I was merely illustrating that it is much easier to discriminate against names than it is against physical appearance, as it (probably) gives fewer false positives. Again, please accept my apologies.
1) Short FlexPlay and Staples stock. 2) Buy straight pins (~$2?), super glue (~$15?) and debonder (~$20?). 3) Super glue straight pin to left index finger (need right hand is for driving), drive to Staples and ask cashier to see a few movies, inconspicuously prick each one, buy a single - non-pricked - movie (~$5). 4) Copy movie onto hard drive for "backup" purposes ("I swear, your honor, I was only torrenting it to my mirrors!"). 5) Sell shorted FlexPlay and Staples stock. 6) Profit!
Pirating and sticking it to (the) MPAA/RIAA/FlexPlay/Staples/Microsoft/Man/Government! My plan for world domination is nearly complete!
Heh, I've still got the original CD (slightly worn), probably most of the extraneous material, and the box sitting around somewhere. I would offer to sell it to you, but I don't know what Autodesk would say about that./joke
Agreed. The education system isn't broken in this country (USA), it's the parental system that's broken. My parents supported my learning. I've even failed classes, and instead of letting me pass, my parents forced me to retake things. I hated it at the time, but, as they told me, I had to buckle down and get through it, regardless of whether it was easy or interesting. That is what kids these days are missing: discipline to get through tough times.
And as I'm fond of saying, "The education system is not designed to force kids to learn, it's designed to allow kids to learn." The rest is up to parents (a) not being shit-for-brains by allowing their kid to stay out all night because they are the mature age of 14 (and have an attitude) and (b) not allowing their kids to grow up with shit-for-brains. Generalizing, stupid parents breed stupid kids, and smart parents generally breed smart kids.
Cue the Einstein quote about the Universe, designing things to be idiot-proof, and making better idiots.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm looking to work for a startup (although I currently have a job). If you ever get up and going, hit me up for my resume.
Thanks for sharing - I'd like to start my own business and I was a little worried about exactly that - turning something I love into something I have to do.
How did you start your own business? Did you have investors? How did you generate your revenue stream in the beginning? Did it require a lot of up-front R&D?
Any advice for somebody who would like to start a company?
Thanks!
It's my understanding that kernel modules could get around this legal requirement, because kernel modules are not derivatives of the kernel, and are therefore not subject to the GPL. As I'm sure I'm not the first person to think of this, there has to be a reason this doesn't work. Does anybody know why or why not?
Somebody above pointed out the fact that what he said could be grounds for a lawsuit under unfair competition laws. So Microsoft was left between a rock and a hard place. If they didn't say anything, Apple could try to take them to court over copying their specific look and feel ideas (the 1990's case covering this is also mentioned above), but if they did try to officially retract his statement, the Streisand affect comes into play.
They were in a damned-if-they-do-damned-if-they-don't situation, because let's face it: they did copy a lot of ideas from other operating systems. Perhaps they should try to come up with their own ideas instead of playing follow the leader/s (Apple and the KDE team) in UI design.
Gee, now if only somebody thought of a solution that worked for *removable media* like the parent asked in addition to the NFS part, we wouldn't have to read snarky replies on Slashdot that don't really answer the question completely.
Ah, I see your point, although my understanding is that X forwarding is faster than VNC and RDP. There are advantages and disadvantages for everything though, I suppose.
I used X forwarding over SSH from my school's computers to run Firefox to get access to websites behind the school firewall (the VPN software didn't work with my computer - they switched from the Cisco VPN, which had a nice plugin for NetworkManager, to Juniper, which needed a bunch of messing with and still didn't work on my standard Ubuntu desktop - yes). Without the networking functionality of X, I would have had to call up a friend and divulge my password to the school's computers (which would have voided my agreement to use the network to begin with) or drive the 20 minutes to school to use the computers for 5 minutes and then drive back home - roundtrip time: 45 minutes of my life, 40 of which I thankfully spent doing other (admittedly sometimes non-productive) things.
Do not underestimate the utility of networking functionality in today's software environment; Bill Gates wrote an email to his employees in the *90's* about the rise and usefulness of the internet, and when his employees did not share his vision, Google - a company that also recognized the potential of the internet and the browser - managed to become Gates' worst nightmare: a relevant and *widely successful* competitor to the entrenched monopoly that is Microsoft. To successfully compete against a monopoly is difficult, to surpass the monopoly makes the feat even more impressive (even though Google may turn into a bad monopoly in the future, much as Microsoft did).
I am not familiar with the architecture of X, but somebody smarter than I needs to sit down and think about the architecture of X, whether or not it can improve, and whether or not it needs to be rewritten from scratch. FOSS should not fall into the trap of rewriting everything as pointed out by somebody smarter than I (I think it was Jamie Zawinski, who has criticized the X project for quite awhile, perhaps not the best reference).
The more people you have, the more hardware manufacturers and software companies take notice and actually care about Linux. When hardware companies release open source drivers (and even proprietary drivers - look at nVidia) and when software companies release software for Linux (Wolfram's Mathematica, MathWorks' Matlab, National Instruments' LabVIEW), Linux users do benefit. As more applications become more available on Linux, it becomes a more mainstream desktop OS and the interest in Linux grows and quality of software for Linux improves. Once Linux is mainstream, more and more hardware will "just work" because the Linux kernel includes more drivers. The more the hardware "just works", the easier it is to configure for everybody using clickable GUI tools instead of looking up commands and command options (the command line, while sometimes easier to use than GUIS, is not necessarily hard to use for everything, but it is hard to initially learn). The easier it is to configure, the more "Regular Joe" users will be able to use Linux, not only making Linux a more visible solution to Windows, but making all of FOSS a more visible solution to proprietary software. Finally, as the number of Linux users increases, presumably the number non-duplicate bugs are reported (as some users are technically inclined enough to submit a bug, but not enough to fix it - something even Linus, if I remember correctly, has noted as an advantage of FOSS), making architecture errors easier more visible, giving developers to improve the architecture, which hopefully leads to happier developers and users. All of these changes, while insignificant when standing alone, lead towards a better world of software for everybody, including you. So whether or not Linux developers are aiming for world domination or not, the "Regular Joe" users of the Linux desktop are as important as the developers themselves.
Like Agilent scopes better. At my school, the physics department has two different models of Tektronix scopes, the only difference being that one model can save results to a usb drive. The only problem I've had with them is that they sometimes format the damn usb drive, so you sometimes have to continually swap it out and download the data to a computer, which kind of defeats the purpose (a bit). So, to minimize the problem of people's usb drives and data getting eaten, the lab profs decided to get their own usb drives, which promptly resulted in a few of the usb drives rapidly evolving legs and running out of the room (they were stolen for those of you with no sense of humor). Both models of Tektronix scopes will lie to you if you hit the autoset button.
The engineering department at my school has Agilent scopes, and while they are larger (though they aren't stationary), they have a slightly more intuitive interface. They also don't format usb drives willy nilly without warning you and making sure you know whats going on. They autocalibrate their own probes, and they have storage space for the manual and probes in a compartment on top. Their autoset buttons are better than the Tektronix scopes, but still ended up giving me garbage settings on a few signals. I do vaguely remember somebody having to learn to use the interface and having a little trouble with it, but in a class of 18, that was probably not statistically significant.
My impression was that the Agilent folks had to use their own instruments, which gave them the incentive to go that extra tweak in UI improvement. They also had a spinning wheel for when the drive was being accessed, similar to the Apple beachball. Which looked cool even if it didn't serve a useful purpose.
Disclaimer: I have a few friends that work at Agilent, and love it. I had tried to get a job at Agilent for the summer, but was turned down. I even baked them a cake.
It's actually fairly simple (afaik). Particles bounce between potentials (inside a "well") and create standing waves. These waves die off exponentially in the potentials themselves, and so if you have a potential that is small (thin) enough, there is a non-negligible probability that the particle will be found outside of the well.
Voila, "teleportation".
Is that you Ballmer? Maybe you should get back to throwing chairs so you don't overexert yourself.
The number of posts for this article (I think) are like the announcement itself: vapor.
In my humble opinion, I don't know whether or not a small clump of cells should be considered human life (has to be a "small" clump of cells because humans are just a big clump of walking, talking cells in the first place).
I become concerned when people say that if we don't know if its a life or not, then we should treat it as dead to help the unambiguously alive. I would disagree with that, and I think that's what Bush meant when he said America should be a "culture of life" not a "culture of death" forever ago (don't worry, that's the only thing I actually appreciate about Bush). If we don't know whether or not a clump of cells is a life, we need to save those cells (except in the case of the health of the mother vs. health of clump of cells) until we know whether or not it is a human life or not. We need to play it safe if it might be a human life.
So, then it becomes a question of philosophy, what is a/the logical definition of life? This is, as you correctly identified, the crux of the matter. The problem is that a lot of conservatives like to define life as broadly as possible, so as somebody else stated, a vial of blood becomes a separate life. On the other hand, I've known a minority of liberals to define life as being severed from all other biological human interaction, which would make everything up to partial birth abortion perfectly acceptable.
My take, and as I stated before, I don't know for sure, is that life begins when it starts to incubate, which, imho, is when it implants into the wall of the uterus. This would make almost all contraceptives legal. I also think that the government doesn't need to dictate medical practices to a doctor, so the doctor will simply have to make the best decision he/she can at the time given the available information. Those decisions would be subject to a medical board if somebody second guesses the doctor, much like it is now.
The solution, however, is not to lay down and take it, which is how I read (misread?) your post.
Whoop, evidently I didn't post anon (bye bye karma, I'll miss you).
I can't see the reasons being:
1) WMDs
2) Spread democracy
3) al Queda
4) Yellowcake
(no "Step 5 profit" jokes)
I can't think of any other reason to go in there (barring the WMDs that we haven't found yet, and the yellowcake story that we investigated and found to be false) other than oil. It hasn't gone down yet because the war is a guerilla war, making the area unstable, making supply unstable, driving down supply, and driving the market price up. Granted, previous administrations (read: Bush Sr.) probably foresaw this (or listened to their generals), and didn't want to get into a drawn out war. I wouldn't trust this administration as far as I can throw Cheney (I would have to dodge the shotgun pellets first). ;-)
I ask this seriously: Anybody got any other ideas (or excuses) for the administration? If not, then can we start calling it what it is: a distraction/justification from/for infringements on our rights at home? Anybody?
>>Or are we just expecting that actionable intelligence will fall into our laps, like manna from heaven?
We fucking had actionable intelligence, so did everybody else. It told us that Iraq was NOT a threat. But, our benevolent dictator decided to lie to the American people to go get oil and make his buddies rich. How about, instead of wishing for actionable intelligence, you wish that the government would actually USE the intel they have APPROPRIATELY.
Fear is not a valid reason to do anything.
Yes, I would argue that it is a Linux problem. But, it is in no way Linux dev's fault.
Me? I don't harass middle-eastern people as it is today. Hell, a lot of them are more trustworthy than the pasty-white people.
Answer to first question: No, I don't say that about middle-eastern people, either.
Answer to second question: No, because either we all have rights or none of us do.
My point was that the current government will, regardless of what I do. And, no, I haven't voted in any presidential election (yet).
Well, I was originally gonna' call them Beaner Rodriguez and Derka-derka Mohammad, but I figured I might offend a few people.
That said, I didn't want my point to be lost in the cries of "your just prejudice and insensitive".
I think you misunderstand the government.
Keep in mind that they cannot *outright* discriminate against any minority. They must check as many 80 year old ladies as middle eastern looking men, even though the majority (yes, not all) of the terrorists in the past 20 years have been middle eastern looking males.
What this does is effectively make sure that they don't discriminate against any Enrique Rodriguez's*, only the Abdullah Mohammad's* in the world. Before, the idiot Joe on "guard" duty couldn't tell the difference between the hispanic people and the middle eastern people. Now, they can simply look at the ID and pick out Mr. Abdullah Mohammad for intense questioning and let the Rodriguez's go about their merry business.
And think about it, if they don't bring an ID, they are searched. So even if the middle eastern men do not bring their ID's, they are still searched.
This is simply an attempt to discriminate under the table, if you will.
Before you mod, please understand that this was posted under the assumption that all of this TSA idiocy actually does something to prevent terrorism.
* My profound apologies if any of these names are remotely close to your real name. This was not the intent, I was merely illustrating that it is much easier to discriminate against names than it is against physical appearance, as it (probably) gives fewer false positives. Again, please accept my apologies.
1) Short FlexPlay and Staples stock.
2) Buy straight pins (~$2?), super glue (~$15?) and debonder (~$20?).
3) Super glue straight pin to left index finger (need right hand is for driving), drive to Staples and ask cashier to see a few movies, inconspicuously prick each one, buy a single - non-pricked - movie (~$5).
4) Copy movie onto hard drive for "backup" purposes ("I swear, your honor, I was only torrenting it to my mirrors!").
5) Sell shorted FlexPlay and Staples stock.
6) Profit!
Pirating and sticking it to (the) MPAA/RIAA/FlexPlay/Staples/Microsoft/Man/Government! My plan for world domination is nearly complete!
Heh, I've still got the original CD (slightly worn), probably most of the extraneous material, and the box sitting around somewhere. I would offer to sell it to you, but I don't know what Autodesk would say about that. /joke
I see your MS Bob and raise you an MS Vista.
I, too, am a resident in Colorado, anybody know what city he is in (so I can avoid him like the plague/borg)?
Agreed. The education system isn't broken in this country (USA), it's the parental system that's broken. My parents supported my learning. I've even failed classes, and instead of letting me pass, my parents forced me to retake things. I hated it at the time, but, as they told me, I had to buckle down and get through it, regardless of whether it was easy or interesting. That is what kids these days are missing: discipline to get through tough times.
And as I'm fond of saying, "The education system is not designed to force kids to learn, it's designed to allow kids to learn." The rest is up to parents (a) not being shit-for-brains by allowing their kid to stay out all night because they are the mature age of 14 (and have an attitude) and (b) not allowing their kids to grow up with shit-for-brains. Generalizing, stupid parents breed stupid kids, and smart parents generally breed smart kids.
Cue the Einstein quote about the Universe, designing things to be idiot-proof, and making better idiots.