You leave no room for the concept that a current employee has a job, gets up in the morning, goes to work, does their work, goes home, goes to bed just so they can get money to pay the rent.
And what, exactly, do you think it is that Saddam Hussein's prison guards did? Or Enron's accountants? Or Darl McBride?
Unethical behavior is unethical, regardless of how the unethically obtained money is spent. A company hires an unethical person at their own risk. Hiring is as much about risk management as it is in finding the most skillful person, and a person with a proven track record of questionable ethics is, for a legitimate enterprise, a liability, and will generally be passed over for one who either has a proven track record of behaving ethically, or at the very least, a record clean of questionable behavior and associations.
SCO employees who left a year ago fall into one category (no reason to suspect their ethics or judgement). Those who remain, knowing full well what their employer is doing (or remaining willfully ignorant), fall into the other (their ethics, judgement, and quite possibly their intelligence are open to question). A competent person hiring for a legitimate company will not chose such a person over another candidate not so tainted.
Does that mean perfectly competent, ethical people who somehow kept their head in the sand these last ten months may get passed over? You bet. But it is the responsibility of those hiring to look out for the best interests of their firms, not to insure that every last, unfortunatel ex-SCO employee get the benefit of a tremendous and well-justified doubt.
My personal ethics would put feeding my children above working for a lying, litigatious employer. Idealism only goes so far when the house and college educations are on the line.
1. A false dichotomy. You have other options (leave SCO and work for someone who will hire you, start your own business, change career paths completely, hell, even go on welfare if need be, and this list of alternatives to SCO v. the poor children is hardly exhaustive).
2. Your justification (putting your children's dinner above the ethics of your employer) can and has been used to justify doing virtually anything for money. It is no coincidence that crime goes through the roof when economic times are bad, and drops precipitiously when they are good, nor that most crime is committed by those in poverty. Desperation causes many to abandon any ethical or moral backbone they might have had. However, that desperation in no way negates what they have done. A crime remains a crime, a reprehensible act remains a reprehensible act, regardless of whether the money is used to feed a child or buy crack cocain.
The ethics of obtaining well are orthogonal to the ethics of how that wealth is spent, and ill-gotten gains remain ill-gotten regardless of how well the might later be used. The people harmed remained harmed, even if you turn around and choose to help others.
What if, what if, what if??? To think this issue is black and white is hopelessly nieve. [sic]
To expect any employer to consider hiring you out of pity (or compassion for your starving children) rather than for their own economic benefit is hopelessly naive. Employees who have continued to work for SCO knowing what we know now, these long months (nearly a year) since this has become widespread public knowledge within the industry, are a liability. They bring with them enormouse risk for any potential employer, and offer nothing of value to counter that risk.
So, whether those foolish enough to remain at SCO through all of this nonsense have chosen to support an unethical company out of greed, cowardice, or simple desparation to feed their kids (unlikely, as the kids can be fed any number of other, far more ethical, ways) is irrelevent. They pose a potential risk that other candidates do not, and offer nothing of additional value, therefor they lose and another, untainted, candidate will be chosen instead. And rightly so.
Evil deeds, like paying their mortgages, feeding their kids, keeping their credit stable...
When you pay your mortgage, feed your kids, or keep your credit stable using blood money, you deserve to be marked as unethical.
SCO apologists (and those who apologize for the denizens of SCO who make up the body of the corporation engaging in this activity, as though being only a part of something bad somehow magically washes one's hands of it) seem to have difficulty differentiating in the ethics of how one obtains their money and the ethics of how one spends it.
If you had a job as secretary at Enron, making $20k year subsistance living, and knew what was up, you are unethical irrespective of how many brats' mouths you have to feed.
Ditto for anyone working at SCO, knowing what we know of SCO's current behavior. Using ill gotten gains (and providing support for a corporation whose business model is quintessentially unethical is an ill means of getting gains) for good purposes does nothing to change the fact that those gains are ill gotten, and you are an unethical person for having gotten them that way.
It may be a handy way to put a nice spin on what you are doing, that the gullible with limited skills in critical thinking may buy, but at the end of the day the fact that you choose to feed children (who will likely to grow up to be just as unethical) rather than, say, to buy hookers for a little afterwork play, in fact changes nothing: by continuing to work for SCO, and opting to continue to collect your paycheck with the full knowledge that the eight hours or more you put in each day is actively spent supporting and propogating (and pulling your own weight in) an unethical business engaged in widespread fraud and disinformation, you are behaving unethically.
That makes you an unethical person, by definition.
Hell, you can feed your children on welfare or unemployment: you do not need to sell out every aspect of common decency to keep the little tykes fed. Choosing to keep such a job, knowing its social and economic consiquences to thousands (perhaps millions) of others, is an act of greed, cowardice, or any number of other negative motivations: it is not, under any circumstances, anything remotely resembling a selfless act of sacrifice "for the children." So please spare us your platitudes and your spin: most of us aren't foolish enough to buy it.
If you can do the work, and do it well - - and you're reliable and honest and willing to take what's offered in the way of starting compensation - - many doors will open.
Yes, but...... a company that will willingly hire someone with doubtful ethical qualities stands to lose alot. The risks are quite substantial, and the reward for hiring an ex-SCO employee vs. hiring someone with a less tainted background is negligable.
Of course, not all risks are created equal. Hiring an ex-SCO employee could be hiring a plant; someone who will be placing SCO code in their new employer's product for future litigation in exchange for financial consideration on the side, etc. This is a real risk, but a pretty remote one.
Far more likely than the possible-but-remote possibility outlined above, and far more troublesome, are the simple consiquences of having unethical people in your ranks, whether it be to moral (back-stabbing of fellow employees), effeciency (covering up one's own mistakes by shifting blame to another, resulting in incorrect corrective action being taken, etc.), or liability exposure of the company (unethical behavior towards clients to pad one's own performance, unethical behavior on behalf of the company but unbeknownst to its CEO), and so on.
Anyone still working at SCO, knowing what is widely known now, isn't someone with the kind of ethical or moral foundation I would want within my ranks. The risk of damage (to morale, to our firm's reputation, etc.) is far too high, and the possible reward (a decent employee hired on the cheap) is both not worth it (the difference between getting a cut-rate ex-SCO employee and paying someone with a less questionable resume something closer to market value doesn't begin to outweigh the risks) and far too fleeting (sooner or later that underpaid employee is going to want to be paid market value and demand a raise).
Does this mean all current SCO employees are unethical? No, it doesn't. But given the widespread knowledge within the industry of SCO's current behavior and its ethical implications, of which no employee can realistically or believably claim ignorance (and doing so would be quite telling in its own right), one can pretty much reduce their willingness to stay to a few possiblities, all negative qualities in a potential employee:
Unethical: they stay because they value their income above personal ethics
cowardice: they stay because they fear change more than hanging on to an ever-more untenable situation
incompetence: despite being employed at the heart of the storm, they remain blissfully (perhaps deliberately) ignorant of just what their employer is doing.
gullibility: they believe the rhetoric of their management and are unwilling to examine it critically, or to listen to the ever more mountainous evidence to the contrary.
stupidity: they cannot recognize a lost cause when it kicks them in the face.
None of these possibilities bode well for the success of a potential hiree, or their contribution to the hiring firm. Indeed, they represent substantial risk to any future employer and offer no significant benefit to counterbalance that risk.
Sorry, SCO denizens. There's no work for you here, at any price.
Makit is simeple, the first 50 emails in a 24 hour period get sent as per normal. the rest sit in a queue for 10 seconds each, limit the queue to 500.
First, that wouldn't slow down SPAM in the least in that, since, as mentioned before, the SPAMmers will simply offload the work to millions of compromised Windoze boxes in parallel. Each could be told to send 50 mails and stop, completely bypassing this methodology. Or not, if the spammers don't care how burdonsome their behavior is to their victims (not just the recipients of their trash, but those unwittingly sending it).
Second, what happens to all of those legitimate mailing lists? Microsoft may not have communities that form around mailing lists (or perhaps they may, I neither know nor, to be honest, really care), but the free software world certainly does. Whether it is Gentoo, Blender, transcode, moveon.org, or anti-DMCA poltical action work, there are all kinds of legitimate mailing list activity that would be crippled by such a design, even with your "friendly" margin.
The point remains, however. This will add tremendously to the burden of those using the net, and those victimized by the SPAMmers, while not reducing SPAM in the least. It is the worst kind of "cure", one that not only is worse than the disease (with or without your 50 email "grace" period), but to make matters worse, it won't cure the disease regardless.
Count on Microsoft's "cure" to be worse than the disease itself. You would think for $40 billion they could buy just a little more intelligence than that.
SMTP needs to be redesigned. Not by Microsoft, who will use any change in the protocol to tighten their monopoly grip, locking in their customers (and locking out the non-Microsoft world), but by the IETF.
Spammers having to do a computation before delivering email isn't going to limit them to 8000 pieces of mail a day, it simply means they're going to cluster all of those Windoze boxes their custom worms have infected, and let those millions of PCs do the work for them in parallel. SPAM won't decrease one bit, but the load and toll it places on those who use the net will go up significantly.
The solution isn't to increase the cost of email (computationally, bandwidth-wise, or financial), the solution is to repair the design flaws in SMTP (and, for that matter, USENET, something that remains the most useful medium on the 'net despite its widespread abuse) that make SPAM a viable methodology.
Not true, I have a Sony Vaio C1 (old one) which sleeps just fine when you close the lid. It really depends on the laptop's APM implementation in BIOS I guess. (newer laptops are probably all ACPI - no idea how well that works with linux).
ACPI works great with Linux 2.6.0 on my Fujitsu tablets.
There, believe it or not, is a difference between a war criminal and the secretary that the war criminal employs. If you don't see it that way, more power to you.
The interesting question becomes the secretary working for the war criminal who processes the paperwork for a person's execution, knowing full well what s/he is doing, vs. the secretary who processes the paperwork having no idea what it really means. Where then is the ethical culpability? Perhaps not equal to that of the person who sets policy, or physically carries it out, but certainly a great deal more than zero.
Were the SCO employees ignorant of what their bosses are doing, that would be one thing. But, as the original person purporting to be a SCO employee pointed out, most of the talk around the coffee pot IS about the lawsuit. It stretches credulity beyond the breaking point to assume they are not knowledgable about what is going on, or the role they play in it by helping such people keep the doors open and the lights on.
The justifications and excuses are identical to those used by far more notorious criminals of decades past. The crime (seeking to steal the creativity and hard work of thousands, seeking to cripple the empowerment of millions) is nowhere near as horrific as other crimes that have been committed throughout history, but the excuses this particular, alleged employee of SCO is using to justify their participation, however minor, in SCO's crimes are indistinguishable from those used by historical figures to justify their bad behavior. The fact that their behavior was orders of magnitude more wicked than that of SCO is not in dispute: the same arguments are being used to justify bad behavior. Those arguments didn't hold up then, and they don't hold up now.
It's a shame that you need to equate SCO employees trying to feed their families to Nazis, seeing as I don't remember anyone at SCO killing 12 million people in concentration camps, or did I miss a history lesson?
Nope. You missed a logic lesson.
I did not compare SCO employees trying to feed their families with Nazis trying to feed their fmailies. I did compare the justification "I am only doing my job" used by an alleged SCO employee with the justification "I was only following orders" used by famed war criminals in years past.
The crimes being justified couldn't be more radically different from each other, indeed they utterly unrelated. However, the justifications used by both parties are virtually identical. The latter ("I was only folling order", ie. "I was only doing my job") has been formally and resoundingly debunked; the former ("I am only doing my job"), being semantically identical to the latter, is likewise nonesense.
The only similiarity between this troll posing as a SCO employee and war criminals of centuries past is that they use exactly the same justification to defend their immoral and unethical behavior, and that justification holds absolutely no water.
...and those of us who have chosen ethically in the past, even to our own financial disadvantage, quite rightly look down on those who do not.
Nice view, from way up there on your high horse, but put yourself in the same situation. The economy is in the shitter. You quitting wouldn't change a damn thing.
"Yeah, I knew it was wrong, but I did it anyway. If I hadn't, someone else would have." I cannot believe that an adult would even field such an answer in public, much less accept its veracity.
It's not like they're committing genocide - it's a fucking law suit.
No one ever suggested it was genocide. However, what so is doing is much more than a lawsuit. Indeed, it is a lawsuit in name only.
Were it merely a lawsuit, it would not entail the vast amount of public FUD, misdirection, deception, and outright lies (including lies that contradict one another) that has come from SCO's management. Indeed, attorney's strongly discourage such statements, as they are destructive to their client's case. The fact that SCO shows no such restraint (and that SCO's lawyers apparently feel no need to reign them in or insist upon such restraint) demonstrates prima facia that this isn't so much a lawsuit as something very, very different.
At its heart it is an attempt to defraud thousands of free software out of their hard work, to defraud third parties by charging licensing fees for things that do not belong to them, and to defraud their investors by pumping up their stock value through deceit and market manipulation.
They may be within the limits of the law in the United States (or they may not). They certainly are not within the limits of the law in Australia, Germany, and numerous other countries.
Either way, they, and those who support them, are unethical, and I for one would never hire an HR person who would knowingly hire unethical people and open my company up to the potential of such behavior within my own ranks. Nor would I hire an HR who would staff my company with weak-minded people who put a paycheck ahead of any ethical considerations, or who cannot recognize a lost cause when they see one.
One final morsel for what, at this point, I must conclude is almost certainly a troll (albeit an entertaining one).
Pursuing LEGAL action in a LEGAL way is far from being unethical - this has nothing to do with genocide or stealing paper clips! If we are causing damage to you or others, those who are damaged are completely within their rights to pursue LEGAL actions against US.
You need to grow up. LEGALITY does not make something ethical or right. SCO's behavior is UNETHICAL and despicable. It may also be illegal (certainly there are cases pending in court to determine this, and their behavior has been judged ILLEGAL in numerous other countries already), or it may not. The courts will decide.
Whatever the legality, their behavior is DISHONEST, DECEPTIVE, and UNETHICAL, and if it does in fact turn out that what they have done is technically legal, then that is a statement on the state of American law (and its need for serious reform) than it is in defense of SCO's actions, which are unconscionable by any rational measure.
Before you continue to spout off on my ethics, I suggest you take a good look at yourself - got any mutual funds? If so, there's a reasonable chance that YOU stand to benefit from this lawsuit more than *I* do! Better make sure SCO isn't in your portfolio.
Please. Unwittingly possessing something isn't the same as conscously choosing to devote one's energies toward helping advance a particular agenda. Owning a pair of sneakers does not equate to running a sweat shop usiing virtual slave labor, particularly if the person involved had no idea the manufacturer was engaged in such activity.
You appear to be weak, and to have made a decision stemming from weakness of character, blinded perhaps by fear if not greed. You have publicly stated that you have no problem putting your professional energies into promoting a business whose actions are unarguable DECEPTIVE and unethical, illegal in many countries (quite possibly including the United States... that is something the Red Hat case will determine), and are just happy to have a job irrespective of the harm that job may cause to others.
Furthermore, you have justified SCO's DECEIT, INNUENDO, and UNETHICAL business practices as perfectly acceptable because they will enrich those stupid enough to own shares in the company. Circular reasoning at its finest, given an air of legitimacy for having been enshrined in our current financial markets. Is it any wonder we have the Worldcoms, Enrons, and SCOs, with this kind of mindset? "It will make us money if take an unethical approach to this situation. But it's OK to do something unethical and skirt the limits of the law, in fact, it is a duty, because it will make us money." Are you really living so deep in denial as to not see the problem with that?
In most people's book, that would be considered very unethical. No one, except those trying to justify such actions, would equate the unwitting possession of a mutual fund whose fund manager has been duped by SCO's pump-and-dump scheme with the conscious choice to help and support an organization persuing a business strategy of deception, misdirection. FUD, and extortion of license fees for material belonging to someone else.
And no one, except someone who stands to benefit financially from an action they know to be unethical, would so vehemently defend such an action on the basis of perceived LEGAL technicalities (notice how the subject was so conviniently changed from ethics to legal technicalities?), which legal technicalities in fact probably do not exist, if the decisions of courts in other countries and the current trends in the IBM case are any guide.
All the developers wanted to use Linux, but the project manager chose FreeBSD because he thought we might have to pay SCO money at some point. Stupid SCO...
Stupid manager. SCO has already publicly announced that it plans to go after FreeBSD next. Either the case has no merit (probability approaching unity), in which case deploying Linux would have been fine, or it does (probability almost but not quite equal to zero), in which case FreeBSD will be next. Followed by every other brand of UNIX out there (except Sun's offerings, as they are helping to bankroll this fiasco).
Not a very bright manager. Either s/he can't think logically past his or her own nose, or s/he doesn't plan very far ahead. About the only way to have 100% certainty that one will not be sued by SCO would be to deploy Windows or Solaris.
NOTE that I did not include SCO Open Server. If you will recall, Darl McBride cited a professional relationship with ones customers as having the primary purpose of providing an avenue for future litigation. Companies having any relationship with SCO are at much greater risk of litigation than those with no relationship.
Of course, having 99.99999999% certainty is good enough for most of us, in which case, running Linux (or FreeBSD, or HPUX, or Irix, or AIX) would be more than adequate.
While i don't agree to the comparison to nazi's, i agree with the fact you are working for an unethical company.
Nobody's comparing SCO's actions (embezzling and confiscating the hard work of others) to the actions of the Nazis (murder on a hitherto unprecedented scale), least of all me. What is being compared is the logical justification of the one ("I'm just a guy doing my job") with the historically debunked justification of the other ("I was just following orders"). The two justifications can be shown to be semantically equal ("I was just doing my job" -> "I was just following my manger's orders" ~= "I was just following orders"), so while the crimes they seek to justify are vastly different in both substance and magnitude, the justifications used are in fact identical, and there veracity equal (i.e. nil).
"I'm just doing my job" didn't hold water then, and it doesn't hold water now. It wouldn't hold water if your job was going to your competitor's office and stealing a $0.05 paperclip from the secretary's desk, nor would it hold water if your job were corporate hitman tasked with "taking out" the competition and their families, nor is it for supporting actions which fall somewhere between those moral and ethical extremes.
You ARE unethical, and blinded by greed if you can't see what's happening.
Indeed he is. Unfortunately, many people seem to be blinded by the comparison of methodoligies (e.g. justifying bad behavior as "just doing one's job") with actions (theft vs. murder), and blind themselves to the underlying similiarities in mindsets by emphesizing the differences in venue and specifics of the crime while dismissing the virtually identical arguments both perpetrators used to justify their behavior.
Not only that, but some names and photos are extraneous and have no relevence to Internet history whatsoever.
To wit, what do Bill Gates and Paul Allen have to do with the history of the Internet? Absolutely nothing. Neither of them innovated a single thing with respect to the Internet, indeed, the Internet blindsided them while they were busy trying to setup a Microsoft version of CompuServe embedded in the windows desktop. Hell, they're still trying, by dumbing down the Internet to CompuServe-esque levels and embedding it into their desktop in the form of a pansy candy-assed butterfly by the name of MSN.
Unless Bill Gates is going down as the End of the History of Internet, killed by his desktop monopoly and wide deployment of DRM (events which have yet to happen, and arguably may never occur), his presence, while perhaps relevant to the history of personal computing, certainly isn't with repect to the history of the 'net.
I kind of guessed it may be something like that. Hey you're employed, you're doing better than many and I figure there are employers who've done far worse things in the world than take what look like big risks, to save the company.
While there are companies that have hired slave labor (BWM, Bayer), and those that continue to employ near-slave labor (Nike), and even those that have killed en masse (Union Carbide, Monsanto), trying to steal the hard work of tens of thousands of people and claim it as your own, then force the creators to buy their own work back at extortionate prices (or any price, for that matter) is still pretty damn low. About as low as one can get without doing actual, direct physical harm to others.
Frankly, anyone willingly working at SCO, recession or no, deserves the low self esteem they undoubtably enjoy and the difficult job prospects their current employment on their Resume post-law-suit will almost certainly bring. This notion that earning a living justifies doing what is unequivocably wrong is complete and utter bullshit. Evil isn't defined by the difficulty of doing good, it is defined by the harm it causes others. The fact that doing the right thing would be difficult for those foolish enough to be working at Caldera/SCO has absolutely no bearing on the fact that what they are doing all those long hours they put in each day is wrong both morally and ethically, nor does it absolve them of one iota of their part in it all.
I'm sick to death of "my employer made me do it" or "I fear unemployment so I have no ethics" crap this formerly great nation seems to have instilled in so many of its drones. It rings a hollow as the famed defenses of the Nuremburg trials, or the death-bed repentences of dying Christians. (cue Godwin-Law pundits)
What kind of idiot would appeal his own not guilty verdict?
You obviously are not an attorney.
The question I posed (which obviously went over your head) was whether one can request a "ruling of pricipal" from the supreme court. This does not presume that an innocent verdict will be overturned (after all, he has been found innocent... twice), even if the ruling of pricipal disagrees.
In the US potential victims of lawsuits can file a suit preemtively, asking for the court to determine whether or not they are liable. My question goes to whether or not such an approach is available on criminal cases, where cases can be brought in an effort to clarify the law, without a specific individual's life being put at risk.
Given how different Norwegian law is from US law (allowing prosecuters to appeal an acquital, for example), this is something I would like to know.
So, once again I ask, are there any Norwegian attorneys in the house, or merely more noisy denizens of the peanut gallery?
The case might also be escalated to the Norwegian supreme court, for a principal ruling. However, I am not sure that the MPAA would want that to happen, as that would be a definitive ruling affecting all similar cases in the future, and with the firm rulings of the two lower courts, it's highly unlikely that the Norwegian supreme court would rule differently.
Could Jon Johansen appeal this to the supreme court in the interest of getting a principal ruling? Or althernatively, could his supporters? It seems that getting such would be a worthwhile public service to the people of Norway, and an important step in assuring their freedoms against encroachment by the American media interests.
Interesting for Home Theatre Applications
on
The Return of S3
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Overall, I have to agree with the concensus that S3 is back, and may be primed to stay in the market for some time.
Indeed.
I find this card interesting for home theatre applicatons, where 3d capabilities (while nice and IMHO necessary for a complete entertainment system, including xmame and 3d simution support) don't have to be cutting-edge fast. Of particular note is this card's component output capabilities and ability to do 1080p, 1080i, 720p, etc. Right now my home theatre PC has an ATI card connected to my TV's DVI input. However, the TV only has one DVI input, while it has three component inputs, so being able to connect the computer to a component input (and free up the DVI interface for an HDTV tuner) would be nice.
Of course, until and unless there are decent Linux drivers for the hardware it will be of absolutely no interest for those of us building truly DRM-free home entertainment systems. Which is where S3, like so many others, may shoot itself in the foot (more's the pity). Here's hoping I'm wrong, and we do so solid 3d, X11, and linux driver support for the mpeg2/mpeg4 chip, tv and component outputs.
Not according to Trolltech's investor list, which claims that the employees own nearly two-thirds of the stock. Even Borland owns more than Canopy and SCO, which put together control less than 6 percent of Trolltech.
So, to reiterate the parent poster's question: what the fuck is Darl McBride's boss doing on the board of directors? As one who has defended KDE and spoken rather vehemently against UserLinux's exclusion of arguably the most mature Linux desktop in previous stories on this subject, I'd really like to know. Frankly, any business with a relationship with Canopy is open to serious question, given SCO's recent behavior. Guilt by association may not be popular or politically correct, but in the business world, where almost all backroom deals are run on personal contacts, suspicion by association is very warrented.
..gets keyboard navigation working sometime soon. If KDE is being 'phased out' in a major distribution, that is.
I wouldn't call UserLinux a "major distribution." Bruce Perens may be able to trade on his name recognition to make it one, but then again, maybe not.
Frankly, as an enterprise sysadmin, it is a part of MY job to select the desktop for my users, not my distribution's job. My users are quite comfortable, indeed happy, with KDE... had it been gnome, there is a good chance they would have rebelled and insisted we do all of our development under Windows instead. Not now, now that they get the "free as in freedom, freedom as in the freedom to conduct our business without being held hostage by our vendors", but during that critical transition phase when we were still winning their minds and hearts. You list a number of great reasons for preferring KDE over Gnome, and I could certainly add to that list (my nits with KDE, like hardcoding user defaults in the software wizard rather than allowing the sysadmin to configure sensible defaults... e.g. focus-follows-mouse rather than that gawdauful kick-to-focus crap, notwithstanding), but there are undoubtably reasons some might have for preferring Gnome over KDE.
I think chosing one major desktop, rather than providing the sysadmin with a choice of the two top desktops, is a mistake. As others have observed, they have effectively halved their potential contributing developers, not to mention their potential users. It is unnecessarilly polarizing and penny-wise, pound-foolish to do this (and I say this as someone who has preferred Gnome over KDE in the past, who has preferred Enlightenment over both, and who now prefers xfce4).
I frankly won't be surprised if UserLinux is relegated to the ranks of fringe distributions living in the shadow of Gentoo, Debian proper, or some other derivation of one or the other.
Trolltech has licensed Qt under the GPL for Linux, which is the same license as Gnome. They will also sell you another license if you don't like the GPL and want to write apps that link to Qt using some other more restrictive license.
That is correct. Commerical developers actually have more options with qt than with gnome, in that they can release commercial GPLed software under both, but if they want to release a non-GPLed version, then qt offers them this option for a price.
Whatever Bruce's reasons are for such a flame-inviting Jihad against KDE, the notion that qt doesn't allow commercial development and gtk/gnome does is absolutely fallacious. I suspect his reasons are not those described in this thread. I also suspect that this decision (to disregard the desktop choice of roughly half the Linux GUI-using population) will relegate his distribution to little more than Yet Another Fringe Curiosity, his name recognition nothwithstanding.
And to think they took this off and left "Everyone Loves Raymond" on. Now they're wondering why we don't watch TV...
I like Raymond... anyone with a significant other and/or annoying family members will likely find humor in it. What is appalling is that shows like "Survivor 2" survive, while excellent shows like Firefly get cancelled. I'd never seen the show when it aired (where the hell was their marketing department?), but after watching the entire series back-to-back last weekend I can only agree that it was absolute incompetence on the part of the Media Empire that allowed this one to go by the wayside while inundating the public airwaves with so much utter and complete crap. COPS, Survivor, Blind Date, Elimidate, etc. ad nauseum.
We need some open source movie making (perhaps with Blender and cheap clusters such is just around the corner). Version 0.1 of OurGreatOnlineAnimatedSeries might suck, but by Version 0.8 it'll be the best thing on, beating anything from Hollywood hands down.
I'm not American, but from an outsiders's POV, one of America's defining aspects has always been its national pride. Whatever happened to that "Made in America" pride?
Are you joking? I am an American, and let me tell you, ever since Dubya was appointed by the Republican-appointed justices of the Supreme Court to the presidency, it has been downright humiliating to be American. At least, it is if you are anywhere to the left of Gengis Khan, or get your news from a source other than Rupert Murdoch's propogandists.
Our defining aspect at one time was our high regard for personal freedom, even when it might be less practical than other alternatives (remember when Japan was on the top of the heap and pundits were commenting on how America had "too much individualism" to compete?). This of course was back when "the American Dream" was a dream of freedom and liberty, and the opportunity to achieve one's potential... before the media changed the definition to "get lots of money at whatever cost" sometime during the Reagan and Bush Senior administrations (and reiterated the mantra to death during the Clinton administration).
American pride you ask? At one time we deserved it, but ever since the 1980s when we sold out our most basic principles of freedom and democracy for a little short term economic prosperity, a War on Drugs, a War on Political Incorrectness, a War on Terrorism, and now, lately, a War on Thought, we don't have a hell of a lot left to be proud of at all, Saddam's capture notwithstanding.
Certainly not enough national pride to keep our firms from moving their IT operations offshore and entrusting their sensitive corporate secrets to foreign contractors... go figure.
I'm curious about this situation where I might be able to see where there *is* a legal, non-infringing use. Suppose I already am a subscriber, but I purchase my own equipment, ie, one of these black boxes, to use instead of my cable provider's in order to save the extra charges they tack on to the bill for each box? Fair use? Or illegal?
Fair use. But don't tell that to our whored out congress; they'll just use it to sell themselves cheap to yet another corporate media John and turn another Trick.
Anybody who reads the washington times is incabable of thinking rationally. I don't want to single them out of course. I would also not waste my time listening to bible thumpers, islamic jihadists or anybody else who is driven by idiology rather then rationality.
While I agree with the sentiment of this statement (discussing most topics with idealogues is generally a waste of time), not everyone is aware of every publication's biases. Someone could well do a news.google.com search on a topic, find what they consider to be a good article on the subject from, say, the washington times, and cite it without ever having been a regular reader of the publication.
Dismissing that person would be a mistake. Lambasting the publication, on the other hand (particularly if you have links to mae culpa type articles the publication has run in the past to underscore your point), would make perfect sense.
In this particular discussion, it has been my observation that "the truth" (such as it is) lies somewhere between the rabid anti-Americans bitter that the Bush administration has had some success in prosecuting a war many vehemently disagree with (myself included) and the right-wing zealots proclaiming an end to tyranny everywhere even as they gut our constitution at home. Nowhere will the 'mainstream media' give us any clue as to what the people of Iraq feel (about free software, democracy, running water, or the American occupation)... every publication, of every country I've come across, has a political bias and agenda it is pressing in its reporting, whether it is the Frankfurter Rundschau, Le Monde, the New York Times, or what have you. Taking a smapling of the Iraqi blogs (both pro- and anti-American) gives one a sense of what people are feeling, which I think is vastly more complex than either "I hate America" or "I love America", and IMHO is probably the best way to triangulate on some semblance of "the truth" on what people are feeling.
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You leave no room for the concept that a current employee has a job, gets up in the morning, goes to work, does their work, goes home, goes to bed just so they can get money to pay the rent.
And what, exactly, do you think it is that Saddam Hussein's prison guards did? Or Enron's accountants? Or Darl McBride?
Unethical behavior is unethical, regardless of how the unethically obtained money is spent. A company hires an unethical person at their own risk. Hiring is as much about risk management as it is in finding the most skillful person, and a person with a proven track record of questionable ethics is, for a legitimate enterprise, a liability, and will generally be passed over for one who either has a proven track record of behaving ethically, or at the very least, a record clean of questionable behavior and associations.
SCO employees who left a year ago fall into one category (no reason to suspect their ethics or judgement). Those who remain, knowing full well what their employer is doing (or remaining willfully ignorant), fall into the other (their ethics, judgement, and quite possibly their intelligence are open to question). A competent person hiring for a legitimate company will not chose such a person over another candidate not so tainted.
Does that mean perfectly competent, ethical people who somehow kept their head in the sand these last ten months may get passed over? You bet. But it is the responsibility of those hiring to look out for the best interests of their firms, not to insure that every last, unfortunatel ex-SCO employee get the benefit of a tremendous and well-justified doubt.
My personal ethics would put feeding my children above working for a lying, litigatious employer. Idealism only goes so far when the house and college educations are on the line.
1. A false dichotomy. You have other options (leave SCO and work for someone who will hire you, start your own business, change career paths completely, hell, even go on welfare if need be, and this list of alternatives to SCO v. the poor children is hardly exhaustive).
2. Your justification (putting your children's dinner above the ethics of your employer) can and has been used to justify doing virtually anything for money. It is no coincidence that crime goes through the roof when economic times are bad, and drops precipitiously when they are good, nor that most crime is committed by those in poverty. Desperation causes many to abandon any ethical or moral backbone they might have had. However, that desperation in no way negates what they have done. A crime remains a crime, a reprehensible act remains a reprehensible act, regardless of whether the money is used to feed a child or buy crack cocain.
The ethics of obtaining well are orthogonal to the ethics of how that wealth is spent, and ill-gotten gains remain ill-gotten regardless of how well the might later be used. The people harmed remained harmed, even if you turn around and choose to help others.
What if, what if, what if??? To think this issue is black and white is hopelessly nieve. [sic]
To expect any employer to consider hiring you out of pity (or compassion for your starving children) rather than for their own economic benefit is hopelessly naive. Employees who have continued to work for SCO knowing what we know now, these long months (nearly a year) since this has become widespread public knowledge within the industry, are a liability. They bring with them enormouse risk for any potential employer, and offer nothing of value to counter that risk.
So, whether those foolish enough to remain at SCO through all of this nonsense have chosen to support an unethical company out of greed, cowardice, or simple desparation to feed their kids (unlikely, as the kids can be fed any number of other, far more ethical, ways) is irrelevent. They pose a potential risk that other candidates do not, and offer nothing of additional value, therefor they lose and another, untainted, candidate will be chosen instead. And rightly so.
Evil deeds, like paying their mortgages, feeding their kids, keeping their credit stable...
When you pay your mortgage, feed your kids, or keep your credit stable using blood money, you deserve to be marked as unethical.
SCO apologists (and those who apologize for the denizens of SCO who make up the body of the corporation engaging in this activity, as though being only a part of something bad somehow magically washes one's hands of it) seem to have difficulty differentiating in the ethics of how one obtains their money and the ethics of how one spends it.
If you had a job as secretary at Enron, making $20k year subsistance living, and knew what was up, you are unethical irrespective of how many brats' mouths you have to feed.
Ditto for anyone working at SCO, knowing what we know of SCO's current behavior. Using ill gotten gains (and providing support for a corporation whose business model is quintessentially unethical is an ill means of getting gains) for good purposes does nothing to change the fact that those gains are ill gotten, and you are an unethical person for having gotten them that way.
It may be a handy way to put a nice spin on what you are doing, that the gullible with limited skills in critical thinking may buy, but at the end of the day the fact that you choose to feed children (who will likely to grow up to be just as unethical) rather than, say, to buy hookers for a little afterwork play, in fact changes nothing: by continuing to work for SCO, and opting to continue to collect your paycheck with the full knowledge that the eight hours or more you put in each day is actively spent supporting and propogating (and pulling your own weight in) an unethical business engaged in widespread fraud and disinformation, you are behaving unethically.
That makes you an unethical person, by definition.
Hell, you can feed your children on welfare or unemployment: you do not need to sell out every aspect of common decency to keep the little tykes fed. Choosing to keep such a job, knowing its social and economic consiquences to thousands (perhaps millions) of others, is an act of greed, cowardice, or any number of other negative motivations: it is not, under any circumstances, anything remotely resembling a selfless act of sacrifice "for the children." So please spare us your platitudes and your spin: most of us aren't foolish enough to buy it.
Yes, but
Of course, not all risks are created equal. Hiring an ex-SCO employee could be hiring a plant; someone who will be placing SCO code in their new employer's product for future litigation in exchange for financial consideration on the side, etc. This is a real risk, but a pretty remote one.
Far more likely than the possible-but-remote possibility outlined above, and far more troublesome, are the simple consiquences of having unethical people in your ranks, whether it be to moral (back-stabbing of fellow employees), effeciency (covering up one's own mistakes by shifting blame to another, resulting in incorrect corrective action being taken, etc.), or liability exposure of the company (unethical behavior towards clients to pad one's own performance, unethical behavior on behalf of the company but unbeknownst to its CEO), and so on.
Anyone still working at SCO, knowing what is widely known now, isn't someone with the kind of ethical or moral foundation I would want within my ranks. The risk of damage (to morale, to our firm's reputation, etc.) is far too high, and the possible reward (a decent employee hired on the cheap) is both not worth it (the difference between getting a cut-rate ex-SCO employee and paying someone with a less questionable resume something closer to market value doesn't begin to outweigh the risks) and far too fleeting (sooner or later that underpaid employee is going to want to be paid market value and demand a raise).
Does this mean all current SCO employees are unethical? No, it doesn't. But given the widespread knowledge within the industry of SCO's current behavior and its ethical implications, of which no employee can realistically or believably claim ignorance (and doing so would be quite telling in its own right), one can pretty much reduce their willingness to stay to a few possiblities, all negative qualities in a potential employee:
None of these possibilities bode well for the success of a potential hiree, or their contribution to the hiring firm. Indeed, they represent substantial risk to any future employer and offer no significant benefit to counterbalance that risk.
Sorry, SCO denizens. There's no work for you here, at any price.
why couldn't it be done at the ISP?
Makit is simeple, the first 50 emails in a 24 hour period get sent as per normal. the rest sit in a queue for 10 seconds each, limit the queue to 500.
First, that wouldn't slow down SPAM in the least in that, since, as mentioned before, the SPAMmers will simply offload the work to millions of compromised Windoze boxes in parallel. Each could be told to send 50 mails and stop, completely bypassing this methodology. Or not, if the spammers don't care how burdonsome their behavior is to their victims (not just the recipients of their trash, but those unwittingly sending it).
Second, what happens to all of those legitimate mailing lists? Microsoft may not have communities that form around mailing lists (or perhaps they may, I neither know nor, to be honest, really care), but the free software world certainly does. Whether it is Gentoo, Blender, transcode, moveon.org, or anti-DMCA poltical action work, there are all kinds of legitimate mailing list activity that would be crippled by such a design, even with your "friendly" margin.
The point remains, however. This will add tremendously to the burden of those using the net, and those victimized by the SPAMmers, while not reducing SPAM in the least. It is the worst kind of "cure", one that not only is worse than the disease (with or without your 50 email "grace" period), but to make matters worse, it won't cure the disease regardless.
Count on Microsoft's "cure" to be worse than the disease itself. You would think for $40 billion they could buy just a little more intelligence than that.
SMTP needs to be redesigned. Not by Microsoft, who will use any change in the protocol to tighten their monopoly grip, locking in their customers (and locking out the non-Microsoft world), but by the IETF.
Spammers having to do a computation before delivering email isn't going to limit them to 8000 pieces of mail a day, it simply means they're going to cluster all of those Windoze boxes their custom worms have infected, and let those millions of PCs do the work for them in parallel. SPAM won't decrease one bit, but the load and toll it places on those who use the net will go up significantly.
The solution isn't to increase the cost of email (computationally, bandwidth-wise, or financial), the solution is to repair the design flaws in SMTP (and, for that matter, USENET, something that remains the most useful medium on the 'net despite its widespread abuse) that make SPAM a viable methodology.
Not true, I have a Sony Vaio C1 (old one) which sleeps just fine when you close the lid. It really depends on the laptop's APM implementation in BIOS I guess. (newer laptops are probably all ACPI - no idea how well that works with linux).
ACPI works great with Linux 2.6.0 on my Fujitsu tablets.
There, believe it or not, is a difference between a war criminal and the secretary that the war criminal employs. If you don't see it that way, more power to you.
The interesting question becomes the secretary working for the war criminal who processes the paperwork for a person's execution, knowing full well what s/he is doing, vs. the secretary who processes the paperwork having no idea what it really means. Where then is the ethical culpability? Perhaps not equal to that of the person who sets policy, or physically carries it out, but certainly a great deal more than zero.
Were the SCO employees ignorant of what their bosses are doing, that would be one thing. But, as the original person purporting to be a SCO employee pointed out, most of the talk around the coffee pot IS about the lawsuit. It stretches credulity beyond the breaking point to assume they are not knowledgable about what is going on, or the role they play in it by helping such people keep the doors open and the lights on.
The justifications and excuses are identical to those used by far more notorious criminals of decades past. The crime (seeking to steal the creativity and hard work of thousands, seeking to cripple the empowerment of millions) is nowhere near as horrific as other crimes that have been committed throughout history, but the excuses this particular, alleged employee of SCO is using to justify their participation, however minor, in SCO's crimes are indistinguishable from those used by historical figures to justify their bad behavior. The fact that their behavior was orders of magnitude more wicked than that of SCO is not in dispute: the same arguments are being used to justify bad behavior. Those arguments didn't hold up then, and they don't hold up now.
It's a shame that you need to equate SCO employees trying to feed their families to Nazis, seeing as I don't remember anyone at SCO killing 12 million people in concentration camps, or did I miss a history lesson?
Nope. You missed a logic lesson.
I did not compare SCO employees trying to feed their families with Nazis trying to feed their fmailies. I did compare the justification "I am only doing my job" used by an alleged SCO employee with the justification "I was only following orders" used by famed war criminals in years past.
The crimes being justified couldn't be more radically different from each other, indeed they utterly unrelated. However, the justifications used by both parties are virtually identical. The latter ("I was only folling order", ie. "I was only doing my job") has been formally and resoundingly debunked; the former ("I am only doing my job"), being semantically identical to the latter, is likewise nonesense.
The only similiarity between this troll posing as a SCO employee and war criminals of centuries past is that they use exactly the same justification to defend their immoral and unethical behavior, and that justification holds absolutely no water.
...and those of us who have chosen ethically in the past, even to our own financial disadvantage, quite rightly look down on those who do not.
Nice view, from way up there on your high horse, but put yourself in the same situation. The economy is in the shitter. You quitting wouldn't change a damn thing.
"Yeah, I knew it was wrong, but I did it anyway. If I hadn't, someone else would have." I cannot believe that an adult would even field such an answer in public, much less accept its veracity.
It's not like they're committing genocide - it's a fucking law suit.
No one ever suggested it was genocide. However, what so is doing is much more than a lawsuit. Indeed, it is a lawsuit in name only.
Were it merely a lawsuit, it would not entail the vast amount of public FUD, misdirection, deception, and outright lies (including lies that contradict one another) that has come from SCO's management. Indeed, attorney's strongly discourage such statements, as they are destructive to their client's case. The fact that SCO shows no such restraint (and that SCO's lawyers apparently feel no need to reign them in or insist upon such restraint) demonstrates prima facia that this isn't so much a lawsuit as something very, very different.
At its heart it is an attempt to defraud thousands of free software out of their hard work, to defraud third parties by charging licensing fees for things that do not belong to them, and to defraud their investors by pumping up their stock value through deceit and market manipulation.
They may be within the limits of the law in the United States (or they may not). They certainly are not within the limits of the law in Australia, Germany, and numerous other countries.
Either way, they, and those who support them, are unethical, and I for one would never hire an HR person who would knowingly hire unethical people and open my company up to the potential of such behavior within my own ranks. Nor would I hire an HR who would staff my company with weak-minded people who put a paycheck ahead of any ethical considerations, or who cannot recognize a lost cause when they see one.
One final morsel for what, at this point, I must conclude is almost certainly a troll (albeit an entertaining one).
... that is something the Red Hat case will determine), and are just happy to have a job irrespective of the harm that job may cause to others.
Pursuing LEGAL action in a LEGAL way is far from being unethical - this has nothing to do with genocide or stealing paper clips! If we are causing damage to you or others, those who are damaged are completely within their rights to pursue LEGAL actions against US.
You need to grow up. LEGALITY does not make something ethical or right. SCO's behavior is UNETHICAL and despicable. It may also be illegal (certainly there are cases pending in court to determine this, and their behavior has been judged ILLEGAL in numerous other countries already), or it may not. The courts will decide.
Whatever the legality, their behavior is DISHONEST, DECEPTIVE, and UNETHICAL, and if it does in fact turn out that what they have done is technically legal, then that is a statement on the state of American law (and its need for serious reform) than it is in defense of SCO's actions, which are unconscionable by any rational measure.
Before you continue to spout off on my ethics, I suggest you take a good look at yourself - got any mutual funds? If so, there's a reasonable chance that YOU stand to benefit from this lawsuit more than *I* do! Better make sure SCO isn't in your portfolio.
Please. Unwittingly possessing something isn't the same as conscously choosing to devote one's energies toward helping advance a particular agenda. Owning a pair of sneakers does not equate to running a sweat shop usiing virtual slave labor, particularly if the person involved had no idea the manufacturer was engaged in such activity.
You appear to be weak, and to have made a decision stemming from weakness of character, blinded perhaps by fear if not greed. You have publicly stated that you have no problem putting your professional energies into promoting a business whose actions are unarguable DECEPTIVE and unethical, illegal in many countries (quite possibly including the United States
Furthermore, you have justified SCO's DECEIT, INNUENDO, and UNETHICAL business practices as perfectly acceptable because they will enrich those stupid enough to own shares in the company. Circular reasoning at its finest, given an air of legitimacy for having been enshrined in our current financial markets. Is it any wonder we have the Worldcoms, Enrons, and SCOs, with this kind of mindset? "It will make us money if take an unethical approach to this situation. But it's OK to do something unethical and skirt the limits of the law, in fact, it is a duty, because it will make us money." Are you really living so deep in denial as to not see the problem with that?
In most people's book, that would be considered very unethical. No one, except those trying to justify such actions, would equate the unwitting possession of a mutual fund whose fund manager has been duped by SCO's pump-and-dump scheme with the conscious choice to help and support an organization persuing a business strategy of deception, misdirection. FUD, and extortion of license fees for material belonging to someone else.
And no one, except someone who stands to benefit financially from an action they know to be unethical, would so vehemently defend such an action on the basis of perceived LEGAL technicalities (notice how the subject was so conviniently changed from ethics to legal technicalities?), which legal technicalities in fact probably do not exist, if the decisions of courts in other countries and the current trends in the IBM case are any guide.
All the developers wanted to use Linux, but the project manager chose FreeBSD because he thought we might have to pay SCO money at some point.
Stupid SCO...
Stupid manager. SCO has already publicly announced that it plans to go after FreeBSD next. Either the case has no merit (probability approaching unity), in which case deploying Linux would have been fine, or it does (probability almost but not quite equal to zero), in which case FreeBSD will be next. Followed by every other brand of UNIX out there (except Sun's offerings, as they are helping to bankroll this fiasco).
Not a very bright manager. Either s/he can't think logically past his or her own nose, or s/he doesn't plan very far ahead. About the only way to have 100% certainty that one will not be sued by SCO would be to deploy Windows or Solaris.
NOTE that I did not include SCO Open Server. If you will recall, Darl McBride cited a professional relationship with ones customers as having the primary purpose of providing an avenue for future litigation. Companies having any relationship with SCO are at much greater risk of litigation than those with no relationship.
Of course, having 99.99999999% certainty is good enough for most of us, in which case, running Linux (or FreeBSD, or HPUX, or Irix, or AIX) would be more than adequate.
While i don't agree to the comparison to nazi's, i agree with the fact you are working for an unethical company.
Nobody's comparing SCO's actions (embezzling and confiscating the hard work of others) to the actions of the Nazis (murder on a hitherto unprecedented scale), least of all me. What is being compared is the logical justification of the one ("I'm just a guy doing my job") with the historically debunked justification of the other ("I was just following orders"). The two justifications can be shown to be semantically equal ("I was just doing my job" -> "I was just following my manger's orders" ~= "I was just following orders"), so while the crimes they seek to justify are vastly different in both substance and magnitude, the justifications used are in fact identical, and there veracity equal (i.e. nil).
"I'm just doing my job" didn't hold water then, and it doesn't hold water now. It wouldn't hold water if your job was going to your competitor's office and stealing a $0.05 paperclip from the secretary's desk, nor would it hold water if your job were corporate hitman tasked with "taking out" the competition and their families, nor is it for supporting actions which fall somewhere between those moral and ethical extremes.
You ARE unethical, and blinded by greed if you can't see what's happening.
Indeed he is. Unfortunately, many people seem to be blinded by the comparison of methodoligies (e.g. justifying bad behavior as "just doing one's job") with actions (theft vs. murder), and blind themselves to the underlying similiarities in mindsets by emphesizing the differences in venue and specifics of the crime while dismissing the virtually identical arguments both perpetrators used to justify their behavior.
Some names (and photos) seem to be missing.
Not only that, but some names and photos are extraneous and have no relevence to Internet history whatsoever.
To wit, what do Bill Gates and Paul Allen have to do with the history of the Internet? Absolutely nothing. Neither of them innovated a single thing with respect to the Internet, indeed, the Internet blindsided them while they were busy trying to setup a Microsoft version of CompuServe embedded in the windows desktop. Hell, they're still trying, by dumbing down the Internet to CompuServe-esque levels and embedding it into their desktop in the form of a pansy candy-assed butterfly by the name of MSN.
Unless Bill Gates is going down as the End of the History of Internet, killed by his desktop monopoly and wide deployment of DRM (events which have yet to happen, and arguably may never occur), his presence, while perhaps relevant to the history of personal computing, certainly isn't with repect to the history of the 'net.
I kind of guessed it may be something like that. Hey you're employed, you're doing better than many and I figure there are employers who've done far worse things in the world than take what look like big risks, to save the company.
While there are companies that have hired slave labor (BWM, Bayer), and those that continue to employ near-slave labor (Nike), and even those that have killed en masse (Union Carbide, Monsanto), trying to steal the hard work of tens of thousands of people and claim it as your own, then force the creators to buy their own work back at extortionate prices (or any price, for that matter) is still pretty damn low. About as low as one can get without doing actual, direct physical harm to others.
Frankly, anyone willingly working at SCO, recession or no, deserves the low self esteem they undoubtably enjoy and the difficult job prospects their current employment on their Resume post-law-suit will almost certainly bring. This notion that earning a living justifies doing what is unequivocably wrong is complete and utter bullshit. Evil isn't defined by the difficulty of doing good, it is defined by the harm it causes others. The fact that doing the right thing would be difficult for those foolish enough to be working at Caldera/SCO has absolutely no bearing on the fact that what they are doing all those long hours they put in each day is wrong both morally and ethically, nor does it absolve them of one iota of their part in it all.
I'm sick to death of "my employer made me do it" or "I fear unemployment so I have no ethics" crap this formerly great nation seems to have instilled in so many of its drones. It rings a hollow as the famed defenses of the Nuremburg trials, or the death-bed repentences of dying Christians. (cue Godwin-Law pundits)
What kind of idiot would appeal his own not guilty verdict?
... twice), even if the ruling of pricipal disagrees.
You obviously are not an attorney.
The question I posed (which obviously went over your head) was whether one can request a "ruling of pricipal" from the supreme court. This does not presume that an innocent verdict will be overturned (after all, he has been found innocent
In the US potential victims of lawsuits can file a suit preemtively, asking for the court to determine whether or not they are liable. My question goes to whether or not such an approach is available on criminal cases, where cases can be brought in an effort to clarify the law, without a specific individual's life being put at risk.
Given how different Norwegian law is from US law (allowing prosecuters to appeal an acquital, for example), this is something I would like to know.
So, once again I ask, are there any Norwegian attorneys in the house, or merely more noisy denizens of the peanut gallery?
The case might also be escalated to the Norwegian supreme court, for a principal ruling. However, I am not sure that the MPAA would want that to happen, as that would be a definitive ruling affecting all similar cases in the future, and with the firm rulings of the two lower courts, it's highly unlikely that the Norwegian supreme court would rule differently.
Could Jon Johansen appeal this to the supreme court in the interest of getting a principal ruling? Or althernatively, could his supporters? It seems that getting such would be a worthwhile public service to the people of Norway, and an important step in assuring their freedoms against encroachment by the American media interests.
Overall, I have to agree with the concensus that S3 is back, and may be primed to stay in the market for some time.
Indeed.
I find this card interesting for home theatre applicatons, where 3d capabilities (while nice and IMHO necessary for a complete entertainment system, including xmame and 3d simution support) don't have to be cutting-edge fast. Of particular note is this card's component output capabilities and ability to do 1080p, 1080i, 720p, etc. Right now my home theatre PC has an ATI card connected to my TV's DVI input. However, the TV only has one DVI input, while it has three component inputs, so being able to connect the computer to a component input (and free up the DVI interface for an HDTV tuner) would be nice.
Of course, until and unless there are decent Linux drivers for the hardware it will be of absolutely no interest for those of us building truly DRM-free home entertainment systems. Which is where S3, like so many others, may shoot itself in the foot (more's the pity). Here's hoping I'm wrong, and we do so solid 3d, X11, and linux driver support for the mpeg2/mpeg4 chip, tv and component outputs.
Not according to Trolltech's investor list, which claims that the employees own nearly two-thirds of the stock. Even Borland owns more than Canopy and SCO, which put together control less than 6 percent of Trolltech.
So, to reiterate the parent poster's question: what the fuck is Darl McBride's boss doing on the board of directors? As one who has defended KDE and spoken rather vehemently against UserLinux's exclusion of arguably the most mature Linux desktop in previous stories on this subject, I'd really like to know. Frankly, any business with a relationship with Canopy is open to serious question, given SCO's recent behavior. Guilt by association may not be popular or politically correct, but in the business world, where almost all backroom deals are run on personal contacts, suspicion by association is very warrented.
..gets keyboard navigation working sometime soon.
... had it been gnome, there is a good chance they would have rebelled and insisted we do all of our development under Windows instead. Not now, now that they get the "free as in freedom, freedom as in the freedom to conduct our business without being held hostage by our vendors", but during that critical transition phase when we were still winning their minds and hearts. You list a number of great reasons for preferring KDE over Gnome, and I could certainly add to that list (my nits with KDE, like hardcoding user defaults in the software wizard rather than allowing the sysadmin to configure sensible defaults ... e.g. focus-follows-mouse rather than that gawdauful kick-to-focus crap, notwithstanding), but there are undoubtably reasons some might have for preferring Gnome over KDE.
If KDE is being 'phased out' in a major distribution, that is.
I wouldn't call UserLinux a "major distribution." Bruce Perens may be able to trade on his name recognition to make it one, but then again, maybe not.
Frankly, as an enterprise sysadmin, it is a part of MY job to select the desktop for my users, not my distribution's job. My users are quite comfortable, indeed happy, with KDE
I think chosing one major desktop, rather than providing the sysadmin with a choice of the two top desktops, is a mistake. As others have observed, they have effectively halved their potential contributing developers, not to mention their potential users. It is unnecessarilly polarizing and penny-wise, pound-foolish to do this (and I say this as someone who has preferred Gnome over KDE in the past, who has preferred Enlightenment over both, and who now prefers xfce4).
I frankly won't be surprised if UserLinux is relegated to the ranks of fringe distributions living in the shadow of Gentoo, Debian proper, or some other derivation of one or the other.
Trolltech has licensed Qt under the GPL for Linux, which is the same license as Gnome. They will also sell you another license if you don't like the GPL and want to write apps that link to Qt using some other more restrictive license.
That is correct. Commerical developers actually have more options with qt than with gnome, in that they can release commercial GPLed software under both, but if they want to release a non-GPLed version, then qt offers them this option for a price.
Whatever Bruce's reasons are for such a flame-inviting Jihad against KDE, the notion that qt doesn't allow commercial development and gtk/gnome does is absolutely fallacious. I suspect his reasons are not those described in this thread. I also suspect that this decision (to disregard the desktop choice of roughly half the Linux GUI-using population) will relegate his distribution to little more than Yet Another Fringe Curiosity, his name recognition nothwithstanding.
And to think they took this off and left "Everyone Loves Raymond" on. Now they're wondering why we don't watch TV...
... anyone with a significant other and/or annoying family members will likely find humor in it. What is appalling is that shows like "Survivor 2" survive, while excellent shows like Firefly get cancelled. I'd never seen the show when it aired (where the hell was their marketing department?), but after watching the entire series back-to-back last weekend I can only agree that it was absolute incompetence on the part of the Media Empire that allowed this one to go by the wayside while inundating the public airwaves with so much utter and complete crap. COPS, Survivor, Blind Date, Elimidate, etc. ad nauseum.
I like Raymond
We need some open source movie making (perhaps with Blender and cheap clusters such is just around the corner). Version 0.1 of OurGreatOnlineAnimatedSeries might suck, but by Version 0.8 it'll be the best thing on, beating anything from Hollywood hands down.
I'm not American, but from an outsiders's POV, one of America's defining aspects has always been its national pride. Whatever happened to that "Made in America" pride?
... before the media changed the definition to "get lots of money at whatever cost" sometime during the Reagan and Bush Senior administrations (and reiterated the mantra to death during the Clinton administration).
... go figure.
Are you joking? I am an American, and let me tell you, ever since Dubya was appointed by the Republican-appointed justices of the Supreme Court to the presidency, it has been downright humiliating to be American. At least, it is if you are anywhere to the left of Gengis Khan, or get your news from a source other than Rupert Murdoch's propogandists.
Our defining aspect at one time was our high regard for personal freedom, even when it might be less practical than other alternatives (remember when Japan was on the top of the heap and pundits were commenting on how America had "too much individualism" to compete?). This of course was back when "the American Dream" was a dream of freedom and liberty, and the opportunity to achieve one's potential
American pride you ask? At one time we deserved it, but ever since the 1980s when we sold out our most basic principles of freedom and democracy for a little short term economic prosperity, a War on Drugs, a War on Political Incorrectness, a War on Terrorism, and now, lately, a War on Thought, we don't have a hell of a lot left to be proud of at all, Saddam's capture notwithstanding.
Certainly not enough national pride to keep our firms from moving their IT operations offshore and entrusting their sensitive corporate secrets to foreign contractors
I'm curious about this situation where I might be able to see where there *is* a legal, non-infringing use. Suppose I already am a subscriber, but I purchase my own equipment, ie, one of these black boxes, to use instead of my cable provider's in order to save the extra charges they tack on to the bill for each box? Fair use? Or illegal?
Fair use. But don't tell that to our whored out congress; they'll just use it to sell themselves cheap to yet another corporate media John and turn another Trick.
Anybody who reads the washington times is incabable of thinking rationally. I don't want to single them out of course. I would also not waste my time listening to bible thumpers, islamic jihadists or anybody else who is driven by idiology rather then rationality.
... every publication, of every country I've come across, has a political bias and agenda it is pressing in its reporting, whether it is the Frankfurter Rundschau, Le Monde, the New York Times, or what have you. Taking a smapling of the Iraqi blogs (both pro- and anti-American) gives one a sense of what people are feeling, which I think is vastly more complex than either "I hate America" or "I love America", and IMHO is probably the best way to triangulate on some semblance of "the truth" on what people are feeling.
While I agree with the sentiment of this statement (discussing most topics with idealogues is generally a waste of time), not everyone is aware of every publication's biases. Someone could well do a news.google.com search on a topic, find what they consider to be a good article on the subject from, say, the washington times, and cite it without ever having been a regular reader of the publication.
Dismissing that person would be a mistake. Lambasting the publication, on the other hand (particularly if you have links to mae culpa type articles the publication has run in the past to underscore your point), would make perfect sense.
In this particular discussion, it has been my observation that "the truth" (such as it is) lies somewhere between the rabid anti-Americans bitter that the Bush administration has had some success in prosecuting a war many vehemently disagree with (myself included) and the right-wing zealots proclaiming an end to tyranny everywhere even as they gut our constitution at home. Nowhere will the 'mainstream media' give us any clue as to what the people of Iraq feel (about free software, democracy, running water, or the American occupation)