The Sun engineers I'm aware of are paid to support hardware that Sun sells, not "strange hardware item X". Sun tried to get hardware vendors to write/support drivers for Solaris x86 at one time, and had very little success. Neither has Linux. The main difference? Sun has to justify spending money on telling Joe Engineer to write a driver for something--a Linux person on the other hand will frequently be doing their work on an "itch my scratch" basis and only has to have the time and the energy.
Hopefully there are enough people interested in an OSS Solaris that some of those same motivations can be harnessed for wider hardware support. Only time will tell.
Perhaps it would be more likely for Sun engineers to give respect when respect was routinely paid back to them. For example: GNU would not be where it is today if it hadn't been built on Unix, and particularly Solaris/SunOS for a long time before The Linux kernel was a sparkle in Linus' eye.
You don't generally get respect from people who you routinely disrespect, and Sun gets very little but "you're an irrelevant old dinosaur" from anyone prominent in the OSS world. This interview with Linus is a case in point; at least he's not openly hostile, but he's clearly dismissive.
I'm rather amused to see Sun be the first to implement a replacement for the old init and have it done. I can't say I know who thought it up first, but Solaris 10 SMF is the first working implementation I'm aware of that's going to get any kind of wide deployment. I saw some linux-head saying this needed to be done a year or more ago, but I can't even find their website in google now. And obviously if Solaris has it now, the implementation started a while back (probably more than a year)...
One may argue that America is not doing enough on all these issues, or in Iraq doing the wrong things, but you can hardly say they're ignoring it, especially when your only evidence is that we're doing something else too. A country with 300 Million people is NOT single-threaded.
If enough people make smart decisions, the companies will go out of business. If the right people make smart lawsuits, the courts will force them to reform. Otherwise, caveat emptor, as always. I agree, corporations making short sighted decisions is practically a tautology. But you're not going to fix that with anything that works any better (at least nothing that anyone has come up with in many thousands of years).
Why is what OK? The general practice of hiding the EULA and not letting you return software? The standard boilerplate that says "we can change this at our whim"? I never said I thought that either was OK in general terms. I said it was expected, because it was standard business practice, and to behave as if it didn't exist that way was stupid. Either you like the game enough to swallow the terms, or you don't buy the game, and if enough people refuse to buy the game, eventually the standard business practice will change. Or you can bring suits like this one when you're unhappy with the terms of the EULA and want to return the game, and maybe the courts will take your side (as apparently they have in California--good news!).
I was previously pointing out the stupidity of the whiners claiming to not know that the Steam EULA was like every other one in the industry, not defending industry practice.
I think you undergeneralize. Cthulu is well known in gaming geek circles, period. Just because there's a significant OSS -> Gaming overlap is no reason to claim "most computer geeks" don't know the Ancient Ones.
So make the companies report oustanding options in enough detail that potential investores know what effects they may have, and can figure them into whatever models of expense they prefer. Reporting them as an expense from the top, where you basically have to pull an arbitrary number out of your butt to figure out what the expense amounts to, is not the right solution.
What would the camera's response be to you holding a placard that's a photo of another person in front of you? How would it know it was compromised? And how hard would it be to set up a webcam to mimic the setup so you could even present a photo that looked like a correct perspective of that location.
I think it's actually supposed to be a reference to a supposed 24 number sequence somehow in the bowels of the sequence. Which apparently has actually been mentioned in a journal of mathematics; unfortunately by someone else who could actually be bothered to supply discussion and proof, unlike Sollog.
Ok, it's a combination of 1) the instructions are unclear (I opened the citibank webpage on step one when they were talking about the thing to click on) and 2) they appear now to have fixed whatever it was that couldn't tell that I had pop ups blocked. Now the vulnerability is clear, and the demonstration does work on my browser.
You need to cite which version of firefox. I have FF 1.0 (not the PR release), and secunia's site couldn't even tell that I had the popup blocker in firefox turned on, much less do anything malicious with the citibank popup.
And guess what else? Journals are self-selecting surveys, so any statistical trends that someone may want to try to project on them are completely without meaning.
You don't typically get published in a journal by contradicting the dogma of the editors. When it does happen, it's done with very strong evidence that is clearly contradictory to the ruling paradigm.
Since the whole "is it human caused or not" debate has nearly zero hard data to prove the point, it's going to be damn near impossible to come up with the "proof" required that it's not human caused that will actually convince an editor to publish your paper. Voila, no studies contradicting human causes for Global Warming, but no real facts to prove it either.
The difference which makes no difference is no difference. There's no way to lock a customer into Solaris either, now is there? Plenty of people have switched from Sun systems to IBM systems to HP systems to Linux systems. It's all a matter of "can we take the cost of the migration", and from your perspective, there is no such thing as lock in.
With open source software you can always hire someone to fix any issue that your vendor will not address. It may cost you, and may not be worth it, but you have that option.
With Closed Source systems you can always migrate to a different (some claim better) vendor. What's the difference? If it's too expensive for a developer to migrate from one distribution to another of what is supposed to be this great open source manna from heaven, then it doesn't matter. It's still lock in. The difference between not being able to afford $5000 versus $5,000,000 is irrelevant if the result is the same--I can't migrate.
An OS that is just a naked kernel is useless, and won't operate much of anything. And a bunch of programs (GNU utilities) to do useful stuff without the foundation of a kernel can't stand on their own.
I've had more than one developer tell me they're stuck with a particular distribution of Linux because it would take too much work to migrate to another distro. How is that not "lock in" and thereby proprietary? Just because someone misstates it as "proprietary kernel" doesn't mean that there isn't an underlying point that's correct.
a new contract they did not agree to was thrust upon them
Bull Shit.
A new contract was displayed for their approval. They could have refused to accept the contract. No one held a gun to their head.
The original contract, that they did agree to, I'm sure had NO GUARANTEE of online game services. I'm also sure it had a "we may change this contract at our will, and you can opt out and stop using the software" clause.
UNLESS the original contract had some guarantee of not changing and/or lifetime service, they don't have a legal leg to stand on.
As if any of these idiots doing the monty python "I'm being oppressed" dance are lawyers either....
Slashdot Mirror
Hopefully there are enough people interested in an OSS Solaris that some of those same motivations can be harnessed for wider hardware support. Only time will tell.
And I never see mud slinging from OSS Zealots deriding Sun and Solaris as a dinosaur etc. Nope. Y'all are pure as the fucking driven snow.
You don't generally get respect from people who you routinely disrespect, and Sun gets very little but "you're an irrelevant old dinosaur" from anyone prominent in the OSS world. This interview with Linus is a case in point; at least he's not openly hostile, but he's clearly dismissive.
I'm rather amused to see Sun be the first to implement a replacement for the old init and have it done. I can't say I know who thought it up first, but Solaris 10 SMF is the first working implementation I'm aware of that's going to get any kind of wide deployment. I saw some linux-head saying this needed to be done a year or more ago, but I can't even find their website in google now. And obviously if Solaris has it now, the implementation started a while back (probably more than a year)...
One may argue that America is not doing enough on all these issues, or in Iraq doing the wrong things, but you can hardly say they're ignoring it, especially when your only evidence is that we're doing something else too. A country with 300 Million people is NOT single-threaded.
If enough people make smart decisions, the companies will go out of business. If the right people make smart lawsuits, the courts will force them to reform. Otherwise, caveat emptor, as always. I agree, corporations making short sighted decisions is practically a tautology. But you're not going to fix that with anything that works any better (at least nothing that anyone has come up with in many thousands of years).
I was previously pointing out the stupidity of the whiners claiming to not know that the Steam EULA was like every other one in the industry, not defending industry practice.
I think you undergeneralize. Cthulu is well known in gaming geek circles, period. Just because there's a significant OSS -> Gaming overlap is no reason to claim "most computer geeks" don't know the Ancient Ones.
So make the companies report oustanding options in enough detail that potential investores know what effects they may have, and can figure them into whatever models of expense they prefer. Reporting them as an expense from the top, where you basically have to pull an arbitrary number out of your butt to figure out what the expense amounts to, is not the right solution.
What would the camera's response be to you holding a placard that's a photo of another person in front of you? How would it know it was compromised? And how hard would it be to set up a webcam to mimic the setup so you could even present a photo that looked like a correct perspective of that location.
I think it's actually supposed to be a reference to a supposed 24 number sequence somehow in the bowels of the sequence. Which apparently has actually been mentioned in a journal of mathematics; unfortunately by someone else who could actually be bothered to supply discussion and proof, unlike Sollog.
It already has....
So I need to upgrade then :-) I bought my pad about 10/12 years ago....
I think he meant the guy who wrote the slashdot submission, not the guy who built the clock.
Software has EULA's.
Software frequently has questionable EULA's.
You read slashdot, so you've probably seen coverage of bad EULA's before. Or other BS like Doom conflicting with Nero et. al.
Yet you didn't do any research at all to find the ramifications of spending your $50.
And then you wait a week to reply so you can be sure to get the last word.
Wow. I'm impressed.
Ok, it's a combination of 1) the instructions are unclear (I opened the citibank webpage on step one when they were talking about the thing to click on) and 2) they appear now to have fixed whatever it was that couldn't tell that I had pop ups blocked. Now the vulnerability is clear, and the demonstration does work on my browser.
I have it on, but I have the "hide status bar" and "change status bar text" stuff turned off. But that wouldn't seem relevant....
So I wonder what's different between yours and mine. Does it require an open session to the net or something? (I'm behind NAT)
You need to cite which version of firefox. I have FF 1.0 (not the PR release), and secunia's site couldn't even tell that I had the popup blocker in firefox turned on, much less do anything malicious with the citibank popup.
We can dream though.
You don't typically get published in a journal by contradicting the dogma of the editors. When it does happen, it's done with very strong evidence that is clearly contradictory to the ruling paradigm.
Since the whole "is it human caused or not" debate has nearly zero hard data to prove the point, it's going to be damn near impossible to come up with the "proof" required that it's not human caused that will actually convince an editor to publish your paper. Voila, no studies contradicting human causes for Global Warming, but no real facts to prove it either.
With open source software you can always hire someone to fix any issue that your vendor will not address. It may cost you, and may not be worth it, but you have that option.
With Closed Source systems you can always migrate to a different (some claim better) vendor. What's the difference? If it's too expensive for a developer to migrate from one distribution to another of what is supposed to be this great open source manna from heaven, then it doesn't matter. It's still lock in. The difference between not being able to afford $5000 versus $5,000,000 is irrelevant if the result is the same--I can't migrate.
An OS that is just a naked kernel is useless, and won't operate much of anything. And a bunch of programs (GNU utilities) to do useful stuff without the foundation of a kernel can't stand on their own.
I've had more than one developer tell me they're stuck with a particular distribution of Linux because it would take too much work to migrate to another distro. How is that not "lock in" and thereby proprietary? Just because someone misstates it as "proprietary kernel" doesn't mean that there isn't an underlying point that's correct.
Tell that to Red Hat and their stupid "just another day at Red Hat" planes flying over Sun's campuses.
Bull Shit.
A new contract was displayed for their approval. They could have refused to accept the contract. No one held a gun to their head.
The original contract, that they did agree to, I'm sure had NO GUARANTEE of online game services. I'm also sure it had a "we may change this contract at our will, and you can opt out and stop using the software" clause.
UNLESS the original contract had some guarantee of not changing and/or lifetime service, they don't have a legal leg to stand on.
As if any of these idiots doing the monty python "I'm being oppressed" dance are lawyers either....