So if you might get screwed either way, why not go on the cheap.
Because knowledgable people aren't cheap. Going for cheap labor just increases your chances of getting bozos doing your work. That's true in ANY industry, from construction to IT to manufacturing to teaching (I've done all of those).
My stepmom had a Betamax machine, which of course came into our house when she and my dad got married. To be perfectly honest I could never see the alleged quality difference, and I very much suspect that most consumers couldn't either. The differences I could see, however, were that VHS had a longer record time and wasn't a proprietary product. Record time was something people really cared about back then, they were going crazy recording every stupid miniseries that came out on the off chance that they might want to watch it again, and all those lame movies you only see around christmas time (yes, I'm still bitter about my grandmother using my Monty Python's Flying Circus tape to record some stupid Santa Claus movie). In fact, record time was so important, and image quality so unimportant, that people were perfectly willing to sacrifice quality for record time. Ever watch any tapes produced by the early LP VHS machines? Yikes! But, everybody I knew had a shelf or two full of them.
More importantly, though, Sony was restrictive about who could put out movies on Beta, and specifically that meant no porn. If there's one lesson that can be learned from every media revolution in history, it's that people love their porn. The second lesson might be that pornographers are THE early adopters on the production side. VHS, on the other hand, was almost totally open, so anybody and everybody put out tapes for VHS. Even back in the early days of video rental, when it was far from certain which format would prevail, the Beta section of every rental place I went to was miniscule. Strangely, people just weren't as interested in the platform with the more restricted content selection.
What this all boils down to is that the best format DID win in Beta v. VHS. It was the format that gave the consumers what they actually wanted: content and record time. So shut the hell up about Betamax already. If it had really been as good as everyone likes to say it was, it would still have a viable niche market, just like Apple does.
Comments and spacing in source code have no effect at all on the result of the compilation (the binary (or whatever) produced).
THAT'S EXACTLY THE POINT!!!!!
They could take comments from Linux and put them in their source code and it wouldn't affect the binary at all, but it would result in compelling evidence of code copying.
But we wouldn't sell one to him, or anyone else, except as part of our Digital Video Server product, which I wouldn't recommend for this purpose even if he did have the budget for one, which he doesn't.
I said as a minimum, not "as a minimum that would fulfill his requirements".
If it doesn't pertain to the actual question being asked, why the hell did you bother to post it. I agree with the basic statement (although I'm wondering where you're finding 250GB drives), but it's completely irrelevant to this discussion, since it won't fill his requirememnts.
I think you legacy SCSI RAID guys are scared.
First of all, I'm hardly a legacy SCSI guy. The one SCSI drive I have at home is only used as a paperweight. I'm a firm believer in ATA for most applications.
However, to say that an ATA drive is just as good as a SCSI drive is just plain bunk. They might be just as good for your particular purpose, but that doesn't mean they're just as good across the board. First there's performance. Todays SATA drives perform, bandwidth wise, about as well as 5 year old SCSI drives. SCSI might not have been advancing as fast as ATA in recent years, but it has been advancing, and the jumps SCSI technology makes are a hell of a lot bigger than the ones ATA technology makes. If you don't need the bandwidth, well, good for you. Some people do, and ATA can't touch SCSI in that regard.
But, that's irrelevant to this particular discussion, since he didn't mention any bandwidth requirememnts, just the ability to withstand mechanical stress, and SCSI wins that too. The simple fact is that SCSI drives are engineered for higher reliability, manufactured to tighter tolerances, and subjected to more rigorous testing than ATA drives. That's why ATA drives are cheap and SCSI drives aren't. It might make no difference in your data center, where the drives are just sitting in an immobile rack, but in a more mechanically hostile environment like a tv production truck or the space shuttle it makes a huge difference. How many ATA drives do you have that are still usable after 5 years, even in an immobile application?
Then again, if you actually knew what you were talking about you wouldn't have even mentioned Fibre Channel, since the physical transmission of the data is completely irrelevant to the discussion at hand (how the drives will stand up to the mechanical stresses of the environment).
You're right, I haven't, because if I have data that's important enough or big enough to require any sort of RAID I'm going to also want the increased reliability of SCSI drives. If he's even thinking of using anything beyond RAID-0, this is obviously a consideration for him.
What, so he can pay 10X as much for the same thing?
No, so he can get the same thing for less than it would cost him to engineer and test a custom solution for the problem he describes. My company resells EMC^2 and Ciproco RAIDs which often end up being used in mobile applications (TV news vans and such) with a small enough failure rate that they have only one guy (me) in their customer service repair center supporting all the RAIDs they've sold in the last 7 years. Considering that we sell the most popular professional digital video server on the market, as well as some less popular lines we acquired from other companies, I think that speaks highly of the reliability of those systems. And since that is his primary concern, it seemed like a reasonable suggestion that he at least talk to some people who are experts in the field.
A 500GB RAID is as few as two hard disks these days.
As you pointed out, he wants "at least RAID3", which will NEVER be satisfied with only 2 drives. But, perhaps you have a line on 500GB drives he could put in a RAID-1?
Liability: Do you really think that anyone packaging OSS in the spare time would do this, if he was liable (for his hobby)?!? I'm sure that most developers would quit soon when they were sued.
I personally don't believe[1] exclusion of liability clauses are valid, but I would still release stuff under GPL if I had written anything worth releasing. Honestly, how much is the providor of a free product going to be liable for? As I understand it, German law would require me to either fix the problem or refund their money. So, if I can't fix the problem I refund them the nothing they paid me for it. Frankly, I don't see a problem here.
[1] Even if you (or I) live in a jurisdiction where exclusion of liability clauses are valid for situations where the product is used properly, I don't think that will be the case for long. IT is a huge part of our economy, and software failures can have a huge impact on a business. Eventually the courts will recognize this and act accordingly, so depending on such a clause for protection is foolish, IMHO.
If you want RAID-3 you pretty much have to go SCSI. There may be a way to do it with ATA drives, but I haven't heard of it.
The other reason you want SCSI is reliability. That's one of the reasons SCSI drives are so much more expensive. I've seen more than one SCSI drive get dropped on a hard tile floor and still be usable for a year or more (These are half hieght Seagate and IBM, 7200 or 10k RPM, YMMV).
If you do decide to go IDE, try to use laptop drives. They have MUCH better g-force tolerance than the standard 3.5 inch IDE drives. However, I've still never seen one survive getting dropped on a hard tile floor. Shock and vibration are different things, though, so the laptop drives still may be a better choice. You can
You could go flash, and that would take care of the vibration/shock issue, but at 1GB each that's an assload of IDE controllers you have to somehow get working together. Assuming 4 per controller, that's still 125 controllers. Even if you solved the IRQ problem, where would you put all of them? Space is a precious comodity on these missions. Plus at $200 each that means $100k for 500GB, which seems to be out of your budget range. A custom motherboard with 125 PCI slots is certainly out of your budget range.
What I would do is talk to standard RAID vendors like EMC^2 or Ciprico and see what they've got. I know a company that would be happy to design and build a shock-mount for a standard raid chassis for you for probably under $10k. You could also go somewhere like Musicians friend and buy a road case, which will certainly have some anti-shock measures, for a few hundred dollars if your needs won't be too severe.
I very much doubt that zero-g will be an issue at all. The things that will be problems have already been mentioned by other posts.
But what, if the Linux kernel contains some backdoor? Blame Linus? Alan? Redhat?
I would say you would go after whoever maintains the kernel you were using. Could be AC, could be Linus, could be SuSE, etc. That seems like the most logical answer to that question.
The concept of copylefting for example is difficult under German law (Urherbergesetz). "You own the copyright of everything you produce" is it's basis. That's to protect the producers. Bad for copylefting.
I don't think you understand how copyleft actually works. If I, as an American, release software under the GPL, I still own the copyright (and so do my descedents for 75 years after my death), I've just chosen to give up the exclusive rights copyright normally gives me. GPL is not public domain. GPL still protects the producer, just in a different way than copyright usually does. There is no difference in this respect between American and German copyright law, if what you wrote is accurate.
Cause you are liable for your products. The licence doesn't matter.
Which is exactly why the very first sentence in the GPL's NO WARRANTY clause contains the phrase "TO THE EXTENT PERMITTED BY APPLICABLE LAW." Considering this, where exactly is the conflict with German law? As far as I can tell this article is nothing but FUD. Then again, IANAGL, nor can I read German. If I've missed some crucial point please fill me in.
Continuing to infringe after you have been put on notice is a serious matter.
Correct, but until they identify the infringing code they haven't put anyone on notice.
Of course one could try the slashdot approach, 'yes your honor we continued to ship the same code for two years after SCO presented the evidence of infringement'.
gcompris is superior to any other "educational game" software I've seen. Then again, my daughter is only 3, so exposure is limited. The graphics are not that good, but the actual games/gameplay is better.
I don't use Dreamweaver, so I can't help you much there, but I know there are similar apps for Linux, I just don't know how similar.
Let's see, when I was growing up the computers I had access to were (in order of appearance):
A Commodore PET in my 4th grade classroom Various Apple IIx in junior high computer labs A TRS-80M3 at home An Atari 600xl at home A hand-me-down 8088 with MS-DOS3.3 and WordPerfect5.1 at home Some Win95 machines in the high school computer lab, which we never got to use for some reason A DOS machine running VersaCAD in my high school drafting class Various Amigas, old PCs running DOS, and an Atari ST at friends houses
I didn't have any significant access to Windows or MS Office until I was in my early twenties, yet (shockingly!) I was able to become proficient in both in a fairly short period of time, and that was before I had any real interest in computers beyond playing the occasional game and typing up a paper once in a while.
My point is, demanding that schools teach ApplicationX on OSY is stupid. The specific computer skills I learned 10-20 years ago are absolutely useless today. The only thing that has any value today are the concepts I learned, and those can be taught on any platform with any application that has that general functionality. I fully expect the same to be true for my daughter when she gets out of school in 15 years or so.
I think IBM is actually very smart in not doing anything at all while letting SCO run up legal bills and make more and more unwise threatening statement.
Sorry, but SCO's lawyer is working on contingency. That means he gets a portion of the settlement, no fees.
ATI has always had crappy driver support, which is why I don't buy their cards. I bought an 8500DV for my dad because he wanted to edit video, if I had it to do over again I would have bought him and nVidia VIVO card.
I don't care if they're putting out the fastest consumer hardware right now, that means precisely dick when their driver support sucks. The nvidia cards work well enough, and I'm willing to sacrifice some fps and AA (which I don't use anyway) to go with a company that actually believes in customer support.
Removing the alleged infringing code does not eliminate the infringement but it does significantly limit the damages.
No, it doesn't.
If the infringement is not willful SCO only get to recover actual damages. In this case the cost of a cafe latte and doughnut for each member of the board.
SCO has a legal obligation to mitigate damages. By failing to do so they are actually reducing the amount of damages they can get.
Any arguement that would invalidate the GPL would invalidate every single EULA ever used. I very much doubt that is their strategy.
Even ignoring the very compelling shooting-themselves-in-the-foot scenario Stephen Samuel presents, defeating the GPL itself would be bad for them, as an IP licensing company, in almost every way imaginable.
SCO knows that there is no chance of significant damages if the alleged infringing code is replaced before the case comes to trial.
That's bullshit, go ahead and ask any IP lawyer. Just because the infringing code is removed doesn't negate the fact that the infringement occured, and it would have absolutely no negative effect on any damages awarded.
As a strategy it's completely braindead. Not only would pointing out the infringing code have no effect on any legitimate claims they have against IBM, but failing to do so will make it nearly impossible for them to collect any damages from Linux or other FOSS projects. The only possible conclusion is that their claims are not legitimate, and that they know it and are afraid of it being publicly proven.
I often find the ads more entertaining than the shows. Then again, I often don't buy the things I see advertised. In fact, the things I'm most likely to buy are the things I either don't see advertised, or that I wouldn't watch the ad for anyway, like infomercial kind of stuff. I never CALL NOW FOR THIS INCREDIBLE OFFER, but when I see that stuff in stores it's usually at least interesting to me.
Re:Why has this not been implemented anywhere?
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I had an idea a couple of years ago to start a site that would basically be a clearing house for this sort of thing. Basically, you would go to the site and start a ticket for a particular feature in a particular project and put a few bucks toward it, and later on maybe some other people would add more money to it if it was a feature they wanted. At some point the bounty would be high enough that someone would be interested in doing it.
My plan was to keep the donated money in an interest-bearing account, and use the dividends to pay for bandwidth and such. If it catches on it should actually be self-sufficient at some point.
Anyway, as I always say when I present my idea, feel free to steal it. I simply don't have the time to do it myself at the moment, but I'd love to see it happen someday.
In the UK at least you are permitted to "cost" your time preparing and attending a small claims court as "legal costs" although normally in the UK small claims courts do not award costs... each side pays their own
In CA you can include costs to the amount of damages you're asking for, but you probably wouldn't be awarded costs in addition to damages. The contract seems to say that they will bill you $1000 for filing suit anywhere other than Santa Clara, so I would just add that to the damages I was seeking. I think the reality, though, is that they countersue you for that amount. I would be very suprised if they would still have legal claim to that $1000 if they lost.
I can't think of a single instance where a US court has accepted a US internet company is liable for breaking the laws (or being sued) of another *country*
I said county, not country. The T&C says that you are bound by the laws of Santa Clara County.
Finally, there are other avenues. If you don't live in CA, for example, the FTC might be very interested in what Paypal is doing with your money.
As would I be. They claim to be legally your (or your clients, depending on which is convenient for them) agent; the money in limbo is either in the process of arriving in your account - or in the process of leaving theirs...
Another fun possibility is the agency that regulates banks (I can't remember what it's called right now, I keep wanting to say FICA but I know that's not right). Paypal has been very careful to not be considered a bank, it would be a Damn Shame to ruin that for them.
interesting - it might be worthwhile you posting an URL or email address that international (or out of state) readers here who may have had problems with paypal could get in contact with them though.
Here is the main page for the San Jose BBB office. It should be obvious from there.
It depends upon how they were brought up. When you've spent your whole life being told "software must be controlled by the author", then it's very hard to grok the concept of open source software. If you don't understand the concept of source code, then understanding the difference between proprietary freeware (IExploder) and open source freeware (Mozilla) is very difficult.
It's more fundamental than that, I think. I was born in 1975, and grew up right in the middle of the era you speak of, but FOSS makes more sense to me than proprietary software does.
Most people are brought up in a very materialistic environment, where the only value anything has is how much money you can get for it. If you're used to thinking of everything in terms of money, of course you won't understand why someone would do something for any other reason. I don't think it has anything to do with ZDNet and MS, though, I think they're just symptoms of the underlying disease.
Re:Like it or not, managers default to commercial
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See, you have the misconception that simply having access to the source means you can fix problems in an acceptable amount of time. If you've ever had to pore over a massive project you'll realize that you could spend a couple days trying to track down and fix a problem that is preventing you from finishing your real work or you could simply send a problem description off to the guys who originally wrote the code (and who you're already paying for), and they'll probably be able to fix the problem far quicker than you ever could. THAT is the reason closed-source software is so appealing. If you have a problem with a piece of code you bought you can tell them "hey, I've got a problem, I'm paying you, get on this problem and fix it for me ASAP or we'll be re-evaluating our business relationship with you." With open source software, you might get lucky with helpful developers and you might not. You never know. What you do know is that you don't have the ability to really push open source developers to fix problems for you, and that's a major drawback.
Going to the maintainer or a major developer for the project and saying "hey, I have this problem and will pay you $x to fix it" would probably be plenty of leverage on an OS project, and would probably still be cheaper than the CS solution, and likely eliminates the need to be an asshole about it.
You catch more flies with honey than with vinegar.
Basically, what you're saying is that CS is a more attractive solution than OS for people who have no vision and no people skills.
All I can say is that with all the KVM (and just KV) switches I deal with at work, everything works best if you boot the machine active. My QNX boxes are especially "sensative", if I don't boot them active I don't even get the extra keys on the keyboard (arrow keys, 10-key pad, etc.).
I have yet to encounter a KVM switch that truely works as advertised. Then again, my company doesn't buy the good ones.
Most modern KVM switches will send a signal that tells the machine that it has a keyboard and mouse plugged in even if you're actually switched to another machine. My guess is that the KMS' pseudo-mouse is just a basic 2-button, so Linux doesn't recognize that it's actually a wheel mouse that's plugged in. Have you tried booting the Linux box completely while switched to it (meaning you don't switch to another box to do something else while it comes up)? That might make a difference.
Also, check for the ZAxisMapping option in your X11Config (you may have more than one, and the one in/etc might not be the one being used), and/or you might try installing imwheel, which is supposed to fix some mouse wheel in Linux issues. I would probably do both.
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So the average American 'executive' earns about $18 million a year now? I am in wrong country!
Watch your semantics.
It means that the top paid executives are ludicrously overpaid. The mean may be $18M, but I suspect the median is well below that.
So if you might get screwed either way, why not go on the cheap.
Because knowledgable people aren't cheap. Going for cheap labor just increases your chances of getting bozos doing your work. That's true in ANY industry, from construction to IT to manufacturing to teaching (I've done all of those).
My stepmom had a Betamax machine, which of course came into our house when she and my dad got married. To be perfectly honest I could never see the alleged quality difference, and I very much suspect that most consumers couldn't either. The differences I could see, however, were that VHS had a longer record time and wasn't a proprietary product. Record time was something people really cared about back then, they were going crazy recording every stupid miniseries that came out on the off chance that they might want to watch it again, and all those lame movies you only see around christmas time (yes, I'm still bitter about my grandmother using my Monty Python's Flying Circus tape to record some stupid Santa Claus movie). In fact, record time was so important, and image quality so unimportant, that people were perfectly willing to sacrifice quality for record time. Ever watch any tapes produced by the early LP VHS machines? Yikes! But, everybody I knew had a shelf or two full of them.
More importantly, though, Sony was restrictive about who could put out movies on Beta, and specifically that meant no porn. If there's one lesson that can be learned from every media revolution in history, it's that people love their porn. The second lesson might be that pornographers are THE early adopters on the production side. VHS, on the other hand, was almost totally open, so anybody and everybody put out tapes for VHS. Even back in the early days of video rental, when it was far from certain which format would prevail, the Beta section of every rental place I went to was miniscule. Strangely, people just weren't as interested in the platform with the more restricted content selection.
What this all boils down to is that the best format DID win in Beta v. VHS. It was the format that gave the consumers what they actually wanted: content and record time. So shut the hell up about Betamax already. If it had really been as good as everyone likes to say it was, it would still have a viable niche market, just like Apple does.
Comments and spacing in source code have no effect at all on the result of the compilation (the binary (or whatever) produced).
THAT'S EXACTLY THE POINT!!!!!
They could take comments from Linux and put them in their source code and it wouldn't affect the binary at all, but it would result in compelling evidence of code copying.
My company resells EMC^2 and Ciproco RAIDs
Wow, big surprise there.
But we wouldn't sell one to him, or anyone else, except as part of our Digital Video Server product, which I wouldn't recommend for this purpose even if he did have the budget for one, which he doesn't.
I said as a minimum, not "as a minimum that would fulfill his requirements".
If it doesn't pertain to the actual question being asked, why the hell did you bother to post it. I agree with the basic statement (although I'm wondering where you're finding 250GB drives), but it's completely irrelevant to this discussion, since it won't fill his requirememnts.
I think you legacy SCSI RAID guys are scared.
First of all, I'm hardly a legacy SCSI guy. The one SCSI drive I have at home is only used as a paperweight. I'm a firm believer in ATA for most applications.
However, to say that an ATA drive is just as good as a SCSI drive is just plain bunk. They might be just as good for your particular purpose, but that doesn't mean they're just as good across the board. First there's performance. Todays SATA drives perform, bandwidth wise, about as well as 5 year old SCSI drives. SCSI might not have been advancing as fast as ATA in recent years, but it has been advancing, and the jumps SCSI technology makes are a hell of a lot bigger than the ones ATA technology makes. If you don't need the bandwidth, well, good for you. Some people do, and ATA can't touch SCSI in that regard.
But, that's irrelevant to this particular discussion, since he didn't mention any bandwidth requirememnts, just the ability to withstand mechanical stress, and SCSI wins that too. The simple fact is that SCSI drives are engineered for higher reliability, manufactured to tighter tolerances, and subjected to more rigorous testing than ATA drives. That's why ATA drives are cheap and SCSI drives aren't. It might make no difference in your data center, where the drives are just sitting in an immobile rack, but in a more mechanically hostile environment like a tv production truck or the space shuttle it makes a huge difference. How many ATA drives do you have that are still usable after 5 years, even in an immobile application?
Then again, if you actually knew what you were talking about you wouldn't have even mentioned Fibre Channel, since the physical transmission of the data is completely irrelevant to the discussion at hand (how the drives will stand up to the mechanical stresses of the environment).
You haven't looked very hard.
You're right, I haven't, because if I have data that's important enough or big enough to require any sort of RAID I'm going to also want the increased reliability of SCSI drives. If he's even thinking of using anything beyond RAID-0, this is obviously a consideration for him.
What, so he can pay 10X as much for the same thing?
No, so he can get the same thing for less than it would cost him to engineer and test a custom solution for the problem he describes. My company resells EMC^2 and Ciproco RAIDs which often end up being used in mobile applications (TV news vans and such) with a small enough failure rate that they have only one guy (me) in their customer service repair center supporting all the RAIDs they've sold in the last 7 years. Considering that we sell the most popular professional digital video server on the market, as well as some less popular lines we acquired from other companies, I think that speaks highly of the reliability of those systems. And since that is his primary concern, it seemed like a reasonable suggestion that he at least talk to some people who are experts in the field.
A 500GB RAID is as few as two hard disks these days.
As you pointed out, he wants "at least RAID3", which will NEVER be satisfied with only 2 drives. But, perhaps you have a line on 500GB drives he could put in a RAID-1?
Liability: Do you really think that anyone packaging OSS in the spare time would do this, if he was liable (for his hobby)?!? I'm sure that most developers would quit soon when they were sued.
I personally don't believe[1] exclusion of liability clauses are valid, but I would still release stuff under GPL if I had written anything worth releasing. Honestly, how much is the providor of a free product going to be liable for? As I understand it, German law would require me to either fix the problem or refund their money. So, if I can't fix the problem I refund them the nothing they paid me for it. Frankly, I don't see a problem here.
[1] Even if you (or I) live in a jurisdiction where exclusion of liability clauses are valid for situations where the product is used properly, I don't think that will be the case for long. IT is a huge part of our economy, and software failures can have a huge impact on a business. Eventually the courts will recognize this and act accordingly, so depending on such a clause for protection is foolish, IMHO.
If you want RAID-3 you pretty much have to go SCSI. There may be a way to do it with ATA drives, but I haven't heard of it.
The other reason you want SCSI is reliability. That's one of the reasons SCSI drives are so much more expensive. I've seen more than one SCSI drive get dropped on a hard tile floor and still be usable for a year or more (These are half hieght Seagate and IBM, 7200 or 10k RPM, YMMV).
If you do decide to go IDE, try to use laptop drives. They have MUCH better g-force tolerance than the standard 3.5 inch IDE drives. However, I've still never seen one survive getting dropped on a hard tile floor. Shock and vibration are different things, though, so the laptop drives still may be a better choice. You can
You could go flash, and that would take care of the vibration/shock issue, but at 1GB each that's an assload of IDE controllers you have to somehow get working together. Assuming 4 per controller, that's still 125 controllers. Even if you solved the IRQ problem, where would you put all of them? Space is a precious comodity on these missions. Plus at $200 each that means $100k for 500GB, which seems to be out of your budget range. A custom motherboard with 125 PCI slots is certainly out of your budget range.
What I would do is talk to standard RAID vendors like EMC^2 or Ciprico and see what they've got. I know a company that would be happy to design and build a shock-mount for a standard raid chassis for you for probably under $10k. You could also go somewhere like Musicians friend and buy a road case, which will certainly have some anti-shock measures, for a few hundred dollars if your needs won't be too severe.
I very much doubt that zero-g will be an issue at all. The things that will be problems have already been mentioned by other posts.
See the dilemna now?
No, because in a circuitous way you said exactly the same thing as the post you were replying to.
But what, if the Linux kernel contains some backdoor? Blame Linus? Alan? Redhat?
I would say you would go after whoever maintains the kernel you were using. Could be AC, could be Linus, could be SuSE, etc. That seems like the most logical answer to that question.
The concept of copylefting for example is difficult under German law (Urherbergesetz). "You own the copyright of everything you produce" is it's basis. That's to protect the producers. Bad for copylefting.
I don't think you understand how copyleft actually works. If I, as an American, release software under the GPL, I still own the copyright (and so do my descedents for 75 years after my death), I've just chosen to give up the exclusive rights copyright normally gives me. GPL is not public domain. GPL still protects the producer, just in a different way than copyright usually does. There is no difference in this respect between American and German copyright law, if what you wrote is accurate.
Cause you are liable for your products. The licence doesn't matter.
Which is exactly why the very first sentence in the GPL's NO WARRANTY clause contains the phrase "TO THE EXTENT PERMITTED BY APPLICABLE LAW." Considering this, where exactly is the conflict with German law? As far as I can tell this article is nothing but FUD. Then again, IANAGL, nor can I read German. If I've missed some crucial point please fill me in.
Continuing to infringe after you have been put on notice is a serious matter.
Correct, but until they identify the infringing code they haven't put anyone on notice.
Of course one could try the slashdot approach, 'yes your honor we continued to ship the same code for two years after SCO presented the evidence of infringement'.
Show me the evidence that has been presented.
gcompris is superior to any other "educational game" software I've seen. Then again, my daughter is only 3, so exposure is limited. The graphics are not that good, but the actual games/gameplay is better.
I don't use Dreamweaver, so I can't help you much there, but I know there are similar apps for Linux, I just don't know how similar.
Let's see, when I was growing up the computers I had access to were (in order of appearance):
A Commodore PET in my 4th grade classroom
Various Apple IIx in junior high computer labs
A TRS-80M3 at home
An Atari 600xl at home
A hand-me-down 8088 with MS-DOS3.3 and WordPerfect5.1 at home
Some Win95 machines in the high school computer lab, which we never got to use for some reason
A DOS machine running VersaCAD in my high school drafting class
Various Amigas, old PCs running DOS, and an Atari ST at friends houses
I didn't have any significant access to Windows or MS Office until I was in my early twenties, yet (shockingly!) I was able to become proficient in both in a fairly short period of time, and that was before I had any real interest in computers beyond playing the occasional game and typing up a paper once in a while.
My point is, demanding that schools teach ApplicationX on OSY is stupid. The specific computer skills I learned 10-20 years ago are absolutely useless today. The only thing that has any value today are the concepts I learned, and those can be taught on any platform with any application that has that general functionality. I fully expect the same to be true for my daughter when she gets out of school in 15 years or so.
I think IBM is actually very smart in not doing anything at all while letting SCO run up legal bills and make more and more unwise threatening statement.
Sorry, but SCO's lawyer is working on contingency. That means he gets a portion of the settlement, no fees.
ATI has always had crappy driver support, which is why I don't buy their cards. I bought an 8500DV for my dad because he wanted to edit video, if I had it to do over again I would have bought him and nVidia VIVO card.
I don't care if they're putting out the fastest consumer hardware right now, that means precisely dick when their driver support sucks. The nvidia cards work well enough, and I'm willing to sacrifice some fps and AA (which I don't use anyway) to go with a company that actually believes in customer support.
Removing the alleged infringing code does not eliminate the infringement but it does significantly limit the damages.
No, it doesn't.
If the infringement is not willful SCO only get to recover actual damages. In this case the cost of a cafe latte and doughnut for each member of the board.
SCO has a legal obligation to mitigate damages. By failing to do so they are actually reducing the amount of damages they can get.
Any arguement that would invalidate the GPL would invalidate every single EULA ever used. I very much doubt that is their strategy.
Even ignoring the very compelling shooting-themselves-in-the-foot scenario Stephen Samuel presents, defeating the GPL itself would be bad for them, as an IP licensing company, in almost every way imaginable.
SCO knows that there is no chance of significant damages if the alleged infringing code is replaced before the case comes to trial.
That's bullshit, go ahead and ask any IP lawyer. Just because the infringing code is removed doesn't negate the fact that the infringement occured, and it would have absolutely no negative effect on any damages awarded.
As a strategy it's completely braindead. Not only would pointing out the infringing code have no effect on any legitimate claims they have against IBM, but failing to do so will make it nearly impossible for them to collect any damages from Linux or other FOSS projects. The only possible conclusion is that their claims are not legitimate, and that they know it and are afraid of it being publicly proven.
I often find the ads more entertaining than the shows. Then again, I often don't buy the things I see advertised. In fact, the things I'm most likely to buy are the things I either don't see advertised, or that I wouldn't watch the ad for anyway, like infomercial kind of stuff. I never CALL NOW FOR THIS INCREDIBLE OFFER, but when I see that stuff in stores it's usually at least interesting to me.
I had an idea a couple of years ago to start a site that would basically be a clearing house for this sort of thing. Basically, you would go to the site and start a ticket for a particular feature in a particular project and put a few bucks toward it, and later on maybe some other people would add more money to it if it was a feature they wanted. At some point the bounty would be high enough that someone would be interested in doing it.
My plan was to keep the donated money in an interest-bearing account, and use the dividends to pay for bandwidth and such. If it catches on it should actually be self-sufficient at some point.
Anyway, as I always say when I present my idea, feel free to steal it. I simply don't have the time to do it myself at the moment, but I'd love to see it happen someday.
In the UK at least you are permitted to "cost" your time preparing and attending a small claims court as "legal costs" although normally in the UK small claims courts do not award costs... each side pays their own
In CA you can include costs to the amount of damages you're asking for, but you probably wouldn't be awarded costs in addition to damages. The contract seems to say that they will bill you $1000 for filing suit anywhere other than Santa Clara, so I would just add that to the damages I was seeking. I think the reality, though, is that they countersue you for that amount. I would be very suprised if they would still have legal claim to that $1000 if they lost.
I can't think of a single instance where a US court has accepted a US internet company is liable for breaking the laws (or being sued) of another *country*
I said county, not country. The T&C says that you are bound by the laws of Santa Clara County.
Finally, there are other avenues. If you don't live in CA, for example, the FTC might be very interested in what Paypal is doing with your money.
As would I be. They claim to be legally your (or your clients, depending on which is convenient for them) agent; the money in limbo is either in the process of arriving in your account - or in the process of leaving theirs...
Another fun possibility is the agency that regulates banks (I can't remember what it's called right now, I keep wanting to say FICA but I know that's not right). Paypal has been very careful to not be considered a bank, it would be a Damn Shame to ruin that for them.
interesting - it might be worthwhile you posting an URL or email address that international (or out of state) readers here who may have had problems with paypal could get in contact with them though.
Here is the main page for the San Jose BBB office. It should be obvious from there.
It depends upon how they were brought up. When you've spent your whole life being told "software must be controlled by the author", then it's very hard to grok the concept of open source software. If you don't understand the concept of source code, then understanding the difference between proprietary freeware (IExploder) and open source freeware (Mozilla) is very difficult.
It's more fundamental than that, I think. I was born in 1975, and grew up right in the middle of the era you speak of, but FOSS makes more sense to me than proprietary software does.
Most people are brought up in a very materialistic environment, where the only value anything has is how much money you can get for it. If you're used to thinking of everything in terms of money, of course you won't understand why someone would do something for any other reason. I don't think it has anything to do with ZDNet and MS, though, I think they're just symptoms of the underlying disease.
See, you have the misconception that simply having access to the source means you can fix problems in an acceptable amount of time. If you've ever had to pore over a massive project you'll realize that you could spend a couple days trying to track down and fix a problem that is preventing you from finishing your real work or you could simply send a problem description off to the guys who originally wrote the code (and who you're already paying for), and they'll probably be able to fix the problem far quicker than you ever could. THAT is the reason closed-source software is so appealing. If you have a problem with a piece of code you bought you can tell them "hey, I've got a problem, I'm paying you, get on this problem and fix it for me ASAP or we'll be re-evaluating our business relationship with you." With open source software, you might get lucky with helpful developers and you might not. You never know. What you do know is that you don't have the ability to really push open source developers to fix problems for you, and that's a major drawback.
Going to the maintainer or a major developer for the project and saying "hey, I have this problem and will pay you $x to fix it" would probably be plenty of leverage on an OS project, and would probably still be cheaper than the CS solution, and likely eliminates the need to be an asshole about it.
You catch more flies with honey than with vinegar.
Basically, what you're saying is that CS is a more attractive solution than OS for people who have no vision and no people skills.
Curious.
All I can say is that with all the KVM (and just KV) switches I deal with at work, everything works best if you boot the machine active. My QNX boxes are especially "sensative", if I don't boot them active I don't even get the extra keys on the keyboard (arrow keys, 10-key pad, etc.).
I have yet to encounter a KVM switch that truely works as advertised. Then again, my company doesn't buy the good ones.
Most modern KVM switches will send a signal that tells the machine that it has a keyboard and mouse plugged in even if you're actually switched to another machine. My guess is that the KMS' pseudo-mouse is just a basic 2-button, so Linux doesn't recognize that it's actually a wheel mouse that's plugged in. Have you tried booting the Linux box completely while switched to it (meaning you don't switch to another box to do something else while it comes up)? That might make a difference.
/etc might not be the one being used), and/or you might try installing imwheel, which is supposed to fix some mouse wheel in Linux issues. I would probably do both.
Also, check for the ZAxisMapping option in your X11Config (you may have more than one, and the one in