Because I do know enough about this to realize that its a difficult legal question, not appropriate for ask slashdot.
Perhaps you should say that it's more difficult than YOU can answer, but possibly appropriate for somebody else on Slashdot. There are half a million people here, but you can arrogantly dismiss all half a million people as being less informed than you.
Your arrogance was also shown by your dismissive "over and out". I bet you say "plonk" or "killfiled" as well.
Lawyer != copyright lawyer. Lawyers these days are specialists -- this is NOT my field of expertise.
So if this was not your field of expertise, why did you feel the need to say "IAAL"? Perhaps trying to browbeat me down with credentials? Shame on you.
The point about liability insurance was not that I'm worried about getting sued. Its precisely the opposite. If the submitter asked an attorney his question, he would have recourse against the attorney for bad advice. Not so for bad advice from random Slashdot people.
Give these people more credit. You seem to think the questioner was incapable of realising this on their own. Nobody asks a question on/. expecting the perfect truth with a nice insurance payout if the information is wrong. People are looking for advice so they can *start* upon the journey of gaining knowledge.
Now you could question the value of asking a question like this on/. instead of lawmeme or freeadvice, but it is pretty useless to do what you did. You added no value. You just added a useless noise that some pedant will voice every time there's a non-computer question on Ask/..
If you AAL then perhaps you should give advice next time, instead of saying that Slashdot has no legal experts who can give legal advice.
and who, frankly, has malpractice insurance if he gives you bad advise
Seeing as you AAL you would already know that you can't be sued for malpractice over free advice posted on a bulletin board under a pseudonym.
On another rant, I think it's pretty fucked up that a professional won't even talk within his field of expertise because of the fear of malpractice. And lawyers wonder why they're universally reviled.
As a result, Microsoft is highly unlikely to be aware, as a company, if Open Source has penetrated its products. This presents a significant risk to shareholders.
I fail to see why Open Source would pose more of a risk than Closed Source. If Microsoft isn't keeping track of their code and finds something in... oh, I don't know... SQL Server that doesn't belong to them, then they're in just as much trouble as if MySQL code was in there or Linux code was in there.
In fact, for some open source licenses there is less of a problem. For example, BSD licensed software.
Even for GPL software, possibly the harshest of all the open source licenses, they are no worse off than if they stole code from... oh, I don't know... Stac Technologies and incorporated it into a flagship Microsoft product. They don't have to accept the GPL. They can always revert to their standard practise when they've been caught "stealing" code; pay heaps of money to keep it all quiet.
What, exactly, is so bad about IE, other than the fact that it's not open source and you can't hack away at it to your heart's content?
Gosh, where to start...
Ok, let's start with the horribly broken HTTP/1.1 support. It breaks keepalives. It breaks expirations. It locally caches content that it shouldn't. Caching servers the world over (eg, look at Squid) have hacks to workaround stupid mistakes in the IE implementation of HTTP.
Let's move onto authentication. They created a completely broken HTTP authentication model called NTLM. It assumes a single state across *3* successive HTTP connections. Completely breaks HTTP. What's even worse, NTLM didn't offer any value over existing auth models like Digest.
Javascript. Oh, this one's a doozy. Not only does IE Javascript differ substantially from Netscape Javascript, it also differs from the W3C Javascript (aka ECMA), and it also differs from IE Javascript! There's no consistency even within the same product line.
CSS. Apparently Microsoft heard of this thing called CSS and decided to do something else. Same for DOM. Same for HTML for that matter. Standards are something that other companies follow, not Microsoft. Other companies manage to follow the standard and if they get it wrong they admit it. Microsoft just says "fuck you all, we're bigger than you and we don't have to follow standards".
Yes, there's a browser built into the OS- but, let me ask you Mr. Smart guy, if that browser wasn't integrated, how would Joe Put-Down-By-The-M$an Consumer find and download any alternative?
Perhaps by clicking the icon on the desktop installed there by the OEM? You know, like Compaq wanted to do with Netscape, before Microsoft threatened them with a licensing freeze. You may have noticed a little court case that Microsoft LOST over that particular incident.
You wouldn't trust your lawyer to write some software for you; why would you trust a bunch of programmers/geeks to give you good legal advice?
For many reasons:
Slashdot isn't entirely populated by geeks and programmers; there are real lawyers (or so they claim) who read and post on Slashdot.
Other geeks might have done this before so he's intelligently asking for some pointers on where to start. Lawyers aren't the sole source for that sort of information.
The answer might be really simple, eg FILL OUT FORM 1209127 AT RIAA DEPT 2387. You don't need paid legal advice to tell you that.
Time for the rant... I'm getting really sick of people like you who leap at EVERY opportunity to say IANAL or HINAL or SINAL. No fucking shit. Do you think people are so retarded that they're not going to know this already? The fact is, if people like you had their way then Ask Slashdot would be nothing but questions about computers. Some of us have hobbies outside of a computer screen. Some of us do know other stuff. Slashdot is News for Nerds, not News for Computer Nerds. I'm fricking sick of you nitwits assuming that everybody else is as dull as you are. If you don't have any valuable input then SHUT THE FUCK UP.
Well, I'm sure folx have said the same about ILM and Apple in the past. I fear that Microsoft will exist in some form for at least another 100 years.
Sure, but they also said the same thing about Data General, Sperry and Burroughs. Some companies never seem to take the hint but others fade into obscurity so fast that entire generations have never even heard of them.
I have no doubt that Microsoft's rotting corpse will continue to wander around, like a zombie, for decades to come. The difference is that Microsoft is to become another UNISYS; alive in theory but irrelevant in practise.
That's the first time I've ever heard that. Usually a console has to sold at a loss to the company just so they would have a big enough userbase to make money on the software.
First thing when the revolution comes, shoot all the pedants. Don't be so damn literal. You could naturally assume that I meant profit from the whole franchise not just the bit of plastic that plugs into the TV. The "console as a loss leader" strategy isn't news to anybody on/.. Microsoft hasn't turned a profit despite having reasonable success in marketshare. Even Nintendo has turned a profit and apparently the Cube was also a loss leader.
Why is it that anything Microsoft does is considered bad?
Not everything that Microsoft does is bad. Don't exaggerate.
When Microsoft overcharged $200 for WinXP, everyone was criticizing them. Now that they are releasing it for a more reasonable price, they are still getting criticized.
Because they're not dropping the price across the board. Only people who were "about to switch" are getting a discount. That's dirty behaviour and probably illegal too.
Overall I see this as very positive. It means that Microsoft realises they can't keep charging ridiculous prices without competitors breaking into the marketplace. Linux is poised to take the desktop (it's not ready yet but it's poised) and even Microsoft knows it. Rejoice everybody. Linux has won. It's now a simple matter of waiting for Microsoft to painfully bleed to death. Just watch out for the flailing death throes.
Please, elaborite on why the XBox is one of the 25 biggest mistakes ever in gaming?
Because it's not making a profit. No, sorry, simple as that, you can't argue. Games consoles are supposed to make a profit. The Xbox makes a huge loss for Microsoft. That's a mistake. In fact it would be a fatal mistake for almost any company except for Microsoft.
Now we could argue all the little details. I think the original Xbox controller was shit. I think the original games lineup was worse; how many fucking snowboarding games did they have? The console itself is so big it could easily be mistaken for a moon of Jupiter.
But those are just details and Microsoft has been correcting them. The new Xbox pack has a decent controller. The video and audio on the Xbox is far and away the best of the 3 consoles. The hard drive is a great idea even if it does cost more. The games lineup is now pretty damn decent.
But the profit; that's a showstopper. There's no point in having a brilliant product that loses money hand over fist. Microsoft fucked up. Nobody can dispute that.
2. The government steps in and makes spam e-mail illegal because there's no viable solution for checking the age of an e-mail recipient before sending the message. Given how government generally operates, it should only be 3-5 years before snail-mail junk is outlawed also...
Fucking awesome. Option 2. Definitely. If it means even 12 months of spam-free bliss before the world comes crumbling down around us, then I'm all for it.
The problem being there is no way to tell how old the person who checks the email address is.
Sure there is. It's called an opt-in list. The only spammers who don't know their target audience are the scumbags who reap emails from lists and webpages and then spam-away without any concern for the recipients. These people should be strung-up from the highest branch anyway.
Though maybe hanging is too good for these pricks. We should bring back public floggings.
With titles like "re: what's up?" and stuff, I *have* to open them because it might be someone I sent a message to a while back...
I have a simpler technique; if the subject is ambiguous I delete it. If it was important then the person will try again, or use a phone, or speak to me in person. I'd rather miss out on valid email than read anymore fucking spam.
Parents shouldn't be dropping their kids off at a strip club any more than they should be leaving them alone while on the Internet. If they can't handle that, they should get snipped/tied.
And strip clubs shouldn't be calling Tommy Junior on the phone at 4pm on a weekday, before his parents get home, and asking him whether he wants to see Hot Naked Chicks.
This kid I work with said he likes "Industrial" music, "like Tool and Linkin Park." I just couldn't stop laughing. He hadn't heard of Throbbing Gristle or Coil or Einsturzende Neubauten.
Similar thing happened to somebody I know. 14 year old punk told him Korn was heavy metal.
If that punk had said it to me I'd have beaten him to death with a Black Sabbath CD.
See, this is the thing I've never understood - why would you install *nix/BSD on a palmtop? Most of the apps out there are not designed for such a small screen
Because *some* of the apps are designed for such a small screen. Also, if you had the skill to port UNIX to the PDA then you probably have the skill to code up the apps you need as well.
I love reusable code. Thanks to CPAN I can mockup incredibly functional scripts without ever needing to know the details of a protocol. I love linking against libssl or libpng and not needing to know or care what TLS is or what RLE means. It's great.
But when I write code for a living it's never that easy. The problem is that most libraries cost money (in the areas I work in) and, even worse, they cost a LOT of money. If you use libraries to do the bulk of your work then you can find a product costing upwards of $500 just in licensing fees; that's before you add your own costs and profits on top. It's no wonder that so many people reinvent the wheel; it's because you can't just buy the wheel, you have to pay licensing fees everytime you use it. It's just not economical to reuse code in the "real world".
That is, unless you write open source. This is where reusable code really is working. I can ldd any binary on my system and find incredible levels of code reuse. Evolution (the mail client) links against 50+ libraries. That's great!
I think attempts in the past to encourage code reuse fell flat because they focussed on the technical problems and not the legal or economic problems. Open source changes all of that. So there's hope yet for reusable code.
My answer was rather simple. "Well, before Walmart, the center of my town- the local town hardware store, the local grocery store, and so on. But thanks to Home Depot and Walmart running all the local businesses out, now you can't get anything without driving 20+ minutes". So now, for the $2 in savings, I've got to burn $2 in gas just to get there. I've got to spend 5 minutes finding a parking space, 5 walking from the lot into the store, another 5 trying to find the section and get there, another 5-10 waiting in line...so on etc. That's 'better'?
My most recent experience with a M&P store going bust was the local fruit&veg. They shared a closed area "shopping village" with a butcher, a baker, a deli, a pharmacy, a newsagent, and a general purpose supermarket. The supermarket had products in common with them all but everybody seemed to do OK.
Except for the fruit&veg store. Their prices were astronomical. Their service was lousy. The range was pathetic. The fruit was rarely fresh; I remember one day going to buy a lettuce and being put off by the swarm of FRUIT FLIES. I often found myself driving 15 minutes to the next nearest fruit&veg just to avoid buying from this lousy store.
So one day the supermarket decided to expand their range and offer a fruit&veg section. I've never heard such a stink. The fruit&veg store had signs proclaiming "save our local business" and "big corporations destroying our community" and all sorts of nonsense. Nevermind the supermarket was family-owned even though the name was from a franchise.
But the consumers weren't fooled by the rhetoric. The supermarket offered the better product; fresher, wider range, better service, lower prices. Within a month the fruit&veg store had gone bankrupt. All I remember thinking is "good riddance". The supermarket expanded into the vacated area and made the fruit&veg section even bigger.
So I have no problem with M&P stores being destroyed by the big "megamarts". If the M&P stores want my business then they need to offer a compelling reason. If the supermarket offers a better product at a lower price then I'm going there. No amount of rhetoric will sway me on that.
Re:This SCO story just makes me sick to my stomach
on
Latest SCO News
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· Score: 1
What it all comes down to is this: I don't care if there are six or ten minor chunks of SCO code in Linux. I don't care where the Linux code came from. SCO is not good for humanity; SCO is a product. Linux, on the other hand, is good for humanity on a fundamental level.
Would you want Linux to help humanity by trampling on the rights of another entity? I don't believe SCO's claims have any merit but I also wouldn't support somebody like yourself who seems to be claiming "it's OK to infringe on SCO's copyright because Linux is good for humanity".
You are advocating the ends justify the means no matter the cost. That's not something I can agree with. Linux needs to win fairly. I think it has won fairly and SCO is full of shit, but I still think SCO deserves their right to be heard.
I almost feel like some kind of neo-flower-child. Screw the establishment. Help the people. If that's communism or if that's bad for business, so fscking what?
Because businesses are fundamentally people working for a common goal. When you advocate the harm of businesses to further your own personal goals (Linux) then you are actually inflicting harm on individuals.
I think here on/., we are all denying it like crazy and ludicrously thinking that SCO is suing for *no* reason. Why would a company sue unless it has at least something to base its case on?
IBM and Novell are denying it too. Are they also crazy?
Slashdot Mirror
Are you lazy? Do you expect everybody else to do your research for you.
Here's a start but you find the next one yourself. I suggest reading the SEC.
Choice quote regarding the Xbox division: "This loss is by far the largest of Microsoft's unprofitable divisions."
Perhaps you should say that it's more difficult than YOU can answer, but possibly appropriate for somebody else on Slashdot. There are half a million people here, but you can arrogantly dismiss all half a million people as being less informed than you.
Your arrogance was also shown by your dismissive "over and out". I bet you say "plonk" or "killfiled" as well.
So if this was not your field of expertise, why did you feel the need to say "IAAL"? Perhaps trying to browbeat me down with credentials? Shame on you.
Give these people more credit. You seem to think the questioner was incapable of realising this on their own. Nobody asks a question on /. expecting the perfect truth with a nice insurance payout if the information is wrong. People are looking for advice so they can *start* upon the journey of gaining knowledge.
Now you could question the value of asking a question like this on /. instead of lawmeme or freeadvice, but it is pretty useless to do what you did. You added no value. You just added a useless noise that some pedant will voice every time there's a non-computer question on Ask /..
If you AAL then perhaps you should give advice next time, instead of saying that Slashdot has no legal experts who can give legal advice.
Seeing as you AAL you would already know that you can't be sued for malpractice over free advice posted on a bulletin board under a pseudonym.
On another rant, I think it's pretty fucked up that a professional won't even talk within his field of expertise because of the fear of malpractice. And lawyers wonder why they're universally reviled.
I fail to see why Open Source would pose more of a risk than Closed Source. If Microsoft isn't keeping track of their code and finds something in... oh, I don't know... SQL Server that doesn't belong to them, then they're in just as much trouble as if MySQL code was in there or Linux code was in there.
In fact, for some open source licenses there is less of a problem. For example, BSD licensed software.
Even for GPL software, possibly the harshest of all the open source licenses, they are no worse off than if they stole code from... oh, I don't know... Stac Technologies and incorporated it into a flagship Microsoft product. They don't have to accept the GPL. They can always revert to their standard practise when they've been caught "stealing" code; pay heaps of money to keep it all quiet.
Gosh, where to start...
Ok, let's start with the horribly broken HTTP/1.1 support. It breaks keepalives. It breaks expirations. It locally caches content that it shouldn't. Caching servers the world over (eg, look at Squid) have hacks to workaround stupid mistakes in the IE implementation of HTTP.
Let's move onto authentication. They created a completely broken HTTP authentication model called NTLM. It assumes a single state across *3* successive HTTP connections. Completely breaks HTTP. What's even worse, NTLM didn't offer any value over existing auth models like Digest.
Javascript. Oh, this one's a doozy. Not only does IE Javascript differ substantially from Netscape Javascript, it also differs from the W3C Javascript (aka ECMA), and it also differs from IE Javascript! There's no consistency even within the same product line.
CSS. Apparently Microsoft heard of this thing called CSS and decided to do something else. Same for DOM. Same for HTML for that matter. Standards are something that other companies follow, not Microsoft. Other companies manage to follow the standard and if they get it wrong they admit it. Microsoft just says "fuck you all, we're bigger than you and we don't have to follow standards".
Perhaps by clicking the icon on the desktop installed there by the OEM? You know, like Compaq wanted to do with Netscape, before Microsoft threatened them with a licensing freeze. You may have noticed a little court case that Microsoft LOST over that particular incident.
For many reasons:
Time for the rant... I'm getting really sick of people like you who leap at EVERY opportunity to say IANAL or HINAL or SINAL. No fucking shit. Do you think people are so retarded that they're not going to know this already? The fact is, if people like you had their way then Ask Slashdot would be nothing but questions about computers. Some of us have hobbies outside of a computer screen. Some of us do know other stuff. Slashdot is News for Nerds, not News for Computer Nerds. I'm fricking sick of you nitwits assuming that everybody else is as dull as you are. If you don't have any valuable input then SHUT THE FUCK UP.
You misunderstood. The way to *win* marketshare is to open the format. The way to *maintain* marketshare is to keep the format closed.
Sure, but they also said the same thing about Data General, Sperry and Burroughs. Some companies never seem to take the hint but others fade into obscurity so fast that entire generations have never even heard of them.
I have no doubt that Microsoft's rotting corpse will continue to wander around, like a zombie, for decades to come. The difference is that Microsoft is to become another UNISYS; alive in theory but irrelevant in practise.
First thing when the revolution comes, shoot all the pedants. Don't be so damn literal. You could naturally assume that I meant profit from the whole franchise not just the bit of plastic that plugs into the TV. The "console as a loss leader" strategy isn't news to anybody on /.. Microsoft hasn't turned a profit despite having reasonable success in marketshare. Even Nintendo has turned a profit and apparently the Cube was also a loss leader.
Not everything that Microsoft does is bad. Don't exaggerate.
Because they're not dropping the price across the board. Only people who were "about to switch" are getting a discount. That's dirty behaviour and probably illegal too.
Overall I see this as very positive. It means that Microsoft realises they can't keep charging ridiculous prices without competitors breaking into the marketplace. Linux is poised to take the desktop (it's not ready yet but it's poised) and even Microsoft knows it. Rejoice everybody. Linux has won. It's now a simple matter of waiting for Microsoft to painfully bleed to death. Just watch out for the flailing death throes.
Because it's not making a profit. No, sorry, simple as that, you can't argue. Games consoles are supposed to make a profit. The Xbox makes a huge loss for Microsoft. That's a mistake. In fact it would be a fatal mistake for almost any company except for Microsoft.
Now we could argue all the little details. I think the original Xbox controller was shit. I think the original games lineup was worse; how many fucking snowboarding games did they have? The console itself is so big it could easily be mistaken for a moon of Jupiter.
But those are just details and Microsoft has been correcting them. The new Xbox pack has a decent controller. The video and audio on the Xbox is far and away the best of the 3 consoles. The hard drive is a great idea even if it does cost more. The games lineup is now pretty damn decent.
But the profit; that's a showstopper. There's no point in having a brilliant product that loses money hand over fist. Microsoft fucked up. Nobody can dispute that.
Also remember that analogue=loss. Your two comments following that statement are equally applicable to analogue. There's nothing magic about analogue.
The Suse price was for 5 licenses, so multiply your $521 by 5 and try again.
Fucking awesome. Option 2. Definitely. If it means even 12 months of spam-free bliss before the world comes crumbling down around us, then I'm all for it.
Sure there is. It's called an opt-in list. The only spammers who don't know their target audience are the scumbags who reap emails from lists and webpages and then spam-away without any concern for the recipients. These people should be strung-up from the highest branch anyway.
Though maybe hanging is too good for these pricks. We should bring back public floggings.
I have a simpler technique; if the subject is ambiguous I delete it. If it was important then the person will try again, or use a phone, or speak to me in person. I'd rather miss out on valid email than read anymore fucking spam.
And strip clubs shouldn't be calling Tommy Junior on the phone at 4pm on a weekday, before his parents get home, and asking him whether he wants to see Hot Naked Chicks.
My signature is printed. I've also been told that it's a very good signature; many distinctive characteristics.
Similar thing happened to somebody I know. 14 year old punk told him Korn was heavy metal.
If that punk had said it to me I'd have beaten him to death with a Black Sabbath CD.
Because *some* of the apps are designed for such a small screen. Also, if you had the skill to port UNIX to the PDA then you probably have the skill to code up the apps you need as well.
I love reusable code. Thanks to CPAN I can mockup incredibly functional scripts without ever needing to know the details of a protocol. I love linking against libssl or libpng and not needing to know or care what TLS is or what RLE means. It's great.
But when I write code for a living it's never that easy. The problem is that most libraries cost money (in the areas I work in) and, even worse, they cost a LOT of money. If you use libraries to do the bulk of your work then you can find a product costing upwards of $500 just in licensing fees; that's before you add your own costs and profits on top. It's no wonder that so many people reinvent the wheel; it's because you can't just buy the wheel, you have to pay licensing fees everytime you use it. It's just not economical to reuse code in the "real world".
That is, unless you write open source. This is where reusable code really is working. I can ldd any binary on my system and find incredible levels of code reuse. Evolution (the mail client) links against 50+ libraries. That's great!
I think attempts in the past to encourage code reuse fell flat because they focussed on the technical problems and not the legal or economic problems. Open source changes all of that. So there's hope yet for reusable code.
My most recent experience with a M&P store going bust was the local fruit&veg. They shared a closed area "shopping village" with a butcher, a baker, a deli, a pharmacy, a newsagent, and a general purpose supermarket. The supermarket had products in common with them all but everybody seemed to do OK.
Except for the fruit&veg store. Their prices were astronomical. Their service was lousy. The range was pathetic. The fruit was rarely fresh; I remember one day going to buy a lettuce and being put off by the swarm of FRUIT FLIES. I often found myself driving 15 minutes to the next nearest fruit&veg just to avoid buying from this lousy store.
So one day the supermarket decided to expand their range and offer a fruit&veg section. I've never heard such a stink. The fruit&veg store had signs proclaiming "save our local business" and "big corporations destroying our community" and all sorts of nonsense. Nevermind the supermarket was family-owned even though the name was from a franchise.
But the consumers weren't fooled by the rhetoric. The supermarket offered the better product; fresher, wider range, better service, lower prices. Within a month the fruit&veg store had gone bankrupt. All I remember thinking is "good riddance". The supermarket expanded into the vacated area and made the fruit&veg section even bigger.
So I have no problem with M&P stores being destroyed by the big "megamarts". If the M&P stores want my business then they need to offer a compelling reason. If the supermarket offers a better product at a lower price then I'm going there. No amount of rhetoric will sway me on that.
Would you want Linux to help humanity by trampling on the rights of another entity? I don't believe SCO's claims have any merit but I also wouldn't support somebody like yourself who seems to be claiming "it's OK to infringe on SCO's copyright because Linux is good for humanity".
You are advocating the ends justify the means no matter the cost. That's not something I can agree with. Linux needs to win fairly. I think it has won fairly and SCO is full of shit, but I still think SCO deserves their right to be heard.
Because businesses are fundamentally people working for a common goal. When you advocate the harm of businesses to further your own personal goals (Linux) then you are actually inflicting harm on individuals.
IBM and Novell are denying it too. Are they also crazy?