WorldCom is clearly worth many billion dollars, even in its present form. That will be divided amongst the creditors (either as cash, securities in a new WorldCom, securities in an acquiring company or some combination of all three)
WorldCom's creditors can reasonably expect that this $25M expenditure will ultimately increase the value of WorldCom by more than $25M. This is what the Judge was saying when he approved the deal.
Keep in mind that most of the value in any company is in its people, processes and knowledge. Hard assets represent a small part of the equation. MOST of the creditors' potential for recovering their investment lies in the hope that the profitable divisions of WorldCom (and there are many) will retain their key people.
The Judge has to evaluate the cost of NOT allocating the bonuses (people leave, and the business becomes worth less), and compare it to the $25M cost. Judges DO nix deals like these when they don't make sense. $25M is very little in comparison to the value of the (soft) assets that are being protected.
When a company goes into bankruptcy, key employees who are capable of getting a job somewhere else, usually do.
This mass exodus of employees would massively decrease the value of Worldcom, which appears likely to emerge from bankruptcy.
Giving the employees bonuses that are contingent on remaining with the company is the best way to ensure that this exodus doesn't happen.
The judge's job is to maximize the value of Worldcom, thus making sure that Worldcom's creditors get as much money as possible.
SBC, in addition to being a creditor, is also a competitor. They had an interest in decreasing Worldcom's competitiveness, so they opposed the bonuses. The Judge (and tellingly, most of Worldcom's creditors) saw through this and supported the bonuses.
One of my favorites is the "non-compete" clause, where you agree not to compete against your former company. This never stands in court, because they can't force you not to earn a living. When another company hires you for your skills, technically that means you could be competing against your old company.
This is miserable advice, particularly the quoted part. Many of these agreements DO stand up in court. DO NOT SIGN ANYTHING YOU DON'T AGREE TO, THINKING THAT YOU CAN WALK AWAY FROM IT LATER BECAUSE IN YOUR MIND ITS ILLEGAL. That's just begging for extreme pain.
As a Massachusetts employer myself, I can tell you that reasonable non-competes have been repeatedly upheld in state court. Somebody please mod this guy down before some sucker follows his advice.
I've been responsible for hiring and firing many people. Neither I nor any reasonable businessman would provide severance payments beyond the legal minimum without a commitment by the employee not to sue. If you believe that you have cause for legal action, feel free to negotiate or hire a lawyer, but don't expect the company to pay you any more than the legal minimum without a written commitment not to sue or a court order.
Businesses offer severance for four reasons:
1. Because the managers feel bad about laying you off. 2. Because they wish to protect their reputation and preserve good will. 3. Because they wish to avoid being sued. 4. Because they forgot to secure confidentiality or non-compete agreements and are prepared to pay for this at the time of the layoff.
If they can't cover these bases, they aren't going to pay you money.
N.B. If you have a legitimate cause of action and bankruptcy is not imminent, DO negotiate. You will almost certainly get substantially more than is offered. Lawsuits, even frivilous ones, are a major pain in the butt for companies. Whether or not you should hire a lawyer for this depends on the circumstances.
Millions of people who have hardly heard of linux, but who could have a significant impact on its adoption, just saw it endorsed by a newspaper they trust.
New York Times editorials are THE most respected voice amongst educated Americans with a moderate or left of center viewpoint. No single event could have improved Linux's credibility amongst non-technical folk as much as this editorial has.
is to have the authors pick up the cost. As you point out, $500 is nothing in comparison to the cost of the research, and publishing is clearly the payoff for modern academics.
In fact, I was under the impression that most quality academic journals were already charging authors substantially more than $500.
I just sold a software business several months ago and am starting a new one now. It is true that it is much harder to start a business than it is to get a job. Your points are quite accurate, but there are some immensly important caveats:
|> 1. You don't know everything when you are 25. Or 35. Or 45.....
Lets face it, most 25 year olds know absolutely nothing about running a business. But if you keep on programing for somebody else, you'll only know a little more when you turn 45. STARTING A BUSINESS IS THE SINGLE BEST WAY TO LEARN ABOUT RUNNING A BUSINESS. There is absolutely no substitute. One year of running your own business is as valuable a learning experience as 15 years in middle management.
|> 4. Learn what all those funky financial reports mean, how to create them, and why you're business life (and personal life) depends on them.
Business finance is ALL about common sense. Its a gross mistake to treat it as something funky and new that must be learned from accounting books. Financial results are the only measure of the success of your business and must not be obscured by layers of abstraction.
Starting a business is NOT the easy route. But in my opinion it is far far more rewarding - especially for somebody in their 20s who can apply what they learn from the experience to the rest of their lives.
Everybody wants to point fingers and blame somebody, but lets look at it rationally starting with the first $3.8 Billion dollars.
Worldcom is accused of capitalizing too great a fraction of its customer acquisition expenses.
Does it make accounting sense to spread the cost of acquiring a customer out over several years?
-Absolutely. The customer is going to be generating revenue for many years, and revenue and the costs of that revenue ought to be recognized at the same time.
Is it industry standard practice to capitalize customer acquisition costs?
-Yes
Did Worldcom does this for over a decade, dating back to the early days of LDDS?
-Yes
Did the capitalization of expenses make sense at the time it was implemented? (When long distance customers were worth much more than they are today.)
-Yes
Did the accountants approve this?
-Yes
Why did Worldcom want to capitalize as many expenses as possible?
-Because it boosted the stock price. More expenses capitalized means fewer expenses in the current quarter. If your revenue remains constant and your expenses go down, your earnings go up. And if your earnings go up, your stock price goes up.
Who wanted a short term stock price boost?
-Worldcom's shareholders. So gunghoe were they about boosting Worldcom's stock price that they repeatedly approved massive grants of incentive options that encouraged Worldcom's executive to focus on one and only on goal -- boosting the short term stock price.
In my opinion Worldcom's shareholders got what they voted for. Charges of fraud only distract attention from the shareholders, with whom responsibility ultimately lies. I fear that as a consequence, Wall Street investors will fail to learn, what should be an important lesson from all this.
If you purchase something in ANY state which contains inside the box (but not outside the box) terms which make it unacceptable to you, you are able to return it REGUARDLESS of what the stores return policy is. Chances are that if you politely explain the circumstances and ask to see the manager if you are refused, you will succeed in returning the item.
I know two people who did this in Massachusetts. In one case, the store (Microcenter) refused. A letter was written demanding payment and refused. A small claims case was filed and treble damages plus court costs were awarded.
Note that the reason she had to go to court at all was, IMHO, that she failed to be polite (as I suggested above).
This is a myth, and has been debunked so many times that further repetition can only be the result of intentional ignorance. I don't see how this Microsoftian FUD helps the open source cause.
Here is one of the better posts on the issue by screen name "adamba":
I worked at Microsoft for ten years, most of it on the core Windows NT/2000 (hereafter referred to as NT) networking code. [...]
I know a lot about the TCP/IP stack that is running on NT. Here is a short history of it (some of this may also be told in the book How the Web Was Won, but I haven't read it):
The original plan for NT was that a few members of the core NT team (which numbered about 15 developers) would write all the networking code. However, in 1990 a small team was started up in the LAN Manager group at Microsoft to do some of that NT networking work. Eventually that team moved over to be a part of NT (this coincided with the IBM-OS/2 "divorce", if anyone is interested).
Microsoft's networking software at the time ran over a network protocol called Netbeui, but it was decided that TCP/IP was gaining in importance, and should be included in NT. In addition, the user-mode API associated with Netbeui, which was called Netbios, was too Netbeui-specific and couldn't be adapted to allow user-mode access to TCP/IP. As a result, the decision was made:
1) To put a TCP/IP stack in NT
2) To adapt the sockets user-mode API for NT
#1 was solved by licensing code from a company called Spider Systems. However, Spider's TCP/IP stack was written to run within an environment called STREAMS, which was a wrapper that specified how the various parts of the stack would communicate with each other (TCP/IP is really several pieces of code -- two of which are TCP and IP -- layered on top of each other. Most network protocols are like that, which is why they are referred to as "stacks"). As a result, STREAMS also had to be ported to NT.
#2 involved the creation of the winsock API, which persists today.
It was recognized that using Spider's stack was a temporary measure, because nobody really wanted a stack that depended on STREAMS and its associated overhead. So, a short time after this, work was begun on a new version of TCP/IP, written entirely by Microsoft.
Along with Spider's stack came versions of various TCP/IP-related utility programs, such as ftp, rcp and rsh. Those were ported from BSD sockets to winsock (not a huge change) and bundled with NT.
Now, some of Spider's code (possibly all of it) was based on the TCP/IP stack in the BSD flavors of Unix. These are open source, but distributed under the BSD license, not the GPL that Linux is released under. Whereas the GPL states that any software derived from GPL'ed software must also be released under the GPL, the BSD license basically says, "here's the source, you can do whatever you want, just give credit to the original author."
Eventually the new, from scratch TCP/IP stack was done and shipped with NT 3.5 (the second version, despite the number) in late 1994. The same stack was also included with Windows 95.
However, it looks like some of those Unix utilities were never rewritten. If you look at the executables, you can still see the copyright notice from the regents of the University of California (BSD is short for Berkeley Software Distrubution, Berkeley being a branch of the University of California, for some reason referred to as "Berkeley" on the East Coast and "California" on the West Coast...and "Berkeley" is one of those words that starts to look real funny if you stare at it too long - but I digress).
Keep in mind there is no reason to rewrite that code. If your ftp client works fine (no comments from the peanut gallery!) then why change it? Microsoft has other fish to fry. And the software was licensed perfectly legally, since the inclusion of the copyright notice satisfied the BSD license.
I won't even swear on a stack of bibles that the "new" TCP/IP now shipping in NT/2000/XP and Windows 95/98/Me is completely free of the old code from Spider. Since I don't work there I don't have access to the source code. Certainly some parts of TCP (the checksum calculation comes to mind) are the same everywhere and once someone has written an optimized version, why rewrite it? And once again, this would be perfectly legitimate for Microsoft to do under the license.
But it is certainly misleading of the Wall Street Journal to say that BSD code is used "deep inside" the NT networking code, unless they mean the STREAMS wrapper itself, which I believe is still there in case someone wants to write a transport using it (I think there is an OSI TP4 STREAMS transport lurking somewhere out there, if anyone cares - but I just checked, nobody does). But the TCP/IP in NT certainly doesn't use STREAMS.
And implying that the TCP/IP stack uses BSD code is also false. As I said above there may be small vestiges of it in there, although I doubt it. Anyway the FreeBSD programmers who reported all this to the Wall Street Journal can't see the NT TCP/IP source either, so they can't have been referring to that.
Many posts have been made about how VA needs to recover the costs of running this site. Well guess what, Slashdot is ultimately owned by a public company. The upper management of VA has a DUTY to the shareholders of VA to make as much money off of Slashdot as possible. This isn't about breaking even, its about profit maximization.
VA can take a long term view of this (making less money money now, so that they can make more money later). But ultimately, VA must justify its actions as being in the best interests of the shareholders. If, in the long run, more money can be made by taking steps that reduce the population of Slashdot by 50%, then they have a responsibility to do so.
We shouldn't think that these actions are being taken just to ensure that Slashdot breaks even (nor should we believe that earning a PROFIT is somehow morally or otherwise wrong. They will only earn money if what they provide us with exceeds the cost to us [in money or annoyance]).
There are alot of posts here supporting Natural Selection with an almost religious zeal (some irony in that). What is so great about natural selection? OK, so its been the dominant form of evolution on earth for a few Billion years. Things change. Its ironic that people are arguing that Natural Selection needs PROTECTION from science.
The whole idea behind natural selection is to let biological organisms compete to determine which is best suited to survive. If Natural Selection is so great then the organisms that it produces should have better long term chances of survival than those produced by Scientific Determinism. If not, then by its own principles Natural Selection should face extinction.
You don't have to provide a written recommendation if you don't want to. You should especially avoid doing so if you feel uncomfortable.
While the grounds for suing over a positive recommendation are few, anyone can sue over anything (and there are no shortage of people who are willing or eager to demonstrate this).
Except for certain circumstances where written recommendations are the norm (Academic Recommendations for Admission or Tenure), you shouldn't feel any obligation to provide a written recommendation.
Most Engineers leave school expecting the world to operate in a relatively optimal fashion.
They believe that business problems should be solved by sitting down, itemizing the possible solutions and their pros and cons, and making the best choice. Developing software should simply be a matter of clearly writting out the requirements, and creating a program that satisfies them.
In practice there are almost no organizations bigger than 4 or 5 people that able to operate in such a logical manner.
No organization is immune to sudden changes in direction, arbitrary decision making, poor internal communication and politics. Successful organizations understand that entropy always wins, and cultivate cultures and processes that can be successful despite the chaos that infiltrates all organizations.
Don't let the inefficiency of the world irritate you. Its like getting upset at gravity. Besides, if it were possible to run the world efficiently, there would be far less need for IT professionals.
Find a job with people you like working with, and you can be happy in spite of the chaos. You may even start to enjoy the constant challenges it creates. Just don't try to fight it. Entropy always wins.
This is simply wrong. Shareholders care about one things, profits. A boycott will directly and negatively impact this.
Shareholders would strongly prefer that Blizzard NOT use its Corporate legal power if it reduces profits (through legal expenditures and/or lost revenues from a boycott)
It's hard to imagine ArsDigita -- basically some support for a community database/website -- taking over the world
This is like saying "Its hard to imagine an auction website taking over the world." ArsDigita's target market had the potential to satisfy VC's required returns many times over.
The VC's didn't have to start hiring people at.com boom salary levels, abandon aD's existing products, and ignore the developer community. They chose to, because that's what everybody else in the VC community was doing at the time.
And that brings me to your first statement: VC's are gamblers. Nothing could be further from the truth. VC's try to avoid risk like the plague. But for them the biggest risk is getting left behind by other Venture firms. So they act like lemmings, out of fear that deviating from the norm will get them in trouble. The tactic works quite well. Although some Venture investors are irrate over the the collapse, most firms are getting off the hook by saying that everybody else made the same mistakes. (Of course some did so poorly that even this excuse won't help).
The collapse of aD will go down as a classic case of VC's (Two of the most prominent in the business) acting like lemmings at the expense of common sense.
Your analogy stinks because it gets copyright law wrong.
I made absolutely no mention of copyright law, so how could I possibly have gotten it wrong?
How do the Cubs get a copyright to control who can view their ballgames?
The Cubs ballgames are, in fact, copyrighted (by Major League Baseball). They tell you verbally and display a message to that effect on the screen. And before you claim that the copyright is specific to the televised production of the game, be aware that MLB has successfully prosecuted unauthorized recordings of their games USING COPYRIGHT LAW. So before you tell me that I'm wrong, you should tell it to the Federal courts.
The plaintiff has the RIGHT to determine HOW and WHERE his work is displayed.
The plaintiff chose to display the image to people using the search engine. The referer field gives the plaintiff precise control over which web pages the image can be viewed on, and which it can not. The plaintiff chose to allow search engine users to view the image.
If you decide to display your copyrighted work in a public area (as in the case of the poster) you have no legal right or ability to control how people in that public area choose to view your work. To exercise that control, you need to use a private area. It is absurd to suggest that displaying a copyrighted work in the town square gives you the right to prosecute people who look at it the wrong way.
1. The copy of the poster allows it to be viewed at a different location. This would be equivalent to making a copy of a JPEG and putting it on a different server. In the case at hand, the plaintiff's picture could only be viewed from the same URL as the plaintiff chose to display it at. All the defendant did was provide a different way of getting to the location at which the plaintiff decided to display his pictures. This is like viewing a Chicago Cubs game from one of those apartments that overlook the ballpark. If the Cubs don't like giving people free access to their games, they can relocate the ball park, or modify it so that the views are obstructed. They can't restrict how people use their own buildings.
2. Your painter removes the poster. The copy allows the poster to be viewed even after the painter has chosen to stop displaying it publicly. The plaintiff in this case did not attempt to remove the picture from his web site.
I'm sorry to quibble, but the figure is actually between 200 and 300 billion dollars each year at least half of which is spent on DISTRIBUTING the energy, not generating it. $500 billion is the total amount spent on all end use energy sources (including gasoline for cars, etc.) and including distribution, which doesn't go away when fusion arrives. $100B would be a more appropriate number to use in the comparison.
What I wonder is why the project was originally budgeted at $10B if they could achieve nearly the same results for half as much money.
The extraordinary thing about this is how lightly CSFB (and the street as a whole) is getting off. The profits from inappropriate IPO allocations alone substantially exceeded the penalties.
No penalties will ever be assessed against the hundreds of analysts who hyped internet stocks in exchange for those companies giving their firms a slice of the investment banking business.
Ask any analyst from any wall street firm, sell side or buy side, and they will tell you that everybody does this. Compare the SEC's treatment of big firms doing outwardly crooked things to their treatment of the little guy.
It looks like they're too busy busting 15-year olds to attack the real stock manipulators.
Slashdot Mirror
WorldCom is clearly worth many billion dollars, even in its present form. That will be divided amongst the creditors (either as cash, securities in a new WorldCom, securities in an acquiring company or some combination of all three)
WorldCom's creditors can reasonably expect that this $25M expenditure will ultimately increase the value of WorldCom by more than $25M. This is what the Judge was saying when he approved the deal.
Keep in mind that most of the value in any company is in its people, processes and knowledge. Hard assets represent a small part of the equation. MOST of the creditors' potential for recovering their investment lies in the hope that the profitable divisions of WorldCom (and there are many) will retain their key people.
The Judge has to evaluate the cost of NOT allocating the bonuses (people leave, and the business becomes worth less), and compare it to the $25M cost. Judges DO nix deals like these when they don't make sense. $25M is very little in comparison to the value of the (soft) assets that are being protected.
When a company goes into bankruptcy, key employees who are capable of getting a job somewhere else, usually do.
This mass exodus of employees would massively decrease the value of Worldcom, which appears likely to emerge from bankruptcy.
Giving the employees bonuses that are contingent on remaining with the company is the best way to ensure that this exodus doesn't happen.
The judge's job is to maximize the value of Worldcom, thus making sure that Worldcom's creditors get as much money as possible.
SBC, in addition to being a creditor, is also a competitor. They had an interest in decreasing Worldcom's competitiveness, so they opposed the bonuses. The Judge (and tellingly, most of Worldcom's creditors) saw through this and supported the bonuses.
This is miserable advice, particularly the quoted part. Many of these agreements DO stand up in court. DO NOT SIGN ANYTHING YOU DON'T AGREE TO, THINKING THAT YOU CAN WALK AWAY FROM IT LATER BECAUSE IN YOUR MIND ITS ILLEGAL. That's just begging for extreme pain.
As a Massachusetts employer myself, I can tell you that reasonable non-competes have been repeatedly upheld in state court. Somebody please mod this guy down before some sucker follows his advice.
I've been responsible for hiring and firing many people. Neither I nor any reasonable businessman would provide severance payments beyond the legal minimum without a commitment by the employee not to sue. If you believe that you have cause for legal action, feel free to negotiate or hire a lawyer, but don't expect the company to pay you any more than the legal minimum without a written commitment not to sue or a court order.
Businesses offer severance for four reasons:
1. Because the managers feel bad about laying you off.
2. Because they wish to protect their reputation and preserve good will.
3. Because they wish to avoid being sued.
4. Because they forgot to secure confidentiality or non-compete agreements and are prepared to pay for this at the time of the layoff.
If they can't cover these bases, they aren't going to pay you money.
N.B. If you have a legitimate cause of action and bankruptcy is not imminent, DO negotiate. You will almost certainly get substantially more than is offered. Lawsuits, even frivilous ones, are a major pain in the butt for companies. Whether or not you should hire a lawyer for this depends on the circumstances.
Millions of people who have hardly heard of linux, but who could have a significant impact on its adoption, just saw it endorsed by a newspaper they trust.
New York Times editorials are THE most respected voice amongst educated Americans with a moderate or left of center viewpoint. No single event could have improved Linux's credibility amongst non-technical folk as much as this editorial has.
is to have the authors pick up the cost. As you point out, $500 is nothing in comparison to the cost of the research, and publishing is clearly the payoff for modern academics.
In fact, I was under the impression that most quality academic journals were already charging authors substantially more than $500.
I just sold a software business several months ago and am starting a new one now. It is true that it is much harder to start a business than it is to get a job. Your points are quite accurate, but there are some immensly important caveats:
|> 1. You don't know everything when you are 25. Or 35. Or 45.....
Lets face it, most 25 year olds know absolutely nothing about running a business. But if you keep on programing for somebody else, you'll only know a little more when you turn 45. STARTING A BUSINESS IS THE SINGLE BEST WAY TO LEARN ABOUT RUNNING A BUSINESS. There is absolutely no substitute. One year of running your own business is as valuable a learning experience as 15 years in middle management.
|> 4. Learn what all those funky financial reports mean, how to create them, and why you're business life (and personal life) depends on them.
Business finance is ALL about common sense. Its a gross mistake to treat it as something funky and new that must be learned from accounting books. Financial results are the only measure of the success of your business and must not be obscured by layers of abstraction.
Starting a business is NOT the easy route. But in my opinion it is far far more rewarding - especially for somebody in their 20s who can apply what they learn from the experience to the rest of their lives.
Everybody wants to point fingers and blame somebody, but lets look at it rationally starting with the first $3.8 Billion dollars.
Worldcom is accused of capitalizing too great a fraction of its customer acquisition expenses.
Does it make accounting sense to spread the cost of acquiring a customer out over several years?
-Absolutely. The customer is going to be generating revenue for many years, and revenue and the costs of that revenue ought to be recognized at the same time.
Is it industry standard practice to capitalize customer acquisition costs?
-Yes
Did Worldcom does this for over a decade, dating back to the early days of LDDS?
-Yes
Did the capitalization of expenses make sense at the time it was implemented? (When long distance customers were worth much more than they are today.)
-Yes
Did the accountants approve this?
-Yes
Why did Worldcom want to capitalize as many expenses as possible?
-Because it boosted the stock price. More expenses capitalized means fewer expenses in the current quarter. If your revenue remains constant and your expenses go down, your earnings go up. And if your earnings go up, your stock price goes up.
Who wanted a short term stock price boost?
-Worldcom's shareholders. So gunghoe were they about boosting Worldcom's stock price that they repeatedly approved massive grants of incentive options that encouraged Worldcom's executive to focus on one and only on goal -- boosting the short term stock price.
In my opinion Worldcom's shareholders got what they voted for. Charges of fraud only distract attention from the shareholders, with whom responsibility ultimately lies. I fear that as a consequence, Wall Street investors will fail to learn, what should be an important lesson from all this.
If you purchase something in ANY state which contains inside the box (but not outside the box) terms which make it unacceptable to you, you are able to return it REGUARDLESS of what the stores return policy is. Chances are that if you politely explain the circumstances and ask to see the manager if you are refused, you will succeed in returning the item.
I know two people who did this in Massachusetts. In one case, the store (Microcenter) refused. A letter was written demanding payment and refused. A small claims case was filed and treble damages plus court costs were awarded.
Note that the reason she had to go to court at all was, IMHO, that she failed to be polite (as I suggested above).
This is a myth, and has been debunked so many times that further repetition can only be the result of intentional ignorance. I don't see how this Microsoftian FUD helps the open source cause.
Here is one of the better posts on the issue by screen name "adamba":
I worked at Microsoft for ten years, most of it on the core Windows NT/2000 (hereafter referred to as NT) networking code. [...]
I know a lot about the TCP/IP stack that is running on NT. Here is a short history of it (some of this may also be told in the book How the Web Was Won, but I haven't read it):
The original plan for NT was that a few members of the core NT team (which numbered about 15 developers) would write all the networking code. However, in 1990 a small team was started up in the LAN Manager group at Microsoft to do some of that NT networking work. Eventually that team moved over to be a part of NT (this coincided with the IBM-OS/2 "divorce", if anyone is interested).
Microsoft's networking software at the time ran over a network protocol called Netbeui, but it was decided that TCP/IP was gaining in importance, and should be included in NT. In addition, the user-mode API associated with Netbeui, which was called Netbios, was too Netbeui-specific and couldn't be adapted to allow user-mode access to TCP/IP. As a result, the decision was made:
1) To put a TCP/IP stack in NT
2) To adapt the sockets user-mode API for NT
#1 was solved by licensing code from a company called Spider Systems. However, Spider's TCP/IP stack was written to run within an environment called STREAMS, which was a wrapper that specified how the various parts of the stack would communicate with each other (TCP/IP is really several pieces of code -- two of which are TCP and IP -- layered on top of each other. Most network protocols are like that, which is why they are referred to as "stacks"). As a result, STREAMS also had to be ported to NT.
#2 involved the creation of the winsock API, which persists today.
It was recognized that using Spider's stack was a temporary measure, because nobody really wanted a stack that depended on STREAMS and its associated overhead. So, a short time after this, work was begun on a new version of TCP/IP, written entirely by Microsoft.
Along with Spider's stack came versions of various TCP/IP-related utility programs, such as ftp, rcp and rsh. Those were ported from BSD sockets to winsock (not a huge change) and bundled with NT.
Now, some of Spider's code (possibly all of it) was based on the TCP/IP stack in the BSD flavors of Unix. These are open source, but distributed under the BSD license, not the GPL that Linux is released under. Whereas the GPL states that any software derived from GPL'ed software must also be released under the GPL, the BSD license basically says, "here's the source, you can do whatever you want, just give credit to the original author."
Eventually the new, from scratch TCP/IP stack was done and shipped with NT 3.5 (the second version, despite the number) in late 1994. The same stack was also included with Windows 95.
However, it looks like some of those Unix utilities were never rewritten. If you look at the executables, you can still see the copyright notice from the regents of the University of California (BSD is short for Berkeley Software Distrubution, Berkeley being a branch of the University of California, for some reason referred to as "Berkeley" on the East Coast and "California" on the West Coast...and "Berkeley" is one of those words that starts to look real funny if you stare at it too long - but I digress).
Keep in mind there is no reason to rewrite that code. If your ftp client works fine (no comments from the peanut gallery!) then why change it? Microsoft has other fish to fry. And the software was licensed perfectly legally, since the inclusion of the copyright notice satisfied the BSD license.
I won't even swear on a stack of bibles that the "new" TCP/IP now shipping in NT/2000/XP and Windows 95/98/Me is completely free of the old code from Spider. Since I don't work there I don't have access to the source code. Certainly some parts of TCP (the checksum calculation comes to mind) are the same everywhere and once someone has written an optimized version, why rewrite it? And once again, this would be perfectly legitimate for Microsoft to do under the license.
But it is certainly misleading of the Wall Street Journal to say that BSD code is used "deep inside" the NT networking code, unless they mean the STREAMS wrapper itself, which I believe is still there in case someone wants to write a transport using it (I think there is an OSI TP4 STREAMS transport lurking somewhere out there, if anyone cares - but I just checked, nobody does). But the TCP/IP in NT certainly doesn't use STREAMS.
And implying that the TCP/IP stack uses BSD code is also false. As I said above there may be small vestiges of it in there, although I doubt it. Anyway the FreeBSD programmers who reported all this to the Wall Street Journal can't see the NT TCP/IP source either, so they can't have been referring to that.
Many posts have been made about how VA needs to recover the costs of running this site. Well guess what, Slashdot is ultimately owned by a public company. The upper management of VA has a DUTY to the shareholders of VA to make as much money off of Slashdot as possible. This isn't about breaking even, its about profit maximization.
VA can take a long term view of this (making less money money now, so that they can make more money later). But ultimately, VA must justify its actions as being in the best interests of the shareholders. If, in the long run, more money can be made by taking steps that reduce the population of Slashdot by 50%, then they have a responsibility to do so.
We shouldn't think that these actions are being taken just to ensure that Slashdot breaks even (nor should we believe that earning a PROFIT is somehow morally or otherwise wrong. They will only earn money if what they provide us with exceeds the cost to us [in money or annoyance]).
There are alot of posts here supporting Natural Selection with an almost religious zeal (some irony in that). What is so great about natural selection? OK, so its been the dominant form of evolution on earth for a few Billion years. Things change. Its ironic that people are arguing that Natural Selection needs PROTECTION from science.
The whole idea behind natural selection is to let biological organisms compete to determine which is best suited to survive. If Natural Selection is so great then the organisms that it produces should have better long term chances of survival than those produced by Scientific Determinism. If not, then by its own principles Natural Selection should face extinction.
You don't have to provide a written recommendation if you don't want to. You should especially avoid doing so if you feel uncomfortable.
While the grounds for suing over a positive recommendation are few, anyone can sue over anything (and there are no shortage of people who are willing or eager to demonstrate this).
Except for certain circumstances where written recommendations are the norm (Academic Recommendations for Admission or Tenure), you shouldn't feel any obligation to provide a written recommendation.
Most Engineers leave school expecting the world to operate in a relatively optimal fashion.
They believe that business problems should be solved by sitting down, itemizing the possible solutions and their pros and cons, and making the best choice. Developing software should simply be a matter of clearly writting out the requirements, and creating a program that satisfies them.
In practice there are almost no organizations bigger than 4 or 5 people that able to operate in such a logical manner.
No organization is immune to sudden changes in direction, arbitrary decision making, poor internal communication and politics. Successful organizations understand that entropy always wins, and cultivate cultures and processes that can be successful despite the chaos that infiltrates all organizations.
Don't let the inefficiency of the world irritate you. Its like getting upset at gravity. Besides, if it were possible to run the world efficiently, there would be far less need for IT professionals.
Find a job with people you like working with, and you can be happy in spite of the chaos. You may even start to enjoy the constant challenges it creates. Just don't try to fight it. Entropy always wins.
This is simply wrong. Shareholders care about one things, profits. A boycott will directly and negatively impact this.
Shareholders would strongly prefer that Blizzard NOT use its Corporate legal power if it reduces profits (through legal expenditures and/or lost revenues from a boycott)
Governments spend billions of dollars each year attempting to attract businesses, and encouraging investment.
Corporations and LLCs provide a simple method of accomplishing this without any expenditure of funds (most states net a small amount.)
Why would governments need any additional compensation?
It's hard to imagine ArsDigita -- basically some support for a community database/website -- taking over the world
.com boom salary levels, abandon aD's existing products, and ignore the developer community. They chose to, because that's what everybody else in the VC community was doing at the time.
This is like saying "Its hard to imagine an auction website taking over the world." ArsDigita's target market had the potential to satisfy VC's required returns many times over.
The VC's didn't have to start hiring people at
And that brings me to your first statement: VC's are gamblers. Nothing could be further from the truth. VC's try to avoid risk like the plague. But for them the biggest risk is getting left behind by other Venture firms. So they act like lemmings, out of fear that deviating from the norm will get them in trouble. The tactic works quite well. Although some Venture investors are irrate over the the collapse, most firms are getting off the hook by saying that everybody else made the same mistakes. (Of course some did so poorly that even this excuse won't help).
The collapse of aD will go down as a classic case of VC's (Two of the most prominent in the business) acting like lemmings at the expense of common sense.
Philip Greenspun's story (not surprisingly) agrees with Eve's, but provides a very different point of view.
I made absolutely no mention of copyright law, so how could I possibly have gotten it wrong?
How do the Cubs get a copyright to control who can view their ballgames?
The Cubs ballgames are, in fact, copyrighted (by Major League Baseball). They tell you verbally and display a message to that effect on the screen. And before you claim that the copyright is specific to the televised production of the game, be aware that MLB has successfully prosecuted unauthorized recordings of their games USING COPYRIGHT LAW. So before you tell me that I'm wrong, you should tell it to the Federal courts.
The plaintiff has the RIGHT to determine HOW and WHERE his work is displayed.
Courtesy of the wayback machine here is Phil's side of the story.
This is a quality read and highly recommended for any entrepreneur.
He removed it from his site when he entered into the settlement.
There are two key problems with your analogy:
1. The copy of the poster allows it to be viewed at a different location. This would be equivalent to making a copy of a JPEG and putting it on a different server. In the case at hand, the plaintiff's picture could only be viewed from the same URL as the plaintiff chose to display it at. All the defendant did was provide a different way of getting to the location at which the plaintiff decided to display his pictures. This is like viewing a Chicago Cubs game from one of those apartments that overlook the ballpark. If the Cubs don't like giving people free access to their games, they can relocate the ball park, or modify it so that the views are obstructed. They can't restrict how people use their own buildings.
2. Your painter removes the poster. The copy allows the poster to be viewed even after the painter has chosen to stop displaying it publicly. The plaintiff in this case did not attempt to remove the picture from his web site.
You say that mIcrosoft has dropped hints that it will not permit cloning of the Winforms classes. Can you be specific?
What is it that Microsoft has said/done to create this impression?
Am I the only one who thinks it is a bad idea to announce the awards before the money has been raised to pay for them?
The could have delayed the announcement, made fewer awards or made smaller awards.
Now, instead of focusing their efforts on raising money for future activities, they instead have to focus on digging out of a $160K hole.
I'm sorry to quibble, but the figure is actually between 200 and 300 billion dollars each year at least half of which is spent on DISTRIBUTING the energy, not generating it. $500 billion is the total amount spent on all end use energy sources (including gasoline for cars, etc.) and including distribution, which doesn't go away when fusion arrives. $100B would be a more appropriate number to use in the comparison.
What I wonder is why the project was originally budgeted at $10B if they could achieve nearly the same results for half as much money.
The extraordinary thing about this is how lightly CSFB (and the street as a whole) is getting off. The profits from inappropriate IPO allocations alone substantially exceeded the penalties.
No penalties will ever be assessed against the hundreds of analysts who hyped internet stocks in exchange for those companies giving their firms a slice of the investment banking business.
Ask any analyst from any wall street firm, sell side or buy side, and they will tell you that everybody does this. Compare the SEC's treatment of big firms doing outwardly crooked things to their treatment of the little guy.
It looks like they're too busy busting 15-year olds to attack the real stock manipulators.