The law requires "a written instrument signed by the owner of the rights licensed."
because if all this is the case, then why can people be accountable for email that they have written?
I realize that these are in some sense disjoint subjects, but I think that there is a connection between them. if electronic means can't be used to give the rights of a program to someone, then why can email be used as evidence in court? If the courts are going to "grow up" digitally and use email in court, then they sure as hell should allow the use of granting rights and permissions over electronic means.
I know this is somewhat off topic, but it doesn't seem like the court plays by all of the same rules. Either using an electronic means to do something is considered binding, or it isn't...make up your mind!
okay I'm done ranting now...kill my karma. --- "Everybody knows the moon's made of cheese."
I don't think that it would be like a telephone call. Even though the transaction of the messages in ICQ is closer to a phone converstion than email is, ICQ doesn't really fall under the same strict monitoring laws that the phones do (all sorts of sticky can I record this conversation or not, etc).
ICQ even gives you a chance to save all of the messages and chat that you have with other members. Unfortunately (although I don't like it) I think that ICQ is just glorified email.
> We had to put out to Friend and associates > to please DO NOT send me anything remotely > inapropriate over mail, this included > Hotmail and the like. It just isn't worth it.
I completely understand what you're saying here because I've been involved in similar situations, but the part that I don't understand about this is that people don't really seem to understand that you don't have any control over the email that people send you.
I know that people think that you do, but why can't companies understand that you are going to get spam occationally and you're going to get junk mail. The only thing that you can really control is the mail that you are sending out and if that isn't apropriate then they should have words with you, but not because you are being sent some dirty jokes.
arghh, just another one of my peaves against PHBs!
I'm sorry, but I do not think that this answer is BS. This is not your web site, so if you want to have a special news site of your own that has user moderation of the submitted articles then go ahead and start one and see if it gets more popular than Slashdot. If for some reason it does, then come back here and say "Told ya so."
But for now, Slashdot is still controlled by CmdTaco and Hemos and I don't think they're going to leave any time soon which means that there won't be moderation of story submissions.
I personally agree with CmdTaco and Hemos because I don't know about you, but I am not the Slashdot Man, I actually spend most of my day working and take a break here and there to check Slashdot to see if any interesting stories have popped up. If the users were allowed to moderate the stories being posted that would cause a large abundance of stories going through the main page causing the amount of time I can spend reading each story to decrease, also causing the amount of interesting conversation on the stories to decrease.
I think that moderation of the stories would decrease my reading pleasure of Slashdot and force me to go find some other new site to get my daily fix from.
I think you need to figure out the difference of something being "bigger than Rob Malda now" and something that you would have if you ran your own cute little Slashdot copycat. This is the original and they are waaaaaaay ahead of any other "open journalism"
> They were completely within their legal rights > to cancel the orders, but there was more > backlash then they expected.
You're completely right.
I spoke way too soon on this...For some reason the impression I got from the article was that Apple said, "Well we can't produce these machines, so here you go, now you get a cheaper one at the same price." Which in my mind resulted in a big "screw you" from Apple. I really did not realize that the orders were cancelled until after I wrote this.
I do think that its fair of a company to cancel orders because of a shortage based on another company's fault. I think that Apple should have some words with Motorola if they did promise to produce enough chips for shipment because whether it is Apple's fault or not this may hurt Apple's business.
Although I think that in this case if I did have to cancel orders, I may offer another computer to the person with the cancelled order at the price that peticular computer was at when the original order was made (which I heard Apple is doing so cheers to them).
If any business let something go like this I'm sure they would see a lot of law suites for false advertising. You just can't treat customers like that or you're going to get burned. ---
I don't know a lot about tissue regeneration, but my sister used to work for a company called Genzyme, first doing tissue repair, and then cartilage repair. Is this a lot different then this?
Here's a link to Genzyme's tissue repair page. This by any means is a very interesting subject, but I think the Genzyme has been doing this for at least 5 years now.
If I remember correctly this Boston branch used to be a company called BioSurface that was an MIT company at one point until they got bought out by Genzyme. ---
Don't get me wrong...I'm not saying that Toy Story wasn't impressive, its just that it fit the example of what I was saying.
Onyx's are SGI's gift to the movie industry. They are large servers that do very well with graphics/special effects rendering. Most of the movies with heavy fx in them use Onyx's, for example Twister.
With the example of Toy Story, and the amount of machines they had to use (I remember when Sun had a story on their site about it, they were using Sparc 20's which at the time of the movie with the options they had would cost about $20000). Using 200 sparc 20's at US$20000 would cost about US$4million. You could probably do the same thing with 3 to five Onyx's which at that time cost around US$200000, so figure 5 and you still are at half the budget of the sparcs.
I am sure that Pixar got some good kickback from Sun on the machinery because Sun used that as a huge advertising gimic, so that would save the budget on that movie, but it still doesn't account for the fact that if you were just to go out and buy the machinery, you wouldn't be saving anything.
I talked to someone who used to do film remastering at one of the imaging giants here in Rochester. He said that they used three SGI Onyx's and it was more power than they would ever need for removing the dust and scratches off the last master of the movies turning it into the final master. They didn't do any special fx with them, but they did remaster every single frame for a large number of movies (any movie shot on this company's film) and they Onyx's work much more efficiently than any Sun solution they could get that competed in price with buy the three Onyx's (I think he said they paid US$200000 a machine).
Linux seems to fall under the same cometetition standards as the server market did for a while.
I remember a conference I went to 6 years ago called the SGI/Oracle Webmaster Survival Conference. In this conference, SGI made it well known that even though they would like to see one of their workstations on every desk top and one of there servers in everyone's server room, they knew that it wasn't possible. They knew that there would be a market split and that certain server/workstation solutions made sense in certain situations.
IBM seems to get this too. They portray that although we wouldn't really mind if you bought all this computing machinery from us, it isn't a big deal if you don't, especially if it doesn't make sense to do so. At a company I used to work for we would use IBM's high end printing solutions. Although we ran the printer with an RS/6000, we ran the rest of the network with Sun equipment. IBM would have liked to see us running the rest of the network (which was all *very* dependant upon this printer) with IBM equipment, but it wasn't necessary and they understood that the Sun/HP solution we had in place made more sense.
On the same respect, it seems as though Sun does not support this mentality. They think that every computer in your network should be a Sun computer. PC's? Forget it, replace them with XTerms. SGI's? Why do you need one of those when you could use an enterprise 10000 to do the same thing? Remember the movie Toy Story? They had to use (I forget the exact stats, but something like) 20 farms of 100 Sparc 20's to do the same thing that 2 or 3 SGI Onyx's could do. Sun doesn't seem to care if something doesn't make sense as long as it puts money in their pocket. Although I think that Sun has some great products, I think that this mentality will haunt them.
That also seems to be the same way that these companies approach Linux as mentioned before so I won't mention it again. You are right, and the evidence has been around longer than all of these companies have been embracing Linux. Articles like this are good indicators that Sun still believes that every computer in the world should and will be a Sun. Perhaps Sun is the one that needs the reality check in this article and not IBM. ---
Why is it that whenever a distribution tries to become main stream, they are accused of "becoming Microsoft?" It is quite obvious here that Red Hat has just IPO'd and now has name recognition in the computer industry beyond the level of those of us who simply will go to try to find the best OS to use, or the most agreeable cause to work for.
In my mind the reaction to the last article about Red Hat falling right into what Suck said they would do, or just the general comparison of Red Hat to Microsoft is all bad. If Red Hat was really turning this corner, do you think that they would have offered the stock to the open source developers such as they did?
I think that they key point here is that if someone goes to the store and says "I want Red Hat," Red Hat wants to make sure that they get it so that the customer can truly see what red hat is. I think the same people that went to the store a year ago and asked the question, "Does this computer come with the internet installed" are going to asking for Red Hat in a similar manner. Name recoginition is how you will make the desktop, you will not get there with these second name distros based on yours that soley bare your name. If you want to be a Linux hacker and don't want to fall under the "trendy wave" like all this seems to be opening up to, then go out and get a copy of Debian for yourself.
The fact of the matter is if you really want to see freedom in the computer industry insofar as OS's go, then do go accusing everyone who tries to make a run at name recognition and a run at the desktop as being Microsoft. They may make a lot of money by getting on the average desktop, but what they do with the money is another thing that we haven't had the chance to see. Let us judge them on what they do not what everone else thinks they will do. Anything else is severly unfair. ---
In fact, we here in the United States have decided to align the equator with Rochester, NY. We have decided to comemmorate this for the millenium by building a giant chain of Starbucks stretching along the entire length of the northern United States.
We will get around the whole idea of this insignificant "equator" notion of it being 0 degrees latitude by renaming it "le Equator de Rochester." ---
At last, Gecko, but what about OpenSource?
on
Gecko under Review
·
· Score: 1
You have a very good point here, that I'm not going to argue with. Most of us (myself included) need to get more involved.
But let's not forget an OpenSource project that is working very well: Debian, about 300 Developers!
Slashdot Mirror
I don't really like the statement:
The law requires "a written instrument signed by the owner of the rights licensed."
because if all this is the case, then why can people be accountable for email that they have written?
I realize that these are in some sense disjoint subjects, but I think that there is a connection between them. if electronic means can't be used to give the rights of a program to someone, then why can email be used as evidence in court? If the courts are going to "grow up" digitally and use email in court, then they sure as hell should allow the use of granting rights and permissions over electronic means.
I know this is somewhat off topic, but it doesn't seem like the court plays by all of the same rules. Either using an electronic means to do something is considered binding, or it isn't...make up your mind!
okay I'm done ranting now...kill my karma.
---
"Everybody knows the moon's made of cheese."
I don't think that it would be like a telephone call. Even though the transaction of the messages in ICQ is closer to a phone converstion than email is, ICQ doesn't really fall under the same strict monitoring laws that the phones do (all sorts of sticky can I record this conversation or not, etc).
ICQ even gives you a chance to save all of the messages and chat that you have with other members. Unfortunately (although I don't like it) I think that ICQ is just glorified email.
> We had to put out to Friend and associates
> to please DO NOT send me anything remotely
> inapropriate over mail, this included
> Hotmail and the like. It just isn't worth it.
I completely understand what you're saying here because I've been involved in similar situations, but the part that I don't understand about this is that people don't really seem to understand that you don't have any control over the email that people send you.
I know that people think that you do, but why can't companies understand that you are going to get spam occationally and you're going to get junk mail. The only thing that you can really control is the mail that you are sending out and if that isn't apropriate then they should have words with you, but not because you are being sent some dirty jokes.
arghh, just another one of my peaves against PHBs!
I just found an article on Yahoo that says this rumor is not true at all.
Check out the link
I'm sorry, but I do not think that this answer is BS. This is not your web site, so if you want to have a special news site of your own that has user moderation of the submitted articles then go ahead and start one and see if it gets more popular than Slashdot. If for some reason it does, then come back here and say "Told ya so."
But for now, Slashdot is still controlled by CmdTaco and Hemos and I don't think they're going to leave any time soon which means that there won't be moderation of story submissions.
I personally agree with CmdTaco and Hemos because I don't know about you, but I am not the Slashdot Man, I actually spend most of my day working and take a break here and there to check Slashdot to see if any interesting stories have popped up. If the users were allowed to moderate the stories being posted that would cause a large abundance of stories going through the main page causing the amount of time I can spend reading each story to decrease, also causing the amount of interesting conversation on the stories to decrease.
I think that moderation of the stories would decrease my reading pleasure of Slashdot and force me to go find some other new site to get my daily fix from.
I think you need to figure out the difference of something being "bigger than Rob Malda now" and something that you would have if you ran your own cute little Slashdot copycat. This is the original and they are waaaaaaay ahead of any other "open journalism"
My hat goes off to the Slashdot crew!
Scott,
> They were completely within their legal rights
> to cancel the orders, but there was more
> backlash then they expected.
You're completely right.
I spoke way too soon on this...For some reason the impression I got from the article was that Apple said, "Well we can't produce these machines, so here you go, now you get a cheaper one at the same price." Which in my mind resulted in a big "screw you" from Apple. I really did not realize that the orders were cancelled until after I wrote this.
I do think that its fair of a company to cancel orders because of a shortage based on another company's fault. I think that Apple should have some words with Motorola if they did promise to produce enough chips for shipment because whether it is Apple's fault or not this may hurt Apple's business.
Although I think that in this case if I did have to cancel orders, I may offer another computer to the person with the cancelled order at the price that peticular computer was at when the original order was made (which I heard Apple is doing so cheers to them).
Thanks for keeping me on track.
Steve.
---
If any business let something go like this I'm sure they would see a lot of law suites for false advertising. You just can't treat customers like that or you're going to get burned.
---
> (although it's miles ahead of Linux, OS/2, or even BeOS).
If its really miles ahead of those OS's, then why:
- can I set up my Linux box in 1/4 the time it takes me to set up a default installation of a WinNT machine.
- was I able to set up Be faster and easier the first time I ever used it than any of the times I've ever installed WinNT.
I don't think I agree with the author on these points, but then again, it was an MSN article.---
I don't know a lot about tissue regeneration, but my sister used to work for a company called Genzyme, first doing tissue repair, and then cartilage repair. Is this a lot different then this?
Here's a link to Genzyme's tissue repair page. This by any means is a very interesting subject, but I think the Genzyme has been doing this for at least 5 years now.
If I remember correctly this Boston branch used to be a company called BioSurface that was an MIT company at one point until they got bought out by Genzyme.
---
Don't get me wrong...I'm not saying that Toy Story wasn't impressive, its just that it fit the example of what I was saying.
Onyx's are SGI's gift to the movie industry. They are large servers that do very well with graphics/special effects rendering. Most of the movies with heavy fx in them use Onyx's, for example Twister.
With the example of Toy Story, and the amount of machines they had to use (I remember when Sun had a story on their site about it, they were using Sparc 20's which at the time of the movie with the options they had would cost about $20000). Using 200 sparc 20's at US$20000 would cost about US$4million. You could probably do the same thing with 3 to five Onyx's which at that time cost around US$200000, so figure 5 and you still are at half the budget of the sparcs.
I am sure that Pixar got some good kickback from Sun on the machinery because Sun used that as a huge advertising gimic, so that would save the budget on that movie, but it still doesn't account for the fact that if you were just to go out and buy the machinery, you wouldn't be saving anything.
I talked to someone who used to do film remastering at one of the imaging giants here in Rochester. He said that they used three SGI Onyx's and it was more power than they would ever need for removing the dust and scratches off the last master of the movies turning it into the final master. They didn't do any special fx with them, but they did remaster every single frame for a large number of movies (any movie shot on this company's film) and they Onyx's work much more efficiently than any Sun solution they could get that competed in price with buy the three Onyx's (I think he said they paid US$200000 a machine).
Here's a link to the new Onyx's. So that you can read the specs on them.
---
Linux seems to fall under the same cometetition standards as the server market did for a while.
I remember a conference I went to 6 years ago called the SGI/Oracle Webmaster Survival Conference. In this conference, SGI made it well known that even though they would like to see one of their workstations on every desk top and one of there servers in everyone's server room, they knew that it wasn't possible. They knew that there would be a market split and that certain server/workstation solutions made sense in certain situations.
IBM seems to get this too. They portray that although we wouldn't really mind if you bought all this computing machinery from us, it isn't a big deal if you don't, especially if it doesn't make sense to do so. At a company I used to work for we would use IBM's high end printing solutions. Although we ran the printer with an RS/6000, we ran the rest of the network with Sun equipment. IBM would have liked to see us running the rest of the network (which was all *very* dependant upon this printer) with IBM equipment, but it wasn't necessary and they understood that the Sun/HP solution we had in place made more sense.
On the same respect, it seems as though Sun does not support this mentality. They think that every computer in your network should be a Sun computer. PC's? Forget it, replace them with XTerms. SGI's? Why do you need one of those when you could use an enterprise 10000 to do the same thing? Remember the movie Toy Story? They had to use (I forget the exact stats, but something like) 20 farms of 100 Sparc 20's to do the same thing that 2 or 3 SGI Onyx's could do. Sun doesn't seem to care if something doesn't make sense as long as it puts money in their pocket. Although I think that Sun has some great products, I think that this mentality will haunt them.
That also seems to be the same way that these companies approach Linux as mentioned before so I won't mention it again. You are right, and the evidence has been around longer than all of these companies have been embracing Linux. Articles like this are good indicators that Sun still believes that every computer in the world should and will be a Sun. Perhaps Sun is the one that needs the reality check in this article and not IBM.
---
Why is it that whenever a distribution tries to become main stream, they are accused of "becoming Microsoft?" It is quite obvious here that Red Hat has just IPO'd and now has name recognition in the computer industry beyond the level of those of us who simply will go to try to find the best OS to use, or the most agreeable cause to work for.
In my mind the reaction to the last article about Red Hat falling right into what Suck said they would do, or just the general comparison of Red Hat to Microsoft is all bad. If Red Hat was really turning this corner, do you think that they would have offered the stock to the open source developers such as they did?
I think that they key point here is that if someone goes to the store and says "I want Red Hat," Red Hat wants to make sure that they get it so that the customer can truly see what red hat is. I think the same people that went to the store a year ago and asked the question, "Does this computer come with the internet installed" are going to asking for Red Hat in a similar manner. Name recoginition is how you will make the desktop, you will not get there with these second name distros based on yours that soley bare your name. If you want to be a Linux hacker and don't want to fall under the "trendy wave" like all this seems to be opening up to, then go out and get a copy of Debian for yourself.
The fact of the matter is if you really want to see freedom in the computer industry insofar as OS's go, then do go accusing everyone who tries to make a run at name recognition and a run at the desktop as being Microsoft. They may make a lot of money by getting on the average desktop, but what they do with the money is another thing that we haven't had the chance to see. Let us judge them on what they do not what everone else thinks they will do. Anything else is severly unfair.
---
I agree with you completely.
In fact, we here in the United States have decided to align the equator with Rochester, NY. We have decided to comemmorate this for the millenium by building a giant chain of Starbucks stretching along the entire length of the northern United States.
We will get around the whole idea of this insignificant "equator" notion of it being 0 degrees latitude by renaming it "le Equator de Rochester."
---
You have a very good point here, that I'm not going to argue with. Most of us (myself included) need to get more involved.
But let's not forget an OpenSource project that is working very well: Debian, about 300 Developers!
Let's here it for Debian!
---
just as in the famous Win98 demo, I'm sure sure that M$ will get a wonderful blue screen of death when they try this challange...
after all, do you really thing that they have anywhere near all the bugs worked out of SQL Server 7, and then trying to tweek it on top of that???
perhaps using the new version will work against them.
---
Al Gore spoke at my brother's graduation a few years ago (I think it was 1997 if you were there).
He made two big mistakes there:
1. Bragged about being a Harvard grad (he got booed for a good 2 minutes).
2. Bragged about coining the term "Information Superhighway"
Number 2 is why he thinks he invented the internet. What a panzy.
---
other from the fact that the got the source code from the browser freed up...
---