Actually, the $3 dividend will raise the price of the stock by slightly less than $3/share (because it's a future value), while reducing the price of the company by slightly less than $3/share (because the money is going to be payed out.) Once the dividend is payed, the cash is gone -- the $56 billion hoard becomes $26 billion.
In the end, the two effects cancel each other out. If there's a rise in the price of each share, it's because the company is seen as making better money on other activities than on its cash...in which case, I'd rather have the company focus on the things it does better.
No. The header files used to define the contents could well contain copyrightable material -- if Linux reuses a pattern of constants taken from header files, then, yes, there could well be a copyright violation. Remember the errno.h discussion? Torvalds changed the constants in errno.h to agree with the SysV constants because so many things didn't work otherwise. That's a very possible infringement, particularly if there was an intelligent pattern to the assignment of values to names. The same thing applies here -- if constants were defined to match the ELF constants, then there's a possible case.
I don't know about MBU, but I prefer to keep a solid wall between my two "selves". I don't hide the fact that I work for Microsoft, but I also don't ever divulge my real name here (or my nick at work). I am concerned that what I say could be taken as an official statement from the company, which it, of course, is not.
The blogs are special -- they're officially sanctioned, but not official communications, and that's a part of their definition. That's somewhat different from posting here.
Wow. So what he says is "We installed a complicated system in a unique configuration without any system integration testing, and it broke." That makes it the fault of the code from the outside? Somehow, I find that kind of hard to believe, particularly since they managed to get the Tuesday edition out.
This all sounds vaguely like something this Gary Campbell fellow pulled out of his ass...
I was thinking much the same thing. More than something which has been pulled out of Gary Campbell's ass, I think that it's something he pulled out of his ass in order to increase his influence. Look at what he writes in the memo: "we need an HP-wide committee", "we need an HP-wide committee", "Intel went radio silent on Linux in March; maybe MS got to them then", "And did I mention that we need an HP wide committee to handle this threat?"
I also don't think that it worked very well. The guy's fief has been increasingly marginalized over time. He owned Linux initially (in fact, at the time this memo was written), but has been pushed out of that focus as other executives rose in the company. If he did this kind of analysis, I can see why.
Threatened by "Edit and continue"? Edit and continue has been a part of VS for C++ in some flavors of debug, and has been in VB since VB its first release.
So here's a good thing for you to know: Bing Crosby never performed a song live during a fifty year career. He was strictly a studio artist; he never toured. He had terrible stage fright, and was unable to perform in front of a live audience.
Yet (although you may not know this) he revolutionized vocal music worldwide; as far as sung ballads go there is a "before Crosby" and an "after Crosby" era. He created the "crooner" style upon which American popular song is based, and created the modern intimate performance of love songs.
What many not performers don't understand is that studio performance is neither better nor worse than live performance. They are different genres, calling for different kinds of skills and permitting different audience experiences. If you want a layered, textured, or intimate sound, then you are not going to get it in a large hall; the acoustics are wrong, and there is too much to do. If you want the energy of working on the edge, then you are not going to get that in a studio. They are different things, and different experiences for the audience.
Yes, exactly. The Federal Accounting Principles are notoriously difficult to interpret. That's why I put scare quotes around "truth" -- a perfectly reasonable defense would be to say "this is what our previous accountant recommended". If, however, their previous accountant also complained, and they ignored it, and then their new accountant not only complained, but threatened to throw the book at them...that would be a different matter, right?
Look again at Red Hat's history. They announced, with great fanfare, a quarter when they "broke even", and their stock price rose. Except, oops...they didn't break even that quarter. Did they know that they were not really telling the "truth" as dictated by GAAPP? I don't know, for sure, but the corporate officers certainly look guilty.
Did they do this repeatedly? Well, as a matter of fact, yes. Did they do it intentionally? Who knows? Is it suspicious? You betcha. Add to that the sudden departure of the CFO, coupled with a clear failure to disclose material information, and, yes, there's good reason to look entirely askance at RH's management.
No. In fact, if you go to the copyright office's own page, the first paragraph on fair use say:
One of the rights accorded to the owner of copyright is the right to reproduce or to authorize others to reproduce the work in copies or phonorecords. This right is subject to certain limitations found in sections 107 through 118 of the copyright act (title 17, U.S. Code). One of the more important limitations is the doctrine of "fair use." Although fair use was not mentioned in the previous copyright law, the doctrine has developed through a substantial number of court decisions over the years. This doctrine has been codified in section 107 of the copyright law.
Notice that the authors are careful to talk about a doctrine developed from a number of court decisions over the years, and that it's codified in section 107 of Title 17. It's not Constitutional, it's statutory and judicial.
In fact, the doctrine of fair use evolved from the silence of the Congress on certain classes of speech. The right of the Congress to forbid certain uses of copyrighted materials is Constitutionally defined -- the courts, reasonably, ruled that if the Congress had wanted to restrict those uses, then it would have done so. Having not done so, the courts tried to figure out what Congress had been silent about.
Section 107 is a very recent addition to the law, in fact. Historically, large scale infringement was sufficiently difficult that only a few people did it, and so fair use could be left in that legal limbo. Recently, though, mass copying devices have become sufficiently common that large scale infringement has also become common. At that point, courts and prosecutors started needing explicit guidance to explain exactly what the Congress had been trying to allow by not legislating it. Hence, section 107.
The thing to understand, though, is that the Congress could have defined all the things that the courts had ruled to be protected to have been infringement at any time. Congress, after all, is not only allowed to define copyright, but required to do so under its Constitutional charter. The question of freedom of speech is not relevant here; copyright, if anything, is the senior right in the Constitution.
Red Hat versus reality is more like it...
on
Red Hat Vs. The Lawyers
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· Score: 4, Interesting
About a month ago, Red Hat suddenly lost their CFO. Immediately thereafter, they pre-released earnings in order to cushion the blow. Now we find out two things: (1) the day before the CFO left, their auditor complained about their accounting practices, and (2) they recently received a request for information from the SEC. They didn't announce either of those facts during their extraordinary earnings release or at any time since then.
Like it or not, those are both material facts. No, the accounting change isn't all that significant, and yes, most SEC audits turn out fine, but that is irrelevant. They did things to prop up their stock price, and didn't publicize all the news, limiting themselves to the better news. To the extent that they propped up their stock price by selectively releasing only positive informaion, they're in violation of their fiduciary responsibility to their shareholders.
Blaming the ambulance chasers for Red Hat's misbehavior is like blaming Janet Reno for Microsoft being held in violation of the Sherman Antitrust laws. Just like MS, Red Hat did this to themselves; the attorneys are just doing their jobs by trying to hold crooks accountable for their crimes.
That's got nothing to do with what the GP said. The GP stated that Fair Use is not constituionally mandated. You pointed out that there are statutory recognitions of certain limited fair uses of copyrighted material.
Word 2k, patched, shows the "Hyperlinks can be harmful" dialog, just like Word 2002 and Word 2004 do. (See here.) MSN Messenger shows an even more aggressive dialog about worms and viruses. (See here.)
I'm glad you posted the note. As several people on Full Disclosure pointed out to you, you misunderstood the original vulnerability: the Microsoft products you cite raise a warning dialog when you traverse the link by hand. In neither case does the link "self execute" -- you need to ation on it to cause the problem. The Mozilla bug is that including such a link in a META tag can cause the shell code to be executed immediately, without any user intervention, and without giving a warning.
Users are allowed to do stupid things. They're not supposed to be exposed to situations where stupid things can happen when they didn't do anything stupid themselves. Chasing a link that raises an error box, and then clicking "OK" -- that's stupid and dengerous. Opening a safe web page is supposed to be safe.
"Do I want to do cutting-edge research (that only five other people in the world will genuinely understand), find solutions to problems (that will be important in a hundred years, but which don't matter at all right now), work with colleagues all around the world (via e-mail), and meanwhile struggle to pay my kid's day care bills, getting lousy benefits, and having credit stolen from me by my lab director, so that in fifteen years I can have a one in five hundred shot at a tenured position? The alternative is to go into industrial research, where I will not get to work on quite such arcane things, but will, to my surprise, get all the freedom I ever got in academe, even as a star post-doc, get to work on equally interesting problems of a slightly different nature, but using the same skills as I used as an academic, and get payed...errr...five to ten times as much. Before benefits."
I made the first choice before we had kids. After we had kids, I changed my mind. I work at Microsoft now -- I look back on my time as a tenure-track assistant professor with some nostalgia, but only because it was what I always wanted to do, not because I was any better off there than I am here.
How do you measure usefulness? Typically, by looking at how people respond to purchase decisions. So here we have an OS from a company with very high positive valence (Apple) competing against an OS from company with very high negative valence (Microsoft). More than that, the first OS is running on hardware provided by a supplier with a reputation for reliability and stylishness (Apple), and the second OS is running on hardware from a supplier with a reputation for lackluster quality (Dell, in your example, eMachines in mine). Yet people buy the second.
There's only one reason for that: the perceived usefulness -- the utility -- of the first box is lower. There are a bunch of reasons for that: perhaps the monitor sucks, perhaps OS X is unfamiliar and therefore less producting, perhaps the available application spectrum is too narrow...it doesn't matter why, the difference is there.
Are you responding to the correct comment? He's saying exactly what you're saying: that Macs really aren't all that more useful then Windows boxes, and that they don't provide comparable value for the money. That's what "utility" means in that context.
The whole point of your argument is that if I go into a store looking for an entry level box (which is what the eMac is), I'm going to see that I really want a few more letters for my money. I'll buy an item from eMachines, not an eMac.
Actually, the EC is doing the wise thing from the model slashbot's point of view, even if he or she doesn't realize it.
Microsoft has a very strong case for a temporary restraining order, and the court was overwhelmingly likely to have granted one if the EC had tried to play hardball. No, make that "the court would have granted one" -- the court of the first instance needs to decide whether or not there's going to be irrevocable harm in enforcing the EC order before the order is allowed to come into force. Because the order would have come into force tomorrow, the court would have had to grant a TRO until after the motion to set aside the penalties had been heard and decided.
If a TRO is granted, the EC loses control over the penalties; it has to go to the court and grovel if it wants to threaten MS with them. This step makes it less likely that a TRO will be granted prior to the first hearing, which leaves the EC with at least a little leverage. Worse, if the EC had chosen to play hardball here, the court would likely have looked askance at any attempt to reactivate the sanctions -- any judge would look at the EC's representative and ask "How do I know you won't try to railroad this court again?" That's not a question any attorney wants to be asked by any judge anywhere.
No, the EC made a wise strategic choice here. It's better to make a tactical retreat than make your strategic position infinitely worse.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, the $3 dividend will raise the price of the stock by slightly less than $3/share (because it's a future value), while reducing the price of the company by slightly less than $3/share (because the money is going to be payed out.) Once the dividend is payed, the cash is gone -- the $56 billion hoard becomes $26 billion.
In the end, the two effects cancel each other out. If there's a rise in the price of each share, it's because the company is seen as making better money on other activities than on its cash...in which case, I'd rather have the company focus on the things it does better.
No. The header files used to define the contents could well contain copyrightable material -- if Linux reuses a pattern of constants taken from header files, then, yes, there could well be a copyright violation. Remember the errno.h discussion? Torvalds changed the constants in errno.h to agree with the SysV constants because so many things didn't work otherwise. That's a very possible infringement, particularly if there was an intelligent pattern to the assignment of values to names. The same thing applies here -- if constants were defined to match the ELF constants, then there's a possible case.
I don't know about MBU, but I prefer to keep a solid wall between my two "selves". I don't hide the fact that I work for Microsoft, but I also don't ever divulge my real name here (or my nick at work). I am concerned that what I say could be taken as an official statement from the company, which it, of course, is not.
The blogs are special -- they're officially sanctioned, but not official communications, and that's a part of their definition. That's somewhat different from posting here.
Wow. So what he says is "We installed a complicated system in a unique configuration without any system integration testing, and it broke." That makes it the fault of the code from the outside? Somehow, I find that kind of hard to believe, particularly since they managed to get the Tuesday edition out.
I also don't think that it worked very well. The guy's fief has been increasingly marginalized over time. He owned Linux initially (in fact, at the time this memo was written), but has been pushed out of that focus as other executives rose in the company. If he did this kind of analysis, I can see why.
You didn't bother to click the link, did you? LinuxMyths is a porn site, not a MS-sponsored site. The parent was no Microsoft FUDster; he was a troll.
YHBT. YHL. HAND.
Threatened by "Edit and continue"? Edit and continue has been a part of VS for C++ in some flavors of debug, and has been in VB since VB its first release.
They usually say it's a dominant market share, and that the other competitors are irrelevant.
So here's a good thing for you to know: Bing Crosby never performed a song live during a fifty year career. He was strictly a studio artist; he never toured. He had terrible stage fright, and was unable to perform in front of a live audience.
Yet (although you may not know this) he revolutionized vocal music worldwide; as far as sung ballads go there is a "before Crosby" and an "after Crosby" era. He created the "crooner" style upon which American popular song is based, and created the modern intimate performance of love songs.
What many not performers don't understand is that studio performance is neither better nor worse than live performance. They are different genres, calling for different kinds of skills and permitting different audience experiences. If you want a layered, textured, or intimate sound, then you are not going to get it in a large hall; the acoustics are wrong, and there is too much to do. If you want the energy of working on the edge, then you are not going to get that in a studio. They are different things, and different experiences for the audience.
Yes, exactly. The Federal Accounting Principles are notoriously difficult to interpret. That's why I put scare quotes around "truth" -- a perfectly reasonable defense would be to say "this is what our previous accountant recommended". If, however, their previous accountant also complained, and they ignored it, and then their new accountant not only complained, but threatened to throw the book at them...that would be a different matter, right?
Look again at Red Hat's history. They announced, with great fanfare, a quarter when they "broke even", and their stock price rose. Except, oops...they didn't break even that quarter. Did they know that they were not really telling the "truth" as dictated by GAAPP? I don't know, for sure, but the corporate officers certainly look guilty.
Did they do this repeatedly? Well, as a matter of fact, yes. Did they do it intentionally? Who knows? Is it suspicious? You betcha. Add to that the sudden departure of the CFO, coupled with a clear failure to disclose material information, and, yes, there's good reason to look entirely askance at RH's management.
Notice that the authors are careful to talk about a doctrine developed from a number of court decisions over the years, and that it's codified in section 107 of Title 17. It's not Constitutional, it's statutory and judicial.
In fact, the doctrine of fair use evolved from the silence of the Congress on certain classes of speech. The right of the Congress to forbid certain uses of copyrighted materials is Constitutionally defined -- the courts, reasonably, ruled that if the Congress had wanted to restrict those uses, then it would have done so. Having not done so, the courts tried to figure out what Congress had been silent about.
Section 107 is a very recent addition to the law, in fact. Historically, large scale infringement was sufficiently difficult that only a few people did it, and so fair use could be left in that legal limbo. Recently, though, mass copying devices have become sufficiently common that large scale infringement has also become common. At that point, courts and prosecutors started needing explicit guidance to explain exactly what the Congress had been trying to allow by not legislating it. Hence, section 107.
The thing to understand, though, is that the Congress could have defined all the things that the courts had ruled to be protected to have been infringement at any time. Congress, after all, is not only allowed to define copyright, but required to do so under its Constitutional charter. The question of freedom of speech is not relevant here; copyright, if anything, is the senior right in the Constitution.
About a month ago, Red Hat suddenly lost their CFO. Immediately thereafter, they pre-released earnings in order to cushion the blow. Now we find out two things: (1) the day before the CFO left, their auditor complained about their accounting practices, and (2) they recently received a request for information from the SEC. They didn't announce either of those facts during their extraordinary earnings release or at any time since then.
Like it or not, those are both material facts. No, the accounting change isn't all that significant, and yes, most SEC audits turn out fine, but that is irrelevant. They did things to prop up their stock price, and didn't publicize all the news, limiting themselves to the better news. To the extent that they propped up their stock price by selectively releasing only positive informaion, they're in violation of their fiduciary responsibility to their shareholders.
Blaming the ambulance chasers for Red Hat's misbehavior is like blaming Janet Reno for Microsoft being held in violation of the Sherman Antitrust laws. Just like MS, Red Hat did this to themselves; the attorneys are just doing their jobs by trying to hold crooks accountable for their crimes.
That's got nothing to do with what the GP said. The GP stated that Fair Use is not constituionally mandated. You pointed out that there are statutory recognitions of certain limited fair uses of copyrighted material.
Word 2k, patched, shows the "Hyperlinks can be harmful" dialog, just like Word 2002 and Word 2004 do. (See here.) MSN Messenger shows an even more aggressive dialog about worms and viruses. (See here.)
I'm glad you posted the note. As several people on Full Disclosure pointed out to you, you misunderstood the original vulnerability: the Microsoft products you cite raise a warning dialog when you traverse the link by hand. In neither case does the link "self execute" -- you need to ation on it to cause the problem. The Mozilla bug is that including such a link in a META tag can cause the shell code to be executed immediately, without any user intervention, and without giving a warning.
Users are allowed to do stupid things. They're not supposed to be exposed to situations where stupid things can happen when they didn't do anything stupid themselves. Chasing a link that raises an error box, and then clicking "OK" -- that's stupid and dengerous. Opening a safe web page is supposed to be safe.
Only if they're male. Female humans don't start experiencing significant high-frequency hearing loss until they're in their fifties.
Let me rephrase that yet again:
"Do I want to do cutting-edge research (that only five other people in the world will genuinely understand), find solutions to problems (that will be important in a hundred years, but which don't matter at all right now), work with colleagues all around the world (via e-mail), and meanwhile struggle to pay my kid's day care bills, getting lousy benefits, and having credit stolen from me by my lab director, so that in fifteen years I can have a one in five hundred shot at a tenured position? The alternative is to go into industrial research, where I will not get to work on quite such arcane things, but will, to my surprise, get all the freedom I ever got in academe, even as a star post-doc, get to work on equally interesting problems of a slightly different nature, but using the same skills as I used as an academic, and get payed...errr...five to ten times as much. Before benefits."
I made the first choice before we had kids. After we had kids, I changed my mind. I work at Microsoft now -- I look back on my time as a tenure-track assistant professor with some nostalgia, but only because it was what I always wanted to do, not because I was any better off there than I am here.
Yes, but his number for the 98 stock price includes that number, too. Since 98, the company's P/e has halved, from 40+ to approx 20.
How do you measure usefulness? Typically, by looking at how people respond to purchase decisions. So here we have an OS from a company with very high positive valence (Apple) competing against an OS from company with very high negative valence (Microsoft). More than that, the first OS is running on hardware provided by a supplier with a reputation for reliability and stylishness (Apple), and the second OS is running on hardware from a supplier with a reputation for lackluster quality (Dell, in your example, eMachines in mine). Yet people buy the second.
There's only one reason for that: the perceived usefulness -- the utility -- of the first box is lower. There are a bunch of reasons for that: perhaps the monitor sucks, perhaps OS X is unfamiliar and therefore less producting, perhaps the available application spectrum is too narrow...it doesn't matter why, the difference is there.
Are you responding to the correct comment? He's saying exactly what you're saying: that Macs really aren't all that more useful then Windows boxes, and that they don't provide comparable value for the money. That's what "utility" means in that context.
The whole point of your argument is that if I go into a store looking for an entry level box (which is what the eMac is), I'm going to see that I really want a few more letters for my money. I'll buy an item from eMachines, not an eMac.
Naah -- we'll just move in from the south and reform your government. No, wait, Reform is no more, right? It's the Liberals and the NDP this week?
Hell, never mind -- we don't understand your government, so we'll fix it. But good.
You haven't read _The Phantom Tollbooth_, have you?
Actually, the EC is doing the wise thing from the model slashbot's point of view, even if he or she doesn't realize it.
Microsoft has a very strong case for a temporary restraining order, and the court was overwhelmingly likely to have granted one if the EC had tried to play hardball. No, make that "the court would have granted one" -- the court of the first instance needs to decide whether or not there's going to be irrevocable harm in enforcing the EC order before the order is allowed to come into force. Because the order would have come into force tomorrow, the court would have had to grant a TRO until after the motion to set aside the penalties had been heard and decided.
If a TRO is granted, the EC loses control over the penalties; it has to go to the court and grovel if it wants to threaten MS with them. This step makes it less likely that a TRO will be granted prior to the first hearing, which leaves the EC with at least a little leverage. Worse, if the EC had chosen to play hardball here, the court would likely have looked askance at any attempt to reactivate the sanctions -- any judge would look at the EC's representative and ask "How do I know you won't try to railroad this court again?" That's not a question any attorney wants to be asked by any judge anywhere.
No, the EC made a wise strategic choice here. It's better to make a tactical retreat than make your strategic position infinitely worse.
It a Gnu acronym: BSD == BSD's still dying.