The name of the company is ZINMAL. What is ZINMAL? ZINMAL Is Not Microsoft's Answer to Linux. Zinmal will take all the software that Corel has released under the GPL, repackage it under the Zinmal label, and continue to develope it independantly of Corel. All the Slashdot types who care about the GPL will buy Zinmal distributions and refuse to have anything to do with Corel. Corel's proprietary products will be treated with the same disdain as Microsoft's proprietary products. People who work at Corel will flee to come work for the new startup, and Zinmal will eventually be purchased either by VA Linux (LNUX) or RedHat (RHAT).
This is one stupid purchase. MSFT needs to wake up and realize that Linux can't be bought, and that profitability in the software market is shrinking long term due to the presence of Free Software. Concentrate on the hardware, dum-dums. You can't pirate hardware as easily as you can pirate software.
NOTICE to those who read both Yahoo! stock message boards and Slashdot: istartedi==smm7epub
Lessig filed a "friend of the court" brief in the Microsoft case. He is a Harvard professor. Now, MS attorneys argued that he was biased.
I don't know what arguments the MS attorneys used, but it seems pretty clear to me: Lessig was biased in that case because Bill Gates turned his back on the academic world before graduating and became a tremendous success--thus invalidating the idea that smart young men need professors like Lessig in order to become successful. Worse yet, BG turned his back on the very same institution on which Lessig relies for his livelihood.
Lessig has publicly stated that he thinks the *government* should be involved in making software; no doubt so it could enforce standards and what-not.
In other words, you can't find a more stereotypical liberal, academic, Clintonite than L. Lessig.
They could have chosen two more constructive things to put in a room... Hydrazine and LOX come to mind. I just hope we don't have one of those Geraldo-type incidents.
? Are the oil companies thinking of drilling for crude there or something?
If the moon had crude, that would be real news. I think that would prove that the moon once had life, since crude is a pretty complex organic mix, but I could be wrong.
At any rate, yes, claiming the site as a US historic site would be widely perceived as yet another obnoxious move by "those arrogant Americans". IMHO, it's a really bad idea. An international treaty would be more appropriate.
...I unscrewed my CueCat a while ago just to see what was in it: One Circuit board with a connector for the "tail". There was also a plastic piece that apparently served no purpose other than to help hold the light steady. Then when I snapped it back together, the little lense that focuses the light onto the sensor came out. So, it's basicly 3 pieces inside -- PC board, plastic retainer, and lens. The sensor is held to the PC board with a strip of copper tape. I did not remove the sensor or the copper tape, because I wanted it to remain intact.
As far as hacking stuff off the PC board goes, it's way beyond me, since there are a lot of tiny surface mount components, and I haven't dabbled with a soldering iron in years.
The lens assembly was intriguing. It got me thinking that perhaps you could turn this thing into a scanner that could scan more than barcodes. Maybe it could even scan text. Maybe somebody else can provide some insight as to whether or not retrofitting a bar code scanner to scan in 2-dimensions is practical or not.
If Linux desktops become good enough to replace Windows desktops, we could see Windows driven into the "niche" category. In that case, a $1000 price tag would not be unrealistic at all.
I don't have any hard data, but I believe I have heard of other cases where Free Software has a dominating market share, and if you want some obscure feature that the free version doesn't have, you are driven to pay a high price for something that satisfies your particular need.
The analogy that I always like to use is the public school analogy (software under the GPL is much like a public work). In the US, public schools provide free education for everybody, but it's not always the best education. Those who want a better education for their children often pay thousands of dollars per year for private schooling, even though their taxes also support the public school.
In the future, the masses run klutzy X-desktops; and the wealthy pay a premium to continue running their favorite apps on state-of- the-art hardware. It could happen.
Things like this usually happen because the context is sufficient to determine the meaning. Witness the slow death of the word "whom" in the English language.
Tolerance for split infinitives has gone up recently too.
In 1986, I had a room-mate thrash me for using the phrase "a whole nother", because I had split an article. In his English major mind, that was far worse than splitting an infinitive.
Just a few years later, I actually heard one of my professors say "a whole nother", and she had no idea why I was smiling at her.
I could go off on adverbs too, but that's a whole nother post.
I seem to recall having seen some documentation for a mouse driver that said movements from the mouse are converted to "pixels" from "mickeys".
Of course this is a unit of measure, not a physical object, but I think the idea is the same--mickey has become almost as generic as klenex, xerox, and fedex. Fedex was smart--they took the generic term that everybody was using and painted it on the side of their trucks. Before that happened, people were actually saying things like "Do you want me to fedex that with Purolator or UPS?".
I can see it now. A jeep pulls up in a village and they announce that there is a delivery of free Linux CDs. People misunderstand and think that it's Linux seeds. Now, nobody knows what Linux is, but seeds grow food, and they figure this must be a free UN agricultural handout. So they plow their fields and plant these strange looking seeds in the ground and irrigate them with what little water they have.
6 months later the fields are still barren, but several more jeep loads of well intentioned Linux advocates return to see how they are doing. Oh! the villagers exclaim, that's what Linux seeds grow: Pretentions foreigners. Best crop they ever had. Finger lickin' good.
One of the wise village elders is heard to remark that whatever this Linux is, it's a lot like Unix--difficult to understand at first, and you have to go through a lot of steps that aren't really necessary, but if you wait long enough you eventually get a setup that works.
Huh? The Milgram experiment was where they told people they were giving subjects dangerous electric shocks. In reality, the subjects were actors and the people doing the shocking were the subject of the experiment.
How does this relate? Other than the fact that I used the imperetive "apply this rule", I see not even the slightest connection to the Milgram experiment. I certainly hold/. readers in higher regard than to expect that they will apply the rule simply because I told them.
In the Milgram experiment, the willingness of the participants to shock the alleged victims was partially attributed to the fact that the people running the experiment were associated with a respected university. I, on the other hand, am just a guy on/..
Whenever I run accross a new piece of software, I always like to apply this rule. It requires you to use your imagination a little.
Imagine that you are sitting in a room full of vacuum tubes at the moment the first modern digital computer was assembled. After the initial glee, the engineers all sit around and brainstorm for ideas about where it will lead. The continuously shout out: "This is great! Someday we'll be able to (blank)".
Now, take the new piece of software, hardware, or application, and fit it in the blank.
So, we have "This is great! Someday we will be able to (transmit text only to people who have our particular program)" vs. "This is great! Someday we will be able to (transmit text in a universal format that all systems can understand)"
Now, to be fair, the MS format might have some advantage over ASCII. What, I don't know. After all, we already have the UTF standard for the handling of foreign character sets, so it can't offer that. So, I challenge anybody to fill in the blank: "This is great! Someday we will be able to (blank)" and put this MS format in a good light.
I will be amazed if anybody can do that.
BTW, you may think my little thought experiment is klutzy, but it works much more quickly in my mind than it does when I am trying to explain it on/..
What'd happen? It'd be like AT & T back in the 70s. You didn't buy your phone, you rented it from Ma Bell. In fact if memory serves correctly, it was actually illegal to hook a non-AT & T device to the line or service an AT & T phone. By "service" that included opening up the phone.
I have a very vivid memory of this from when I was a kid. Me and a kid accross the street got curious and unscrewed a phone which had become defective. We didn't damage it in any way, we just removed the outer casing and a few simple parts, so that reassembly would have been obvious to anybody (even an adult). Well, his mom found out about it and soundly scolded us, much more than if we had taken apart a radio. Why? Because tampering with phones was illegal! It seemed strange to me. After all, taking apart radios and TVs was not illegal. People unscrewed tubes from TVs all the time. But, that's the way it was.
Now, this may have seemed strange, but I don't recall feeling particularly oppressed by the phone company. At this point, we could digress into the fact that the Telco was a monopoly at that time, and indeed, disolving it *did* open up a lot of things. Also, I think that some of the cool telephone products we have now are a direct result of the fact that you no longer have to rent your phone. So yes, hardware licenses do oppress people, and we should be opposed to them, but it's a mild form of oppression, or at least it was from my point of view.
I'd be more interested in hearing if any adults from that era were actually prosecuted for working on AT & T equipment without a license. If they were, and they got anything more than a small fine and a blot on their record, then this was indeed very oppressive.
So, maybe we should look at this in terms of AT & T, and pass a low a requiring that all communication services (not just AT & T) should allow you to use 3rd party equipment to access the service, so long as said 3rd party equipment functions properly and does not cause harm to the network or service.
That would mean that you would also have to allow 3rd parties to sell cable boxes (not descramblers mind you, that would still be illegal). Hmmmm... my cable box is owned by the cable company. I don't feel particularly oppressed by the cable company. OTOH, I bet that if we opened up this market, some innovative 3rd party might come up with a cable box that didn't weigh 10 pounds and throw out heat like a blast furnace. You might be able to get them in some other color than brown too.
Somehow, without US vs. USSR, the Olympics just aren't the same. They should have the next Olympics in either India or Pakistan. Better yet, those two countries should just learn from US vs. USSR and forget the f***ing nukes already. All international disputes should be resolved in a Quake Deathmatch. It could be a much more efficient proxy for world war.
you just happen to know a telephone number that lets anybody in the world log in and use their DNS. Uhm. Yeah
That's nothing. There is a certain modem manufacturer (I will not name) that used to allow total Internet access through their test line, no fancy DNS hack required. Of course they didn't advertise that fact. I was connected to it and tried typing in a regular URL into the browser, and whaddya know--it worked. The test line remained active for at least several months, and may still be active for all I know. It was never terribly difficult to connect to it, so it was presumeably not abused. I offer that as living proof that security through obscurity is at least marginally effective.
Or better yet, set up a Slashcode based website, and moderate up the good patches. Unlike regular slashdot, there would be no Anonymous Cowards, and you could be banned for trolling.
OK, score me Flamebait for using the S-word again, but this is to be expected. In a capitalist system, the wealthy get things better, faster, etc. In a socialist system, there is the illusion of equality via the elimination of capital, but the fundamental laws of economics remain unchanged. You have just replaced dollar capital with social capital. What is social capital? It's how well connected you are, whether or not you are a member of the "3 initial club" or something like that.
For $20000 I'll build you a really nice cabinet that *looks* like the Cray, and I'll stick a $10000 system in it. Run quake, and nobody will know the difference. After all, how many people have even seen a Cray in real life anyway.
For $2000 I'll just build you a cabinet with some blinking LEDs and fans in it. You can tell people that what it's doing is too important to be interrupted for Quake.
Slashdot Mirror
The name of the company is ZINMAL. What is ZINMAL? ZINMAL Is Not Microsoft's Answer to Linux. Zinmal will take all the software that Corel has released under the GPL, repackage it under the Zinmal label, and continue to develope it independantly of Corel. All the Slashdot types who care about the GPL will buy Zinmal distributions and refuse to have anything to do with Corel. Corel's proprietary products will be treated with the same disdain as Microsoft's proprietary products. People who work at Corel will flee to come work for the new startup, and Zinmal will eventually be purchased either by VA Linux (LNUX) or RedHat (RHAT).
This is one stupid purchase. MSFT needs to wake up and realize that Linux can't be bought, and that profitability in the software market is shrinking long term due to the presence of Free Software. Concentrate on the hardware, dum-dums. You can't pirate hardware as easily as you can pirate software.
NOTICE to those who read both Yahoo! stock message boards and Slashdot: istartedi==smm7epub
Lessig filed a "friend of the court" brief in the Microsoft case. He is a Harvard professor. Now, MS attorneys argued that he was biased.
I don't know what arguments the MS attorneys used, but it seems pretty clear to me: Lessig was biased in that case because Bill Gates turned his back on the academic world before graduating and became a tremendous success--thus invalidating the idea that smart young men need professors like Lessig in order to become successful. Worse yet, BG turned his back on the very same institution on which Lessig relies for his livelihood.
Lessig has publicly stated that he thinks the *government* should be involved in making software; no doubt so it could enforce standards and what-not.
In other words, you can't find a more stereotypical liberal, academic, Clintonite than L. Lessig.
They could have chosen two more constructive things to put in a room... Hydrazine and LOX come to mind. I just hope we don't have one of those Geraldo-type incidents.
Imagine a beowolf cluster of them
I just closed my eyes, and saw a nuclear power plant, with cooling towers and everything.
Nice use of rn to fake an m, but Carmack (assuming he has a /. ID) is probably well below 100,000.
? Are the oil companies thinking of drilling for crude there or something?
If the moon had crude, that would be real news. I think that would prove that the moon once had life, since crude is a pretty complex organic mix, but I could be wrong.
At any rate, yes, claiming the site as a US historic site would be widely perceived as yet another obnoxious move by "those arrogant Americans". IMHO, it's a really bad idea. An international treaty would be more appropriate.
...I unscrewed my CueCat a while ago just to see what was in it: One Circuit board with a connector for the "tail". There was also a plastic piece that apparently served no purpose other than to help hold the light steady. Then when I snapped it back together, the little lense that focuses the light onto the sensor came out. So, it's basicly 3 pieces inside -- PC board, plastic retainer, and lens. The sensor is held to the PC board with a strip of copper tape. I did not remove the sensor or the copper tape, because I wanted it to remain intact.
As far as hacking stuff off the PC board goes, it's way beyond me, since there are a lot of tiny surface mount components, and I haven't dabbled with a soldering iron in years.
The lens assembly was intriguing. It got me thinking that perhaps you could turn this thing into a scanner that could scan more than barcodes. Maybe it could even scan text. Maybe somebody else can provide some insight as to whether or not retrofitting a bar code scanner to scan in 2-dimensions is practical or not.
If Linux desktops become good enough to replace Windows desktops, we could see Windows driven into the "niche" category. In that case, a $1000 price tag would not be unrealistic at all.
I don't have any hard data, but I believe I have heard of other cases where Free Software has a dominating market share, and if you want some obscure feature that the free version doesn't have, you are driven to pay a high price for something that satisfies your particular need.
The analogy that I always like to use is the public school analogy (software under the GPL is much like a public work). In the US, public schools provide free education for everybody, but it's not always the best education. Those who want a better education for their children often pay thousands of dollars per year for private schooling, even though their taxes also support the public school.
In the future, the masses run klutzy X-desktops; and the wealthy pay a premium to continue running their favorite apps on state-of- the-art hardware. It could happen.
Things like this usually happen because the context is sufficient to determine the meaning. Witness the slow death of the word "whom" in the English language.
Tolerance for split infinitives has gone up recently too.
In 1986, I had a room-mate thrash me for using the phrase "a whole nother", because I had split an article. In his English major mind, that was far worse than splitting an infinitive.
Just a few years later, I actually heard one of my professors say "a whole nother", and she had no idea why I was smiling at her.
I could go off on adverbs too, but that's a whole nother post.
I seem to recall having seen some documentation for a mouse driver that said movements from the mouse are converted to "pixels" from "mickeys".
Of course this is a unit of measure, not a physical object, but I think the idea is the same--mickey has become almost as generic as klenex, xerox, and fedex. Fedex was smart--they took the generic term that everybody was using and painted it on the side of their trucks. Before that happened, people were actually saying things like "Do you want me to fedex that with Purolator or UPS?".
I can see it now. A jeep pulls up in a village and they announce that there is a delivery of free Linux CDs. People misunderstand and think that it's Linux seeds. Now, nobody knows what Linux is, but seeds grow food, and they figure this must be a free UN agricultural handout. So they plow their fields and plant these strange looking seeds in the ground and irrigate them with what little water they have.
6 months later the fields are still barren, but several more jeep loads of well intentioned Linux advocates return to see how they are doing. Oh! the villagers exclaim, that's what Linux seeds grow: Pretentions foreigners. Best crop they ever had. Finger lickin' good.
One of the wise village elders is heard to remark that whatever this Linux is, it's a lot like Unix--difficult to understand at first, and you have to go through a lot of steps that aren't really necessary, but if you wait long enough you eventually get a setup that works.
Huh? The Milgram experiment was where they told people they were giving subjects dangerous electric shocks. In reality, the subjects were actors and the people doing the shocking were the subject of the experiment.
How does this relate? Other than the fact that I used the imperetive "apply this rule", I see not even the slightest connection to the Milgram experiment. I certainly hold /. readers in higher regard than to expect that they will apply the rule simply because I told them.
In the Milgram experiment, the willingness of the participants to shock the alleged victims was partially attributed to the fact that the people running the experiment were associated with a respected university. I, on the other hand, am just a guy on /..
Whenever I run accross a new piece of software, I always like to apply this rule. It requires you to use your imagination a little.
Imagine that you are sitting in a room full of vacuum tubes at the moment the first modern digital computer was assembled. After the initial glee, the engineers all sit around and brainstorm for ideas about where it will lead. The continuously shout out: "This is great! Someday we'll be able to (blank)".
Now, take the new piece of software, hardware, or application, and fit it in the blank.
So, we have "This is great! Someday we will be able to (transmit text only to people who have our particular program)" vs. "This is great! Someday we will be able to (transmit text in a universal format that all systems can understand)"
Now, to be fair, the MS format might have some advantage over ASCII. What, I don't know. After all, we already have the UTF standard for the handling of foreign character sets, so it can't offer that. So, I challenge anybody to fill in the blank: "This is great! Someday we will be able to (blank)" and put this MS format in a good light.
I will be amazed if anybody can do that.
BTW, you may think my little thought experiment is klutzy, but it works much more quickly in my mind than it does when I am trying to explain it on /..
What'd happen? It'd be like AT & T back in the 70s. You didn't buy your phone, you rented it from Ma Bell. In fact if memory serves correctly, it was actually illegal to hook a non-AT & T device to the line or service an AT & T phone. By "service" that included opening up the phone.
I have a very vivid memory of this from when I was a kid. Me and a kid accross the street got curious and unscrewed a phone which had become defective. We didn't damage it in any way, we just removed the outer casing and a few simple parts, so that reassembly would have been obvious to anybody (even an adult). Well, his mom found out about it and soundly scolded us, much more than if we had taken apart a radio. Why? Because tampering with phones was illegal! It seemed strange to me. After all, taking apart radios and TVs was not illegal. People unscrewed tubes from TVs all the time. But, that's the way it was.
Now, this may have seemed strange, but I don't recall feeling particularly oppressed by the phone company. At this point, we could digress into the fact that the Telco was a monopoly at that time, and indeed, disolving it *did* open up a lot of things. Also, I think that some of the cool telephone products we have now are a direct result of the fact that you no longer have to rent your phone. So yes, hardware licenses do oppress people, and we should be opposed to them, but it's a mild form of oppression, or at least it was from my point of view.
I'd be more interested in hearing if any adults from that era were actually prosecuted for working on AT & T equipment without a license. If they were, and they got anything more than a small fine and a blot on their record, then this was indeed very oppressive.
So, maybe we should look at this in terms of AT & T, and pass a low a requiring that all communication services (not just AT & T) should allow you to use 3rd party equipment to access the service, so long as said 3rd party equipment functions properly and does not cause harm to the network or service.
That would mean that you would also have to allow 3rd parties to sell cable boxes (not descramblers mind you, that would still be illegal). Hmmmm... my cable box is owned by the cable company. I don't feel particularly oppressed by the cable company. OTOH, I bet that if we opened up this market, some innovative 3rd party might come up with a cable box that didn't weigh 10 pounds and throw out heat like a blast furnace. You might be able to get them in some other color than brown too.
OK, IANAL, etc... how would this work?
Seems like DC might be stealing something from MS: The (not so coveted) position as the #1 company that /. loves to hate.
For a while, it seemed like Amazon might be that company, until Bezos became conciliatory on the issue of software patents.
For now, however, MS continues to reign supreme both on the desktop and the /. hate list.
...Compaq, or some other manufacturer, would you have mentioned that and linked to them?
For those who don't know, /. is owned by VA.
There is a time and a place for everything. Guess what? Childhood is not the time for sex, and Slashdot is not the place to forward your agenda.
We do not harm children, we love children, and would give our lives to prevent any harm to a single child
So give up your life of pedophilia.
For your sake, I hope you're just a troll and not real.
Somehow, without US vs. USSR, the Olympics just aren't the same. They should have the next Olympics in either India or Pakistan. Better yet, those two countries should just learn from US vs. USSR and forget the f***ing nukes already. All international disputes should be resolved in a Quake Deathmatch. It could be a much more efficient proxy for world war.
Should we assume that the pun in your subject line is unintentional?
Not really much of a story, but at least it's true. I know, because I was the tech.
Customer: Arghh.. sorry I can't type that, my keys keep sticking.
Tech: Sometimes if you turn your keyboard upside down and shake it, that helps.
Customer: (sound of shaking in the background) Eeewww! There's all this nasty white flaky stuff.
Tech: Yeah, a lot of times dandruff gets in there and makes it harder to type.
Customer: I do NOT have dandruff.
Tech: (thinking to himself) Wow, I can't believe I just had this conversation. I feel like I'm in a shampoo commercial.
Yeah you overthere with the Palm Pilot: "DELETE ADDRESS BOOK. YES. RETURN."
you just happen to know a telephone number that lets anybody in the world log in and use their DNS. Uhm. Yeah
That's nothing. There is a certain modem manufacturer (I will not name) that used to allow total Internet access through their test line, no fancy DNS hack required. Of course they didn't advertise that fact. I was connected to it and tried typing in a regular URL into the browser, and whaddya know--it worked. The test line remained active for at least several months, and may still be active for all I know. It was never terribly difficult to connect to it, so it was presumeably not abused. I offer that as living proof that security through obscurity is at least marginally effective.
Or better yet, set up a Slashcode based website, and moderate up the good patches. Unlike regular slashdot, there would be no Anonymous Cowards, and you could be banned for trolling.
OK, score me Flamebait for using the S-word again, but this is to be expected. In a capitalist system, the wealthy get things better, faster, etc. In a socialist system, there is the illusion of equality via the elimination of capital, but the fundamental laws of economics remain unchanged. You have just replaced dollar capital with social capital. What is social capital? It's how well connected you are, whether or not you are a member of the "3 initial club" or something like that.
And then the Devil got greedy and tried to overclock it.
For $20000 I'll build you a really nice cabinet that *looks* like the Cray, and I'll stick a $10000 system in it. Run quake, and nobody will know the difference. After all, how many people have even seen a Cray in real life anyway.
For $2000 I'll just build you a cabinet with some blinking LEDs and fans in it. You can tell people that what it's doing is too important to be interrupted for Quake.